TOM HOUSTON : In Only a Year on the Job, Bradley’s Chief of Staff Is Credited With Creating Activist Image for Mayor

Jim Wood vividly remembers his first meeting with Tom Houston.

It was soon after Houston took the job as Mayor Tom Bradley’s chief of staff and one of two deputy mayors. Bradley had just asked all 175 city commissioners to resign, but said that he would reappoint about 30% of them. Wood, who had been a Community Redevelopment Agency board member since 1977, had been sweating it out to see whether he was going to be one of those kept. He had just heard that the mayor would reappoint him when he happened to meet Houston, the intense new man in City Hall who some said had spurred the massive turnover.

“Hi,” Wood said, smiling broadly and extending his hand to shake. “I’m Jim Wood. One of the survivors.”

Houston shook his hand, nodded sincerely and replied, “You mean you’re a survivor of the first cut.”

It may have been Houston’s own brand of humor, but Wood took it as a serious message. “It told me I was expected to do a job,” he said.

Makes His Point

Houston may not be a charmer but he gets his point across. As the mayor’s new on-staff political operative, he is the one that many say is the new image of Bradley--more aggressive, more visible, taking more calculated chances. Houston, 39, is often described as both bright and brash, and one co-worker describes the workaholic Houston as “a guy who always looks like he’s been tearing his hair out.”

In his job as chief of staff, Houston has--in less than a year--tightened the reins on aides and maneuvered through sometimes-petty office politics, including a reported frostiness between two top Bradley assistants.

An old friend says that Houston “approaches life in the same way he approached wrestling” as a youth. Conway Collis, a member of the state Board of Equalization, said: “When he was in high school in Missouri, he was a champion wrestler and performed far beyond his physical capacity because he was so tenacious.”

Bradley described Houston as someone “I have high regard for, one who will serve us well.” But beyond his ability to do a good job for the city, Houston, head of the state Fair Political Practices Commission under former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., has statewide experience and connections that would be valuable to Bradley if he decides to run for governor again next year.

Dramatic Differences

Political observers inside and outside City Hall have noticed the dramatic difference between Houston, who thrives on politics, and his predecessor, the low-key Ray Remy, who steered clear of politics.

“Tom Bradley had been on automatic pilot for years,” said one local elected official, considered a Bradley ally, who did not want to be named. “To take nothing away from Remy’s abilities, I think he underscored Bradley’s natural tendency to be an overly cautious politician. I think Houston brings him back to a more activist stance, which is where Bradley started.”

Political activism came early for Houston, but not the way most might expect for the Democrat. As a youth, Houston was a staunch Republican, walking precincts for Sen. Barry Goldwater when he ran against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. As a member of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps at Princeton in the mid-1960s, Houston was a member of the Ad Hoc Committee to Support the War.

While Houston was working in Heidelberg, West Germany, as a courier, his opinion about the Vietnam War changed. “I got turned off to the war,” he said, “when I saw the great disparity between what the commanding generals said and what the enlisted men said.”

From Princeton he went to Stanford Law School. While there he worked for California Chief Justice Rose Elizabeth Bird, who was then with the Santa Clara public defender’s office. Bird became instrumental in Houston’s career. He was her assistant when Bird was head of the state Agriculture and Services Agency and later helped fight an attempt to recall her after she became chief justice.

When the post at the Fair Political Practices Commission opened up in 1979, Brown tapped him for the job. Houston said that he and Brown were “extremely close for a time. . . . I really thought when I went to the FPPC I would go a couple of years and I’d be chief of staff for the governor.”

Not everyone agrees with that scenario. “I don’t know anyone who would have put Houston in that group of people closest to the governor,” said one former high-ranking Brown Administration member, who asked not to be identified. “But when you worked in the Brown Administration you had to think your job was important to justify the hours seven days a week.”

The Houston-Brown relationship suffered a permanent fissure in 1980 during what became known as “Computergate.” Brown was accused of using state funds to compile lists of his political supporters and install a computer mailing system to make use of the lists. The matter landed in Houston’s lap as chairman of the FPPC, which oversees compliance with campaign contribution reporting laws.

Report Critical

Eventually the commission--with Houston at the helm--released a lengthy report detailing how Brown staff members allegedly altered documents and took other actions to thwart the investigation. Later, the Sacramento district attorney’s office said that there was insufficient evidence for criminal prosecution.

Some touted Houston as courageous. Others said that Houston had no choice but to pursue the investigation or risk branding himself and the commission as pawns of Brown. The Computergate period was “painful emotionally. . . . It was like getting exiled to Siberia,” Houston said.

While he was still in charge of the nonpartisan FPPC, Houston served as one of many unofficial advisers to Bradley when he ran for governor, some close to Bradley have said. But Houston strongly denies any involvement with the first Bradley gubernatorial campaign.

When Remy resigned as deputy mayor to become president of the Greater Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, many of those around Bradley decided it was time to make some fundamental changes.

‘Too Much Like Tom’

“I think the very capable people on the staff are too much like Tom (Bradley),” said Paul Ziffren, the Century City attorney and Democratic elder statesman who is one of those close to the mayor. “You need people with ability to get out and talk about it (his record). A competent President has plenty of people to go out and talk about what he’s doing. He doesn’t have to do it.”

Ziffren’s wife, Mickey, helped provide a solution. As a member of the FPPC, she had come to respect Houston. She recommended Houston--then a Sacramento attorney in private practice--to Maureen Kindel, a Bradley confidante and president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

Another person close to Bradley agreed with the Ziffrens.

“I think the mayor saw a need for a change in the way he addressed himself out there,” said William Robertson, head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. “I think the move to go with Houston reflects that change in how he would present himself to the public. He needed, he felt, the astute guidance of someone like Tom Houston.”

Once hired, Houston walked into a staff filled with longtime, loyal Bradley aides, some still smarting from the failure of the 1982 gubernatorial campaign, when the mayor narrowly lost to Republican George Deukmejian.

Old Friends Separated

Recriminations separated old friends on the staff. A once-friendly relationship cooled between two of Bradley’s top aides--Philip Depoian, who was the mayor’s gubernatorial campaign manager, and Frances Savitch, said by friends to be critical of Depoian’s work on the campaign. Both are reluctant to talk about their apparent falling-out.

Second-guessing about the gubernatorial loss still goes on. One specific criticism has reshaped Bradley’s office. That is the feeling on the part of some advisers that state voters had no real sense of Bradley’s record, and longtime aides did not encourage him to trumpet the issues that might have helped the mayor.

Houston has personally increased the publicity on Bradley’s stands on issues, working closely with press secretary Ali Webb and scheduling secretary Linda Miller.

He also quickly ascertained the hot city issues and placed himself in the middle. For example, when he was first named deputy mayor, Houston said that he would have little to do with the proposed Metro Rail subway system. After reporters raised several questions about it, Houston said that he “may have some part to play.” And just a few months later he was speaking for the mayor, strongly defending Metro Rail.

‘Not a Gut Issue’

But Houston has said that Metro Rail is “not a gut issue” with voters. Some Bradley supporters have said that Houston has made an effort to distance the mayor from the project, which seems increasingly likely to die from lack of federal funding.

Houston also has played a supporting role in Bradley’s stepped-up stand in favor of campaign contribution limits. And he was the major architect behind the scenes last fall when the mayor, in Fresno and Los Angeles, criticized Deukmejian’s handling of toxic waste dumps.

“His (Houston’s) style is so different from Tom Bradley’s style, I might anticipate there might be problems,” Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus said. “Tom Bradley has managed to be in office for 12 years and avoid controversy. So when I see Tom Bradley taking something on, I see that as the influence of Tom Houston.”

His influence is not always welcomed. Some Bradley staffers resent the way he has restricted the number of people who can see the mayor.

Needs Time to Work

“Tom Houston is insisting that Tom Bradley’s door remain closed so that he has some time to go over . . . all the stuff he has to do,” said Doris (Dodo) Meyer, Bradley’s longtime San Fernando Valley coordinator.

She said that Houston asks area coordinators such as herself to report to him on their activities each week. “I understand some of the people were really offended,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea, frankly.”

“I expected that,” Houston said when told of the discontent. “I will do a summary of those reports and how I feel those people are performing and whether there should be a change in assignments.”

One person who worked with him at the FPPC said that Houston “displayed a certain arrogance that turned people off. . . . The lower-echelon people at the FPPC said Tom Houston worked there for four years and never talked to any of them.”

Lost in Thought

Collis--who works out regularly with Houston at a gym and who turned to attorney Houston when he ran into legal problems with the FPPC in 1983--said that his friend sometimes gets lost in thought. “When Tom focuses on something, his focus tends to be quite total,” Collis said. “I have seen him be non-responsive to a question and afterwards not even realizing it’s been asked.”

And Houston sometimes displays an offbeat sense of humor, such as the time he persuaded the mayor to pretend that he was going to set up a Tupperware display at one of his political parties.

“I got the mayor to tell (city protocol officer) Bee Lavery that Tupperware had agreed to sponsor the affair, so we were going to allow them to have a tasteful display and a two-minute presentation,” he recalled, smiling. “The mayor said all this with an absolute poker face, and she left the office aghast. We told her later that it was a put-on.”

Houston says he enjoys political life so much that he toyed with the idea of running for state superintendent of schools in 1982. He said that he would consider running for secretary of state if incumbent March Fong Eu “were out of it.”

“I think I’d enjoy being on the stump,” Houston said. “I think I’d be fairly good at it.”

He said that his biggest dream is to be “secretary of the Interior or (put) in charge of the EPA. You could do a lot if you had vision. It’d be a great way to cap off a career.”

BRADLEY’S KEY ADVISERS

In Mayor Tom Bradley’s office, the sign of influence is to be able to walk in and see him without an appointment. The cast varies from day to day, depending on the circumstances. But usually, these men and women, along with Deputy Mayor Tom Houston, are the staff members in the mayoral suite who walk in the most: