Fear, patriotism and uncertainty from 1941 resonate today

WASHINGTON -- People stood shoulder-to-shoulder outside the White House in anxious vigil. Washington hostesses dashed off notes canceling teas. The zoo made contingency plans to kill its poisonous snakes.

A note scrawled on cardboard outside the Soldiers, Sailors and Marines Club told the story: "All servicemen are due in camp at reveille tomorrow. Signed, Secretary of War."

In the first frenzied hours and days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Washington scrambled to adjust to what first lady Eleanor Roosevelt called "a completely changed world."

Sixty years later, there are echoes of those anxious days in the way America has reacted to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and a world once again forever changed.

President Roosevelt created the Office of Civilian Defense. President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security. First ladies then and now paid special attention to the nation's youth, and coped with worries about their own safety.

'I have faith in you!'

Just hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to young people in her regular radio address and told them "there will be high moments in which your strength and your ability will be tested. I have faith in you!"

A day later, she was on an overnight flight to California to help with civilian defense when she got word -- inaccurate, it turned out -- that San Francisco was being bombed by the Japanese. She landed in Los Angeles as planned.

On Sept. 11 this year, Laura Bush told reporters that "parents need to reassure their children everywhere in our country that they're safe." Then she was hustled out of Congress as it was being evacuated in a terrorism scare and taken to a secret location -- her testimony at an education hearing put off for another day.

Later, she stepped in for her husband and delivered the weekly radio address, devoted to the plight of Afghan women under the Taliban.

Both attacks immediately brought new security precautions to the White House and other Washington sites. Elliott Roosevelt recalled that his mother thought the anti-aircraft guns installed on the White House roof "passed into the realm of fantasy." Franklin Roosevelt himself rejected Secret Service efforts to encircle the White House with troops and put tanks on guard duty.

The president did consent to the building of an air-raid shelter in the Treasury Department across from the White House, but told Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, "Henry, I will not go down into the shelter unless you allow me to play poker with all the gold in your vaults."

This Sept. 11, the White House again was a locus of fear. The building was temporarily evacuated, fighter jets patrolled overhead, and Bush, who had been visiting a school in Florida, made unplanned stops at two air bases before returning to Washington.

'We're into it, boys'

After both attacks, waves of fear and patriotism rippled coast to coast.

After Pearl Harbor, Los Angeles' harbor was temporarily closed and Japanese fisherman held in blockade; crowds massed in New York's Times Square, rallying war sentiment with the words, "We're into it, boys;" air raid wardens drilled nationwide.

On Dec. 8, 1941, as Roosevelt stood before Congress to deliver his war message, a group of boys outside sang a chorus of "You're in the Army Now." On Sept. 11, members of Congress themselves stood on the steps of the evacuated, floodlit Capitol and sang, "God Bless America."

The uncertainty after Pearl Harbor bred anxiety that at times looks almost silly in hindsight. The Washington Zoo had a plan to exterminate its poisonous snakes if the capital were attacked, so they wouldn't get loose.

Then, as now, calls for tolerance mingled with discrimination against people of the same racial groups as the attackers.

Mrs. Roosevelt made a point of being photographed with American-born Japanese and warned against "great hysteria." Six days after the September hijackings, Bush padded through a Washington mosque and delivered a similar message of tolerance toward Arabs and Muslims.