Honolulu is the place named in Harry S. Truman’s account of the news that broke into his weekend: a report that it had been bombed turned an expected wartime crisis into an immediate summons to travel. The letter records Honolulu not through a description of the attack, but through the distance its news traveled and the rapid changes it set in motion.

Honolulu in the Account

Truman was resting at the Pennant Hotel near Columbia, Missouri, before a planned Monday visit to Jefferson City. At about three o’clock on Sunday, the boy who had driven him there telephoned from Cross Timbers and told him that Honolulu had been bombed. The report reached Truman secondhand, by a call from a deputy U.S. marshal on his way to Springfield; the account gives no further details of the attack itself.

From News to Urgent Travel

The news transformed a weekend organized around rest into a race to attend a joint session on Monday. Bess Wallace relayed that the Secretary of the Senate had called, and Truman, without a car or driver, arranged for a plane from the small airport across the road from his hotel to take him to St. Louis. He arrived at the airport there at 5:35, after a 40-minute flight of 130 miles, then tried to secure onward passage. His route ultimately took him through an overnight flight to Pittsburgh, where he met senators who, like him, were making their way toward the gathering. In the letter, Honolulu’s narrative importance lies in this sudden turn: news of the bombing converts a distant place into the cause of immediate political and personal movement.