<Begin Segment 1>

TI: Today is Wednesday, May 24, 2023. We are in Reno at the home of Jack and Jill Svahn. Today we have John A. Jack Svahn to interview. I'm the interviewer, Tom Ikeda, and I used to say I was the executive director, but this is my first interview not as the executive director, I retired three months ago. So, Jack, you pulled me out of retirement to do this interview.

JS: Well, I'm impressed.

TI: And on camera -- and Dana, you've done hundreds of interviews with me -- is Dana Hoshide. So, Jack, I'm going to just start with some basic background information. Can you tell me where and when you were born?

JS: Well, I was born in New London, Connecticut, in 1943.

TI: So 1943, what was the date of your birth?

JS: May 13th.

TI: And so today's May 24th, so this makes you eighty years old.

JS: Don't remind me. [Laughs]

TI: So congratulations. And I'm sure people tell you, you look fabulous.

JS: Only my wife does.

TI: No, I'm sure. You look great. But I want to start actually just... tell me the names of, first, your father and just a little bit about you.

JS: Well, my father was in the navy, and he started out in 1935, no, '36, I think, and went to submarine school, and then was transferred to a submarine out in the Pacific. And was out there for about five years, came back in 1941, and married my mother from Spokane.

TI: Spokane, and then ended up in New London, Connecticut, where you were born.

JS: I was born there. He was on a submarine in the north Atlantic just out of New London.

TI: And you said he met your mother in Spokane. Why Spokane, Washington?

JS: Well, they're both from Spokane. Well, actually, my father lived in a little town outside of Spokane called Fishtrap.

TI: Oh, I don't know that place. Fishtrap?

JS: It's in between Sprague and Cheney.

TI: Okay.

JS: They lived on a farm there, and my mother lived in the city of Spokane. And after, I guess it was after my grandfather sold the farm or the ranch, and he moved into the city, he was running a store that was next door to where my mother lived with her family. And when my father came home on leave, it was July of '41, and they had already been engaged in the Pacific, of course, because he was operating out of the Philippines and China, and Japan had already invaded China so there was a war going on over there. We weren't involved in it yet, but I guess people met and got married in a hurry.

TI: Well, and for your parents, I mean, literally, she was the "girl next door."

JS: Absolutely.

TI: You hear that term, and especially for younger generations, I mean, that would be so rare.

JS: Well, it was a different time.

TI: Different times.

JS: Different time.

<End Segment 1> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 2>

TI: Going back to your father, how did your father's family go to Spokane, Washington? I ask this question because we're based in Seattle, Washington, and so I'm always curious how people got to the state of Washington. So how did your father's family come to the Spokane area?

JS: Well, my grandfather came from Sweden. And he went to work for the railroad, Northern Pacific at the time, and he was out in Montana and he just sort of moved across a little bit and he wound up, before he bought the ranch, he had a store and it was the train station, and he was the postmaster.

TI: Interesting.

JS: That was 1920.

TI: And then going back, what was your father's name?

JS: Albert, Al. Albert Russell Svahn.

TI: Okay. And then going back to your mother, mother was your mother's maiden name?

JS: Caferro.

TI: Okay, and her first name was?

JS: Esther.

TI: And same question about your mother's family. How did they come to...

JS: Same train.

TI: Same train?

JS: Only my grandfather worked for the Great Northern as opposed to the Northern Pacific. And they had a lot of, my mother's relatives came over from Italy and they all went to work for the Great Northern railroad. So I had relatives in Milwaukee and Chicago and Cut Bank.

TI: All the places where the train would stop?

JS: Whitefish.

TI: Because, I mean, Whitefish, those are all on the train line.

JS: Nice mountain go to skiing there.

TI: No, it is. I like that place, too. For the viewers, we're both skiers, we were talking about that before.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 3>

TI: So I'm going to jump ahead to your childhood. Although you were born in Connecticut, where did you grow up? When you think of your childhood memories, where is that?

JS: Well, we traveled a lot. In fact, when President Reagan appointed me as the Commissioner of Social Security in 1981, I got a nice letter from the congressman who was from southeast Connecticut. And he said it was really great to have somebody who knows the problems of southeast Connecticut and things like that. So I sent him back a letter and said, "I left when I was two." [Laughs] But I hadn't been back.

TI: Yeah, so not really any memories of Connecticut.

JS: Not really. But we moved a lot because my father was in the navy. And at the end, he was on submarines all during World War II. And at the end of World War II for some odd reason, only the military and the federal government could figure out why they took a newly minted ensign -- because he came up through the ranks and he became and ensign at the end of the war -- they took a newly minted ensign and they sent him to Africa to set up an ordinance facility for an air wing. You say, well, he's a submariner, how come they did that? I don't know, he didn't know. But we left Connecticut, we moved down to Washington, D.C., for about a year. Then we went back to Connecticut for about a year, then we went to Africa for three years, and Morocco. And then I left there and we went to Keyport, Washington, the torpedo station there at the time. Now, it's a big base, but in those days, it was just torpedoes and trying to make them better. Because in World War II, they had a real problem with the torpedoes not going where they were supposed to go.

TI: I saw that. Last week I was in Honolulu at the USS Arizona memorial, they have a submarine museum. And yeah, they talked about, at the beginning of World War II, just that problem of the torpedoes sometimes circling back.

JS: Circling back and hitting you.

TI: And actually hitting the submarine, and that actually happened. I did not know that.

JS: Well, let's see. We went up there in '51, and that's what they were doing. They'd test torpedoes right there in Dabob Bay in Puget Sound, to see how they could make them work better.

TI: That's so interesting, because you probably just see these places differently than I do as a native Seattleite. Hood Canal is just beautiful. I think of that as oyster beds, and you probably look out there and think submarines out there. Because that's where nuclear submarines are testing and doing things also.

JS: Yeah, but Bangor wasn't even somebody's dream at that time, and now, of course, it's huge, and so is Keyport. When I lived there for three years, I guess, it was a great place to be a kid. Because you were on a base, I went to grade school in Poulsbo, but they had all kinds of fruit trees, you'd go fishing anywhere you wanted to, you could get a gunnysack full of oysters. Because it was very sparsely populated in the area at the time, on the base, people couldn't come and do that. So it was only the people who lived there that could go out and harvest oysters and things like that.

TI: Oh, so generally the base people didn't really get to partake of, I think of it as the natural bounty. It is just an amazing part of the country.

JS: Oh, it is, no question about it.

TI: I mean, people could fish for salmon from the shore if they wanted to, and all those different things. Okay, so after Keyport, where did you go?

JS: After Keyport we went to San Diego where my father was a navigator and ordinance officer on the USS Nereus (AS-17), which is a submarine tender. It was anchored in San Diego, and they had to go to sea, I think, once a year. They went to Acapulco or someplace that was very navy.

TI: And so, in that case, so your father was pretty much at home then. He wasn't at sea that much?

JS: No, he wasn't at sea very much at all. They'd go out for a little cruise for a few days. In fact, he took myself and my brother several times out on that.

TI: And so you went to school in San Diego for about how long?

JS: Three years. Everything was pretty much three years.

TI: Okay. Then after San Diego, where did you go?

JS: Went to Honolulu. It was at submarine base Pearl Harbor, and I went to high school there. I got there when I was in the tenth grade, so I went tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades in Honolulu.

TI: Right. So I'm curious, because your experience is so different than mine. I pretty much lived... we moved once, but I'd lived in Seattle, so pretty much stayed in the same community my whole school career. Every two or three years, you're moving and moving. How do you make friends? Or you must be good at just...

JS: You make friends very quickly and you forget them. I mean, I still have friends in different places, but it's funny. In fact, both of us, my wife and I both, her father was a pioneer captain with Pan American, flew the flying boats across the Pacific. So we both moved a lot, and you got there, you had new friends, and then you left and sometimes you'd catch up with them somewhere else, but sometimes you wouldn't. And you spent some time thinking about, gee, I wonder what happened to so and so?

TI: So you get pretty good at reading people, making friends, but then moving on, I guess. You just had to keep moving on.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 4>

TI: So during all those travels, especially in places like San Diego, maybe Honolulu, there are significant Japanese American populations, especially in Honolulu. I mean, did you ever come across members of the Japanese or Japanese American community?

JS: Oh, sure. [Laughs]

TI: So tell me about that, yeah. I mean, Honolulu, for some people, they don't realize how prominent Japanese Americans are, I think, in Honolulu. San Diego, not as much, but Honolulu there are a lot.

JS: Well, the whole West Coast has a very large population of Japanese Americans. And growing up, as a kid, I had friends who were Japanese American friends. And as an adult, I had friends, I had people who worked for me who were Japanese Americans, so I knew quite a few. Of course, living in Hawaii, particularly being a student in school, the school that I was in, the high school I went to out there, it had a very high percentage of non-local people, it was about 50/50. Because it was a new school and it was situated by Pearl Harbor, and so you had a lot of military dependents, from the Navy, from the Air Force, and from the Army. They had Hickam, Fort Shafter, and Pearl Harbor there. So we had about fifty percent military brats, and about fifty percent locals. And, of course, a lot of the locals were Japanese Americans.

TI: And so this was Radford High School?

JS: Radford High School. Named after Admiral Radford.

TI: Okay. And how did the locals get along with the military? I mean, 50/50 is kind of, so it's a fairly wide balance. To the point where sometimes they would kind of stay with their own, right? They would stay with locals or in the military, or was there a lot of mixing back and forth?

JS: Well, there was among kids, not so much among adults. And that sometimes translated and caused its own problems in the school setting. Because it was 1957, '57 or '58.

TI: Yeah, you graduated in 1960. Or at least that's when you started the University of Washington, so, yeah, probably late '50s.

JS: Yeah, it was late '50s. And half the Marine Corps base there had been in World War II, and a lot of them had been in the Pacific and so they'd get their boys on Friday night and they'd go out and get juiced up, and, "Let's get in a fight." So it wasn't all wonderful, but by the same token, at the kid level it wasn't nearly as bad as it was at the adult level.

TI: Well, and I didn't think about this until now. So this is the '50s, like mid- to late-'50s, World War II wasn't that long ago. World War II was a war against Japan, the local population, there were a lot of Japanese Americans, was there any kind of racial tension between the military and Japanese Americans because of that?

JS: This is just my opinion. In the first place, most people who were in the military couldn't differentiate a person who was a Japanese American from a person who was Samoan, you know.

TI: Or Chinese American or...

JS: Chinese, Korean, Filipino, yeah, gets a little tougher, but that's just a fact. So it was more military folks, and of course, the brass didn't like that at all, but they weren't out on Friday nights. But like I said, as far as the kids went, it was not much problem at all. Everybody was friendly, and in that school, because we had such a high percentage of non-locals, it was fine, we never had a problem. It wasn't a Canne school or it wasn't Punahou or something like that, it was regular people going to high school.

TI: And especially people from Hawaii who would see this, they would understand that, public school, not Punahou or Iolani.

JS: Iolani.

TI: Yeah, Iolani.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 5>

TI: So the question, is there like a story or a person that just shows your interaction with a Japanese American or the Japanese American community, like something you would attend. I'm just trying to establish that you knew the Japanese American, Japanese Americans. Is there like a story that you have?

JS: Well, I don't know. I guess, well, two things. One, I had a very, very good friend who was a Japanese American girl, her name was Lucy Ikeda, and we stayed in touch over the years. In fact, when I was... I don't know what I was doing at the time, maybe when I was at Social Security. She had gotten married and moved to New Jersey and had put in a request and asked me if I could come speak to a group there in New Jersey, and I went up there and spoke with her, and I went and did the speech. And I have to say, it was really kind of odd because here was a Japanese American girl who was born in Hawaii, grew up in Hawaii, and had moved to New Jersey. And it was really odd to hear her talking with a New Jersey accent. I looked at her and said, I want to make sure you're the right girl. I'd say that one of the, a Japanese American person who made a tremendous impact on me was my biology teacher in the tenth grade, his name was Mitsuo Yuichi, and he'd say, "You call me �You Itchy,� I'll tell you, 'Me Scratchy.'" [Laughs] It was in the tenth grade and he said, "I'm going to teach you like you have to learn when you go to college," and he made the biology course very interesting, and I got good grades, I worked hard there. We stayed in touch for a while. He became a legislator in Hawaii and he's passed away, I guess, a number of years now. But when I'd have to go out there for some reason in Hawaii, I would always look him up and we'd have lunch or breakfast or something like that, but he was a real impact on me.

TI: Yeah, that's good. Your story about the woman from Hawaii going to Jersey and having a Jersey accent, that reminded me. So you were sort of being raised primarily on the mainland, and high school, you go to Honolulu. When I go to Honolulu, especially when I'm in the community, people, the locals talk sort of in this pidgin English, it's very informal. So they probably thought you talked funny when you first got there, or did you adapt?

JS: Well, actually, it took, I guess, maybe almost two years before I would call myself a hapa haole.

TI: Okay, right.

JS: And you pick up pidgin. People sometimes could speak real good pidgin and also real good English. It's an affectation in Hawaii and when you find some newcomer or something like that, you talk a lot of pidgin in order to make sure they don't understand what you're saying.

TI: And as you say, the ability to switch back and forth. I mean, one example, Senator Inouye, who was incredibly articulate and formal, and when you talked to him in D.C. he talks a certain way, when he's with his buddies, he would talk differently, and that pidgin would come up. It's just interesting to see how those can switch back and forth as an example.

JS: Every once in a while I use it when I meet someone from Hawaii or if I'm out there or something like that, I'll do a little pidgin.

TI: I love that we're sharing this, because it will help people understand who you are and the connection to, I think, the culture, the community and all that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 6>

TI: So let's jump to, after you graduate, you decide to go to the University of Washington in Seattle. Why the University of Washington?

JS: Well, I could afford it. [Laughs] I was paying my own way and I was accepted to the University of Washington and I said, well, okay, my parents were both from Washington. And then I thought, well, in that case, maybe I can get to be a resident and pay resident tuition. Because my father was active duty in the military and they were really from Washington, my grandparents lived there, my uncle and my aunt lived there, I thought, well, I can do that. That lasted for about thirty days after I got there, and then the university found out that I was only seventeen and they said, "You can't be a resident because you're a resident of wherever your parents live."

TI: Oh, okay. But then when you turned eighteen, did they make you a resident there?

JS: Yeah, I turned around and went back and said, "I'm here, I'm paying my own way, and I should be a resident."

TI: The people back in Washington will want me to ask this question. Why not Wazzu instead?

JS: Moo U, you mean?

TI: What's that?

JS: Moo U.

TI: Moo U, yeah. [Laughs] Yeah, you're a true Husky. But your family was in Eastern Washington, Spokane, and so did you consider Washington State?

JS: No, I did not.

TI: We won't go into the Cougar-Husky conflict there. I really want to get to your time in the White House, but I just wanted to talk about this. But one more question about the UW, what did you major in, and in some ways, what were you thinking in terms of career, and because oftentimes, the degree you get determines what you do later.

JS: Well, I was going to be a dentist.

TI: [Laughs] You surprised me with this one. I know what you ended up with, I wasn't expecting that. So you were going to be a dentist.

JS: That was my plan. And I got to organic chemistry, and I said, "Well, I'm not going to be a dentist." Besides that, I couldn't meet any of the manual dexterity tests that they gave us, and that's when I sort of switched.

TI: Oh, so you were essentially a pre-dent.

JS: Pre-dent.

TI: And it was organic chemistry. So it's funny, I actually, my degree is in chemistry and chemical engineering, so I actually thrived in that, those organic chemistry labs, I loved that.

JS: Everybody's a chemist.

TI: [Laughs] Well, who else is a chemist?

JS: We have a PhD, or doctor of chemistry is a next door neighbor. She's a professor over at the university here in Nevada.

TI: Well, as a fellow chemist, she must be very interesting. [Laughs]

JS: Oh, yeah, she's very interesting.

TI: We like to see how things get all mixed together. But any other stories you want to talk about from the University of Washington, and in particular if there's anything that you did with Asian Americans or anything like that? Can you remember any?

JS: Well, after I quit pre-dent, then I went into political science and I had an awful lot of courses in the Far East department, and graduated eventually in political science.

TI: So you went from -- this is a UW thing -- so you went from the lower campus up to the quad or upper campus.

JS: Right. Where you could take art and things like that. [Laughs]

TI: It was much prettier, they had the cherry trees in the spring, just gorgeous up there.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 7>

JS: But I do have one interesting story. I came from Hawaii, and Hawaii had just been made a state in '59, I got there to Washington in '60. And I had long hair and I had a couple pair of bell bottoms, which in those days, nobody was wearing that. Everybody wore button down shirts and the pants with the little belt in the back and stuff like that, short hair. Anyway, I was registering in the ad building there, and I walked out of the ad building and these two guys were standing over there, they were wearing letterman's jackets. And he said, "Hey, you, come here." I said, "Me?" They said, "Yeah, come here." I walked over there and they said, "You want to turn out for crew?" And I said, "What's crew?" I'm a surfer. [Laughs] And I said, no, I said, "Why me?" They said, "Well, you see that line on the wall over there on the ad building?" "Yeah." He said, "You walked across that and you were above the line, and so you can turn out for crew," so I wound up turning out for crew, a sport that I knew nothing about.

TI: Oh, yeah, so crew was, as you know, was UW's major sport.

JS: Well, football was the major sport.

TI: But crew, too, right? I mean, crew was big.

JS: Well, crew was big, but it was, on the crew we bought our own uniforms. We had the Conibear Shellhouse down there. But the football team had it during football season.

TI: Jim Owens, was Jim Owens there?

JS: Yeah, Jim Owens. Fil Leanderson was the crew coach, freshman year was Johnny Bissett.

TI: We could talk Husky stuff all day, but by any chance, have you read the book The Boys in the Boat?

JS: Oh, yeah. In fact, I've met most of them.

TI: Really?

JS: Well, they were '36, and the would come back to the...

TI: Oh, the crew to kind of just inspire you guys? I mean, yeah. After the interview I'll tell you some stories about that, but we'll keep going.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 8>

TI: After... I'm going to jump around a little bit. But I just wanted to ask you, because later on, you went to law school, which I think is important to what we talk about later. And first, you took your constitutional law course from Anthony Kennedy, who later on became a Supreme Court Justice.

JS: Right.

TI: And I just wanted to ask you about that experience. I mean, he's such a legal scholar, and I just wanted your impressions of taking a course from...

JS: It was fantastic. I mean, it was very, very interesting in his approach to constitutional law and his approach to the law was, I found to be very much aligned with mine. And, in fact, I'd guess how he voted on cases before the Supreme Court all the time. I said, "Oh, Kennedy's not going to vote for that," or, "He will vote for that."

TI: Oh, because you could just tell from the lectures that you, the way he thought, how he framed the issues, and how he would vote on various cases?

JS: Well, how he taught constitutional law.

TI: So what would be an example? I mean, what would be something that would be, would help you understand how he would do that?

JS: Well, I don't know other than studying him and learning from him. In fact, the first exam that I had when he taught constitutional law, and I just happened to have been the number one student in the class at the time. And I got the exam, the blue books back, and I had a C+ and I was devastated. I thought, oh my god, how could I get a C+? I mean, that's the worst grade I'd had up to that time, and I don't remember if that was the second or third year, but that was the worst grade I'd had. And we got to the class and we were sitting there and I was really feeling bad and everything like that. And he said, "I want you to know," that the best grade in his class was a C+. Everybody else had a bummer, so I figured I must have written the way he thought I ought to right it. Actually then, after I left the government, I was on the board of visitors for (University of the Pacific), McGeorge School of Law. And it was an interesting group. It was myself, Anthony Kennedy, the chief justice of the Nevada supreme court who also happened to be a professional boxer originally and then turned into a referee. Raymond Burr, who was not an attorney, and he was the guy who played Perry Mason on television. It was an interesting group.

TI: That's interesting that you had Raymond Burr, he's an actor and he was part of that group.

JS: He's Perry Mason.

TI: [Laughs] Well, he's an actor playing... yeah.

JS: He always won his cases.

TI: Well, Anthony Kennedy, when he was with that group, was he a Supreme Court Justice at that time?

JS: Yeah, he was still on the Court.

TI: Wow, that's a pretty esteemed group to be with.

JS: Yeah, I looked around and wondered what I was doing there. I did that a lot. But he continued to teach at McGeorge even when he was on the Court, and he would do, when the court would recess for the summer, he would do the McGeorge, I forget whether it was in Belgium or Germany. They had a foreign campus, and he would go over there and teach there.

TI: So I'm going to have to plead some ignorance. When I think of Supreme Court Justices, where they get them, the type of schools they would come from, I think of Harvard Law School, Yale, Georgetown, I mean, places like that, I'm not really familiar with McGeorge Law School. So I'll plead ignorance, I mean, tell me more why, how a Supreme Court Justice comes from this school?

JS: Well, you mean, from being a professor?

TI: Being a professor, yeah, being a professor. It feels like not a well-known law school.

JS: Well, no, it's not. [Laughs] Not at all.

TI: I mean, I'm fairly well-read, I have not really heard of this law school before.

JS: Well, actually it started, it was a dream of one superior court judge in California, and it started as a night law school. It was in Sacramento, so you had all those people who were working for the government, working for the state, and they could go to law school at night like I did for three years.

TI: So it was a very pragmatic way of getting your law degree then?

JS: It was a bar school.

TI: Yeah, a bar school.

JS: I don't know now.

TI: Thank you for doing this. I just wanted to do this because you're not like this high falutin Ivy League lawyer, I mean, you were a state worker going to night school.

JS: By the way, I'm not a lawyer.

TI: Right, yeah. I understand that

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 9>

TI: So let's move on to -- again, I'm going to jump around because I want to get you to... yeah, so I'm going to really jump all the way to 1983 now. And this is Labor Day weekend, 1983. So this is, you're already in DC, you're working in the government, you mentioned that the Commissioner of Social Security, you've already done that. But Labor Day weekend, 1983, was when you went to Santa Barbara. So tell me about that, that weekend and why you went to Santa Barbara.

JS: Well, I had, at the time, I was the Undersecretary of Health and Human Services and the Commissioner of Social Security, which was interesting. I'm not sure how you can do that legally, but I was both.

TI: Oh, so you wore both hats? I thought you had to...

JS: I had both hats on.

TI: Oh, I didn't realize that.

JS: And it was not working out. The lady who was the Secretary of Health and Human Services did not want me to be the number two, the Chief Operating Officer of the department. And I said, "Well, then, I'm going to leave." And the powers that be said, "No, we don't want you to leave, we want you to move over to the White House." So I said, gee, that sounds really interesting, and actually we were out on a sailboat at the time in the Chesapeake Bay. And we had the radio turned off, and when we got to an anchorage, some people that we knew had said, "Hey, the Coast Guard's looking for you." And I said, oh, really? So I called the Coast Guard on the radio and he said, "Sir, have you contacted area code 202-456-1414 today?" I said, "No, that's the White House switchboard." I said, "No." He said, "Sir, could you get to a land phone and call 202-456-1414." I said, "Okay."

TI: And before you go on, generally if you got something like that, what would that mean to you?

JS: Well, I knew what the phone number was.

TI: Right, but what are you thinking before you make the call? I'm just curious, are you, like, worried, are you concerned, do you think, oh, this bad news, good news, what goes on?

JS: I had no idea why they were calling me. So I called, I spoke to, I think it was Jim Jenkins, it might have been Ed... no, I don't think I spoke to Ed Meese at that time. But anyway, he said, "We want you to move over to the White House and take Marty Anderson's job," which was the chief domestic and economic policy advisors to the president. I said, well, that sounds interesting, and that's how I got to go out, the president was out at the ranch in Santa Barbara. And Ed Meese said, "Well, come out and let's talk about it," because he was there at the time. And so I flew out to Santa Barbara. And I checked in late at night, and the next morning I got up and I went to the staff headquarters there and things were in kind of an uproar. And I said, "Ed," I said, "what's going on?" He said, "We think the Russians," or the Soviets, "just shot down a Korean airliner."

TI: I remember that when that happened. So this is essentially your first day of work.

JS: Uh-huh, in the White House.

TI: I'm curious, I don't remember this from your memoir. Did your wife go with you to Santa Barbara?

JS: No.

TI: Not on that trip, okay. The reason I ask is, there was this humorous story you tell in your memoir when you took the Assistant Secretary position of Health and Human Services, that initially you didn't want that position.

JS: Oh no, undersecretary, no, I didn't want it.

TI: Yeah. And I thought it was a great story, and what you said was, well, part of it was, well, "My wife won't, doesn't want this to happen."

JS: Yeah, they had me in a hot box, and they were pushing me because it was palace intrigue. They had decided that they were going to appoint this congresswoman from Massachusetts who had never voted with Ronald Reagan in the past, they were going to make her...

TI: So that's a headscratcher that they would do that first. I mean, at that level, why would they do that? I mean, that's always puzzled me.

JS: Well, it puzzled everybody.

TI: But then, but they thought the solution was to make you the undersecretary, because you would actually run things.

JS: That was the deal, was that I was going to be the number two, the chief operating officer of the department, and the administration would get credit for having appointed a woman as the cabinet secretary. But it didn't work that way.

TI: And when you understood the deal, you really didn't want to be part of it, is my understanding?

JS: Well, no, I said no. I know that woman, I said, "You guys are crazy." And I was sitting in Ed Meese's office with Ed and Mike Deaver and Jim Baker.

TI: Oh, The Troika.

JS: I said, "You guys are crazy." I said, "You can tell her to do anything you want and she will not do it."

TI: Right. And so you knew this, and yet you took the job. So what made you take the job?

JS: Well, I said I'm not doing it, and Mike Deaver said, "Well, why not?" And I said, "Well, one reason is I told my wife I wouldn't do it." And he said, "Where is your wife?" I said, "She's at home," and he turned to somebody and he said, "Go get her." So I got on the phone, I called her up, I said, "There's going to be a car there to pick you up and bring you to the White House. And she said okay, but by then she was used to funny things happening. And so when she got there, she came in to the White House and came into Ed's office and we were still there, I forget who was still in the room. But then Mike said, "Let's go." And we started out and Jill said, "Where are we going?" "Where are we going?" I said, "I don't know, but if we go into a room with no corners, you say, 'Hello, Mr. President,' to the tall guy in the brown suit." And so she did. He put the arm on her, and I think I wound up saying okay.

TI: I love that story. But it also said to me, you have to be careful. If you give a reason to not do something...

JS: Then they remove the reason.

TI: They remove the reason.

JS: Then you no longer have it.

TI: I know, and that was part of that story, too.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 10>

TI: But also -- and the reason I wanted that story in here -- was when you went to the White House, again, I did the math, you're forty years old. I mean, you may not have felt this, but you were a young man with, around a lot more older and experienced people.

JS: Most of them were willing to tell you that, too. [Laughs]

TI: Right. And it wasn't like you were coming through the back door, they were recruiting you, you were a star. I mean, the fact that the president would have your wife come to the Oval Office and, as you say, put the arm on her and essentially convince her that you had to do this, the undersecretary job, it says a lot to me. You're a very modest person, but I just wanted to establish that to be in the position you are, and for them to want you so much, says a lot in terms of what you were doing, what you were capable of. I mean, did you get that, did you understand all that?

JS: Well, you have to remember, I had in... well, let's see, how many years would that be, I don't know. But I had been through two of the biggest wars that Ronald Reagan went through as a politician.

TI: So welfare?

JS: Welfare reform in California and social security, saving social security. And today, people look at it and they say, "Oh, they want to cut social security, it's running out of money." Well, it ran out in November of 1982, and it took a lot of courage on the part of the president and a lot of leadership, and the very excellent help of Alan Greenspan and a number of other people that were on that commission, National Commission on Social Security Reform, to fix the system in 1983, knowing full well that in about forty years, we'd have to do something again. I mean, that system's a simple system, it works just like your checkbook. You got money coming in, you got money going out. Now, when you got more money going out than you got coming in...

TI: Right. Okay, so you had...

JS: So what I'm saying is I'd been through those two battles, and the president knew it, and his key lieutenants, Ed Meese was there in Sacramento, Mike Deaver was there in Sacramento, Jim Baker had been through the social security fight. And so I guess they said, well, so what if he's only forty years old?

TI: I mean, were there other Assistants to the President?

JS: Oh, sure.

TI: As young as you, though?

JS: Oh, no.

TI: Okay, that's what I thought.

JS: I don't think so. No, there weren't any that were as young as I was.

TI: And again, for the benefit of the viewer right now, explain the rank of Assistant to President. I mean, to some people, "Oh, he's just an assistant." No, the Assistant to the President is an incredibly high level position. I mean, if you were try to compare it to like a rank in the military, what would something like Assistant to the President be?

JS: They don't have any ranks that high.

TI: So, I mean, higher than like a general, like a two star, three star general type of thing?

JS: An Assistant Secretary in a department is the equivalent to a four star general.

TI: Yeah, so people, I think, most people don't understand this in terms of, when I say, "Oh, you were only forty years old, I mean, that seems so unusual. And people don't understand, you have direct access to the president.

JS: It depends on the White House, it depends on who's running the show. And even with the president, the Chief of Staff is an Assistant to the President; the Press Secretary is an Assistant to the President; the National Security Advisor is an Assistant to the President. It's a rank as opposed to a description.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 11>

TI: Well, let's talk about, in the case for you and the Reagan administration at that point, what was your role and responsibility and your relationship to the president specifically? How did it work?

JS: Well, it involved a lot. I mean, in the first term, we had the so-called Troika, and each one had an assigned responsibility. Early on in the first one or two years, three years, something like that, there'd been a lot of friction between the camps, if you will, and that caused a lot of leaks. The President was, he didn't like that. He was mad about that.

TI: And so when you say the camps, it's among the three of them? So between Deaver, Meese and Baker?

JS: Baker.

TI: Okay. Was it like three different camps, or was there like more of a California camp and a Baker camp?

JS: Well, that's a different group, too. I mean, in fact, we did have... we had a group that came out of Sacramento, and the original strategy, I think, even though I was not party to it, was in each department you could have someone, if the secretary was not a Californian, then the number two person had to be somebody who was known to the President and to the administration as having come out of government in California. And we had a club called the Hangtown Fry. We would all get together no matter where you were, if you were in the National Health Service or you were running NOAA, or you're in the Census Bureau or wherever you were, then we'd all get together and commiserate.

TI: Talk about the dysfunction in Washington, D.C.?

JS: This is true.

TI: But so what I wanted to... okay, so again, your relationship and role with the president...

JS: Like I said, it evolved. When Mike and Ed and Jim were there, it was more a team operation. Everybody had their differences and everybody had their own hobby horse and that sort of thing. But even so, we still worked together. I mean, I was a member of the Legislative Study Group, which was Baker's group, to figure out how to get things through Congress. We worked pretty much together. Then in the second term, in 1985, then all of a sudden we had a big swap. And Ed Meese was going over to be Attorney General, Jim Baker swapped jobs with Don Regan, who came over from Treasury, Baker went to treasury and Regan became the Chief of Staff, and it was a totally different ballgame.

TI: And when you have that kind of transition, that kind of switch, was part of it, is it almost like getting away from the... what's the right word? I mean, I always read about how high pressured it is in those positions. Is it almost like a form of pulling back a little bit, or is it like people are just... why are people moving at that level? Especially when you're at the pinnacle, you're right there next to the president, why would you move away from that?

JS: Well, Baker did because he was worn out. He spent four years doing that, and he was tired. I mean, being the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States is a very powerful and important job, but people don't really know it. I mean, they think it might be, but they have no idea what really transpired. And being a cabinet officer of a cabinet department like the Treasury Department, is a big deal.

TI: But not as pressured as chief of staff or something like that.

JS: Well, you were your own boss, pretty much, so you can call the shots. When you're working as a staff person anywhere, you're a staff guy, and that's a different role.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 12>

TI: And your title was Assistant to the President for Policy Development. Tell me what that meant in terms of the scope of your work.

JS: Anything you wanted. [Laughs]

TI: Yeah. To me, when I read that, it's not very descriptive.

JS: Actually, that title, the Assistant to the President was, as I said, just rank. And "for Policy Development" was actually created for Marty Anderson, Martin Anderson, who was at the Hoover Institution, then a PhD professor at Stanford, who was the first Assistant to the President for Policy Development in the Reagan Administration, it was a new title. And Marty developed that title because he didn't want to be hampered by artificial barriers. So what's policy development? Well, it's anything you want. So you could put your fingers in any pot that you wanted to. Plus the fact that there were a whole lot of pots that you might not want to put your finger into, but you had to because you were the guy who was charged with policy development.

TI: That's interesting. So the previous one, was he a little bit more of an academic then?

JS: Marty?

TI: Yeah, Marty.

JS: Yeah, he was an academic politician.

TI: You seem very different than that. In your background, your upbringing, I wouldn't think of you as an academic sort of...

JS: Oh, no, I'm not an academic.

TI: You're very much more pragmatic, get things done type of person, is how I...

JS: You give me a job, I go and do it. I mean, that's sort of what got me where I was.

TI: This is fascinating. This is taking longer than I thought, because I'm just so curious about all this. This is really, really interesting

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 13>

TI:. So I'm going to kind of get refocused here. Because I want to talk about an interesting piece of legislation. At the point you joined the White House in 1983, already by that time, so 1980, or before 1980, President Carter formed a federal commission to study the World War II internment and incarceration of Japanese Americans, and this federal commission had started meeting in 1980. And by 1983, they had their findings, it was called Personal Justice Denied. And so this had all happened before you were in the White House. And you talked a little bit about your background, so you knew Japanese Americans and you knew what happened to them, but I'm curious, at what point did the issue of redress, this redress legislation, come to your attention?

JS: Well, when you say come to my attention, I mean, I knew about it. I knew what had happened, I knew people who had been impacted by it, I knew people who were born in those camps. And I personally felt that it was a great injustice. I could not believe that, one, the President of the United States would issue an executive order like that, and two, that it would be held up by the...

TI: So you're talking about President Roosevelt back in the 1940s, a Democratic president who issued the executive order.

JS: Well, you said that, I didn't.

TI: [Laughs] Executive Order 9066, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Which reminds me, when you were in law school, did you, at any time, study the Korematsu decision?

JS: No, I read that on my own, it was not an assigned case. Yeah, I had a fellow who worked for me in the Welfare Department out there, his name was Mike Suzuki, and he was always telling about, how can they do that, and we'd banter back and forth. He was a good Democrat, I was a good Republican, and we'd go back and forth about it. So I was pretty familiar with the subject. It was a subject that I look at it and I say, well, if you're not from the West Coast, you don't know about that issue. People just don't know about it.

TI: But if you go, like you, if you actually read the case as a legal precedent, what were your thoughts about that?

JS: I thought how the hell could they do it? [Laughs]

TI: So tell me a little bit more. Why do you say that? The Supreme Court, in 1944, they ruled on this and it was 6 to 3, the majority ruled that the government was right in rounding up Japanese Americans in particular, Fred Korematsu. So from a legal standpoint, why did you think that was...

JS: Because they only rounded them up because they were Japanese Americans who lived on the West Coast. They didn't round up anybody in Hawaii because that would have been real hard to do. They didn't round up any Germans, they didn't round up Italian Americans, I mean, I had a bunch of relatives who came over from Italy. But nobody bothered them, they only rounded up the Japanese Americans on the West Coast. So when it comes down to it, why did they do that?

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 14>

TI: And so now you're in the White House, 1983, and it's kind of gone through this process where, in some ways, this federal commission is coming up with the same ideas that you are, that it was wrong. There was no military necessity, it was, they said, racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership, that was in the findings, those three things. And their recommendations were for there to be an apology and reparation payments. And so that's kind of where it is when you walk in to the White House. So you said you kind of knew about it. But as you say, this was not an East Coast Washington D.C. issue. People on the West Coast knew about it.

JS: I have to say, I wasn't even thinking about it when I went into the White House. I mean, I had a plate full of things.

TI: And rightly so. When you talk about your first day, a Korean Airline jetliner gets shot down.

JS: With a U.S. congressman on board.

TI: U.S. congressman on board. So, I mean, these are global issues that you're dealing with on a crisis basis. And here's this issue, which, it was very important to a particular community, is out there floating around. So as busy as you are, how did this come to your attention now?

JS: Oh, well, that's pretty simple. Frank Sato was the Inspector General over at the Veterans Administration, and he came over with a group of gentlemen from the JACL, and they said, "Hey, we've got this problem." I said, "Well, I know about your problem," and they said, "We're going to try and move this bill through Congress, but we're worried that it won't be signed." And I listened to what they had to say. I agreed with what the problem was, and I can't remember how many times we... I think we met twice. I know I met with Frank.

TI: Yeah, I think Frank says he met with you maybe initially, and then maybe brought others. So I think there was only one group meeting that I'm aware of.

JS: There might have been just one person with him or something like that. That's forty years ago. [Laughs]

TI: And so I have to tell you, I interviewed the other gentlemen that were at those meetings. And one in particular, he said -- this is John Tateishi -- he had a career where he spent forty-five years working for the JACL, most of that in Washington, D.C. And he talked about the difficulties in getting access to the White House. And he was kind of saying that up to that point, he said, he would tell people that he would go to the White House. But he says in actuality, that meant going to the old Executive Office Building, generally meeting with lower level staffers about issues. And a sense of frustration, because, as you say, it wasn't an issue that would get elevated high enough for the people who really made decisions to hear things. And he tells me that he was on the West Coast, and he gets a phone call. I don't think it was Frank, it was someone else from the JACL that said, "We have a meeting in the West Wing, in the White House." And so John takes the redeye back to D.C., pulls together some documents to meet with you. Because you kind of mentioned this matter-of-factly, but yeah, you kind of made time, but for a group, an issue to actually meet with you was a very big deal for some of these issues. And I guess the question is, why did you make time for this? Because as you said, you have so many different things, you made time to meet with these folks.

JS: Well, the reason made time was because of Frank Sato, because Frank was a member of the administration.

TI: Yeah, but it wasn't an IG issue from VA, right? So it wasn't, like, official, this was kind of a side issue for you and him in some ways. I mean, it wasn't side in the sense that, this is in your purview, but it's not like if you were to think of your weekly list of priorities, that this probably wouldn't haven't been on there.

JS: Not at that time, no. I'm reminded of when Bill Smith, who was the Attorney General, left the AG's office and went back to Los Angeles, he was giving his departure remarks. And he said, "You know, people ask me about this job, and they ask me what do I think about it." And he said, "You know, I think about that, and I think, well, this morning I made a decision, and it affects a million people, and this afternoon I can't remember what it was." He said, "This job is just one damn thing after another." And I use that in speeches sometimes, because that's what it was. It was this issue, this issue, this issue, and you had to be able to move between all kinds of... it's just, I happened to have a background on this one particular issue. I mean, I felt that an injustice was done and it continued to be an injustice into the '80s, so forty-something years. So from that standpoint, that's why I spent some time on that issue.

TI: Yeah, I love that story. Let me ask this question. If Frank Sato were not the IGVA and had this relationship with you, would this issue have come to your desk or in your office?

JS: It probably would not. I mean, it's hard to say what if, what if, what if? You're not supposed to answer those kind of questions anyway. But I would imagine that it wouldn't have come up at that point in time. When the legislation started moving through Congress, and you got some interest on the Hill, co-sponsors on the Senate side that you were mentioning, then it would be up on people's radar screen.

TI: Yeah, though, that makes sense. So what you're saying is, for sure, it came up to the attention at that level much earlier than it would have in any case, and maybe not even at all.

JS: Yeah, because the issue had been floating around for a long time. It had been floating around since 1942.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 15>

TI: And you knew quite a bit. I mean, you talk about, you looked at Korematsu, you knew people in the community, you knew what happened. When Frank and the other members of the JACL came to you in that meeting, they presented, they talked with you, they gave you some documents, do you recall learning anything new that said, "I didn't know this," or, "This is kind of something that, in particular, I should bring this to the attention, to the president"? Was there something that... I'm guessing that when you first met with the group, there was no promise that you would say anything to the president.

JS: Oh, no.

TI: But you, at some point, decided, "I need to bring it to his attention." Was there something said that made you think that?

JS: No. And I didn't think that at the time. But I had been with Ronald Reagan for a long time, and by the second term there, when Ed Meese left and went to be the Attorney General, we were working on immigration. That was when the Simpson Mazzoli Bill was moving in the Congress. And Alan Simpson wanted to meet with the president. And he came down and he and I met with the president, he wanted to push his way of thinking. And when we were walking out of the Oval Office at the end of the meeting, and Al turned to me and he said, "Jack, you're from California. Why the heck are you guys not..." we used to have a Bracero program and we needed immigration reform. And he said, "Why are you guys not..." and I looked at him, I said, "Al, the guy in the Oval Office and me, we're the only two left." And in that long period of time, I learned to read Ronald Reagan fairly well. And one thing I knew was if he heard something, he remembered it. And, I mean, he would go sometimes off on a tangent, you might have to bring him back, but he remembered almost everything. And he knew, he had a little file in his desk drawer of quotes and facts that he had saved over years and years, but he knew exactly what was there and where it was.

TI: It's like his own little computer system, database.

JS: I don't know. I often thought, I wonder if that's the training he got as an actor.

TI: Oh, maybe, huh?

JS: I mean, he could read -- and in fact, in Sacramento, if you were taking something to the governor, it had to be on one page. And so, I mean, we did all kinds of, we adjusted margins, we did this and tried smaller print, all that kind of stuff, trying to get things to him. But when he, if you could succinctly state what the issue was and what your recommendation was on that one page, and he looked at it, he might come back to it six months later and know exactly what it was. I think that's what caused me to really bring the issue up was just the fact that I knew that he knew what the issue was, and it might be that he needed a little reminding, just so he remembered, like the speech he gave at the Hollywood Bowl in 1945. And he would remember, but somebody might have to tickle his memory a little bit, but he was very good at that. And so we would go to him with the issue and explain the background and he would listen to it. And it might not come up for a year, but when it did, he would remember.

TI: Or in this case, maybe four years. Because you met with him towards the end of '84, the legislation was signed in '88, that's almost four years later. And when he was signing, he told the story of that '45 Hollywood Bowl, the Nisei soldier Masuda and going to that memorial service, very powerful, powerful statement that he made that you essentially reminded him of that.

JS: Yeah, but I was thinking about whether it was '84 or '85, I'm pretty sure it was '85 because I know Reagan was there, and he would have only been there if he was the Chief of Staff and had moved over, and he moved over in January of '85.

TI: Okay, that would make sense.

JS: That was probably '85.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 16>

TI: I always heard that Ed Meese was kind of anti-redress, that he didn't think it was a good idea.

JS: Well, I don't know. Ed never expressed that to me. Even if you were opposed, it would not be politic to state opposition. I mean, that's what I sort of got the impression, was that there were people who, for a variety of reasons, which I found out later, the National Security side, the State Department, well, it's going to interfere with our relationships with Japan.

TI: Yeah, so as you were talking about it, I heard the same thing. I never understood that, though. Why would Japan, why would they think Japan would be opposed to redress? I didn't ever understand that. If anything, I would think it would be the opposite, that they could use that to say, "They're not Japanese citizens, but their parents were, and they still have connections to Japan, and we're trying to do the right thing for them." I mean, that would seem to be a very simple thing to say to the Japanese government, and that they would appreciate that. So I never quite understood that argument.

JS: Well, I didn't either, but they made the arguments, you know.

TI: So this is from the State Department?

JS: The national security community. That community, the State Department, the CIA...

TI: I understand the OMB or the budget concerns, you're talking about a chunk of money, and so that was that side.

JS: How much.

TI: Yeah. But then there was something else you just mentioned that was actually, I think, really important. And that was the precedent issue. If we apologized and gave reparations to Japanese Americans, are we setting a precedent for slavery for African Americans? And I think that was a real issue.

JS: I think it was, too, but it's not one that people argued openly about.

TI: Oh, but eventually they changed the legislation. I'm not sure if you... they did a very nuanced thing. That as the legislation approached the end, they changed it to say "only living survivors," living people who were impacted, could get the reparations.

JS: Right.

TI: Which was put in there so that it would not be a precedent for giving reparations to people who had passed away but were affected.

JS: It would be an argument why you wouldn't give reparations to people that...

TI: Yeah, but an argument for that, yes. So that was done very intentionally and it caught a lot of people by surprise that it was done, actually, very quietly and not publicly. And so it wasn't caught, I mean, people saw it a little bit later, so it's really interesting.

JS: Well, I kind of discounted the argument because I viewed one as something that existed before this was a country, and this country worked for almost a hundred years and fought a very, very bloody war to eliminate that vestige of the English colonies. On the other hand, the internment was an action by the President of the United States against his own constituency that was upheld by the United States Supreme Court. And I could make a differentiation pretty easily, it's a different case.

TI: Yeah, I agree.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 17>

TI: But going back to the, kind of, differing influences the president was getting, earlier you mentioned Al Simpson. And Al Simpson has said that -- because he was meeting with the president as you said -- that he would mention to the president, his experiences with the World War II Japanese American incarceration, with his story with Norm Mineta. Because the two of them were Boy Scouts, they met at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and Al Simpson, a Republican, Norm Mineta, a liberal Democrat, were actually very good friends.

JS: He wouldn't be called a liberal Democrat today. [Laughs]

TI: Yeah. Really? Well, not a liberal now, exactly as you probably wouldn't be called a Republican today. But another tangent, we won't go there. But Al says that he talked to the president about that. And did you ever know that, did you ever hear him talking?

JS: I don't remember, I really don't. I mean, I know that story, and I'm sure that Al did, because Al was always willing to open his mouth and express an opinion on almost any subject. He was a great guy.

TI: Yeah, I know him, too, and I enjoy his stories. But on the other side, so complicating this is, all Japanese Americans weren't for redress. You had S.I. Hayakawa. This is before Reagan got into the administration, but he was the California U.S. Senator, and he was publicly opposed to redress. So I think it was through the S.I. Hayakawa story that I heard about maybe his connection or something with Ed Meese or something, that there was an opposition to redress, and to some people, surprisingly, it was from a Japanese American. Although S.I. Hayakawa was born in Canada, so his family and he were not affected by the U.S. actions during World War II.

JS: Oh, he wasn't?

TI: Yeah, he was in Canada.

JS: Oh, he was in Canada.

TI: Yeah, he was born in Canada.

JS: But he hadn't moved to California yet.

TI: Yeah.

JS: But if he had moved to California, he would have been.

TI: He would have been, and maybe his opinion would have been different if his family had been. But he was known to say, essentially, these baby boomer Japanese Americans, activists or extremists, and, "We shouldn't listen to them about redress," was his stance.

JS: He was a funny guy.

TI: Yeah, I mean, with his hat. And I know the stories that when he was president of San Francisco State and all that, very colorful character. Did you know him?

JS: Well, I know him, or knew him, but we weren't colleagues or anything like that. But I had the opportunity to observe Sam in a lot of different things, and he was a character.

TI: And it appeared he had access to Ronald Reagan at times?

JS: Well, he was from San Francisco and we had George Shultz and Cap Weinberger, I mean, they were all from that area, so I wouldn't be surprised. Plus, he was a United States Senator.

TI: A Republican U.S. Senator.

JS: Republican, yeah. I'll tell you a funny story. I was at a fundraiser, no, I think it was a California State Society party on Capitol Hill one night, and Sam came in, he was late. And he went up right away and he grabbed the microphone and he started in about, "We've got to beat these guys, we've got to do this." He thought it was a political fundraiser for Republicans and it was a California State Society. And John Burton walked up later and said, "I get the mike, too." [Laughs]

TI: And I'm guessing, as colorful as they are, they rolled with it really easily.

JS: Yeah.

TI: That's a good story.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 18>

TI: So going to... and you're, by far, the closest person that I know to Ronald Reagan, in terms of his thought process, he never publicly came out before the signing of redress that he was either for or against. It seemed like he kept that very close to his vest in terms of what he was going to do. There was concern that even though if Congress... well, first, in terms of the community, the sense was the Senate would pass redress, the House, we weren't quite sure and that a lot of effort and lobbying would have to happen to have the House pass redress, but then the sense was if we got Congress to pass redress, there was concern that the president might veto it. And so that was kind of the thinking in the Japanese American community. And there was never anything said that we knew this one way or the other. I think part of it is just people are always worrying, like what could happen, what could go wrong? But I'm wondering, in 1985, at the point you're at these Issues Lunches, you're talking to the president, what's your sense about where he was on this issue?

JS: Well, one thing, Ronald Reagan did not telegraph anything. He wasn't that kind of dealmaker where he would let it be known that he was, if they didn't do something, he was going to veto a bill or something like that. And in fact, he rarely made decisions on the spot. He would listen to a group of us talking about something and then he would say, "Well, fellows, I'm going to think about this and I'll let you know what I decide." And he would do that. So it was incumbent to explain things in a way that he would understand them. Because he made up his mind on a lot of stuff that he'd do it himself, and that was both an advantage and a disadvantage. I mean, the thing we'd all try to do is to get him as much information, relevant information, and to explain how it worked into the way he made decisions. And I'm sure that that was the case here. I know there were people who were interested in vetoing that. I was gone, I left, and I knew there was going to be problems in the House, and that's when I went to talk to Bob Matsui. I told him, "He'll sign that bill." I was very confident that he would sign the bill.

TI: And about when did you have that conversation with Bob Matsui? And Bob Matsui, for people, he was the...

JS: Congressman from Sacramento.

TI: Congressman from Sacramento. And so did you know Bob before?

JS: Yes.

TI: Because, that's right, you had that Sacramento connection.

JS: Well, I knew him, he was on the city council out there in Sacramento. I don't know how he did it, but he got named to the Ways and Means Committee when he was a freshman. I mean, that's a very big and powerful committee and he was on the Ways and Means Committee, and so he went through that Social Security thing with me. And I knew that he knew what the issue was and which side of it he was on. And so I went up there on my own initiative -- that was after I left the White House -- just to tell him that I was confident that the president would sign the bill.

TI: Well, so why were you confident? I mean, I'm curious, because how would you have that...

JS: The only reason I can say it is that I knew Ronald Reagan. And I knew how he approached things like that. He wasn't... he never worried about politics, I mean, he always tried to do what was right, and there was no question, in a man with common sense's mind, whether this was right or wrong. So I was very confident that he would.

TI: When you talked about how President Reagan wouldn't telegraph what he was thinking, how would he respond when someone would try to advocate for something? Not staff member, but like a congressman or a governor, and they'd say, "Oh, you need to do this." And when President Reagan had not yet decided, how would he respond to people? Would he kind of let them, just let them know that he's thinking about it, or he'd say, "Oh, I like what you're saying"? What was his general kind of demeanor in those situations?

JS: Well, he would start out with, "Well..." Like I said, he didn't make decisions on the spot. I mean, people would come in and make pitches. I mean, people didn't get in there unless they had something that they wanted to say, unless, of course, they were old friends or something like that. And he would be polite. I mean, he was polite to Tip O'Neill and I never understood that. But he'd be polite and he would listen and he would thank people for their position, but he would never say... I remember a session we had with, well, it was a whole National Security establishment about whether or not we were going to go ahead with the space station, the International Space Station. And everybody in that room -- we were in the Cabinet room -- everybody in that room wanted him to say, "Okay, let's go." He thanked everybody, he said, "I'll let you know later." In fact, that day, there was an admiral there and he had a tie on that said, "Don't give up the ship." And I grabbed him as he was going by me and I said, "Mr. President, do you see this tie?" Just to try to push him a little more towards saying, "Okay, we're going to build the International Space Station," which, of course, is still up there flying around.

TI: Right, right. And so even in your role, sometimes you wanted to try to get a little bit more? Wasn't that kind of dangerous for you as a staff person to push him on these things? I mean, at some point would he get, like, "Jack, you need to back off. Give me the space to think about this"?

JS: No, but he got to the point where he'd say, "Now, Jack, I'm not going to say this, but wouldn't it be funny?"

TI: Oh, so he'd kind of change the subject, you mean? Or what do you mean?

JS: No, no. It stemmed from an incident where I didn't say anything and he did, and it was the wrong thing to say. Then from that point on, I always would tell him, "No, you can't say that." Like when he had cancer, he was going to get asked at a press conference, which poor Joe Biden just found out that you can't show what the questions are going to be beforehand because someone will accuse you of knowing them. But he was going to be asked a question about, "How do you feel?" Because he came back from the hospital, he had the surgery for colon cancer and everything. And he thought about it and he said, "Well, let me say something about that." This was in a practice session. He said, "Let me say something about that. I didn't suffer from cancer, I had an operation, and I'm fine." Unfortunately the Chief of Staff at the time, Don Regan, said, "That's a wonderful answer, Mr. President." I thought, well, here goes, maybe I'll be a civilian tomorrow. I said, "Mr. President, that is not a good answer." And so I had Regan staring daggers at me and I told the president, I said, "Mr. President," I said, "you had cancer." I said, "I know you didn't suffer, and that's what you're talking about is you've suffered from cancer. You didn't, you had an operation and they told you it's all gone, and you recovered from the operation." I said, "But if you use that answer, they're going to get four doctors who are going to say, "That's a typical response of a cancer patient. They'd deny that they have cancer." And I said, "You don't need that." So he agreed, he didn't use that answer. He waited about three weeks until he was being interviewed by the Washington Post, and then he gave that answer.

TI: Where do you think you developed such good political instincts like this?

JS: Well, I don't know that I have good political instincts.

TI: Well, no, this is a good example of that, right? I mean, because I would have agreed. I think anything that, in that position, anything that could be perceived as defensive or avoiding it, I mean, people would just go after that.

JS: Well, they were always after him for being his age and his work habits and things like that. People didn't know what the truth was, I mean, they just see what the Post or the Times or the Chronicle or what they would write, and they'd extrapolate from that. I mean, in the time that he was president, he worked all the time.

TI: Earlier you mentioned that you were not in the administration at the time Reagan signed the redress bill. You left, I think, in 1986, and the bill was actually, he signed the legislation in 1988. But before you left -- and we talked about this meeting in 1985, the Issues Lunch -- in your memoirs, let me see if I can grab this. In your memoirs, you actually talk about... and something you said which was really powerful. Because it was more than just explaining to President Reagan what the issue was. I'm going to read this. That you say that, at the conclusion of your pitch, you said, "I completed my pitch by saying, quote, 'Mr. President, there is little doubt today that the actions taken over forty years ago were unnecessary and unjust. Some of us think that it's time to put forty years of resentment and frustration to rest in the Japanese American community. Perhaps next Veterans Day, President Reagan could say again what Captain Reagan said so long ago.'" That's a very powerful thing to say and to end. It's essentially a strong pitch for him to sign the bill. It feels like a little bit, going beyond just a staff position saying, "Here are the options, here is the issue, here are your options, and here's my recommendation." You really put your heart into this one.

JS: Well, I believed in the issue, and so you fight a little harder when it's something that you understand and you think that he really needs to understand it and needs to do what's right. And I just figured I knew what was right. But that quote, actually, I had that on the back of a 3-by-5 card, my notes for that quote, and that's what I used. I imagine it's down in the library somewhere. [Laughs]

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 19>

TI: And we were talking a little bit before the interview, how it was for the Japanese American community during this time. And during this conversation, you talked about how, in your portfolio of things to work on, redress was not a high priority issue, and in some ways, the circumstances allowed you to do what you did at this meeting. But I just wanted to let you know that, from the Japanese American community, there were hundreds of not thousands of people working on this issue, and everyone is doing what they can to move this issue forward. And what's clear to me, given the research I've done, the people I've talked with, what you did in this moment was substantial because of your position. And not just stating an opinion, you understood the issue and presented it in a way that, as a community member, I really can't imagine being done in a better way. So, one, I want to thank you for doing this. And I know you just feel like you were just doing your job, but I just want to let you know that in the scheme of things, people don't really understand, or are still wondering, why did Reagan sign the redress bill? Because of the story that people thought he wouldn't sign it, people thought there was this magic moment. And there were stories that it was Al Simpson convinced him, that Grant Ujifusa with Governor Kean convinced him. But in my research, it's probably a combination of lots of things...

JS: Tom Kean?

TI: Yeah, Tom Kean. That there was a story that Tom Kean in, I think it was a limousine with the president, made the pitch. And this is much later, this is, like, after you had left the administration and that he was the one who convinced the president, is what, there's one story there. So there's lots of stories. There's another story that Reagan decided to sign it because he saw the movie Bad Day at Black Rock, you know, the Spencer Tracy one where his friend Spencer Tracy played this veteran coming back. I think it reminds me of the Owens Valley, or I'm not sure exactly, but that the community had killed a Japanese farmer and his son, served in the 442 with Spencer Tracy. And that the president saw this movie and that compelled him to sign the redress. So there's all these different theories.

JS: Wow. [Laughs]

TI: But what you have presented is actually just the logical way how things are decided. But your story isn't really well-known in the Japanese American community. This whole story of what the JACL did, Frank Sato making this connection with you, and you presenting this at these Issues Lunches to the president, and your sense of the president just wanting to do the right thing. And so this is what I've been working on with all these interviews, and in some ways, you're the culmination of all these different interviews.

JS: Uh-oh. [Laughs]

TI: In that, yeah, you corroborate a lot of what John Tateishi, Frank Sato, and like you, I like to do my homework. If one person tells me something, it's, "Oh, that's really interesting. I need to go talk to the next person and find out more." And so everything's been consistent, is what I'm saying. So, again, thank you. There was no question in there, I just wanted to share kind of what my thoughts are.

JS: Well, I hadn't heard some of those, especially Tom Kean. [Laughs]

TI: Yeah, so that is still, for many people, they think that is the primary reason Reagan signed.

JS: Are they all from New Jersey?

TI: [Laughs] And so you kind of shake your head, so you think that's implausible?

JS: No, I didn't say that at all. I mean, I have no idea. It might well have happened. I mean, I give... well, I give the credit, as far as I'm concerned, to me, to Frank Sato. I give the credit for signing the bill to Ronald Reagan. Because I'm convinced he would sign that bill no matter what. He was from California, and he knew a lot of the issues and he would sign the bill anyway, I'm very confident. Without having a bunch of people, whether it's Al Simpson or me or Tom Kean or whoever, encouraging him to do so.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.

<Begin Segment 20>

TI: And it's really interesting. I speak a lot at schools, especially high schools, about the Japanese American World War II incarceration. And the way I like to talk about it are the lessons we learned. And one of the lessons is, in some ways, and I think the United States did good in this case in terms of, it made a mistake in terms of the World War II incarceration. And it took a few decades, but they looked at what happened and they admitted a wrong. And in today's political climate, when I talk to students, oftentimes they say, well, was it a left or a right issue? And I say, "No, this was signed by Ronald Reagan, a Republican president. And the person who actually signed the executive order during World War II was a Democratic president. So it goes beyond party. And this really is part of what we can learn as Americans in terms of one of the strengths of our country, that we can do this. I think, in some ways, in this case, we did this as well as I think any other country would do in the world. And so it is something that, as difficult as this issue, the process that we went through with the redress and that Reagan signed this, is, I think, a really important American moment, and I think students get this. And so I just want to let you know that this is a big issue that I think will live on and on. And in some ways, it feels like sometimes these things are happenstance almost in terms of people being in the right place at the right time. And I think having you in the administration in your position at this moment, and having this connection with Frank Sato, and Frank Sato being in his position, all this happening, I think, actually made the difference. It's exciting, as a historian, to see in some ways how history is made. And I'm sure you have other stories in terms of, it could have gone this way or that way, but that's how history is made. So again, thank you for your time. Is there any other last comments or any other thoughts that you have before we end this interview?

JS: No. I have no idea... I have no idea who got it, I don't know where the idea that he was going to veto the bill or wouldn't sign it, I mean, Washington's a funny place. And it dwells on rumor, and if there isn't one, well, let's start one, and that's sort of the way it works. And that's forty years ago. Now, I mean, you mentioned that Roosevelt was a Democrat and Reagan was a Republican. Well, when Roosevelt signed that, Reagan was a Democrat.

TI: Yeah, I think he ran a union or something.

JS: Yeah, Screen Actors Guild. So you say, well, those are labels that we attached. And you said, "Maybe you're not a Republican now." Maybe I'm not, because I sure don't agree with a whole lot that is going on in recent years. And I'm not sure we're to the point where we can really go back and say, "Well, let's work something out," "Let's use some common sense," "Let's see if we can't compromise somewhere where we can get to where we all want to get." And I'm not sure we can do that today. I mean, look at the debt ceiling.

TI: So why can't we? And maybe that's why, part of my work that I want to do is to see if -- especially when, and maybe I, as a historian, I get too enamored of the past, and there are problems with the past. But there are some things that were very powerful. As you talk about having a relationship with Bob Matsui, again, a liberal Democrat, right? Or again, you wouldn't call him a liberal Democrat now, but a Democrat. And there were these relationships to get things done. And it was, in my perspective, not always, but oftentimes, a healthy debate, discussion, which I think is good. We have gone away from that so much. And as a democracy, it feels like, for the democracy to thrive in any way, or even survive, we have to go back to some of that, we can't continue on this path.

JS: Oh, I agree. This thing about the debt ceiling, we supposedly have the Speaker negotiating with the president. What happened to the Senate? The way legislation normally works is it originates in the House or it originates in the Senate. They're different bills, you get together in a room, I've been in that room. And there's a lot of people there and everybody's got an issue and they just, the two chairmen just roll through it and they come out with a bill that then it goes to the president. So maybe the president is going to veto it, but at least you have the Republicans and Democrats in the House and the Senate going to the president and saying, "We've passed this in a bipartisan manner." But now we're sitting here, we're gambling with the world economy on a whim.

TI: And so, to me, it says it's broken right now.

JS: Oh, yeah.

TI: And we're not owning up to that, we're not, sort of, seeing that. I mean, a lot of people see it, but we're not fixing it in any way, and it feels like it's getting, potentially could get very, very bad, very quickly.

JS: We're almost there. [Laughs]

TI: And so, Jack, with that, we'll keep talking, but at this point we'll end the recorded interview. And again, thank you so much for your time.

JS: No, you're supposed to say, "Pau already."

TI: Say what?

JS: Pau already.

TI: Oh yeah, pau already. But see, I'm not a Hawaii guy, I'm a Seattle guy. But, yeah, pau, so we'll go pau. But again, thank you so much.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.