by Joan Didion
The showdown took the form of placing opposing propositions, one co-sponsored by Zev Yaroslavsky and the other by an Occidental front calling itself the Los Angeles Public and Coastal Protection Committee, before the voters on the November 8, 1988, ballot. The Los Angeles Public and Coastal Protection Committee had some notable talent prepared to labor on its behalf. It had the support of Mayor Bradley. It would have, by the eve of the election, the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times. It had not only Armand Hammer’s own attorney, Arthur Groman, but also, and perhaps most importantly, Mickey Kantor, of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg, and Phillips, a law firm so deeply connected to Democratic power in California that most people believed Bradley to be backing the Occidental proposition not for Armand Hammer but for Manatt. It had Robert Shrum, of Doak & Shrum, who used to write speeches for Ted Kennedy but was now running campaigns in California. It had, above all, $7.3 million, $7.1 million of it provided directly by Occidental.
There was considerable opacity about this entire endeavor. In the first place, the wording of the Los Angeles Public and Coastal Protection Committee (or Occidental) proposition tended to equate a vote for drilling with a vote for more efficient crime fighting, for more intensive drug-busting, for better schools, and for the cleanup of toxic wastes, all of which were floated as part of Occidental’s dedication to public and coastal protection. In the second place, the players themselves had kept changing sides. On the side of the antidrilling proposition there was of course its coauthor, Zev Yaroslavsky, but Zev Yaroslavsky had backed Occidental when the drilling question came before the City Council in 1978. On the side of the Occidental proposition there was of course Tom Bradley, but Tom Bradley had first been elected mayor, in 1973, on an anti-Occidental platform, and in 1978 he had vetoed drilling on the Pacific Coast Highway site after the City Council approved it.
During the summer and fall of 1988, when the drilling and the antidrilling propositions were placed fairly insistently before the voters, there were seventeen operating oil fields around town, with tens of thousands of wells. There were more wells along the highways leading north and south. Oil was being pumped from the Beverly Hills High School campus. Oil was being pumped from the golf course at the Hillcrest Country Club. Oil was being pumped from the Twentieth Century-Fox lot. Off Carpinteria, south of Santa Barbara, oil was being pumped offshore, and even people who had expensive beach houses at Rincon del Mar had come to think of the rigs as not entirely unattractive features of the view—something a little mysterious out there in the mist, something a little Japanese on the horizon. In other words the drilling for and pumping of crude oil in Southern California had not historically carried much true political resonance, which made this battle of the propositions a largely symbolic, or “political”, confrontation, not entirely about oil drilling. That Zev Yaroslavsky won it—and won it spending only $2.8 million, some $4 million less than Occidental spent—seemed to many to suggest a certain discontent with the way things were going, a certain desire for change: the very desire for change on which Zev Yaroslavsky was planning, in the course of his campaign for the mayor’s office, to run.
There was, early on, considerable interest in this promised mayoralty race between Tom Bradley and Zev Yaroslavsky. Some saw the contest, and this was the way the Bradley people liked to present it, as a long-awaited confrontation between the rest of the city (Bradley) and the West Side (Yaroslavsky), which was well-off, heavily Jewish, and the only part of the city that visitors to Los Angeles normally saw. This scenario had in fact been laid out in the drilling battle, during which Occidental, by way of Mickey Kantor and Robert Shrum, introduced the notion that a vote for Occidental was a vote against “a few selfish people who don’t want their beach view obstructed”, against “elitists”, against, in other words, the West Side. “The euphemism they kept using here was that it was another ploy by the ‘rich Westsiders’ against the poor minorities and the blacks,” I was told by a deputy to Councilman Marvin Braude, who had co-authored the antidrilling proposition with Zev Yaroslavsky and in whose district Occidental’s Pacific Coast Highway property lay. “You always heard about ‘rich Westsiders’ in connection with anything we were doing. It was the euphemism for the Jews.”
Others saw the race, and this was increasingly the way the Yaroslavsky people liked to frame it, as a confrontation between the forces of unrestricted growth (developers, the oil business, Bradley) and the proponents of controlled, or “slow”, growth (environmentalists, the No Oil lobby, the West Side, Yaroslavsky). Neither version was long on nuance, and both tended to overlook facts that did not support the favored angles (Bradley had for years been the West Side’s own candidate, for example, and Yaroslavsky had himself broken bread with a developer or two), but the two scenarios, Yaroslavsky’s Greed v. Slow Growth and Bradley’s The People v. the West Side, continued to provide, for that handful of people in Los Angeles who actually followed city politics, a kind of narrative line. The election would fall, as these people saw it, to whoever told his story best, to whoever had the best tellers, the best fixers.
Only a few people in Los Angeles were believed to be able to fix things, whether the things to be fixed, or arranged, or managed, were labor problems or city permits or elections. There was the master of them all, Paul Ziffren, whose practice as a lawyer had often been indistinguishable from the practice of politics, but he was by the time of this race less active than he had once been. There was his son Kenneth Ziffren, who settled the Writers Guild of America strike in the summer of 1988. There was, operating in a slightly different arena, Sidney Korshak, who settled the Delano grape strike against Schenley in 1966. There was almost anybody at the Manatt office. There was Joseph Cerrell, a political consultant about whom it had been said, “You want to get elected to the judicial, you call him, a campaign can run you fifty thousand dollars.” There was Robert Shrum, who worked Alan Cranston’s last campaign for the Senate and Representative Richard Gephardt’s campaign in the 1988 presidential primaries. There were Michael Berman and Carl D’Agostino, of BAD Campaigns, Inc., who were considered direct mail (most of it negative) geniuses and were central to what was locally called “the Waxman-Berman machine”, the Democratic and quite specifically Jewish political organization built by Michael Berman; his brother, Representative Howard Berman; Representative Henry Waxman; and Representative Mel Levine, who was positioning himself to run for Alan Cranston’s Senate seat in 1992. It was Michael Berman who figured out how to send Howard Berman and Henry Waxman and Mel Levine to Congress in the first place. It was Michael Berman and Carl D’Agostino who continued to figure out how to elect Waxman-Berman candidates on the state and local levels.
These figures were not without a certain local glamour, and a considerable amount of the interest in this mayoralty race derived from the fact that Doak & Shrum—which, remember, had been part of Mickey Kantor’s team on the Occidental proposition—was working for Bradley, while Berman and D’Agostino, who had been hired by Yaroslavsky and Braude to run their antidrilling proposition, were backing Yaroslavsky. A mayoralty contest between Shrum and the Berman-D’Agostino firm, Bill Boyarsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times, could be “one of the great matchups of low-down campaigning”; in other words a chance, as I recall being told in June of 1988 by someone else, “for Berman and D’Agostino to knock off Doak & Shrum”.
Then something happened, nobody was saying quite how. One Friday in August of 1988, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Reich, got a phone call from a woman who refused to identify herself but said that she was sending him certain material prepared by BAD Campaigns, Inc. The material—delivered the following Monday with a typewritten and unsigned note reading, “You should be interested to see this. Government is bad enough without BAD”— consisted of three strategy memos addressed to Zev Yaroslavsky. One was dated March 29, 1988, another was dated May 4, 1988, and the third, headed “Things to Do”, was undated.
Berman and D’Agostino acknowledged that the two dated documents were early drafts of memos prepared by their office, but denied having written the undated memo, which, accordingly, was never printed by the Times. The memos that were printed, which Yaroslavsky charged had been stolen from a three-ring binder belonging to one of his aides, had, however, an immediately electrifying effect, not because they said anything that most interested people in Los Angeles did not know or believe but because they violated the local social contract by saying it out loud, and in the vernacular. The memos printed in the Times read, in part:
The reason why BAD thinks you [Yaroslavsky] can beat Bradley is: you’ve got fifty IQ-points on him (and that’s no compliment). . . . Just because you are more slow-growth than Bradley does not mean you can take anti-growth voters for granted . . . many are racially tolerant people who are strongly pulled to Bradley because of his height, skin color, and calm demeanor. They like voting for him—they feel less guilty about how little they used to pay their household help. . . .
Yaroslavsky’s vision [should be that] there is no reason on this earth why some flitty restaurateur should be allowed to build a hotel at the corner of Beverly and La Cienega. . . . The Yaroslavsky vision says “there is no reason on earth why anyone should be building more places to shop in West L. A.” , . . There is no reason for guilt-ridden liberals to vote out of office that fine, dignified “person of color” except that your Vision is total, unwavering and convincing. You want to hug every tree, stop every new building, end the traffic jams and clean up the Bay. . . .
To beat Bradley, you must be intensely, thoroughly and totally committed to your vision of L.A. . . . It is the way you overcome the racial tug many Jews and non-Jewish liberals feel toward Bradley. It is also the way you overcome the possible Republican preference for the conservative black over the Jewish kid friendly with the Waxman-Berman machine. . . .
Bradley can and will excite black voters to outvote the white electorate especially if there is a runoff where his mayoral office is seen as jeopardized by a perfidious Jew. . . .
What we do know is that Jewish wealth in Los Angeles is endless. That almost every Jewish person who meets you will like you and that asking for $2,000 is not an unreasonable request to people who are both wealthy and like you. . . .
The Yaroslavsky campaign becomes the United Jewish appeal. . . .
This was not, on the face of it, remarkable stuff. The language in the memos was widely described as “cynical”, but of course it was not: it was just the working shorthand of people who might even be said, on the evidence of what they wrote down, to have an idealized view of the system, people who noticed the small perfect deals and did not approve of them, or at any rate assumed that there was an electorate out there that did not approve of them. This may have been an erroneous assumption, a strategic miscalculation, but the idea that some of Yaroslavsky’s people might have miscalculated the electorate was not, for some people who had supported him and were now beginning to back away, the problem.
“Make a complete list of mainstream Jewish charities,” the March 29 memo had advised. “Find a person in each charity to slip us a list with name, address and phone numbers of $l,000-and-above contributors. . . . Zev begins dialing for dollars. . . . Make a list of 50 contributors to Zev who have not participated to their ability and who belong to every Jewish country club in the L. A. area. . . . Make a list of every studio, Hollywood PR firm and 100 top show business personalities in Jewish Los Angeles. . . . You cannot let Bradley become the chichi, in, campaign against the pushy Jew. ...”
It was this acknowledgment, even this insistence, that there were in Los Angeles not only Jewish voters but specifically Jewish interests, and Jewish money, that troubled many people, most particularly those very members of the West Side Jewish community on whose support the Yaroslavsky people were counting. What happened next was largely a matter of “perceptions”, of a very few people talking among themselves, as they were used to talking whenever there was something to be decided, some candidate or cause to be backed or not backed. The word “divisive” started coming up again and again. It would be, people were saying, a “divisive” campaign, even a “disastrous” campaign, a campaign that would “pit the blacks against the Jews”. There was, it was said, “already enough trouble”, trouble that had been simmering, as these people saw it, since at least 1985, when Tom Bradley’s Jewish supporters on the West Side had insisted that he denounce the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, and some black leaders had protested that Bradley should not be taking orders from the West Side. This issue of race, most people hastened to say, would never be raised by the candidates themselves. The problem would be, as Neil Sandberg of the American Jewish Committee put it to Bill Boyarsky of the Los Angeles Times, “undisciplined elements in both communities”. The problem would be, in other words, the candidates’ “people”.
Discussions were held. Many telephone calls were made. In December of 1988, a letter was drafted and signed by some of the most politically active people on the West Side. This letter called on Zev Yaroslavsky to back off, not to run, not to proceed on a course that the signers construed as an invitation, if not to open ethnic conflict, at least to a breaking apart of the coalition between the black and Jewish communities that had given the West Side its recent power over the old-line Los Angeles establishment—the downtown and San Marino money base, which was what people in Los Angeles meant when they referred to the California Club. On the sixth of January, citing a private poll that showed Bradley to be running far ahead, Zev Yaroslavsky announced that he would not run. The BAD memos, he said, had “played absolutely no role” in his decision to withdraw. The “fear of a divisive campaign”, he said, had “played no role on my part”.
This “fear of a divisive campaign”, and the attendant specter of the membership of the California Club invading City Hall, seemed on the face of it incorporeal, one of those received fears that sometimes overtake a community and redirect the course of its affairs. Still, the convergence of the BAD memos and the polarization implicit in the Occidental campaign had generated a considerable amount of what could only be described as class conflict. “Most of us have known for a long time that the environmentalists are . . . white, middle-class groups who have not really shown a lot of concern about the black community or black issues,” Maxine Waters, who represented part of south-central in the California State Assembly and was probably the most effective and visible black politician in Southern California, told Bill Boyarsky when he talked to her, after the publication of the BAD memos, about the drilling issue. “Yet we have continued to give support. ... I want to tell you I may very well support the oil drilling. I feel such a need to assert independence from this kind of crap, and I feel such a need for the black community not to be led on by someone else’s agenda and not even knowing what the agenda was.”
One afternoon in February of 1989 when I happened to be in City Hall seeing Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude, I asked what they made of the “divisive campaign” question. The apprehension, Yaroslavsky said, had been confined to “a very small group of people”, whose concern, as he saw it, had been “fueled by my neighbors here in the mayor’s office, who were trying to say we could have another Chicago, another Ed Koch”.
“Some of it started before your candidacy,” Marvin Braude said to him. “With the Farrakhan incident. That set the tone of it.”
“Let me tell you,” Zev Yaroslavsky said. “If there’s any reason why I would have run, it would have been to disprove that notion. Because nothing so offends me—politically and personally—as the notion that I, simply because I’m white or Jewish, don’t have the right to run against a fourth-term incumbent just because he happens to be black.”
Zev Yaroslavsky, at that point, was mounting a campaign to save his own council seat. He had put the mayoral campaign behind him. Still, it rankled. “Nothing I was talking about
had remotely to do with race,” he said. “It never would have been an issue, unless Bradley brought it up. But I must say they made every effort to put everything we did into a racial context. They tried to make the Oxy oil initiative racial. They tried to make Proposition U—which was our first slow-growth initiative—racial. They pitted rich against poor, white against black, West Side against South Side—”
“It wasn’t only Bradley,” Marvin Braude said, interrupting. “It was the people who were using this for their own selfish purposes. It was the developers. It was Occidental.”
“I think if the election had gone on . . .” Zev Yaroslavsky paused. “It doesn’t matter. At this point it’s speculative. But I think the mayor and his people, especially his people, were running a very risky strategy of trying to make race an issue. For their candidate’s benefit.”
During the week in February 1989 when I saw Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude, the Los Angeles Times Poll did a telephone sampling to determine local attitudes toward the city and its mayor. About 60 percent of those polled, the Times reported a few days later, under the headline “People Turn Pessimistic About Life in Los Angeles”, believed that the “quality of life” in Los Angeles had deteriorated during the last fifteen years. About 50 percent said that within the past year they had considered leaving Los Angeles, mainly for San Diego. Sixty-seven percent of those polled, however, believed that Tom Bradley, who had been mayor during this period when the quality of life had so deteriorated that many of them were thinking of moving to San Diego, had done a good job.