NEWS ANALYSIS : Gates Affair Stirs Nostalgia for ‘Elites’

With Los Angeles city government tied in knots over the fate of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and with scholars and activists alike arguing that the system needs an overhaul, a growing number of business and civic leaders are looking to the past for a way out of present difficulties.

Disappointment in Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council has bred a nostalgia for a time when a corporate elite, men like the late Asa Call, James Lin Beebe and John McCone virtually hand-picked public officials and dictated city policies in Los Angeles. Increasingly, the names of the old power brokers are being invoked by a downtown business establishment worried about its waning influence and concerned that a city beset by political factions will lose sight of common goals.

“The perception is of an almost total lack of leadership coming out of City Hall right now,” said lawyer and investor Richard Riordan. “The question is whether the private sector could get itself organized and play a beneficial role.”

As much or more than any other city in America, Los Angeles owes its existence to the chutzpah of self-appointed elites. The city’s harbor, its imported water, its transportation system, even the City Charter all are due to the efforts of unelected businessmen convinced that they knew what was best for Los Angeles.

Today, the notion of a corporate oligarchy calling the shots for a multiracial metropolis couldn’t be more unfashionable. Discussions of political reform in Los Angeles usually focus on making government more accessible to the ordinary citizen by enlarging the City Council or the County Board of Supervisors. In the current climate, elitism is an ugly word. The old elites are remembered less for their civic accomplishments than for their hostility toward organized labor, subsidized housing and public assistance for the poor.

But, in the midst of this zeal for more democracy, the notion of a handful of private citizens negotiating deals, pressuring public officials or settling feuds at City Hall has not lost all its savor. In a city that has not quite shed its historical distrust of professional politicians, the old frontier image of a few strong men putting things right still has its adherents.

Some observers express surprise that the current crisis of government has not sparked more involvement by civic leaders.

“Where are the elites?” asked political pollster Pat Caddell. “I would have thought by now there would have been a self-generated meeting of people determined to get things back on track.”

“We have no non-governmental vehicle that is broad-based, can turn on a dime and sees its mission as reacting to crises, and I think we need one,” said Jane Pisano, president of the 2,000 Partnership, an organization of top executives and university officials that offers recommendations on a range of local issues but stays out of politics.

Nor are white business and professional people the only ones receptive to the idea of an elite group of citizens influencing public policy.

“The idea of having a group of civic, business and community leaders coming together to focus on issues like the police chief and bringing pressure on politicians is something we really need,” said John Mack, president of the Urban League, an African-American civil rights organization.

“Of course, it couldn’t be set up the way it once was, a handful of white corporate executives,” Mack said. “You’d have to have various racial and ethnic groups represented. But I think it would work.”

Bill Hayling, a physician and the founding president of One Hundred Black Men, an African-American civic association, said he believes that a coalition of prominent people might have headed off the current crisis of leadership at City Hall. Pitting the mayor against the council and dividing the city into pro- and anti-Gates camps, the furor over the police chief erupted after the videotaped beating of Rodney G. King by a group of Los Angeles police officers.

“You’ve had a lot of groups shouting at each other over whether Gates ought to go or stay,” said Hayling, who says he thinks the police chief should step down. “I think if you’d had some kind of coalition, you might have pulled a lot of people together and found some sort of solution.”

Despite the bitter social divisions exposed by the King affair, black and white leaders believe the impetus for an effective coalition exists because all sides are afraid of the consequences of polarization. Besides the fear of another Watts riot, there is the prospect of the World-Class City becoming the Third World City--a place of extreme wealth and poverty abandonned by the middle class, where ethnic violence and political factionalism make government by consensus all but impossible.

“The Rodney King incident isn’t about police,” Riordan said. “It’s about the perceived oppression of the have-nots by the haves. If people agree on that point, I think a group could be formed around an agenda that has to do with jobs and education and economic opportunity--all the things that business cares about.”

Most discussions of leadership coalitions or citizen power brokers these days lead back to Riordan, a confidant of the mayor who plays golf with the police chief, serves on the Parks and Recreation Commission and has worked with black and Latino community leaders on a variety of educational and philanthropic projects.

Riordan’s wealth--reported to be about $100 million--his willingness to spend money on candidates and causes, and his appetite for political problem-solving invites comparison with power brokers of old such as Call, Beebe and McCone.

McCone headed the Atomic Energy Commission and the CIA before returning to Los Angeles and chairing a commission investigating the causes of the Watts riot.

Call, chief executive officer of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co., and Beebe, a partner in the downtown law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, were charter members of the Committee of 25, the last in a long line of civic associations to dictate policy at City Hall. In its heyday, a quarter of a century ago, the Committee of 25, composed of white male business executives, was known variously as a civic benevolent association and a shadow government that sponsored candidates for mayor and police chief.

Now, Riordan and others are talking about reviving the Committee of 25, or something like it.

At the same time, Riordan and others admit that it wouldn’t be easy fashioning a like-minded group of civic leaders out of a society that is much more factional than it was when the original Committee of 25 presumed to speak in the best interests of Los Angeles.

“There are so many pockets of power, so many interest groups,” Riordan said.

The challenge, according to Riordan and others contemplating the idea of a new elite, is to put together a group of people that is both culturally varied and intellectually unified.

“I’m not overly confident you can have everything you want,” Riordan said. “Maybe, you limit the group to economic power. Too much emphasis on diversity and you can have political divisions within the group. Then, you are no longer seen as powerful, and power is the name of the game whether you like it or not.”

Riordan also said he wasn’t sure whether the modern executive would be willing or able to take on the political issues of the day.

“In the old days, a group like the Committee of 25 could hold a meeting and decide who the next mayor would be without worrying how the media or minority groups would react.”

(In fact, the Los Angeles Times editorial policy regularly echoed the sentiments of the downtown elites until 1969, when it broke ranks to support Tom Bradley’s mayoral campaign.)

“The city has changed so much, it’s so diverse I’m not sure whether today’s CEO has the confidence or competence to be responsive,” Riordan said.

Diversity poses the biggest challenge, agreed David R. Carpenter, who heads Transamerica Corp.’s Los Angeles-based life insurance division.

“It won’t work if it is seen as a fraternity of good old boys, but you won’t be able to get a consensus if it’s too diverse,” Carpenter said.

“Still, we ought to get downtown leaders reorganized in some meaningful fashion. Downtown leadership may not have the credibility it once did, but we shouldn’t give up trying to get it back.”

The business community is partly to blame for its reduced influence at City Hall. Many of the companies that furnished the leaders who influenced city policy--Pacific Mutual, the Lockheed Corp., and Carter Hawley Hale stores--have moved away or fallen on hard times. Foreign interests, headquartered oceans and continents away, own more than a quarter of downtown banks and businesses. As Los Angeles has grown, many local enterprises have become more preoccupied with their place in international markets than with their relationship to City Hall.

“Local businesses don’t quite have the stake in local politics as they used to,” said Steven Erie, a political scientist at UC San Diego who is writing a history of political power in Los Angeles.

Elites may be better at building things than at resolving explosive political disputes, said Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

“Private-sector efforts have done best in a culture of optimism where you are trying to put up a museum or a concert hall,” Weinstein said. “I don’t know that they do so well with the kind of complex, ethnically motivated problems the city now faces.”

Although there is no new Committee of 25 to test Weinstein’s theory, prominent individuals have tried unsuccessfully to bring an end to the City Hall strife over Gates’ future.

Riordan readily admits that his behind-the-scenes attempt at compromise failed. His plan would have allowed Gates to stay on and would have given the city Police Commission funds to conduct an investigation of the chief’s responsibility for the King beating.

Attorney Dan Garcia, whose ties to the mayor and talent for high-level negotiation made him a natural intervener in the crisis, resigned from the Police Commission convinced that no one--the mayor, the police chief or the City Council--was willing to compromise.

“When a political trouble-shooter like Dan Garcia throws up his hands, it makes you wonder just how successful the private sector can be anymore in Los Angeles,” said historian Kevin Starr.

For the better part of the Bradley era, business leaders have found a sympathetic ear at City Hall when it came to the issues they cared most about, such as taxation, transportation and environmental regulation. After he was elected mayor, Bradley quickly made the business Establishment a partner in the unusual coalition of organized labor, Southside blacks and Westside liberals that supported the mayor for so long.

Over the last few years, however, disaffection with the mayor has been growing downtown.

Many businessmen regard the campaign to remove Gates as only the latest sign of a tilt by the mayor’s office away from the centrist position that Bradley carefully cultivated during his first decade in office.

“Bradley’s strength has been that of a mediator and a conciliator between various parties,” said Xandra Kayden, a political scientist who chaired a special city commission on ethics in local government. “It is harder to play that role now that he is seen as a partisan.”

Because they believe the political middle ground has been abandoned at City Hall, some business leaders think there may be a place for a group that could be more representative than the Committee of 25, but just as powerful.

“Somebody has to stand in for the old Tom Bradley, the fellow that got us all together in the first place,” said one executive.

BACKGROUND

Los Angeles city leaders have been polarized and paralyzed by the March 3 beating of black motorist Rodney King by white police officers. Mayor Tom Bradley responded to the beating by calling for an independent commission to investigate police brutality while his chief deputy orchestrated a behind-the-scenes effort to force out Chief Daryl Gates. Amid mounting public controversy, most City Council members refused to take a position on whether Gates should quit or stay.

When Gates adamantly refused to quit, Bradley openly called for his resignation. Then, the Bradley-appointed police commission put the chief on paid administrative leave. Outraged, the City Council voted to reinstate Gates. A Superior Court judge upheld the council and Gates remains in office. But the commission has appealed.