Jesse Unruh: Man of Power

Jesse M. Unruh’s name seldom appeared in print far from the word powerful ; it suited well his politics, his physique and his personality.

In the mid-1960s his politics and 290-pound physique earned him the unflattering title Big Daddy after he locked up the Assembly, of which he was the Speaker, until it did as he demanded: vote on a budget. His personality later led him to reflect that it was a big mistake.

In another time, Unruh’s career might have taken him at least as high as the governorship if he had been able to curb an instinct for winning at almost any cost. But his bulldog face, the rough edges left over from growing up poor, and a sardonic sense of humor, which he used to shield from view a wide streak of idealism, conspired against him as television searched for pretty faces.

In recent years it was not power in the usual sense that led politicians, regardless of party, to say of some proposal to do things differently in Sacramento, “Check it out with Jesse.” It was the power of intricate knowledge of the way government works, or can be made to work, to help move people closer to a public goal and of an instinctive understanding of how people think.

Unruh--the custodian as state treasurer of billions of dollars in state funds and millions in campaign contributions, a pioneer in civil rights and other laws to give a fairer shake to people who start, as he did, without privilege--died Tuesday of cancer. California politics will not see the likes of him again soon. His death is a loss that California will begin to feel the next time, on a close call, someone starts to say, “Check it out with Jesse.”