Inouye’s experience in Mississippi was a reflection of the racial schizophrenia loose in America. The Magnolia State was the epicenter of discrimination against black citizens, treating them as little more than paid slaves, and yet it made the extra effort for Japanese American soldiers at the same time the U.S. government was shipping their families off to internment camps.
Inouye and his buddies went from Mississippi directly into combat with the 5th Army in Italy. They were out to prove something. “I felt that there was a need for us to demonstrate that we were just as good as anybody else,” he says. “The price was bloody and expensive, but I felt we succeeded.”
After three months of heavy fighting in Italy, during which Inouye was promoted to sergeant for his outstanding traits as a patrol leader, the 442nd was called upon to perform one of the legendary feats of the war: rescue 140 members of a Texas outfit that had been caught in a German trap in the French Vosges Mountains. Another Texas division had tried and failed to get their fellow Lone Star Staters out, so the 442nd was sent in.
Inouye remembers, “We only had two thirds of our regiment after the Italian campaign. We had to fight hard for four straight days. We knew this was the test. We knew we were expendable. We knew it would have been unheard of to call on another regiment to rescue us. They were asking these brown soldiers to rescue these tall Texans. Our casualties exceeded eight hundred, but we rescued them.”
Inouye’s role was so impressive that he was awarded the Bronze Star and won a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant. The 442nd also won the admiration of commanders throughout the Army. “After that,” Inouye says, “we were in demand.”
They were sent back to Italy to continue the long, bloody battle for control of southern Europe. In the Po Valley, Lieutenant Inouye was leading an assault against heavily fortified German positions in the mountains when he was hit by a bullet that went through his abdomen and exited his back, barely missing his spine. He continued to charge, gravely wounded, making a one-man assault on a machine-gun nest that had his men pinned down. He threw two grenades before the Germans hit him with a rifle-launched grenade. His right arm was shattered. He pried a third grenade from his right hand and threw it with his left. He continued to fire with his automatic weapon, covering the withdrawal of his men. Finally, he was knocked out of action by another bullet in the leg, but by then the German position was neutralized. Twenty-five Germans were dead, and Inouye took eight as prisoners of war.
Daniel Inouye, senatorial portrait
Inouye was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his gallantry, and many believe that if he had not been a Japanese American he would have won the Medal of Honor. He was shipped back to the United States to begin treatment for his extensive injuries, and it was in the hospital that he met Bob Dole.
As the two became friends, Dole often talked about getting a law degree and going into politics back home in Kansas, maybe running for Congress. Inouye thought that wasn’t a bad plan for the future and began to think about law school and politics as a possible career for himself.
He spent twenty months in hospitals before his discharge as a captain. On a layover in Oakland, California, on his way back to Hawaii, he decided he wanted to get, as he puts it, “all gussied up so when I got home Mama and Papa would see me in all my glory. I went into an Oakland barbershop—four empty chairs—and a barber comes up to me and wants to know if I’m Japanese. Keep in mind I’m in uniform with my medals and ribbons and a hook for an arm. I said, ‘Well, my father was born in Japan.’ The barber replied, ‘We don’t cut Jap hair.’ I was tempted to slash him with my hook, but then I thought about all the work the 442nd had done and I just said, ‘I feel sorry for you,’ and walked out. I went home without a haircut.”
Remembering the plans of his friend from Kansas, Inouye utilized the GI Bill to get a law degree from George Washington University. He returned to Hawaii and became active in local politics, serving as a prosecutor and in the territorial legislature before Hawaii became a state.
When Hawaii was admitted to the Union, Danny Inouye was a natural choice to become the state’s first congressman, and he was elected overwhelmingly. It was an arresting moment in the well of the House of Representatives when Sam Rayburn, the larger-than-life Speaker, intoned, “Raise your right hand and repeat after me . . .” Of course, the new congressman from Hawaii had no right hand. Danny Inouye raised his left and took the oath of office, the first U.S. representative from his state and the first Japanese American in Congress. As another congressman said later, “At that moment, a ton of prejudice slipped quietly to the floor of the House of Representatives.”
After just one term in the House, Inouye was elected to the Senate in 1962, and he’s been successfully reelected six times. He’s highly regarded on both sides of the aisle for his middle-of-the-road Democratic party principles and his measured, almost stately style. When a Washington Post reporter asked him how he reconciled his laid-back demeanor as a senator with his record as a fearless, hard-charging member of the 442nd, he answered with a shrug and a laugh: “I was young. I was eighteen, first time leaving Mama. I had no strings, no sweetheart.”
Inouye’s reputation for fairness has served him well on the Senate Watergate Committee investigating the Nixon White House and as chairman of the Senate committee that investigated the Iran-contra scandal during the Ronald Reagan administration. Former senator Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, a Republican and not an easy judge of other public figures, has said simply, “There is no finer man in the Senate.”
Inouye also knows how to make a point. He was a lead sponsor of the bill to get reparations for the Japanese American families interned during the war, and there were very few senators who could look at this quiet man with the Japanese surname, valorous military record, and empty right sleeve and vote no.
On another occasion, the Senate was considering a bill to place a limit of $25,000 on rewards “for pain and suffering” in product liability suits. It was a hot issue in the Senate Commerce Committee, where Republicans were determined to rein in corporate exposure in lawsuits. Then Senator Inouye spoke up, saying, “It’s easy for those who have not been the victims to set the caps.” End of argument. End of bill.
Daniel Inouye, “Danny” to all his fellow senators and his friends, has just finished his sixth term as a U.S. senator. In September 1998, he turned seventy-four. He was a teenager when he saw those Japanese planes, “with pilots that looked like me,” and knew that his world was changed forever. What he did not know at the time was how much he would shape the new world through his bravery and his commitment to public service and the end of discrimination.
What he does know now, as he looks back, is that this country has been divided at critical times in its past, during the Revolutionary War and the Civil War; but, as he says, “The one time the nation got together was World War II. We stood as one. We spoke as one. We clenched our fists as one, and that was a rare moment for all of us.”
CASPAR WEINBERGER
“Young man, you go where you’re sent in the Army.”
THE PUBLIC ARENA was not reserved only for those who ran for elective office. Some of the most distinguished and influential public servants to emerge from the World War II generation were men who moved easily in and out of the private sector to take assignments in public life. They are as well known now as their fellow veterans who chose elective office.
Caspar Weinberger is one of them. He was an important adviser to Ronald Reagan during Reagan’s first term as governor of California. He served in the Nixon administration, and when Reagan went to the White House, Weinberger went to the Pentagon as secretary of defense. That appointment was the apotheosis of a lifetime of deeply held conservative personal and political beliefs, a passion for public affairs, and the lessons learned by an eager young lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War II.
Weinberger grew up as the bookish youngest son of a prosperous San Francisco couple. His father, a lawyer
, was Jewish, and his mother was Episcopalian. Young Caspar was raised in his mother’s church, although his last name often subjected him to anti-Semitic insults.
The future defense secretary was so interested in public affairs that he subscribed to the Congressional Record before he reached high school, and he remembers his father telling him stories of the American constitutional convention at bedtime.
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Captain John A. Moriarty, commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy, touring the ship during the International Naval Review celebrating the centennial of the Statue of Liberty
Weinberger went to Harvard in the autumn of 1934, but as a product of a California public high school he was not naturally a member of the inner circle at the venerable academy that, for many of its students, was the natural extension of their prep schools and family pedigrees.
However, Weinberger did find a place at Harvard. When he was not pursuing his studies in English literature and political science, he was a tireless worker at the Crimson, the school’s highly regarded student newspaper. Students of the contemporary Crimson may be surprised to learn that at the height of the New Deal and the first term of Franklin Roosevelt, the newspaper was very conservative, a perfect fit for young Weinberger.
When he was elected president of the Crimson, he found an outlet for his anti–FDR and anti–labor union views. He was an unapologetic, take-no-prisoners editorialist, firing off scathing memos to Crimson staff members who questioned his judgment and fairness. His position as president of the newspaper has been a point of pride his entire life.
Weinberger maintained his interest in journalism, later writing columns for California newspapers and, when he retired from politics, serving as a publisher and commentator for Forbes, the conservative business magazine.
Weinberger stayed at Harvard to get a law degree, and then, in August 1941, he enlisted in the Army. He was accepted for Officer Candidate School and shipped out to Australia as a second lieutenant. His training experience would later help shape his views as secretary of defense. “We were trained with wooden rifles and little blocks of wood painted to look like grenades,” he remembers. “We did little live fire, because there wasn’t enough ammunition.”
Weinberger was not one of those children of the Depression who saw the Army as a step up in their lifestyle, as Bob Dole did. As Weinberger puts it, “I had been very pampered and very carefully brought up. I have always been extremely ashamed of myself because I complained about the food at Harvard. When I got in the military, I saw that was really something to complain about.”
The future defense secretary also benefited, he believes, from having been both an enlisted man and an officer. Forty years later, when he ran the Pentagon, “it gave me a certain resolve to do something about two things: improve the food and the mail service, which are the two biggest factors in morale.”
In Australia, Weinberger also learned something about chain of command. He protested when he was pulled from an infantry outfit and assigned to intelligence on General Douglas MacArthur’s staff. “I wanted to stay with my division. They were on the eve of an invasion,” Weinberger says. “I was very gung ho . . . very much the crusader. I thought this was a just war.” When he appealed to a general who was running operations, he had a very short hearing. Weinberger says he was told, “Young man, you go where you’re sent in the Army.”
So Weinberger reported to MacArthur’s headquarters in Brisbane, where he was a very junior officer on the staff of the legendary general. Nonetheless, he saw enough to have a full appreciation of MacArthur’s brilliance. “I saw the plans for the invasion of Japan,” Weinberger says, “the breadth and scope of his military genius. With very few troops, a couple of understrength divisions, and some Australian militia forces, he accomplished an enormous amount in the Pacific.”
The young intelligence officer also learned directly from MacArthur something about judgment and decision making. Weinberger was on duty one night as the American forces were moving on a small island, lightly occupied by the Japanese, to take it for a radio base. Suddenly, there were reports of a Japanese ship and Japanese aircraft in the vicinity. Weinberger thought he’d better take this information directly to MacArthur. “So I walked the two blocks to his hotel,” Weinberger remembers. “I got through the various security and gave him the message. He came out in his bathrobe, looking just as erect and as imposing as he did in full uniform, that magnificent posture, deep voice. He looked the message over carefully and said, ‘Well, Lieutenant, what do you think?’ I said, ‘General, I think it’s a coincidence they’re there. They don’t seem to have hostile intent. I would go ahead with the landing.’ General MacArthur said, ‘That’s what I think, too. Good night.’ ” Weinberger walked back through the night to his post “in fear and trembling—to see if I was wrong or not. Fortunately, it worked out.”
. . .
Caspar Weinberger, chairman, Forbes magazine
WEINBERGER came home from the war to a successful law practice in San Francisco and a continuing passion for conservative causes. He was elected to the California Assembly in 1952 and became active in California and national Republican party politics. In 1966 he worked for one of Ronald Reagan’s opponents in the Republican primary for governor. Later, however, he became a key adviser to Reagan on the state budget. When Reagan was elected president in 1980, one of his first appointments was Weinberger as secretary of defense. The former first lieutenant had moved to the top of the military chain of command. If Douglas MacArthur had still been alive, he’d have been reporting to Caspar Weinberger.
Weinberger immediately set out to repair what he believed was the damage inflicted on the military by the cutbacks of the Jimmy Carter presidency. He went on a military spending spree that lasted seven years and added up to a price tag just shy of $2 trillion. This was about much more than memories of wooden blocks painted as grenades and stick rifles when he was in basic training. Secretary Weinberger was on a crusade with his boss, President Reagan, to persuade the Soviet Union that it could not win and could not keep up.
He was—and remains to this day—the champion of the Strategic Defense Initiative, the so-called Star Wars defense against incoming missiles. It remains on the drawing board and in the laboratory, a high-tech and high-cost high concept that critics charge is merely provocative and is unreliable. Weinberger didn’t get Star Wars, but he did order up new aircraft carriers, strategic bombers, and weapons systems, and he oversaw the development of the cruise missile. Later questioned about the impact on federal budget deficits of this gusher of military spending, Weinberger told a Harvard audience that the deficit could be controlled if Congress cut back “on a lot of unnecessary domestic spending that has big constituencies.” By then it was fifty years since he’d been at Harvard, but the certainty of his views had not diminished.
Weinberger’s public career ended on a dark note when he was indicted by Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel investigating the Iran-contra scandal. Walsh had concluded that Weinberger had lied to Congress when he denied knowledge of the plan to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to arm contra rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Walsh claimed that Weinberger’s own notes indicated that he did know, and that he was trying to protect President Reagan.
However, Weinberger never stood trial. In one of the closing acts of his presidency, George Bush gave the former defense secretary a full presidential pardon, describing him as a “true patriot.” The country, by then exhausted by the long, complicated investigation into Iran-contra, barely blinked at the news of the pardon. It was already anticipating the arrival of a new, young president in Washington, Bill Clinton.
Caspar Weinberger joined Forbes magazine as a publisher and, on the editorial page, found a new outlet for the conservative views that had defined his lifetime.
Lloyd Cutler (right) with Henry Kaiser, a client and friend
Lloyd Cutler
LLOYD CUTLER
“We live in a multilateral world. . . . It’s going to take a lot of public service.”
AT THE SAME TIME Caspar Weinberger was growing up in northern California, another bright young man, who would later typify the liberal intellectual in national affairs, was growing up in New York. Lloyd Cutler became the quintessential Washington lawyer of the old school, a courtly and scholarly man who was counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton.
He always had promise. As a child he relished trips to his father’s law offices, where he would sit spellbound, listening to the tales of his father’s law partner, Fiorello La Guardia, then a congressman and later one of the most colorful mayors in New York’s history. It was young Lloyd’s first connection to the fields that would become his life: public affairs and the law.
He was a precocious student and graduated from high school at sixteen, enrolling first at New York University and then at Yale, where he earned his law degree. Cutler was the editor of the Yale Law Journal at the same time another future power in Washington was president of the Harvard Law Review. That was Philip L. Graham, later the husband of Katharine Graham, the man who shaped the modern Washington Post. Cutler remembers, “We were arrogant young kids. When Justice Cardozo of the Supreme Court died, we published a joint issue of the law journals and rejected an article by a Columbia University law professor as not being up to our standards, because he was Columbia and we were Harvard and Yale.”
Following graduation, Cutler went to work at the prestigious New York firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, but when Pearl Harbor was attacked he volunteered to take any job in Washington. He went to work for the Lend-Lease Administration, President Roosevelt’s ingenious way of getting to the embattled British the war material they so desperately needed. Cutler’s boss, Oscar Cox, was also the assistant solicitor general in the Justice Department, so Cutler was able to sharpen his courtroom skills as well as serve his country.
Tom Brokaw Page 30
