Having a father who served as governor and senator made him politically astute, and Alan kept up with the happenings of his community and the world, never one to shy away from voicing his opinion with a cheerfully barbed tongue. One morning, a cup of coffee and the local paper in hand, a smile spread across Alan’s distinctive long face. He dashed off a letter to his old buddy Norman Mineta.
When Norm ran for Congress and won, Alan Simpson wasn’t far behind. The friendship formed inside the barbed wire of Heart Mountain, Wyoming, picked up where it left off. When Alan and Norm met again, they immediately started laughing, greeting each other with the hugs and kisses that come from the hearts of only the truest of friends.
They couldn’t have been more opposite: Alan was cowboy stock: large, pale, and steely. Norm was the son of an immigrant, with a thick shock of black hair. He barely came to Alan’s shoulder. When you watch interviews of them together, they either spend all their time laughing or trying to make each other cry.
“You know,” Alan joked, “the word politics is interesting. It comes from the Greek. Poly meaning many, and ticks meaning blood sucking insects.” Norm bursts into laughter. “Today, we don’t talk of Scouts, we have organ recitals,” Alan said. “How’s your heart? How’s your liver? You know, we recite our organs.”[6] Norm is laughing before Alan even gets to the punch line.
But Alan can’t help but extoll Norm’s virtues. “It’s been a wonderful, rich ride of true friendship, which is a beautiful thing”[7] and “I really respect and admire him. And love him. He is a wonderful, wonderful individual.”[8] These are words you don’t expect from a juvenile delinquent cowboy from Wyoming.
“There are a lot of issues where I’ve had an opposite view,” Norm said. “I’m a liberal Democrat. He’s a conservative. He’s a good Republican. So it’s not that we had agreement on everything…. We had fights in committees or subcommittees, and then we’d slap each other on the back and say, ‘Come on, let’s go have dinner. Let’s go have a drink.’ I don’t know how to describe it. We just see each other and begin to laugh.”[9]
Norm Mineta and Daniel Inouye were proud to be among the first Asian Americans in Congress. Together with other Japanese American congressional leaders, they proposed legislation that would make amends for the atrocities the government leveled at Japanese Americans during World War II. The bill, called the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, gave a payment of $20,000 to every survivor who had been incarcerated in America’s incarceration camps. They said, “It’s not about the money, it’s about honor.”[10]
It seemed an impossible ask: $1.2 billion in reparations for the remaining sixty thousand survivors. The bill had over one hundred cosponsors, including Alan Simpson, Joe Biden, Al Gore, Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, Ted Kennedy, and Dan Quayle. As a sponsor, Alan said: “He was an American citizen, and they stuck him behind barbed wire. That’s a hell of a thing to do.”[11]
Norm went to bat for HR 442, named after the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. It came up for debate in 1987, on the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution. He said, “Though this bill is a deeply personal one for a small number, this legislation touches all of us, because it touches the very core of our nation. Does our Constitution indeed protect all of us, regardless of race or culture? We lost our homes, we lost our businesses, we lost our farms, but worst of all, we lost our most basic human rights. Our own government had branded us with the unwarranted stigma of disloyalty which clings to us still to this day.”[12]
The bill passed. When President Reagan signed it into law, he said: “My fellow Americans, we gather here today to right a grave wrong. More than forty years ago, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, one hundred twenty thousand persons of Japanese ancestry living in the United States were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in makeshift internment camps. This action was taken without trial, without jury. It was based solely on race, for these one hundred twenty thousand were Americans of Japanese descent…. We must recognize that the internment of Japanese-Americans was…a mistake. For here, we admit a wrong; here, we reaffirm our commitment as a nation to equal justice under the law.”[13]
Norm served ten terms in Congress. After he left to work in the private sector, President Clinton called and asked him to be the Secretary of Commerce. He accepted, becoming the first Asian American cabinet member in U.S. history.
When George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, he asked Norm to stay in his cabinet, this time as Secretary of Transportation. It’s only the fourth time in history that a cabinet member has served presidents of opposite political parties. “I tried to depoliticize my cabinet. I didn’t want people in there serving the Republican Party, I wanted people in there serving their country. There is no better servant for America than Norm Mineta,” Bush recalled.[14]
There was only one objection to his nomination at his confirmation hearing: a senator who said she couldn’t understand why it had taken so long for someone to nominate Norman Mineta for a cabinet position. He was confirmed 98–0.[15]
Norm watched in horror when planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was summoned to a secure bunker in Washington, D.C., with Vice President Dick Cheney, and they sat in front of a radar screen that refreshed every seven seconds.
They watched as a plane bound for the Pentagon was fifty miles away. Then twenty. Then ten. They heard the report of an explosion. Fuming with righteous anger, Norm phoned the head of the FAA and told him to ground every plane in the air immediately. No similar order had been given before, or since.
The head of the FAA said he would give the order, but would leave some room for pilot discretion. “F*** PILOT DISCRETION. GET THOSE G**D*** PLANES ON THE GROUND!” Norm shouted at him.[16] All told, 4,546 civilian aircraft were grounded, a feat that took more than 2.5 hours. Many pilots weren’t even told what was going on, just that there was a security incident. Pilots who did know largely didn’t tell their passengers.[17]
As soon as Canada heard that the FAA had grounded all flights, they implemented Operation Yellow Ribbon, shutting down nearly all of its own air travel, to allow room for incoming international flights that were bound for the United States, and to allow U.S. planes a safe place to land if they needed it. Many incoming international flights were past the point of no return, meaning they had to continue on to their destination, as they didn’t have enough fuel to turn around and go back. As many as forty-five thousand people were diverted to Canada on September 11.[18]
Norm quickly saw United States sentiment begin to turn on people who wore traditional Muslim dress, or who had names that sounded like they might have Middle Eastern heritage. He thought back to that moment, at age ten, when his baseball bat and puppy were taken from him and his family was imprisoned without due process because of the sound of their name and the appearance of their faces. He refused to do that to anyone else.
So he sent a letter to all U.S. airlines saying they were forbidden from using racial profiling or subjecting Muslim or Middle Eastern passengers to extra scrutiny. He said it was the “right and constitutional thing” based on his own experience as someone who had lost the most basic human rights during his childhood incarceration.
Norm influenced presidential policy post-9/11. Bush said that “one of the important things about Norm’s experience is that it reminds us that sometimes we lose our soul as a nation. That the notion of all equal under God sometimes disappears. And 9/11 certainly challenged that premise. I didn’t want our country to do to others what had happened to Norm.”[19]
—
When he died in 2012, Daniel was nearly ninety, and was one of the longest serving senators in U.S. history. Then-Vice President Joe Biden spoke at his funeral, after having served with him in the Senate for decades.
Biden said, “I’m here to tell you that his physical courage was matched by his moral courage. I don’t know of anybody else I can say that of. He was, in my thirty-six years in the Senate, more trusted by his colleagues than any man or woman I ever served with. No one ever doubted that Danny Inouye had such integrity at his core that he would meet any obligation thrust upon him with absolute steadiness and objectivity. With the exception of my father, there are few people I have ever looked at and said, ‘I wish I could be more like that man.’ ”[20]
Daniel Inouye was President Obama’s senator when Obama was growing up in Hawaii. Obama said, “For him, freedom and dignity were not abstractions. They were values that he had bled for. Ideas he had sacrificed for. He taught so many of us, including a young boy growing up in Hawaii, that America has a place for all of us. May God bless Daniel Inouye. And may God grant us more souls like his.”[21]
When Daniel had finished lying in state in the Capitol and being eulogized in the National Cathedral, his casket traveled home to Hawaii, where hundreds gathered. Senator Jon Tester played taps. A bagpipe corps played “Danny Boy.”
As I watched his funeral(s), which you can find on YouTube, I cried for a man I had never met. I saw the members of the honor guard fire their guns. I watched nineteen cannons salute him, and listened to the roar of four jets flying over the assembled crowd of family, friends, and members of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. One of them remarked, “He was a giant among men. A hero among heroes.”
Two years later, in 2014, the United States Navy commissioned a destroyer to be named in his honor. It was to be built about as far away from Hawaii as one could go in the United States: Bath Iron Works, on the Kennebec River, in Maine.
The Daniel Inouye left Maine in 2021, bound for its home port. In November, it sailed into Pearl Harbor, 59 feet wide and 509.5 feet long. Soldiers in white stood at attention on the decks. It received its commission on December 8, 2021, eighty years and one day from the time a seventeen-year-old went to bed a boy and woke up a man.[22]
When Daniel Inouye left home for the first time to undergo his rigorous military training, his leader was a man he greatly admired, but who was later killed in battle. He impressed on his unit, the 442nd, something that Dan carried with him the rest of his days. “Those that survive,” he told the Nisei unit, “will have the chance to make a world where every man is a free man, and the equal of his neighbor.”[23]
So Dan went for it. He went for broke.
In a letter dated the day of his death, Inouye wrote to the governor of Hawaii, saying, “People have asked me how I want to be remembered and I say very simply that I represented the people honestly and to the best of my abilities. I think I did okay.” His last word was “Aloha.”[24]
Norm and Alan helped form the Mineta-Simpson Institute at Heart Mountain, which has a retreat space and funding dedicated for communication about the atrocities of Japanese incarceration. There are pictures of them seated near each other, Mineta dwarfed by Simpson. They are always in states of uproarious laughter, their faces consumed with glee.
Norm died in 2022. Before he passed, he said, “The word compromise today is a bad word. People think of it as a weakness, rather than a strength to get something done.”[25] Alan Simpson, as of this writing, is ninety-two years old.
What will history remember with kindness? The leader with the most cunning tweets? The one with the most self-aggrandizing speeches and the biggest audiences? No, it’s not the cynics who emerge the heroes, but the people who spent their lives in service to others. It’s those that fight for justice for someone whose reflection they don’t see in the mirror.
Momentum
Twenty-two
Claudette ColvinAlabama, 1950s
Here’s a lie you might have learned in school: Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress who wanted to rest her feet, so she declined to move seats on the bus.
Here’s another one: Rosa Parks ignited the civil rights movement by chance.
The real thing Rosa was tired of that day in December was giving in. And while Rosa was a very important catalyst, she certainly was not the first person to challenge bigotry on the buses of Montgomery, Alabama.
