The poker player; as a governor, Bruce Babbitt was not only smart, he was effective.

• Author: Osborne, David
• Position: Includes related article on other state governments

The Poker Player

As a governor, Bruce Babbit was not only smart, he was effective By David Osborne

Bruce Babbit has made his name nationally with a series of unique and politically risky stands on issues. But in Arizona where he was governor for nine years, he is known for making such ideas reality. Because he has trouble communicating on television, however, Babbit has been unable to project his greatest asset: his capacity to lead in office.

In Arizona, the name Bruce Babbit is virtually synonymous with the word leadership. A look at Babbit's years as governor tells a remarkable -- and remarkably unknown -- story. In the most conservative state in the union, in the fact of a Republican legislature and a fiercely antigovernment business community, Bruce Babbit transformed the very nature of the governorship. In the process, he forced Arizona to come to grips with the most basic issues clouding its future; its fragile environment, its substandard education system, and its inadequate social services.

To understand the Babbitt story, one must understand the context. When Babbitt assumed office in 1978, Arizona still embraced the frontier ethos in which the old Arizona had taken such pride. Arizona was the last of the contiguous 48 states to join the union, in 1912. By 1940 it had only 500,000 people, spread out in small, desert towns and over vast Indian reservations. But World War II brought military bases and defense plants, and the postwar boom brought air conditioning and air travel. Defense contractors and aerospace and electronics companies poured in, bringing an army of young engineers and technicians with their wives and their children. With their crew cuts and their conservatism, they transformed Arizona into a bastion of Sunbelt Republicanism.

But even as the Republicans cemented their control in the 1960s, rural legislators held onto the reins of seniority -- and thus power. In the 1950s Arizona declined to participate in the federal Interstate Highway System; in the 1960s it turned down Medicaid. State government was tiny, the governor a figurehead. And Arizonans had little truck with Washington.

The task of dragging Arizona into the modern era fell to Babbitt. He is a lanky scholarly type whose habitual slouch, thoughtful manner, and awkward style of speech hide an enormous drive. He has sandy hair, a lined face that has begun to sag, and large pale eyes. On a dais, when he tries to sound like a politician, his body stiffens and his eyes bulge. In a small group, when he is in his natural, analytic mode, Babbitt can be brilliant.

Despite his weakness as a public speaker, Babbitt captivated the Arizona electorate. (He was elected governor in 1978 with 52 percent of the vote and reelected four years later, during a recession, with 62 percent.) Summing up the Babbitt yeas, the Arizona Republic -- a conservative newspaper -- called him the "take-charge governor." In a comment echoed by many others, an environmental activist told me, "He is without a doubt the smartest, quickest elected official I have ever met." "Babbitt played it on the precipice," added a state senator. "He is constantly pushing this state forward, and he has an uncanny ability to pull it off."

"This guy called us dailyc

In addition to his brains and his daring, Babbitt was not hurt by his name. In Arizona, a Babbitt carries the status of a Kennedy in Massachusetts,a Rockefeller in New York, a Du Pont in Delaware. "The Babbitts came here in the 1800s," said Alfredo Gutierrez, until 1987 the minority leader in the state senate. "They built an immense empire in the state senate. "They built an immense empire in northern Arizona. There are Babbitt car dealerships, Babbitt department stores, Babbitt trading posts, Babbitt property managers, Babbitt everything. And they own an enormous amount of land."

A large Roman Catholic family, the Babbits were known for their commitment to the Flagstaff community. As a boy, Bruce was the "in-house genius" according toa childhood friend. In 1956, he was valedictorian of his class at Flagstaff High. He attended Notre Dame, where he served as student body president and studied geology -- his link to the grandeur of northern Arizona. From there he went to the University of Newcastle in England on a Marshall scholarship to study geophysics. But a summer project in Bolivia changed his life.

Babbitt went to Bolivia in 1961 on a research project with Gulf Oil. Ferried to and from a lavish base camp by company helicopter, he was struck by the contrast between the opulence of Gulf Oil and the poverty all around him. He decided he was more interested in people than rocks, more concerned with where the continent was going then where it had been.

He returned to the United States and enrolled in Harvard Law School, returning to South America during his summer vacations to work on a variety of social action projects. In 1965 he headed south for the civil rights march on Selma, then joined the War on Poverty as a field agent for the Office of Economic Opportunity in Texas.

Living out of a suitcase, the 27-year-old Harvard Law graduate traveled from one south Texas town to another to help set up community action agencies, through which federal resources were channeled to the poor. In 1967 Babbitt followed his boss, who had been named director of VISTA, to Washington. "There are believers who perhaps may be naive and others who are realistic," said one former VISTA official. Babbitt "was a believer who was realistic."

The realist in Babbitt could see that the War on Poverty was to be short-lived. Spending on the Vietnam war was already forcing cutbacks at OEO, and Congress was under intense pressure from local politicians to rein in the young idealists who were giving them so much trouble. More importantly, the program was not working. "The War on Poverty bore some good fruit, but what I learned was you can't force thoroughgoing social change from the top down," Babbitt later told the National Journal. "The whole War on Poverty had a certain kind of arrogance....It could not be a lasting process of change when it depended upon GS-7s hired in Washington dispensing federal money with terms and conditions that they prescribed in local communities."

After a decade of adventure, which has taken him from South Bend to South America to south Texas, Babbitt dusted off his law degree and returned to Phoenix. He joined a firm, served on the local legal services board, and did legal work for the Navajo trible. He was one of a handful of liberal activists in Pheonix, a hardy band who stuck together because they were so outnumbered. In 1974 they drafted Babbitt to run for attorney general. He had the name, he had the money, and he had the right politics.

Babbitt understood the potential of the attorney general's office in an era of corruption and consumerism. While Wategate dominated the national news, land fraud and price-fixing were hot at home. The laissez-faire, frontier mentality was so strong in Arizona that organized crime had moved in to take advantage of it -- just as it had to the north in Nevada. By the early seventies, Arizona was becoming known as the land fraud capital of the world.

Babbitt convinced the legislature to allow him to appoint a statewide grand jury, then set it to work on land fraud. It prosecuted more than 100 cases and effectively ended the practice. He also attacked price-fixing in the milk, bread, funeral home, and liquor industries. His name did not really hit the headlines, however, until he prosecuted the murderers of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in 1976. Like Babbitt, Bolles was investigating the role of organized crime in land fraud. On June 2, 1976, his car blew up. When Babbitt's name turned up on the accused murderers' hit list -- for his role in prosecuting organized crime -- he became something of a hero.

One March morning in 1978, Babbitt awoke to discover that he was governor. Raul Castro, the governor, had resigned to become ambassador to Argentina, Lt. Gov. Wesley Bolin, who succeeded Castro, had died. The secretary of state was appointed, not elected, hence she could not assume the post. Babbitt was next in line.

Raising Arizona

To appreciate Babbitt's capacity for leadership it is important to understand the weakness of the governor's office he inherited. Arizona was perhaps the only state in the union in which a governor would consider the ambassadorship to Argentina a step up. State government was run by a small group of senior legislators and their staffs. The governor, who had virtually no staff, was brought out largely for ceremonial occasions. The notion that a governor might try to set an agenda for the state, or dare to veto a bill, never crossed most politicians' minds.

Babbitt immediately set out to change that. Six weeks into his term he vetoed two bills on the same day -- then timed his veto message for the evening news, knocking the wind out of a planned override. The legislature reacted with shock. "Our idea of an activist governor was one who met with us once a month to seek our advice," said Gutierrez, the former senate minority leader. "This guy called us daily to tell us what he wanted to do."

Babbitt vetoed 21 bills in 1979, 30 more over the next two years. "My business friends used to complain that we had a weak governor," says Jack Pfister, general manager of the state's biggest utility, the Salt River Project. "After Babbitt was in two or three years, you never heard anybody complain about that again."

In his second year as governor, Babbitt tackled the issue that dwarfs all others in Arizona: water. In the desert, water is life. Boston gets 44 inches of rain a year; Phoenix gets seven. By 1980 Arizonans were pumping almost five million acre-feet of water out of the ground a year -- nearly twice the amount nature was putting back in. (An acre-foot is enough to cover one acre to a depth of one foot.) In central Arizona, where most of the...