Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Pat was not the most inspiring of politicians: a “tower of Jell-O,” according to the Democrats’ legislative boss, Jesse Unruh. It was only what he had accomplished that was inspiring. His first legislative session, in 1959, was the most productive in California history: bold new agencies for economic development and consumer protection; top-to-bottom bureaucratic reorganization; increased social security and welfare benefits; new funding for hospitals, mental health clinics, and drug treatment; a ban on racial discrimination in hiring; massive new funding for schools; miles upon miles of highways, rail lines, tunnels, and bridges. The next year, he successfully appropriated $1.75 billion to deliver 100 million gallons of water to Southern California by 1972. He had built 1,000 of the state’s 1,650 miles of freeway; ordered up the greatest college construction boom in human history—room enough for 25 percent of high school grads to attend the greatest public university system in the world, tuition-free; had added two hundred thousand jobs. And if he hadn’t done it with any particular stylishness—well, what of it? Under his touch, the biggest state in the union had blossomed into a kind of bourgeois utopia. Let the actor have at him: the middle class knew better than to fall for that. He had built the ladder upon which they had climbed.