Move the date of Pearl Harbor one week one way or the other on the calendar, and I might not be here. My grandfather, Dwight Lyman Johnson, was a gunnery officer aboard the USS Oklahoma, who swapped his duty roster with a friend to spend the weekend with my grandmother on her birthday. Everyone he knew was killed on that day which shall live in infamy. The Japanese surprise attack left its mark on my grandfather, who fought in every subsequent major battle of the Pacific, winning the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and the Navy Cross, and retiring as a rear admiral in June 1958.
But as we mark the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week, it is worth recalling that the war in the Pacific didnâ??t need to happen the way it did. Had politicians followed the teachings of the Declaration of Independence --- that all men are created equal --- and not passed racist, exclusionist laws, it neednâ??t have happened at all.
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