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BN: So you're continually doing this work on research, on what would lead to Concentration Camps USA, the twenty-five years comes, what happens at that point, or what opens up?

RD: Well, I go charging into the National Archives, and it turns out that while yes, all this material has been declassified, before you can look at it, somebody has to stamp it. Under today's conditions, I don't know what would have happened. It's a different world now, and they do things very differently. But there were two guys declassifying papers for me when I went there. And I used every minute that the place was open. Sometimes you have to wait for things, and I was never as eager... that's not the right word... adventuresome or insistent as one of the most accomplished American researchers, that's at the University of Michigan, Sidney Fine, who had two projects going, and he'd run from one to the other while they were putting materials up, and he always had stacks of material waiting for him. And they don't like that, but he would do it. They don't like to have too much sitting around and out.

But I got through all kinds of things, and I have to say that the first thing I did was not go to the National Archives. The first thing that I did was go to the office of the Chief of Military History, who at that time was a man named Stetson Conn, C-O-N-N, whose work I discovered when I was doing the earlier search. He had a 1959 article, and I discovered the uses of the official military army histories which too few people who are not military, just military historians, utilized, because they're very, very good stuff. And his essay on the origins of the policy of what he called evacuating Japanese Americans, published in 1959 and 1960 in various versions, and official army documents, very good. So I had an appointment with him by mail, told him what I wanted to do, and we talked, and gave me some advice. And then he said, "Would you like to see my notes?" I said, "Yes, that would be very, very nice." And he was ready for that, and he took me to a room he had all set up, and there were boxes and boxes and boxes; I spent three days. Paid my respects, left, and then he said, "Could I take a look at your notes?" And I thought, "Ugh." I had some dynamite. He goes through them very carefully and a big smile creeps up on his face and he says, "I'm glad you found that." And that was my bomb. I had it on a separate piece of paper. But it raised an interesting question in my mind, and I left, and he'd been very helpful. And every piece of information he had was labeled with where it was, so I knew where to look. I wasn't just going in and saying, "Well, I got to look at all this stuff." I went some other places, but really, that was a road map, an itinerary.

BN: So he had access to some of this material?

RD: Oh, he'd had access to anything he wanted.

BN: Right, but no one else, no one outside the government had access to it.

RD: Yeah, and publish it. And it wasn't in the Archives. But the question is why he hadn't used it. I never asked him that question. I said something, and he muttered something about, "I was lied to about that." I'm not sure that's a direct quote, but something like that. And what that particular set of words was was a document of John J. McCloy's quoting himself in an argument with the attorney general, in which he expressed himself very vigorously in saying, "If you're telling me if it's a question of the security of the United States, the Constitution of the United States is just a scrap of paper to me." And that's dynamite. And years later... not years later. I eventually found that piece there, and when I'm in the Archives, as opposed to being in Stetson Conn's office, I don't have to write it down. They would microfilm it for you. They won't do that now. You have to go do your own Xeroxing, but there was no Xeroxing in those days. There was copying, but not Xeroxing. When that particular document came, it wasn't on a microfilm reel. It came to me in a personal letter addressed. And when I opened it up, there were holes cut out around that particular phrase. Well, I knew what the words were. And in the original preface to the Concentration Camps book, I described this document and its censoring. And my wife said to me -- I don't know if she remembers this or not. She read it; she reads everything I write. She said, "You know, they're not going to like that back at the National Archives." I said, "I know, I know, I know." I thought about it some more, and this is when I was, I finished this book in Laramie, University of Wyoming, and I'd made friends with somebody in the federal records center down in Denver. And I went down and I talked to him about this, and I showed him the preface, and I thought I knew what would happen. And lo and behold I get -- that letter was a form letter from somebody, "This was left out of your other shipment, here it is," and then that thing came up. So maybe ten days later I get a letter from the Archivist of the United States apologizing for this, saying that the person had been disciplined, lieutenant had been disciplined, and that it was improper, etcetera, and here is the full text without the part taken out. So my preface now reads... not in my preface, but in the acknowledgements part, "I thank the Archivist of the United States for restoring to me a document that had been improperly censored by one of his subordinates." I did that because, as my wife had suggested, and I knew I would be back there again. And it might well be that some people wouldn't give me -- nobody's going to stop me, but if they want to screw you up, they can be slow and drag their feet and this sort of thing. So that's it.

And I'd run into that once before from my research on the Bonus March. There was no city government of Washington at the time. This would have been while I was teaching at UCLA. I got hold of an awful lot of stuff, and again, before I went to go to the archives, and a lot of the stuff was not in the archives as the story will later say. I went to see somebody, and in this case I went to see a congressman named Wright Patman who had been -- we're talking about 1962, 1963, 1964, somewhere in there, probably '64 or '65. Back in 1932 he had been the major spokesman for the Bonus and he's still there, he's now a powerful committee chairman. And I introduced myself to him in a letter, and introduced myself in a way that I do not usually do in that I started off by saying though I now teach at the University of California, I was an undergraduate at the University of Houston, and so he thought I'm a Texan. He's from Texas. And he said, "Yes, come see me," etcetera, so I came to see him, talked to him, met him in his office, told him what I wanted to do, and he says, "Well, somebody ought to have done that a long time ago. I've got a lot of material. Not here." He was a committee chairman, so he had two offices. He may have had three offices, but he showed me another one and says, "I got a lot of stuff on the Bonus March in here. This is one of my research offices, and you can come anytime you want to, and here's a key to the room. I'll leave a note downstairs that you're to have complete access." He was in one of the subsidiary buildings. I don't know if any of you have been in Washington in the summertime, but it can be brutal. And I was in a non-air conditioned hotel.

So I got up really early in the morning, and the first morning I was there, I was there about six. About six-fifteen, in comes Patman. He sees me working, and he just straight out, "Son," he said, "you're a person after my own heart. I just remembered I got one thing in this drawer I don't want anybody to see." And he took it out and he said, "Everything else is yours." So that helped. One of the places I had to go was the office of the District Commissioner, and they had a lot of stuff. And they let me write in, let me go through stuff, and I copied all, had all sorts of things copied, doing my own copying, but at their expense. As I'm about to leave, up shows... what was his title? Anyway, the Chief Attorney, and he's not going to let any of that stuff out. I asked, "Can I use a phone call?" "Sure," he said. He was a decent fellow, but he said, "I can't let you do that, the regulations," you know what lawyers are like. So lo and behold, Patman's in his office, and I tell him what's going on, he says, "Will you give that gentleman the phone please?" I said, "Congressman Wright Patman wants to speak to you." He hadn't been listening to what I was saying even though he was right there, he was doing something else. He suddenly turned a little green. And I could hear Patman on his phone because he could raise his voice when he wanted to. He wasn't a Texas politician for nothing. And it went something like this: "What is your name?" and he told him his name, says, "Now why, Mr. So-and-so, an employee of the United States government, why are you interfering with a young Texas scholar who's a personal friend of mine? Do you want me to talk to," and he mentioned the name of the guy who was chair of the district attorney, "my friend So-and-so?" etcetera, etcetera. And this guy's turning greener and greener and greener. Well, you can imagine. I was about ready to go home, I'd done all my archive work. Well, anyway, some of the stuff still had to be copied, and I was supposed to pick it up the next day. And he explained that to Patman, he says, "Well, I don't want there to be any confusion, because my friend will be leaving and he's got a lot to do. I want you to deliver that material to him at his hotel at night, and you do it personally." And I went out to dinner, and I came back, and this guy's sitting in the lobby. He was very glad to see me, gave it to me, and I said, "I will reassure him that you did everything he requested, and I'm sure he'll be very grateful to you. He can be a good friend when you're on the right side of him," etcetera. So I've been very lucky. But some luck comes because you do things the right way, and some luck comes because it's just luck. And I've had a lot of good luck in my life.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.