More on the McCloy memo
The classic example is Michelle Malkin’s commentary (see Miriam Burstein’s link to it, below). I have not bothered to respond, as I have made it a practice not to respond to personal attacks, and I found her response fairly lame in substantive terms, for reasons Eric Muller reveals (http://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/2005/09/michelle_malkin.html. Yet her response is so psychologically rich that I feel now that it is worth examination on those grounds.
After beginning with a round of personal attacks on me, Malkin tries to cast doubt on the document’s authenticity (again calling me “sloppy or dishonest”) or my honesty by saying that the “postscript” is not labelled postscript, and could have been written by someone else or added years later:
“Jeffrey M. Flannery, Manuscript Reference Specialist in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and Tab Lewis, an archivist at National Archives, both examined the memo at my request. Both stated that they could not provide a definitive answer as to the author of the "postscript" without consulting the original.”
[I must at least thank Malkin for confirming the document’s existence in the Library of Congress files and thereby refuting accusations of fraud against me—and I thought I was going too far towards paranoia when I commissioned a researcher unknown to me to search the file in case independent verification of the document was needed!]
Since the document on its face states that it was received on “7/24”, the day after it was dated, and so the copy was made then, any addition would have had to be made within 24 hours of the memo’s drafting (and presumably in something like McCloy’s handwriting, since it would be obvious if the handwriting were different from the signature). Even ignoring that fact, what gets lost in this apparently scientific affirmation of uncertainty is the desperate reflex that causes this questioning—obviously, people in the ordinary course of business write postscripts to their own messages, while the mind reels trying to discern what earthly reason anyone other than McCloy could have for surreptitiously adding an anonymous comment at any time to his note to Patterson.
Even Malkin cannot maintain such a stance throughout, and she concedes that the memo is “probably” McCloy’s own words. Yet she then is caught in a dilemma—does she continue to deny that he meant what he said, or does she agree? Faced with the choice, Malkin takes both. (One is reminded of the defensive litany of a man accused of stealing a pot “I never stole the pot” “it was an old pot anyway” and “I gave it back to you in better condition than I found it”). First she insists that “in context”, McCloy could not have said what he clearly said:
“A handwritten note scrawled on the bottom of a memo about food is not the venue for discussing state secrets such as the MAGIC messages which revealed extensive Japanese espionage activity on the West Coast.”
Now, even assuming that the MAGIC messages, taken “in context” and as a whole, said what Malkin says they did, and that the decision for removal was made exclusively by McCloy and his higher-ups—both points that have been refuted countless times—this remark completely undermines her position, and the source of it is irrelevant. She cannot explain why, even in a memo on food, McCloy would have had any reason for saying what he did, especially when he need not have said anything at all on the subject. Even Malkin, though she brings up Robert Stinnett as authority for the proposition that Patterson was not on the recipient list for MAGIC (nor was McCloy, for that matter--but David Alvarez, a historian who has studies MAGIC at length, has told me that both men were “probably” privy to the information), cannot quite bring herself to argue with a straight face that McCloy was dissembling to his superior officer to protect the secret operation.
Thus stymied there, she agrees that the threat of mob violence was part of the reason for the decision (despite the lack of any concrete evidence that it played any part in the military’s actual decisions during February 1942) and praises Congressman Howard Coble for defending mass removal on such grounds in 2003. In her rush to turn the memo to her advantage, she blithely ignores the fact that Coble stated that protection was the sole reason for removal, and that her agreement with McCloy on this point destroys her argument that it was based on military security. (It is not entirely clear that by “control our own white citizens” McCloy meant the threat of mob violence, as Bruce Ramsey and David Neiwert noted, but I am fairly sure that such was his intention). Her attempt at squaring the circle may sound plausible to her fans, but one is left with the distinct impression that they wish to believe strongly enough that she need not try too hard.
In the end, I am disappointed by the lack of thoughtful consideration or historical examination in these replies. There has been little attempt to deal with the complexities of interpreting the document, a matter I discuss in my HNN editorial. Revealingly, what nobody (with a single exception) has bothered to ask, in all this debate about context, is just what it was that McCloy was responding to, and whether there is anything in the Library of Congress file that would illuminate this question. In fact, the trigger for McCloy’s memo was a memo the previous day, July 22, 1942, to Robert Patterson from his chief assistant John Hertz (the rental car tycoon who was working as a dollar-a-year man for the War Department). Hertz mentioned sensational news reports that showed “fancy rations being given interned Japanese.” He asked how these compared with the rations of interned Americans in Japan. Hertz then suggested that such news reports might be censored. “I suppose this matter is not within our control, but I believe that public reaction would not be good if this matter received publicity.” Obviously, after receiving the memo, Patterson asked McCloy for a report. The upper text of the resulting memo provided a careful discussion of the feeding of the confined Japanese Americans. Then, in the postscript, McCloy challenged the phrase “internees”, and Hertz’s offensive equation of their situation with that of Americans held by Japan, in the relevant—and revealing—passage. (Ironically, it was the U.S. government that decreed that neither U.S. citizens nor Japanese aliens were to be considered internees for legal purposes. If they had been internees, the government would have been required by the Geneva Convention to feed them at the same level—50 cents per day—that the Army fed its soldiers. Instead, according to the Western Defense Command’s 1943 FINAL REPORT, food costs in the Assembly Centers were kept to around 33 cents per day in the beginning, with the total ultimately rising to about 39 cents per day).