Mineta served as the United States Secretary of Commerce during the final months of Bill Clinton's presidency.

Upon graduation, Mineta joined the United States Army and served as a military intelligence officer in Japan and Korea.

[5] In 1967, Mineta was appointed to a vacant San Jose City Council seat by mayor Ron James.

[11] As mayor, Mineta ended the city's 20-year-old policy of rapid growth by annexation, creating development-free areas in East and South San Jose.

Mineta won the Democratic nomination and defeated State Assemblyman George W. Milias with 52 percent of the vote.

[17] During his career in Congress, Mineta was a key author of the landmark Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991.

[25] Mineta was appointed United States Secretary of Transportation by President George W. Bush in 2001, a post that he was offered eight years earlier by Bill Clinton.

He became the first Asian American to hold the position, and only the fourth person to be a member of the cabinet under two presidents from different political parties (after Edwin Stanton, Henry L. Stimson and James R.

Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant.Commissioner Lee Hamilton queried if the order was to shoot down the plane, to which Mineta replied that he did not know that specifically.

[30] Mineta's testimony to the commission on Flight 77 differs somewhat significantly from the account provided in the January 22, 2002, edition of The Washington Post, as reported by Bob Woodward and Dan Balz in their series "10 Days in September".

The Vice President in Washington: Underground, in Touch With Bush Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, summoned by the White House to the bunker, was on an open line to the Federal Aviation Administration operations center, monitoring Flight 77 as it hurtled toward Washington, with radar tracks coming every seven seconds.

Belger, the FAA's acting deputy administrator, amended Mineta's directive to take into account the authority vested in airline pilots.

On September 21, 2001, Mineta sent a letter to all US airlines forbidding them from practicing racial profiling or subjecting Middle Eastern or Muslim passengers to a heightened degree of pre-flight scrutiny.

He stated that it was illegal for the airlines to discriminate against passengers based on race, color, national or ethnic origin, or religion.

Subsequently, administrative enforcement actions were brought against three airlines based on alleged infringements of these rules, resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements.

[33][34] White House Press Secretary Tony Snow announced on June 23, 2006, that Mineta would resign effective July 7, 2006, because "he wanted to."

[41] On February 4, 2008, the day before the closely contested California Democratic primary, Mineta endorsed Barack Obama.

[42] Beginning in the summer of 2008, Mineta began service as chairman of a panel of the National Academy of Public Administration overseeing a study of modernization efforts at the United States Coast Guard.

Other notable members of the panel include former Office of Personnel Management director Janice Lachance and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe.

It was established by Congress in 1991 as a research institute focusing on issues related to intermodal surface transport in the United States.

In 2001, the San Jose International Airport adopted his name to honor him while he was serving as the United States Secretary of Transportation.