The New Jess Unruh

Almost everything they say about Jesse Marvin Unruh has been true at one time or another. He has been a hard-drinking political boss, wreathed in cigar smoke, with the bulk of Falstaff and the political cunning of Richard III. He has also been one of the nation's most brilliant state legislators, a reformer of the California state assembly and a studious lecturer at Rutgers and Yale. This year he is hoping to achieve another persona by defeating Ronald Reagan and becoming Governor of California. TIME Correspondent Don Neff filed this analysis of one of the nation's most complex politicians:

Which is the real Jess Unruh? They all are. He is the former Texas farm boy who at 18 hitchhiked to California with $5 in his pocket and became speaker of the state assembly at 39. At least a part of "Big Daddy" Unruh was once a paradigm of the cynical and, to his enemies, sinister political boss. Lyndon-esque in his legislative mastery, he held an almost singlehanded rule over the California assembly from 1961 to 1969, when the Republicans at last gained a majority.

It was during those years that Unruh earned an unsavory public reputation as an arrogant political schemer. First there was his image: he favored electric-blue suits and fat cigars and carried as much as 290 Ibs. on his 5-ft. 9-in. frame. He wolfed down gargantuan meals and gulped down Scotch, haughtily killed bills, demanded favors from lobbyists, made or broke political careers with a word. One night in 1963, he invoked an obscure parliamentary procedure to have the Republican assemblymen opposing him on a bill locked up for nearly 23 hours in the assembly chambers. His last name (pronounced Un-roo) is, appropriately, the German word for unrest.

Fat Buddha. It was around 1963 that Unruh began to redefine himself. After a political cartoon pictured him as a fat Buddha, he abruptly cut out starch and Scotch and in four months took off 100 Ibs. The effort was a good example of his will. A stutterer as a boy, he overcame his affliction by forcing himself to deliver class talks and joining the debating team. In 1959, when he saw a picture of himself puffing a cigar like Boss Tweed, he stopped smoking on the spot. Until last year, he spoke with a lisp; he had that corrected by wearing braces over his bottom teeth for seven painful months and having his upper teeth capped.

Today, at 47, Unruh wears well-tailored Italian suits and razor haircuts, holds his weight at a husky 190-200 Ibs., drinks moderately and counts his calories. He has also trimmed his name from Jesse to Jess. His opponents call the change only a minor victory of public relations. Says one enemy who is influential in California Democratic politics: "Hell, scratch him and there is the same old conniving Jesse Unruh. To know him is to hate him. Sure, he has to say there is a change. How else can he get elected?"

To some extent, Unruh has always been a victim of caricature. He is remembered for two harsh dicta from his assembly days: "Money is the mother's milk of politics," and, speaking of lobbyists: "If you can't take their money, drink their booze, screw their women and look them in the eye and vote against them, you don't belong here." But he was never entirely the Mr. Hyde that his enemies like to imagine. By his driving force he overhauled the ramshackle, lobbyist-dominated state legislature to make it one of the nation's best. He raised members' salaries from $6,000 to $16,000 a year and provided them with research staffs that freed most of them from the influences of lobbies.

Unruh still lives with his wife and three of their five children in the $48,000 house that he bought nine years ago in Inglewood. He was once a Civil War buff, but in the past year his reading has been chiefly political. His hobbies are largely confined to listening to western music and lying in the sun.

High Risk. There have indeed been changes in Jess Unruh. He has a quiet, almost alarming candor that is not usually expected in a politician. His coarse yet sensitive face seems to communicate a new credibility. Because he has seen much of the seedy side of politics, and has been in on so many deals and schemes, he has the poignant aura of a sinner who has seen the light.

To his friends, the changes that were already occurring became especially obvious after Robert Kennedy's assassination. He had been a J.F.K. supporter in 1960 and was in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel with his friend Bobby the night he was shot. When Sirhan Sirhan was grabbed in a hotel kitchen, Unruh shouted: "Don't kill him! If the system works at all, we're going to try this one."

When Robert Kennedy was killed, Unruh says, "I nearly went crazy." Later he found that R.F.K.'s death taught him "a sense of high-risk politics." Says Unruh: "I was always a very cautious, close-to-the-vest politician. Now politics has stopped being a game with me. So much of my early trouble came because I simply didn't give a damn. When I started out, it was with the idea of changing things with idealism. Then how quickly the system picked me up and got me involved, and how long it took me to realize that that early idealism was best. I guess I've come full circle."

To Change the System. The issues that Unruh will emphasize involve what he regards as Reagan's insularity; he asks why the Governor has not done more to cope with rising crime and rising taxes. Although he is a hardliner against campus militants, he claims that he could communicate with the majority of faculty and students and could visit campuses, while Reagan cannot. Above all, he points out that he knows more about state government than Reagan--or nearly anyone else.

California polls show Unruh running from 8% to 13% behind Reagan. Should he lose, Unruh plans to accomplish a "change in the system" he knows so well by publishing an expose. "I'll write," he threatens, "the damnedest book you ever read. I've been in on the deals, through the back doors. I know all about it." But, then, no one has ever doubted Jess Unruh's expertise.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.