Aloha Senator Daniel Inouye

Senator Inouye and John F. Kennedy
The Remarkable Service of Senator Daniel Inouye will be long remembered
Daniel Inouye Longest-serving member of the US Senate who investigated the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals

“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, it’s own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” –the late Senator Daniel Inouye

In France, he was hit by a bullet which was stopped by two silver dollars he carried in his pocket. But he had lost his lucky charms just before an assault on Colle Musatello, in the Po Valley, Italy, in April 1945. Despite being wounded, he took out the first of three German machine-gun positions pinning down his platoon. He led an attack on the second, before collapsing. Then, as his unit attacked the third, he crawled into position to throw a grenade. As he stood to throw, a German rifle grenade severed his arm, leaving the grenade in the fist. Keeping his troops at a distance, he prised the grenade out, threw it, and finished the attack one-handed. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

  • “That’s one of the horrors of war, that you can train person, train them to hate, train them to kill.

    Daniel Inouye September 7 1924 – Decmeber 17, 2012

  • Daniel Inoyue photo
    Daniel Inouye, one-and-a-half years old in Honolulu, 1924.

    Inouye’s Epic Civial Rights Championship Senator Inouye fought for reparations for Japanese Americans who were interned..

    At the time of his death Monday at the age of 88, Inouye was third in line to the presidency.
    But he never stopped confronting power on behalf of the rights of people of color, people with disabilities, women, lesbians and gays and political dissenters to equal justice and equal opportunity. A modest man who served in the Senate for more than fifty years, Inouye was not always accorded proper recognition of his historic advocacy on behalf of civil rights and civil liberties. But that is the error of those who underestimate Inouye, not of the senator. Indeed, as Vice President Joe Biden, who knew Inouye better than most in Washington, said after the senior senator’s death: “To his dying day, he fought for a new era of politics where all men and women are treated with equality.”