Prolific Righter Ferguson Keeps Firing Letter Bombs

Sometime this week, an official-looking letter from the state of California will find its way into the overflowing mail bins of the White House.

With any luck, the fact that it bears the Seal of the Golden State may impress an unsuspecting mail sorter to the point he will let the envelope go through unchecked to the desk of the President. And sometime during the day, the curious chief executive will pick up the letter to see what’s on the mind of a certain state assemblyman from Newport Beach, named Ferguson.

It won’t be a valentine, that’s for sure.

“During your campaign for the presidency, you gave the American people the most precise and unequivocal promise ever made by a presidential candidate; ‘Read my lips, no new taxes,’ ” the letter starts. “Your abrogation of that promise will cost our Republican Party and our candidates across America.

“We will lose elections this November because of it. It has also given glee and renewed vigor to our liberal opposition and to a media that has counted the days, hoping and waiting for you to break your promise . . . ,” it says. “I wish there was something encouraging I could say at this point but there isn’t anything.”

Zing! The commander in chief will become the latest target of one of the Legislature’s most notorious poison pens, wielded by Gil Ferguson.

Long known for his unblushing verbal frankness (during a recent gay rights demonstration, Ferguson called a number of protesters “faggots”), the former conservative newspaper publisher is also a prolific letter writer whose acerbic attacks and linguistic parries could easily earn him the reputation as the H.L. Mencken of the Legislature.

On state letterhead and at taxpayer expense, the six-year Republican assemblyman has put down the high and mighty. Besides Bush, he has unloaded on the chief justice of the United States, the Los Angeles police chief, Republican Party leaders, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate and the chairwoman of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.

It’s an old habit, this poison pen business, Ferguson admits.

Even when he was fighting for the pride of Old Glory during a 26-year Marine career, which spanned World War II to Vietnam, he couldn’t keep himself from dashing off a few pointed missives to those whom he considered to be his more weak-kneed superiors along the way.

One of his favorite targets: Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defense between 1961 and 1968, during the escalation of the Vietnam War.

“My career was saved several times by sergeant-majors who would come back to me and say, ‘Captain, I mislaid that letter you wrote to the commandant,’ ” Ferguson recalled, chuckling. “I’d say, ‘Thank God. Throw it away.’ ”

Now that he’s older and wiser and a public officeholder, however, the dapper, avuncular Ferguson hasn’t mellowed much. In an era when most politicians couch everything they say in equivocating phrases, the 67-year-old Ferguson is not afraid to put his conservative venom where his typewriter is.

The most recent letter to Bush is actually mild compared to the one he sent to the President last year in response to the firing of Harold Ezell, the western regional commissioner of immigration. The controversial Ezell, who raised hackles with his hard-core approach to stemming the tide of illegal immigrants, was relieved of his duties via fax machine.

“Such graceless indignity by your Administration reflects a lack of courage, integrity, loyalty and, last but certainly not least, it shows a lack of class,” Ferguson railed in a letter dated July 11.

“Unfortunately, the dismissal of this good man, in response to his detractors (who also detest our party), and the manner in which it was done, will give additional evidence to the pre-election charge that yours would be a ‘wimp’ administration,” it concludes.

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates received a Ferguson scorcher dated April 6, 1989, for publicly justifying the way his officers used special holds to arrest members of Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group that forms human barricades outside abortion clinics.

“Several times in my experiences in war, I noted that those men who were most reluctant to face an armed enemy, were always in the forefront of those who wanted to rough up the women and children when we entered a city or village,” Ferguson wrote Gates. “But never, in my long experience in the military, even in Vietnam, did I ever hear a senior officer begin to tell his men to abuse women and children.

“I really wish you would run for some political office so that the people would have the opportunity to repudiate you at the ballot box,” he wrote.

Ferguson used a variation of the wartime carnage analogy to take out after unsuccessful Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ed Zschau. In a letter dated December, 1987, Ferguson criticized Zschau’s decision to endorse a Republican who wished to challenge an incumbent congressman from the same party.

“It’s analogous to soldiers shooting their wounded buddies as they lay on the battlefields,” he wrote. “Having never witnessed such an atrocity, I can only imagine it would take a real cretin to do that, or to support another Republican in an effort to unseat an elected Republican whom the liberal media has wounded. A real Republican, like a real soldier, has a better idea of who the enemy is than you obviously do.”

In 1988, Ferguson rendered a two-page dissenting opinion of his own to a U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing local governments to tax landlords to pay for homeless shelters.

“I know you must have some esoteric reasoning that you can torture forth to justify your opinion, but to the average citizen, it sounds unfair. . . . The continuous onslaught of these seemingly ‘unfair’ decisions is beginning to cast a large doubt in the general public mind about justice in America,” wrote Ferguson.

In 1988, Ferguson also offered to Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp an interpretation of the state Constitution that would put liberal nemesis and Assembly Speaker Brown in the hoosegow for his consummate mastery of the political spoils system. Ferguson appealed for an investigation based on an article in the Constitution that makes it a felony for anyone to influence legislation by promises, rewards and intimidation.

“In the past eight years, Brown has initiated a pervasive system of rewards and punishment at taxpayers’ expense to bribe members of the Legislature to support his position of power by granting such favors as choice committee assignments, additional staff, larger office space and other rewards in an effort to influence their actions as members of the Legislature.

“There can be no question that the granting of such favors to supporters is an attempt at bribery, and that the withholding of such favors constitutes intimidation. . . . It is obvious that Brown has targeted certain legislators for such rewards because he believes they can be bought.”

But Ferguson’s application of the state Constitution to Brown is downright delicate compared to the way he has used it to bludgeon fellow Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica). At the behest of war veterans, Ferguson tried unsuccessfully in 1986 to get Hayden expelled from the Assembly for his anti-war activities in Vietnam.

Ferguson maintains that Hayden’s visits to Hanoi violated the constitutional prohibitions against anyone serving the state after supporting a foreign government during a time of hostilities.

“To millions of Americans, especially those who have fought and those who have lost loved ones, the fact that Tom Hayden has avoided justice and now sits in a place of honor and power is a deep pain that will never be relieved. It will not go away while he sits there,” Ferguson wrote in a lather to the Newport Beach Ensign newspaper, which dared at one time to editorialize in favor of the former student demonstration leader.

“For you to call this man a patriot and compare him to me or any other person who has served our country is an insult so gross as to be unfathomable. It reflects your total insensitivity to all patriotic Americans,” he wrote. “I demand an apology.”

More recently, Ferguson lashed back at those who criticized him for calling homosexual protesters “faggots” when they showed up at a local church where he and the Rev. Lou Sheldon were to speak.

“I customarily do not refer to homosexuals as faggots,” Ferguson wrote three months ago in response to a letter from Jean Forbath, chairwoman of the Orange County Human Relations Commission. “On the occasion in question, however, a group of militant ‘gay rights’ demonstrators confronted me as I arrived outside a church where I had been invited to speak. They chanted ‘We’re here and we’re queer and we won’t go away,’ and proceeded to spit on my car and shout the epithet of ‘bigot’ at me. . . .

“Hence, I have no intention of backing down and apologizing to people who disregard basic civility in dealing with someone who doesn’t happen to share their political orientation or regard homosexuals as a ‘minority’ entitled to special status.

“The vast majority of my constituents, and most Americans, couldn’t care less about what homosexuals do in their bedrooms, but find their practices to be deviant, abhorrent and morally reprehensible.

“We do not, however believe in persecuting them, and we certainly don’t condone violence against them. But we refuse to accept the notion that their sexual orientation is normal and equivalent to heterosexuality, and we resist being forced by government to associate with them or accept the public display of their behavior,” he wrote.

Not all of Ferguson’s letters are romping rebuttals. Take, for instance, the three-line zinger he shot back at a Laguna Hills man who had the temerity to send an expletive-filled poison pen letter of his own to Ferguson’s office.

“Your letter is insulting, inaccurate and demeaning to you. I don’t answer letters like this except to say, I hope you feel better soon,” Ferguson wrote.

That is more of a response than Ferguson receives most of the time. The assemblyman admits he rarely gets a response from his targets, except for the occasional form letter thanking him for taking the time to write.

In the case of the Orange County Human Relations Commission, which opened its dialogue with Ferguson by sending him a letter criticizing his use of the epithet for homosexuals, the decision not to continue the war of words was a tactical one.

“We felt by letting it drop where it was was the best human relations technique we could use,” Forbath said this week. “We thought a response to his letter would reinforce a conflict that we had hoped would die down.”

Added Zschau, now chief executive officer of a Silicon Valley disk-drive firm: “It’s hard to take anyone who writes in that way very seriously. I guess I’m more persuaded by facts and logic than expletives.”

Zschau felt strongly enough, though, that he responded to Ferguson’s criticism by pointing out indirectly that Ferguson was guilty of the same political betrayal because he supported a one-time presidential hopeful named Ronald Reagan, who dared challenge incumbent President Gerald Ford.

No matter. Ferguson says he will keep cranking out his letters, which average about one a week, to those who need written correction. Ferguson said he hopes the fact that he’s an assemblyman will help further his views.

“When you have a title, no matter what your title is, whether it is reporter, editorialist, legislator or king, it has additional weight,” said Ferguson. “More people will be impressed and say, ‘Maybe I should believe this.’ ”