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TI: But in the same way, so in FDR's time, it was much more evolved in terms of what you'd expect in terms of human rights. During FDR's time, there was a lot of racism.

RD: That's right.

TI: And so looking back now seventy-five years, I mean, that has evolved a lot. And so --

RD: Yeah, but he didn't believe in it; he was against it.

TI: Against the what?

RD: He was against most forms of racism and discrimination, very certainly was. And he put up with this for reasons that he never explained, never tried to explain it. He didn't live long enough. And I don't think that most of the explanations that are around are appropriate.

TI: So it was like a blind spot? When you say his views on racism were...

RD: My view -- and I will write this out in great detail in the book -- what was Roosevelt thinking in February 1942? He was not tremendously concerned about losing the war with Japan. He was not even concerned terribly about losing the war with Germany, which was a much more formidable opponent. He had incredible confidence, but he understood the power, the potential power of the United States and was now pretty well organized. Even at that early date he was terribly concerned about winning the peace. And what he remembered, and never let it slip out of his mind, that the man who became his political idol, Woodrow Wilson, had lost the peace because he had lost the Congress in the election of 1918. And he's thinking about -- he doesn't know when the war's going to be over, he knows it's not going to be over in 1942, and his plan was -- and it's not clear that it was planned yet, but he was already thinking about offensive action. And the North African invasion was originally planned, he pushed the army to have it early. He wanted it to happen before election, and it surely would have given a bounce before election. He had on his desk before him -- or he'd gotten before him -- he knew what was going on on the West Coast. He'd had a document, I described it in Concentration Camps in 1970, signed by every member of Congress from the three West Coast states and Republican, Democrat representatives and senators insisting on that. And it was clear that if the liberty of the West Coast Nikkei was continued, as it should have been, he might lose some seats and he didn't want to do that. So he went along with 9066, and if you read the thing very carefully, of course -- you both know this -- doesn't say anything about Japanese Americans, doesn't say anything about anybody, and it says absolutely nothing about incarceration; he talks about removal. And nobody knew that they were going to do. And he created the WRA -- I mean, we'll talk about this maybe in more detail later. But the real clincher for me... I'd thought for a long time that this was the case. That the real clincher for me came when I began to read the reports -- the man was then dead -- of the cardiologist who had been assigned to him full time after his heart condition, Dr. Bruenn, developed, was observed during the war. He'd had it before the war, but I don't want to get into his medical health too much. But Dr. Bruenn says that the worst blood pressure reading he ever had, and Roosevelt's blood pressure went up and down. It was never good, and sometimes very alarming. The absolute worst came not at a crucial time in the war, not in a crucial time in his health, when he was on a cruise, it was a wartime cruise -- nothing was better for his health than to be at sea, he just loved it. When he walked out of the -- and they always had first run movies. There was a movie made during the war called Wilson, which was one of the most political movies Hollywood ever made, and it was just Henry Cabot Lodge and those others, and Roosevelt stormed out of there -- he's being pushed in a wheelchair, so that's probably not an accurate term -- but he came out of there in a stormy mood muttering about, "They'll never do that to me, I've taken care of that," or some such words. And that's when the blood pressure, coming out of a movie in the evening, should have been reasonably low, but that's the worst reading he ever got. So that was perhaps his worst wartime fear; not losing the war, not that one of his four sons was engaged in combat, would be killed, not that millions, hundreds of thousands of Americans would be killed, but that the United States would win the war and retreat back into a kind of isolationist position, which was a political position that serious politicians had, and that's what he was concerned about. And I'm convinced -- I can't prove it because he never explained it -- but I do point out in ways that, in this book, that no other historian has stressed, the evidences, or what I think are evidences, of this particular fact. And I do, I have put together a series of statements that he made.

This was in my talk, you guys went, yesterday. Press conference on October 29, 1942. He's talking about what became the Bracero Program, and if you read his press conferences, they're under different rules than they are today. You couldn't quote him without his permission. So he really expanded, he really educated, or tried to educate, reporters. And he says... he's talking about that and he says, "Even right now, we've got Japanese working in the beet fields of Montana." They were also working in the beet fields of Utah, but he didn't say that. But that's what he said. He went on to say something else and somebody said, somebody asked him, first question obviously came from a Californian reporter, or a reporter who knew about California, but I'm sure it's a California reporter from a California paper. And asked him if, "these Mexicans are gonna replace the Japanese Americans and Japanese" -- he wouldn't say "Japanese Americans" -- "the Japanese in the California labor force." And he said, "I don't know that now." And then a little later a somebody yells -- obviously not a Californian and didn't know what was going on -- "Where did those Japanese come from, Mr. President?" Two word answer: "concentration camps." Boom. And then there are things he says after the Endo decision has been written but before it's released, and after the 1944 election. Another press conference, "Is it true that those people are going to be turned loose?" because the WRA was talking about that. Roosevelt said something to the effect of -- and this got in the papers -- "There are a lot of lawyers," he says, "who think we haven't got a right to hold citizens." And this was when the decision was already being made because Endo was being held up by the Supreme Court at the convenience of the War Department, which I talked about but didn't connect it to Roosevelt directly in Concentration Camps. Anyway, that's a long digression.

TI: But I think the point you're making is, so for Roosevelt to win the peace, he needed Congressional support. And here he had all of the western states, at least the coastal state congressional delegation all lined up wanting Japanese Americans to be removed from the West Coast, and feeling that need to keep them sort of on his side or at least, maybe not his side, but in a position where they would be helpful in terms of winning the peace in the future.

RD: That's the choice he took. He could have done something else. He could have embarked on an education program, could have said something about it. He was a powerful man. There were certain people he wouldn't have satisfied, but among those it was Hiram Johnson who couldn't be satisfied on the subject of international affairs by anybody. He was a dyed in the wool isolationist. He died on VJ Day, so he had no say anyway. But that's what I think, but we don't know, he never explained. What he would have said if he wrote the book, if he wrote the book that he said he was gonna write, he'd have a lot of help with that, or some kind of farewell address and this sort of thing, that's something else again. He might well have dealt with it and tried to explain himself and this sort of thing, but that eventuality never came about.

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