Daniel Inouye’s Conscience

This is a story about Daniel Inouye, who died yesterday at the age of eighty-eight after serving nine terms in the Senate. But it’s also about being a reporter.

In late December of 1974, I had written a long article for the Times about the C.I.A.’s illegal spying on American citizens—an article that led to an uproar and, indirectly, to a series of hearings the next year led by the late Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, into intelligence abuses. Long after those hearings, and for no specific reason I know of, Inouye, who was then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, invited me to his Senate hideaway—all ranking members have private, unmarked offices in the Senate—for a drink. I can’t pretend to remember precisely what was said, though of course we talked about the C.I.A. and the disdain of many of its operatives for even the notion of serious congressional oversight. What I vividly recall, however, was that this, so I thought, very careful and cautious senator began our chat by talking about stories I had written a few years earlier, about the American massacre in March, 1968, of more than five hundred Vietnamese women, old men, children, and babies at My Lai, a village in a hotly contested area of South Vietnam. I remember the depth of his emotion—how angry it made him. The initial charge sheet against First Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr.—whose case the Pentagon was trying to keep quiet, along with the story of the slaughter—accused him of the murder of a hundred and nine “Oriental human beings.” My memory is that Inouye had been troubled by that phrase, as I was. It was as if a hundred “Oriental” humans somehow added up to less than the equivalent number of another race. (The word “Oriental” was removed from subsequent charge sheets.) We talked about racism and the casual way that the American G.I.s had carried out the massacre, and how I had learned about and reported it. Inouye, an American of Japanese descent, had volunteered in 1943, as a teen-ager, to fight in the U.S. Army in an all-Japanese-American military unit. He suffered grievous wounds in combat—continuing to press on and take an enemy position on a ridge in Italy even after he’d been shot more than once and his arm had been severed—and eventually received the Medal of Honor, the highest medal for valor. He’d been shocked, and very hurt, he told me, as he told others, to face anti-Japanese racism and hatred of ‘Nips” after the war.

All of this, he made clear to me, made his subsequent political success in Hawaii and election to the House, and then the Senate, all the more dear and important to him. This freedom—this American openness—was why he loved his country so much and why he was so proud to serve in the Senate.

Powerful sentiments from a man of power, but over the next decades Inouye seemed more and more to mask his passion. In its obituary this morning, the Times praised Inouye for serving as a voice of conscience in the Watergate and Iran-Contra hearings. As chairman of the Intelligence Committee in the aftermath of the domestic-spying and C.I.A.-assassination scandals, he helped bring about legislation that was meant to tighten congressional control over America’s intelligence agencies. He learned a lot in those years, and I believe it was, in part, that knowledge that led him to famously lament during the Iran-Contra hearings about “a shadowy government with its own Air Force and its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own idea of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” But ultimately the Senate did not draw the only conclusion possible: that President Reagan and his senior advisers were in the game of illegally trading arms with Iran in return for hostages and off-the-books cash to pursue an anti-Communist venture in Nicaragua. In the end, there was just another political compromise. Inouye ended his career as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee; he also served for many years as chairman of its subcommittee on defense, which oversaw the billions spent daily by the Pentagon.

In 2004, a couple of decades after our first meeting, I stumbled into the Abu Ghraib abuses in Iraq and, most importantly, a brilliant and scathing—and classified—report on the incident written by a two-star Army general named Antonio Taguba, a native of Hawaii whose father had survived the Bataan Death March in the early days of the Second World War while a member of the Philippine Scouts, and later became a drill instructor for the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division at the Schofield Barracks, in Honolulu. Taguba’s honest report meant that his career was effectively at an end—this was in the days of Rumsfeld at Defense and Cheney in the White House.

I got in touch with Inouye’s office and another one-on-one meeting was arranged. Once again, I was confronted with an emotional and empathic man of influence and information—someone who had been moved, as in the My Lai incident, by the mistreatment by Americans of people of different color and ethnicity, and also, now, by Taguba’s courage. (I later learned that Inouye called Taguba, and asked if he needed his support.) Inouye was careful with me, as he needed to be: he was one of the “gang of eight,” those senior members of the House and Senate who are required, by law, to be briefed, in advance, on every Presidential finding involving covert American intelligence operations. He said that he and the late Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, his Republican counterpart on the defense-appropriations subcommittee, had visited the American prison at Guantánamo, which was then being flooded with alleged “terrorists” from Afghanistan and elsewhere. He and Stevens understood, Inouye confided, with much disdain, that they were being shown a “Potemkin village” by the military. Terrible things were taking place there, but—he left me to understand—he believed America was in a crisis and he would hold his peace. It was also understood that we were speaking privately.

The point of all this is that sometimes reporters like me know things, or think we know things, and need someone in the know to hear them out, and perhaps provide some guidance or a sense of where to go next—and, above all, why it matters.

Photograph of Inouye in 1959, by AP.