Gov. Wilson Eulogizes Bos as a Master Campaigner and a ‘Magnificent Friend’

Gov. Pete Wilson on Thursday eulogized his longtime adviser, Otto Bos, as a master campaigner who helped orchestrate Wilson’s political rise and as a “magnificent friend” full of laughs, stories and “bad puns.”

Bos, 47, a former San Diego newspaper reporter who had worked for Wilson as a press secretary and campaign strategist for 14 years, died Sunday of a heart attack while playing in a soccer match.

“I’m not the easiest guy to work for, but Otto and I felt great ease with one another,” Wilson said at a service for Bos in Balboa Park. “We grew closer as we shared more,” including the “danger and excitement of three campaigns.”

“We liked the combat,” said Republican Wilson, who won the governorship in a close race against Democrat Dianne Feinstein last year after serving, with Bos on his staff, as a U.S. senator and San Diego mayor. In those years, the governor said, the two “forged a bond of uncommon respect, trust, loyalty and deepening affection.”

Wilson, choking back tears toward the end of the eulogy, referred to the active, exuberant Bos as “absolutely marvelous company . . . a data bank full of interesting facts, history, sports, music, geography--and of course, politics. Otto called it junk.”

The governor said he and his friend shared jokes--”in Otto’s case, shameless punster was a redundancy”--childhood memories and at times “a little Glenlivet (Scotch whiskey).”

Wilson said he “pushed aside--literally and figuratively--the budget of the great state of California” over which he is in tough negotiations with legislators as they try to close a huge deficit. “I had to, because the thoughts of Otto came flooding in unbidden but, like Otto, irresistible.”

The service, attended by hundreds packed into the open air part of the Old Globe Theatre, was held up for 45 minutes while dozens of officials, legislators and reporters flying from Sacramento were escorted from the airport by motorcycle officers. A switch in aircraft because of a mechanical problem had made the flight late.

Bob White, Wilson’s chief of staff, said, “You know Otto would have loved the (newspaper stories about the day’s events). The way this story played out was vintage Otto.”

An immigrant who realized the American Dream, Bos was born during World War II in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, where his family hid Jews in their attic and his father was imprisoned by the Germans before escaping. Bos was 13 when the family moved to this country, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area, where his father became a hotel doorman and his mother a housekeeper.

Bos graduated with a journalism degree from San Francisco State College, where he became an all-American soccer player and developed a lifelong love of the sport. In Vietnam, he served as a combat surgery technician with an Army MASH unit and received a Commendation Medal for valor in battlefield action.

Bos was a reporter for the San Diego Union, covering Wilson as mayor, when he was recruited in 1977 as Wilson’s press secretary.

Bos is survived by his wife, Florence; two sons, Daniel, 15, and Jacob, 8; a daughter, Susan, 6; his mother, Hendrika Bos, and a sister, Grace Bos.