Frizzelle, This Time, Is Not Ignored : Assemblyman’s Defense of Apartheid Has Everyone’s Attention

Long before he was elected to office, Republican Assemblyman Nolan Frizzelle of Orange County had earned a reputation for being outspoken and opinionated.

But Frizzelle, one of the Legislature’s most loquacious but unappreciated orators, says it seems at times that people simply are not listening to him.

“When he . . . raises that microphone, everybody goes, ‘Oh no. There he goes again,’ ” admitted one Assembly colleague who asked not to be identified.

Suddenly, however, Frizzelle, a tall, grandfatherly optometrist with sincere hazel eyes, has everyone’s attention.

People are listening, because the 64-year-old Huntington Beach lawmaker has become a defender of the South African apartheid system at a time when President Reagan and virtually every other elected official have called for an end to apartheid, or at least have mildly denounced it.

As a result, Democratic political strategists say they may launch a major effort next year to unseat Frizzelle in a district so solidly Republican that they would normally concede it.

While Orange County Republicans see little chance of a Democrat wresting away the seat Frizzelle first won in 1980, some fear that Frizzelle’s apartheid views may prove to be a fund-raising godsend for the opposition.

The silver-haired three-term lawmaker insists that he was misquoted and taken out of context in the first published accounts of his views on apartheid. But while Frizzelle says he has not taken a stance on apartheid, his comments about the system, under which 4.5 million whites control 22 million blacks, defend its origins and current purpose.

“In no way do I discriminate, nor do I approve of discrimination,” Frizzelle has said. “But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for a lot of variations in one part of the world or the other, depending on where they are in the evolutionary process.”

In an interview last week, Frizzelle said American newspapers and television networks have “twisted the motives” of South Africa’s white regime. South African blacks, often warring among themselves, are not yet capable of self-government, he said.

“I don’t think that the whites that are there are all bad,” Frizzelle said.

It is not the first time that published comments attributed to Frizzelle on race-related issues have earned him notoriety and embroilled him in controversy.

Two decades ago, Frizzelle, then president of the California Republican Assembly, angered members of the conservative organization with statements he reportedly made in support of a successful ballot initiative to overturn the state’s first open housing law.

Frizzelle was quoted as saying that the open housing law “violates the right of people to discriminate. . . . The Negro has a right to buy a house, but the white man has a right not to sell.”

Although the organization had endorsed the ballot initiative, which was overturned by the state and U. S. supreme courts in 1967, some members complained that Frizzelle’s statements went far beyond the organization’s viewpoint.

Frizzelle said those views, based on his interpretation of constitutional property rights, are unchanged. But it was others, not he, who made the 1964 initiative a race issue, he said.

Democratic Assemblyman Curtis R. Tucker of Inglewood said he finds Frizzelle’s supportive views on apartheid outlandish, but not at all surprising or out of character.

“I call him ‘The Professor’ and ‘The Pontificator,’ ” said Tucker, who chairs the Assembly Health Committee, of which Frizzelle is a member.

‘Rhetoric and Speechmaking’

“He just talks and talks and talks, and rarely knows what he is talking about,” Tucker said. “. . . Republicans have problems with him, too.”

“He (Frizzelle) is given to a great deal of rhetoric and speechmaking,” echoed Republican Assemblywoman Doris Allen of Cypress, usually among Frizzelle’s legislative allies. “It is very difficult to follow him sometimes.”

Indeed, Frizzelle has earned a reputation in Sacramento for long-windedness, with a penchant for going on and on in expressing his views and reciting purported facts to support them.

His harshest critics say he is lacking in intellect. His strongest supporters say he is so thorough in studying issues that he argues in intricate detail that is beyond the opposition’s ability to grasp.

“He goes into issues rather deeply,” said Dennis Catron, an Orange County GOP activist who has been one of Frizzelle’s strongest supporters. “Nolan is not the type to duck an issue. If someone asks him a question, he is not the type to say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

Moving Airport Terminal

Frizzelle’s ideas--such as moving the John Wayne Airport terminal to the opposite (Costa Mesa) side of the runway, or adding “dwarfs, the little people,” to a proposed affirmative-action plan on lottery concessions--are frequently dismissed out of hand by other public officials.

No matter which side he is on, Capitol lobbyists say that discussing bills with Frizzelle can be a trying experience.

“When I go into his office, I make my case and get out as fast as I can,” one Sacramento lobbyist said. “Otherwise, he’ll go into one of those long diatribes about what ought to be done--even if it is an issue he had never thought about before. . . . He’s amazing.”

Frizzelle says lobbyists who say such things about him are probably telling the truth. He grasps issues rather quickly, he said. And, when he views them in the context of his philosophies about constitutional government, he can form strong, though not inflexible, opinions rather quickly, he said.

But Frizzelle says he rarely makes public statements “until I’m relatively sure of my facts.”

Viewed as Outspoken

“I like not to pop off. . . . I learned by sad experience,” he said, “. . . that when you pop off without knowing what you are talking about, you are killing your own thesis.”

Frizzelle says he knows he is viewed as outspoken and somewhat talkative, “but I . . . consider that . . . a virtue.”

The real problem, he said, is that people who disagree with him, particularly Democratic leaders in Sacramento, often do not care to hear what he is saying.

Admitted Tucker: “Sometimes I just have to cut him off.”

Frizzelle said the situation in South Africa is one matter he has studied in detail. Most people, he said, simply do not understand it.

The widespread opposition in the United States to apartheid would not be nearly as great, he said, if people realized that it is the result of a religious movement that began more than 100 years ago because blacks “were looked upon as people to be loved, cared for and taught.”

Immigration Called Problem

“South Africa has really tried to treat those blacks . . . the way they want to be treated,” said Frizzelle, who added that immigration of blacks into the country is that nation’s biggest problem.

Frizzelle said the United Nations won’t recognize South Africa because the U.N. is “made up of a lot of nations that are basically Communist-controlled.” Communists, he said, are engaged in a “determined effort” to foster unrest and instability in South Africa, to make the nation ripe for takeover.

“I kind of hate to see our country go along with that,” Frizzelle said.

He said President Reagan, whom he has considered a close personal friend for more than 20 years, was yielding to political pressure when he banned the importation of South African gold Krugerrands earlier this year to punish the white-run Pretoria government.

“If the people understood it, if the educational institutions taught it accurately . . . if the news press reported it accurately, especially the visual press, the public would have a little more realistic understanding of the actual facts of the situation,” he said.

An Emotional Issue

“And people in this country . . . wouldn’t become as emotional about it,” Frizzelle added.

“I suppose if I read the tea leaves right,” said Democratic Assembly Speaker Willie Brown of San Francisco, joking about Frizzelle’s lack of clarity during a Capitol press conference last month, “Frizzelle has endorsed apartheid.”

Earlier this year, Frizzelle surprised some when he proposed that a specified share of lottery vendors should be dwarfs.

Frizzelle said he proposed it because Assemblyman Richard Alatorre (D-Los Angeles) and others were proposing that 30% of the lottery vendors be minority.

“I felt there were a lot of people out there who would be very well able to handle various facets of the lottery program who are not necessarily what you would define as minority, but who, in the job market, are specifically discriminated against,” Frizzelle said. “Among those were the dwarfs, the little people.

Stopped Pursuing Idea

“As an optometrist, I had a number of these individuals as patients and I grew to have quite a lot of respect for them.”

Frizzelle said he stopped pursuing the idea after it was rudely dismissed in the Democrat-controlled committee. But a source in the Assembly Republican Caucus said leaders of Frizzelle’s own party persuaded him to drop the proposal after hearing him talk about it in a radio interview.

“I still think it was a valid concept,” Frizzelle said last week.

Frizzelle admits that he has not sponsored much major legislation during his years in Sacramento.

“As a Republican, you cannot initiate a whole lot of legislation and be successful with it,” he explained.