John A. Burns

Preface

PREFACE THE ORIGINS OF THIS biography predate the death of John A. Burns in April 1975. As it became clear that Governor Burns’ illness was terminal , James S. Burns, the governor’s younger son and now chief judge of the state intermediate court of appeals, and Stuart Ho, son and heir to entrepreneur Chinn Ho, decided to approach the University of Hawaii about capturing the record of the governor in an ambitious oral history project. During the final weeks of his life,Burns spent many hours with University of Hawaii Professor Stuart Gerry Brown and two assistants, Dan Boylan and Paul Hooper. The result was a 230-page transcript. Burns’ language was not elegant; indeed he would frequently lapse into pidgin, the language he had learned as a child on the streets of Kalihi. But his insights into Hawaii’s mid-century society and politics were profound. The interviews with Governor Burns were never completed; death took him too soon for that.But there followed a procession of other contributors to the John A. Burns Oral History Project—almost one hundred of them. Most loved and respected Burns. Most recognized him as the most significant figure in Hawaii’s political life for the thirty years following the end of World War II. They would have agreed that these were “The Burns Years.” Brown, Boylan, and Hooper shared in the early interviews, sometimes working together. As time went on, Boylan became the principal interviewer for the project. In the late 1970s his interest in Burns had grown sufficiently that, with Bea Burns’ permission, he began work on a biography of her husband. By the mid-1980s, however, Boylan’s manuscript on the life of John A. Burns was gathering dust in an office drawer.Teaching responsibilities, parenthood, and freelance writing had undermined his resolve. It was at this point that I met Dan Boylan. My doctoral dissertation ix at the University of Hawaii, completed under the supervision of Professor Walter Johnson, was entitled “The Specter of Communism in Hawaii.” It dealt with the McCarthy era in Hawaii; the anticommunist crusade of businessmen and their representatives against growing union power; and the Smith Act trial of leaders of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union and their supporters. My feelings about Burns, as I studied Hawaii’s history from 1947 to 1953, were that he had shown great courage in not being intimidated by those who sought to portray the Democratic Party as being under the influence of the “Communists” who ran the ILWU. But I also saw him as a peripheral figure in the events chronicled in The Specter. While Burns was willing to go to bat for ILWU Regional Director Jack Hall as a loyal American, he did not want to open the door for the union to control the Democratic Party. I left Hawaii in 1976 for a career that would take me out of academe and into the financial services industry. In 1991, determined to return to the academic world, I decided the best way back was through the University of Hawaii Press and the publication of The Specter of Communism in Hawaii. With the encouragement of Iris Wiley, an outstanding editor who has since retired from the U.H. Press, I quit my job in California and returned to Hawaii to update The Specter. Dan Boylan helped guide me through the John A. Burns Oral History Project in search of material relevant to the postwar red scare. The Specter of Communism in Hawaii was completed in 1992 and published by the University of Hawaii Press in 1994. I then asked Boylan if he would like a collaborator on his dormant Burns biography. He immediately assented, and with financial help from the John A. Burns Foundation I devoted the next year to work on the manuscript. We hoped to complete the book by 1995, the twentieth anniversary of the former governor’s death. But Boylan became bogged down in the manuscript once again, and I had taken a teaching job at Iolani School, a one-year replacement position that turned into a four-year tenure. So much for our 1995 deadline. What it finally took to get the Burns biography finished was marriage and my moving away from Hawaii. In 1997 I met a wonderful lady from San Diego. As we began to talk about marriage, it became clear that my work as a writer and teacher was more portable than her consulting business with nonprofit organizations in...