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Executive Decision


Welcome to Executive Decision, the podcast that reviews some of the most significant decisions in history: why they happened; how they happened, and what they tell us about the process of decision making.

Apr 10, 2021

What happens when a strong person makes a weak decision and a weak person makes a strong one? In part two of our episode on FDR and the internment of the Japanese in WWII, we look at the anti-Japanese hysteria that seized the West Coast in the wake of Pearl Harbor and the bureaucratic infighting that resulted in the imprisonment of 120,000 people.

This episode makes use of a variety of archival audio, including:

WOR United Press Radio Announcement on the attack on Pearl Harbor, Dec 7, 1941

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD9PNkkq5Mc

Akiko Kurose, “Hearing about the Bombing of Pearl Harbor”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZoL-O9Y9Aw&list=PL_txUBUpMcH4CS9Ggr6IezvCHoIhYov-f

Gordon Hirabayashi, “Worries about Issei parents after the bombing of Pearl Harbor”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgBjYz0xn38&list=PL_txUBUpMcH4CS9Ggr6IezvCHoIhYov-f&index=8

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Fireside Chat on Fifth Columnists, May 27, 1940

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZZ2k5pXFOU&t=1s

Excerpts from “All Through the Night” Warner Brothers, 1942

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64kxaXSj2tA

Excerpts from “1941,” Steven Spielberg, 1979

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPnwlNvwBLI

Pearl Harbor attack newsreel, 1941

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2kSnlS4xX8

Kara Kondo, “The Day of Mass Removal”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am46ZQgfI3I&list=PL_txUBUpMcH4CS9Ggr6IezvCHoIhYov-f&index=10