<Begin Segment 11>

GU: So we got that message into Ronnie through Tom Kean and I wrote a letter and -- for (June, another sister. Mary had died). And she signed it. And Tom signed another letter that I wrote, and I wrote a letter to Tom saying it wasn't protective custody, please tell the president -- and these three letters went in to Ronald Reagan in a pouch. So he read these three letters. And he said, "Well, I think this is something I wanna do." And he called Tom back and said, "Well, you know, I want to think about this."

So, the way you want to do things sometimes in life, but very often in politics, is set up what you as a quantitative guy would understand well, and that is a binary mode. You say, all right, you wanna do it or not? So the issue for Ronald Reagan is -- this is not about left-wing campus radicals. Okay? They're for it, yes. But the 442 vets are for it. So, it's not just about people who would never vote for you. There are these 442 guys who (probably did) vote for you, and you know what heroes they are. So the question then became binary. Do you want to veto Kaz Matsuda and the 442 or not? He said, "Well shit, I don't wanna veto Kaz. I'll sign this thing." So I think he made that decision sometime in late December of '87, (or the) early part of the year in '88. And then I went in to see Ken Duberstein under some pretense. I said well, these bureaucrats, the career people inside the OMB are still fighting us. So I went in and I saw Duberstein and his aide, a guy named Will Ball, who then became for a while Secretary of the Navy. Nice guys. And I said, well, I'm worried about the OMB people. And Ken Duberstein, brilliant, brilliant guy, one of these guys who can keep thirty balls in the air and understand the relationship among all thirty of them. Jewish guy. Jewish kid from Brooklyn. Used to work for Jake Javits. And he says, "No, Grant. It's been talked about at a much higher level than that," which is to say in the limousine in New Jersey. And I wasn't gonna say, "I know Tom. I put him up to that." And he says -- this is Valentine's Day, February 14, 1988 -- he says, "The President's signing." So I floated back up Connecticut Ave. towards the JACL Office.

TI: It's just amazing for someone like me who's so removed from how things get done to realize that so much was just done on these sort of personal relationships. And how some of these decisions are made, the binary decision you made, or that Reagan had to have made was based on, in some ways, just a gut feeling that he had.

GU: Yeah. That's why we elected him. We elected this guy so that he could use his gut. I mean, they don't let me use my gut 'cause I never got elected to nothin'. But, anybody who works in a corporation or maybe inside Densho says geez, I have a really good relations with Dana, and she's, she's a power. She's got yes or no on this issue, and Dana and I go bowling every Thursday night. That's probably gonna get it for me. But that son of a bitch Tom, stay away from him. That's personal. So you multiply that by a factor of a thousand inside Microsoft, and then this, really this kind of Japanese world which is Washington. It's indirection... you hit the eight ball and it bounces off the pad and hits the six ball and then, that's kind of a Japanese world. And they're not all a bunch of lying bastards. A whole lot of it is like Wall Street. You call your broker and you say, "I want to buy three hundred shares of X." That's done on the telephone and you say here goes. And it's trust. And so someone says, "Yeah, I'm with you on that. It's gonna be hard for me back in Anniston, Alabama, but I'm with you on it." And you believe him. And if he reneges and you say hey, I don't take that guy's checks (anymore). So it is personal. And a lot of it is on the up and up.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.