With six weeks to go in the primary election, I unceremoniously inherited his media campaign. I opened the morning newspaper, which announced its first poll results. My horse was behind by 36 points. Maybe this wasn't our year. And for sure, it wasn't going to be my day.
I saw John Waihee half an hour later. He was slouched in his chair, reading the paper. His forehead was so wrinkled you could have planted corn in it.
"Did you see this?" he asked, with the marked tone of no-joy-in-Mudville in his voice.
This was my moment to rise to the occasion. To cheerlead. To find the silver lining, dream the impossible dream.
"Well, chief, you know," I stammered, "you've still got the mana. You've always had the mana."
To this day, I cannot tell you what I meant. I was doing a tap dance at a funeral. This guy had mortgaged his only earthly possession (a condominium in Kalihi), had speechified in unmapped corners of the Hawaiian Islands and was about to get a public "okole" thumping.
"I know," he said. "But this time I think I stretched the mana too far." With that, he fell back into his chair and broke into laughter, as did I. It was the last time I saw him feel sorry for himself in the campaign.
Waihee's gift for viewing stress as a catalyst and for living life forwards is one of the reasons he was and always will be "chief" to me. The other is I'd worked for him for a while when he was lieutenant governor. I whittled the mouthful of a title down to "chief," first as a matter of convenience. Soon it defined a relationship. He was my leader, my chief. But I was the only one who called him that. I could say the word in a noisy room, and he would know who was calling.
The Hawaii gubernatorial election of 1986 was my moment in the dim spotlight of politics, because I knew John Waihee and how to help him win.
For we were kindred spirits, bonded by ironic differences and ambiguous similarities. I was from the East, had gone about as far west as you can go (Palau) without it becoming East, again. He was from Hawaii and had gone east to college in Michigan. He was a Honokaa Hawaiian and I was a New York Jew. But our value systems were shaped by loving mothers, maverick high school years, chaotic college life, a love for islander ways, relentless curiosity and a God-given gift for laughter.
BEING with him taught me new things about myself. Toward the end of his first term, Waihee was invited by the federal government to lead a delegation of American governors to Eastern Europe on a trade and goodwill mission. Our first day in Warsaw was spent with a roomful of former communists trying to invent a Polish private sector (other than the black market), followed by a meeting with Lech Walesa.
At 8:00 that night, there was a knock on my hotel room door. It was the chief, who told me to put my coat on because we were going for a ride - a little something he'd arranged. A Polish guide took us to the old ghetto, which warehoused Jews before and during World War II. It was an untouched remnant of the Holocaust, nothing but brick walls, darkness, and the sound of the guide's voice telling us about the Jewish resistance in Warsaw. And then there was only emptiness. I felt Waihee's arm around me and heard him say, "How about it, Chuck, got that roots thing working a little bit?" He had known how important it was to come to this place, even in the blackness of night.
I will let John Waihee write the book about his governorship. This column is about friendship. About living things defining and making full other living things. About yang & yin. About loyalty, empathy, compassion, forgiveness and love - emotions it takes more than one person to generate. And, most importantly, about those moments when two people push through the mist of their daily lives and find the mana in their laughter or their sorrow.
Because that's when you know you still got it.