After
war was declared on Japan in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
wanted to issue an executive order that allowed regional military
commanders to designate "military areas" from which "any or all persons
may be excluded." The worry, of course, were the 120,000 people of
Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast that posed a threat;
relocating them to the interior would isolate that threat. His
wife
Eleanor, however, argued that what he proposed was blatant racism, and
threatened to publicly lobby against him (and, supposedly, reveal that
he
had been banging her girl friends). He relented.
So it was that when the Chicago Tribune published, in June 1942, that
we had broken the Jap naval code, Japanese agents quickly alerted
agents in California who relayed the information to Japan. The US
never
recovered, and was forced in 1945 into negotiations that resulted in
the loss of our Pacific bases, including the Phillipines and
Hawaii.
