They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That...

In a democracy, and most particularly in this one, it is not considered good form for politicians to seem exceptional. Smart, sure. Successful, yes. Tough, maybe. But exceptional? Hey, who do they think they are!

Nowadays, it seems, we like our politicians to look neat and mediocre. We don’t like to think that, hiding under those $200 haircuts, there might be extraordinary people with outrageous qualities, because there may well be monstrous egos and appetites to match. Such character traits we would rather discover in histories of biographies written long after our “representatives” have safely passed away.

In Phillip Burton, John Jacobs has exhumed for us one such character. Important people have gone on record as believing he may have been the greatest of them all in his field. His impact on the life of this land is profound, and yet most Americans today would not recognize his name.

Unofficial master of the House of Representatives from Kennedy to Carter, California Rep. Phil Burton was a huge man with a tremendous amount of guts, any way you care to think about it. He was also endowed with an impressively adroit and calculating intellect.

But what really singled Burton out, we learn from these pages, were three other qualities rarely united in one person: He had a gargantuan appetite for work and success, matched only by his appetite for vodka and steak. His behavior, with friends and enemies alike, was usually obnoxious and sometimes downright disgusting. And, surprisingly, given his other traits, he was seemingly incorruptible, both financially and in his devotion to the common man.

Jacobs, a political editor and columnist for McClatchy Newspapers based at the Sacramento Bee, has done a prodigious job of bringing Burton’s life and accomplishments to light. By his own account he worked “exhaustively” through 45 cartons of Burton’s personal papers, and conducted about 400 interviews to disentangle the webs Burton wove, a necessary task because, unlike most politicians, Burton rarely advertised his successes. They depended for the most part on a spectacular talent for wheeling and dealing behind the scenes in rooms that he filled with the smoke from three packs of unfiltered Chesterfields a day.

Burton could afford this relative anonymity by having locked up not just his own San Francisco power base (with his brother, Assemblyman John Burton, and Assembly Speaker Willie Brown), but virtually the whole of political California. He was the acknowledged genius of reapportionment, at which he worked with demonic energy and a dazzling command of detail. The chits he accumulated from grateful politicians--whose tenure in office was thereby assured--lubricated the passage of legislation that was stunning in its scope, complexity and liberality.

As a California assemblyman from 1956 to 1964, he overcame great resistance to drive through a bill that was to govern California’s welfare system for decades. On Feb. 18, 1964, he began serving as a U.S. congressman, determined to effect similarly sweeping changes at the national level.

He was the driving force behind raising the minimum wage and extending it to 8 million more workers, including Cesar Chavez’s farm laborers. For tens of thousands of miners suffering from “black lung” and for their dependents, he won massive compensation, secured great improvements in their working conditions and told John Corcoran, the employers’ representative and president of Consolidated Coal: “If you don’t accept this, we’ll [expletive] socialize your industry.” A measure of the power that Burton projected is that Corcoran took the threat seriously.

He pushed through the bills establishing OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), ERISA (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act guaranteeing pension funds) and and SSI (Supplemental Security Income that provided monthly cash payments to more than 6 million aged, blind and disabled Americans). From small beginnings, he cobbled together a series of bills establishing the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, America’s largest urban park and pushed them through. And along the way, almost incidentally, he managed to bury the House Un-American Activities Committee with a most elegant ploy.

He never forgot why he was there.

“As far as he was concerned,” writes Jacobs, “poor people, workers and racial minorities needed all the help he could give them. Almost everybody else--especially corporate lobbyists who manipulate legislation for their client’s benefit--were his enemies by definition.”

As Burton himself put it in a rare but dramatic quote made in an interview with Joan Moody, a young reporter from National Parks and Conservation magazine: “I’ve got to put the squeeze on the cojones of the exploitive industries in my state. You’d be shocked how well they behave. . . . You have to learn how to terrorize the bastards. . . . They have no limits on their greed or their view of their own self-worth and power. . . . Do not make them figure how much more they’re going to get, but how much they’re going to lose. Most of my colleagues work it the other end: They kiss the asses of everyone.”

In his prologue, Jacobs writes: “I reasoned that if I could understand the nature of Burton’s political genius--how step by step he accomplished what he did--I might then communicate something important about how American politics works.”

In this respect “A Rage for Justice” proves Jacobs right. His accounts of Burton’s legislative campaigns are as instructive as they are entertaining, shining such a penetrating light on the hopes, fears and foibles of the principal players that they would make wonderful theater, but only with Burton in the starring role. Without his riveting presence, it would be a long, hard book.

It is Burton, pursued by his furies, that keeps the reader going, agape and aghast. He terrorizes his staff, hurls threats and curses at his legions of enemies, and hunts people down, grabbing them by the collar and screaming imprecations into their faces, spraying spittle over friend and foe alike. And yet we see many worthy men and women utterly devoted to him.

We see him again and again at tables, loading his platter with huge slabs of prime rib, spearing the chicken off his neighbor’s plate and eating corn on the cob, as his staffer, Richard Colon once said, “like a corn on the cob eating machine. . . . All of a sudden corn is flying all over. He’s got corn all over him! He’s got it all over his shirt; he’s in a short-sleeved shirt. He’s got it on his face. He’s got it in his hair.”

And the vodka: Stolichnaya by the tumbler, constantly, in extravagant amounts, enough to float a battleship. How can the man think at all, we wonder, let alone be, as so many insisted, the most creative congressman of his generation? How did he ever imagine that he could survive? He was forever working, sober or drunk, surrounded by people, wreathed in smoke, the Stoli tumbler in hand and always on top of the game.

Burton preserved, through his legislation, more wilderness and parkland than all previous congresses and presidents before him, yet the man was a living offense to environmentalism: He lived a block from his office, but never walked.

One of the most touching moments in the book describes how unnerved he became when he decided to spend a day alone in a rustic old lodge in the Grand Tetons, gazing at the mountain scenery he worked so hard to protect.

It was an experience he sought never to repeat. Yet he had a close and genuine friendship with Ansel Adams, for whom he all but stopped smoking for two days, saying, “But, thank God, he likes to drink.”

Burton came within one vote of being House majority leader. He lost to Jim Wright. When he died he had less than $1,000 in the bank. Never was there the slightest doubt of his integrity, and one of the story’s fascinating sideshows is the spectacle of supposedly more proper congressmen toppling in scandal and disgrace, from Wilbur Mills to Jim Wright.

Despite the blow to his ultimate ambition, Burton the unstoppable locomotive went barreling on down the track, enormously productive to the inevitable premature end at the age of 56. He carries Jacobs’ story beautifully right up to the moment of sudden death, where one is left wondering how such a driven and determined man could have come about. Jacobs offers clues in the first chapter, which is the weakest in the book, but Burton’s Rosebud eludes him, and the figure otherwise so amply fleshed out in the story remains a towering enigma.

Students of politics, whether Californian or congressional, will find this book a rich and satisfying resource. For others, it may require only a little patience before they become hooked, as I was, on a stupendous and original figure--they will learn more about real politics than they will acquire from a lifetime of following the news.

I emerged from it convinced that what we need now is not less, but better and more honest national government. Only at that level of power can the great private interests be checked and balanced. The central question remains, as always: how to free our legislators from temptation and make them tough enough to do the job.

Jacobs somewhat oversimplifies the changes that have thrown present-day politics into crisis, merely pointing out that today Burton would seem an anachronism. In fact, Burton’s example dramatizes the disappearance of the poll-free politician, making us wonder whether today’s chameleons, now so busily dismantling everything that he stood for, can make government work.