Norman Mineta

Norman Mineta (born November 12, 1931, San Jose, California, U.S.—died May 3, 2022, Edgewater, Maryland) had a long career in government, serving as a mayor of San Jose, California, and then as a U.S. congressman for nearly 21 years. In 2000 he became the first Asian American in a presidential cabinet. He served under two presidents from two different political parties, first as U.S. secretary of commerce under Democratic Pres. Bill Clinton and then as secretary of transportation under Republican Pres. George W. Bush. In the latter post, he helped create the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). That agency enacts policies designed to keep the country’s airlines and other transportation systems safe, especially from terrorism.

Mineta’s parents were immigrants from Japan. After Japan attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States entered World War II. The U.S. government began to regard all Japanese Americans as potential traitors against the war effort, a view that was fueled by racist beliefs. A government agency rounded up large numbers of Japanese American families on the West Coast and sent them to internment camps—detention centers where they were confined during the war. In 1942, when Mineta was 10 years old, the government seized his family’s bank accounts and forced him and his family to leave their home. The Minetas were sent to the Heart Mountain internment camp in a remote area of Wyoming. They returned to San Jose in 1946.

School was a struggle for Mineta, but he learned to work with his learning challenges. In 1948 Mineta was elected president of the student body at San Jose High School. He continued his education at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a business degree in 1952. Mineta then served in the U.S. Army as an intelligence officer in the Korean War. He returned to the United States in 1956.

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Mineta worked with his father in the family insurance business and entered local politics. In 1967 he became the first nonwhite member of the San Jose City Council. Four years later Mineta became mayor of San Jose. He was the first Asian American to be elected mayor of a major U.S. city.

In 1975 Mineta was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. He was the first Japanese American member of Congress from the continental United States. (Earlier members had come from Hawaii.) Over the following years, he was reelected 10 times before retiring from Congress in 1995. He served on several congressional committees, including those on intelligence and technology, and chaired the Public Works and Transportation Committee from 1993.

Mineta was one of the key representatives behind the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA), which created a framework for how highways and transportation in the United States would be funded after the completion of the Interstate Highway System. Under ISTEA, transportation would be planned using a multimodal approach in which highways, airports, railways, and waterways would work together. Mineta also cosponsored the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 and was instrumental in getting it passed. The law stated that Japanese American citizens who had been forced into internment camps during World War II were the victims of a great injustice. The law also established a fund that paid some $1.6 billion in reparations to formerly interned Japanese Americans or their heirs. In 1994 Mineta cofounded the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies. The institute helps Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders to become involved in politics and government.

After leaving Congress, Mineta joined Lockheed Martin as head of the intelligent transportation systems division. In 1997 he was chair of the National Civil Aviation Review Commission, which was charged with assessing both the Federal Aviation Administration’s budget and aviation safety.

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In 2000 U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton appointed Mineta as secretary of commerce. The next year Mineta became the first Asian American to serve in two presidents’ cabinets when George W. Bush chose Mineta to be the secretary of transportation. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mineta helped form the TSA, which was charged with security at American airports. It was the largest new U.S. federal agency created since World War II. Mineta retired from politics in 2006, at which point he had become the longest-serving transportation secretary in U.S. history. He received the Medal of Freedom in 2006.