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TI: I want to back up a little bit --

RD: Then, in addition, I continued to work with the Commission. It turns out that some of the materials I had cited could not be any longer found in the National Archives, so I gave them some microfilm copies. And I don't think there's any conspiracy there, just stuff gets lost. People look at it and they put it back in the wrong place, etcetera. And the other thing I did -- and this was largely due to Jimmie Omura -- who had somehow or other gotten in touch with the people at the Smithsonian who were preparing the wonderful exhibit the Smithsonian put on. And he thought it was being badly done, and he sent me some stuff from it, and I thought it was being badly done, too, so I crudely inserted myself into the matter. I had friends at the Smithsonian, knew who to write, and got in touch with the people involved, and made clear to them that I got sent some of the script, and it was just awful. They had all kinds of terrible mistakes in there. Their heart was in the right place, but it was a very complicated business.

TI: And who was doing that? Was that the historians at the Smithsonian?

RD: Yes, people at the Smithsonian.

TI: But they usually have a community connection. Were they working with a community organization?

RD: Yes, and that's how Omura heard about it. There were other people involved, too, I don't know who was involved, but I just wrote a letter, and I made it clear that I was going to make a stink. So they paid for me to come to Washington and straighten them out. I mean, they had quotations from Supreme Court cases wrong, and just an awful lot of other mistakes. It was a good idea, the whole story of the thing is an interesting story, I tell it. But Roger Kennedy, who was later head of the Park Service, was in charge. And the Smithsonian put up this exhibit as part of its contribution to the bicentennial of the Constitution. And the museum -- not the Smithsonian, but it's a Smithsonian museum, but the Museum of American History was right across the street from the National Archives. That's where the Constitution is, that's where the display for the Constitution is. What the hell are they going to do? And some people who were largely associated with the Air and Space Museum, historians there -- particularly a guy named Tom Crouch, who I quote in my book that's coming out in November -- had the idea of focusing on the Nisei soldiers. But then it wound up that they were going to do the soldiers and this, and it wound up to be mostly an exhibition about the camps. And a former Chief Justice of the United States, who was the head of the commission on the Constitution, heard about it and didn't like it at all. And he came over and complained to Kennedy about it, that they shouldn't do this. And supposedly -- Kennedy would never confirm this, I asked him about it some years later when I heard about it, and he just sort of smiled and said, "I couldn't possibly comment on anything like that." But what the Justice told him was that, "That was a terrible thing that they did to those people, but it has nothing to do with the Constitution." I hope that's an accurate quotation. As I say, the source couldn't confirm it, so when I use it, I make that explanation. But it's widely believed, by people who worked on the project, that that is the case. And it turned out to be a very good exhibit, and I was pleased to be able to do so. But I was happily, by that time, I had enough of a reputation that I was able to insert myself into that situation. And of course I said that I'd raise hell if they didn't, and that's the last thing a government historian ever wants, is somebody, particularly somebody with a reputation, to go and talk to some congressman about they're doing a bad thing, and I would do exactly that. I had some fairly good congressional contacts.

TI: And this was the exhibit A More Perfect Union?

RD: Yes, that's right. That is correct.

TI: That's a good story.

RD: It may even be true. [Laughs] I worked constantly through the commission, and based on my experience, I made one contribution, one suggestion which they accepted, an important one, to their work. One of the things that I kept seeing in various archival collections of Japanese American papers was that under the Japanese American Claims Act, you had to file a claim, and that Japanese American lawyers had a little business going there. They didn't charge them much. I mean, somebody like Kido got twenty-five dollars a shot for filing these papers. And I went and I talked to the people when they were drafting the recommendations, and I set about this and I said, "Listen. People shouldn't have to establish their claims. The government knows who these people are. It's the government's responsibility to do that." And they put that into the law, into the recommendations, and Congress accepted them. And nobody there had any awareness of this, and I don't think it would have come up. And the office of ORA, the Office of Redress Administration, set up in the Justice Department, did an absolutely superb job. They went so far as to have two people attached to the embassy in Tokyo for more than a year hunting down eligible people who were living in Japan, most of whom were renunciants, of course. But that had nothing to do with it. If they were in camp, they were entitled to their money. So that this was a tremendous thing, and I never would have thought of it if I had not seen all those letters. And those claims were really, I mean, claims were being cut down under that act. They recognized so much property damage done, but the appropriation was only a fraction of that, and the government litigated these things; the litigation went on for twenty-five years. So that a lot of the money wound up not to the people who lost it, but to lawyers, mostly Japanese American lawyers, but some places Caucasian lawyers. There were some people who lived in places where there weren't any Japanese American lawyers, although on the West Coast they got to be pretty thick on the ground. And it's an interesting question as to how much the Japanese experience in the camps, and with other kinds of discrimination before that, impelled such a relatively high percentage of Nisei and Sansei to become lawyers, more Sansei than Nisei. I have no doubt that the percentage is much higher than for most groups in the population.

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