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Norman Y. Mineta, a first-generation Japanese American who was held in an internment camp during World War II and later became one of the highest-ranking Asian-American political leaders in the country, as mayor of the big city, a congressman with 10 term and cabinet secretary, died May 3 at his home in Edgewater, Md. He was 90 years old.
The cause is heart disease, said John Flaherty, his former chief of staff.
As a congressman for the Democrats, and later a member of the cabinet of the presidents of the Democrats and the Republicans, Mr. Mineta was widely valued for his experience in Byzantine policies governing the country’s highways, railroads, and airports. In 1971, he was the first Asian American to run a major city in the United States, his hometown of San Jose, which was in the midst of a population boom.
During his tenure in the Silicon Valley Congress from 1975 to 1995, he defended civil liberties and played a key role in receiving a formal apology and compensation for Japanese-Americans who were forced to flee their homes during World War II. war, when their origins turned them into objects of suspicion.
Mr. Mineta had briefly served as Secretary of Commerce at the end of the Bill Clinton administration – becoming the first Asian-American member of the cabinet – and future President George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of Transportation in January 2001. His career was most sharply defined by the terrorist attacks on Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001.
After the second plane hit the World Trade Center in New York that day, Mr. Mineta, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, were taken to a secret bunker under the White House. There, Mr. Mineta made an unprecedented decision to stop all 4,638 aircraft in US airspace. No emergency protocol was created to remove them all at once.
A subordinate reported to Mr. Mineta that the pilots would be told to land at their discretion. That was not good enough. “I didn’t want a pilot who was over Kansas City thinking, ‘Well, I’m going to fly to LA, I’m going to sleep in my own bed tonight,'” Mr Mineta said later.
All planes landed within two hours and 20 minutes.
In the months that followed, Mr Mineta worked 100 hours a week to plug security holes in seaports, airports and railway stations, as well as those related to oil and gas lines. He is leading efforts to establish a new agency, the Transport Security Administration. The TSA, established by Congress on November 19, 2001, became larger than the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Border Patrol combined.
Within a little over a year, the TSA – which was transferred to the new Homeland Security Department in 2003 – replaced a number of private security companies. The agency hired and trained tens of thousands of federal baggage inspectors and enforced a set of strict rules that transformed the US airport experience.
“His calm hands on the reins after 9/11 are one of his main legacies,” Michael P. Jackson, then Under Secretary of Homeland Security, told The Washington Post in 2006. He simply had the confidence to lead a team of people to do meaningful work in every corner of the Ministry of Transport. “
Months after Mr. Mineta’s resignation in 2006, George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. San Jose Airport was named in his honor in 2001.
Mr. Mineta entered politics in the late 1960s as a member of the San Jose City Council. When he became mayor, the city was in the midst of a decades-long population explosion fueled by a thriving aerospace and service industry. The demand for urban services jumped and Mr. Mineta got acquainted with the problems of congestion and restrictions on the city’s transport network.
He was disappointed that local officials no longer had a say in how federal funds should be used to improve roads and railroads, and he promised to change that as a member of Congress.
First elected to the House of Representatives in 1974, he was on the Public Affairs and Transportation Committee, a perch that allowed him to help bring billions of dollars home to California to build and maintain highways.
He played a key role in drafting and passing the Intermodal Land Transport Efficiency Act, a 1991 law that reshaped federal transport policy, re-emphasizing public transport and signaling the end of the government’s focused focus on interstate highways.
“Expanding the role of transit and financing transit was one of his contributions,” said former Congressman James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.), Mr. Minetta’s longtime colleague on the Transport Committee in 2011, in an interview with the obituary. (Oberstar died in 2014) “The main focus on highways would not get us out of the traffic jams we are increasingly facing as we complete the interstate system.”
In 1992, Mr Minetta turned down the chance to become President Bill Clinton’s transport secretary so he could chair the Transport Committee of the House of Representatives, where he said he could have a more direct influence on politics.
Two years later, a tide of the Republican Party swept away the Republican majority in both houses of Congress, and Mr. Mineta lost his presidency. Shortly afterwards, he resigned.
He spent several years as CEO of Lockheed Martin before returning to public service as commercial secretary for the last six months of the Clinton administration. When Bush won the contested presidential election in 2000, he retained Mr Minetta as secretary of transport in a bipartisan demonstration.
“There is no such thing as a democratic highway or a republican bridge,” Mr Mineta used to say.
Outside of his work on transportation policy, Mr. Mineta was best known for advocating on behalf of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans who were forced into internment camps during World War II.
More than 40 years after the end of the war, he called on his colleagues in the US House of Representatives to make an official apology and “close the books on one of the most shameful events in our history.”
“We have lost our homes, we have lost our businesses, we have lost our farms, but the worst thing is that we have lost our most basic human rights,” he said on the Chamber floor in 1987. disloyalty that clings to us to this day. ”
The Civil Liberties Act 1988 allows for $ 20,000 in reparations for each surviving intern; it passed with the support of both parties and served as an official acknowledgment that the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans was wrong, as a result of “racial prejudice, military hysteria and the failure of political leadership,” the presidential commission concluded.
In 1991, when the United States went to war with Iraq in the Persian Gulf, Mr Mineta warned against targeting Arab Americans, saying he hoped the country would not fall back into such racism and fear.
“The US constitution should not fall victim to our conflict with Saddam Hussein,” he said at the time.
Later, as transport secretary in charge of security efforts after 9/11, Mr Mineta vehemently opposed racial profiling in the baggage screening queues. “I was criticized for chasing blue-haired grandmothers at airports, but I just felt very strongly about it,” he told a McClatchy reporter in 2006.
The 10-year-old’s life turned upside down
Norman Yoshio Mineta was born to Japanese immigrants in San Jose on November 12, 1931, and is the youngest of five children. He was 10 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the United States into World War II.
In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order denouncing West Coast residents with Japanese heritage as a threat to national security. They were lined up from their homes in one of several camps around the inner West, taking only what they could carry.
Norman was wearing his Boy Scout uniform and clutching a baseball glove and bat as he and his siblings boarded a train in San Jose. He remembered an American soldier confiscating the bat, calling it a deadly weapon.
The Minetas were eventually taken to Heart Mountain, Wyo., A makeshift village surrounded by a high fence and barbed wire. “Some say the internment was for our good,” Mr. Mineta later recalled. “But even as a boy of 10, I could see machine guns and barbed wire turned inward.
Behind the barbed wire of a World War II internment camp, two scouts forged a connection. This continued when they both entered Congress.
In Wyoming, Mr. Mineta befriended a local boy scout named Alan Simpson, who came to visit the camp and later became a U.S. senator. Decades later, when Mr. Mineta sought a bill for reparations in the House, Simpson sponsored an accompanying bill in the Senate.
“He went through all of this with the camps, just rising above any kind of resentment or resentment,” Simpson told The Post in 2000. “You see the way he handles this and how hard he’s worked since then, and you say : “There is a man with depth. ”
Mr Mineta remained at Heart Mountain for 18 months before moving to the Chicago area, where his father, a professional insurance agent, volunteered to teach Japanese language courses to U.S. Army soldiers. Norman Mineta was a teenager when his family returned to San Jose.
Mr. Mineta graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1953 and then served for three years as an Army intelligence officer. He later worked for his father’s insurance company in San Jose before being prepared for political office by leaders of the Japanese-American community in the city.
His first marriage to May Hinoki ended in divorce. In 1991, he married flight attendant Danealia “Denny” Brantner. In addition to his wife from Edgewater, the survivors include two sons from his first marriage, David Mineta of San Jose and Stuart Mineta of Redwood City, California; two adopted sons, Robert Brantner of West …
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