In a word

I’ve visited some of the world’s most renowned museums. El Prado in Madrid. The Louvre in Paris. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Elvis is Alive in Wright City, Mo.

My hands-down favorite is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, located on the grounds of FDR’s family estate overlooking the Hudson. There’s a document displayed there that gives me the chills every time I see it because it speaks to me as a writer, demonstrating the power of a single well-chosen word to describe, inform and provoke.

The document is a draft of one of the most famous presidential addresses in history, the speech FDR gave to Congress seventy-two years ago tomorrow, the day after Pearl Harbor.

Roosevelt didn’t write the speech. He had more pressing matters to attend to. The draft was written by a speechwriter and typed up for FDR’s review.

It begins, “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 -- a date which will live in world history -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

FDR crossed out “world history” and, in pencil, wrote above it a single word: infamy.

With that one word, FDR made the speech his own and took a nation to war. 

You can hear the entire speech right here.