Akaka defends affable political style in new memoir

“ONE VOICE: MY LIFE, TIMES AND HOPES FOR HAWAI’I”

By Dan Akaka and Jim Borg

(Watermark Publishing, $22.95)

Dan Akaka was 52 when first elected to public office, winning a U.S. House seat in 1976.

Few would have thought it was the beginning of a 36-year career in Congress — 14 years in the House and 22 in the Senate — that would span six presidents and carry into a new century.

Akaka, 93, recounts the journey in his new memoir, “One Voice: My Life, Times and Hopes for Hawai‘i,” written with Honolulu Star-Advertiser journalist Jim Borg.

The book dispels the popular notion that Akaka, who grew up in Pauoa as the youngest of eight kids in a religiously devout Hawaiian family, was a laid-back guy who just went with the flow.

He was an unusually ambitious young man; after serving in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers near the end of World War II, he became a teacher aiming to work his way up to superintendent of education. He made it to principal and a staff position in the superintendent’s office before Gov. John A. Burns recruited him to head the state economic opportunity program.

Gov. George Ariyoshi tapped him to run for lieutenant governor in 1974, a race Akaka lost, but two years later he became the first Native Hawaiian elected to Congress since Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole was a territorial delegate.

The Akaka debate will always be about how effective he was with his affable style in a shark-infested Congress. Notice didn’t come easily in the long shadow of Hawaii’s senior senator, Daniel K. Inouye.

Time magazine once named Akaka one of the least-effective senators, calling him “a master of the minor resolution and the bill that dies in committee.”

Quoting the slam in his book, Akaka defends himself by saying Time “misread my style, which was not to go out and yell and argue with people but rather to talk to them personally, the Hawaiian way of working with people even when we disagree.

“Because I worked quietly, a journalist could look at me and say, ‘Hey this guy doesn’t do anything.’”

His Hawaiian way brought him an outpouring of love from both sides of the aisle when he retired in 2012, with Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada describing him as “the kindest, gentlest person I have ever served in this body with.”

But Congress isn’t a sentimental place and love gets you only so far; colleagues never gave him a vote on his signature “Akaka Bill” for Native Hawaiian recognition.

The argument over effectiveness will never be settled, but his book is an expansive record of what drove Akaka during those 36 years.

At 640 pages, most readers will probably find it 200 pages too expansive.

“One Voice” offers few juicy new details about the momentous issues and big personalities Akaka dealt with during his political career. There’s little introspection or threading together of the big picture.

He’s quiet on controversies such as his defense of million-dollar Bishop Estate salaries, and he tries so hard to be gracious to rivals such as Pat Saiki and Ed Case that the drama of those elections is lost.

But within a sometimes tedious year-by-year account of his service is enough substance to glean a good sense of Akaka’s legacy.

He co-founded the Congressional Space Caucus with unlikely GOP partner Newt Gingrich, and the alliance led to passage of the Commercial Space Act, crucial to keeping America in orbit after NASA retired the space shuttle.

Akaka sponsored the Whistleblowers Protection Act, a key advance toward greater government transparency.

He was a leading advocate for veterans and among the first to recognize and do something about the post-traumatic stress many brought home from U.S. misadventures abroad.

The box on your credit card statement explaining the real cost of interest is called the “Akaka box” because of his long battle to get it enacted.

Akaka engineered final approval of Hawaii’s H-3 freeway in the House after litigation almost killed it, and the Hawaiian Apology Resolution he sponsored in 1993 will be the basis for any gains Native Hawaiians make on self-determination.

He didn’t shy away from tough votes, standing in the minority against the Iraq war, creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense of Marriage Act.

You can argue about whether these things were good or bad for Hawaii and the nation, but you can’t fairly say Akaka didn’t do anything.

If “One Voice” reads like a victory lap on a long and notable life, who would begrudge him?