Moving On : Green Line Vote May Be Political Springboard That Has Eluded Catherine O’Neill

Catherine O’Neill is marching back and forth across the terrace, delivering bowls of luncheon salad to the table with a thud, quick-stepping back to the kitchen to grab the telephone.

Unsuspecting callers receive the imperative blast: “I’m Cathy O’Neill! Who’s speaking?” Even the miracle of a perfect California day merits but a terse accolade: “Heaven!”

A political crusader in the no-nonsense mode of Betty Friedan, O’Neill is focusing her considerable energy on marshaling forces for today’s vote on reconsideration of the Metro Green Line contract awarded to the Japanese firm Sumitomo Corp. of America.

In so doing, O’Neill created the ad hoc committee Citizens for Public Transportation in the Public Interest and is clocking the final crucial hours as the 11 members of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission ponder their decisions.

Amid mounting furor, the telephone is ringing furiously.

Supervisor Kenneth Hahn’s office has just called to say he’ll go with reconsideration.

Hahn is a longstanding commission member and supporter of the Sumitomo award. Says commission Chairman Ray Grabinski, who also originally voted for the Japanese firm: “This must rip Kenny’s heart out.”

O’Neill, however, is taking Hahn’s move with the impassive assurance of a jut-jawed field commander.

“(Mayor Tom) Bradley’s been calling Hahn to encourage him to stay pat,” she observes, driving home the importance of the victory.

Now she’s waiting for a call from Councilman Richard Alatorre, a Bradley appointee to the commission and an influential holdout.

The six votes needed to assure reconsideration are virtually in the bag, with many bets on unanimous approval. But, O’Neill declares, “you don’t let your guard down.”

Today’s tally is expected to be a dramatic reversal of the Dec. 18 commission vote to give the contract for Green Line cars to Sumitomo instead of to the American firm Morrison-Knudsen. A second vote in favor of automated driverless cars also may be forced today. Against the background of a deep recession, “Buy American” has become an increasingly convincing war cry for the counterattack. For O’Neill, however, the political opportunities raised by the rail contract go beyond the issue of today’s debate and the ensuing fallout.

After a decade away from Southern California, she has returned--full of what she terms “a civic surge”--to participate in the region’s politics. She has not yet defined the direction this surge will take; perhaps it will veer to education issues or to a role as a public policy commentator.

It also may mean a crack at the one thing she says she has missed in life--a seat in the state Legislature.

O’Neill, 49, ran for the state Senate on the Democratic ticket in 1972 and lost; two years later she was defeated in the primaries in a bid for the secretary of state’s office. Acknowledges Richard Reeves, the syndicated columnist and political analyst who is her second husband: “It may well be that it still eats at her.”

Already, watching her visibility rise throughout the Green Line brouhaha, some political observers are questioning her motives.

“Many people have taken this as an opportunity to seize the moment,” notes a beleaguered Grabinski, adding, “I’ve not seen the lady involved heavily before.”

According to well-placed Republican sources, pernicious rumors have variously linked O’Neill to lobbying for the losing American bidder, for organized labor or for an unnamed politico with high aspirations.

O’Neill firmly denies any such speculation and asserts, “We’re all clean beans”--with a budget of less than $1,000.

Her supporters concur, touting O’Neill as a savvy wielder of people power who whipped up the political storm virtually single-handedly.

“She’s been an unbelievable spark plug in rallying the public,” says John Phillips, a longtime social acquaintance of O’Neill and state chairman of Common Cause.

Phillips, an attorney for the public-interest consortium that has sued for a Century Freeway light-rail system, has offered powerful support for O’Neill’s citizen group.

“She’s the one who has really brought this to the surface and kept the pressure on,” he declares. Without her, he adds, “it would have sneaked by without a great deal of attention.”

Between telephone calls, O’Neill gives her version of events. Wearing a tailored skirt and a blouse with a bow tied primly at her neck, she sits on the terrace of her Pacific Palisades home overlooking an expanse of golf course.

O’Neill and Reeves moved back to Los Angeles last October after leaving for the East Coast 10 years earlier. During that time, she held various positions in what she categorizes as the international portion of her resume.

“I want to understand the world of my times,” she states broadly, enumerating how she earned a master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University, worked in Paris as public affairs director at the International Herald Tribune and served in Washington as a senior public affairs officer for the International Monetary Fund.

Three years ago she founded the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children under the auspices of a private volunteer agency, the International Rescue Committee, and through it established a women’s social service center in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Reeves, who declares himself “portable,” was meanwhile researching a book on the Administration of the late President John F. Kennedy.

Last fall both found themselves free of obligations and ready to return to California, which, they say, has been their intention. No sooner had they rented a house and gotten it furnished than she picked up the newspaper and read about the Sumitomo contract.

“She said, ‘Just look at this,’ ” Reeves recalls.

While he retreated to his second-floor office to write a newspaper column on the subject, O’Neill took to the telephone to gauge the political winds. She phoned her old pal Phillips and Ron Kennedy, head of the Los Angeles County Building Trades Council, started organizing her citizens committee and began a mail and phone campaign aimed at overturning the contract decision.

Both O’Neill and Reeves jumped on the emotional issue of keeping jobs in the region, expressing outrage that the commission had opted for experience over economics. While Morrison-Knudsen, which has primarily refurbished rail cars, had pledged to give 66% of its work to U.S. firms, Sumitomo, which built the cars for the Blue Line, had committed only 22%.

“It really made me nuts,” exclaims O’Neill. “Why should we spend more money (the Sumitomo bid was $5 million higher) to take jobs away from people?”

O’Neill made her pitch to the media, appearing on “The Michael Jackson Show,” “Good Morning America” and the premiere edition of KCET’s “Life & Times.” Meanwhile, politicians of both stripes were holding news conferences on the issue, and both Bradley and Grabinski were penning op-ed pieces.

If O’Neill’s motives have been questioned, her capabilities have not.

“She’s someone you’d want to have working with you,” says Greg Nelson, deputy to Republican city Councilman Joel Wachs and a co-member with O’Neill years ago on a Democratic platform committee.

“I perceived her as someone of tremendous substance,” Nelson adds, “as opposed to someone who would be running around power-brokering and putting deals together in smoke-filled rooms.”

She is also nothing if not assertive. “Catherine’s a pretty tough piece of business,” Reeves concedes, with O’Neill avowing, “I’m not shy; I know that.”

But there is an oddly vulnerable side to O’Neill. It is noticeable when, in full rhetorical charge against the enemy, she mildly asks her husband, “Hon, can you open the Pellegrino?” And it is striking when, describing her defeat in the state Senate race 20 years ago, she suddenly begins to cry, dabbing her eyes with a flowered napkin. At a time when few women were entering politics, O’Neill, an Irish Catholic mother of two, not only ran for office but also refused to stand against abortion. As a consequence, a pastoral letter was read in the pulpits of Roman Catholic churches in her district.

“It was very hurtful,” she says as she regains control.

Indeed, if O’Neill touts herself as “an inveterate advocate,” Reeves sees her religious upbringing as the bedrock of her activist nature.

“Beneath it all, she’s a nice little Catholic girl from Queens who wore white gloves to school,” he says. “For her experience and age, she’s probably the most idealistic person I’ve met.”

Reeves has recently framed a picture, now on the mantle, showing O’Neill and her son Conor in front of her mother’s cottage in Ireland. “Thatched roof, no heat, no running water,” O’Neill says, ticking off the lack of modern facilities and sounding much like a real estate agent in reverse gear.

O’Neill’s late father, like her mother an immigrant to the United States, spent his career as a conductor on the New York subway (“I have a lifetime interest in transportation,” O’Neill boasts). Her mother, 85 and still in Queens, worked in school cafeterias.

While at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, O’Neill, then known by her maiden name of Catherine Vesey, considered becoming a nun before marrying attorney Brian O’Neill and moving to Los Angeles in 1965.

Here, O’Neill moved quickly through a variety of fields, from social work to Democratic politics and, after her successive defeats, to co-founding a furniture business and writing editorials for KFWB. The full panoply of her eclectic career is displayed on her office wall.

Perhaps out of childhood frugality, O’Neill puts everything she does to use. At a New Year’s party this year, one guest remembers, she had everyone sum up the political events of 1991. Even the food is calculated, friends joke. Says Reeves with a laugh, “At the moment you walk out the door, you down the last glass of milk.”

Looking to the future, she talks in her rat-tat-tat style about the myriad social issues that need to be addressed.

For example, she says as she heads down the freeway to an afternoon meeting, “When you come to California, you have to buy car insurance, you have to buy health insurance, you have to buy life insurance. People simply can’t afford to do that.”

The culprits, she says, are the legislative leaders: “The major players in the Legislature are the major (campaign) donors; they funnel the money to the leadership, which then divvies it up to the people who support them. . . . I’m saying it’s corrupt. It’s a corrupt system.”

O’Neill swings off the freeway, heading toward the Hall of Administration. In a final push for reconsideration, she is meeting face-to-face with the deputies of supervisors who have not signaled their voting intentions.

Over a mirror-varnished conference table, she and Deane Dana’s deputy, Don Knabe, begin in droning, business-like tones--but as agreement for a regional builder for the rail cars becomes apparent, the rhetoric heats up.

Dana’s district extends through Long Beach, encompassing hard-hit aeronautics companies like Hughes Aircraft, which could spearhead any joint manufacturing effort. As the meeting reaches a crescendo, O’Neill grandly caps the discussion: “We want to see a Don Knabe plaque as the father of the new Southern California rail industry.”

In the car driving home, she is coaxed to chat more casually about her life. “We read the papers and talk about the papers,” she responds when asked what she and Reeves do to enjoy themselves.

Tonight she is going home to relax, “to have a drink,” she says, “and watch the news.”