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, these 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.

With the top story not ready, the producer, who stacked the show’s content, panicked in the control room. He scrambled to rearrange items, making the necessary adjustments in the show order, while the anchors shuffled their scripts on the set, trying to figure out where to go next.

Producers talk to anchors via earpieces they’re wearing, called IFBs (interruptible feedback), while the producer can obviously hear what the anchors are saying through their microphones.

The news is live television, making it imperative that reporters and editors always make their deadline. Missing a slot can screw up an entire show and make the anchors look like dorks. That’s the riskiest thing about anchoring news, sports, or weather. Regardless of who makes the mistake, when or where, the anchor is the one sitting in front of thousands (or millions) of people, potentially looking like the idiot.

Welcome to my personal hell. In this case, we were ultra-late. Not only did we miss the top-story slot, we missed the entire first block of news. Then, we missed the entire second block.

At each of the breaks, I got queasier. Bob Jones would swear, shake his head, and talk shit about my performance with the producer. Moon would just give me a “tsk” and look at me painfully. I didn’t need the humiliation. I was already so pissed off at myself I couldn’t stand it. While Jones moaned during the breaks, I’d lean back and yell down the hallway, “How we doin’? Done yet?” It may have been the longest fifteen minutes of my life.

My live introduction and three-minute recap came at the top of the third block. This is normally where a story about a one-legged surfer or a pineapple-picking competition airs, just before we tease what’s coming up in sports.

The story was everything I had dreamed of all day long. It was beautiful, it was thorough, and the preproduction worked perfectly. All of this meant absolutely nothing, since it was twelve minutes late.

When it finally ran, no one on the set paid attention to the story; everyone remained rattled. I hopped off the set when I was done and quickly left the building, embarrassed and fuming.

The added gnarliness to this whole thing was my relationship with Jones. When he had returned to the anchor chair and to running the newsroom the previous day, it came as no surprise when he indicated I was to be taken off the Inouye story. Jones was still putting me through his personal wringer for the eleventh straight month, for whatever reason, and in the limelight was the last place he wanted me.

His was a strange resentment I’ve never completely been able to figure out.

Maybe due to the “big fish, small pond” phenomenon, local anchors’ egos are gargantuan, even compared to most widely known national TV figures I’ve worked around, which makes Will Ferrell’s portrayal of Ron Burgundy in Anchorman all the more entertaining. Of course the movie was exaggerated, but much of the nonsense and self-centeredness rings true.

Reporters would mispronounce Hawaiian words, show up late, miss deadlines, and they’d never hear a word of criticism. I’d misspell a word in a script and I’d be threatened with a pink slip. My long-term strategy to deal with this weirdness was to hang low and stay as inconspicuous as possible. The Inouye fallout made that difficult. The recap delay screw-up made it almost impossible. Jones had a legitimate gripe.

The next day, I arrived to find the predictable email from Jones. I was incompetent, he was tired of the mistakes, and I needed to be fired. This I couldn’t ignore. It was ridiculous. It was my first error of any kind in months and the only major screw-up of my tenure. In my mind at the time, I had no excuse for messing up (although I actually had a couple) and I took responsibility, but the harassment had to stop. I replied to Jones’s threatening email with my own rebuttal, sent it to him and to GM Grimm, and then printed it out and put it on the newsroom bulletin board. It basically said, “Stop the bullshit and let me do my job.” It was the best note I’ve ever written.

Wednesday turned out to be easy, probably thanks to assignment editor Salgado looking out for me. I interviewed another woman from a women’s rights group, then conducted an interview on an unrelated topic, and finished up early. Thursday and Friday would be uneventful in terms of new developments and just as mellow, which was exactly what I needed.

~

Although not much of an actor, I auditioned for a play at a local theatre each night that week, which served as the perfect distraction from Bob Jones, Senator Inouye, and associates. Eventually, through the media/theatre grapevine, I landed speaking parts and a role as an extra in a few network television programs that were shot in Hawaii. Just like news reporters and anchors before me who managed to sneak onto Hawaii Five-0 in the 1970s (such as Bob Jones himself) or Magnum, P.I. in the 1980s, I snagged a couple of gigs on shows that would never go on to be as successful. One might draw a correlation between the failure of those programs and the level of talent they were using to round out the productions.

When they weren’t shooting on location, these productions shot the remainder of their material in a studio about six blocks from my apartment, over a hill behind Diamond Head where the Kaimuki neighbourhood ended and the Kahala area began.

I earned my coveted Screen Actors Guild union card for appearing on Raven, starring Lee Majors (the six-million-dollar man) and some dude named Jeffrey Meek, who played a special forces, martial-arts specialist. Local comedian Andy Bumatai played a character named “The Big Kahuna.” In one episode, I played the host of America’s Most Dangerous, a show on which Majors’s character is mistaken for a serial killer. I never was on set with any of these people.

Three years later I played a local TV sportscaster — quite a stretch, since at the time I was a local TV sportscaster — in a segment shot right on our news set. In the role, I introduced a story about a sumo wrestler who had been murdered; the show was One West Waikiki, starring Cheryl Ladd. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to actually work with her either.

In between, I was an extra on another show that never made it, The Byrds of Paradise, starring Timothy Busfield (the red-headed guy from Thirtysomething who also played reporter Danny Concannon on The West Wing). What jumped out of this production was the emergence of the people playing his two older kids. Seth Green played the eldest son and Jennifer Love Hewitt played his character’s sister. Green, among other things, went on to play the son of Dr. Evil in the Mike Myers’s Austin Powers movies. I did actually get to hang around these people on set and I remember thinking about Jennifer, this young lady is gonna be beautiful when she gets older. Yeah, I know, it didn’t take a genius.

~

Lie detector tests became the next angle on the scandal. Our police reporter, Jerry Drelling, handled that part of the story because it was retired Honolulu Police polygrapher, Mike Orion, who would be administering the tests and analyzing the results. Lenore Kwock took the test and passed with flying colours, reaffirming everyone’s gut feeling that Kwock was not a liar. Senator Inouye danced around the issue for a few days and then refused to take a polygraph.

Drelling asked the senator if he had any reason to doubt the expertise of Orion.

“I don’t know Mr. Orion, I’ve never met him,” the senator said. “I’m not aware of his credentials . . . I suppose he’s a credible person. But I saw part of his statement when he said it’s very reliable and he as a polygraph — whatever title you have — should know better than that. Can we go to something else?” Good idea, Senator.

Despite the lie detector refusal and the growing debate over the senator’s past, his lead in the polls actually grew a little bit with just over seven days to the election. Public sentiment seemed to be against Reed for his suspected role in bringing the scandal forward, more so than against the senator, even if many believed Inouye guilty. Part of this was simply “f’ing haole boy” versus local. Reed came across as a disingenuous haole originally from the mainland, while Inouye was as local-Japanese as local-Japanese could get.

One important resource who wasn’t available during this entire mess was the senator’s right-hand man and spokesman in Washington, D.C., Nestor Garcia. Nestor had worked as a news reporter in Honolulu for a while but decided on politics instead. He knew our entire news staff rather well, was close friends with a few of my cohorts, but offered little or no help during these proceedings. His role during the campaign was hands off, an interesting dynamic. The Washington staff was kept apart from the Hawaii election staff, at least publicly, and this seemed to serve the senator well. Plus it meant the full-time staff could “play dumb” once they arrived back in D.C. and could avoid having to answer any questions.

While Garcia kept his distance in the final weeks leading up to the election in Hawaii, the role of public relations consultant, or media assistant, on the ground fell to hired hand Marie Reyko. Reyko was apparently instructed to make my job as difficult as possible, and she followed instructions perfectly. “Uncooperative and nasty” was my term for her performance during those couple of weeks. (Less than a year later, I ran into her at a concert and she admitted to being horrible, but insisted she was only doing her job. I couldn’t blame her. The most powerful public figure in Hawaii was footing the bill.)

Despite the Inouye camp’s obvious dislike for me and their lack of cooperation, our news management decided to put me back on the beat right before the election. The perfect capper came when Jones insisted that I handle the live shots and the interviews from Inouye’s campaign headquarters during election night. More of an intentional manoeuvre, I reckon, rather than an obvious error in judgement.

The evening unfolded as expected. Inouye won by a landslide, narrower than most of his victories, but still by almost a two-to-one margin.

The Democratic machine had chewed up the scandal and spit it out.

As the senator and his cronies celebrated with the crowd, I and the other TV reporters, who had assembled at various positions around the ballroom, set up for our final live shots. After reporting the results and the reaction, our last task would be to interview the victor.

Fat chance.

Inouye talked to Channel 2 for a few minutes, live. Then he briefly chatted with the Channel 4 reporter. When he finished, I tried to distract him, our on-site producer tried to grab him, as did one of his campaign assistants. Our camera was set up right inside the door to the building. The senator turned away from us, slid in between a couple of his very large Samoan body guards, and passed us like we had the bubonic plague. He didn’t even shoot us a look, just smirked as he passed by. The most powerful politician in Hawaii, and the prize interview of the night, walked right out the door.

Momentarily I was upset, at him, at Jones, at the whole damn scene. Then I realized it was over. I sighed.
A weight had been lifted.

No more mudslinging, no more runarounds, no more lies.

No more politics.

~

Rick Reed, living back in the state of Washington, is an executive at a marketing firm.

In December 2012, two years after winning his ninth term in 2010, Senator Inouye died at the age of eighty-eight. His body lay in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, only the thirty-first person, and the first Asian-American, to receive such an honour.

Not long after the 1992 election, nine other women alleged harassment against Inouye, via a female state legislator, but none would participate in a full inquiry. In 2014, two years after his death, Inouye was accused of sexually harassing fellow senator Kirsten Gillibrand.