Dusting Off a 'Youth for Yorty' Button After 30 Years: No Longer a Youth, Still for Yorty

Sept. 23, 1991

Page 12

PERSPECTIVES (Column)
Dusting Off a 'Youth for Yorty' Button After 30 Years: No Longer a Youth, Still for Yorty

By ROGER M. GRACE

Last Saturday night, at the dinner honoring former Mayor Sam Yorty, I asked our photographer, Amber Eck, to snap a photo of George Putnam.

"Who's George Putnam?'' she asked.

Don't fret, George. She also needed to have Yorty pointed out.

As you may have assumed, Ms. Eck is in her early twenties.

I was but a few years younger than Amber is now when I first sported the "Youth for Yorty'' button I was wearing last Saturday. That was 30 years ago.

And if I had come face-to-face then with Fletcher Bowron, the mayor who preceded the then-incumbent, Norris Poulson, I would not have recognized him.

Those who were our political heroes and villains of decades gone by are unknown to the just-out-of-college bunch. And, 30 years from now, it may come to pass that Amber Eck will burst into laughter as some young reporter or photographer she is directing queries, "Who's Pete Wilson?''

Now that Amber has unwittingly succeeded in making me feel like I'm getting old—and proceeding on the notion that with age comes sagacity—I offer some reflections.

First is that any ex-politico who can fill a room nearly 20 years after he has left office, and has no residue of political clout, must have done something right. Yorty, in his first two terms, did, indeed, do quite a lot right. It's just a shame that in his third term, perhaps disillusioned by his failure to attain higher office, he became insouciant—permitting a man with far lesser talents to wrest the office from him.

Second: his 1972 bid for the presidency was taken no more seriously than that of former Minnesota Gov. Harold Stassen. The irony is that both Stassen and Yorty are brilliant and insightful men who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the past 30 years, we have had four presidents—Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, and Carter—whose talents were, in my view, exceeded by Yorty's.

Third: the globe-trotting Yorty attracted derision that Los Angeles was the only city in the nation with a foreign policy. While the barbs may have been apt owing to the lack of utility to the taxpayers of those trips—purportedly aimed at boosting trade for our city—it remains that Yorty possessed considerable savvy with respect to international politics. It is a shame that such savvy was never harnessed by a national administration.

Fourth: there are not many office-holders of today whom I can imagine drawing an audience three decades from now. Thirty years ago, we had the likes of Goodwin Knight, William Knowland, Richard Nixon, Pat Brown, Stanley Mosk, Pat McGee...and Sam Yorty on the scene. Today, the cast of characters lacks the verve of their predecessors, and when they depart the political scene, they are far less apt to be kept in memory.

I can't help but find irony in Amber's lack of recognition of George Putnam, once the most influential person on Los Angeles television. In 1965, my wife-to-be and I, students at USC, formed a youth group for Goodwin Knight, who was contemplating a comeback bid in the following year's gubernatorial election. We went to KTTV to seek Putnam's support for Knight.

During a commercial, he responded to our plea by declaring that Knight had no chance of regaining the governorship.

"He's a has-been!" the commentator boomed, with what struck me as utter insensitivity. "He's a has-been," he repeated.

I'm certain that Amber has too much class to refer to Mr. Putnam in so degrading a manner.

ANNIVERSARY: Last Saturday marked precisely 30 years since the happening of a rather significant—yet now forgotten—event. The American people were apprised by Walter Winchell of the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Yet, for the next year—despite repeated assertions by Winchell and by U.S. Sen. Kenneth Keating, a New York Republican, that the missiles were in place—President John Kennedy kept proclaiming: "There are no missiles in Cubar."

Two weeks before the 1962 November elections, Kennedy suddenly found out that there were, by gosh, missiles in "Cubar." We now had a national crisis—and, in the wake of a crisis, one clings, for sake of security, to what is familiar. Democrat incumbents across the nation were reelected, notwithstanding growing disenchantment with the Democratic Kennedy administration—or "oddministration" as Winchell aptly dubbed it.

It's heartening to see that even liberal historians are now catching on to how little substance there was to that fluffy-haired, womanizing, politically unscrupulous head of state.

Let note be taken that from Sept. 21, 1961 up until the time the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba was finally acknowledged by Kennedy at a politically opportune time, it was journalist Walter Winchell who was telling it straight to "Mr. and Mrs. United States," while the president lied.

Copyright 1991, Metropolitan News Company

See the news story on the dinner in honor of Yorty, "Former Los Angeles ‘Maverick Mayor’ Sam Yorty, Nearing 82nd Birthday, Is Feted."

UPDATE

The column appearing above was re-published on Sept. 21, 2001, in the aftermath of "9-11," with this preface:

The following column is a "re-run." It was first published a decade ago — to be precise, on Monday, Sept. 23, 1991. A dinner in honor of former Mayor Sam Yorty (since deceased) had been held the previous Saturday night.

The column recounts events of 30 years before. If one goes by math, it's increased in nostalgia value 25 percent. (On the other hand, the percentage of our readers who remember 1961 has probably dipped by at least that mark.)

By the way, the young photographer mentioned in the column, Amber Eck, did not remain in journalism. She went off to Boston University, attained a law degree, passed the bar exam here, and is now practicing law in San Diego with the firm of Milberg Weiss Bershad.

The column was originally headed, "Dusting Off a 'Youth for Yorty' Button After 30 Years: No Longer a Youth, Still for Yorty." It's now been 40 years since I was a rooter for Yorty in his first campaign for the post of mayor. Yorty died June 5, 1998; yet, in terms of his enduring principles, I'm still for Yorty. And I'm still a booster of a couple of other fellows mentioned below: Goodwin Knight, a statesman, and Walter Winchell, a commentator who was a flag-waver even in times when being such was subject to derision.

Those who unabashedly expressed their love of country were extolled by Winchell as "Yankee doodlers." Out of the horrific tragedy of last week has come one good: we have become a nation of united "Yankee doodlers."

Yorty, Knight and Winchell all recognized that national security was dependent upon vigilence. Yorty, as a young politico, sounded the alarm against Nazism long before the threat posed by Hitler and his movement was commonly appreciated. Winchell doggedly ferreted out, and reported on the air and in print, pre-World War II underground Nazi activities in the United States.

And today marks four decades since that reporter warned in his column of the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba — a claim, though veracious, that was contradicted at the time by the White House.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear…

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