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TI: Going back to Woodward, why did you want to study with Woodward?

RD: Oh, because he was the outstanding historian of... and about the only historian of any stature who was writing about civil rights. John Hope Franklin had begun to write, but was not a well-known historian at that time, although he became a very good friend of mine. Got to UCLA and had my first interview with the man with whom I eventually worked. He asked me what I wanted to do for my dissertation, and I told him that I had some notion, I had a pretty exact notion. He said, "Gee, that's a great topic." But looking down at my vitae, because this was our first serious conversation, he said -- this was September 1957 -- he says, "In December you're going to be thirty years old. Your contemporaries are about to get -- and some of them who are very bright -- are already getting tenure. You're behind the curve. You've got to, if you want to succeed in a professional career, you've got to get started soon because people don't like to hire middle aged assistant professors. Therefore, you're going to have to do your coursework fast." I'd already explained to him, because he asked me about my preparation, that I was prepared to do that, that I could pass, he viewed this comment that's coming up with some skepticism I remember: "I'm prepared to pass my French and German reading examinations almost immediately." They were done in October. And he apologized to me for having questioned me in a joking sort of way. "And you need to pick a topic on which you can do work while you're doing your coursework, which means that you're not going to have very much of a social life." Well, I hadn't expected to have very much of a social life.

And he was a historian of immigration, and he said, "You might want to do something about immigrants because you're interested in twentieth century history and there are a lot of immigrants." And I said that I was really interested in doing, or I might be really interested, I thought for a while... I'm not sure this was in the same conversation, but I think it was. "Maybe I could do something about what they did to the Japanese in the Second World War." I'm sure I said it in just that way, or pretty close. He said, "Well, that'd be a good topic; that was a terrible thing. But there's a twenty-five year rule on most confidential documents, and I'm sure those are at least confidential. So that means that you can't get any non-public information until about 1970." And he thought for a while and we talked about other things, he says, "Why don't you go to the library and see how much work there's been done on Chinese and Japanese immigrants here on the West Coast? I'm sure we and USC and up in San Francisco at the Bancroft Library" -- I'm not sure he said the Bancroft Library, he might have said Berkeley rather than San Francisco -- "There's a lot of information here and I don't think there's very much good work being done on that topic." So I went to the library and that's where I spent my nights and part of the days from then until just before Christmas break.

And I came back and said, "Professor Saloutos, you're absolutely right." His name was Theodore Saloutos, S-A-L-O-U-T-O-S. He had a dual specialty: American immigration with a subspecialty within that of Greek Americans, he's of Greek ethnicity, and he was also a historian of American agriculture. "You were absolutely correct, there's no good work of a historical nature on either of those groups that I see, in my judgment. But that's just too much for a dissertation." The fact is, I eventually wrote that book. It was in 1988, it's called Asian America. I think that there ought to be enough information... and I listed some of the things I'd found and some of the manuscript collections at Berkeley that I'd found, and there were even a few at UCLA, although it did not have at that time a great manuscript library, about what was done to Japanese Americans -- I'm sure I said that -- in that way at that time, up to 1924, and starting with their initial coming here just after the Civil War. He said, "That early?" His eyebrows went up, "That early?" I said, "Yes, that early." And I had a long bibliography that I submitted to him of books and of archival sites I wanted to visit and he said, "Well, that sounds pretty good. Now get it done and get to work on other things." At that time, my assumption was I'd do the dissertation and get it published. I've never been wanting in self-confidence. And I knew that I wanted to do a second book sometime after 1970 on the wartime incarceration. And that would be it, because I was going to be essentially a historian of the politics of the New Deal. That was my December 1957 career plan.

TI: So these two pieces would really work together. You'd have first the immigration up through 1924, and then the second one would pretty much cover that prewar time and the war.

RD: Yeah. And that one, actually, the first chapter of that goes back and just touches base with some of that stuff. So that, yeah, this was already, this was at that time already seen as one continuous project, and, of course, then that was the end of it. Well, that didn't work out as we'll develop later. It seemed to me at the time that my lack of any significant knowledge of Asian languages, I had a horseback command of working-class Korean, because at certain times in my service in Korea I had a batch of Koreans I was responsible for who were not the KATUSAs who were the sort of well-trained or at least partially trained. Those were Koreans attached to the United States Army, but these were members of what they called the Korean Service Corps, who were people lacking in either the physical and/or moral capability to be in the Korean army. And that's not a very high reach at that time. A lot of these guys, even though they were doing engineering work, had only one hand, and that, of course, was because they had been caught stealing or thought to be caught stealing and had a hand chopped off. And they were a pretty rough bunch.

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