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World War I. General Gullion, sixty-one, also favored mass evacuation as soon as war was declared and had already suggested that camps be built to hold all Japanese, citizens and aliens, men, women, and children. Secretary of War Stimson immediately rejected the idea. After being blocked by Stimson and snubbed by Attorney General Biddle, Gullion called DeWitt as early as December 22, 1941, and urged him to do the job. He wanted DeWitt to recommend the evacuation and incarceration. But as memos and calls went back and forth between Washington and San Francisco, DeWitt sometimes seemed to be changing his mind, something he did regularly. Twice before December 26, DeWitt sent Gullion reports arguing against mass evacuation, saying, “If we go ahead and arrest the 93,000 Japanese, native born and foreign born, we are going to have an awful job on our hands and are very liable to alienate the loyal Japanese from disloyal.… I’m very doubtful that it would be common sense procedure to try and intern or to intern 117,000 Japanese in this theater.” He went on to say that the evacuation would not be sensible: “An American citizen, after all, is an American citizen. And while they all may not be loyal, I think we can weed the disloyal out of the loyal and lock them up if necessary.”
    Gullion, the army’s top legal officer, was learning what others already knew: men who worked with DeWitt saw him as indecisive, often influenced by the last person with whom he talked. One day he would tell California congressmen he favored evacuation of all Japanese, the next he would be arguing that mass evacuation would be a logistical nightmare. Those who knew the general, his chief deputy General Stilwell among them, thought his real concern was evading the fate of Pearl Harbor commanders Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, whose military careers were essentially ended because they were totally unprepared for the sneak attack.
    In fact, General DeWitt, the army’s man on the West Coast, tried to avoid confronting the politicians of California, Oregon, and Washington. Those politicians were giving in to public hysteria and to their states’ racists, including farmers and fishermen determined to eliminate Japanese competition. Despite what he had been telling Gullion about logistics, DeWitt was still using his “A Jap’s a Jap” line, talking of segregation of all Japanese of “undiluted racial strain.” Then, day after day, he changed, twisting his arguments again and again—often depending on his audience of the moment. At times, he characterized evacuation warnings and preparations as “damned nonsense”—and then he suggested that the War Department issue a proclamation declaring the states of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah as military zones. That grand plan was quickly killed in Washington and Provost General Gullion soon realized that DeWitt was too weak or ignorant to be trusted.
    The provost general’s next move was to send one of his young assistants, a thirty-three-year-old captain named Karl Bendetson, to San Francisco by plane to be an “adviser” to General DeWitt. Bendetson was a talented and ambitious Stanford Law School graduate from Aberdeen, Washington, a small town 110 miles southwest of Seattle, whose army reserve unit was called up early in 1941. He was then assigned to Gullion’s staff in Washington, D.C. The thinking of the young captain and General DeWitt was not dissimilar. In one phone call between them, DeWitt, speaking of the Japanese Americans offering to cooperate in the war effort, said, “Those are the fellows I suspect the most.” Bendetson agreed, saying, “Definitely. The ones who are giving you lip service are the ones always to suspect.”
    Bendetson quickly became DeWitt’s confidant and deputy chief of staff. He had also, on February 4, 1942, changed the spelling of his name from “Bendetson” to “Bendetsen” to make it seem less Jewish. “Bendetsen” was, in