FDR remained nonetheless hopeful that by “next January, I can get” a law granting “authority to the President.” Instead, Congress reinstated the embargo three years straight. Already accused of provoking hysteria, Roosevelt needed to nudge opinion carefully. If any segment of the public supported repealing the embargo, it was less “to help France and Britain” than to “improve business in this country,” a poll at the time found.

Noting “storms from abroad” that challenged “institutions indispensable to Americans” in his 1939 State of the Union, FDR did not mention repeal. Instead, he exposed the embargo’s unintended consequences. When we “deliberately try to legislate neutrality,” he posited, our “laws may operate unevenly and unfairly.” The law may “give aid to an aggressor” and “deny it to the victim.” “The instinct of self-preservation should warn us that we ought not to let that happen anymore,” since Americans could not know when aggressors might turn their sights toward the United States. Pressed days later to elaborate which reforms “short of war” he had in mind, FDR prevaricated, just as he had before when asked to reconcile his proposed quarantine with neutrality policy.

Though he worked vigorously from beneath the bully pulpit to shift opinion, Roosevelt had abstained from public neutrality talk since January when Congress took recess in summer 1939 without amending the embargo provisions. By July, the president’s impatience prompted him to ask his attorney general, “how far do you think I can go in ignoring the existing [neutrality] act—even though I did sign it?!” Having mobilized a nationwide network that loosened resistance to repeal, the president went to the press to exploit Congress’s “bet” that “another international crisis would not erupt.” If one did, Roosevelt told reporters, Congress had “tied my hands,” rendering him powerless “to prevent … war from breaking out.” When, not a month later, Germany’s invasion of Poland seemingly called Congress’s bluff, Roosevelt encouraged public opinion to follow the direction of events. “This nation will remain a neutral nation,” he stated during a fireside chat that made no mention of the embargo, “but I cannot ask that every American citizen remain neutral in thought as well.”

He delayed convening Congress for special session until he gathered enough votes for repeal. FDR forbade a cabinet member from speaking to a Polish club in Chicago for fear of appearing unneutral, and postponed the Canadian governor-general’s visit to Washington, writing, “I am, almost literally, walking on eggs” and “at the moment saying nothing, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.”

After aggressive bargaining within Washington and some subtle rhetoric without, Roosevelt signed the Neutrality Act of 1939, replacing the arms embargo with a cash-and-carry provision. The country was gradually substituting neutrality for its emerging role as the “arsenal of democracy.”

ON MAY 15, 1940, five days after assuming the premiership of an embattled Britain, Churchill sent Roosevelt a cable requesting the “loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers” to replenish Britain’s dwindling fleet. In exchange, the United States would gain military basing rights in British possessions. The American public, however, would likely decry the deal. Therefore, FDR repeated the steps that won the cash-and-carry policy: a little rhetoric followed by lots of politicking.

Without mentioning any specific materiel, FDR reaffirmed America's cash-and-carry pledge to “extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation,” for “the future of this nation” was contingent on it. He alerted Republican newspaper editor William Allen White and his network, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, to preempt the protestation of the America First Committee, an 800,000 strong isolationist pressure group. He directed advisors to furnish a legal basis for aiding “the allies,” which appeared in the New York Times in August. 

Roosevelt presented the “destroyers-for-bases” deal as a fait accompli in September 1940 despite fears that it would cost him reelection two months later. However, the deal encountered “virtually no criticism,” he wrote to King George. Indeed, the leap-first strategy met a relatively tame public reaction. Moreover, Congress seemingly endorsed the deal when the Lend-Lease Act passed the following year. The Supreme Court, by its silence, validated the leap.

THOUGH ROOSEVELT still hoped to spare major American bloodshed, he recognized that resupplying fledgling democracies was at best hedging the nation’s bets. As early as 1920, Roosevelt assumed “every sane man knows that in case of another world war America would be drawn in.” Twenty years later, Roosevelt would urge a military draft to prepare for just that inevitability.

“Yet he had not urged it too vocally” his aide recalled. The idea of introducing the nation’s first peacetime draft, breaking with an American tradition averse to standing armies, came to FDR from a Harvard classmate in May 1940. His classmate was reviving the “old Plattsburg crowd,” a university-based military preparedness movement dormant since the Great War. Roosevelt encouraged their advocacy, but warned conscription was ultimately a “political” question contingent upon “what one can get from Congress.”

It was also a political question about how much FDR was willing to gamble as he campaigned for an unprecedented third term. But with the fall of France came a rise in support for compulsory service: up from 39 percent in December 1939 and 50 percent in June 1940, 63 percent supported a draft once Germany captured Paris. Roosevelt nudged this trend further in an address to Congress. Praising industry’s military production, he added, “a system of selective service” may be needed so that “when this modern materiel becomes available, it will be placed in the hands of troops trained, seasoned, and ready.”

By August, 71 percent of Americans supported “the immediate adoption of compulsory military training.” Perhaps it was this turning tide that convinced FDR’s electoral opponent, Wendell Willkie, to jilt his party’s platform by endorsing conscription. FDR swiftly caught up to opinion by signing the draft into law on September 16, 1940, calling it “America’s answer to Hitlerism.” Not only a tool of deterrence and preparation, Roosevelt celebrated the draft as an instrument that would also intertwine the fates of “Americans from all walks of life.”

CASH-AND-CARRY, destroyers-for-bases, and conscription were but three of several policies Roosevelt stewarded in preparation for war. Each illustrates the persistent process by which Roosevelt moved the needle and reduced polarization prior to that day which would “live in infamy.”

The president was the calmest person in a White House of scrambling officials that day. The attack on Pearl Harbor had vindicated his warnings, justified his preparations, and roused the cohesion the nation would need. His most trying task—preparing America spiritually and industrially to fight a war a majority had opposed—was over. Following the attack, FDR continued to corral support for the war effort, but he also rode a wave of nationalism that assured (most) politics stopped at the water’s edge.

It was not inevitable that an attack, especially one on a far-flung island territory many Americans did not instinctively recognize as U.S. homeland, would unite Americans. If the country had “overnight” become “at long last a united people,” as the journalist Walter Lippmann supposed, that unity owed much to the conditions Roosevelt set for events to do their work.

AN EVENT like Pearl Harbor is unlikely, though not unthinkable, during Biden’s presidency. Since each president “deals with concrete difficulties,” Roosevelt once said at Gettysburg, “[i]t seldom helps to wonder how a statesman of one generation would surmount the crisis of another.” But as FDR proceeded that day to explain how Lincoln had forged a “new unity” years ago, let us consider what Roosevelt’s example can clarify today.

Like FDR, Biden has the opportunity to lead public opinion from behind. Biden’s quiet diplomacy inside the Washington Beltway and beneath the bully pulpit has long been his greatest source of influence. He used precisely this technique to broker the bipartisan infrastructure compromise, over the intransigence of many Republicans and the efforts of progressives in his party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. In fact, it was on the few occasions Biden did discuss the deal outside closed doors that he nearly unraveled it. 

Biden can also lead public opinion on China from behind, and with less resistance than FDR confronted. For all its missteps, the Trump administration did leave in its wake what Senator Dan Sullivan calls a “bipartisan awakening” to the challenge of China. Although recent research doubts this awakening can reduce either Congress’ policy polarization or Americans’ affective polarization, recent trends trump those findings. A bipartisan concern with U.S. technological competitiveness vis-à-vis China is pushing congressmembers across the aisle. Outside Congress, nine in ten Americans view China as a competitor, and a majority want a more assertive policy towards China.

Biden should steer this momentum toward investing in what he calls “a competition to win the twenty-first century.” The competition, he stresses, has many non-security dimensions. Even so, the administration’s early attempts to cloak domestic tax-and-spend bills in the language of strategic competition risked squandering the bipartisan awakening. Roosevelt acknowledged that making “democracy work within our borders” was indeed “a component of national defense.” But he also knew that to simultaneously “pursue two equally important things” like common defense and general welfare was “darned hard.” When pressed to justify spending billions of post-recession dollars on tanks over social welfare, FDR defended the former as the better guarantor of Americans’ security and prosperity. That Biden’s first proposed defense budget could not find the $9 billion the operable National Defense Strategy requires, while the president’s administration proposed $6 trillion for other “once-in-a-generation” investments, suggests we have forgotten how precarious all investments are in an insecure world.