rebuilt this country from the ruins of those catastrophic events
Our country was in ruins after WWII?
Well, we had a massively changed economy made for the war effort. Consumer goods were rare right after the war, but as the factories retooled, things changed.
Even then, we were helping with the Marshall Plan and working on paying off our own war bonds.
To top it off, we lost many people and the home radically changed, as most women helped in the factories while the men were away.
We may only have had Pearl Harbor's ruins on our shores, but we were hurting in many other ways.
So, yes, we had our own ruins.
Wasn't in ruins after the Depression either, a great deal of infrastructure still in use today was built then. But hey, what's a bit of hyperbole among reporters. It beats the facts for reader interest, I guess.