On the last day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, the FBI received an urgent, confidential request from the attorney general: Do immediate background checks on U.S. Sens. Fred Harris, Daniel Inouye and Edmund Muskie.
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had just secured the Democratic presidential nomination, was talking to President Lyndon Johnson and thinking about his No. 2. The attorney general gave the FBI, which in that era routinely compiled personal information on members of Congress, 30 minutes to comb through the secret files.
Twenty minutes later the FBI reported back that the bureau never had any reason to investigate the three senators and did not have any derogatory information about them that was pertinent.
Humphrey would announce that Muskie, the senator from Maine, was his choice for vice president.
The 1968 memo was among thousands of documents that the FBI gathered on Inouye from 1959 to 2006. The FBI on Monday publicly posted the documents on the late Hawaii senator in The Vault, the bureau’s online reading room, which also contains once-private files on other prominent politicians, celebrities, gangsters and fugitives.
The Star-Advertiser and other news media requested the FBI’s files on Inouye shortly after the senator died of respiratory complications last December at age 88.
The trove provides a fascinating window into the FBI’s intelligence operations and reveals the kinds of threats Inouye experienced during his remarkable political career.
Inouye, who lost his right arm in combat and earned the Medal of Honor for his sacrifice in World War II, was the first Japanese-American elected to the U.S. House and the second-longest-serving U.S. senator in history. At the time of his death, he was chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and Senate president pro tempore, third in line to the presidency.
His FBI files show the underside of public life: racially and politically motivated threats of violence; unsubstantiated allegations of bribery; lurid — and mistaken — tales of naked romps with prostitutes.
Historians have written that Muskie was Humphrey’s early preference for vice president in 1968, but Inouye, who gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, was a favorite of President Johnson. Audiotapes released in 2008 disclosed that Johnson had urged Humphrey in a telephone conversation to consider Inouye and was likely responsible for including him in the FBI’s background checks.
In a hint at the clandestine nature of the FBI’s methods, the 1968 memo notes that the attorney general was not advised that the FBI’s background checks on the three senators were "based on current, up-to-date cards that are kept on the various representatives of Congress."
Inouye’s starring roles in the investigations of the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals raised the senator’s public profile but came with a price.
In August 1973, during a summer of nationally televised Watergate hearings, an editorial assistant at the Baltimore Morning Sun received a troubling telephone call: "I’ve got a story for you. We’re going to kill that Jap." When the assistant asked whom the caller was referring to, the man said, "Senator Inouye."
"I fought those people in WW II and simply don’t like them," the caller said, according to the FBI’s report, finishing with obscenities and a claim that Inouye would be shot.
In July 1987, during the Iran-Contra hearings, an anonymous caller left a message on the answering machine in Inouye’s Hilo office: "If you hurt North, we’re going to kill you." Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was celebrated by conservatives as a hero, was at the center of the scandal.
Jennifer Goto Sabas, who was Inouye’s chief of staff in Honolulu, recalls that Inouye declined extra security and did not publicize the threats because he did not want to further politicize the Iran-Contra hearings.
"He was concerned that it would just heighten all of the national tension and divisiveness over the issue," she said Monday.
Race and ethnicity were often a subtext in the threats. From a 1988 postcard sent from Honolulu to U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman: "The scum in the guise of slant-eyed filth like Dan Inouye is the cause of racial discrimination. My people lost loved ones and still suffer because of the Japs."
The FBI files show that federal agents take anonymous claims of public corruption seriously.
In 1989 an anonymous caller informed the FBI in Honolulu that Inouye was receiving cash payoffs from Matson Navigation Co. to help protect the shipping company’s near monopoly in Hawaii. The caller named maritime sources who could provide information about the bribery, including one who allegedly saw a Matson Navigation representative deliver a "suitcase full of cash" to Inouye.
Matson, at the time, was fighting off competition from American President Lines. During the probe a confidential source told the FBI that Inouye was once allegedly overheard at a Pacific Club meeting, saying, "APL will come in over my dead body."
But when FBI agents finally interviewed the maritime sources, the case crumbled. They said that while there was talk in the maritime community that Inouye had a close relationship with Matson, they had never witnessed nor had any evidence of payoffs.
In October 2005 Inouye himself asked the FBI to investigate claims by a University of Hawaii professor that the senator was bribed with campaign contributions to back the establishment of a University Affiliated Research Center.
Several professors and students had opposed the initiative, known as UARC, as potentially contributing to the increased militarization of Hawaii. The professor who made the allegations at first claimed he had direct information that Inouye was taking bribes, according to the FBI, then denied having any direct knowledge, undermining his credibility.
Investigators determined that while Inouye had received campaign contributions from UH staff, "no reputable information was developed that Inouye engaged in any illegal activities."
The strangest tale from Inouye’s FBI files involves a story from a Virginia prostitute. The woman told the FBI she met Inouye at a Washington, D.C., nightclub in 1963 and that the drunken senator took her to a hotel and paid her to talk "filthy" to him.
She said she saw the senator a few more times, including one incident where the woman and another prostitute were brought to a Senate office building, told to take off their clothes but leave on their high-heeled shoes, and then were chased around by the naked senator.
Investigators discovered, however, that the prostitutes’ physical description of the man they thought was Inouye did not match the senator: The drunk they cavorted with had no missing limbs.
During that era the FBI was widely condemned after it was discovered that the bureau was collecting personal information about politicians and other public figures and using the details for political leverage.
Inouye himself, his FBI files show, complained to J. Edgar Hoover, then the FBI’s director, in 1969 about what appeared to be the leaks of the bureau’s files on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971 Inouye said the fear of government surveillance was so pervasive that he had his telephones checked for bugs.
But the senator was a moderate — as the FBI privately described him — and would not use the FBI’s abuses to trash its mission. In a 1976 speech to a law enforcement conference in Honolulu — flagged by the FBI as "supportive" — Inouye, chairman of a new select committee on intelligence, said, "I do not wish to in any way stop the criticism because I believe criticism can be healthy in our democracy, provided it is directed at strengthening those things which are good in our institutions and calling to our attention those which are bad."
