Matsui papers to go to Bancroft Library
Sacramento Bee 1/2/07
Matsui said she has worked out arrangements for all of the late congressman's papers -- the years of correspondence and the volumes of notes on his private discussions over public policy -- to be moved from storage at the National Archives to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.
In exchange, the university is establishing the Robert T. Matsui Center on Policy and Public Service at its Institute of Governmental Studies. The institute hopes that someday the Matsui center will fund student internships and offer special lectures promoting the congressman's interest in government service.
Robert Matsui died two years ago on Jan. 1, 2005, from complications stemming from a rare blood disease diagnosed just months earlier. He was 63.
The timing of the announcement on where the 450 boxes of his papers would go marks more than the anniversary of his death. For Doris Matsui, it also marks the end of her mourning.
Elected in March 2005 to fill her husband's unexpired term, Matsui in November won her first full term in a campaign stressing her own accomplishments. She will be sworn in Thursday as the new congressional session opens.
In an interview last week, Matsui said she has come to terms with her husband's death and is forging ahead with confidence and conviction, ready to make her own mark on the Congress that her husband had loved so much.
In a kind of symbolic emphasis of that point, the congresswoman's office recently moved from the suite her late husband held for years in the more modern Rayburn House Office Building to the older but stately Cannon House Office Building.
"Sometimes during the last year it took a turn," Matsui, 62, said of her grieving.
"It's a real transition that has occurred," she said softly.
"And it's good. It's good."
A decision on where the late congressman's papers should go was difficult, she said. UC Berkeley and California State University, Sacramento, wanted them. She said she selected Berkeley in part because she and her husband had such an emotional connection to the campus.
"Bob and I met there," she said of the Berkeley campus, where she earned a degree in psychology.
"In a sense, that's where it all began for us," she said. "It was a catalyst, the start of our careers. Berkeley represented the start of Bob's ideals of lifelong public service. That's where our papers should go."
But she said it was hard to disappoint CSUS, saying she will continue to vigorously lobby for its interests in Congress.
The Sacramento university was closed last week and no one could be reached for comment.
Robert Matsui's papers are of keen interest to Berkeley officials.
"We are very pleased and honored to have them," said John Cummins, the university's associate chancellor and chief of staff.
"During his long term in Congress, he frequently visited the campus and the Institute of Governmental Studies to meet with students," Cummins said. "He was a role model for public service."
Among the congressman's papers are his public and private records of battles over Sacramento flood control, and his notes and correspondence from years of work on the House Ways and Means Committee on Social Security, his primary area of expertise on Capitol Hill.
But probably the most significant part of the collection is his notes on legislation providing restitution to Japanese Americans who were rounded up from their homes after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and forcibly held in internment camps.
Robert Matsui was 5 months old when his family was sent to such a camp. Doris Matsui was born in one.
In the legislation he wrote and that was passed in 1988, the United States issued a formal apology to the survivors and provided them restitution for violating their civil rights.
Bruce Cain, head of the Institute of Governmental Studies, said the congressman's papers on the internment legislation are likely to be of the greatest historical interest.
"We believe that this is going to be a valuable addition to our collection," Cain said. "It may also be a chance for the university to build a research agenda around Japanese Americans. This is still in the formative stage."
The full extent of the Matsui center has yet to be defined. In part, Cain said, it will depend on the success of fundraising efforts.
Cain said fundraising will begin almost immediately and will focus initially on hiring archivists to sort through and catalog the papers.
The Bancroft Library is one of the country's premier libraries for archival research. In addition to its collections on North America and California history, it houses manuscripts of American writers Bret Harte, Jack London, prominent Beat Generation writers and others.
Among its research programs is The Mark Twain Papers and Project with more than 500,000 pages of personal notebooks, letters and manuscripts penned by the writer, whose real name was Samuel Clemens.