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TI: Something you mentioned earlier, about how when you were national president, there was a meeting where you really tried to get everyone to work together, and how important that was. As I look at the history of redress, it was incredibly successful, and you did have cooperation. But at times it must have felt like you're herding cats. That you have strong personalities, different organizations, believing that there were different ways of accomplishing the end result, and being pretty adamant about do it this way versus that way. I'm trying to think, how did people, how did you navigate that? I mean, again, there's only so much the JACL could do, you were not the only organization, there were other organizations, there were individuals doing things, at some point, how do you keep people in line? What do you do, especially, in particular, the inside game? Because you know, to get this, there's certain key players that you have to convince, and there may be things that other individuals or other organizations doing that aren't helping. What do you do in that case?

FS: You know, you can't control people and what they do or say in meetings. The one thing that I tried to do, for example in my office, in the inspector general office in the VA, when those other groups that come into town, they would generally call me, and I'd invite them to come in to my office and meet with me before they went. And my message to them constantly was, "You know, if we don't all work together, we're gonna fail together," and don't you forget that. And I'd tell them, "Look you can meet with all these people you want, but let's work together. We got to stick to this thing together." And I think they basically did. Bill Hohri from NCRR in Chicago, he and I became fairly close, and he agreed. He told me once, he said, "Frank, I agree with what you're doing, we've got to work together." It was that kind of thing. And I had several meetings like that as national president. We met with them once in San Francisco to bring them all together, and every time we met, my message to them was, "Look, we've got to do this together. We can't go charging off on our own." And I think it worked.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2017 Densho. All Rights Reserved.