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LB: So tell me about the publicity portion of your work.

DT: I think the most astounding thing to me was how ignorant the American press was about the internment. And I would talk to journalists, and they had no background on this. And when we first, when I first spoke to them, I had multiple responses from different reporters saying, "This happened in America? When did this happen?" And then other reporters thought these were involving Japanese prisoners of war. And I said, "No, these are American citizens." And they said, "That happened in America?" And so...

LB: So let's back up a little bit. The case just started, did you devise a press strategy?

DT: Well, we didn't have to until we were, the petition was pretty much on its way. So we began the process in 1982, probably January/February, and we didn't file until January of 1983. So we had a year of ramp-up time. But beginning in November/December of '82, I began to lay the groundwork and I called key reporters.

LB: And this was around, you wanted press coverage around the filing of the petition.

DT: Right. So I called up key people and got, basically, agreements to embargo the story. And in exchange for their agreement to embargo the story, we would give them copies of the documents.

LB: When you say "key people," who do you mean?

DT: Well, it was Fred Barbash of the Washington Post, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun-Tribune, every... Seattle Intelligencer, which regrettably is no longer around. The major newspapers all over the country. And the wire services, AP, Reuters, UPI, United Press International. And we just began to get priming them. And a lot of that was educating them that this had happened in the first place, getting the right people that would kind of be interested in the story. And it was intriguing to them on a number of different levels. I mean, for us it was our families, but that's not a national news story. The national news story was the government cover-up. And this is post Watergate, where a President had been impeached, and an attorney general had resigned rather than fire the independent investigator on a criminal action. And so the press were teed up, I would say, and they were interested in any type of massive government misconduct like this. And so that was very, very helpful, and that was really the story for them.

As far as the television media, that was also kind of difficult. 'Cause they're based purely... they don't do these long pieces. I mean, they do three-minute little deals on the national news. And for them, the issue is competition. They're all, it's all competition in terms of what they don't want to, nobody wants to get outscooped on a story, but the television news even has a shorter attention span. That's a not-so-nice way of saying it, but I think it's accurate. And so I recall the day before the press conference, I'd be calling up CBS News and say something like, "We're going to have the press conference tomorrow, we're going to have all three litigants there. And I've contacted ABC and NBC, and as a courtesy, I just wanted to let you know." And I said, "Will you be there?" And they said, "Well, I don't know. We don't know, we've got other kind of news stories we're working on." And I said, "Well, okay, who can I contact in the event that anything, news breaks?" and they gave me a name and so on, and so I sort of worked the way up the channel. Then I'd call ABC, and I'd say, "Well, just as a courtesy, I just want to let you know I've called ABC, NBC and CBS, so I'm letting you know." And I said, "Well, will you be there?" And says, "Oh, yeah, we've got this on our schedule." So I said, "Are you going to be there for sure?" And he says, "Well, we don't know, but we think we're going to be there." So I called back CBS and I said, "Well, I just talked to ABC, and they're going to be there." And they said, "Well, if they're going to be there, then we'll be there." So then I called ABC back and I said, "Well, just to let you know, CBS is going to be there. Just wanted to let you know." And they said, "Well, we'll be there." [Laughs] And so there's a little bit of this thing that goes around in getting the news coverage. But the consequence of that day -- and it was a slow news day, that was part of it -- is that we hit a home run. So after we filed the petition, we walk into a packed press room.

LB: This is the San Francisco Press Club?

DT: That's right. And so we had set up, and I had orchestrated, basically, who's gonna sit where and who's gonna speak. And we had the litigants in front and the lawyers in back. And Fred, who had never talked before a camera before, suddenly had five or six cameras. And he's seated, along with Min, Gordon... and Gordon, and the cameras are literally four or five feet away from all of them. I mean, they were, like sitting in front of a firing squad. And Fred was a little freaked out, I mean, he wasn't used to this publicity and the flashes going off and so on. And we began to tell the story of the documents and other things. Another kind of oops happened that day where the Washington Post did not respect the embargo, so they broke the story on that day. And the other press were furious at me, and they said, "You promised that nothing would get printed, and here it is this morning, it's all over the paper, the wire services picked it up, you've outscooped us." And I said, "I'm sorry, I can't control it." And I talked to Barbash, and he said, "You weren't clear. You said that we'd embargo the story until this day, it is now the day, and so I'm running the story." And so he wasn't even at the press conference, 'cause he already had his story. And he knew that we meant the next day, but he ran it that day. But the consequence of that is that we had a story that ran for two full days, on front page news. So it had a... it was unintentional, but it had a very favorable effect. And then it was on every network channel, including CNN, around the world. I mean, Min was amazed that his friends in Germany saw this thing. And so we couldn't have gotten better press coverage. I think the other redress groups suddenly were like, "Whoa, where did this group come from?" 'Cause we were quietly working away. They knew that there was a group working on a petition to reopen these cases, but they had no idea what we had.

LB: When you first met Fred, I think he said that he could go, would go ahead with the case, but he didn't want to talk to the press.

DT: Right, he didn't. And so the history behind that is that when he was arrested, the headline was "Jap Spy Arrested in San Leandro." And he was vilified, and he was literally brought into court in shackles. And he, I mean, how humiliating is that for an American citizen, if he'd done no wrong, to be treated that way? And so he was very distrustful of the press. So we said, "Fred, don't worry about it. We will speak for you." And assured them that they wouldn't be that, a target. And then literally, right after the story ran, the next day, he's got a television camera on his front lawn. And suddenly he's having to deal with all this. Eventually, he became very good at it, and probably liked the attention. But in the beginning, it wasn't easy, it wasn't easy for him. Later on, this is a couple years later, I remember Kathryn saying to Dale, she said, "I thought you wouldn't, that Fred wouldn't have to speak to the press." And Dale laughed and he said, "I lied." [Laughs] But Fred turned out to be his own best advocate. He was good. He got practice and got good.

LB: You had done community outreach prior to this, but you hadn't done anything at this scale. Was this overwhelming?

DT: Yeah. I mean, we were, when you walk in to a press conference, and then you've got every national news outlet there, including the Japanese press, too. And it was, for all of us on the legal team, not just me, it was suddenly we're center stage. And we were making very serious allegations against the United States government. A guy like John J. McCloy is still alive, former president of the World Bank and adviser to eight or nine presidents, and the single driver, not single, but one of the main drivers of the internment, and suddenly we're explaining to the world that he's lied to the American public, he's lied to the Court, that the solicitor-general lied to the Court. And I think it was explosive, so we had a tiger by the tail.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.