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TI: Now, here's a question, I'll throw this out, this might be out of the blue, but you've worked on several books. It sounds like oftentimes, people approach you with ideas and want to work with you. I'm curious; if you were to write a book that you wanted to write, what would that be?

RM: Oh.

TI: If you could, like, all of a sudden, clear your calendar and actually work on a project or a topic that you want to work on, what would that be?

RM: The fallacy of the human mind. The hundreds of people I've interviewed, and how fiction has become truth in their mind, and the reverse of that. How fallible the human mind is, and I find myself now, at my age, saying, "Hey, I, I remember it so exactly as this," and then suddenly to realize, no, it wasn't, Ron. You, you've let the myth and the desire and the hopes become the facts. I would love to write a book on how the human mind plays tricks on people. How, how change is so subtle that you didn't recognize it. And I find this particularly, in all the interviews I've done, especially when it's a central issue in their minds. I can take diary entries and compare them with the answers of the, of the interview, and they're diametrically opposite, and yet they're adjusted in this human being's mind.

TI: So as a historian, how do you deal with that? So that you, you have this sort of sometimes a document record of something that happened, then you start interviewing people who tend to be more elderly, and they may have forgotten some things, or twisted things around. How do you, how do you sort of use your judgment in terms of when you put flesh on things, realizing that some of these memories are frail?

RM: I go back to my ancient history days, and Thucydides and the great speeches on the Pelopennesian War that are in those, and the controversy over whether those speeches were actually given or not, and, and how real this was. Dave Beck is a classic example of revision of history. Of how he wanted to be remembered, how he saw his immortality based upon not what happened, but what he wanted to have happened. And he was in his, he was ninety at least when I started to interview him, and how this colored his imagination, and I could run Black, Clyde Black interviews and other people, and it was diametrically opposite what really happened. And I find that fascinating. And I find trying to separate out the, what people wanted to have happen with what really happened. It, to me, is the core of history.

TI: Now, explain that. So, so when you have someone who, who perhaps in their mind -- they're not really lying to you, this is how they really think it happened, but it may be exactly the opposite of what really did happen.

RM: That's right. That's happened.

TI: You said that was interesting to you. Why is that interesting? What does that --

RM: I'm interested in the human mind and how, how it will hide disasters. Maybe that was why, one of the basic reasons I got involved with internment. The denial of camp life, there's a lot to that that's missed in interviews and everything else. The shame of it, the, we want not to remember this, we want to remember the good parts of what happened in the camp if there were, and they -- that kind of ideas. And it's so important, and yet, history is the pursuit of truth. That's all it really is, and sometimes we don't want to see that truth, it's so horrible. And, and it was in many people in the camp, and it did destroy people in camp. And, and it left an indelible memory that people have never forgotten. And I didn't, it didn't hurt me when people said, "No, Ron, I'm not gonna talk about camp. You can ask me anything you want about my life, anything, but I don't want to talk about being in the, in the concentration camp, please." You know, and I would respect that, that it was too sore still, fifty, forty-five years later. And they didn't even try to gloss over what happened in camp, or see the optimistic side no matter what. They, they just wanted to deny it, that they didn't, the memory of it was so bad, that -- and they, it would destroy them psychologically. And I think there was a lot of the Holocaust concept in this, that I saw in writing the book. And there were those people who wanted to face it squarely: "By God, it happened, and if there's any way that I can prevent it from ever happening again, I'm gonna do it, even if it's, it sickens me and saddens me, I'm gonna tell you exactly what happened so that if you get it in the book, they can't deny it." Now, was it exaggerated? Sometimes, maybe. But I always had the camp incident records. I knew what I was doing with Minidoka. I knew what happened in Minidoka every day, 'cause I had the written federal records. I could follow exactly what was taking place. "You, you didn't know that they electrified the fence?" "No." "You were the security guard running around the camp?" "Yeah." "Didn't you see the fence?" "No." Said, "Did you look for it?" "No." I, I said, "It was a big incident there." "I don't know anything about that." "You were in charge of security?" "Yeah. But it's something I didn't want to see." And, and that's how to explain some of this. There's inconsistencies in all of history.

<End Segment 35> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.