Read Online Infamy by Richard Reeves - Free Book Online Page B

fact, a serial liar from a prominent Orthodox Jewish family that had emigrated from Lithuania in 1869, settling first in Elmira, New York, then moving west to the Seattle area. But in 1929 he denied all that, claiming to be a Christian to get into a Stanford fraternity, Theta Delta Chi, which barred Jews from membership. As the years went by, he created a new biography under the name Bendetsen, saying that he was from a Danish logging family and that a fictional great-grandfather had come from Denmark to America in 1670.
    Bendetsen signed the first official document with his new name that same day, February 4, in a memorandum to McCloy titled, “Alien Enemies on the West Coast.” In the memo, he endorsed the idea that there was an American Japanese Fifth Column: “A substantial majority of the Nisei bear allegiance to Japan, are well controlled and disciplined by the enemy, and at the proper time will engage in organized sabotage, particularly should a raid along the Pacific Coast be attempted by the Japanese.… This will require an evacuation and internment problem of some considerable proportions.”
    In Washington, the young lawyer had quickly earned Gullion’s trust by creating a craftily worded legal strategy to evacuate the Japanese and Japanese Americans from the West Coast: the military would have authority to remove any American from new “Military Zones” and the power to allow any of them to return to the zones. “Race,” “ethnicity,” or “ancestry” were never mentioned in regard to the zones. The plan was described by Stetson Conn, the chief historian of the Department of the Army: “Bendetsen recommended the designation of military areas from which all persons who did not have permission to enter or remain would be excluded as a matter of military necessity. In his opinion, this plan was clearly legal and he recommended that it be executed in three steps: first, the issuance of an executive order by the President authorizing the Secretary of War to designate military areas; second, the designation of ‘Military Zones’ in the Western United States on the recommendation of the Western commander, General DeWitt; and third, the immediate evacuation from areas so designated of all persons to whom it was not proposed to issue licenses to re-enter or remain.”
    The proposed licenses were not authorized, but they did not have to be. Only one group of “persons,” Japanese and Japanese Americans, would be denied permission to enter or remain in the zones.
    The first military zone designated by General DeWitt was all of the West Coast from California to Washington State and a corner of Arizona within two hundred miles of the coast. The idea could then be presented to President Roosevelt as a way to authorize the relocation of the West Coast Japanese and Japanese Americans, with an executive document that did not mention race—and then not allow any of them to return.
    Bendetsen, the chief strategist for both Gullion and DeWitt, the reservist from a one-man law office, was promoted again and again. He had been promoted from captain to major and then lieutenant colonel on February 4, 1942, and then, ten days later, to full colonel on February 14, 1942. Along with McCloy, he tweaked and polished their ideas into an executive order. McCloy, who favored evacuation, said he thought it was barely constitutional. But he was willing to go along and told Bendetsen and DeWitt, “We can cover the legal situation.”
    Bendetsen had already explained more of his thinking in a memo to Gullion, calling mass evacuation “undoubtedly the safest course to follow, that is to say as you cannot distinguish or penetrate Oriental thinking and as you cannot tell which ones are loyal and which ones are not and it is, therefore, the easiest course (aside from the mechanical problem involved) to remove them all from the West Coast and place them in the ‘Zone of the Interior’ in uninhabited areas where they can do no harm