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.