A Washington Friendship

Editor’s Note: We were saddened by the recent passing of Norman Mineta and asked Alan Simpson, who served for 18 years as Republican senator from Wyoming, to write recollections of his friend for American Heritage. Mineta was a former Democratic Congressman who served as Secretary of Commerce under President Bill Clinton, then Secretary of Transportation under President George W. Bush. He was the first person of East Asian descent to be named a Cabinet secretary. 

The friendship of Norm Mineta and Al Simpson for eight decades – and their ability to work together across party lines – remain an inspiration for us all. It will be memorialized this summer with groundbreaking of the Mineta-Simpson Institute at Heart Mountain Interpretive Center, on the grounds of the camp that imprisoned Mineta’s family 80 years ago. 

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan struck a blow to our Nation’s heart. On that very day, Federal agents came to Norm Mineta’s house to inform the family that they were “under surveillance.” That was the beginning of the odyssey for Norman Y. Mineta. 

Later, in February 1942, a Japanese submarine shelled the coast of California. How could this happen? Hysteria was in full-throated cry. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 stating that all Japanese-Americans in Washington, Oregon, California and Alaska were to be detained and distributed to ten remote camps throughout America because of a “military necessity.” Their farms and property were taken, often never to be returned. It was an exclusion of all persons of Japanese ancestry, both “aliens and non-aliens.” [even 1/16th and spouses?]