This is Captain Colin P. Kelly Jr., who was idolized from coast to coast as one of America’s first World War II heroes in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As Life Magazine reported in December 1941, “Kelly dove his plane straight into the Japanese battleship, Haruna, released a stick of high explosives almost into the mouths of flaming guns, and then vanished himself in the mighty explosion that ushered the 29,000-ton ship to the bottom of the sea.”  Americans were still numb over the surprise assault — many feared an early and successful Japanese invasion of the West Coast — and the tale of the 26-year-old Kelly’s patriotic courage was bracing. In the South Bronx, friends of 4-year-old Colin Powell, a future general and secretary of state, whose Jamaican-born parents wanted him called “Cah-lin,” now started saying “Coh-lin,” like the newly famous aerial lionheart of the Pacific. Powell found that the new pronunciation stuck for life.  Eager to reassure skeptical Americans and the world that the Allies would prevail in World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt released a letter a week after Kelly’s death. Addressed to “the President of the United States in 1956,” it asked that “a young American youth of goodly heritage” — Kelly’s namesake one-year-old son, “Corky” — be considered for admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point.  F.D.R. said his request was intended as “an act of faith in the destiny of our country … in full confidence that we shall achieve a glorious victory in the war we now are waging to preserve our democratic way of life.” This letter was Roosevelt’s testament that 15 years hence, there would be a United States, and it would have a president, not some Japanese or Nazi viceroy.  As it happened, the American president of 1956 was Dwight Eisenhower. With almost poetic coincidence, Ike was not only a member of the famous West Point class of 1915 but was also Roosevelt’s personal choice as supreme commander of the D-Day invasion unleashed 70 years ago next week. Ike, of course, was delighted to send Captain Kelly’s son to West Point, but the young man honorably insisted on winning his place on merit, which he did by taking and performing well on the standard competitive exams.  With decades of hindsight, it turns out the elder Kelly’s actual heroism was different from, but no less than, what was contemporaneously reported in the fog of the Pacific war. In fact, after attacking not the Haruna (which survived) but another Japanese vessel, Kelly’s B-17 was struck by Japanese Zeros; the captain died valiantly in the conflagration after telling his eight-man crew to bail out first.  As for Colin P. Kelly III, he became an Episcopal priest, serving for a time as West Point’s assistant chaplain. With pleasing historical symmetry, when he finally retired last year, the hero’s son, once so identified with America’s entry into World War II, was serving in a town imperishably linked to the war’s denouement — Los Alamos, N.M., birthplace of the two atomic bombs that were dropped in August 1945 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, is the author of nine books and a contributor to NBC News and “PBS NewsHour.” Follow him on Twitter at @BeschlossDC.  The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
President Roosevelt reassured the nation with a prospective gift to the 1-year-old son of a pilot who sacrificed his life on the Pacific war’s third day.