Paloma Newsletter, Texas Edition

Hello Palomedians, from Houston, Texas, city #4 on a three-week road trip. Night number #3 was spent in Memphis, watching Matt Welch on The Bill Maher Show, where he was able to get Fiona Hill to pose with a mug he'd carted from Paloma Media studios in NYC, causing stupefaction in the other Fifth Column boys but also, can an appearance of Dr. Hill on the Fifth be far behind?

In “O City, My City,” I wrote about Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora, the two NYPD officers murdered this month in the line of duty. Maureen Dowd wrote about the men in today’s New York Times, including, in "Rhapsody for a Boy in Blue," Rivera’s wife of three months seeing her husband in the hospital: “Standing by her dead husband, wrapped in sheets, she told him: ‘Wake up, baby. I’m here.’” May these young men rest in peace.

Scott Ross wrote about the passing over again (and again) of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens for MLB’s Hall of Fame, in “The End of the Steroids Era.” And, noting that “nearly every citizen on the planet has been strapped onto the COVID's rollercoaster for two years,” we linked, and asked some questions of, Nicolas Wade’s “A COVID Origin Conspiracy?” 

And though we were not intentionally highlighting beautiful people, Paul Newman and Barbi Benton did both wind up as a Person of the Day this week, as did Fred Korematsu, whose story is below. I am almost never the person who picks/writes about the Person of the Day and am often learning about them as you are!

Until next week xx Nancy

When your forgotten local newspaper does its little “Born on this Day” feature for today, chances are you’ll see the longest-serving American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born on this day in 1882 to old-money New York. But perhaps we’d be better off celebrating the 103rd birthday of a man FDR cruelly shackled.

Fred Korematsu was a little badass. Born in Oakland to Japanese parents who’d arrived the decade before, Korematsu was passed over for the pre-WWII Selective Service in 1940 ostensibly for ulcers (though it could have been his ancestry), so he trained as a shipyard welder to help with war effort. But he was bounced from a couple of those jobs as well, and then after Pearl Harbor the noose started to close.

First came the March 1942 order for Japanese-Americans not to leave a military perimeter, a restriction that prompted Korematsu to undergo plastic surgery on his eyelids, change his name to Clyde Sarah, and claim to be some kind of Mexican-Hawaiian. Then when the order came in May for the Japanese to report to assembly centers in preparation for internment camps, Korematsu went into hiding. He was captured at the end of the month, then used by civil libertarian lawyers as a test case against FDR’s Executive Order 9066 stripping fully fledged U.S. citizens of their property and freedom.

Korematsu was tried, convicted, given a suspended sentence, then shipped off to the internment camp in Topaz, Utah. His case reached the Supreme Court in 1944, producing one of the most infamous decisions in the high court’s history, the 6-3 Korematsu v. United States. Having lost the battle, Korematsu clammed up about the whole thing for decades, not even telling his own daughters about his central role in American civil liberties law.

Gerald Ford formally rescinded Executive Order 9066 in 1976; Jimmy Carter launched a special investigation into the internment fiasco in 1980; Korematsu’s conviction was vacated by a district court in 1983, Ronald Reagan signed financial reparations into law in 1988, and by 1998 Bill Clinton was giving Korematsu a Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying: “In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls: Plessy, Brown, Parks ... to that distinguished list, today we add the name of Fred Korematsu."

Not content to rest on those laurels, Korematsu stayed in the game, writing amicus briefs after 9/11 in support of lifting open-ended criminal detentions in the War on Terror. He died in 2005, but kept on making news: In 2018, as a side-comment in the Trump v. Hawaii decision upholding the then-president’s partial travel ban on visitors from selected countries, the Supreme Court expressly declared that Korematsu had been wrongly decided. Not a formal overrule, but at least a clear acknowledgment that one brave American from Oaktown had been done dirty by his own government.