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TI: Going back to the Commission, did you attend any of the hearings?

RD: Yes, I attended the Chicago hearing.

TI: So tell me what you saw. What were your experiences?

RD: I had a nightmare getting there. [Laughs] I got off at the airport and had to go to this Holiday Inn in a suburb of Chicago. I was told it was seven stories high and purple, and I had a taxicab driver who spoke perfect English and drove very well, but a week previously he'd been driving a taxi in Lahore, and he didn't know anything about Chicago. So I thought I was never going to get there, and I got there a little late. And I thought it wasn't as wild as the L.A. hearings, which was apparently the most uncontrolled, which is probably about right. But it was not unlike other hearings, and they were wonderful stories. I'd never seen large numbers of Japanese Americans crying in public before; some just absolutely broke down. I wish I had been at the L.A. hearings. I don't know where I was when that happened.

TI: And since you had already briefed the commissioners, what was their reaction to the hearings?

RD: I don't know, I didn't have much contact with most of them. The only commission member I saw with any frequency was the Washington senator who went to some of the meetings that Gordon and I went to.

TI: Was that Senator Mitchell?

RD: Yes. He was an appointed senator; he never won an election. He was a very good man.

TI: Did you ever have a chance to talk to Bill Marutani after the hearings?

RD: I spoke to him at a reception, and as I say, he asked me a question. He didn't talk about coram nobis. You know, Irons says that he presented some of his findings to a special panel that met with the Commission in Cambridge of mostly lawyers. And Marutani was the one who suggested to him that his information that Aiko and he found was, that a coram nobis proceeding was the appropriate way to go. Now, whether that's the first, I don't know, but it's what Peter mentions. He's a little unforthcoming on that.

TI: So to make sure I understand, so what you just said was it was Judge Marutani who first suggested that the writ of coram nobis would be --

RD: I didn't say that. I said that he says that when he presented his materials, that Marutani suggested that coram nobis might be the case. He doesn't say that that was the first he had thought of it, and he doesn't say not. He just says that, so what you said was a conclusion, and it's probably true, but it's not something you could say, because he didn't say it.

TI: Okay, got it.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.