Entry Into Politics

A Dream Deferred

In the early 1940s, when Dan was still a high school student, he instructed first aid courses for the Red Cross.  Helping injured people get well was as good for his soul as it was for their bodies, he discovered, and a career path presented itself:  He would become a surgeon.  After graduation from high school, 18-year-old Dan enrolled in a premed program at the University of Hawaii.

But the loss of his right arm as a result of combat injuries sustained during WWII destroyed his plans.  There were no one-armed surgeons, Dan noticed upon his return to Hawaii after the War.

While he could have easily become a radiologist or an internist, it was a surgeon’s career Dan had dreamt of.  Surgery appealed because it came with enormous responsibility and accountability, because the stakes were literally life and death, because the profession required solving extremely complex problems, usually in groups, and always under intense pressure. 

Little did Dan know at the time that a career in politics – diagnosing, treating, and curing public problems instead of medical ones – would become his destiny.

Still, as a young man just back from the War, Dan didn’t actively chase a job in politics; politics, as it turned out, was chasing him. 

He just didn’t know it yet.

A Seat at the Table

Immediately after the outbreak of WWII, it stung when Dan and thousands of other Japanese-Americans’ loyalty was questioned. 

The Nisei could have protested stridently; instead Hawaii’s Japanese-Americans decided their actions should speak louder than words, so they lobbied relentlessly to be enlisted in the Army.  Eventually, the Nisei persuaded a skeptical military establishment to allow them to serve. 

So when Dan and his highly-decorated brothers in the legendary 442nd Regimental Combat Team returned home from service in WWII, Dan reasonably assumed he and other Asian-Americans’ had demonstrated their loyalty and fully earned a seat at the grand American table.

Sadly, Dan was wrong.

On his way back to Honolulu, at a stop-over in San Francisco, Dan figured he’d better get a haircut.  If his mother was about to see him with only one arm, he reckoned he’d better look as good as possible when he arrived on her doorstep.

But when he popped into a barber’s shop in one of the outlying towns near San Francisco, Dan Inouye – U.S. Army officer, war hero, and now disabled American veteran – was refused a haircut.  “You’re a Jap and we don’t cut Jap hair,” the barber hissed.

Back home in the States, it also stung when Dan considered that the African-Americans whose blood kept him alive after he was injured – men who went to Europe to fight fascism – returned after the war to American cities and towns where they were not permitted to drink from the same water fountains as their Caucasian neighbors.

And, once he returned to Hawaii, Dan couldn’t help but notice the same old privileged families and their cronies were still firmly in charge.  Or that despite its citizens’ extraordinary sacrifice during WWII, the Hawaiian “territory” still didn’t enjoy the same benefits asAmerica’s 48 other states. 

Not everyone in America and Hawaii seemed to enjoy equal access to the American Dream.

So in 1947, when Dan opened up the newspaper and read that Democratic candidate John Burns, a one-time patrolman at the Honolulu Police Department, was daring to challenge Joseph Rider Farrington, the incumbent Republican delegate to the U.S. Congress from the Territory of Hawaii, he felt duty-bound to do anything he could to help Burns win.

Dan – and thousands of other Nisei in Hawaii – knew the name John Burns and were indebted to him.  Burns was a man of courage and honor who in the immediate aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor stood up for the Nisei at a time when it was unfashionable to do so.  Burns assured the citizens of Hawaii that, as a law enforcement officer, he had absolute confidence in Japanese-Americans’ unyielding loyalty to America. 

Dan picked up the phone, called John Burns, and volunteered on his campaign.  Burns immediately put the young war veteran to work, involving Dan in fundraising and sending him around the islands to deliver speeches on the candidate’s behalf.

Certainty

Dan – who even as a boy displayed fierce determination and an unwavering point of view – had since returning from the war become a man who, by 1947, was certain about a lot of things.

Dan was certain that John Burns deserved support. 

Dan was certain that Hawaii needed reforming – and the Democratic party would be the instrument of reform in Hawaii.  Republicans had long stood for the acquisition and protection of property, whereas the Democrats were concerned more about people. 

Dan was even certain about whom to marry.  When on a parking lot after a football game he met Margaret Awamura – a lovely, Columbia-educated speech instructor at the University of Hawaii, he decided then and there to marry her.  On their second date, after attending a Thanksgiving dinner-dance held at Fort Shafter, he proposed.  Margaret accepted.  And the couple remained together 57 years, until her death in 2006.

Unfortunately, the voters were not as certain about John Burns as was Dan. And when the election for Territorial Delegate to the U.S. Congress was finally held in 1948, John Burns lost to Joseph Rider Farrington. 

Becoming the Other Side

But defeat was not a deterrent to the Democrats.  Just the opposite, in fact:  the party was organized, energized and ready to assert itself in Hawaii and on the national stage. 

Before 1948, Hawaii was a staunchly Republican stronghold ruled by a handful of elite families.  But as a result of the Burns candidacy, a legitimate opposition movement was born.  Within a decade Burns would quickly become the father of the modern Democratic party in Hawaii, a principal architect of Hawaii’s statehood in 1959, and Hawaii’s second governor, serving with distinction from 1962 to 1974.  And Dan Inouye, his political protégé, would eventually ascend the ladder from campaign volunteer to become the third most senior member of the United States Senate.

But there were stops along the way.

After his failed Congressional bid, John Burns quickly emerged as chairman of the Democratic Oahu County Committee.  Dan was named secretary and entered politics the best way anyone can:  at the municipal level. 

Dan also decided to attend law school.  Thanks to the G.I. Bill, Dan had after the War enrolled at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Political Science.  In 1950, he and Margaret moved to Washington, DC, where for the next two years the future senator studied law at George Washington University.

While attending law school at GWU, Dan was invited to join the prestigious legal fraternity, Phi Delta Phi.  He got in; but two of his fellow students, both Jewish and equally worthy of admission, were blackballed. 

Dan found himself advocating on the students’ behalf, challenging fraternity members to reconsider their exclusionary practices.  In what was becoming something of a pattern, Dan opened the eyes of people for whom it had been too easy for too long to choose not to see the racial or economic injustice around them.  He was never strident or scolding when he tried to undo bigotry.  Instead, his style – then as now – was patient and soft-spoken, albeit resolutely firm. 

In the early 1950s, the first Jewish students were admitted to Phi Delta Phi because of Dan’s intervention.  In the decades ahead, Dan and other Democrats would also open America’s eyes to the plight of African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians, Hawaii’s and America’s indigenous peoples.

Ascent

In 1953, after Dan graduated from GWU, he and Maggie returned to Hawaii to settle.  The day after Dan passed the territorial bar exam, Johnny Wilson, the mayor of Honolulu, named Dan Inouye assistant prosecutor for the city.

A year later, at John Burns’s urging, Dan ran for a seat in the Territorial Legislature, representing Honolulu’s 4th District.  It was a long shot race:  Only two Dems in history had won. 

Until Dan became the third in 1954. 

Just shy of 30, the junior legislator was named majority leader. 

And then Dan starting going places – fast.

In 1958 he was elected to the Territorial Senate. 

In 1959, when Hawaii became America’s 50th state, residents voted him their first U.S. Congressman from the new state.

In 1960, the citizens of Hawaii sent him back to Washington again. 

In 1962, he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

One American Family’s Journey

On January 9, 1963, the day of Dan Inouye’s swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol, the senator-elect was accompanied by his wife, Maggie, as well as his two younger brothers and his father, Hyotaro Inouye.

The senior Inouye watched as his son – not yet 40 – was greeted by legendary politicians such as Sam Rayburn, the Democratic Texas legislator and longest serving Speaker of the House in U.S. history.  “Mr. Sam,” as he was widely known, had been an early and generous mentor to Dan.

As they toured the Capitol, the Inouyes were greeted by another mentor to Dan, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who would become the longest-serving majority leader in history.  The Montana Democrat – who like Dan was himself the son of immigrants, his parents having emigrated from Ireland – invited the Inouyes to lunch in his private dining room.

During lunch a waiter informed Senator Inouye that he was wanted on the phone.

Then as now, it was not viewed as particularly good manners – or a smart career move – for junior senators to excuse themselves to accept phone calls during power lunches with the Majority Leader of the United States Senate.

But Dan had no choice:  It was the President of the United States.

“I called to offer my congratulations, Senator,” said President John F. Kennedy.

Stunned, Dan thanked the President.

“I understand your father is in town.  I’d like to meet him,” President Kennedy added.

When the next morning at nine a.m. the awestruck Hyotaro Inouye shook hands with the President of the United States, Dan couldn’t help but marvel at his family’s fantastic and slightly surreal journey:  from his father’s birth in a small village in Japan … to his own in a crowded Japanese ghetto in Honolulu … to the war years, when the Nisei were interned in concentration camps by their own government … and now to the White House, where the father of the first Japanese -American member of the United States Senate was shaking hands with the President of the United States.

For Hyotaro Inouye, it was a journey made complete.

And for Dan Inouye, it was a journey just beginning.