Densho Digital Archive
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Angus Macbeth Interview
Narrator: Angus Macbeth
Interviewers: Tetsuden Kashima (primary), Becky Fukuda (secondary)
Location: University of California, Los Angeles
Date: September 11, 1997
Densho ID: denshovh-mangus-01-0011

<Begin Segment 11>

TK: Did you feel a sense of historic importance, both in what you were doing and in the, perhaps final outcome, at this time, before the report was actually written and distributed?

AM: Well, you hope for it. You know, one thing that (...) I realized reasonably quickly as I got into this was there are a lot of commissions that get appointed whose final product is quickly forgotten. And there are a lot of recommendations from commissions on which Congress never acts. And it seemed to me that you had to be realistic that it was altogether possible here that Congress wouldn't do anything in the long run for any one of a number of reasons. One, you know, just the simple political fact that Japanese Americans are very unevenly distributed geographically, and so there were a large number of congressmen who really don't have any Japanese American constituents to speak of. And it's not that they're opposed to this, it's just that it never gets on their radar screen. And if there are enough people that simply just don't care or aren't aware of it, there's a high chance that nothing happens. So that given that real possibility, it seemed to be very important to try to leave behind a document that, on its own, would make some impact in the long term and further the ends that the commissioners were pursuing. But it's very, very hard to tell when you're sitting there doing the writing whether you're able to express this in a way that will capture people's interest and imagination, and they'll actually read it through rather than looking at the head notes and the summary. And I certainly hoped that we would leave behind something people would read, and we did our best to send it to all the major libraries in the United States. [Laughs] But there's a difference between the hopes of the people who are sitting there with a pen in their hand and the reality of how the public may receive the book.

TK: Many people have said this is a fantastic book. It has a poignant story, a very -- but told very simply and very powerfully. And people just are amazed that a government report could be so easily readable. Where do you give the credit for this? How did this happen?

AM: Well, we tried to do that. There was one point in one of the drafts where Senator Brooke called me up and said that he had really read fifteen pages of this carefully, and he just had a number of editorial suggestions. And we sat there on the phone and he went through it. And basically what he was doing was removing all the unnecessary words and anything that was a bit of a purple adjective, he toned down. And you know, in fifteen pages he probably had twenty of those. And my first reaction, I think as any author was, you know, "Lord I've worked hard on this, it can't be that it really needed this kind of work." But then I picked it up a day or so later and he was right. And it brought home to me, very powerfully, really just what you're saying. Make it simple, make it direct. This isn't a story you have to over tell. You really don't have to load up the adjectives, because it speaks for itself very strongly. And after that, I went back over what we'd already written and then really tried to keep it in mind as we went forward and aimed to make it as simple and clear and direct as we could. So if we've succeeded in that, I feel very, very happy with it because that's, that is something that we were consciously trying to do.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.