Galanter Has More Surgery; Her Campaign Role in Doubt

Los Angeles City Council candidate Ruth Galanter was in good condition after a second round of throat surgery for wounds inflicted in a nearly fatal knife attack in her home May 6, doctors at UCLA Medical Center said Monday.

Although her condition has steadily improved, doctors could not say whether Galanter will be able leave the hospital or rejoin her campaign, which is being conducted on her behalf by friends and supporters. Galanter, the challenger in the 6th District race, faces a June 2 runoff against City Council President Pat Russell.

“Doctors are optimistic about her recovery and they expect that she will be able to return to normal activities in the next few weeks. It is too early to predict a date for her discharge,” a hospital release said.

The prognosis means that Galanter enters the final two weeks of the race dependent on friends and supporters to answer questions about her health and about potentially damaging reports of her involvement in left-wing politics. These questions have begun to draw voter interest away from the issues of growth and development around which Galanter built her campaign against Russell.

Typical of the latest round of questions were those asked at a fund-raiser for Galanter Sunday. The people attending were primarily Westchester Republicans, a species of voter whose support could determine the outcome of the June 2 runoff election.

Among the questions asked were:

“How could anyone bounce back from an experience like that and run for office?”

“What are her feelings about Tom Hayden?”

“What is her relationship to the Venice Town Council?”

In reply, City Councilman Marvin Braude, who was representing Galanter, attempted to allay people’s anxieties about her condition and about her political affiliations. Braude, along with Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), are the two most prominent politicians to endorse Galanter. Councilman Ernani Bernardi is expected today to become the second member of the 15-member council to endorse Galanter.

Replying to questions about Hayden and the Venice Town Council, Braude described Galanter as “an independent person.”

“She is not part of his (Hayden’s) organization. She has no connection with him at all. Ruth is a very conservative person on taxes (and) on law and order. She’s her own person,” Braude said.

The 46-year-old Galanter was a classmate of Hayden at the University of Michigan, and said she has worked for some of the same political causes as Hayden in recent years.

An urban planner who has never sought elective office before, Galanter comes to the race with a reputation as an ardent environmentalist who has worked to preserve the California coast and to oppose big development in her district.

Although she was not well known, Galanter was able to build a viable candidacy on the strength of the growing anti-development movement.

The publicity surrounding the knife attack has made even more people aware of her, but the focus has shifted to her personal life, particularly her recovery from the assault.

Since the assault, during which she was stabbed in the neck, unofficial reports on the progress of her convalescence have varied widely.

Police and prosecutors, who are trying to build a case against her accused attacker, a 27-year-old neighbor with a history of drug use, say that Galanter has had great difficulty talking and was communicating mostly by writing notes. Members of her campaign staff, on the other hand, have insisted that Galanter is lucid, although they said her voice is raspy and that talking causes her some pain.

After Galanter’s surgery Monday, a source close to her campaign described the operation as “minor” and predicted that Galanter would be able to do some campaigning.

The day of the attack, Galanter underwent throat surgery for more than five hours. On Monday, the hospital said, she was operated on for less than an hour as doctors sought to strengthen her left vocal cord and “to augment her intake of food.”

Efforts by Russell

In the Russell campaign meanwhile, the City Council president has been working hard to exploit some of the concerns about Galanter and to turn public sympathy, aroused by the attack, into doubts about Galanter’s qualifications.

Over the weekend, her press secretary said, Russell distributed to voters copies of a letter written by a retired Los Angeles police official stating that “the irony of the attack on Galanter is that the leftist politics practiced by her and her leftist advisers would make it more difficult for law enforcement to do its overall job.”

In a telephone interview Sunday, retired Los Angeles Deputy Police Chief Daniel R. Sullivan, who commanded operations in the department’s West Bureau between 1978 and 1983, conceded that he “didn’t know Ruth Galanter from a hole in the wall.” Sullivan said he was basing his criticism of her on his experience with the Venice Town Council, a citizens’ group that has fought commercial real estate development in that community.

“The Venice Town Council would do nothing but complain about police services, always accusing us of harassment, the sort of thing you used to get from SDS types,” he said, referring to Students for a Democratic Society, a group that gained prominence in the 1960s for its opposition to the Vietnam War.

Galanter has said she was a member of the Venice Town Council but never belonged to SDS.