We Need to Restore ‘60s Idealism, Not Enshrine ‘80s Greed

Richard Riordan’s campaign manager, the merchant banker William Wardlaw, says that he wishes to “mine the veins” of my 1960s radicalism during the mayor’s race.

Conservative commentators George Will, David Horowitz and Cal Thomas also have seen my campaign as an opportunity to vent their continuing resentment against the ‘60s.

If I’m an inkblot for everybody’s subconscious feelings about the ‘60s, fair enough. But what if the same standards were applied to all candidates? What about Riordan’s past? How are our different pasts reflected in the present?

I think my long involvement in human rights movements is a better qualification to be mayor of this diverse city than Riordan’s background in mergers and acquisitions. My “radical” belief in speaking truth to power is a positive asset in a time of widespread official deception and denial.

I was jailed with Martin Luther King Jr. on my 21st birthday. I stood in the honor guard over the coffin of Robert Kennedy. I helped carry the coffin of Cesar Chavez. I experienced all the hopes and dreams, despair and fury of the ‘60s and survived with my idealism dented but intact.

Sure, I fell into the “temptation to hatred,” as Albert Camus described it. But that bitterness stemmed from feeling abandoned personally and politically, not from a diabolical ambition to be subversive. My father disowned me for 15 years, and my government sent thousands of my generation to risk their lives for a lie. I’m genuinely sorry for the times my anger went out of control, but I have no regrets for opposing the hypocrisy of our times.

Richard Nixon indicted and scapegoated the “Chicago Seven” after his election in 1968 for the same reason that he earlier supported McCarthyism: because it was politically popular and it deflected blame for the nation’s troubles away from the government and onto the protesters.

As a community worker in Newark in 1965, I saw the nation’s choice as waging war in Vietnam or resurrecting our cities. I opposed the Vietnam War the year of the Watts riots precisely because it shifted our fiscal resources and moral attention away from making cities like Los Angeles more livable.

Which brings me to Riordan, a lifetime Republican who, like most Americans, presumably supported Nixon and Vietnam but has never felt public pressure to explain those choices. Apparently, a politician’s past support for Nixon and Vietnam is considered mainstream and not worth mentioning, while past opposition to Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate is still controversial and demands explanation.

During the ‘60s, when many Americans were alive with idealism, Riordan was an invisible man. Riordan strikes me as an archetypal conservative of the 1950s who, like my father, dreamed the American Dream and believed that whatever our government said was true. Riordan said nothing and did nothing about the war, racism or the environment.

Riordan had a prophetic dream of his own. In the early ‘60s, he began an autobiographical novel in which he was hired by a Howard Hughes-type figure to represent a corporate empire. He never finished the novel but became the character instead.

Unable to identify with ‘60s causes like peace, justice or simple good vibes, Riordan eventually found meaning in junk bonds. He built a personal fortune, at least in part with the financing of Drexel Burnham Lambert and Michael Milken, the securities dealer who later was imprisoned for fraud.

They performed numerous leveraged buyouts in the 1980s. When a Bayless supermarket deal in Arizona resulted in 3,000 layoffs, Riordan told an industry newsletter, “I’m not crying over it.” He also restructured Mattel, fired 250 employees and moved a plant to Mexico, then denied any involvement until forced to issue a correction.

Riordan was silent when Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez and the Berrigan brothers went to jail, but the investigation preceding Milken’s 1989 indictment led Riordan to write a letter to the editor in Milken’s defense.

Riordan supported other causes that ran against the temper of the ‘60s. He gave big money to right-to-life movements, including the legal foundation trying to overturn Roe vs. Wade. After the 1991 Rodney King beating, Riordan told Mayor Tom Bradley to “back off” in his quest to remove Riordan’s close ally, Police Chief Daryl Gates.

Nothing reveals Riordan’s anti-’60s sentiments more than his cochairmanship of the 1987 national conservative campaign to appoint Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Bork is so extreme his nomination was rejected by the Senate. Bork is obsessed with a conspiracy theory that all of today’s problems began with those pesky ‘60s activists and specifically with me.

Riordan sought to alter his image in preparation for the 1993 mayor’s race. In 1992, he dropped his membership in an all-white golf club. He hasn’t tried to criminalize abortion since then either. In 1997, three decades after the civil rights movement, Riordan opposed Proposition 209 as “too divisive,” while saying that he supported the measure’s goals.

If I am rooted in the ‘60s, isn’t Riordan rooted in the anti-’60s consciousness? Look at the record:

* He preaches law-and-order but is against a Los Angeles ordinance to stop the sale of ammunition clips that allow maniacs to spray hundreds of bullets at police and bystanders. His advisor James Q. Wilson says there are no root causes of crime, and therefore prevention programs are a waste of money.

* His television ads portray him as a “dollar-a-year” mayor, while his former law firm, Riordan & McKinzie, rakes in money from subway contracts, his properties near the site of a proposed downtown sports arena inflate in value and the state fines him $3,000 for benefiting from a City Hall renovation contract.

* Riordan says we can’t afford a “living wage” for the working poor. He showcases his charitable contributions while pursuing public policies that will make the poor poorer. On the other hand, Ross Perot’s company gets a $14.3-million contract to study downsizing the Department of Water and Power.

* Riordan hasn’t lowered fees or taxes for small businesses, even though the small business failure rate climbed by 11% last year. The Los Angeles economy is about merger-mania for the few and hardship for the many; there were a record 53,000 personal bankruptcies reported last year.

* Riordan proposed a $5,000 fee for homeowners who appeal zoning decisions in their neighborhoods. He lobbies against stronger air quality laws in an area where thousands die preventable deaths every year. He supported a federal amendment to end court-ordered sewage-treatment for Santa Monica Bay. His environmental affairs commissioner, Mark Armbruster, is the lobbyist for the Kajima conglomerate, which is trying to put a golf course in the Tujunga Wash.

* Riordan says he’s never solicited contributions from subway contractors and has returned any checks they’ve given. That’s a lie. For instance, he has received $20,000 from Tutor-Saliba, the contractor responsible for the too-thin tunnel walls.

* He is still carrying on with the Drexel junk bond kings, now renamed Apollo Advisors in Century City. Called “vulture capitalists” by the Wall Street Journal, Apollo is the biggest source of contributions to the mayor’s charter reform drive.

Behind the charitable smile, Riordan is a special-interest Republican politician, a pretender like the Wizard of Oz, a personification of the hidden government that has caused rising public suspicion and cynicism since the ‘60s.

With his Police Commission’s firing of Chief Willie Williams and his rejection of the “living wage,” Riordan threatens to plunge Los Angeles back into the same disorder and polarization that engulfed us in the ‘60s.

I want to restore the best of the ‘60s, when young people were romantic idealists, when King and Kennedy were alive, when urban reform movements were budding--the hopeful days that were destroyed by Nixon and Vietnam.

Richard Riordan wasn’t present in that past, and it’s not present in him now.