by Rob Simpson
Despite being an acquaintance, Reed wasn’t about to reveal any potential secrets to me and take any chance of blowing his campaign, off the record or not.
At the end of the conversation came a very tense moment. As Reed said farewell to me, he put his hand on the back of my shoulder as he talked. His hand missed the microphone by about an inch. Panic shot through me.
“Okay, well, I’ll talk to you later,” I said while standing up and extending my hand. He took his hand off my shoulder and shook mine.
“Good luck,” I added.
“You, too, see ya later,” he said. “Let me know how it goes with Lenore,” he added as he walked off.
“I’m sure you’ll hear about it,” I responded.
Whew. I had reacted quickly, but the last ten seconds had seemed like ten minutes. The secret meeting had failed. Reed’s involvement in the Walker tape recording would remain purely speculative.
As Reed had mentioned, at this point, the biggest victim in the alleged scandal, was hairdresser Lenore Kwock. It was obvious that she had no idea she was revealing the Inouye information on tape. During the disclosures, the sound was a bit muffled, as Walker kept the microphone hidden, and ambient “elevator” music from the salon could be heard in the background.
“I had no idea that Umeko Walker was recording all of this secretly without my knowledge,” she told the large group of reporters at her salon on Friday. “Her intention was devious. I did not consent to this. I thought I was helping a young lady.”
In 1975, Kwock worked at a hair salon in the Ilikai Hotel in Waikiki. Kwock told the story of how her boss asked her to pick up a jumpsuit from the senator’s apartment.
“He grabbed me right as I came through the door and began making his advances on me. So it was him who removed my clothing and proceeded on, by then in my mind I realized, this is going to happen.”
Kwock said the two of them had sex, but that it wasn’t rape, possibly just coercion or intimidation. She said she decided to continue to cut the senator’s hair after the first incident.
“For me, I forgive him, and I actually bless him and wish him well, which is why I still took him [as a customer]. I realize this man has a problem, and I feel sorry for him.”
Months after the first encounter, Kwock said she became angry after another incident.
“As I was washing his hair, he just reached up my dress, right up to my crotch, and it was shocking to me and humiliating, and degrading and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do, but from that moment on I was so afraid of this man,” she concluded.
She was afraid to confront him and to cut his hair. On the taped interview, Kwock explained her fears of revealing the incidents.
“Dan,” she said, “everyone knows about his reputation. He’ll still be in office, but he’ll come and get you. He has all the connections to do it.”
Gee, just what I wanted to hear.
For fifteen years, Kwock had kept the issue and the alleged incidents a secret, but at some point, she slipped up. She must have told the story to a customer, who eventually leaked the information to Walker, or to whoever sent Walker. Then Walker, under the guise of a crusader for women’s rights, got Kwock to talk and secretly tape recorded it.
Of course, by Friday, Reed was using the tape recordings of Kwock in his thirty- and sixty-second campaign commercials entitled “Rape and Daniel Inouye.”
NARRATOR: “Has Daniel Inouye misused his position as our U.S. senator to exploit women? Here’s what his barber of twenty years says Inouye did to her.”
KWOCK (FROM TAPE): “I just felt a lot of force and intimidation and that kind of feeling, and everything just happened so quickly I didn’t know what to do.”
WALKER (FROM TAPE): “Did he say anything?”
KWOCK (FROM TAPE): “No! I came through the door, I remember . . . I remember just stepping in and remember him grabbing me and it was just so . . . whoa! Everything was so fast.”
Meanwhile, my role in the scandal had reached one of its many points of frustration. Our GM, Dick Grimm, wouldn’t let us run various elements of the story throughout the week, including, at one point, the exclusive Umeko Walker interview. He called me upstairs to his office to debate the validity of the story. Not the validity of the source, or of the tape recordings, or of the legal ramifications, but the validity of Kwock’s description of rape.
I couldn’t believe it. Dozens of issues swirled around this story, and my general manager was trying to decide if Inouye sticking his hand up a woman’s skirt was sexual assault. To be quite honest, I didn’t know. I did know our boss was concerned about the station potentially taking a bath from a major lawsuit or two, alienating the most powerful man in Hawaii politics, and pissing off all of his constituents, and I can only imagine the heat he was taking from politically active TV advertisers. I viewed it as a reporter; he viewed it as a businessman.
Grimm and I argued, and at one point he told me I couldn’t run the story about Walker discussing women’s rights and sexual assault, and I left.
Fortunately by the end of the week, and after Kwock’s Friday press conference, the rest of the local TV stations had cautiously jumped on the bandwagon. It then became a full-blown circus, at least by Hawaii standards.
That’s another of the many nice things about reporting news on the most isolated islands in the world: even a big, obnoxious story never really gets that big and obnoxious. Had this been a mainland man of comparable stature with comparable allegations — holy cow!
The “circus” however, did take the pressure off our GM, and it did allow me the chance to run the entire Walker interview late Friday, our second exclusive scoop of the week.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and its most prominent figure, silent to this point, were taking a beating.
In her interview, Kwock said, “The Democratic Party, the way they talk, it’s, yeah, we are aware of the dark side of him and we know a lot of people have mistresses, and then they try to shove it under the rug because they have to protect his image.”
As one might imagine, at this point I ranked just below Ronald Reagan on the Democrats’ popularity list and was known as the haole jackass “who started this mess with the senator.” My sudden notoriety made it very difficult for me to follow additional leads in the unfolding story. One of our more veteran island reporters, Jerry Drelling, although often assigned to the police beat, was more than anxious to pick up a big portion of the load. It was the story of the decade. He’d follow Inouye around while I chased down others.
We talked to Inouye, Reed, Kwock, their family members, the party chairman from each side, the minor party candidates, and men and women on the street. We were taking call-in polls on who in the scandal was the biggest “scumbag.” I garnered a couple votes.
It was stressful, it was fun, and it was all within the scandal’s first four days.
DUMBASS HAOLE BOY
Part 2
“This is ridiculous. You’re in deep trouble.”
My boss to me, on the news set, October 1992
We broke the harassment allegations on Tuesday. By Friday, Senator Daniel Inouye was speaking out.
“For a long time, we felt that this was just a mainland kind of campaigning,” the senator announced. “But now we find it’s here; resorting to sleazy slime, guilt by innuendo, guilt by association. Well, I’m not going to take this sitting down.”
As horrendous as the scandal was becoming, the mudslinging did provide Inouye an easy escape from a potentially undesirable obligation. He used the sleaze as an excuse to dismiss any hope for a debate. Opponent Rick Reed would not have the opportunity to confront Inouye on his senatorial voting record.
“After this demonstration of slime and sleaze, after all the demonstrations [Reed] had in the night-time flyers, sleazy ad on the Keating Five . . . I can tell you the debate is a moot question,” the senator concluded.
The Keating Five was in reference to an investigation of a savings-and-loan financial scandal involving five U.S. senators in the 1980s. Inouye wasn’t one of the five.
Meanwhile, our interim news director and anchor, Bob Jones, continued his off-island business, and none of the other “hierarchy” within our newsroom knew which stories to run and which angles to kill.
By Friday evening, I had received a number of calls from political correspondent Rita Braver from CBS News, anxious to get updates as often as possible. CBS showed portions of our newscast on its newscast, mentioning that we had broken the story. Braver apologized for the fact that those clips didn’t include shots of me on the set. I didn’t care. Contrary to conventional thinking for a reporter looking for exposure, I was content with as much anonymity as possible at this point. I was more concerned with my well-being in the Islands, as I wasn’t planning on leaving any time soon.
In the end, I think CBS eventually did about a story and a half on Inouye, mostly tied into other scandals around the country during “Election ’92.” There was never a network-level Inouye story unto itself.
I took Saturday off; the story, of course, did not. My colleague Jerry Drelling reported the fact that Reed had pulled his “rape” campaign commercials off the air. That decision came after Lenore Kwock pleaded with him to do so. The two finally agreed that Kwock had suffered enough humiliation on the airwaves as a result of her revelation, and that good taste suggested a change in strategy. Of course, Reed probably already felt pretty confident he had successfully established an anti-Inouye campaign platform.
Meanwhile, the Inouye camp’s attempt to simply sweep the allegations under the rug was a lesson in futility. Even in the senator’s Democratic fiefdom, this scandal was tough to shove aside. His best option was the “family values” strategy, a popular concept during this time period. Mainland politicians who were drunks, or pill poppers, or adulterers would grab the wife and kids and stand in front of a church and say, “I’m good.” It was like a rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card. It came from the “image is everything” cache, also known as the “let’s just see how gullible my constituents are” strategy. More often than not, gullible and ignorant went hand in hand.
Enter Mrs. Inouye.
On Sunday, I was back at work and did something I had never done before as a reporter or as a “civilian.” I attended a fashion show. Mr. and Mrs. Inouye were there as a team. Both spoke about the scandalous allegations to a crowd mostly made up of hundreds of women. The female constituents appeared to dismiss the allegations as nonsense as they applauded and cheered approvingly when the two discussed their decades of marital bliss. Following the speeches, the Inouyes briefly met the media.
“I support Dan, I love Dan, I don’t believe any of this,” Maggie Inouye stated. (After fifty-seven years of marriage, Maggie passed away in 2006. The senator married his second wife, Irene, a prominent California patron of the arts and philanthropic socialite, in 2008.)
Interviewing a historian outside of Iolani Palace on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. overthrowing the Queen. The windows were shrouded in black curtains.
I actually felt bad for Mrs. Inouye, yet another victim in this swirling mess. Whether the allegations were true or not, she was confronted with an ugly situation.
I was conflicted. This was the only time I really felt pangs of guilt for my role in the scoop. At the same time, why should I feel guilty? I was simply the original public messenger, second only to the mysterious Umeko Walker.
To calm my mind, I tried to stress and reiterate what Sophocles once said, as did Shakespeare in Henry IV: don’t kill the messenger.
I forced myself to brush off the emotions. Unfortunately, the senator didn’t make the adjustment that easily. He glared at me as I asked him and his wife a question.
Later that day, I interviewed a political analyst on the impact of the scandal on the election campaign, and then I spoke to a women’s rights attorney about her take on things. All of these angles made up a pretty solid Sunday newscast.
I took a day off from Inouye on Monday. Instead, I did a story about the minor party candidates running for the senate seat. From my perspective as a voter, the Green and Libertarian Party candidates were looking better and better every day. They weren’t professional politicians and they weren’t bought. They made sense, they talked about the issues that really mattered, and they made me temporarily forget about being dragged through the slop by those two other dudes.
Ultimately, this election, like any other, was about power and money, money and power. And of course, it was about one guy winning the right to get paid decent money to be a “public servant” and hang out in D.C. as a VIP.
Whether in Alabama, Florida, or Hawaii — all places I have worked in TV news — I never quite figured out the public-servant deal, especially when it came to U.S. senators. People would treat these guys like royalty, ready to kiss their rings. I’d be thinking, Hey, dipshits, this guy is supposed to be serving you, not giving himself a raise every few years, flying around on junkets on your dime, living in the lap of luxury, and serving special interest groups (and their money) before anything else. But, you know, that’s pretty much how it works.
The following Tuesday, a week after the original story broke, our very supportive and delightful assignment editor, Brenda Salgado, came up with the idea of a little scandal recap starring yours truly. I loved this idea, since I already had a good idea on how to put it together, and besides, that Tuesday brought little fresh information to report. It would be our little one-week anniversary scandal special.
The recap would involve sound bites from every person involved and fancy preproduced graphics to help lay out the events chronologically.
Had this been 2017, the graphics guy would have been done putting together what I wanted in about fifteen minutes and would have emailed it to the cameraman/editor or handed it to him on a jump drive. Or the
cameraman/editor would have been able to do the simple graphic effects themself on their computer editing system. Television shows are put together the same way. Interview material (sound bites), video (“cover”), stand-ups (reporter-on-camera shots), and audio track (reporter voice) are all loaded off a disc or video card onto a computer. Like linking little train cars together electronically, the editor follows the reporter’s written script and puts the video and audio pieces end-to-end so they all mesh together delightfully. Each piece can be trimmed, tightened, and fit snugly with a quick click of the mouse.
In 1992, in the sixty-third largest TV market in the country, we were still doing what is called linear editing, and building graphics took time, effort, and a written request. The main news control room was used to build any special effects in advance of the live show.
Despite the fact that I had finished writing the piece by noon and had isolated the sound bites I wanted, I had to wait until at least three o’clock to get my preproduction started. That’s when the director and the other technical staff members came to work in the control room to prepare for the show.
The three o’clock start was a built-in liability. Often, preproduction requests would pile up and reporters would have to wait until late in the afternoon to get their finished product. Again, the intricate graphics and special effects for the story could not be done in the normal editing booth. The cameraman/editor didn’t have the technology.
For the Inouye recap, I had a number of funky on-screen moves. Umeko Walker, Rick Reed, Daniel Inouye, and Lenore Kwock would all appear together on the screen in four individual little boxes. As my voice began to describe each individual, their box and picture would come forward and fill the screen completely. After their sound bite ended or I finished discussing each person, their little box would sink back into the set of four, and then the next person’s image would move forward.
Once the preproduction was finished in the control room, th
ese graphic effects still had to be edited into the final story by the photographer/editor in one of four edit bays (tiny rooms). Linear editing, or editing tape machine–to–tape machine, took time. The other reporters and I actually did quite a bit of it ourselves. The on-air sports guys at the station did all of their own edits.
A master tape, where the story would end up, would be inserted into the machine on the right. Here, we would assemble the story. In and out of the tape machine on the left, we would alternate between the tape with the reporter’s scripted voice track on it and the field tapes with the sound bites and video on them. The editor would set an edit in-point on both machines by pushing two buttons simultaneously. The tapes would rewind three or four seconds, then roll forward to that dub in-point and continue. As they kept rolling, the master tape would record what was on the field tape. It would record until you hit a button to stop them. Then he’d cue up the master tape to the end point of that first cut, put a new tape in the left machine, pick a starting spot for the next piece, cue it, and lay it on the master tape using the same recording method. This would go on until the entire combination of audio, bites, and video was laid down on the master. In the case of my story, the editor would then do a “video only” overlay, and roll the graphics over the top of the existing edited material in the appropriate positions. (And to think fifteen years before this, they were still building news stories by editing film!)
A couple big problems arose for my Inouye recap. First, my editor, Terry Hunter, was late getting back from shooting another story, and it wasn’t until he arrived that he actually found out he was editing mine. Secondly, the preproduction took longer than expected and was running late. Therefore, I’d be late.
For the first time in the KGMB portion of my career, I’d miss my assigned slot in a show. I sat on the set with co-anchors Jones and Moon, ready to introduce the top story of the six o’clock news with a little question-and-answer session.
