-The Congress is so polarized.
The American public is so polarized on certain issues.
And you wonder, how are we gonna ever get the different voices to come together to get something done?
-There was a symbolic impact of being the first Asian-American Cabinet member.
-I tried to depoliticize my Cabinet.
And there's no better public servant for America than Norm Mineta.
-Does our Constitution indeed protect all of us?
-As a former inmate of an American concentration camp, Norm's life and Norm's perspective embodied the Japanese-American experience.
-What drives him is the idea that being an American citizen with all these strengths from other cultures could then actually add to the fabric and strengthen the fabric of the nation.
That's what he embodies.
Dad's legacy is living out the American dream.
♪♪ -Norman Yoshio Mineta was born the son of two immigrants.
He became a United States congressman who won re-election 10 times.
He served as a Cabinet member for two presidents, a Democrat and a Republican.
He was an American by birth yet imprisoned by his own country because of his Japanese ancestry.
-In 1902, nearly 30 years before Norman Mineta was born, a penniless young man named Kunisaku Mineta left home in Mishima, Japan, and sailed to America.
-He came over as a 14-year-old by himself.
-The teenage boy was supposed to disembark in San Francisco and join his uncle in nearby Salinas.
But Kunisaku spoke no English.
And he accidentally got off the ship in Seattle instead.
-So now he's 900 miles away from where he should be, so he had to work from one lumber camp, farm camp, and it took him a year and a half to work from Seattle down to Salinas.
So when he gets to Salinas, he's now 16 years old, and his uncle said, "You've got to learn English."
And he puts him in the first grade.
And he said it was the most humiliating thing he ever did.
-10 years after he came to America, Kunisaku made a decision.
-"I'm 24.
It's time for me to consider getting married."
So he wrote to a friend of his, and the friend sent back all these pictures and, you know, "Here's Emiko, here's Ayako," and all these pictures.
Then he said, "Remember my little sister who we used to tease?
I'm enclosing her picture, as well."
He just said, "Okay, I'll get married to your sister."
-Kane Watanabe was 20 years old when she arrived on a ship from Yokohama.
The wedding was the result of a pact known as The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907.
President Theodore Roosevelt signed it because of the growing anti-Japanese sentiment.
Japanese could now come to the United States only to join a family member, which is how tens of thousands of Japanese women entered the U.S. as picture brides.
Kane and Kunisaku Mineta were Issei, the first generation of Japanese to come to America.
-When the Japanese immigrants first came here, they saw themselves as still being Japanese.
They began to sink roots into the United States, and, certainly, when their children were born, they realized that, "Perhaps we're not going back to Japan.
Perhaps we truly are Japanese-Americans."
-The Minetas worked hard to become American.
Kunisaku started his own insurance company in San Jose.
They bought their own house.
They joined the Wesley United Methodist Church.
-So the experience of Japanese-Americans is really the experience of an immigrant community coming to the United States.
They were trying to eke out a living, trying to raise families, trying to establish themselves in this new land called America.
♪♪ Japanese faced a lot of racism.
They faced tremendous racist and discriminatory laws -- the Alien Land Laws, which didn't allow them to own land.
They couldn't live in certain places.
Anti-miscegenation laws, which said who they could and could not marry.
♪♪ -Japanese immigrants like Kunisaku and Kane Mineta could never become citizens no matter how long they stayed in America.
-The racism against Japanese was fueled by economic greed.
What we started to see is Japanese-Americans becoming successful in small businesses, as well as in small farming opportunities.
They were able to make what was before unfertile ground very profitable.
And that became the source of envy.
The white community wanted to see Japanese-Americans forcibly excluded from the West Coast so that the economic opportunities could be exploited.
-In 1924, the U.S. banned all immigration from Japan.
The only new Japanese-Americans would be the children of the Issei, called the Nisei, born in the U.S., citizens by birth.
Norman Mineta is Nisei.
He was born in San Jose in 1931, raised in a family that spoke Japanese.
-The Issei would send their kids to school to study English, to learn English, but, more generally, they sent them to school to socialize them to the American lifestyle, American customs, American ways, trying to live the American dream.
-For non-whites, the American dream was never entirely attainable.
-People look at you, they look at your face, and they make certain assumptions about who you are.
And there's a certain assumption about foreignness that is correlated with your appearance.
-A group of Nisei founded the Japanese American Citizens League to work for Japanese-American rights.
But events across the Pacific made that difficult.
Japan invaded China, bombed Shanghai, and formed a military alliance with Germany and Italy.
And then in 1941, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.
For Japanese-Americans, it changed everything immediately.
-The attack on Pearl Harbor united Americans as never before in history.
And the explosion... -On the 7th of December, about 2:00, Joyce comes running through the backyard of the house saying, "The police are taking Papa away.
Police are taking Papa away."
So, my dad runs from our house next door, but by that time, Mr. Hirano was gone.
♪♪ I did a lot of eavesdropping.
I used to sit by the glass door.
So I'd get to hear those conversations about, "What's our next move?
What should we be doing, given what's happening to us?"
-Norm Mineta had just turned 10.
-And President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19th of 1942.
-Within weeks, the government began to move people of Japanese ancestry away from the West Coast.
2/3 of them were American citizens.
The Minetas, like the others, were ordered to leave their home.
-I had a little dog.
The dog's name was Skippy, and I had to give Skippy, my dog, away because we couldn't take dogs to camp.
I mean, he was just a great, great friend.
So, never saw Skippy again.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The day that we left San Jose on the train, I turned around to look at my father.
Here are all these tears coming down, and I'm quite sure that was a reflection of his looking back on life since coming to the United States in 1902 and seeing all that he had done to build a life for himself and his family all being lost.
-Japanese society is a collective system.
That is, they value belonging.
To be cast out, like we were, out of our homes, out of our community, identified as a threat to the very community, the very country that they had dedicated their lives to, it was experienced as shame.
♪♪ [ Train wheels clacking ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Norman Mineta was 11 years old when the family arrived at Heart Mountain, Wyoming, in late 1942.
Heart Mountain was called a relocation center, but it was a concentration camp, one of 10 concentration camps, all in remote locations, where some 120,000 Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II.
-And it was a windy, blustery, cold day.
Tumbleweed blowing along and the sand just whipping along, hitting our face, and we didn't have any heavy clothing.
So, here it is in November, and it's just biting cold.
First thing we had to do was to string rope.
That was Mama and Papa's bedroom behind the sheets over there, and my brother and I were over here, and my two sisters were over here.
♪♪ This was the third-largest city in the state of Wyoming, a city of 13,000, 14,000 people in this area.
It's really not much different from any other typical community except that this one had barbed wire all the way around it, military guard towers every 300 feet or so with searchlights and machine-gun mounts.
♪♪ I don't think I was ever angry.
I think one of the amazing things about this whole experience is that you had this happen to 120,000 people, but there wasn't that lasting bitterness or rancor that came out of this.
-We talk, "Well, I lived on this block, and the food was bad."
I don't know that you hear the stuff of, like, "I feel scared.
I feel broken."
It's not like a murder.
They weren't killed.
But they were.
It broke my mother.
-I think I was like my dad, an optimist kind of person.
He kept saying, "In the long run, we're going to prove our loyalty to this country."
He really loved -- He loved the United States.
-If you have a sense that you're hated, you know, like, so what is it about you that makes you hated?
Invisible is one thing, but hated?
-There was conflict.
Do we accept our role in the United States as second-class citizens?
Do we accept our role as being the recipients of racism and discrimination?
That was a very difficult decision for many of these families to make, and, in fact, it literally tore families apart.
And this debate wasn't just a debate of constitutional rights.
It was a debate of generational differences.
-There was a sense of -- In Japanese, the saying is "Shikata ga nai" -- "It can't be helped."
-Some people would see that as just being a truly fatalistic perspective on the world.
"It can't be helped, so let's not do anything about it."
It's an understanding that some things can't be avoided, so we need to adapt to that and we need to work around it, that the water doesn't go over the mountain, the water goes around the mountain because shikata ga nai -- it can't be helped.
-Loyalty is very strong and respect for elders and authority, and so I think many of the Isseis were guided by that principle.
"This is how we'll show our loyalty, by doing what -- by suffering what we need to suffer."
-The Japanese-American experience was very much one of being a suspect community.
So we went over backwards to prove that we're loyal.
We had the biggest American flags that existed and walked around with them.
We did the Pledge of Allegiance at everything.
It was a need to kind of say, "I'm loyal, I'm loyal, I'm loyal."
-Some never forgot, and to this day, they're living with bad feelings and bad thoughts about what happened.
♪♪ ♪♪ -The end of the war meant the end of the concentration camps.
The Minetas went back to their home in San Jose in 1945.
But for many, it was not exactly the end of the long Japanese-American ordeal.
-It wasn't like they were being returned back to a welcoming society.
This was a very hostile environment afterwards.
-They went back out into a society that, essentially, saw them as being guilty enough for the U.S. government to have locked up, basically, over 90% of the population of Japanese ancestry.
-Kunisaku Mineta had to struggle to get his business going again.
Insurance companies simply didn't want Japanese-American agents or clients.
-For many Japanese-American families, the feeling was, "Let's become so American.
Let's be 110% American so that this will never happen again.
Let's send our kids to school, have them get good jobs.
Let's have them speak English, not Japanese, and let's make sure that we are never questioned again.
Let's be so American that we will never be under the microscope."
-Nothing was more American than a sport like basketball.
-I was on the basketball team in high school.
And here I'm maybe 5'5", and I became the center.
-His story about, "Oh, yeah, you know, I used to jump center for my basketball team," and you know why -- you know how he got to do that?
-I was a guard and not a very good guard.
So, I thought, "I'm going to start exercising and jumping as high as I could."
-"'Cause every night I would jump at home, right?
I'd just jump, jump, jump."
-It enabled me, at the beginning of the game, to be the center, and right after the tip-off, when the first whistle is blown, I'd probably come out of the game.
Second half, I'd start the game, headed with a tip-off.
First whistle, and I'd be out.
-It's a try-hard lesson.
You try harder than the person next to you, right?
-I was elected student body president.
3% or 4% of the student body population was Japanese-American.
-He is just an engaging, gregarious, charismatic individual who, if he had been angry, you wouldn't blame him, given what happened to him when he was 10 years old, but who had gone well beyond that.
-After World War II, alliances had shifted, ushering in the Cold War.
One result -- a 1951 security treaty between the U.S. and Japan.
-In 1952, we have the McCarran-Walter Act, which allows Japanese immigrants, for the very first time, to become naturalized citizens.
And so now our Issei have a chance to become citizens of the United States of America.
-I graduated Berkeley.
I had a ROTC commission, went into the Army right away.
Korean War was going on, and so I went overseas.
-He returned home from the service and joined his father in the insurance business.
Just two months later, his mother passed away.
But another woman was about to enter his life.
-He was a really brash kind of guy, just show off, and, you know, and I'm not that -- I'm so introverted that that didn't attract me at all.
So the longer we were together, the more good qualities would come out, and I thought I was mistaken, and then, by that time, I said, "Oh, okay."
I saw a future there.
-May Hinoki was a Nisei from Colusa, California.
They married, then had two sons, David and Stuart.
The future seemed set.
Norm would be an insurance man forever.
-I was getting engaged to be married, looking for an apartment, and went to an apartment in response to an ad in the paper.
And I'm standing in front of the door with this lady.
"I'd like to see that apartment."
She looks at me and says, "You know, I think -- I think my husband might have rented it out.
Honey?
Hey, Ben, come over here.
Did you rent the apartment?"
He looks at me.
He says, "Yeah, yeah.
I rented the apartment."
So I left and went to the corner gas station, called up the number, said, "Do you still have that apartment?"
"Yeah, it's still available."
I said, "Great, I'll be right over."
-Norm Mineta did not forget that blatant discrimination.
In time, he would work to end that injustice and many more.
The young Mineta was the man Japanese-American community leaders had been waiting for.
In the early 1960s, they quietly built support for Mineta to take on a leadership role in San Jose politics.
-Norm, from his insurance company, got appointed to the San Jose Human Relations Commission, and his career takes off from that.
-Then all of a sudden, 1967, the new mayor and two incumbent members of the city council came to me and said, "Look, we have a vacancy on the city council.
We want you to apply."
So I said, "Well, I'm in business with my father, so let me talk to him about that."
So, when I talked to my dad, he said, "Well, you and I can manage the insurance business in any way," but he said, "You know, there's an old adage in Japan that if you're in politics, you're like the nail sticking out from the board."
He says, "You know what happens to that nail?
It always gets hammered.
Can you stand being hammered by your friends, your neighbors, constituents, whomever?"
-And Japanese society, it's an island culture.
In contrast to U.S. Western culture, sticking out and speaking out is not particularly valued.
For someone like Norm to decide that he's going to enter the political arena in that era was remarkable.
♪♪ -In a sense, Mineta's timing was good.
America was in turmoil.
Growing protest against the Vietnam War shared the stage with the Summer of Love.
By 1967, there were three Latino congressmen and a senator.
Hawaii's representatives were all Asian-American.
But outside of Hawaii, there were no Asian-Americans -- no mayors, ambassadors, federal judges, Cabinet members or congressmen.
-Norm got into politics.
And that's when our lives just changed something awful.
And then he started moving up and moving up, and then he ran for mayor, and he got it, and, oh, my gosh, it was international news.
People from Japan, the newspapers came over to interview him, and pictures were taken, and we were in the newspapers all over, and it was amazing.
-The night of the election, the next morning, I wake up.
There on the garage door is spray-painted "J-A-P." You don't make a big thing out of it, but you store it away.
[ Applause ] -I'm confident that we will be able to face the kind of danger that we do have in the urban crisis but take advantage of the opportunities that are available to all of us and make San Jose a great city.
[ Applause ] -San Jose was a city pivoting from the past to the future.
It would soon become the epicenter of a world called Silicon Valley.
The new mayor of San Jose would have his hands full.
-We were going through a metamorphosis within the city of San Jose.
All of the farms were developing into housing tracts, and urban sprawl was terrible.
-And we were making that shift from an agricultural community to high tech, so it was a question of, how do we plan for even greater goals?
My goal was to be a visionary in terms of, where are we going in the future, and how do we get there?
-His own future, too, was taking shape.
-He went from one office to another, and, my gosh, he -- "Are you kidding me?
You're going to run for Congress?"
-In 1974, he ran for a congressional seat that had been Republican for 46 years.
-Norm comes from a district that isn't primarily Japanese-American.
It is very multiethnic but primarily white.
-Again he won easily.
The first Asian-American mayor of a major city had now become the first Asian-American congressman ever elected from the lower 48 states.
Mineta's stunning victory was part of a massive Democratic wave, the backlash from the Watergate scandal.
-Here the country had gone through Watergate, President Nixon resigning, and then in the November '74 election, all of a sudden, 75 new Democratic members of Congress.
-Look, to be elected to Congress, you got to have ambition.
Norm had a normal-sized ego for a politician, and he never expressed it in a way that put people off.
-Mineta would win re-election to Congress 10 times and serve 21 years.
But it was no easy job.
-Three weekends out of the month, I would be back in the district.
-Friday night, he'd leave the office.
He'd go out to Dulles, be in San Jose by Friday night, and then spend Saturday, Sunday at the district office and then being with constituents.
-But you still have to be in touch with the district.
But it still, as you say, takes its toll.
-Norm was gone pretty much all the time even then.
Because he's so involved in what he's doing.
That's all he can think of at the time.
And so family should really understand and applaud him and just urge him on.
We did that, but we also were sad that we didn't have a dad at home.
-I was blind to a lot of things.
But again, when you have responsibility to a congressional district, that sort of, unfortunately, took the main effort.
-How can that work out, you know?
But, um, for some people, it does work out well, but in our case, it didn't.
-After 25 years of marriage, May and Norm Mineta were divorced.
In the late '70s, the busy congressman found what would slowly become his central mission -- a movement for justice called Redress, people asking the United States to disavow the massive World War II imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps.
-The officers and the staff of the JACL came to visit Senator Inouye, Senator Matsunaga, myself, and Congressman Bob Matsui.
And when they were presenting this, Dan shook his head, said, "We'll never get this passed."
-And, in fact, it was Norm who kind of came with the counter narrative and says, "But we do have a chance for an incredible public education."
-This was not a Japanese-American issue.
This was an American issue.
It involved the Constitution.
-As a former inmate of an American concentration camp, Norm's life and Norm's perspective embodied the Japanese-American experience.
You know, he represented our story in the halls of Congress in a way that only someone with his background could.
His life and his family was what we were talking about.
What happened to them is what happened to the Japanese-American community that was incarcerated.
♪♪ ♪♪ -People said, "Well, Mineta, this happened 40 years ago, 50 years ago.
What are you bringing this up for now?"
As an adult, you keep reflecting on what happened to you.
You know, you were really screwed.
And that, you know, stays in the back of your mind, and you think, at some point in life, you would do something to try to correct.
-In 1980, Congress appointed a nine-person commission to investigate what had happened and why.
Over the next two years, more than 750 people gave testimony.
Many of the former camp prisoners spoke in public for the first time.
-They came to say goodbye to me before being moved to Amache, Colorado, and I waved goodbye to my sister from the window.
I did not know then that it would be 4 1/2 years before I would see any of them again.
-Our family was placed in a horse stall.
-Which were very unsanitary, and the stench was unbearable.
-Where one horse was housed, there were three families.
-On August 27, 1941, at 2:00 a.m., we were informed that our baby had passed away.
-[ Speaking Japanese ] -It's in regards to my brother James, who was killed in Manzanar.
I've never been able to talk about this, but more people have come up to me and said I must speak out.
-In a short time, my father and two uncles were arrested and put in concentration camps.
I am very bitter about this.
I have not seen my father since I was 11 years old.
I am now 51 years old.
I have missed my father very much, and I wonder -- ♪♪ [ Voice breaking ] I-I wonder if he's alive today.
-The commissioners took two years to study it and came to the conclusion that there was a gross violation of constitutional rights.
And the commission decided, "And so therefore we recommend that the Congress issue an apology to the Japanese-American community and pay $20,000 redress payments to the internees."
-Year after year, Mineta pushed for Redress.
Year after year, the idea died in committee.
The bill finally reached Congress in 1985.
-We know that 120,000 people, most of them native-born American citizens, were denied their basic civil and constitutional rights.
-It was called H.R.
442, in honor of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the famous all-Japanese American unit in World War II.
-Returning from three years of war service in Italy and France, the 442nd Combat Team receives a rousing welcome at New York.
The veteran unit is made up of Japanese-Americans, many from Hawaii.
-The biggest thing we had going for us was the valor and the dedication of the men and women in the armed services during World War II who, despite what happened to them, were proving their patriotism.
-With Republicans holding the Senate majority, Mineta would need to gather support from both sides of the aisle.
On the Republican side was someone Norm Mineta had met at Heart Mountain concentration camp when he was 11 years old.
-And so we had our own Boy Scout jamboree here in the camp, and our scout leaders would write to the scouts in Ralston, Deaver, Cody, all the towns surrounding Heart Mountain.
Invariably, they would all write back, "Oh, we're not going in there."
-Well, first, you can imagine that in Cody, Wyoming, there was an extraordinary fear about this place.
This was 11,000 people sitting in a sagebrush flat between Powell and Cody, Wyoming, with guard towers and barbed wire and the guns aimed inward, and we thought, "What if those people escape?"
-So finally, a troop from Cody, Wyoming, came in, and we did our knot-tying contests and woodworking contests, and then we got paired off with a kid from the Cody camp to put up our tent.
And that was Alan Simpson.
-And we messed around and were both rather pesky.
All I do remember is he has the same -- I'm not even looking at him right now.
He has the same look in his eyes that he did then, which is deviltry, peskiness.
-All through junior high school, high school, and college, we wrote to each other.
'74, I get elected to the House.
'78, he gets elected to the Senate, and our friendship went back as if we were still sitting in that pup tent.
-It's been one wonderful, rich ride of true friendship, which is a beautiful thing.
-And there are a lot of those issues where I've had an opposite view.
I'm a liberal Democrat.
He's a conservative -- He's a good Republican.
So it's not that we had agreement on everything.
-But Norm Mineta and Alan Simpson both remembered what America had been like in 1943.
-We'd go downtown, and here would be a sign on the restaurant, "No Japs allowed.
You sons of bitches killed my son at Iwo Jima."
Now, how do you feel when you're a kid and you've been out to the Boy Scouts and seen guys just like yourself?
He was an American citizen, and they stuck him behind barbed wire.
That's a hell of a thing to do to people.
-Senator Inouye, of course, Senator Matsunaga were great champions of this bill as H.R.
442 making its way through the House and Senate.
But right by them, Spark and Dan, was Alan Simpson all the way.
-H.R.
442 came to a vote in the House on September 17, 1987.
Norm Mineta himself chose the date -- the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution.
-And though this bill is a deeply personal issue for a small number, this legislation touches all of us because it touches the very core of our nation.
Does our Constitution indeed protect all of us regardless of race or culture?
-When I heard Norm speak, it brought it all together, that this is what we were fighting for, that, yes, it was about constitutional issues, yes, it was about America's promise, but more than anything, it was about individuals.
It was about families.
♪♪ ♪♪ -The House bill passed, and nearly a year later, on August 10th, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
[ Applause ] Justice had been delayed more than 45 years.
-How many countries really admit a wrong they've done and then admit it and then correct it?
-But I can't help but think that the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was his crowning achievement, and certainly, I think it propelled his legislative career.
-In his 21 years in Congress, Mineta fought many kinds of wrongs.
-One of the most emotional things for me is the role Norm played in same-sex marriage.
Norm made a strong speech in favor of endorsing same-sex marriage, and there were a couple of things that struck me.
First of all, the very fact that, as a member of Congress, he injected himself into the dispute was an example of great intellectual courage, so for Norm to plunge voluntarily into a controversy where he did not need to take part was extraordinary, and then what he said -- "If a gay man could be one of the leaders in getting justice for us, we can do the same for him and his people."
-He was one of the primary sponsors of the Americans Disability Act, and the reason why was when he was mayor, he decided to spend some time in a wheelchair to figure out what some of the challenges were.
The reason why we have cutouts on sidewalks, on corners is because Norm Mineta spent time and realized folks couldn't cross the street.
-And I believe his phrase always is, "You just do what's right."
That's not a hard thing to do.
-In the early 1990s, doing what was right meant taking on an opponent that was deeply ingrained in the American way of life -- the car culture.
Mineta wrote the act known as ISTEA, Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act.
For the first time ever, funding shifted away from highway construction to support public mass transit.
And he was able to persuade fellow congressional members to pay for it by voting for a 5-cent increase in the gas tax.
-In October 1995, after 21 years, Norman Mineta voluntarily gave up his seat in Congress.
But even before that, his life had changed.
in 1989, he met Deni Brantner.
-Deni Mineta was the sea change in Norm Mineta's life.
There is a before Deni and an after Deni.
Deni helped Norm find himself.
[ Indistinct talking ] [ Motor revs ] ♪♪ -The Mineta family week every year is just a chance for all of us kids to get together and the grandkids.
And we just enjoy our family time.
And we generally avoid meetings and dinners at that time.
We just get together and be a family, really.
It's a wonderful thing.
-Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick, kick.
-Would you please run for president?
-Me?
Run for president?
-Yes, you.
Yes.
-No.
-They love each other, but they genuinely like each other.
They enjoy spending time with people.
-The role that I've played as Norm's partner is a sounding board that's safe.
If he asks my opinion, he knows he's going to get it.
But occasionally it's not his opinion.
[ Camera shutters clicking ] -I'm pleased to bring you here to announce my nomination of Norm Mineta to be the 33rd Secretary of Commerce.
As a young boy during World War II, he and his family were forced from their home and held hundreds of miles away in a desolate internment camp.
-A person who had once been incarcerated as an enemy alien was now part of the inner circle of the President of the United States.
-There was a symbolic impact of being the first Asian-American Cabinet member.
-Norman Mineta served the remaining six months of President Clinton's term in office.
And almost immediately, he was recruited for another Cabinet position, this time in a Republican White House.
-"This is Dick Cheney.
I'm calling to see whether or not you would consider coming on board as Secretary of Transportation in our administration."
And I said, "Dick, you've got to be kidding."
I said, "Uh, I don't know.
I don't want to be marginalized as the Democrat in a Republican administration, nor do I want to be considered a turncoat by the Democrats."
So when I called President Clinton, he said, "I think you ought to do this."
-Mineta was confirmed as Secretary of Transportation by a 98-0 vote.
-Thank you very much, Mr. President.
[ Camera shutters clicking ] -I thank him for accepting my invitation to serve again.
And I'm honored to have him by my side.
Mr. Secretary.
-Thank you very much, Mr. President.
-I tried to depoliticize my Cabinet.
I didn't want people in there serving the Republican Party.
I wanted people in there serving the country.
And there's no better public servant for America than Norm Mineta.
-Some of his constituents, his old friends in Congress were unhappy because he wasn't even more liberal, but he couldn't be more liberal.
Went as far as he could and still maintained support from the President.
-The word "compromise" today is even a bad word.
People think of it as a weakness rather than a strength to get something done.
The Congress is so polarized.
The American public is so polarized on certain issues.
And you wonder, how are we gonna ever get the different voices to come together to get something done?
-Soon after he became Secretary of Transportation, Mineta spent a weekend with new president George W. Bush.
-We were guests of the President up at Camp David, and one day he just -- After dinner he just said, "Hey, Norm, tell me about camp life.
Tell me about the evacuation."
-What struck me about his answer was there was no bitterness.
I mean, here's the greatest democracy in the world interning fellow citizens because of their background, and Norm could've been really angry.
But his reaction was very instructive to me, and that is you learn from life lessons and try to improve on America, and his presence did just that.
♪♪ -Just months later, the 9/11 terrorist attacks reshaped America.
As Transportation Secretary, Norman Mineta was thrust into the spotlight.
His own childhood wartime experience influenced presidential policy.
-Well, one of the important things about Norm's experience is, it reminds us that sometimes we lose our soul as a nation, that the notion of all equal under God sometimes disappears, and 9/11 certainly challenged that premise.
And so right after 9/11, I was deeply concerned that our country would lose its way and treat people who may not worship like their neighbor as noncitizens.
So, I went to a mosque.
And, in some ways, Norm's example inspired me.
I didn't want our country to do to others what had happened to Norm.
-To have President Bush say, "We will not do to Muslim-Americans what we had done to Norm's family," was a reminder to the Cabinet, as well as to the American people, that we needed to be much more than our fears wanted us to be.
-In 2006, Secretary Mineta resigned.
He'd served more than five years, longer than any Secretary of Transportation in American history.
He'd served as a city councilman, mayor, 11-term congressman, and Cabinet member for both a Democratic president and a Republican one.
-When Norm and I were dating, I asked him what he'd like to do when he retires, and he told me that he had no intentions of ever retiring, and I thought he was kidding.
And now I know he was really serious.
-One of Mineta's ongoing projects is strengthening the bonds between the land of his ancestry with the land of his birth.
-Whatever happens in the Asia-Pacific area is going to still be dependent on a strong relationship between Japan and the United States.
And I'm proud to be an American.
I'm proud to be of Japanese Ancestry, so whatever I can do to help in that relationship I want to do.
Well, I suppose it dates back to December 7, 1941.
Some people still haven't gotten over that.
So I want to do things that will help promote people understanding and knowing more about Japan.
♪♪ ♪♪ -When he travels to Japan, Norman Mineta visits Mishima, his parents' hometown and where he still has relatives.
-Hi.
Good to see you.
-Hello.
How are you?
-I'm fine, thank you.
-Good to see you.
-You too.
[ Birds chirping ] ♪♪ -Well, I suppose going to the cemetery... it's not something anyone says you should do, but you just sort of have this sense of wanting to do it and to, I guess, in a way, connecting back to your -- your ancestral forebears.
And that gives you a great deal of inspiration and comfort.
-His roots may lie in Japan, but his heart is definitely American.
After 50 years of public service, he wears an American flag pin not to just prove his patriotism, but also his citizenship.
-I still get treated like a foreigner and feel that.
You know, when you're in close quarters, like get in the elevator, and people will sort of give you the once-over.
So I always wear this, the flag.
But, uh, it's -- You know, it's something you feel when you're doing things.
Am I really being fully accepted as an American citizen?
And so I want to make sure everyone knows I am.
-The man who'd been incarcerated, then denied housing because of his race has a solution for discrimination.
Work hard.
Gain power.
Become involved.
-I want to keep that pipeline of young Asian-Pacific Americans pursuing public service, either in appointive, major role or running for political office.
[ Cheers and applause ] -I'm Congresswoman Grace Meng from New York, the first Asian-American elected to Congress from the East Coast.
-Decisions are being made about us and for us somewhere, and what you've got to do is be at the table when those decisions are being made.
-When Norm was in the Congress, uh, he would see that the African-American groups and the Hispanic groups in Congress were able to have audiences with the President.
And, uh, he understood, you know, "We need to be at the table just like those people are."
And so he created the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, CAPAC.
-Without any question, I am really very, very pleased to be here this morning for this announcement of the founding of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
-I think Norm took very seriously -- took very seriously cultivating someone like me and mentoring someone like me and many others.
-Okay.
-Okay.
-All right.
-Norm has been a tremendous mentor for many of us.
I mean, he was a true trailblazer that opened up the doors for many of us who never thought it was ever possible to run for office.
-What drives him is the idea that being an American citizen with all these strengths from other cultures could then actually add to the fabric and strengthen the fabric of the nation.
Man, he's like the poster boy for that, right?
That's what he embodies.
Dad's legacy is kind of living out the American dream.
-You have to look at the arc of Norm Mineta.
Young guy, Japanese-American, growing up in San Jose, California.
And then interned.
And that whole arc, from the time he was interned to the time where he sat in the Cabinet Room of the White House with the President of the United States saying, "And we're not gonna let what happened to Norm happen to Muslim-Americans" -- that arc is Norm Mineta's life.
♪♪ ♪♪ -I didn't know they were going to name an airport after me.
So ever since then, I've been saying, "Isn't that strange?
My parents named me after an airport."
Even my grandkids one time said, "Grandpa, do you own an airport?"
♪♪ ♪♪ -Can we say hello to you?
-Absolutely.
Hi.
And you're... -Sarah.
Nice to meet you.
-Sarah?
And you're... -Carolina.
-Carolina.
-And I'm Kim.
-Hi, Kim.
-It's so nice to meet you.
-So where are you off to?
-For Norm Mineta, fame was never the point.
He was trying to change the nation he loved.
-I was doing things to help people.
I took that as a real responsibility, to speak out on behalf of those who had no voice.
-Norm Mineta spent his entire life both proving, by his own achievements, that America was working for more and more people but also trying to give that chance for everybody else.
And that's a worthy life.
And it should be honored.
More important, it should be emulated.
♪♪ ♪♪ -Norman Y. Mineta.
[ Applause ] ♪♪ Norman Mineta exemplifies the high ideals of service, integrity, and courage.
Despite the injustice of living in internment camp when he was a child, he later served his country in the U.S. Army and went on to become a mayor, congressman, and Cabinet secretary under two presidents.
The longest-serving Secretary of Transportation, he worked to improve the security of our transportation system and restore our confidence in air travel after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The United States honors Norman Y. Mineta for a life of selfless and distinguished service to our nation.
[ Applause ] ♪♪ ♪♪
