Today is the 69th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and I was thinking of the flashback scene at the end of Part II, set on the day of the attack (December 7th also, of course, happened to be Vito's birthday). Although Sonny thinks Michael is stupid for enlisting in the Marines, he still shares the feeling of outrage over the attack which was the dominant feeling in the U.S. at that time. But Tom reacts differently. Instead of being consumed with indignation, he says that "We should have expected it after the oil embargo."

To me, this scene illuminates Tom's personality and character perhaps better than any other scene in the trilogy. Tom never let emotions rule his thinking. He was always able to keep a sense of detachment and coldly analyze things to a degree rarely seen in human beings, gangster or otherwise. At a time when almost all Americans simply reacted with extreme shock and anger, Tom realized that the attack, while a "surprise" in the sense of being unforeseen, did not simply come out of thin air--it was linked to the oil embargo the U.S. imposed on Japan in retaliation for Japanese aggression in East Asia. Sonny, being far more emotional, accused Tom of being a "Jap lover" for making the comment (much as people who today suggest that American foreign policy was partly responsible for 9/11 are often accused of being anti-American). Sonny was unable to see that Tom was simply stepping back and looking at the situation unusually dispassionately.

By showing Tom reacting this way to Pearl Harbor, an event not related to the business of the Corleones, we see that Tom's detachment wasn't simply due to a belief that business (at least his family's business) was the most important thing in life. Instead, it was a characteristic of his personality that manifested itself even in something that he and his family had no personal stake in, where he was just an observer of what was going on.

Thoughts?