<Begin Segment 6>

BF: You -- in the little I've, I've heard you speak -- you strike me as a realist and a pragmatist. And I know that, well, it's obvious, redress is one of those issues that's loaded with emotions and big moral values and things like that. When you got involved with JACL, was there sort of a learning curve where you had to figure out how to work within this organization, and within this community, and still be yourself and get things done? I mean, did, was there ever a time when you were really frustrated?

GU: That's a, that's a very good question and Cherry, among others, tried to guide me. Sometimes more successfully than others. Yeah, one of the problems, of course, is that here's this, here's the JACL, it's a longstanding institution. There are people who put in lots of time. It's based mostly on the West Coast, and now we're doing the most important project, maybe in the history of the organization, and there's this guy that we had never heard of, who's been given this position and a lot of power. Right?

BF: Uh-huh.

GU: And so there was of, there was of... this guy, who is this guy? We've never heard of this guy, he's not paid his dues, what is going on here? So that I think was the, one of my big, one of my big problems. And there were some, like Denny Yasuhara, and Grayce Uyehara, and Cherry, who got to know me a little bit, and then... but they recognized also pragmatically, that the reason I was offered this position is, number one, I was willing to do it and number two, I co-authored this book that provided access in Congress and in Washington generally.

BF: The Almanac.

GU: The Almanac. That's gonna, that's... if I may say so, in white, male, Washington, that book is a big deal. So, they understood that, that I brought something to the effort that they needed. And also, my powers of persuasions were... Wyoming is a very Republican state. I was, I was a liberal, even a radical in college. And then, I thought about it a little bit, and I thought about how I grew up on the farm, and some of the ranchers, ranchers that I knew, and their sons with whom I played football. And I came back around to thinking, the people in Wyoming are right about life, and about their politics, and the people on the West Side of New York are wrong. Nobody gives you anything in life and, and you gotta work hard and keep your nose clean and take care of your kids. It's a question of personal responsibility, not of social responsibility and so that led me in a conservative direction. And that conservative direction also helped me as I talked to people who were conservatives and on the ascendancy in Capitol Hill, and also in the Reagan White House. In other words, I could speak their language convincingly.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.