The climax to Brown’s campaign of bad taste was his guilt-through-association commercial late in the campaign comparing me to an actor named John Wilkes Booth—Lincoln’s assassin.
On election day I defeated Brown by a margin of fifty-eight percent to forty-two percent.
Until that day, I don’t think it had dawned on him that a new wind was blowing in America. Brown and a few journalistic pundits attributed my victory to conservatives and “extremists.” In fact, analysis of the election returns showed that most of my support didn’t come from right wingers or even conservative Republicans, but from middle-of-the-road voters in both parties.
A lot has been written about college students and other young people who rebelled against society during the 1960s. But there was another, quieter revolution sweeping across the land during the same decade.
It was a rebellion of ordinary people. A generation of middle-class Americans who had worked hard to make something of their lives was growing mistrustful of a government that took an average of thirty-seven cents of every dollar they earned and still plunged deeper into debt every day.
There was a growing sense of helplessness and frustration across the country over a government that was becoming a separate force of its own, a master of the people, not the other way around.
People were growing resentful of bureaucrats whose first mission in life seemed to be protecting their own jobs by keeping expensive programs alive long after their usefulness had expired. They were losing respect for politicians who kept voting for open-ended welfare programs riddled with fraud and inefficiency that kept generation after generation of families dependent on the dole. And they were growing mistrustful of the self-appointed intellectual elite back in Washington who claimed to know better than the people of America did how to run their lives, their businesses, and their communities.
There was unrest in the country and it was spreading across the land like a prairie fire.
23
ON THE NOVEMBER EVENING IN 1966 when I learned I had been elected governor of California, three of our four children—Maureen, Mike, and Ron—joined Nancy and me at a victory celebration. Patti was away at school in Arizona and when we called and told her that I’d won, she started to cry. She was only fourteen, but as a child of the sixties she believed the antiestablishment rhetoric that was popular among members of her generation, and she let me know that she didn’t like having a member of the establishment in the family.
In different ways, the election changed the lives of everyone in our family that night.
As funny as it might seem now, when I gave in to the appeals to run for governor, I had never given much thought to the possibility I might win. All the emphasis had been on deciding whether to run and bringing the party back together. I’d figured, “Well, okay, I’ll run and help the party with the unity problem, then in November it will all be over.”
Well, it wasn’t over. I had less than two months to prepare for putting my ideas about government into practice. Nancy started packing for Sacramento and we put the ranch up for sale.
Although I may have been (as the papers put it) a “citizen politician” whom reporters liked to compare to the Jimmy Stewart character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I knew that reality often turned out to be a lot more complicated than Hollywood portrayed it, and I knew I had to do some quick homework about my new job before arriving in Sacramento. After years of criticizing government, I was about to stick my head into the lions’ den and the lions would be waiting for me.
Friends arranged for a veteran Republican legislator who’d spent years in Sacramento to brief me on the fine points of state government. I knew the basics regarding how laws were enacted in the capitol, but during a period of several days at our home, he told me about political life in Sacramento. We went over the rules and procedures and key players in the legislature, he outlined the budgetary processes and the statutory powers of the governor, and told me some of the things that would be expected of me as governor.
Meanwhile, I made a priority list of the things I wanted to accomplish in Sacramento. At the top of the list was my determination to attract a new kind of civil servant into state government.
During the campaign, I’d promised voters I wouldn’t appoint people who wanted jobs in government, but go after outstanding people outside government who didn’t want these jobs but could be persuaded, as I had been, to make a sacrifice and help put government back on course.
As I started forming my cabinet and filling other senior positions, I discovered a great many good people willing to do that, talented executives who believed as I did that the people deserved better from government than what they were getting.
Some of the business leaders who had initially persuaded me to run for governor—Holmes Tuttle, Henry Salvatori, Justin Dart, Leonard Firestone, Cy Rubel, and a handful of others who became known collectively as my “Kitchen Cabinet”—scoured the business world to identify top managers and administrators and then helped me persuade them to come to Sacramento and work for the state at a reduced salary. We brought scores of good people into the top jobs that way.
For me, finding these people and putting them to work was really the beginning of the realization of a dream. After years of preaching about what government should be, I had a chance to practice what I preached.
Shortly after the election, a national meeting of governors was scheduled and in a gesture I appreciated, Pat Brown suggested that I represent California instead of him because he would be leaving office soon.
At the conference, I got an idea from Governor Jim Rhodes of Ohio that proved priceless to me, not only in Sacramento but later in Washington. In an effort to streamline his state’s government, Governor Rhodes told me he had asked a group of top businessmen in Ohio to evaluate the operations of all state agencies and suggest ways to make them more efficient by applying modern business principles. These advisory panels had come back with hundreds of recommendations, he said.
Since I’d never seen a government agency that was run as efficiently or as economically as a well-run business, I thought it was a great idea and unashamedly borrowed it. I called some of the leading business people in California together at a luncheon, told them what I had in mind, and said, I’ll leave it up to you. You tell me how we can make our state government work better.”
Within a few days, they had put together an executive board to coordinate the project and a committee to raise money for administrative expenses, and then began studying the operations of every agency in the state government.
Meanwhile, I learned that things were even worse for California than I’d thought they were during the campaign. Through accounting sleight of hand, the previous administration had concealed the fact that the state government was broke.
One day, after he’d met with members of the outgoing administration, Caspar Weinberger, a San Francisco lawyer who was among the first people we brought from outside government to assist in the transition as director of finance, came to me and said: “The state’s spending more than a million dollars a day more than it’s taking in and it’s been doing that for a year.”
The Democrats in Sacramento had known about the mounting deficit for almost a year, but had concealed it by altering bookkeeping procedures that pushed the deficit into the subsequent fiscal year; then, they had gone on spending as extravagantly as always, while avoiding the embarrassment of an election-year tax increase.
Now suddenly the state faced its worst financial crisis since the Depression, and it was up to me, as the new governor, to end it.
In my inauguration speech on January 2, 1967, I informed Californians about the financial mess we had uncovered and promised to do everything I could, as soon as I could, to put the state’s financial house back in order.
“We are going to squeeze and cut and trim until we reduce the cost of government,” I said. “It won’t be easy and it won’t be pleasant.”
And it wasn’t.
; 24
FOR A WHILE, it seemed that every morning I walked into the capitol somebody was standing at my desk waiting to tell me about a new problem we hadn’t known about before.
It was as if they opened a new drawer at midnight every day and uncovered another crisis.
Cap Weinberger told me the state was facing a deficit of at least $200 million and within two weeks of my inauguration, I had to send a balanced budget to the legislature. Unlike the federal government, California had to have a balanced budget before the fiscal year began each July 1, and the job was up to me.
We imposed a hiring freeze and a ten percent budget cut at all state agencies and did other things we could to slow the hemorrhage of red ink; we sold Pat Brown’s state-owned airplane, slashed out-of-state travel by state employees, canceled several construction projects, and stopped buying new automobiles and trucks for the state. But more drastic steps than that were needed, and soon I found myself in an all-out war with the legislature.
Although California’s voters had ended eight years of Democratic leadership in the governor’s office, they had left the state assembly and state senate in Democratic hands—and the Democrats didn’t like a brand-new Republican governor telling them how to spend the taxpayers’ money.
With Pat Brown’s departure, the most powerful Democrat in Sacramento had become Jesse Unruh, the speaker of the assembly. Called “Big Daddy” because of his girth and reputation as a political manipulator of the smoke-filled-room variety, Unruh was a classic tax-and-spend liberal. He ruled the assembly with an iron hand and had close ties with the big-spending lobbyists who maneuvered for favors from the legislature. In the past, he had usually gotten his way with Pat Brown.
From my viewpoint, Unruh represented many of the things I thought were wrong with government. From his viewpoint, I must have seemed like an inexperienced and naive alien trying to force my way into what he and his cronies thought of as their private club, with an exclusive franchise for spending the taxpayers’ money.
Over time, I gained some grudging respect for Unruh’s skills as a legislative tactician—he was good at what he did—but he put partisanship above all else and never took prisoners.
I have often wondered about a paradox in American government: Every four years, voters elect a president and in California a governor, the only officeholders elected by all the people; then, the same people in their individual districts turn around and elect a legislature and congress that is often controlled by the opposing party, enabling it to prevent the president or governor from carrying out the things they elected him or her to do.
I know some people think this is good because they consider it as part of our system of checks and balances. Well, if that’s the case, why don’t we have a Republican legislature more often when we have a Democratic governor? Every ten years, after each census, the boundaries of our electoral districts are redrawn during the reapportionment process. And for most of the past half century, a single party—the Democrats—have been in power and they have used this power to draw the boundaries of electoral districts in such a blatantly partisan fashion that the districts seldom have reflected the real political sentiment in much of the nation. As a result, a lot of the effects of that prairie fire I’ve mentioned—the quiet revolution in which middle-class Americans have tried to regain control over their government—have been smothered by the outrageous machinations of incumbent legislators.
I don’t limit that to Democratic legislators.
Gerrymandering has been around a long time, but with modern computers, it has become a science as well as a political weapon. Incumbents of both parties are able to hold on to their office—and their power—by drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in ways that assure they will get reelected, circumventing the public will with crazy-quilt borders so convoluted that they make the gerrymandered districts of previous generations seem neat and symmetrical by comparison.
And I’m afraid many Republican incumbents have been all too willing to go along with Democratic reapportionment plans that disenfranchise voters in return for a “safe” district that assures their reelection.
Now that I had to govern California, it occurred to me there was something so basic about doing any job—call it common sense, if you will—that it didn’t take a lot of reflection on my part to decide how I was going to approach my new occupation.
First, I had to select the best people I could find for my administration—people whom I could rely on and trust; this we accomplished by going out and recruiting top people from the business world and elsewhere.
Then, I had to set policies and goals I wanted these people to accomplish and to do whatever I could to help them achieve these goals. It seemed like simple, basic, sound management policy to me. It worked for me in Sacramento and it worked for me later in Washington.
I’ve been criticized for what some people call a “hands off” management style. But I think the criticism has come from people who don’t understand how we operated.
I don’t believe a chief executive should supervise every detail of what goes on in his organization. The chief executive should set broad policy and general ground rules, tell people what he or she wants them to do, then let them do it; he should make himself (or herself) available, so that the members of his team can come to him if there is a problem. If there is, you can work on it together and, if necessary, fine-tune the policies. But I don’t think a chief executive should peer constantly over the shoulders of the people who are in charge of a project and tell them every few minutes what to do.
I think that’s the cornerstone of good management: Set clear goals and appoint good people to help you achieve them. As long as they are doing what you have in mind, don’t interfere, but if somebody drops the ball, intervene and make a change.
Of course, for chief executives to make intelligent decisions and good choices, they have to be well informed about what’s going on in their organization and the world around it.
As we began plowing into the problems we found in Sacramento, one of the first things I told the members of my cabinet was that when I had a decision to make, I wanted to hear all sides of the issue, but there was one thing I didn’t want to hear: the “political ramifications” of my choices.
“The minute you begin saying, ‘This is good or bad politically,’” I said, “you start compromising principle. The only consideration I want to hear is whether it is good or bad for the people.” I made the same statement at our first cabinet meeting in Washington.
Like a presidential cabinet, the governor’s cabinet was composed of specialists—the top people who headed the departments of finance, parks, employment, agriculture, and so forth.
As I later did in Washington, I told the cabinet members that I didn’t want them to speak up only on the matters that affected their own departments. They were all my advisors, I said, and I wanted to hear everything that each of them had to say about whatever topic we were considering, whether it involved their department or not, including any reservations they might have about a proposal; this gave me the opportunity to get opinions from a variety of perspectives, not only from the people who might be supporting a certain project or program.
Some people have suggested that both in Sacramento and in Washington my cabinet meetings resembled the meetings of a corporation’s board of directors. I suppose that’s true, but there was one difference: We never took a vote.
Everyone pitched in and was involved in the give and take of debate, but when the discussion was over, they all knew it was up to me and me alone to make the decision.
I learned a lot during those first few months in Sacramento. I’m sure Jesse Unruh, who wanted to be governor, and other Democratic legislators regarded my arrival in Sacramento as the beginning of a jousting match, with them determined to knock the novice from Hollywood out of the saddle.
It didn’t work out that way. But there were plenty of days in those first months when I had to hang on to my saddle p
retty tightly.
25
WHEN I ARRIVED IN SACRAMENTO it had been less than two years since a large portion of Los Angeles had gone up in smoke during the Watts riots. I wanted to understand more about the causes that had led to the rioting, heal the scars it had left, and assure that minorities had the same opportunities as every other Californian did.
To find out what was going on, I decided to visit families who lived in black neighborhoods around the state as well as the large Mexican-American barrio in East Los Angeles. I decided to keep the visits secret from reporters and never told anyone about them: I’d disappear for a few hours, travel incognito to private homes, and talk to the family to learn what was on their minds. Sometimes they invited neighbors or relatives and some of the meetings got so large that we had to move them to a school or neighborhood storefront.
One, of the first things I heard was a complaint that blacks weren’t being given a fair shot at jobs in state government. I looked into it and confirmed that virtually the only blacks employed by the state were janitors or those working in other menial positions, largely because state civil service tests were slanted against them.
Some blacks just hadn’t had the opportunity to get the same kind of schooling as other Californians. They were as capable as anyone else, but the tests were skewed to make it difficult for them to compete on an equal footing with whites for the better jobs, trapping them forever at the bottom of the ladder. We then changed the testing and job evaluation procedures to make sure that, in the future, everyone got an even break.
My visits, incidentally, gave me a new insight on the state bureaucracy. One black man told me he had been trying to help young men from welfare families in his community to find work, and he had taken a half dozen or so to a state employment assistance office to register for jobs.
An American Life Page 16