Cover Story
The Common Touch
President Kessai Note, the first commoner to serve as president of Marshall Islands, is an accidental politican
Kessai Note made history in early 2000 by becoming the first commoner to be elected president of the Marshall Islands, where traditional power remains strong and, until recently, there had been little change in a political environment once dominated by traditional leaders. Paradoxically, the man who led the popular groundswell for government reform in the new millennium launched his career in an almost accidental manner.
In 1977, he was petitioned by voters to run for the then-region wide Congress of Micronesia. Local political powers urged him instead to run for the Constitutional Convention that was just forming to draft the first Marshall Islands constitution. Note was working as a Trust Territory agricultural economist in the district center, Majuro, at the time.
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“I thought the Con-Con wasn’t a full-time job,” he said. “One session and it would be finished. So I said, OK, put my name in.’” Despite not having been on his home atoll of Ailinglaplap for 10 years, he won the election.
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The Con-Con ended up taking two years to complete. While in the Con-Con, the 27-year-old Note, just three years back from university training in Papua New Guinea, mingled with the country’s top leadership. “I saw that I could do the job,” he said, adding that his thinking about politics changed: “Why not? I can do it.”
A month-long trip to several remote outer islands during the first session of the Con-Con also had a profound impact on his future career. Note and Ruben R. Zackhras, then-Con-Con president and veteran politician, headed a team that held public meetings on far-flung and sparsely populated islands to get people’s reaction to the first draft of the new constitution.
“During the discussions, I found that I really related to people and could talk with them,” Note said. “I learned a lot from that trip — and about how little people knew (about political status options).”
Kessai Note was born on Ailinglaplap Atoll in 1950, the second oldest in a family of 10. At the time, U.S. administration of the Marshall Islands and the rest of Micronesia — known officially as the U.S. Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands — was just shifting from military to civilian control. Small inter-island freighters bearing trade goods and news from Majuro arrived only occasionally; life on Ailinglaplap was largely subsistence.
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While Note’s parents lived on the island of Aerok, he bounced around the atoll’s numerous inhabited islands, spending time with relatives at Jeh, Mejel, Jabwon and Woja. From the time he was old enough to swim, he was in the water spear fishing or on it sailing in outrigger canoes. His grandfather built canoes — some small, in the 13-foot range, some as large as 26-feet long — that they used for sailing within the atoll to fish and move about. Note, as he grew older, began learning the craft of building canoes from his older relatives.
He recalled those early years as a time of happiness and learning to be independent. Joining his friends fishing along the miles of reef flats at low tide, they lost track of time. “Sometimes, my parents would wonder if I was still alive and they’d send people out to look for me,” he remembers with a laugh. “We went fishing not because we needed to but because it was fun. It was like a game that we enjoyed.”
They would grab bits of plywood for makeshift surfboards and go surfing on the treacherous ocean side of the island, where the surf pounded the outer reef. “We’d get scratches all over,” he said. But the danger never deterred them. “Climbing coconut trees, sailing canoes, fishing: it makes you grow up — to prove yourself,” he said.
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But his parents decided it was time for school, so they dispatched relatives to bring the exuberant teenager back to Aerok, from where he was sent to urban Ebeye Island in 1965. “I’d never seen so many people in my life,” he said of his shock as an outer islander arriving on Ebeye, the growing bedroom community for the nearby Army Kwajalein missile testing range that at the time had a population of about 5,000. “I felt nervous and out of place on the streets of Ebeye.”
Note’s parents wanted him to become a preacher and sent him to Ebeye to attend Ebeye Christian Elementary School that was being run by Rev. Jude Samson, Note’s cousin. Samson, now the head of the United Church of Christ in the Marshall Islands, had at the time just returned from college and was recognized as one of the most educated Marshallese. “Jude was a role model for everyone,” Note said, adding that his parents “wanted me to become like Jude.”
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In fact, his family intended for him to stay with Samson and attend his mission school, but when Note arrived on Ebeye, Samson was off-island for an extended period, so he went to live with an aunt. He began attending Ebeye Public Elementary School and stayed there for the two years he was on Ebeye. Then it was to Marshall Islands High School in Majuro, from which he graduated in 1970 — after being president of the student body in his senior year.
Breaking up the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands — which at the time included Palau, the Northern Mariana Islands, what is now the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands — was simply “unthinkable,” Note recalled of people’s attitudes in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the winds of political change began sweeping Micronesia. An artificial creation of colonization, the Trust Territory could not hold up under the pressure of U.S. strategic interests in the Marshall Islands, Palau and the Marianas, and local desire for greater control of decision-making and budgets.
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But in the early 1970s, “the (American) High Commissioner was revered, even more than our own leaders,” Note observed. Leaders from the Northern Marianas were pushing for separate U.S. commonwealth status, while other islands in Micronesia were talking independence or an unusual status they called “free association” in the first, heady days of status talks with the U.S.
At the time, Note was trying to go to college. After high school graduation, he’d applied for scholarships offered by the Trust Territory (T.T.), the Congress of Micronesia, the Nitijela (Marshalls Parliament), and the Australian government — as well as applying to several U.S. universities, the T.T. nursing school on Saipan and the Micronesian Occupational College in Palau. He didn’t make the deadline for the fall semester, so went to work at a local business while hoping that one of the scholarship requests would bring him good news for January. In a story that is classically typical of Micronesia 30 years ago, one day in December, the Trust Territory’s district administrator representative showed up and said, “You’re going to (study in) Papua New Guinea. Here’s your ticket and your scholarship money.” Note was on a plane to Rabaul a week later. It took him more than a week to reach PNG — via Guam and Australia — his first time out of the country.
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He attended Vudal College for three years, where among other things he worked with local farmers, helping them get loans and start agriculture projects. Perhaps most significant, he was there just as PNG was emerging as an independent country, meeting and talking with prominent political leaders such as Michael Somare, Julius Chan and John Kaputin. In contrast to most Marshall Islanders — whose college education experiences were largely U.S.-focused — Note was in a country teeming with nationalist fervor and political debate.
Returning to Majuro in 1974, the islands were alive with political debate about separating from the rest of Micronesia. But Note didn’t get directly involved in the growing political movement for separation led by senator and paramount chief Amata Kabua. Instead, he got a job in the Trust Territory agriculture office in Majuro where he worked with outer island cooperatives and, as he recalls, produced numerous monthly, quarterly and annual reports for the T.T. administration on Saipan. The agriculture office was conveniently located just across the street from the Ajidrik Restaurant, a popular local haunt for key members of the separation movement — so Note kept abreast of developments despite a somewhat detached view from his T.T. job. And still, he points out, in spite of the increasing clamor for a separate political status for the Marshall Islands, it just seemed impossible to even consider the breakup of the Trust Territory.
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One day in the mid-1970s, Amata Kabua brought a visiting Australian businessman over to the agriculture office and asked Note if he could help the businessman set up a promotional display so that local businesses could see the products he was offering to provide. Note recalled this as the first time he had met the charismatic and powerful Kabua. At the time, Kabua was seen as a radical for his leadership in the Marshalls’ campaign for separation from the rest of Micronesia.
Note handled the Australian businessman’s product promotion. Several days later, Kabua returned, asking Note who he was and learning that his parents lived with Note’s on Ailinglaplap. That visit produced the first of Kabua’s requests to Note to join the separation campaign that was headquartered just down the street in the second floor offices above the Post Office.
A couple months later, the Marshall Islands Political Status Commission, which Kabua chaired, held a meeting for Marshallese college graduates at the Court House. Kabua and other members of the Commission presented their ideas and plans for future status of the Marshalls, negotiations with the U.S. and the Compact of Free Association.
Note remembered asking a lot of questions and talking about his experience in PNG. “I probably asked too many questions,” he said. “After the meeting, Amata came up to me and said, ‘you really have to come to work for us.’” But they went their separate ways, until Note’s election to the Con-Con in 1977.
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From that point on, Note was at the center of political action. “It was during the Con-Con that I began to see the possibilities of separate political status, and that it was a good thing after all,” he said.
“I have a lot of admiration for Amata Kabua. He was a visionary. He was a self-made man who taught himself.” A mentor to Note, Kabua taught him much about politics.
After the Con-Con wrapped up in 1979, Note was ready to get back to a job in the Trust Territory bureaucracy. But the mayor of Jabot asked him to run for the Nitijela in the first constitutional election. “I said OK, I’d do it if he got the required signatures on a petition,” Note said. “I hadn’t been to Jabot in 20 years but I was elected.” He hasn’t lost an election for Nitijela, serving in the Parliament for more than 22 years.
Kabua was the first president of the Marshall Islands, and named Note to his Cabinet from the start in 1979. Note handled Internal Affairs and Transportation and Communications portfolios until 1987, when Kabua tapped him as Speaker of the Nitijela, a post he held until his election as president in 2000.
Note was elected on — for the Marshalls — an unprecedented anti-corruption campaign platform. While the attempt to clean up the Marshalls’ financial management record has defined his first two years in office, two watershed events during his speakership in 1998 and 1999, when he locked horns with the majority party led by then-President Imata Kabua, catapulted him to viability as a future President.
In the first instance in 1998, he ruled that Kabua and two other Nitijela members could not vote on a measure to outlaw gambling because they had gambling interests. As a result of his move, legislation pushed by the local religious community passed, banning gambling. Kabua later sued him and Note’s decision was upheld by the courts. In August 1999, just three months before the national election, he sided with the opposition on a procedural question, allowing the first-ever vote of no confidence to be held by secret ballot. It precipitated a walkout by the majority party and the eventual intervention of the courts for the vote (which lost by one vote). Again he was sued and his decisions upheld by the courts.
Although Note in his characteristically modest way downplays the significance of his actions, they were a dramatic part of political developments that have changed the political landscape in the nation since the death of first President Amata Kabua in late 1996. Indeed, the election of a president who was not a traditional chief — as were the first two presidents — was unimaginable just half a dozen years ago.
But Note, again, sees his election in a different light. He prefers not to describe it as the demise of the iroij (chief) system, but a “result of people expressing democratic principles and wanting to exercise their rights within the Constitution. My election was a combination of several circumstances, including people not trusting the leaders at the time and a lot more educated Marshallese who have more liberal ideas. People are very nationalistic now and they want good government and good leaders. Whether I’m here or not, life in the Marshall Islands will continue to change.”
Adds Note: “Five-to-ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that someone like me from humble beginnings would be president. But it’s what people approved in the Constitution — that you don’t have to be an iroij to be president.”
Note is also as down-to-earth about what his legacy might be to this young country. “I’ve tried my best to deliver the best for the people,” says this soft-spoken leader who as a young man once was happy to do nothing but build and sail Marshallese canoes. “The satisfaction I have is that while I’ve been in government, I’ve given my best. After that, it’s up to people to decide what kind of president I am.”
Photos: Floyd K. Takeuchi
