Senator Inouye: Most Senior Member of U.S. Senate http://www.csa.us/email/spirit/ssarticles/1112SeniorSpotlight.html
Senator Daniel Inouye is not only a leader in Congress, but he is also the highest-ranking Asian-American politician in U.S. history. Added to his legislative accomplishments is his heroism in World War II, which earned him the nation’s highest military award, the Medal of Honor. Read his story.
At age 88, Sen. Daniel Inouye has a lot of accomplishments to his name. He’s president pro-tempore and the most senior member of the U.S. Senate, is the second longest serving U.S. senator in history (after Robert Byrd) and the highest-ranking Asian-American politician in U.S. history. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, he is the son of a Japanese immigrant father and a mother whose parents had also emigrated from Japan. The senator from Hawaii was the first Japanese-American to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives and later the first in the U.S. Senate. And he’s not quitting while he’s ahead. Inouye has already announced that he plans to run for a record tenth term for senator in 2016, when he will be 92 years old.
Add to that a distinguished military career that started when he was a medical volunteer at Pearl Harbor during the 1941 attack and ended with a Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for military valor. In between, Inouye enlisted in the army as soon as the U.S. Army dropped its ban on Japanese-Americans in 1943. Quickly promoted to sergeant, he saw action in Italy and France, where he advanced to second lieutenant and dodged a bullet that hit two silver dollars in his shirt pocket rather than his heart.
On April 21, 1945, while leading an assault in Italy against the Germans, Inouye was shot in the stomach, but proceeded to attack and destroy two machine gun nests before collapsing from blood loss. While crawling toward the final bunker, he was shot with a German rifle grenade that struck him on the right elbow, severing most of his arm that was holding his own primed grenade. He was able to transfer the live grenade from his useless right hand to his left and toss it into the bunker and destroy it. The remainder of Inouye’s mutilated right arm was later amputated.
When he left the Army in 1947, he received the Bronze Star Medal and the Purple Heart. President Bill Clinton later upgraded Inouye’s Distinguished Service Cross to the Medal of Honor. (This was done alongside 19 other Nisei servicemen who were believed to have been denied proper recognition of their bravery due to their race). Inouye’s World War II service was featured prominently in the 2007 Ken Burns TV documentary The War.
Inouye’s first foray into politics came when he won a seat in the Hawaii Territorial Legislature in 1958 and then the U.S. House of Representatives as Hawaii’s first full member, taking office on the same date Hawaii became a state—August 21, 1959. He was re-elected in 1960.
In 1962, Inouye was elected to the U.S. Senate and has since served nine terms. He received national attention when he gave the keynote address at the turbulent 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and then as a member of the Senate Watergate Committee in the 1970s, whose investigations led to the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. Inouye also chaired a special committee from 1987 to 1989 on the Iran-Contra investigations of the 1980s, a political scandal under the administration of President Ronald Reagan.
In 2005, Inouye joined 14 other moderate senators, known as the Gang of 14, to forge an agreement that retained the Democrats’ power to filibuster a President George W. Bush judicial nominee only in an “extraordinary circumstance,” thus allowing for a vote by the full U.S. Senate of Bush’s appellate court nominees. In 2009, Inouye took over leadership of the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations after Senator Byrd resigned.
Source: Wikipedia
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