The McCloy Memo: A New Look at Japanese American Internment By
Greg Robinson The removal and confinement of some 120,000
American citizens and permanent residents of Japanese ancestry
from the Pacific Coast during 1942, popularly (if inaccurately)
known as the Japanese American internment, remains a powerful
event in the nation’s consciousness. In the decades since the
war, historians have exhaustively documented the primary role of
anti-Japanese prejudice and war hysteria by West Coast Army
officers and civilians in bringing about the issuing of
Executive Order 9066, which authorized removal. Yet in recent
times a small group of internment revisionists led by journalist
Michelle Malkin, ignoring this evidence, have loudly argued that
mass removal was a justified and positive example of ethnic
profiling. The keystone of their argument is that a few White
House and War Department authorities, notably Assistant
Secretary of War John McCloy, made the decision to confine West
Coast Japanese Americans based on the