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TI: When you say "do it the right way," what's the right way? How do you get such access, such cooperation from these people in power?

RD: Well, I ask for it in a polite way, I treat 'em with respect. There are people who I have reason to believe -- this goes back to, say, Abiko. I'd read some of his stuff, I knew the sort of thing that he'd say, and I thought that he was the kind of person who would like to have this story out so that he's somebody I could talk to. I wouldn't try this on just anybody. And not everyone that you approach thinking that they will be cooperative, not everybody cooperates. So I remember the happy times. I could dig up some other times where I didn't get access, I was denied, or people told me things that I thought were wonderful, said, "But, you know, you can't possibly print that," etcetera. Those are some of the worst words I've ever heard in my life. You're talking to somebody, they say something particularly good, you've been listening for an hour, and all of a sudden they've given you a gem that you can use. You start to write it down, says, "Oh, you can't write that down, you can't say that. I don't want that to appear in my name." So what are you going to do? You play it the way it looks like, you try to be intelligent and plan it the right way, you try to present yourself in a way that you think would appeal to him without being totally unscrupulous and lying and this sort of thing. And as I say, I've been very fortunate, and there are a lot of people... I've been dealing with issues that a lot of people feel very strongly about, and some of them feel strongly positive about it and will cooperate. They might not have cooperated in the same way on another issue. A lot depends on when you do this. Now it's an easy thing to talk about. I'll never forget how stunned I was in the wake of 9/11 to find that three television networks wanted me to talk to them. And I said yes to the first and no to the other two because it'd be all the same night, this was the night after. Which really meant that to a greater extent than I realized, the basic experience of knowing about the evacuation to become almost a part of the wallpaper of American life for well-informed people, and journalists tend to be well-informed, that was not true when I began. There are questions I got when I'd be interviewed for the Concentration Camp book by newspapermen and journalists and television people were incredulity.

TI: Well, I'm impressed that after 9/11 these journalists found you so rapidly, too. I mean, how did they know you were the one to talk with? I guess I don't hold journalists in as high regard as you do, so that's why I'm asking.

RD: Well, if they looked at one book... what journalists do, they ask people. And the network I talked to told me that Robert Dallek had recommended that they talk to me, 'cause I knew Bob, Bob and I were assistant professors together at UCLA. Hadn't seen each other in years, but he knew what I did, and he reads. So somebody tells him, the television folks in particular have to have people who, all of them have a historian or two on tap, mostly people who were in New York for obvious reasons, and they can call on when they need to know. And when they need to know, they need to know in a hurry. I'm sure they have cell phones and numbers and this sort of thing, so that's what happens. But that also... and when I first read it I thought it was an exaggeration, that's also one of the things that Judge Patel said about how little significance and power the decisions in those cases now had, and that they'd already been widely disregarded. So that was it. And in one way... well, go on.

TI: Going back to meeting Stetson Conn and him allowing you to look at his notes, it seems like that was kind of a real breakthrough moment in terms of kind of laying out where things were. I mean, it really helped you.

RD: Yeah, that's right.

TI: Did he know what he was doing? Did he know what you were writing?

RD: Oh, yes, yes. Of course he knew. And he'd said many of the same things. But the question is, that I've never determined, and I've thought about asking him and I never did, is why he hadn't used it. And as I say, I think he'd been pressured not to say it, and had been almost waiting for somebody to come and ask him. And what he'd have done if nobody had come, I don't know. Somebody would have eventually found that. But I found it, and I found it because I was looking, and nobody was looking. Just wasn't a big thing on anybody's agenda. But there were people in publishing who understood the importance of it by that time. The book I wrote was for Helen Wang... not Helen Wang, that was later. Who published Concentration Camps? Rinehart. Holt Rinehart & Winston. They had a series with a scholarly editor, it didn't go very far, just two books and then they changed policies and didn't want any. Well, the scholarly editor was an immigration historian I knew, he'd been at UCLA for a short time and wound up at San Francisco State, his name was Moses Rischin, and he wanted to know if I would do a book on Japanese immigration. I said, "Well, I'll do a book on Japanese American incarceration," and he says, "Well, that's okay." I probably didn't say "incarceration" at that time. So that book, like almost everything else I've done since The Bonus March, had a contract in advance. So that there were publishers willing to publish. I didn't have to break down doors, and I've never had any trouble in getting things published. As a matter of fact, many times people come to me, this Kansas book, they've got a series on American law cases, a rather extensive one. There's one on Tokyo Rose coming, the trial of Tokyo Rose coming out. And they came to me in 2001 and asked me if I would do this book. The book I'm doing is not the book they thought they'd get, but I showed them what I was doing. They thought it would be a more orthodox thing and what I've given them is a social history of the cases and people. Most of their books focus on lawyers, I focused on plaintiffs, although the lawyers are there.

BN: I was also curious if you knew... you mentioned a little about knowing Barnhart, but I was wondering if you knew Grodzins.

RD: No. I didn't know Barnhart, I never met him. He told me in correspondence he didn't know where they were. No, I never met Grodzins. He's a political scientist; we go to different meetings. [Laughs] I've met most historians of my generation and previous generations, and for a while post generations. Most of the people on history programs today are people I've never known.

BN: At the time you're writing this or doing the research for this...

RD: The research and the writing, you know, I was already... this book was written almost as if I dictated it. It wasn't quite that simple, but it was pretty simple. I knew what I was going to say long before I found all the documents. That was just to fill in the holes and make sure I used the right words.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.