Hedgecock’s Fall Leaves a Power Gap : Good Ol’ Boy Network Moves to Fill Vacuum

Tradition dictates that those seeking election to the City Council or mayor’s office here begin by asking the blessing of insiders of the clubby world of San Diego politics, the influential businessmen and Republican Party leaders who open the right doors and campaign pocketbooks with a few discreet telephone calls.

Roger Allan Hedgecock didn’t play by those rules.

With a flamboyant, abrasive style, the one-time rock music promoter startled the so-called good ol’ boys by seizing the mayor’s office in 1983 with a brand of emotional Populism unparalleled in recent San Diego history. Supporters and detractors alike agree that the 39-year-old mayor inspired his constituency with a fierce, personal vision for preventing what he called the “Los Angelization” of San Diego--invoking the specter of smog, clogged freeways and miles of parking lots.

Hedgecock’s 1983 mayoral campaign, some predicted at the time, marked a change in the way San Diego would govern itself as it evolves from a sleepy Navy town into a major city. His coalition of young professionals, neighborhood activists, environmentalists, labor union members, homosexuals, minorities and small businessmen became what supporters called an anti-Establishment “movement” to “open up City Hall” to those usually cut off from political power.

But the movement suffered a crucial blow last week when Hedgecock, convicted of 13 felony counts for conspiring to funnel thousands of dollars illegally into his 1983 campaign, and then lying on public financial statements to cover it up, resigned and was sentenced to one year in county custody.

Even before Hedgecock’s political demise was clinched, however, a behind-the-scenes movement began among some of San Diego’s conservative Republicans to recover the mayor’s office by grooming their ally, Councilman Bill Cleator, to become the mayoral successor.

Cleator--a furniture manufacturer whose trademark is wearing saddle shoes to council meetings--has represented the political antithesis of Hedgecock on development and environmental issues. He lost to Hedgecock in the 1983 primary race to fill the mayoral spot vacated by the election of Pete Wilson to the U.S. Senate.

Cleator now appears to be leading a pack of conservative hopefuls, who include Acting Mayor Ed Struiksma, in another run at the top elected position in the nation’s eighth largest city. What will happen to Hedgecock’s political base, meanwhile, is open to speculation.

“It’s a kick in the teeth, a real kick in the teeth,” Elizabeth Brafford, Hedgecock’s former press secretary, said of his fall. “People tend to deify the person who stands for the movement, but let’s be realistic . . . I think we’re being naive and overly dramatic to sound the death knell for the things that Roger stood for because he’s the figurehead.”

Others disagree.

“Roger was the thread that kept the patchwork quilt together,” said Lee Grissom, president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce. “They (groups in Hedgecock’s coalition) were just beginning to roll. Now, they are without a political guru, so to speak.”

Hedgecock’s intensity and his compelling, sometimes dark, charisma made him that guru. The son of a photographer, Hedgecock grew up in San Diego and bought his first house at the age of 17, in part with money he saved from a newspaper route. He worked his way through college promoting rock concerts and was valedictorian of his graduating class at Hastings College of Law in San Francisco.

Along the way, he became an environmentalist, a cause he melded with conservative Republican ideals to form a brand of politics reminiscent of the young Pete Wilson, who swept to the mayor’s post in 1971 as a reformer and preservationist.

Begins His Climb

Returning to San Diego from college in 1976, he began a climb up the political ladder that included eight successful campaigns for election.

Even before then-mayor Wilson was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1982, Hedgecock was planning his campaign for mayor.

The time was right for Hedgecock. While many California cities saw similar political establishments overthrown by an influx of new citizens and neighborhood interests in the 1960s and 1970s, that kind of change arrived late in San Diego, where the Republican guard remained entrenched as the city population burgeoned from 696,500 in 1970 to 929,300 in 1983.

Hedgecock declined to plug into a network that thrived on the approval of political and business heavyweights such as Gordon Luce, chairman of Great American First Savings Bank; Kim Fletcher, chairman of Home Federal S&L;, and Malin Burnham, president of John Burnham & Co., an insurance and real estate brokerage firm.

‘Access and Power’

“There had always been a certain group of people who had access and power in the city,” said former Hedgecock aide Michael McDade. “It had been virtually exclusively Republican, moneyed, connected to developing and banking interests.”

Burnham--yachtsman, bank founder, scion of a powerful San Diego family and contributor to Republican causes--referred to that network in a recent interview as the “good-ol’-boy Establishment.”

“I think that if the so-called Establishment, if they get to know a candidate and have faith and confidence in that candidate, and if they can pick up the telephone and get other people to understand their endorsement of the candidate, that type of a feel and confidence is much more sincere and much more down to earth . . .,” Burnham said.

Hedgecock, Burnham acknowledged, “went around us. . . . What he did do, which is very positive from a grass-roots basis, is he got a lot of common folks involved in the political process on a personal basis, licking stamps, going to rallies and putting up posters and falling into parades.”

Gets Convention Center

After winning election in May, 1983, Hedgecock quickly scored another political coup by using his coalition of political outcasts to convince voters in November, 1983, to approve the construction of a downtown, waterfront convention center. The project had been pushed for years by the downtown businessmen who form part of the Republican Establishment Hedgecock campaigned against, but had been repeatedly rejected by cost-conscious San Diego voters.

Hedgecock then turned his attention to his primary concern--guarding the environment against what he regarded as reckless development.

But in February, 1984, the J. David & Co. financial empire collapsed. More than $100 million in investor funds had disappeared in a classic “Ponzi scheme” that promised returns of as much as 40% and more through international currency trading. News stories soon revealed links between the ill-fated company and Hedgecock’s mayoral campaign. The state’s Fair Political Practices Commission and the San Diego County district attorney’s office launched investigations that culminated in a $1.2-million civil lawsuit and in felony indictments.

One measure of Hedgecock’s continuing political strength is that despite his indictment, he won reelection in 1984 over La Jolla businessman Dick Carlson, a political newcomer.

Shift Control

Less than a month after his Oct. 9 conviction, something of Hedgecock’s political legacy was preserved when voters adopted an initiative sponsored by environmentalists that shifted control over much of the city’s undeveloped area from the City Council to the electorate. The measure passed easily even though developers spent more than $600,000 trying to defeat it.

With Hedgecock’s ouster imminent, Burnham last month convened a meeting at his downtown office with Luce, Fletcher and a handful of other prominent conservatives to discuss who to back as Hedgecock’s successor, according to two sources at the meeting. Cleator emerged as their favorite.

At Cleator’s insistence, the group agreed not to push for his immediate appointment by the City Council, fearing that it would raise charges of a back-room deal. Instead they agreed to support him during an election, the sources said. The council will decide as early as Monday if and when a special election will be called.

McDade said the conservative Republicans are trying to “regain dominance in the city. And I think they will be doing everything they can to fragment Hedgecock’s coalition by dividing it into segments and appealing to parts of it. . . . I think Roger had a coalition that nobody else can pick up.”

Gays Not Encouraged

A spokesman for San Diego’s homosexual community said Hedgecock’s coalition is left waiting for another “dynamic” leader and “titular head.”

“I think it is possible that there will not be someone to fill his shoes, at least not right away,” said Brad Truax, a San Diego physician and past president of the San Diego Democratic Club, a gay-oriented political organization. “But if someone emerges a year down the road, the people who are part of the coalition will still be around. We’re still here.”

Some political consultants, politicians and businessmen believe that Hedgecock’s coalition will disintegrate, leaving politics to the customary San Diego power brokers.

“I don’t see anybody on the horizon that has that type of unique personality” to match Hedgecock’s, Burnham said. “I don’t want to compare Roger with the Kennedys, but that’s the type of flair he really had with the voters.

“I don’t know that we will get all the way back to where we were,” Burnham said about the operation of the Establishment, “but certainly in a community where we still like to think that politics is less than a full-time job, I think the old-fashioned way will still prevail.”