<Begin Segment 4>

TK: Your title was Special Counsel to the Commission.

AM: Yes.

TK: And what did that entail, just briefly?

AM: I was effectively in charge of the staff. I thought Special Counsel was an appropriate title, largely because I was a lawyer and that was an aspect of what I was bringing to the work that I felt comfortable with. But it could just as well, honestly, have been Executive Director. I was the head of the staff.

TK: Okay. And you talk about your staff. Could you just sort of describe them, and how did you see your staff and what kind of people were there?

AM: Quite a mix. The (...) one that I -- I think I singled her out in the introduction of the final report -- is probably the person who's (most) evident was Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga, who was just a terrific researcher in the archives. She was actually remarkably reticent about trying to persuade me and the commissioners as to what our views about things should be. Which surprised me a little bit simply because she knew so much about this area. But she was, she was very, very restrained about that. But there really is no one I've ever known who, without being a professional archivist in the federal system, knew as much as she did about quite a wide range of things. From there, there were a number of, of much younger people, recent graduate of Puget Sound Law School, for instance, somebody from the Justice Department that actually is now the Assistant Attorney General for environment and natural resources I brought in to help with the writing for a while. And another person, that again, I singled out, an absolutely fabulous typist. It may sound as if this really wasn't very important, but the paper that, the texts that we were dealing with were honestly a mess. (...) You'd send out, you know, a typed transcript to somebody who'd testified and they would, they'd mark it up in all sorts of ways, and they didn't do it with a typewriter and you'd get back twenty or thirty pages of something. And then you had what we were starting to generate ourselves in terms of drafts. This woman, Terry Wilkerson, was just fabulous at being able to take that and with immense speed and accuracy, give you back something you could, you could really work with. So it was, it was quite a diverse group of people from all sorts of places. A good number of Japanese Americans -- no Aleuts -- which in a way isn't too surprising, because we're a long way from the Aleutian Islands; and you know, a number of other people with an interest in this area and so on.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.