<Begin Segment 16>

TI: So going back, you mentioned the Salt Lake City conference right after the findings...

RD: Well, a lot of people at that conference were very skeptical that anything was ever going to happen.

TI: That's what I wanted to talk about.

RD: As I say, I was not skeptical. I thought it would happen, and I thought that the time had come where this thing could be done, and if it didn't get screwed up somehow, that it would eventually get through Congress, and that's what happened.

TI: And that timeframe, I mean, 1983 to the signing, 1988, was that about the timeframe you were thinking? A five-year process?

RD: I had no notion. I would not have dreamed on doing that. It would depend on who had been elected. If the election in 1980 had gone the other way...

TI: So I'm trying to think of the impact of Reagan becoming President.

RD: It slowed down the whole thing. The Reagan administration fought it tooth and nail right up to the last minute, and then Ronnie came trotting in.

TI: And signed it.

RD: Yes, but there's a story. I've described this in books, not everything. Reagan tells a story that he had this letter from a Japanese American woman who reminded him that he had been at this medal ceremony working as a PR man for the Air Force. Ronald Reagan served in the Air Force, and sometimes he imagined he'd been a bomber pilot, but he never left Hollywood. His job was to do public relations, and he did so. He was too old to be a pilot, but he confused the movies with real life all the time. But the fact of the matter is that there were people -- and I was one of them -- who let people in the Reagan White House know that we were very much aware of his appearance at that ceremony, and it would not look good for him. In addition, it was probably good California politics to sign it, but his administration was absolutely against it. And there are papers in... the button woman, the predecessor to Michelle Malkin.

DH: Lillian Baker?

RD: Thank you, Dana, bravo. Lillian Baker, who I debated in Seattle once. But their people corresponded with people in the Reagan administration, her papers at Palo Alto, that make it very clear that they were just shocked and betrayed by Reagan's acceding to redress. Because they knew he was going to encourage the House not to pass it, or he's going to encourage the House not to pass it, but veto it if they passed it, and it's clear that it was not a veto-proof, so it was absolutely crucial.

TI: And so it's still not clear to me why he signed it.

RD: He signed it because it was good politics, because it would have been embarrassing to him. He wanted to be a hero.

TI: But even though people like Ed Meese and others in his administration were really very against it?

RD: There were people up there who were pushing for it. Grant was probably one of those, but he's... I have some documents about Grant.

TI: Well, the story I've heard through Grant is the role of Governor Tom Kean, who through... from Grant's informing Governor Tom Kean about the story of the ceremony during World War II that Reagan participated, that the governor reminded President Reagan of that. And President Reagan, when hearing that, decided to do the "right thing" by signing it.

RD: Well, there were people in the Reagan White House who knew that there was a historian who would scream very loudly about these meetings if he didn't do it.

TI: How did you come across this information? How did you first hear about the ceremony that Reagan participated in?

RD: I read the New York Times for the entire period, I mean, the Los Angeles Times for the entire period. It was in the newspapers. Stillwell was news, Reagan was news.

TI: That's right. Vinegar Joe Stilwell.

RD: And this was all part of something ordered by Truman, who Eleanor Roosevelt had told, apparently, getting information from people in the WRA about the difficulties people were having in California, and there was this whole business of shooting into houses, some of it done by deputy sheriffs, etcetera. And she alerted Truman to this, and Truman began what was a whole series of pro-Japanese American debates emanating from the White House, including the famous review. But he did a lot of things. He did a couple of other things that weren't that good. Following something that had been set up in the Roosevelt administration, he signed the order making it possible to deport the renunciants. Without that order they couldn't be deported. He also pardoned all the war resisters, but didn't discuss the pardon. Actually, his pardon board made the recommendation. A.L. Wirin, who was counsel for the JACL for years, who gave up the much more lucrative counsel to the CIO in California, which demanded that if he were to continue working for the CIO, he'd have to drop his Japanese American, represent that. And the CIO paid him a lot more, but he told them to go to hell. He was a very nasty man in many ways, but he was right on almost every issue. Tule Lake people resent him very much.

TI: Resent him? And why so?

RD: Well, they blame him incorrectly. He found a way for certain people to get their citizenship back before Collins did. He only had two or three clients, Collins had all these people lined up, and went through a long, complicated procedure. Wirin did something very simple: he instructed his clients to apply to the State Department for a passport and let them know that they didn't have... and then sued the State Department. And the State Department didn't want to defend the suit, so they'd issued the passports. And they blamed Wirin -- and I think it's wrong -- for the fact that Denman and his decision did not do what they wanted, what Collins wanted. Collins wanted him to say they were all invalid, Denman said no. He was a very interesting guy. He said all the minors get their citizenship back. Everybody else has to apply for it. And what apply for it meant was they had to file an affidavit, and then the Justice Department had to refute it. The Justice Department didn't have any evidence against anybody. They didn't know who these people were, they didn't know where they were. And one of the reasons it took so long was they've got to find these people. Most of them had been turned loose and could, in fact, if they still had their birth certificates, could pretend that they were citizens, that they were still citizens, and who would have known the difference? But those cases went on forever... not really, I think it was twenty-five years.

TI: But people were upset with Wirin because they felt that his action prompted kind of the ruling that it had to be done by the individual?

RD: Yes. I think that's untrue. I think that Denman was... but he was a nasty man in many ways. He reduced a very nice and naive graduated student, who was trying to do a paper on this, and he gave her an interview and she asked him what he thought was a dumb question and he says, "That's a stupid question. There's no sense talking to you. Get out of here." And it probably was a dumb question, but he wasn't very nice. I could never find anything bad say about him, apart from his character, which I don't have to write about. The one thing I could do that annoyed him was I used his real name.

TI: And what's his real name?

RD: Abraham Lincoln Wirin. He hated it.

TI: Interesting.

RD: Everything is A.L. Wirin. But he was a very good lawyer. He had a client early on, the Wakayamas, clients, and he used the same approach with them that was later used for Mitsuye Endo. But the Wakayamas, who had gotten involved in some of the nastiness at Manzanar, withdrew after he'd gotten it through a local judge. So that case went nowhere. And it would be very interesting to know what would have happened if that had gone up that early. The whole thing about coram nobis that's fascinating is I am convinced that even if the Supreme Court had known all that stuff, they would have done exactly the same thing.

TI: It's more just this time?

RD: Yes. There was a war on, they were Roosevelt's men, all but one of them he'd put in their seats. He didn't initially appoint Harlan Fiske Stone, but he made him Chief Justice. He appointed seven of the other eight. Only Owen J. Roberts was appointed by anybody else. No, they were Roosevelt's men, and there was no way they were going to -- and I think that during a real war, to expect the U.S. Court to not reject something President wanted to do, but to reject something a President wanted to do to enemy people, no way anybody can ever answer that question because it didn't come up. But I'm convinced it would have made a difference.

TI: Now, the Supreme Court... and so the coram nobis cases didn't make it all the way to the Supreme Court. And I know more recently, Peter Irons wants the Supreme Court to repudiate their wartime convictions, the Supreme Court's wartime convictions. Any thoughts about that?

RD: A consummation very much to be wished. But this bunch? Forget about it. I think it's highly unlikely that it will happen. Certainly it's unlikely it will happen soon. I think most will do like Patel did; she said as a precedent, this isn't any good. It doesn't make much sense. But who is to say what's possible? I think it's desirable, but I don't think it's going to happen.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.