PROGRAM

To mark the 83^rd anniversary of the December 7, 1941 attack that brought the U.S. into World War II, please join us as Roosevelt House welcomes back two of our most popular lecturers. Returning for the sixth time is America’s preeminent naval historian, Craig L. Symonds, author most recently of Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo _­Bay, a biography of the indispensable admiral who helped launch the sea battles of the Pacific Theater. Symonds will be joined in conversation by Steve Twomey, author of one of the most popular and acclaimed works of contemporary Pearl Harbor history, Countdown to Pearl Harbor: The Twelve Days to the Attack.

Revisiting their conversation from eight years ago when Twomey’s Countdown to Pearl Harbor was published, this discussion will examine how we look back on the events of that infamous day—and what we can learn from it as we consider America’s role in the global conflicts of today.

Craig L. Symonds is Professor of History Emeritus at the U. S. Naval Academy and former Distinguished Ernest J. King Visiting Professor of Maritime History at the U. S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I. The winner of the 2009 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln and His Admirals, his latest books are World War II at Sea: A Global History, and Nimitz at War, which was just awarded The Gilder Lehrman Military History Award. Symonds has also won the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt award (for his 2005 book Decision at Sea: Five Naval Battles that Shaped American History), the Samuel Eliot Morrison Award for naval literature, the Commodore Dudley W. Knox Naval History Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Pritzker Military Museum & Library Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing.

Steve Twomey began his career in journalism as a copyboy at the Chicago Tribune when he was still in high school. After graduating from Northwestern University, he began a 14-year career at The Philadelphia Inquirer, during which he won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and then worked at the Washington Post for the next 13 years. More recently, he has written for Smithsonian and other magazines and has taught narrative writing at the graduate schools of CUNY and New York University.