AFTER THE RIOTS: REBUILDING THE COMMUNITY : NEWS ANALYSIS : Few of McCone Panel’s Ideas Were Carried Out : Watts: Some critics say the commission’s makeup and methodology were flawed. Still, several of its recommendations are regarded as valid, even innovative.

As a Commission, we are seriously concerned that the existing breach (between the general Los Angeles community and the ‘disadvantaged area ‘) if allowed to persist could in time split our society irretrievably. So serious and so explosive is the situation that unless it is checked, the August riots may seem by comparison to be only a curtain-raiser for what could blow up one day in the future. The McCone Commission on the Watts Riot, Dec. 6, 1965

Since Watts erupted 27 years ago, the McCone Commission study of riot-torn South-Central Los Angeles has stood as the standard reference of what went wrong and how to fix the ills that beset this depressed corner of urban America.

But in the aftermath of the recent riots--the nation’s worst civil disturbance this century--questions are being raised anew about the thrust of the commission’s work, its makeup and, ultimately, its effectiveness.

Although several of the commission’s recommendations are still seen as valid, even innovative, few actually have been carried out.

“On the whole, there was a failure of implementation and a failure of follow-through,” said Warren Christopher, the Los Angeles attorney who was vice chairman of the McCone Commission and last year chaired a comprehensive study of the Los Angeles Police Department after the beating of Rodney G. King.

For some critics, the failures went much deeper. They say the problem began at the outset when Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown called upon millionaire industrialist John A. McCone to lead the study. McCone’s style and attitudes, these critics said, shaped the commission’s work in a way that alienated many in the black community and led to skewed findings that undermined its stated mission.

Virtually all of its meetings were held behind closed doors under rigid security at a downtown office. The reports of knowledgeable social scientists frequently were ignored, and civil rights activists were portrayed more as precipitants of the riots than as participants in a movement to overcome what they viewed as centuries of injustice.

“Mr. McCone was the kind of guy who knew what caused it all before he started,” said Samuel L. Williams, a Los Angeles lawyer who was one of a few blacks on the commission’s staff. It was Williams who had pushed for the report’s prophetic warning that Watts could be a “curtain-raiser for what could blow up one day in the future.”

The commission’s report scoffed at widespread charges of police brutality, rejected calls for a civilian review board and warned that if criticism of the department persisted it could “reduce and perhaps destroy the effectiveness of law enforcement.”

Although it urged the department, which was only 4% black, to increase minority hiring, the commission rejected charges that Chief William H. Parker ran a racist department. This came just two years before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission castigated the department for insensitivity toward blacks, among other criticisms.

Still, the commission generated some recommendations that, if implemented, might have helped bridge the chasm between police and black neighborhoods that many believe was a contributing factor to the recent riots.

The report recommended strengthening the Police Commission and improving procedures for handling citizen complaints against the police, but failed to muster sufficient support to bring about the changes, in part, because it declined to issue concrete findings on police practices.

Big Job, Little Time

When the Christopher Commission was formed to investigate the LAPD after the King beating, that blue-ribbon panel had to grapple with many of the same problems that confronted the McCone Commission, Christopher said.

Christopher said his experiences on the McCone Commission shaped in a critical way his approach to guiding his panel last year, including holding open hearings in a variety of locales, relying much more on aggressive staff attorneys and independent experts and insisting on considerably more outreach to the clergy in low-income neighborhoods. The police panel also had a narrower and more defined focus.

Indeed, some of the McCone Commission’s shortcomings may have been attributable to the fact that it had so large a mission and so little time.

The commission was given 100 days to complete its report of what was at the time the most destructive incident of racial violence in U.S. history--34 deaths, 1,032 injured and $40 million in property damage. Brown secured $150,000 in state funds and a $150,000 Ford Foundation grant to finance the project.

Brown was on vacation in Greece when Watts exploded into violence. He returned swiftly and, on Aug. 24, 1965, a week after the riot had been quelled, announced his selection of eight “leading citizens” to find out what happened, analyze the riot’s causes and develop recommendations to prevent a recurrence of the “tragic disorders.”

Brown, a Democrat, already was under fire from conservatives for not dealing more harshly with student protesters at Berkeley the previous year and for vigorously supporting a state fair housing law that was overturned by California voters in a racially heated campaign in 1964. Looming on the horizon was a tough reelection battle in 1966.

The Commission’s Members

So, for commission chairman, Brown tapped a man with impeccable credentials in the white business world whose appointment would not precipitate a law-and-order backlash. McCone, a slender, wiry, 63-year-old millionaire, was chosen. Known as a man with “a slide-rule mind,” he was on the board of several of the nation’s largest corporations.

McCone had just stepped down as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. A Republican from San Marino, he belonged to a country club with no black members, and he had no connection to Los Angeles’ poor neighborhoods. (McCone died in 1991.)

At the start, many thought McCone would merely be a figurehead. But he was a dominating presence on the commission, which included two blacks and a woman, who was the last member selected.

In addition to McCone and Christopher, Brown tapped six others for the panel: Earl C. Broady, a conservative black Superior Court judge who had been a Los Angeles policeman for 16 years; Asa V. Call, a Republican insurance executive who was one of the most influential businessmen in Los Angeles; the Msgr. Charles S. Casassa, president of Loyola University; the Rev. James Edward Jones, the most liberal of the group and the second black to serve on the Los Angeles schools Board of Trustees; Dr. Sherman M. Mellinkoff, dean of the UCLA medical school, and Marlen E. Neumann, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the League of

Women Voters.

Only two of the eight members--Casassa and Jones--had specific experience in race relations.

Thomas R. Sheridan, a former federal prosecutor, was the general counsel and executive director. He declined to hire an independent expert on police practices, saying he knew enough about law enforcement to be the expert.

Other key decisions about how to operate the commission shed light on what went wrong.

“We decided not to have any open hearings,” McCone said later, “for the simple reason that emotions were running high, and open hearings would have produced nothing but a forum for extremes. . . .” That may have been the case, but according to many others, including the Rev. Jones, it tended to alienate the commission from those likely to be most affected by its findings.

Jones said the commission simply did not spend enough time in the affected areas to do its work properly.

Occasional informal meetings were held in field offices in South-Central Los Angeles, but there was considerable skepticism in the community about the value of attending the gatherings, according to Wardell Collins, vice chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality’s Los Angeles branch, who got into a shouting match with McCone at one of the closed hearings.

The skepticism of Watts residents about the sensitivity of commission members was exacerbated when Call showed up at one of the few public neighborhood gatherings at 103rd and Grape streets in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

‘A Spiral of Failure’

Despite various problems, the commission delivered its 88-page, illustrated report, much of it written by McCone, on schedule. The report said “the tinder-igniting incident” was “the arrest of a drunken Negro youth” by a Highway Patrolman on the evening of Aug. 11.

The violence was “not a race riot in the usual sense,” according to the commission. “What happened was an explosion--a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless violent protest. . . .”

Only 2% of the city’s black residents were involved in the riot, according to the report. Later studies by UCLA researchers, however, said the breadth of participation was really much greater.

The report concluded that there was no single cause for the rebellion. Rather, the commissioners said, it was “a spiral of failure” precipitated by “the economic and sociological conditions in our city that underlay the gathering anger which impelled the rioters to escalate the routine arrest of a drunken driver into six days of violence.”

The only person criticized by name in the report was Lt. Gov. Glenn M. Anderson, who was cited for not responding rapidly enough to Chief Parker’s request for assistance from the National Guard.

The report was heavily criticized by some civil rights groups when it was released and in three books that studied its work--”Prelude to Riot” by Paul Jacobs, “The Politics of Riot Commissions” by Anthony Platt and “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness” by Robert Conot.

The parts of the report that were best received, even by critics, were on education and transportation. The commission recommended that an “emergency literacy” program be set up in poor schools, that class sizes be reduced and that a publicly funded preschool program be set up for children age 3 and older in the city’s disadvantaged areas. Christopher said these recommendations helped pave the way for the Head Start program.

Overall, the commission’s major recommendations were in the areas of education, health care, employment, improved public transit and police. Small progress was made in several of these areas, but the only major accomplishment, according to most experts, was in the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. Ironically, the portion of the report calling for the new hospital in Watts and expansion of other county health facilities was only five paragraphs long--the report’s shortest segment. Within months, County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn persuaded his colleagues to establish the hospital and construction began in 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital opened in 1972.

“The hospital is a great beacon of light to the people of Watts,” despite recent criticism that it provides substandard care, Hahn said in an interview last week. The supervisor said he believes the goal of getting a hospital had been achieved, unlike many of the other McCone recommendations, because it was more narrowly focused.

Perhaps equally important was the fact that the call for a new hospital did not generate the resistance that met the police proposals, nor did it face the sort of obstacles in the way of the commission’s employment recommendations.

About 25,000 blacks and 25,000 Latinos were then unemployed in the Los Angeles area, according to the report. The commission said that a job-training and placement center should be opened in Watts through the combined efforts of blacks, employers, unions and government. An end to discrimination was urged and the report recommended state legislation requiring employers with more than 250 workers and all unions to report the racial composition of their work forces and membership annually to the State Fair Employment Practices Commission.

A special Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce program to secure 1,200 jobs for blacks in the months after the riots was praised. But the report expressed doubts about the massive jobs program proposed by Gov. Brown, noting that escalating costs for the Vietnam War meant tough sledding for the idea.

Unemployment

Perhaps most importantly, the report failed to take into account a landmark study of hard-core unemployment in the area by UCLA economist Paul Bullock.

Robert Blauner, a UC Berkeley sociologist, said shortly after the McCone report was published that it encouraged “a deceptive complacency” because it did not probe sufficiently into the depth and gravity of the problem, including the potential impact of technological developments on the availability for jobs for the unskilled.

“The recommendations are a mouse-sized solution to a lion-sized problem,” said Paul Schrade, then western regional director of the United Auto Workers.

“Probably the principal failure of implementation (of the report) is in the jobs area,” Christopher acknowledged in a recent interview. “That was the hardest, trying to give people in South-Central some stake so they don’t have this ‘nothing to lose’ philosophy. That involves them as well as the greater community.”

Rev. Jones, now 76, was so disheartened by the report that he refused to sign it and issued a brief dissent. In particular, he criticized the commission for comments that took civil rights leaders to task for inflaming discontent.

“I do not believe it is the function of this commission to put a lid on protest registered by those sweltering in ghettos of the urban areas of our country. . . . Protest against forces which reduce individuals to second-class citizens, political, cultural and psychological nonentities, are part of the celebrated American tradition. As long as an individual ‘stands outside looking in’ he is not part of that society; that society cannot say that he does not have a right to protest. . . .”

About the same time the McCone Commission was formed, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent a team of his own, headed by Deputy Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark, to do a similar study. The group’s report, according to one of the authors, painted an even bleaker picture of conditions in the riot zone and was much more critical of the police.

But Johnson, a Democrat, decided, in part because of McCone’s lobbying, not to release the report. Clark said he thought the President decided that releasing it would have engendered political controversy and hampered Great Society programs aimed at improving the lot of the impoverished.

Clark added: “Johnson was a keenly political creature and he believed riots are a loser. Nobody wins from a riot, so you’re better off if you can distance yourself from them.”

Two years later though, Johnson formed his own National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, generally known as the Kerner Commission, to examine the causes of riots that by 1967 had swept 150 cities. It issued a lengthy report urging massive government efforts to heal the cities.

Most of its recommendations ended up in the scrap heap, too, said David Ginsburg, the Kerner Commission’s executive director. Ginsburg said last week that the most trenchant observation ever made on riot commissions was offered by one of the Kerner Commission’s first witnesses--Kenneth B. Clark, an eminent black social scientist who had played a key role in the landmark school desegregation cases of the 1950s. Clark said:

“I read that report . . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of ‘35, the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of ‘43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot.

“I must again say in candor to you members of this commission--it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland--with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations and the same inaction.”