John A. Burns

Prologue: Death of a Leader

P·R·O·L·O·G·U·E Death of a Leader AT 4:05 P.M. ON Saturday afternoon, 5 April 1975, John Anthony Burns died peacefully at his home on a modest side street in the Coconut Grove district of Kailua,on the windward side of the Island of Oahu.The end came just five days after his 66th birthday, scarcely three months after he had left office as the State of Hawaii’s second governor.Death came as no surprise to Burns’ family and close friends. It followed an eighteenmonth battle with colon cancer, a battle that had left him largely incapacitated during the final fifteen months of his third administration. Death came too late in the day for the afternoon Honolulu StarBulletin to get the story in their Saturday edition. Fittingly, it was the jointly produced Sunday Star-Bulletin & Advertiser that informed the majority of the people of Hawaii of Burns’ death.They were clearly prepared . Since 11 April 1974, when Governor Burns delivered his aloha address to a joint session of the state legislature, a major effort to evaluate the impact of John A. Burns upon the history of the Territory and State of Hawaii had been under way. This effort ranged from the creation of the John A. Burns Oral History Project at the University of Hawaii, a project that is at the core of this work, to the individual efforts of reporters who knew that they would soon be writing their tributes to a man who looms as the most significant political figure in Hawaii during the last half of the twentieth century. The outpouring of praise and adulation over the next four days was unlike anything Hawaii had seen since the deaths of Kalakaua and Kuhio. Who was this man who left so indelible an imprint upon the State he loved so much? All who knew him would agree that he was an unlikely candidate to have filled such a role. Burns was born into a military 1 family at Fort Assiniboine, Montana, in 1909. The family followed Sergeant Major Harry Burns to Hawaii in 1913, only to be deserted by him shortly after he was discharged from the U.S. Army for stealing company funds. From 1918, Burns and his three siblings were raised by a remarkable woman by the name of Anne Florida Burns—Flo, to all who knew her well. It was Flo Burns who, against heavy odds, gave her firstborn the religious foundation of his remarkable life. But the strength he was to show later was not evident in young Jack Burns. An indifferent student who frequently found himself at odds with authority at St. Louis High School, Burns was sent to Kansas to live with his uncle for two years. After dropping out of school and serving in the U.S. Army for a year, Burns returned to Hawaii, where he graduated from St. Louis at the advanced age of 21. Burns drifted into the University of Hawaii, but within a year he was married to an Army nurse and had dropped out of school. The Great Depression had begun and Burns bounced from job to job—and from Hawaii to California and back. He and his wife Bea began to build their family on a very tenuous foundation. It wasn’t until 1934, when Burns was 25 years old, that he got his first job with career potential—as an officer in the Honolulu Police Department . Then, just as things seemed to be going well for the young Burns family, tragedy struck. On 7 October 1935, Bea Burns, seven months pregnant, was struck down by polio. Bea lost her third child and lay in her bed of pain, a helpless invalid. Both Bea and Jack Burns’ lives stood at the abyss. Out of this experience, Bea would emerge as the second powerful woman in the life of John A. Burns. The precariousness of John Burns’ existence was made evident when, on 14 December 1935, the day after Bea Burns came home from the hospital, the young, off-duty police officer was involved in an automobile accident in which it was reported that he had been drinking. At this crucial point in his life, when John Burns could have gone either way, his mother stepped forward. Flo Burns gave her son a large dose of what today would be called “tough love.” It changed his life. The rest, as they say, is history. Burns began to fashion...