California Democratic Congressman Phil Burton, second from right, with – left to right – Democratic State Assemblymen Leo T. McCarthy, Willie L. Brown and Art Agnos, in the early 1980s.
The cast of characters includes a chain-smoking, hard-drinking and profane political mastermind; a Polish Jewish activist who fled the Nazis and later became a member of Congress; a Black lawyer and civil rights activist from rural Texas; and the scion of a powerful political family who moved to San Francisco when she got married and made it to Congress in substantial part due to a deathbed endorsement from the refugee-turned-congresswoman.
The two major candidates in that race were the Republican, Harold Dobbs, and the Democrat, Jack Shelley. Shelley had served in Congress since 1949, had strong ties to organized labor and was seeking to become San Francisco’s first Democratic mayor in over half a century.
Dobbs was an affable businessman and one of the owners of a popular diner chain known as Mel’s Drive-In. In the days just before the election, there was a demonstration outside of a Mel’s Drive-In location in San Francisco because of the chain’s refusal to hire African Americans in customer-facing positions, such as waiters or waitresses. The young civil rights attorney who expertly organized that boycott and therefore helped deliver the election to Shelley was Willie Brown.
Shelley won the election, and that’s when the pieces started to fall into place that paved the way for, six decades later, Harris having the presidency within her reach.
Birth of a legacy
In an early 1964 special election, California Assemblyman Phil Burton, from San Francisco, won Shelly’s old seat in Congress. That’s where Burton’s reputation for profanity, drinking and political genius would grow for almost 20 years. Whether it was redistricting, candidate recruitment, messaging or campaign strategy, Burton was a mastermind.
In 1960, his brother John introduced Phil to a handsome, young and progressive Italian American attorney who had been an all-city basketball player interested in getting into politics. Phil Burton recognized the young man’s potential and told him to run for the California Assembly in 1960, and that although he would inevitably lose, the name recognition and reputation he would gain would position him to run for the city’s Board of Supervisors, San Francisco’s equivalent of the city council, a few years later.
The plan worked brilliantly, as George Moscone was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1963, the state Senate in 1966, where he became majority leader in 1967 and eventually mayor of San Francisco in 1975.
The cast of characters includes a chain-smoking, hard-drinking and profane political mastermind; a Polish Jewish activist who fled the Nazis and later became a member of Congress; a Black lawyer and civil rights activist from rural Texas; and the scion of a powerful political family who moved to San Francisco when she got married and made it to Congress in substantial part due to a deathbed endorsement from the refugee-turned-congresswoman.
The two major candidates in that race were the Republican, Harold Dobbs, and the Democrat, Jack Shelley. Shelley had served in Congress since 1949, had strong ties to organized labor and was seeking to become San Francisco’s first Democratic mayor in over half a century.
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