Not until war blew the lid off diplomacy did the U.S. learn all the last-minute moves with which President Roosevelt and his Secretary of State tried to prevent war with Japan.
Conversations between the President and Japan's envoys, Saburo Kurusu and Admiral Nomura, had reached a stalemate when on Nov. 26 Secretary Hull gave the Japanese a memorandum for a general settlement of the Pacific's problems. The terms it offered were stiff, and high-minded, but to a nation which had not already planned a treacherous attack they might have been tempting:
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