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justice on their side, but through the determined efforts of such assimilationists as Masaoka, a lesson clarified in his own recent autobiography, They Call Me Moses Masaoka (1987). Drinnon notes that he once thought of discussing Dillon Myer as the mainland counterpart to Edward Lansdale, the father of counter-insurgency in Vietnam. The resemblance suggests more about Drinnon than about Myer. It suggests, in addition, the tendency of some revisionist historiography to magnify the sins of the past with the lens of contemporary moral preoccupations. American racism, at home and abroad, has become the most obvious such preoccupation. But because racism is so serious an issue in United States history, and because the injustice done Japanese Americans during World War II must be ascribed in part to racist reaction, there is all the more reason to treat the subject carefully, with respect for truth and reasoned judgment. We were boat people in our own country, Donald Nakahata has recently said of his internment. From the distance of over forty years it is difficult to judge reliably the evidence or feel clearly the sentiments that led to the internment and to the creation of an alien enemy among overwhelmingly loyal American citizens. In his testimony before the Commission on Wartime Relocation, John McCloy, one of the internment's chief architects, inadvertently admitted that one motive was retribution for Pearl Harbor. Whether one should interpret this as the confession of an aged war criminal, as some would suggest, or as a revelation that the truth of racial attitudes in wartime is psychologically complex, there can be little question that the internment, however sound its motivations must have seemed at the time, was wrong and that a debt is owed Japanese Americans. The repayment of that debt cannot be made with money alone; it must also include apologies based on a clear historical understanding.
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