<Begin Segment 9>

RD: And the most dramatic thing I did was when they had the first meeting of the commissioners after the establishment of the commission, they asked me to brief them on Japanese American history. And I so I went and I spoke for one hour.

TI: So let me just give a little background. So this was a nine-member commission appointed by President Carter to study the incarceration. Do you want me to mention who these people are, or are you going to mention them?

RD: Some of them will be mentioned.

TI: I'll mention the full group, and then you can tell your story. So it was chaired by Joan Bernstein, other members included Arthur Flemming, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former Senators Edward Brooke and Hugh Mitchell, the Reverend Robert Drinan, Father Gromoff, and Judge Bill Marutani, and also California Congressman Daniel Lungren.

RD: The appointment story is a funny story, and I've got to tell it. It was originally a seven-person commission. And after it had been established, it passed Congress, the Alaska senator who just died, what's his name?

TI: So would that be Mitchell?

RD: No, the Alaska senator, the senator from Alaska.

TI: Oh, I'm sorry, Stevens.

RD: Stevens discovered that some of his constituents, the Aleuts, were also evacuated under the provisions of E.O. 9066. That was a different kind of evacuation, because they were in harm's way. So the evacuation was justified. But the treatment they got after evacuation was just atrocious. They were mostly dumped in abandoned canneries in southern Alaska, developed tremendous rates of TB and all sorts of things. Anyway, the procedure for appointing a presidential commission is that for a seven-person commission, the president pro tem of the Senate gets two, the Speaker of the House gets two, and the President gets three, so that was seven. And that's the way the commission was. And then, after the election, in the lame duck session, Stevens comes up and he wants to appoint Gromoff. And since they made a deal -- Gromoff's name wasn't mentioned at this time -- that they'd add two more people. And the president pro tem of the Senate would get one, and that Stevens could name that one, and the Speaker of the House could get the other. So after the Senate named Gromoff, who was an Aleut Russian Orthodox priest, Tip O'Neill says, "Well, if they name a priest, I'll name a priest." And he picks Father Drinan who was a Jesuit who had been serving in Congress for years, but whom the Pope said had to get out politics, had to get out of political office, so he had resigned, so he put him on. So one of the first documents that Ronald Reagan, the new President, had to sign -- and by the way, what happened was that the old Congress had been controlled by the Democrats. The new Congress, the Republicans were in charge in the Senate, but the Democrats maintained control of the House. So that was the nine. And in addition, a certain number have to be Republicans, but the Republicans were appointed by Democrats, and they were mostly liberal retired Republicans, and then there was Lungren. So that was the nine.

So I talked, and I when I got through talking, Goldberg took over. And I don't know if you know anything about how Supreme Court Justices treat lawyers, but they fire question at them right and left. And he gave me a very thorough grilling. Didn't ask me anything I couldn't answer, but he'd done his homework. He knew the right questions to ask, and it was quite obvious that he was in favor of the whole thing, but he gave me quite a grilling. I hadn't had anything like that experience since my doctoral orals. The only other person who asked me anything was Bill Marutani. The other people just sat there. The last question that Goldberg asked me came as a shock because I didn't think anybody was going to ask me a question like that. He asked me, "Professor, assuming this commission decides to make an award, how much should it be for?" And that really stopped my clock. I'm told I only paused for a moment, but it seemed to me it was a long, long time. And I said -- and I hope to find a transcript of this because I don't have a copy of anything I said -- but I think I said, "Mr. Justice" -- that's what he liked to be called -- "that is a question for the Commission to decide, and I would not presume to tell the Commission what to do. But I believe that if this were a case in law and the Japanese American people" -- remember, he's a retired Justice -- "the Japanese American people were fortunate enough to have you representing them in a court case, I am sure that you would ask for more than twenty-five thousand dollars." [Laughs] He had a good grin. I'm not sure exactly what he said. I think he said, "You're goddamn right," which sort of ended the whole thing. There was nothing to do about that. And at that moment, it was clear to me that there was going to be a positive result.

TI: That exchange, that's priceless. Who else was in the audience? Who else was there when this happened?

RD: A very small audience; there wasn't much of an audience. There was a lot of staff.

TI: And when this happened, was there quite a bit of laughter?

RD: No, there wasn't. There were people sitting around a table. There's a picture of it that I found in the National Archives, I didn't know it was there, of me briefing the Commission, a photograph, and it's published in my book Asian America. You have a copy of it. But I hope to, sometime in the near future, get into the archives of the Commission. Joan Bernstein, who was a government bureaucrat, a government lawyer who knew how to do certain kinds of things, had told me that she would try to arrange, have a publication of the papers, some of them went out on microfilm, but didn't do or wasn't able to do what she said, which was to get some money for a proper historical editing and arrangement of the papers, which I didn't want to do, but I wanted to have some hand in shaping them. My thought was if they got some money and a grant, that I would try to recruit a history PhD or two, a Nisei or Sansei if I could find one, but mostly somebody with historical competence and knowledge. But that never came about.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2013 Densho. All Rights Reserved.