Preview of “Rachel Maddow Presents: Burn Order”

0:02Hey, everybody. It's Rachel Maddow here. I have a new podcast that I'm really excited about. It's called Burn Order. It is six episodes. And what it's about is the decision by the U.S. government during World War II to round up and incarcerate tens of thousands of Americans purely on the basis of their race. No charges, no trials, no hearings, just a racial roundup, mostly of U.S. citizens. Whole families held for years in prison camps in the United States. Behind that terrible, astonishing decision by the U.S. government is a surprising and surprisingly simple story about who came up with that idea and why and how he got it done.

0:53Turns out Stephen Miller is a rerun. In any case, I hope you like it. I hope you check it out. I'm really proud of it. Again, it's called Burn Order. So if you search for Rachel Maddow Presents Burn Order, you can follow the podcast. The first two episodes are available right now. New episodes are going to be dropping on Mondays. If you stay right here right now, you can hear a special preview of the first episode. Oh, and even though it is free to listen, if you want to drop$2.99 to subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts. That will get you early access to each episode the Friday before it drops for everybody else on Monday.

1:36And you can listen without the ads, and you'll get bonus content, bonus episodes that you can only get with that MS Now Premium subscription. Okay, well, here's the preview. Thanks again for listening.

2:00The summer of 1982. Good morning. This is today. It's Tuesday, August 17th. I'm Bryant Gumbel. Year two of the presidency of Ronald Reagan. That was President Reagan in a nationally televised speech last night from the White House, making a sober plea to Americans to support... The number one song in the country is Eye of the Tiger. The summer's smash hit movie is E.T. E.T. Phone home. And in Washington, Democrats and Republicans are at each other's throats over a big controversial bill to raise taxes. What we need now is an end to the bickering. In that summer of 1982, there's a researcher posted up inside the National Archives, which is just a few blocks from the White House.

2:48This researcher has been coming to the archives for years. It's basically her second home. On a typical day, she's at the archives right up until closing time. She's maybe five feet tall. She's got big glasses. She's usually got a brown bag lunch with her. And also her own personal copy machine that she lugs to and from the archives every day. But she's not a professor or an author who's there doing research for a book. She's not a 20-something student either. Quite the opposite, in fact. She's a retiree. She's a retired housewife living in suburban Washington, D.C. And she started coming to the archives basically as a hobby.

3:33It started just out of her own interest to do research in the National Archives. This hobbyist researcher, this retiree, her name is Aiko. Aiko Herzig Yoshinaga. One of the great blessings in my life was meeting and getting to know Aiko. Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga hasn't had any formal research training at all. But in her own way, with her own methods, she's developed an almost uniquely encyclopedic understanding of what's in the parts of the archives where she has been spending all of this time. She knew the archives like the back of her hand. She would go there every single day, look at all of the government documents.

4:18Her husband would join her. When Iko's husband, Jack, gets off work in Washington, he often heads straight to the National Archives himself. He finds Iko in there. He rolls up his sleeves to get to work alongside her. It's a passion that they share, to the point that it's ended up kind of taking over their lives a little bit. Or at least, it has taken over parts of their house. Her files that she'd accumulated over the years took up the whole inside of their condo, even in the bathroom. There were boxes. Iko was the most dogged researcher that I have ever met. And I've been praised as a dogged researcher.

5:00And she was way, way ahead of me. Part of what makes Iko so effective in her work in the archives is that she's developed her own very specific, very detailed filing system. She uses that portable copy machine to make her own copies of some important documents. But she also creates her own sorting system, her own index, basically, of where every document is and how each of those documents connects to every other document. She took such meticulous notes. Every piece of paper that she saw was given a number so that she could keep track of them. And this was way before computers. This was all hand done.

5:47I mean, she is like your dream researcher. God, you talk about somebody who can find anything. And what was it she found? She found a document. One afternoon in that summer of 1982, Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga is at her usual perch inside the National Archives. and she does spot this one document sitting on the corner of a desk. It's a document that is not supposed to exist. And because it's not supposed to exist, Aiko has not been looking for this thing. Nobody's been looking for it. But when she sees it, Aiko, of all people, she knows exactly what it is. She was talking to someone and then noticed this document on the desk of somebody else.

6:36and kind of looked at it and just kind of thought, wow. And she opens it up, and she finds these handwritten notes in the margins, and she realizes, oh boy. She talked about it with her eyes getting really large and just saying, wow, this is, do you know what this is? When Aiko picked it up and started leafing through, she immediately, I mean, her expression, oh my goodness, look what I found. The document that Ico found that day, it's a government report, but it's also a ghost. There's a good reason she never would have looked for it. It's because there's no file, no record anywhere, no index card, no catalog that would have ever pointed her to it.

7:25The only record anyone has found, the only record ICO has ever found about this document, explicitly says that every single copy of this document has been destroyed. Every single copy of this government report was officially certified to have been incinerated, destroyed on purpose by fire. But here it is. Not even singed, not even smoky. Sitting right in front of her. As soon as I opened it, wow, I said, wow, this is it. You know, and it was luck. It was luck. If I hadn't walked in that day, it might not have been there. It wasn't really luck. Aiko was there that day because she was there basically every day.

8:21And because of that, because of her dogged persistence, she's made this find. She has spotted this document that the U.S. government never wanted anyone to see. This document, they insisted, must be destroyed because of what it had the potential to reveal about one of the most disturbing chapters in American history. We all instantly understood that if this gets out, the government is going to look really, really bad. This was something that nobody could have foreseen in their entire life. I still get a little choked up about that because it changed my life. Ultimately, it would change a lot of lives.

9:11This retiree, this self-described little old housewife, she was about to change the course of American history. I'm your host, Rachel Maddow, and this is Rachel Maddow Presents Burn Order.

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