THE SECOND TERM

By the end of 1969, I realized I was going to need more time than I had left in my first term to accomplish my goals as governor, and I'd had enough experience - and enjoyment - at it to know I didn't want to stop. I didn't want to quit before I'd accomplished my most important goal, reforming California's bloated welfare program. I have never questioned the need to take care of people who, through no fault of their own, can't provide for themselves. The rest of us have to do that. But I am against open-ended welfare programs that invite generation after generation of potentially productive people to remain on the dole; they deprive the able-bodied of the incentive to work and require productive people to support others who are physically and mentally able to work while prolonging an endless cycle of dependency that robs men and women of their dignity. I wanted to see if we couldn't rescue some of those people from what FDR had called the "narcotic" of welfare. And so in 1970 I decided to run for a second term - but only one more term. My opponent was Speaker of the Assembly Jesse Unruh, the tax-and-spend liberal who from the beginning had opposed our reforms tooth and nail. On Election Day, I was reelected by a margin of fifty-three percent to forty-five percent. I think the people had made it clear that they wanted the reforms to continue.

Because of lax eligibility standards, the number of people in California receiving welfare checks had almost quadrupled between 1960 and 1970 to more than two million. With about ten percent of the population, the State had more than sixteen percent of the nation's total welfare recipients; it had become a magnet for able-bodied people from around the country who preferred a handout to a job. During my first term, I appointed a special task force on welfare that concluded that even if we were able to pay off the deficit and solve the financial mess the state had fallen into during the Brown years, welfare expenditures were growing so fast that the state would be bankrupt again soon unless something was done to control the open-ended spending.

The task force tried to reduce waste and fraud and improve efficiency of the welfare program through administrative reform but encountered a brick wall: The last thing that many of the people who supervised the welfare program wanted was to reduce their caseload because it might have threatened their jobs. As always, the first goal of the bureaucracy was to protect the bureaucracy. The study panel concluded that the state needed a top-to-bottom rewriting of its welfare regulations. The eligibility standards were so lenient they were an invitation to steal. Through computer cross-checking, we discovered thousands of people who were receiving welfare checks at the same time they were gainfully employed, and many people were getting aid who didn't need it

Some of my most conservative supporters tried to pressure me to wage an all-or-nothing battle to virtually eliminate the welfare program; but I believed we should not take aid from the people who really needed and deserved it, the truly impoverished elderly, blind, and disabled. I just wanted to stop the abuses, take people off the welfare rolls who didn't belong there, and try to end the open-ended cycle that had made a monthly welfare check a way of life for too many people. I went back out, speaking about welfare reform and to urge people to demand that their legislators clean up the mess. We organized committees in all fifty-eight counties of the State to apply pressure on the legislature. Boy, did it work. One day the liberal Democrat who succeeded Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the Assembly Bob Moretti, came into my office holding his hands in the air as if I had a gun on him and said, "Stop those cards and letters!" "Sit down," I said. "Look, we're all partners in this. Let's put aside our personal feelings and jointly go to work and see what we can get done." Over the next week or so, he and I, along with members of our staffs, met almost around the clock to put together a package of welfare reform that cut expenditures by hundreds of millions of dollars a year while raising benefits and providing cost-of-living increases for the truly needy in the state.

By tightening eligibility standards and eliminating loopholes, we turned a monthly increase in the welfare caseload of forty thousand to a monthly decrease of eight thousand. California was no longer the welfare capital of the country. We obtained authority from the federal government, which set a lot of the rules regarding welfare, to let us try an experiment in which able-bodied welfare recipients were given a job. We contacted every level of government throughout the state and asked if there were things they would be doing if they had the money and manpower to do it. We got all kinds of affirmative replies - none of them boondoggles. Washington gave us permission to go ahead with the experiment only after President Nixon intervened on our behalf. We took the able-bodied welfare grants, and as they learned some job skills, they were moving into jobs in the private sector.

During the 1973 - 1974 recession, this program got seventy-six thousand people off the welfare rolls and put them into productive jobs. Later, a lot of them wrote and thanked me for the program, saying for the first time in their adult lives they had felt a sense of self-respect because they were doing something in return for their monthly check; the remarks reminded me of the smiles I'd seen on the faces of the men my father helped find jobs during the Depression. During my second term, I was able to announce a fourth rebate of state taxes to the people - the biggest surplus yet. I'll always remember what happened after I'd announced we wanted to do that. The Democratic leader of the state senate burst into my office and said, "Giving that money back to the people is an unnecessary expenditure of public funds."

In all, largely through property-tax relief, we returned more than $5 billion in taxes to the taxpayers - the people to whom it belonged in the first place. It's not easy for me to boast, but during the eight years, I think we made the state government less costly, smaller, and more businesslike; we were able to upgrade the quality of people attracted to government and cut the government's growth to a rate at or below the level of California's population growth; we made the bureaucracy more responsive to the public; and we began to return some of the power and taxing authority usurped by the state from local communities back to where they belonged, at the local level. During the eight years, I used my line-item veto authority 943 times and was never overridden by the legislature. If a bill had something beneficial in it but legislators had voted too much money for it, I could sign the bill but cut spending to a reasonable level, allowing me to set priorities and enabling the state to live within its means. The power of the line-item veto is held by forty-three governors. How I would miss it later in Washington. Presidents don't have a line-item veto.

Although many of my supporters wanted me to run for a third term in 1974, I'd accomplished most of what I'd set out to do and I'd sworn from the beginning that I was going to stop at two terms. Nancy and I left Sacramento in early 1975. The previous eight years had changed both of us. Yet, hardly a day passed when someone didn't call and ask me to make a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976. These weren't only calls from people in California, but from people all over the country - people I'd met over the years on the speech circuit. Eight years earlier, I'd been dragged kicking and screaming into politics. But now my opinion about holding public office was different.

I didn't automatically turn a deaf ear to the appeals I was receiving. I had changed, probably, I think, because when I'd been governor I'd felt the excitement and satisfaction that comes from being able to bring about change, not just talk about it. It had been thrilling and fun and I was proud of what we had accomplished. Yet, the longer I had been governor, the more I realized the biggest problems we had regarding big government had to be solved in Washington, which was gradually but inexorably taking power from the states.

Of course, I had been disturbed by the expansion of the federal government and its encroachment on our freedoms for a long time, but the problems increased dramatically during the years I was governor with the start of Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and "War on Poverty." Those years were a watershed in the evolution of our central government that I think many historians have not yet paid sufficient attention to. Between 1965 and 1980, the federal budget jumped to roughly five times what it had been while the federal deficit grew to fifty-three times as much and the amount of money doled out under various federal "entitlement" programs quadrupled to almost $300 billion a year; along the way, a lot of the decision-making authority traditionally exercised at the grass-roots level of America was transported to Washington.

Yet, as you look back on that myriad of new federal programs, it's hard to find any that did much good for the poor or the nation as a whole. A lot of the money just got lost in the administrative process. Hundreds of billions were spent on poverty programs, and the plight of the poor grew more painful. They had spent billions on programs that made people worse off. The waste in dollars and cents was small compared with the waste of human potential. It was squandered by the narcotic of giveaway programs that sapped the human spirit, diminished the incentive of people to work, destroyed families, and produced an increase in female and child poverty, deteriorating schools, and disintegrating neighborhoods. The liberals had had their turn at bat in the 1960s and they had struck out.

Although I'd once broadcast a University of Michigan football game in which he played, I knew Gerald Ford only slightly before he succeeded Richard Nixon in the White House. He offered me a choice of virtually any position I wanted in his cabinet, but I wanted to complete my second term as governor and said I'd prefer to remain in Sacramento.

After he became president, a number of Republican leaders around the country began urging me to challenge Ford for the party nomination in 1976. And I remembered something I'd said many years before: A candidate doesn't make the decision whether to run for president; the people make it for him.

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster