MC: The petitions were filed in 1982 and by that time the Civil Rights movement had pretty much run its course and we had just elected a Republican president, Reagan. The country was beginning sort of a right-ward turn. [Ed. note: The petitions were filed on January 19, 1983, and the hearing took place on November 10, 1983.]

DM: Uh-huh.

MC: Did that larger political context have any bearing on your litigation strategies or your thoughts about whether the case might be successful?

DM: Only to a certain degree. I mean, because of, I think, the clarity of what we saw as a great, great wrong with wonderful proof to be able to prove to a court it's a great, great wrong, and prove to the American public it was a great wrong, you know, that wasn't going to change how we presented the case. It did change the way we looked at deciding whether to get to the Supreme Court or figuring out a stratagem to get to the Supreme Court. We actually, we wanted to avoid that because we didn't trust the Supreme Court at that time. So to that extent the right-ward tilt did affect that part of the legal strategy. It did, I think Don could probably even answer this better, but affect our media strategy, the way we presented the case. And we presented the case along the lines as much as the people in the redress movement presented their cases, along their lines -- which I thought was brilliant -- that this is not just a Japanese American story of Fred Korematsu, this is an American story about civil rights. That's how we cast it initially and we felt that we needed to do this. If this were perhaps in the '60s where there was more racial --

MC: Identity politics.

DM: -- consciousness and identity politics, maybe it would have been a Japanese American case. But we knew this is, had to be sold to the American public.

MC: So you stuck to that theme throughout.

DM: We did.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.