(HOST) Barak Obama isn’t the first Hawaiian-born, non-white candidate to make a serious bid for the presidency. Executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council and commentator Peter Gilbert has the story of the man who achieved that distinction 44 years ago.
(GILBERT) It was the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco. That was the year they nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater to run against President Lyndon Johnson.
Attending the convention was Senator Hiram Fong of Hawaii. Hawaii had been a state for just five years; Fong was Hawaii’s first Senator and the first Asian American to be elected to the US Senate. He served in the Senate from 1959 to 1977, the only Republican Senator Hawaii has ever had. The son of impoverished Chinese immigrants, Fong graduated from Harvard Law School and became a highly successful businessman. As Senator, he was both a strong advocate for civil rights and immigration reform, and a supporter of the Vietnam War and President Nixon right up to Nixon’s resignation.
And Fong was the first Asian American to run for his party’s nomination for President – indeed the only Asian American ever to seek the presidential nomination of the Republican Party – and the first Hawaiian-born person to run for President. (In 1972 Congresswoman Patsy Mink, a Japanese American also born in Hawaii, would seek the Democratic nomination for the presidency.)
In 1964, and again in 1968, Fong was a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. In ’64, he received the support of the delegations from Hawaii and Alaska, for a total of five votes toward the nomination. At the 1968 Republican convention, where Nixon won the nomination, Fong received 14 votes.
On the floor of the convention, a correspondent for one of the major television channels asked Senator Fong, who was part of the Hawaii delegation, how long he thought it would be before an Asian American became the Presidential nominee of a major party. Fong replied, "Never."
Taken aback and thinking that Fong had not understood the question, the newsman rephrased it. Fong replied, saying something like, "I understood the question. The answer is never."
Of course, Fong knew that Chinese Americans – indeed all Asian Americans – make up a small fraction of the American electorate. He also knew that being from Hawaii wouldn’t help him. Just recently, Cokie Roberts observed that a lot of Americans still look on Hawaii as "some foreign, exotic place," not a good vacation choice for a presidential candidate who’s trying to connect with middle-class Americans on an emotional, personal level – even if his grandmother does live there. For many people, Hawaii is still an unreal paradise that people visit on their honeymoon or a once-in-a-lifetime vacation.
Hiram Fong died four years ago at the age of 97. But one must think that Fong, a non-white and a man born and raised in Hawaii, would have found Senator Obama’s winning a major party’s presidential nomination a noteworthy moment in the on-going American story.