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Epilogue: The Burns Years
- University of Hawai'i Press
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E·P·I·L·O·G·U·E The Burns Years WHEN IS AN HISTORIAN justified in attaching the name of a single individual to a significant period of years, as we have attached the name of John A. Burns to the years from 1945 to 1975? In the case of Jack Burns, it wasn’t because he was a brilliant and charismatic politician. After all, he lost four of his first six elections. He was capable of terrible political miscalculations: as in 1959, when he failed to come back to Hawaii from Washington, D.C., to fight for an office he thought should be his by merely claiming it; and again in 1966, when he thought he should be able to choose his own lieutenant governor without consulting other Party leaders. But Burns paid attention and he learned from his mistakes . In 1962, he avoided the aloofness that had cost him so dearly in 1959 and won a stunning victory; and in 1970, he avoided the divisiveness that had almost resulted in his defeat in 1966 to win the most impressive victory of his political career. But the central feature of Burns’ success over the years, and the historical reason why those years can properly bear his name, was the coalition he worked so hard to build and sustain during that period he occupied center stage in Hawaii’s changing political scene. That Burns did not occupy center stage in a conspicuous manner does not mean that he was not there. His dogged fight for what he saw as social justice in Hawaii was often lonely and frequently painful. But he hung in there, true to his belief in equal opportunity for all of those who had been locked out for the first half of the twentieth century. As novelist James Michener put it, “Jack kept it together in those bad years; only he.” The working press who covered Burns over the years acknowledged his role as a crusader for social justice. Doug Boswell, who went to Iolani Palace in 1964 to cover state government for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin 303 and stayed for the next twenty years, placed Burns at the head of Hawaii’s gubernatorial pack. “His achievement was not in terms of legislation , but in the spirit of things he achieved,” Boswell contends. “He strove to change the ethnic balance of the State, and he succeeded. He wanted to involve everyone in the State, to make them all coequal; and to a significant degree he did. He wanted to see Americans of Japanese ancestry in responsible positions in both the public and private sectors, and they are. And he encouraged Merchant Street to bring all people into the ongoing picture of Hawaii. Burns did a great deal to establish the climate we enjoy in contemporary Hawaii.” As a cub reporter for KGMB-TV news, Bambi Weil covered politics from 1970 through the end of Burns’ administration. Ultimately, Weil left journalism for law school,and eventually a state judgeship.Predictably , Weil found Burns’ greatest accomplishments in the legal area: allowing the abortion bill to become law and the Burn’s-appointed supreme court led by Chief Justice William Richardson. “It was an activist court in the best tradition of the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren.” But the press differed markedly in their overall assessments of Burns’ contribution. Byron Baker covered state government for both print and electronic media from 1966 to 1973. Baker grudgingly acknowledged Burns’ importance “as a symbol of changes that occurred, but as an individual governor measured against other governors, he was not so outstanding.” Baker faulted Burns for “his terrible habit of procrastinating ” and for his championing a University of Hawaii medical school—“another expensive toy”—among other things. Former Associated Press and Star-Bulletin reporter Buck Donham was equally harsh, criticizing Burns for his belief in “growth for growth’s sake,” for his “overdependence on tourism” as Hawaii’s economic base, and for allowing his “administration to be shut to outsiders.” Tom Coffman’s views probably represented best those of the younger generation of reporters who covered Burns. Coffman credited Burns with “two clear ideas: racial equality and educational and economic opportunity. Burns could get into people’s guts on those great issues . After that, he wasn’t so crystal clear.” Indeed, in Coffman’s estimation little of relevance happened during Burns’ administration:“His first term was the one that mattered; thereafter it was downhill. The governor had...