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LB: You mentioned earlier about how suddenly people knew about the coram nobis effort, redress was going on, and now people knew about what the coram nobis cases were doing. Did the coram nobis effort work with or independently of other groups working towards redress?

DT: We were pretty independent.

LB: Was that a choice?

DT: Well, yeah, in a lot of ways. The thing about the legal process is that it is, because you've got a client and you have a duty only to that client. I mean, legally, ethically, you're not supposed to be worried about public opinion, you're not supposed to be representing anybody else. Fred was our client, the only thing that mattered was what Fred wanted and the family. And, you know, there was a lot of ownership disputes over redress among the Japanese American activists. And people were genuinely worried, and probably rightfully so, that if we lost Korematsu v. United States a second time, it would really set back the redress effort. 'Cause they were lobbying congressmen, they were explaining to the country how this was a great wrong. And can you imagine if we went into court and the court says, "The internment was justified, the government was right when it did the internment, there's no way to reopen these cases, goodbye." And they were concerned about that, I think that was part of it. And then we had such a huge amount of publicity compared to anybody else. And again, why was that? Well, any time you have a government cover-up, misconduct at such a high level. I mean, this is the only case I know of where there's direct evidence of misconduct before the United States Supreme Court. Lying to the United States Supreme Court, probably unprecedented in the history of the United States, at least with evidence. And so I think the fact that we got so much publicity probably was an irritation at some level. And then there were different strategies. There was another legal group, NCJAR, who was saying, well, "Reparations aren't the answer, the lawsuit with no damages is not the answer. We need to get real monetary damages for this," and they had launched their own lawsuit. And we had sort of preempted the whole process in some ways, from a publicity standpoint. So, yeah, I would like to have said all the groups worked together well, but they were taking potshots at each other except we didn't take any potshots at anybody because we had our own problems to worry about. And we just wanted to be kind of left alone, in that sense, to be able to do what we felt was right. There was that one instance that you're aware of that word did leak out that we were doing these cases.

LB: You're talking about Justice Goldberg?

DT: That's right. So Justice Goldberg, former Justice of the Supreme Court, writes an op-ed piece about how this is doomed to fail. And we read that and our hearts sank, and we were worried. I remember Dale, we had a discussion about that, "What are we going to do about this? Seems to be the cat's out of the bag here. We've got a former U.S. Supreme Court saying we have no chance, Supreme Court Justice saying we have no chance." And Dale just said, "Look, he's not privy to the evidence, we know what we're doing, he doesn't." And just this audacity to say, "We need to go forward here." And so we ignored it.

LB: How do you think the coram nobis cases were received by the general public and by the Japanese American community specifically?

DT: You know, it's kind of interesting. I think for Japanese Americans, they wanted to put this history behind them, in that people didn't talk about it. And people claimed that it didn't bother them anymore, that they were Americans now, and it didn't matter. But when we started dredging this up, about that this wasn't some accident, this wasn't just wartime hysteria... it may have started that way, but it culminated at the highest levels of government as really an intentional plan to manipulate the outcome of these cases in order to validate them. And that there was no basis for it and the government knew it at the time. I mean, they, it opened up a whole different view of things. And I think at that point, people said, "You know, there were some things that happened to me that I need to talk about." And I'm not saying that the coram nobis cases were the sole trigger to that, but I think we were part of that trigger. And the other one was when my father and other people were asked to testify in these various commissions that were, the commission hearings that were done regionally. They started thinking about things they had not, they had just packed away and had not touched in forty years. And when they starting unpacking that, and with the context now of knowing that the whole thing was a manipulation, that it was a charade, that it was nothing close to justice, and that it wasn't an accident, I think it really accelerated things. That was from the Japanese American point of view. I think from an American press point of view, it not only got front-page publicity, but 60 Minutes and other coverage, just because of the massive, huge failure of American democracy. You have these institutions, the judiciary, the legislature and the courts, and each branch failed in such a spectacular way. And then there's writing about it contemporaneously among Justice Department lawyers knowing that at the time. I think that was a big story.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.