Big Daddy's $10 Bills

No sooner had Democrats swept California than they set to fighting among themselves. The main antagonists: Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, ham-fisted leader of California's Democratic professionals, and former National Committeeman Paul Ziffren, a Beverly Hills tax lawyer who drives a silver Rolls-Royce but thinks in proletarian terms. The stakes: the Democratic nomination for Governor, if Pat Brown decides not to run, in 1966.

Unruh would like very much to get that nomination. Ziffren does not want it for himself, but he is determined that it go to someone who looks more kindly than Unruh on the California Democratic Council, a group of some 75,000 volunteers who work feverishly at election time but have little power in regular party circles. Shortly after the 1962 elections, Ziffren said: "We are going to have a power struggle for the governorship--that's inevitable. Therefore, let it be on a worthwhile issue. Unruh has made the issue: payroll politics v. citizen participation."

Ziffren was talking about Unruh's immensely successful use of $100,000 in party funds to pay get-out-the-vote workers for Brown against Nixon in the Los Angeles area. Claiming that Unruh may have violated a California law, Ziffren took his case to the press. Said he: "I don't like the picture of an armored truck driving up to Democratic headquarters with more than $100,000 in $10 bills. That's not the symbol of the party that many of us who have worked for it for many years had in mind ... If we condone the hiring of 10,000 workers in this election, what's to prevent the hiring of 100,000 in the next election? At what point do you draw the line at hiring a worker whose only job is to deliver the vote of his wife, sister or brother.'

"Big Daddy" Unruh thought it all over, then reacted with a suitably pained declaration. Said he last week: "I have been bitterly, viciously and unwarrantedly attacked." But he is in a good political position, and it was most unlikely that he was really losing any sleep over the matter.

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