Robert T. Matsui, 63, the low-key but influential California Democrat who had represented Sacramento in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1979 and was a major force on trade and Social Security issues, died Jan. 1 at National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda.
He had pneumonia, a complication of a rare stem cell disorder with which he was diagnosed in recent months.
At his death, Rep. Matsui was the third-ranking Democrat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and among the highest-ranking Asian Americans in House history.
As an infant, he was interned in a detention camp for Japanese Americans during World War II. He later pushed through a bill hoping to redress the psychological damage of internees.
In the early 1990s, he was President Bill Clinton's key ally in getting the North American Free Trade Agreement approved by the House despite opposition from labor groups that traditionally supported Democrats. In 2000, he took a leading role in formulating permanent normalized trading relations with China, again at Clinton's behest.
"I've always believed that technology and trade were the two engines that really drive economic growth," he said during the China debate. "If we want to continue to be the number one nation in the world when it comes to job creation, when it comes to leading the cutting edge, we have to understand that these things are important."
In recent years, as the senior Democrat on the Ways and Means subcommittee on Social Security, he battled against President Bush's proposal to allow people to direct some of their mandatory Social Security contributions to private retirement accounts.
Robert Takeo Matsui was born Sept. 17, 1941, in Sacramento, the son of Japanese immigrants. The next year, he and his family were taken to an internment camp in Tule Lake, Calif., as part of the federal reaction to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II.
Rep. Matsui said that his mother in particular was riven by nightmares for the rest of her life. Shamed by the experience himself, he said that as a child, he denied it when a schoolteacher asked whether he had been taken to an internment camp.
"The mere fact that I was acknowledging that I was incarcerated would've raised the specter that . . . perhaps I was a spy, that I was an enemy alien," he once said. "That still lives with me."
As a member of Congress, he shepherded legislation in 1988 that formally apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans and provided token financial compensation for the survivors.
Rep. Matsui's early ambition was architecture. He switched to law after reading about the advocate Clarence Darrow and hearing President John F. Kennedy beckon young Americans to public service.
After graduation from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, he practiced law and was elected to the Sacramento City Council in 1971.
He won federal election in 1978, after the retirement of Rep. John E. Moss (D), whose reelection campaign he once chaired.
In the House, Rep. Matsui was largely a predictable supporter of Democratic legislation, with the exception of some trade issues.
Two years ago, Rep. Matsui became the controversial choice of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader and a California colleague, to lead the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
The decision angered some black Democrats who had hoped Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) would have a chance at the prestigious chairmanship of the campaign committee.
Although Rep. Matsui was able to recruit new candidates and increase the committee's base of contributors to more than 500,000 from 270,000 in the wake of campaign finance reform, he was unsuccessful in the effort to regain control of the House.
He did win his own reelection handily in November.
Survivors include his wife, Doris Okada Matsui, a former Clinton White House official whom he married in 1966, of Sacramento and Bethesda; a son, Brian Matsui of Bethesda; and a granddaughter.
