I was interning for Honolulu Star-Bulletin Big Island correspondent Jack Bryan during the 1968 election when a tall, fair-haired man in his mid-20s entered the office with a bit of swagger, chewing an unlit cigar someone gave him.
It was my introduction to Tom Coffman, the Star- Bulletin’s new chief political writer who was in Hilo for a rally and looking to pump the veteran Bryan for knowledge.
I listened intently to an old master and an upcoming one display their chops.
“Smart boy,” Bryan said, noting Coffman was only a few years older than me.
When I moved to Honolulu the following year to try out as a reporter at the Star-Bulletin, I was surprised Coffman remembered me as he approached in welcome. Here I was, terrified I’d fail at a job I dearly coveted, and this alpha hotshot was treating me like a regular colleague.
“Act like you belong,” he said.
Coffman, who died Dec. 15 at 83, went on to become perhaps Hawaii’s most influential modern historian.
His books and documentary films told not only of the politics that shaped Hawaii, but the stories of its people and their cherished environment. He shined a probing light on injustices suffered by Native Hawaiians and heroic fights against prejudice by local Japanese and their allies.
His tenure as a newspaper journalist lit the passions and forged the meticulous reporting skills that enabled those masterpieces.
A native Kansan, Coffman arrived in Hawaii in 1965 seeking a newspaper career. By the time I met him three years later, he’d advanced from junior political reporter at the Advertiser to top gun at the then-larger Star-Bulletin.
His personal nature was often quiet and sensitive, but his appetite for the story was voracious.
Night after night, he was out covering speeches, stew-and-rice rallies, fundraisers and coffee hours — anywhere candidates and voters interacted.
By day, he roamed the Capitol and worked the phones, getting the latest from campaign managers, shadow advisers, business leaders, donors big and small, advertising consultants, pollsters — anyone who could help him understand the next election or the last.
Today, most political reporters more likely just call Colin Moore, the University of Hawaii political scientist, for analysis.
No knock on reporters, squeezed for time by shrinking staffs, or Moore, a solid academic who gives an honest take. But voters are poorer when most political analysis is filtered through one guy — no matter which news outlet you get it from — instead of reporters like Coffman at multiple outlets with deep expertise to do their own analysis. Academics called him.
Covering politics that way put Coffman in position to write his first and best-known book, “Catch a Wave,” on the landmark 1970 governor’s race involving John A. Burns, Thomas Gill and Samuel King. It’s still read as a basic source on Hawaii political history.
It started a rich legacy of works that advanced the understanding of Hawaii at home and abroad including “Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai‘i,” “The Island Edge of America: A Political History of Hawai‘i” and “Inclusion: How Hawai‘i Protected Japanese Americans from Mass Internment, Transformed Itself, and Changed America.”
Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.
