I find substantial support in the record that the government deliberately omitted relevant information and provided misleading information to the Supreme Court on the crucial military necessity issue. The judicial process is seriously impaired when the government's law enforcement officers violate their ethical obligations to the court. Although I can not wipe the Supreme Court opinion from the books, it stands as a constant caution that in times of war or declared military necessity our institutions must be vigilant in protecting constitutional guarantees and protecting all citizens from the petty fears and prejudices that are so easily aroused. (FN10)

In Portland, Min Yasui had his criminal convictions erased, and in Seattle, Gordon Hirabayashi was cleared as well. Nevertheless, Hirabayashi had to endure the most scrutiny by government lawyers, and the presiding judge, Donald Voorhees, permitted it. Dozens of witnesses were brought to the Seattle trial to testify that the FDR administration had more than enough reason to doubt Japanese-American loyalty at the beginning of World War II. Formerly top-secret cables from the War Department's Operation MAGIC decoding/counterintelligence operation were introduced, and former American espionage agents testified about Tokyo spies in the Japanese-American community. Yet, Hirabayashi's lawyers demonstrated that the Operation MAGIC cables were quite interpretive, and the former espionage agents could not identify or name the alleged Tokyo spies and their contacts.

Although many Japanese Americans found the Hirabayashi trial an unnecessarily long exercise, if not outright cruel to the elderly Hirabayashi, Judge Voorhees, in the end, offered one of the more intriguing posttrial challenges to the American political community. "The internment of an entire ethnic minority," he said, "on the basis of such deceit, disregard, and fraud requires more than an apology." He urged the Reagan administration to "make up for the misery of the early 1940s."(FN11)

The Voorhees pronouncement became a call to arms to Hirabayashi and his supporters. According to Hirabayashi, his specific trial and the entire case of Hirabayashi-Korematsu-Yasui had not been truly resolved. The clearing of a personal criminal record was not good enough. The Court, he believed, should have taken the next step or, at least, empowered Congress to make that next step. The federal government's "significant financial restitution" to former internees, along with Washington's formal apology to them and the nation, constituted those steps.

Indeed, to Hirabayashi's lawyers, the case for monetary compensation derived from the legal and moral principle that American law "make whole" the victims of injury in a meaningful way and at the cost of those who inflicted the injury or bear its responsibility. This was not without recent precedent. And how much compensation was enough? In 1971, some 1,200 peaceful demonstrators had gathered on the U.S. Capitol steps to listen to members of Congress who opposed the Vietnam War. The demonstrators were unlawfully arrested and held without charges for up to two days. In 1975, each person received a $10,000 award for the violation of their constitutional rights and unlawful detention.

Given this precedent, the Hirabayashi family concluded that $20 per day to Japanese Americans for each day of internment (totaling to $20,000) would be a "modest request." Sadly, from their view, the Court had not even considered a modest request. To Gordon Hirabayashi, "the evidence was clear that Americans had inflicted a grave injustice on an entire group of fellow Americans." Calling for "national fairness and repentance" in the form of a Reagan administration apology, a $20,000 stipend, and the blanket clearing of any and all Japanese-American criminal records from the internment era, Hirabayashi offered a grand motto to the energized political phase of the redress effort. "Ancestry," he said, "is not a crime."(FN12)

The CWRIC shared Hirabayashi's ambitions, adding teeth to the call for "fairness and repentance." Together, the CWRIC's final report to Congress and the conclusion of the court case constituted a powerful argument for legislative action. The result was H.R. 442. This legislation was deliberately numbered in honor of the 442d "Go-for-Broke" regiment of Japanese Americans who emerged from World War II as the army's most highly decorated unit. Echoing, although not perfectly, the Hirabayashi family, H.R. 442 called for a U.S. government apology, a $1.5 billion trust fund, a $20,000 stipend to each internee, a review of criminal convictions associated with the refusal to comply with internment procedures, and possible pardons.

President Reagan's response was negative, at first complaining to his staff about the "bad timing" of the legislation. By bad timing, he was referring to the 1984 election, his accomplishments on behalf of fiscal conservatism, and his call for a balanced budget and a line-item veto.

Establishing a $1.5 billion trust fund in this matter saddled him with the sins of his Democratic predecessors, from Franklin Roosevelt who interned the Japanese to Jimmy Carter who established the CWRIC. Forever railing against the "big-spending liberals" of the Democratic Party, Reagan worried that his fast approval of H.R. 442 (sponsored by a bipartisan group of 166 House members) might put him in the same category as the reviled big spenders. This political contradiction to his presidential career could be easily avoided through opposition to H.R. 442. (FN13)

But Reagan's opposition to H.R. 442 went beyond matters of fiscal conservatism and political purity. Upon further study of the issue, he found much of H.R. 442 already duplicated in law. For instance, during 1976, President Gerald Ford, in a certain bicentennial spirit of goodwill, issued a proclamation officially terminating the executive order that led to the relocation and internment of the Japanese Americans. To Reagan, that was good enough, although he asked his staff to "come up with something" that might please the Japanese-American community "beyond restitution payments."(FN14) As governor of California, and then as the 1980 Republican nominee for president, Reagan had enjoyed significant support from the Japanese-American community. Naturally, he did not want to lose those supporters.(FN15) But as the easy 1984 victory over Mondale came and went, the president's opposition to redress grew rather than lessened.

The strategies of the Reagan opposition ranged from attacks on the legislation's viability to doubts of congressional competence. Hence, Congress was assaulted for trying to break the budget with a new form of "pork" legislation. Specifically, the attorney general's office also opposed pardons for certain criminal convictions, and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the restitution arrangements were "vaguely worded and its effect uncertain." The OMB reported to Reagan that the House-proposed trust fund, in reality, would cost the taxpayer much more. Meanwhile, the American-Japanese Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, claimed the OMB, had provided "meager and selective" restitution to some internees, but the point was that the government had responded. The federal government had no further obligations in this matter. Congress's action, both the OMB and Attorney General Edwin Meese III agreed, "could establish a bad precedent for other groups who feel that they have suffered injustices." The courts, they concluded, had already addressed "the hard issues" in reference to all internment matters.

Joseph Wright, the deputy director of the OMB, once told Reagan that Congress had even "demonstrated its incompetence with the redress legislation through its dangerously vague rhetoric" in H.R. 442 and lack of "homework." By lack of homework, Wright was referring to the fact that H.R. 442 did not reference the 1948 American-Japanese Evacuation Claims Act and the early 1980s court results. Reagan agreed with the Wright assessment. Nevertheless, the president had little to say to the press about the redress legislation, and his discussions with Wright and Meese were kept confidential. (FN16)

Whereas Congress and the Japanese-American community could speculate about the Reagan administration's domestic policy reasons to oppose H.R. 442, they had little knowledge of Reagan's national security concerns. Upon the introduction of H.R. 442, the Japanese government of Yasuhiro Nakasone criticized the Reagan administration for not passing it immediately. Implying that H.R. 442's quick approval by the White House would also benefit harmonious U.S.-Japan relations, Nakasone also noted that soon-to-be revised Japanese high school history texts were now going to address the Japanese-American internment issue. Would it not be a "fine footnote to America's black page," he surmised, if those new books could also proclaim the Reagan administration's apology for this ugly chapter of the World War II past?

To Craig Fuller, a special assistant to the president on issues ranging from Japanese affairs to international education, the Nakasone reaction to H.R. 442 constituted a back-handed slap to American pride and honor. Given the recent history of Japanese militarism and aggression, including horrific war crimes, Japan had no right to preach moral policy to the United States, Fuller explained to Reagan. Fuller also believed that Nakasone's mentioning of U.S.-Japan relations in his H.R. 442 statements was "dirty pool." Somehow, the Reagan administration's approval of H.R. 442 would be seen in Tokyo, Fuller reasoned, as a rejection of "Japan bashing," which the Japanese government believed was ever present in ongoing trade and defense negotiations.

Reagan agreed with Fuller, insisting that "some measure had to be made" to inform Tokyo that the White House "did not make legislation at the whim of the Japanese Diet."(FN17)

This top-secret Reagan position was not a typical one. Publicly, his administration considered the proliferation of Japanese corporations setting up shop in 1980s America as "good for the economy," while the booming success of Japanese electronic and automobile products within the United States was seen as "good for the American competitive spirit."(FN18)

Hence, outwardly, the Reagan administration was a friend to Japanese policy and in spite of Democratic Party and labor union complaints. Privately, at least in the case of H.R. 442, Reagan saw a Japanese insult to the integrity of the American government.

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