Sacramento strongman - Big Daddy Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics; Bill Boyarsky; University of California Press: 266 pp. $29.95
It's been a long time since Jesse M. "Big Daddy" Unruh was a household name in California politics. Unruh was, as the cliche goes, "the powerful speaker" of the state Assembly from 1961 to 1969, candidate for governor in 1970 -- he lost to then-Gov. Ronald Reagan by 500,000 votes -- and state treasurer from 1975 until his death in 1987.
So why would anyone want to write Unruh's biography now? Bill Boyarsky, a former Los Angeles Times reporter, columnist and editor, who covered him and the Legislature for 30 years, asked that same question of the late journalist John Jacobs, biographer of another political big daddy, Phillip Burton, the Democratic congressman best remembered as the "artist" who in 1981 drew California's modern political map.
Fortunately for us, Jacobs urged Boyarsky to take it on. Not only was Unruh a central player in the forging of California's great postwar highway, university and water systems and the creation of its progressive governmental institutions, he also was a man with a voracious appetite for food, drink, sex and power -- a larger-than-life personality that matched his political career. It's those two things combined that makes this story so compelling.
Boyarsky sheds a lot of light on California's less-than-sedate politics in the decades after World War II, providing a telling perspective on the present state of our political affairs. To paraphrase a bon mot attributed to Will Rogers: Things in California politics were never as good as they used to be.
Unruh, who grew up in hardscrabble sharecropper poverty in rural Texas -- an Okie in all but name -- was an angry, sometimes disagreeable man most of his life. He was angry particularly about the great gap between the privileged and the poor. But he also was a pragmatic politician who relished the game and played it hard, especially for the causes he embraced -- sometimes verging on political blackmail.
Paradoxically, this tough-guy populist, nicknamed for Tennessee Williams' bullying character in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," so strengthened the power of the state treasurer's office, never a sexy post, that he ended up hobnobbing with -- and cashing in on -- the very Wall Street bigwigs he was born to hate. California had a lot of money to invest and a lot of bonds to sell, and the treasurer was the key player who picked which brokers and bankers got the fat fees.
