THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF W:

For reasons neither of them could ever quite explain, young Norm Mineta and young Al Simpson hit it off immediately. Their alliance was rekindled in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. Simpson arrived as a Republican senator from Wyoming. Mineta was already here, one of the stars of the fabled "Watergate" class of House Democrats elected in 1974.

Together, with help from Inouye, Matsui, and many others, the two men worked for a decade on passing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. It compensated the survivors of the internment camps with $20,000 in a tax-free payment -- hardly enough -- along with an official apology.

It was signed into law on Aug. 10, 1988 by President Reagan, who made a point of mentioning the tribulations of Norm Mineta and his family. As Mineta watched solemnly from the audience, the president described how the Minetas were taken from their homes in San Jose, sent by train to Santa Anita Racetrack, where they showered in the paddock, and then were shipped to Heart Mountain where the entire family lived in a one-room shack.

"The legislation that I am about to sign provides for a restitution payment to each of the 60,000 surviving Japanese-Americans of the 120,000 who were relocated or detained," Reagan said. "Yet no payment can make up for those lost years. So, what is most important in this bill has less to do with property than with honor. For here we admit a wrong; here we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law."

The president also paid homage to the famed all-nisei regiment, focusing on the central injustice: "The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Japanese-Americans, served with immense distinction to defend this nation, their nation," he noted. "Yet back at home, the soldiers' families were being denied the very freedom for which so many of the soldiers themselves were laying down their lives."

Here, Reagan wasn't just reading something drafted by his speechwriters. The 77-year-old president knew more about this than anyone on the White House staff. He knew about some of that ugly wartime prejudice because he was there. Reagan recalled the saga of Kazuo Masuda, a decorated veteran of the 442nd who was killed in Italy. While the 25-year-old Sgt. Masuda was giving his life for his country, his family was held behind the barbed wire at a relocation camp in Arizona. Even after the war, his sister Mary was threatened when she returned to her Southern California farm. An Orange County cemetery refused to inter Sgt. Masuda's remains.

This did not go well down with the U.S. Army brass. An incensed Gen. Joseph W. Stilwell went personally to Orange County, where he publicly pinned Kazuo Masuda's Distinguished Service Cross on his sister's lapel. Other dignitaries attended the ceremony, too, including Robert Young, Will Rogers Jr. and a 34-year-old film star who'd served stateside during the war as a U.S. Army captain.

"Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all one color," the actor said that day. "America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race, but on an ideal. Not in spite of that, but because of, our polyglot background, we have all the strength in the world. That is the American way."

In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in formulating domestic security policy.

Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate national security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted solely from a combination of"wartime hysteria" and"racial prejudice." As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation, in the words of Michelle Malkin,"like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate," they pre-empt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist enemy.

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