Today we are looking at the week of December 25 to December 31, 1941. The start of the US involvement in World War 2.

It was a surprisingly smooth transition from the chaos of December 7, where no one had any idea what was happening either in Hawaii or Washington.

World War 2 was 3 weeks old and already we knew the outcome. It was assumed that we would win. Where and when this ultimate victory would occur was not known. But not whether we would achieve ultimate victory.

Now, three weeks into the war, the transition to a plan for victory was deftly performed. Factories switched over to wartime production. Leaders were putting plans into motion for how to finance, arm and transport this massive war machine.

In the last week of December 1941 here was no hint that victory was not within reach. It was not a plan for survival or a plan to eke out a victory. The plan was clear, we are going to create a massive war machine and crush the enemies into an unconditional surrender. There was anger, there was determination, there was fear and anxiety. But there was no doubt.

Welcome to a special episode of the Raspberry Podcast, where we welcome our first guest author, Adam Hochschild, the author of American Midnight; The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. American Midnight is about the crisis of democracy that was precipitated when the United States joined The Great War on April, 2 1917.

The Great War, which ended up costing the United States 240,000 casualties, had been underway for almost three years by the spring of 1917, and the European belligerents were stuck in the trenches of the Western Front, grinding away in their stalemated static warfare. Tanks had only that month been introduced onto the battlefield as the horrors continued to accumulate. 1916 had been the most deadly year of the war.

In April 2017 the US, after resisting joining the fight for years, finally threw in with the Entente powers - Britain, France, Italy and Russia. Libraries of books have covered the fighting at the front but little has been written about what was happening here in the US. While President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed we were fighting to Make the World Safe for Democracy, here he led a fervent war Against Democracy, condoning torture, imprisonments and detentions of America’s internal enemies in an endless parade of bloody and repressive scenes as the official and unofficial organs of the government attacked dissenters, minorities, immigrants and organized labor. This edition is truly alarming and timely as 100 years later we are about to enter a second Trump presidency dedicated to similar goals.

Adam Hochschild writes frequently about issues of human rights and social justice. American Midnight is only the latest of his eleven books. He is a three-time winner of the Gold Medal for Nonfiction of the California Book Awards. His reporting from five continents has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Kennedy, Castro. Khrushchev and nuclear missiles. It’s October 1962 and the world is on the brink of nuclear war over Cuba. The funny thing is that no one knows. The world churned on as Nobel prizes were announced and the junior league set their annual luncheon date (watercress sandwiches again) .

Meanwhile, beneath this surface of calm and normal, the world teetered on a razor’s edge. Throughout the week the nation’s top leaders met in secret to discuss how to handle the biggest crisis of the postwar world. The Soviets were installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. They knew. We knew. But the Ruskies did not know we knew. It was the best kept secret since the bomb was invented. Better even.

The gap between what was happening and what the world knew was huge. Perhaps a gap this large has never happened since. And today, in a world where information is free to ricochet around the world in an instant, it is hard to believe such a secret could be kept.

This week on the Raspberry podcast, October 1962, where what you did not know could kill us all.