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TK: Do you know how many copies were printed, and once the original Personal Justice Denied went out, were there any surprises in your mind in terms of the reactions from, for example, the New York Times or the L.A. Times or, or other sources during that initial release and reaction?

AM: Well, (...) you know, in fairness, people working on a deadline in the press don't really have an opportunity to dig very deeply before they have to give their reactions. I was certainly gratified that there weren't any serious attacks on the substance of the historical record. Apart from this one question on the "Magic" cables that came up in the succeeding six months which the Washington Times played a good bit, there really was very little else. Even at the hearings the Congress started to hold thereafter, the next year or two, the Defense Department has a handful of historians who were constantly working on military history and one of them testified, and there were some differences of opinion. But what I would call professional differences of opinion, not a real attack that, "Look, you just have this dead wrong," but rather, "You know, I would draw a somewhat different inference from this bit of the evidence." So that I felt very gratified by that. I did not think in the end that the "Magic" cable issue really, really changed anything. It was true that we hadn't found that particular batch of cables before we finished the report and, you know, the reality is there's probably always a little bit more in some archive somewhere. You do the best you can. But I thought after I read them all through and worked it out, as we said in the second publication, that it really didn't change the conclusions we came to. In a way, I regretted that it didn't get book reviews just because I would have liked to have seen more fully what people would have said if they'd had the time to sit and read it carefully. But I think, certainly for me, the fact that the University of Washington has decided to republish it has been a vote of confidence that it's a book worth reading.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.