A Return Trip to Power

Mervyn M. Dymally was California’s first black state senator, first and only black lieutenant governor and a six-term U.S. representative. When he retired from Congress in 1992 at age 65, an era seemed to be over.

But last November, his hair graying and his girth a bit wider, Dymally made a surprise comeback. At 76, he was elected to represent the same Compton-area Assembly district that started him on his political career 40 years ago.

“He may not be able to run as fast now, but he thinks faster,” said Assembly Speaker Herb Wesson, a fellow Democrat who was shooting hoops at elementary school playgrounds when Dymally won his first election to the Legislature.

In his first 30 years in California politics, Dymally could run as fast as anyone. A onetime janitor from Trinidad and a former Los Angeles teacher, he became a leader in the African American community, founded a political machine among city councils and school boards in south Los Angeles County and molded dozens of proteges.

He also was repeatedly the target of corruption investigations.

In the late 1970s, investigators probed allegations that leaders of a Long Beach church had conspired to pay the then-lieutenant governor $10,000 to shield them from a state Justice Department investigation. In the ‘80s, questions arose over his use of part of a $100,000 grant to a black university to finance a research institute he headed. In 1990, he came under scrutiny when it was learned that a diamond merchant had given $34,000 to a scholarship fund Dymally founded after the congressman softened his support for sanctions against South Africa.

He was never charged with a crime.

Today, he again traverses the Capitol with ease.

“Like the phoenix, I have risen,” Dymally declared in the soft lilt of his native West Indies.

His election in the 52nd Assembly District makes him the oldest member of the Legislature. At least 13 of his new Assembly colleagues were not born when Dymally cast his first vote.

But why, Wesson wondered, would Dymally want to return as an entry-level lawmaker?

“I said, ‘C’mon, you don’t really want to do this,’ ” Wesson said he told Dymally months ago. “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Herb, I really have a desire to serve.’ ”

Dymally said he ran also because he was alarmed at the decline of African American representation in the Legislature and feared the heavily Democratic district might not be represented by a black lawmaker, as it had been for years.

He said he had encouraged several African Americans to seek the seat but they had refused and urged him to run instead.

“I got to thinking: I’m doing all this community work pro bono, with no staff -- maybe I ought to take a crack at it,” Dymally recalled. He won a testy primary and cruised to victory in November.

But the fact that Dymally ran again for state office at 76 may say as much about Sacramento as it does about him. He is a member of a small but ambitious fraternity of politicians whose careers take them out of Sacramento but who return to a Capitol where a single vote can affect the health, safety, welfare and pocketbooks of 35 million Californians.

“Yes, of course, it is very seductive,” Dymally said of the Legislature. “You can accomplish things here. There is a sense of worthiness here. You can see the results of your work.”

There is another plus. If you are a legislator, you get paid very special attention. Staffers compete to hold your chair. You may be dull at home, but here you are the most captivating personality in the room. Lobbyists cozy up and match your stride as you walk to your next destination. Attendants park your state-leased car. Even a freshman can make a simple call and get an immediate response from a government bureaucrat.

During a recent conversation, Dymally abruptly stopped to cite an example: “Talk about political power -- in 15 minutes I’m going to break bread with the attorney general, man.”

In another example, he said that Caltrans had recently learned of his plans to seek funding for an overpass at Compton Boulevard and Willowbrook Avenue in Compton. A Caltrans crew “came immediately,” he said with satisfaction.

There are also some headaches. The budget shortfall threatens to cripple a Dymally proposal to start a research institute to study urban health issues, such as the increase of HIV among African American women and the rise of diabetes among Latinos.

Dymally said the budget problems this session may force him to press only for authorization of the institute, but to delay seeking money for it until the state’s fiscal condition improves. “I have this Spanish notion: Paciencia manana -- do tomorrow what you cannot do today,” he said.

It is an attitude borrowed from his early days in the Legislature, before term limits restricted members to a maximum of six years and forced them to accomplish agendas quickly. “Back in the old days, you didn’t think, ‘Gee, I’m going to be out of here shortly and need to rush,’ ” he said. “As a returning member, I realize life is going to go on, so just take it easy.”

He came to Sacramento in 1962 “with the notion that the Legislature and legislation were going to change the world,” he said in an interview. “It was an exciting time. I was young and feeling my sauce.” Soon, he learned that then-Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, known to his adversaries as Big Daddy, made all the decisions.

“You didn’t have a lot of democratic choices then,” Dymally said as he settled into his new Capitol office, where the only wall hangings were two poster-size black-and-white photos of him with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.

Today he is one of 32 freshmen in a chamber that has changed drastically from the 1960s. One-third of the 80 members are members of minorities. Partisanship has hardened. In 1962, Dymally said, he spent only $13,000 campaigning for a seat that paid $6,000 a year. Now, legislative races can cost millions of dollars and the salary is up to $99,000 a year, plus $125 a day in tax-free living expenses.

One thing hasn’t changed: the lobbyists. He had barely arrived when a bevy of hospital, teachers union and grocery chain representatives tested his “open door” policy. “Yeah, they all come. They’re all lined up,” he said.

This time around, Dymally said, he intends to pursue a relaxed “district-oriented, non-ideological and noncontroversial agenda,” topped by a doubling of the enrollment and expanding the medical school program of Drew University at the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles. Dymally teaches a course in health policy there.

So far, he said, he is encouraged by initial support for the proposal from officials of the University of California, who would have to sign off on the project, and the two GOP physicians in the Assembly. It is unclear how state budget constraints may affect this project.

These days, at private strategy meetings of Democrats, Dymally said, “I sit quietly in the corner and watch the players.” But Wesson said that Dymally’s 40 years’ worth of political savvy will be invaluable in a chamber where today’s veterans have only five or six years of experience.

Several, Wesson said, attended a meeting of Democratic Assembly candidates where Dymally became in instant attraction. “So many of them were in awe of him, it was almost, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ ” Wesson said.

“He’s opened so many doors. A lot of people have walked through those doors,” Wesson said.

These included such former Los Angeles area Democrats as the late Rep. Julian Dixon and state Sen. Bill Greene, state Sen. Teresa Hughes and Assemblywoman Gwen Moore, all African Americans, and former Sen. Art Torres and Richard Alatorre, a former assemblyman and city councilman of Los Angeles, both Latinos.

“I didn’t just go for blacks. I had my share of Latinos also,” Dymally said.

In 1966, Dymally was elected to the Senate, where he became the chamber’s first black member. He served as lieutenant governor with Gov. Jerry Brown from 1974 to 1978. In 1980, he won a seat in Congress, where he served until 1992 .

Throughout his careers in Sacramento and Washington, Dymally figured in many controversies, including the investigation into the alleged offer by the church group.

The probe blew up, Dymally said, when a key witness failed to identify him in a police photo lineup, which included pictures of then-Assemblyman Willie Brown and baseball star Willie Mays.

“Guess whose picture she picked?” Dymally asked. “She picked Willie Mays. That was the end of the case.”

Dymally also said he has obtained FBI files that show that the bureau had him under investigation before and after he was elected to Congress. Shortly after taking his seat in the House, Dymally said, he was summoned to a meeting with FBI officials. They asked about a trip he had made to Cuba some years earlier.

Dymally said the agents told him that a U.S. protocol officer who had accompanied him was actually an FBI agent and that the FBI believed that Cuban President Fidel Castro had “selected you to be his man in Congress.”

The allegation was preposterous, Dymally said. But he recalled telling the agents that “for someone who doesn’t speak Spanish and has not talked with Fidel, I’m honored.” On a later trip, he interviewed Castro for 25 hours for a book.

But it was an investigation that never happened that dealt Dymally his worst political defeat.

As his 1978 campaign for a second term as lieutenant governor against Republican Mike Curb grew increasingly nasty, a rumor circulated that Dymally was about to be indicted for an unspecified crime.

The rumor was broadcast by a Los Angeles television station and repeated by Curb. Although the rumor was false, it damaged Dymally’s campaign, and he lost the election.

Later, Michael Franchetti, a former chief deputy attorney general, acknowledged that he had leaked an investigator’s confident document that contained the false claim. Dymally was enraged at Franchetti, the news media and others.

In 1983, he got even by persuading friends on the state Senate Rules Committee to refuse to confirm Franchetti as Gov. George Deukmejian’s state director of finance.

He said that he and Franchetti have since made peace and that all the bitterness and anger have vanished. “That’s over. That’s gone,” Dymally said. Franchetti agreed. “I wish him well in his new career,” Franchetti said.

Although he served six terms in the House, where he was a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and was elected chairman of the Black Caucus, Dymally said his fights with the Reagan and Bush administrations over domestic programs were frustrating. He retired with an acute case of high blood pressure.

“I was exhausted. The years were not productive.... I had fallen out of love with Congress,” he said.

For a time, he was the Washington lobbyist for the troubled African nation of Mauritania and represented nearby Benin as an “honorary consul.” He also joined the opposition party in his native Trinidad and helped elect what he described as the country’s first new president in 35 years.

Returning to California, he said, he founded a special reading program that collected used books and distributed them to poor children in Inglewood and Sacramento. More recently, he served as a $5,000-a-month special representative of then-Speaker Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) to the state’s community colleges.

Hertzberg, who had served as a driver in a long-ago Dymally election campaign, created the job a couple of years ago when he tired of Dymally’s constant criticism of the community college system’s shortcomings.

Hertzberg challenged him to “put up or shut up,” Dymally recalled. He accepted the challenge and soon found himself back on the road to political power.