If any events have unambiguous meaning, without need for intervening narration, attacks on the homeland – notably, that on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and that on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001 – would seem to fit the bill. At the very least, these events should have imparted such unimpeded narrative authority to the president that it hardly mattered how he expressed himself. It is true that these attacks marked turning points, that they gave birth to dominant narratives of national security, and that the president was crucial to those narratives' rise to dominance. Those narratives limned the full dramatic pentad: they identified the issues at stake, the protagonists, the sources of aggression, the setting of conflict, and the conditions for peace. But neither Pearl Harbor nor 9/11 had to yield the particular pentad that it did. There was more than one conceivable narrative configuration that might have become dominant. Moreover, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's and George W. Bush's preferred narratives rose to the top depended not just on structural openings and institutional advantages, this chapter maintains, but on these authoritative speakers seizing the rhetorical opportunity and embracing the storytelling mode. Their rhetorical interventions shaped both the debates and the policy that followed.

Narrating the origins of German aggression

In Americans' collective memory, the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was the key moment when Americans finally put “isolationism” and “divisionism” behind them. The attack resolved the narrative contest that had riven the nation in recent years. No one could any longer deny that the Axis threatened the survival of the United States and the American way of life. This was “the good war,” and Americans swiftly united, in accord over both policy and its underlying narrative foundation.

Yet, US officials did not see things that way at the time. They did not think the Japanese attack had brushed aside all significant opposition. They noted how rapidly public indifference had set in. They fretted that Americans were not prepared for the long, hard slog they expected. Most worrisome of all, Americans still lacked a well-defined narrative of national security.