Biography Hawaiʻi; Harriet Bouslog; Interview with Mark Bernstein 3/15/02 #1

it all also been a handicap for the local racing sheet, something that probably you couldn't do these days. It was at the, you know, 10 years before he was the attorney general, he was pick and beat for the Hollywood racing for it. I first met Harriet in the late 60s in Los Angeles where she was visiting my mother, Florence Bernstein, who was a judge in Los Angeles, as well as an attorney and at that time a judge in the Superior Court in Los Angeles named Bob Kenney. Bob had been the attorney for the Hollywood 10 in their case before the Supreme Court and also had been Harriet's attorney in various matters in Honolulu and on the mainland. And so we met one day in Los Angeles and struck up a friendship that lasted till the end

of her life. And how did you end up here and as a question? Well, as I tell everyone, you know, who asked me, how in the world you wound up in Honolulu, I graduated from Hollywood High School in 1969 and I had gotten into Berkeley where my brother was and UCLA, which would meant I was living at home and Brown University and the University of Hawaii where I had never been. And I decided for no particular reason that I can put my finger on to come to Hawaii in the summer of 1969 instead of going to Brown, took me about five or six years before I realized why my father was so ecstatic and became so generous after that decision. But I came to Hawaii to go to the University of Hawaii undergraduate school and I would see Harriet occasionally during that time and then I went back to Los Angeles to go to law school in the mid-70s with the idea of coming back and hopefully working with Harriet. So in 1979, I did come back to Hawaii and Harriet offered me the opportunity to go into

practice with her and opportunity that I at least had the good sense to say yes to. And what was her situation at that time as far as her legal career? Well, at that point in time in the late 70s, the law firm that Harriet had been a part of, Bowslog Simons, was in the process of breaking up. The pioneer plaza had been built. The partners wanted to move into chrome and glass with a view as opposed to the rather funky bank of Bishop building where Harriet wanted to continue the practice. What was happening at that time both to the firm members and to Harriet was that they had achieved their life's goals in most respects. And so many of the members of the firm wanted to now reap the benefits of those achievements,

specifically Ed Nakamura, who was interested in becoming a judge and perhaps a justice on the Supreme Court, something that he was able to achieve. But the relationship between the members of the firm and Harriet was uneasy because the members of the firm, having achieved their goals, having grown up and aged, had become quite conservative and now wanted to become a part of the power structure itself. And that just wasn't Harriet. And of course, that caused Harriet a great deal of difficulty if not consternation in terms of what was her role in this society that she had contributed so much to towards the end of her professional career when she did not want to move into the power elite position. And it caused her a great deal of trouble because she wanted to continue to work for

the people. But the people, especially organized labor's members, had moved in terms of their need for services to needing a basic meat and potatoes type of lawyer. The time had come where middle class working people, they needed wills, they needed trust, they needed, you know, standard legal services, they no longer needed somebody to be able to go into all of the courts of the state and try to prevent them from being incarcerated because they wanted to earn enough money in a day to be able to eat. And so this was a very difficult struggle for Harriet. So what she had done was just continue to work for the clients that she had formed not only professional but also very strong personal relationships, which was generally Hawaiian families, Hawaiian working class families.

And so she worked with the Hawaiian community in attempts to try to get their land, to prevent their land from being taken from them by reason of adverse possession by big companies or developers. And that is what she was focused on in the last maybe 15, 20 years of her career as opposed to the both political and economic freedom issues that she had been involved in since she came here and came back here in 1946. I came to know Harriet in the late 60s through my mother Florence Bernstein who was a superior court judge and another L.A. superior court judge Bob Kenny. Bob had a quite a career had been the attorney general of the state of California under Earl Warren and had represented the Hollywood 10 and Harriet Bafslok. And so my mother asked me to come to lunch and I met Harriet and Bob at the same meeting.

And then in 1969 I graduated from Hollywood High School and had gotten into college at Berkeley in UCLA, Brown and the University of Hawaii. And even though I had never been to Hawaii and was not a surfer guy and not an ocean sports person, I decided to come to Hawaii in the summer of 1969. I met Harriet and would see her occasionally while I was at UH between 1969 and my graduation in 1973. And then I went back to the mainland to go to law school. The University of Hawaii law school was just about to start then. And in 1979 I came back to Hawaii and Harriet offered me the opportunity to come and become her partner and practice with her. And luckily I was smart enough to be able to say yes to that. So that's how I came to meet and become Harriet's partner.

What was her situation as far as her previous firm and the legal profession in 1979? In 1979 the firm had just recently broken up the Bafslok and Simon's firm. The firm had accomplished the principal goals that it set out to accomplish. Honolulu was changing, downtown Honolulu was changing. The partners wanted to move across the street to the brand new Pioneer Plaza as opposed to staying in the old Bank of Bishop building. And the partners in general wanted to reap the benefits, both financial and from a political power standpoint, political power that came with having represented the people of Hawaii who had now taken control of the fortunes of the state of Hawaii, which was the working people of Hawaii.

So what had occurred was there was a split in the firm, Meyer Simon's, her Takahashi, Ed Nakamura, they had all decided to move. And they wanted to, especially Ed, was wanted to become a judge and perhaps a justice of the Supreme Court. And that would not be easy with Harriet. I mean, Harriet had a very serious reputation which continued, frankly, to her death as a radical, as a supposed communist. And she was not the type of person that you could associate yourself with if you wanted to become appointed to the Supreme Court of the State of Hawaii. So I think it saddened Harriet, but I think she also understood that the goals of her partners were different than hers. She had no desire to become a political power in the State of Hawaii from an individual standpoint.

Her goals were to help the people that she thought were oppressed in achieving and obtaining a seat at the table of power. And by 1979, she had accomplished that goal. And it really was a very trying time for Harriet in terms of finding something satisfying to do in the face of her tremendous success. What Harriet found to do that she found satisfying was to help Hawaiians in terms of keeping their property in the face of adverse possession claims and other claims by major landowners, big five, or smaller types of corporations who were using adverse possession laws in order to take over the property of poor Hawaiians. And so Harriet found great satisfaction in representing a number of Hawaiian families in trying to maintain their land base.

What were her relations like at this time, formal or otherwise, with organized labor? Well, I mean Harriet is an icon really at the ILWU. And Harriet would never, in public, have any criticism of the ILWU because Harriet came from a time when you could not possibly show any type of divided front. The late 40s and 50s were a time where you had to absolutely demonstrate that everyone in the organization stood shoulder to shoulder. And that was Harriet's view even into the 70s and into the 80s. Yet she had a great deal of difficulty and an uneasy relationship with organized labor because organized labor had a great difficulty with its own self image. I mean, organized labor faced one of the most difficult challenges that any entity or

any person ever faces, which is having a tremendously important goal to achieve, working diligently to achieve that goal and then achieving the goal. What does someone do, what does organized labor do when it has achieved its goal? It won. The ILWU was here to help Hawaiian working people obtain a living wage, to permit organized labor to have a seat at the table with the big five to make it a big six. That goal was achieved. They were successful, in fact, in the state of Hawaii today. One would argue that if you were to have a big five, of course it doesn't exist anymore, that one of the entities would be organized labor. That was their goal. They won. Having won organized labor faced that terribly difficult challenge of trying to figure out

what do we do now that we've won. And that really, I think, defined the kind of relationship. There was obviously great respect in Aloha from the ILWU and organized labor towards Harriet. They understood and appreciated the work that she had done and the sacrifice that she had made on behalf of working people here in Hawaii. At the same time, as their goals changed, those goals didn't necessarily reflect Harriet's goals. And while they might have disagreements in private, Harriet would never allow that to spill out into public. But clearly it's difficult for somebody like Harriet with her background and her experiences to generate much emotion over the issues of whether or not somebody has 30 days off a year or 32, whether somebody has full dental coverage or only 80% dental coverage. Those issues are far less emotional to someone than the issue of whether or not somebody

would continue to be effectively kept as a slave on a plantation. Why did she ask you into the front? Well, I probably could make up some reason, but I really don't have a clue. I mean, Harriet, my mother were good friends. Politically, we probably were similar, but yet we had enough differences to where the conversation would never turn into, you're so right, Harriet, you're so right. We would fight, but we respected each other's viewpoints towards the various issues of the day. And I appreciated Harriet's business acumen, perhaps more than others. Harriet was an incredibly brilliant business person whose investments, you know, far exceeded the returns of certainly any of the so-called financial wizards of Hawaii. Harriet invested in companies that had more acres of land than they had shares of stock

available. And in that, she acquired a great deal of wealth as a result of that. Harriet also believed that you ought to invest locally. And while I asked her, you know, Harriet, do you think that out of loyalty to your state or to your country, she said, no, no, the reason I think you ought to invest locally is you ought to be able to watch the crooks walk down the street with your money. And that was her view that if you invested locally, you knew what was happening with the companies that you were investing in. You knew if they were trying to do something that was going to harm their shareholders or harm the place you lived in. On the other hand, if you invested in some oil company in Texas, you didn't have a clue as to what was going on, and your investment was far more prone to be impacted negatively by things you didn't know about and couldn't do anything about because you couldn't see them coming. The other hand, if you invest in your own community, you know what's going on, you're

able to react more quickly. So I think that, you know, the combination of just sort of having people in our background that were similar, her desire to have somebody different in the building because I, you know, I don't, you know, doubt that loneliness was a part of it in the sense of the people that she had been partners with were now gone. They had moved on to, you know, the Chrome and Glass and the seats of power, and she was by herself in her office. So I think that was one of the, those are the factors that caused her to make that unusually generous offer to me. How did she respond to our handle being sort of a public figure or icon? Well, I think she enjoyed it immensely. I mean, Harriet had a, you know, not a small-sized ego. And Harriet, you know, had enough intelligence to look back on her career and recognize the extent of her achievements.

I mean, it was not possible to look at Hawaii and not tell what had happened in the time between 1946 and 1966. So you know, she enjoyed it. She had no problem going out and being honored by anybody who wanted to honor her because the fact of the matter was, is that to Harriet, and I think to people who look at what was accomplished between 1946 and 1966, the accomplishments were massive. What was she like to work with on the day-to-day base? Oh, Harriet could be a pain in the butt. You know, Harriet was a perfectionist, someone who had no sense of time or of anything other than the work. I remember one day, you know, her coming into the office at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And then looking at me as I walked out the office at 7 p.m. and saying, where did the day go?

And that was just the way Harriet was. She was a perfectionist who wanted everything to be right. She wanted to know every single fact about the case. She wanted to have it effectively memorized. And so she was extremely difficult to work with from the standpoint that she wanted perfection. Anybody who wants perfection from you is a pain. Of course, after a while, you start to recognize the positive impact of having that kind of person to work with. But Harriet was tough. We had a good rapport in the ability for myself to play the good cop and Harriet to play the bad cop because Harriet, there was one thing Harriet didn't do well. In fact, there was something Harriet didn't do at all. And that was compromise. And so in this world of compromise, it was difficult at times, especially in the latter part of her career where compromise became the order of the day.

It's not, it's not terribly difficult to be unyielding on the issue of slavery. It is a different animal to be unyielding on the issue of whether or not you're client ought to get $17,200 or $18,900. What important do you think the scholarship initiative that she started was to earn that time? Extremely important. I think, you know, emotionally what Harriet was seeing occur before her very eyes was that nobody understood the history of Hawaii of the last 40 years. And to her, the entire purpose of the scholarship fund is not to give money to the children and grandchildren of IOW members. It's to force them to learn about what their parents and grandparents did, about what they lived through, about why we are what we are today, about the fact that in the state

of Hawaii, some 60 years ago, we had slavery and that people like Jack Hall and Harry Bridges and Harriet Baoslock and many others, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of other brave men and women ended slavery in Hawaii. And that Hawaii was taken from a racist, feudal community in which a very, very small minority of white people dominated the political and financial affairs of this wonderful place. And in a very short time, you know, the blink of an eye from a historical standpoint, bring this place into a place where working people controlled the government of the state of Hawaii. That occurred between 1946 and 1966. It's a remarkable accomplishment.

And she wanted the children of Hawaii, especially grandchildren, children, great grandchildren of those very brave, you know, workers, to understand what their parents and grandparents had done. How hard they had fought, what they had suffered and what they had accomplished. That was why it was so important to her. Giving out scholarships to UH is very, you know, it's all well and good and she is, you know, this, the scholarship fund has now, I think, over 100, you know, children that have had their education paid for, their tuition paid for by Harriet. But more importantly, again, is the knowledge they gained about their own history and their own selves. How would you situate her politically at the time you met at Louis? Well, I mean, you know, Harriet was a, well, let me go back and sort of give it some context. Harriet comes from strong, middle American progressive stock.

I guess in the, in the ways of today's descriptions, that would make you a, you know, social Democrat or socialist, but in American history, they were called progressives. They were people like Teddy Roosevelt. And Harriet came out of Indiana with a strong, progressive view. Her parents were educators and had an agrarian background as well. So you know, Harriet was always liberal. Harriet was always on the left side of things. And you know, that didn't change later on in her life. You know, Harriet was terribly pained by the terrible abuse heaped upon people by, you know, calling them liberal by the denigration of the, you know, of the fascist right who would like to make, you know, the progressives of middle America into some kind of, you

know, wild-eyed totalitarian, you know, communists. But the fact of the matter was, as Harriet was very proud of her basic social Democrat liberal viewpoint. You know, I would say Harriet's views and those of Franklin, Delano Roosevelt were, you know, pretty similar, although she probably leaned more towards Eleanor. And I think that continued throughout her entire life. I don't think it changed very much at all. Harriet had a tremendous capacity and a wonderful vision of what was right and what was wrong. Slavery was wrong. Living wages for working people was right. The politics of that weren't terribly relevant to her. But those people who supported the rights of working people, she supported those people who supported the rights of those who would keep them in chains effectively, she opposed.

That really never changed. You grew up with a woman lawyer in the judge. To what degree do you think Harriet's being a woman lawyer and a woman lawyer very early on affected the way that she practiced, the way that she carried herself, the way that she made a presence? Oh, it affected her greatly. And unlike many women, it affected Harriet in a positive sense. Harriet knew that because she was a woman, there were things she couldn't do. But Harriet also understood that because she was a woman, there are things she could do that no one else could. And she used her beauty, her presence, her sensuality, her sexuality to achieve what she wanted to achieve. And if the men were too stupid to understand that they were being used, well, that was tough luck for them.

Did you see that at the time you became a partner? Not much of that, okay? Not much of that. Although she still had her collection of red lipsticks, all of them red, one brighter than the next. Harriet liked to, you know, stroll into courtrooms and make a grand entrance and a great presence. And to talk in ways that made it very difficult for judges to criticize her or even get a word in edge wise.