<Begin Segment 37>

MC: Right. Now you alluded earlier to some tensions within the team that might be due to your management style, it might be due to issues of gender. And it sounds like you've reflected upon, in the intervening years, some of the things that might have happened. Do you have any specific examples of gender-related issues that might have come up?

DM: I think they're gender-related only the way the style is... you know, I had, at that, I had a forceful style and it was, you know, I was collaborative but I was collaborative in a male way which is not the same kind of style I've seen in female leaders. And so, to that degree, that would be a gender issue. But I thought -- and I can get that way sometimes -- is that I felt I had such a clarity of vision, there were very few times in your life you get this, which doesn't mean of course it's everybody's clarity of vision, although I think everybody in my group agreed with the vision I had of what this case was about, how to present it. It was almost laid out in a roadmap for me when we first got the case and I read all the materials and I kind of absorbed what was going on in this country at the time. And I'm not saying this was some supernatural thing and I'm clairvoyant or anything like this, but the truth was so clear to me that I think I could have -- and I don't remember specifically doing this, all I remember is feeling the strength of that truth, which of course is your own truth -- and because of that my guess is that I was more impatient than I could have been about presenting an argument for my truth as opposed to just expecting people to accept it as the truth.

MC: I see. Do you... you also mentioned earlier that Kathryn Bannai had been your law clerk but now, but at that point in time she was a full-fledged lawyer working in Seattle --

DM: Right.

MC: -- and the head of the Hirabayashi team. Were there some things related to her formerly being your clerk that might have led to some sort of dynamics?

DM: I think that's kind of hard to decide, what influences how you treat somebody. Because she was younger, she was in Seattle, and there were other issues, so I can't tell what they were. I know that Kathryn and I, Kathryn's personality and mine are very, very different, we have very different personalities, whereas Lori and I are, we tended to be closer in terms of personality and perspective and outlook and sense of humor and things like that. Kathryn is different than that. So I can't, I can't really tell you that I could identify anything that had to do with the fact that she was my clerk. What is striking to me, though, and I can't, I don't understand this, and maybe it could be clarified in further interviews with others, but I keep thinking that, why did I call Kathryn? Why didn't I just call Rod? Because Rod I worked with in the JACL case, I know he was smart, competent and hard-working, okay, in Spokane JACL. I thought I had called both of them but I think I called Kathryn first, who was the lesser experienced attorney, and I'm not sure why that happened. I knew I trusted her a lot, though.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.