A00039 - Norman Mineta, R.I.P. and the Legacies of the Past
It seems like only yesterday that I posted the email entitled Holocaust Chronicle, but it has been five years, and oh so much has changed. The situation in Ukraine has highlighted the fact that the atrocities committed during World War II have occurred again ... but, in reality, they never stopped occurring since the war ended some 77 years ago. With regards to the internment of the Japanese during World War II, former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson's assessment that such injustice could occur again was spot on. During this Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, PBS is airing its series on the Asian Americans. Tonight it aired the episode that chronicles the internment of the Japanese during World War II. The episode concludes by showing former Japanese internees protesting against the immigration compounds in Texas which they view as comparable to the concentration camps they endured during World War II. Eerily, the protesters and Alan Simpson both appear to be right.
Finally, after my return from Alaska, I read with sadness about the passing of Norman Mineta, the former Japanese internee who became the first Japanese-American Cabinet Secretary. Before his cabinet stint, Norman Mineta served as the long term Congressman for the San Jose area. As a Congressman, Norman Mineta sponsored legislation that addressed the injustice done to the Japanese American internees. As his New York Times obituary notes,
"the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which he co-sponsored, was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. It authorized $20,000 payments and formal apologies to the survivors and heirs of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had been incarcerated as potential saboteurs or spies after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Many victims could not be found, but $1.6 billion in reparations were eventually paid to 82,200 people."
Ibn Khaldun, the great Muslim scholar, noted that history does have a way of repeating itself. As to how the legacies of the past are reappearing in the present, I leave you with my 2017 post and with Norman Mineta's obituary. As for Ibn Khaldun, I suggest that you acquaint yourself with his preeminence on your own.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Fairfield, California
May 11, 2022
-----Original Message-----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com
To:
Sent: Thu, May 25, 2017 5:22 pm
Subject: Holocaust Chronicle
From: skipjen2865@aol.com
To:
Sent: Thu, May 25, 2017 5:22 pm
Subject: Holocaust Chronicle
Steve,
![]()
As things often happen in this life, last week I was in Barnes and Noble and made a purchase of one of the Bargained Priced books. It was Holocaust Chronicle, a massive tome that details the history of the Holocaust. I wish there were some way that we could convey what you experienced in Poland to others. The best that we seem to do is to try to recreate the experience by the way of museums. I have visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D, C.; and the National Museum of the American Indian, also in Washington, D. C. Each of these museums try to convey the horror that was inflicted upon a people by other people. And each of these museums try to convey the message that such atrocities should never occur again. Sadly, each of these museums appear to fail.
I am mindful of one of the great stories to come out of the internment of the Japanese during World War II. One of the internment camps was located in Wyoming and as chance would have it, a local Wyoming boy made friends with one of the Japanese boys in the internment camp. I believe they were both involved in the Boy Scouts but whatever it was they became live long friends. Indeed, when I first heard of their stories it was some 70 years after the war and after both had retired from long and distinguished political careers. The Wyoming boy had become a United States Senator for the State of Wyoming, while the Japanese boy had returned to California, where he became the Mayor of San Jose, a United States Congressman, Secretary of Commerce, and Secretary of Transportation. The 70+ year friendship that was forged between the Republican Alan Simpson and the Democrat Norm Mineta is one of the more touching stories to come out of the tragedy that was inflicted upon Japanese Americans during World War II. After listening to Norm Mineta tell his story of sorrow about his time in the Internment Camp, one would think that the country would have learned from this experience. And yet when asked the question as to whether such occur again, Alan Simpson was unequivocal. He said "Yes." He explained that when people are afraid, they are subject to do many things. ... and some of those many things might not be rational or just.
Listening to Senator Simpson was a cold reminder for me, that man's inhumanity against each other can reoccur and will .... unless we are everyday vigilant against it. Stay vigilant, my friend.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Class of 1975
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We just returned from a trip to Poland and Vienna. Included was a 10 hour tour of Auschwitz/Birkenau. It is difficult, if not impossible to describe one's reactions to the horrors that are described in vivid detail at these locations. The inhumanity of man can't be better personified than by seeing these exhibits and walking through a gas chamber and a crematorium. Many had told me that it is a "life changer" to do so and I usually dismissed this as hyperbole. Not anymore.
STEVE
Norman Y. Mineta, First Japanese American Cabinet Member, Dies at 90
Interned during World War II, he went to Congress and later served in the cabinets of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
May 3, 2022
Norman Y. Mineta, who as a boy was interned with his family and thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War II, then rose in government to become a 10-term Democratic congressman from California and a cabinet official under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, died on Tuesday at his home in Edgewater, Md. He was 90.
John Flaherty, his former chief of staff, said the cause was a heart ailment.
Four decades after Mr. Mineta’s childhood-scarring experiences in an American internment camp, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which he co-sponsored, was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan. It authorized $20,000 payments and formal apologies to the survivors and heirs of 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who had been incarcerated as potential saboteurs or spies after Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Many victims could not be found, but $1.6 billion in reparations were eventually paid to 82,200 people.
The measure was an emotional high point, if not a political one, for Mr. Mineta, who served nearly 21 years in the House of Representatives, from 1975 to 1995, representing the San Jose, Calif., area in technology-rich Silicon Valley. He was credited with helping to advance hundreds of bills for transportation improvements, economic development, trade, the environment, civil rights and science and technology projects.
After Republicans regained control of the House in 1994, Mr. Mineta resigned his seat in midterm to become an executive with the aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, a major government contractor for transportation and defense projects. He also served as chairman of the National Civil Aviation Review Commission, which Congress established to investigate the crisis created by a rising volume of air traffic.
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Mr. Mineta returned to government service in 2000, becoming secretary of commerce — and the nation’s first Japanese American cabinet official — for the last six months of the Clinton administration. Then, almost without skipping a beat, he joined the incoming Bush administration as secretary of transportation, serving from 2001 to 2006, the only Democrat in an otherwise Republican cabinet.
Mr. Mineta quickly made it clear that, for him, transportation was not partisan. “There are no Democratic or Republican highways, no such thing as Republican or Democratic traffic congestion,” he told reporters.
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With his transportation experience as a legislator and industry executive, he hit the ground running. He took over a department with 60,000 employees, a $58 billion budget and federal oversight of vast networks of highways, railroads, airports, coastal ports, transit systems, inland waterways and oil and gas pipelines.
On Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorists turned hijacked airliners into missiles that killed thousands at the World Trade Center in New York, at the Pentagon in Northern Virginia and in a field in Pennsylvania, Mr. Mineta joined Vice President Dick Cheney in a command bunker under the White House to respond to the emergency.
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As President Bush was shuttled from a school visit in Florida to secure locations in Louisiana and Nebraska, Mr. Cheney placed U.S. forces on alert around the world and ordered the Capitol evacuated and congressional and other leaders removed to safety.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Mineta claimed that he had ordered all civilian air traffic in U. S. airspace, about 4,500 aircraft, to land immediately. “I said, ‘Get the damn planes down,’” he told ABC News. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Mineta were widely praised as cool hands in the crisis.
But the 9/11 Commission, the bipartisan body set up by Congress to investigate the circumstances of the attacks, found that the unprecedented order to ground the aircraft was issued, on his own initiative, by Ben Sliney, the Federal Aviation Administration’s national operations manager, after hearing that the Pentagon had been hit. The order was executed with great skill and without incident by the air traffic control system, the commission said.
Ten days after the terrorist attacks, Mr. Mineta forbade all United States airlines from subjecting Middle Eastern or Muslim passengers to heightened degrees of preflight scrutiny. In a national mood of suspicion, the orders were widely violated, and enforcement was almost impossible. But several incidents led to charges and multimillion-dollar settlements.
In the months after the attacks, Mr. Mineta organized the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, the federal agency responsible for air-travel safety. He mobilized efforts to upgrade airport security with new equipment to screen for weapons and explosives, and he ordered the training of 65,000 air marshals and ground inspectors to put these measures into effect.
He also increased security on rail and bus lines and in ports and coastal waters. The T.S.A. and the Coast Guard were shifted in 2003 to the new Department of Homeland Security.
There were no more air hijackings on Mr. Mineta’s watch. When he resigned in 2006, after five and a half years, he was the longest-serving secretary in his department’s 39-year history. Mr. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
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Norman Yoshio Mineta was born in San Jose on Nov. 12, 1931, the youngest of five children of Kunisaku and Kane (Watanabe) Mineta. His father emigrated to the United States as a teenager in 1902, and his mother, a picture bride, arrived 10 years later. The couple, denied citizenship under the Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Asian Exclusion Act), settled in San Jose, ran a successful insurance agency and raised their children, all birthright American citizens, in a Spanish-style home.
Norman, a Cub Scout who liked tying knots and playing mumblety-peg, had just turned 10 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. It was the first time he saw his father cry. He saw him cry again five months later, when the Mineta family of seven was ordered first to a racetrack stable, then to a camp, where they lived in a barracks compound enclosed by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.
“My family was told by the military authorities that internment was for our own protection, but the machine guns and searchlights in the guard towers surrounding Heart Mountain, our internment camp in northern Wyoming, faced inward,” Mr. Mineta wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times in 1983. “Simply put, we were incarcerated solely because of our ethnic background.”
During his detention, young Mr. Mineta, by then a Boy Scout, met Alan K. Simpson, a fellow scout and a future United States senator from Wyoming, who often visited the camp with his own troop. The two, separated in age by little more than two months, became close friends and, later, political allies, though they were of different parties: Mr. Simpson is a Republican.
In 1983, a congressional commission condemned the wartime detention of people of Japanese ancestry, most of them American citizens or legal residents, as a flagrant violation of civil liberties carried out under an executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at a time of widespread prejudice against Japanese Americans as potential enemy agents.
After the war, the Minetas were more fortunate than most detainees, who had lost homes and jobs. They had legally safeguarded their property and business and returned to relatively normal lives. Norman finished high school in San Jose in 1949; graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1953; served as an Army intelligence officer in Korea and Japan for three years; and then joined his father’s insurance business.
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Mr. Mineta was married twice. In 1961, he married May Hinoki. They had two sons, David and Stuart, and were divorced in 1986. In 1991, he married Danealia Brantner, who had two sons from a previous marriage, Robert and Mark Brantner.
Mr. Mineta is survived by his wife, who is known as Deni, as well as his sons and stepsons and 11 grandchildren.
Mr. Mineta got into local politics, won a City Council seat in San Jose and in 1971 was elected the city’s mayor. He made national news as the first Asian American to become mayor of a major American city.
First elected to Congress in 1974, he became popular with voters by supporting transportation projects and fostering public-private partnerships that created explosive growth in Silicon Valley.
In 2001, San Jose’s airport was renamed Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport. After leaving government service five years later, Mr. Mineta became vice chairman of Hill & Knowlton, the global public relations firm.
-----Original Message-----
From: skipjen2865@aol.com
To:
Sent: Thu, May 25, 2017 5:22 pm
Subject: Holocaust Chronicle
From: skipjen2865@aol.com
To:
Sent: Thu, May 25, 2017 5:22 pm
Subject: Holocaust Chronicle
Steve,
![]()
As things often happen in this life, last week I was in Barnes and Noble and made a purchase of one of the Bargained Priced books. It was Holocaust Chronicle, a massive tome that details the history of the Holocaust. I wish there were some way that we could convey what you experienced in Poland to others. The best that we seem to do is to try to recreate the experience by the way of museums. I have visited the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D, C.; and the National Museum of the American Indian, also in Washington, D. C. Each of these museums try to convey the horror that was inflicted upon a people by other people. And each of these museums try to convey the message that such atrocities should never occur again. Sadly, each of these museums appear to fail.
I am mindful of one of the great stories to come out of the internment of the Japanese during World War II. One of the internment camps was located in Wyoming and as chance would have it, a local Wyoming boy made friends with one of the Japanese boys in the internment camp. I believe they were both involved in the Boy Scouts but whatever it was they became live long friends. Indeed, when I first heard of their stories it was some 70 years after the war and after both had retired from long and distinguished political careers. The Wyoming boy had become a United States Senator for the State of Wyoming, while the Japanese boy had returned to California, where he became the Mayor of San Jose, a United States Congressman, Secretary of Commerce, and Secretary of Transportation. The 70+ year friendship that was forged between the Republican Alan Simpson and the Democrat Norm Mineta is one of the more touching stories to come out of the tragedy that was inflicted upon Japanese Americans during World War II. After listening to Norm Mineta tell his story of sorrow about his time in the Internment Camp, one would think that the country would have learned from this experience. And yet when asked the question as to whether such occur again, Alan Simpson was unequivocal. He said "Yes." He explained that when people are afraid, they are subject to do many things. ... and some of those many things might not be rational or just.
Listening to Senator Simpson was a cold reminder for me, that man's inhumanity against each other can reoccur and will .... unless we are everyday vigilant against it. Stay vigilant, my friend.
Peace,
Everett "Skip" Jenkins
Class of 1975
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
We just returned from a trip to Poland and Vienna. Included was a 10 hour tour of Auschwitz/Birkenau. It is difficult, if not impossible to describe one's reactions to the horrors that are described in vivid detail at these locations. The inhumanity of man can't be better personified than by seeing these exhibits and walking through a gas chamber and a crematorium. Many had told me that it is a "life changer" to do so and I usually dismissed this as hyperbole. Not anymore.
STEVE
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