Free Infamy by Richard Reeves Page A

Washington, the embattled attorney general lunched with the president on February 7, saying, according to his notes, that “there was no reason for mass evacuation and I thought the army should be directed to prepare a detailed plan for evacuation in case of an emergency caused by an air raid or attempted landing on the West Coast.” He then wrote a letter to Secretary of War Stimson the next day repeating his position. Stimson shared some of the concerns of the attorney general about the forced evacuation of American citizens being unconstitutional. “We cannot discriminate among our citizens on the basis of racial origin,” he told members of his staff and a few officers on February 4. But the aides, particularly McCloy and Gullion, were pressing him every day, arguing that there was indeed a possibility that the Japanese could invade the West Coast.
    In his diary that night, the secretary of war wrote, “The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation, giving access only to the areas only by permits, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. The latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.”
    Meanwhile, important figures from Washington were traveling across the country to meet with General DeWitt and Attorney General Warren. Among the visitors to California in those frenzied February days was Walter Lippmann, the most respected newspaper columnist in the nation’s capital. He arrived on February 8 and had dinner with Warren and Percy Heckendorf, the district attorney of Santa Barbara County, who later said the columnist wrote almost word for word what Warren told him. This is what Lippmann wrote for publication in his column Today and Tomorrow in the Washington Post , the New York Herald Tribune , and 250 other newspapers on February 13, 1942:
The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without.… It is a fact … [that] there has been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast. From what we know about Hawaii and about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some would like to think, a sign there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect.
    Lippmann went on to say, “There is the assumption that if the rights of a citizen are abridged anywhere they have been abridged everywhere.” He concluded: “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”
    Enraged by the column, Biddle sent a memo to the president, saying that Lippmann and other commentators were “Armchair Strategists and Junior G-Men.… It comes close to yelling ‘FIRE!’ in the theater.”
    The attorney general was too late. The column had tremendous impact in Washington and the rest of the country. Others followed, notably columnist Damon Runyon in New York and Westbrook Pegler, a Hearst columnist, who wrote that if the great Lippmann expected sabotage and infiltration, it must be true, writing, “Do you get what he says? This is a high grade fellow, with a heavy sense of responsibility.… We are so damned dumb and considerate of the minute political feelings and influence of people.… The Germans round them all up and keep them in pens.”
    Lippmann was essentially writing to an audience of one: Franklin D. Roosevelt. What happened next was predictable. On the day after the Lippmann column, all members of Congress from California, Oregon, and Washington signed on to a letter to the president saying, “We recommend the immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage and all others, aliens and citizens alike, whose presence shall be deemed dangerous or inimical to the defense of the United States from all strategic