Los Angeles Times
December 12, 2013 Thursday
Home Edition
CAPITOL JOURNAL;
Leading the way to justice; Former Gov. George Deukmejian’s bold
divestiture policy encouraged the U.S. to take a stronger stand
against South African apartheid
by GEORGE SKELTON
IN SACRAMENTO
Nelson Mandela and George Deukmejian never met. They never even
communicated. But Mandela’s freedom and the demise of South African
apartheid resulted in no small part because of California’s governor.
Many in the United States and worldwide had a hand in pressuring South
Africa into releasing Mandela after holding him as a political
prisoner for 27 years and ending the nation’s oft-violent racial
segregation.
But California’s action in divesting itself of the bigoted regime
greatly increased American pressure and wouldn’t have happened without
Deukmejian.
It’s a hazily remembered story that has scarcely been mentioned in the
wall-to-wall coverage of Mandela’s death and the outpouring of
tributes.
Mandela himself credited California with helping push his nation
toward racial integration.
Deukmejian was an unlikely ally — if you didn’t know his background.
They had little in common: Mandela was a black leftist, Deukmejian a
white Republican and strongly pro-business. But they shared one big
passion: an abhorrence of oppression.
Deukmejian grew up listening to stories about his Armenian family
suffering and dying at the hands of brutal Ottoman Turks in the early
1900s.
“My father lost a sister. She just sort of disappeared,” Deukmejian
told me. “Genocide was being carried out against Armenians. My father
and his brothers escaped to the U.S. My mother’s family also was in
Turkey and suffered.”
By the 1980s, there was a growing movement in America and elsewhere to
pressure South Africa through divestment, refusing to invest or do
business with firms keeping direct holdings in the country. The city
of Los Angeles, under black Mayor Tom Bradley, adopted its own
divestment policy.
In Sacramento, Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) and
influential Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), both black,
were promoting divestiture legislation.
But Deukmejian wasn’t buying. He vetoed a bill in 1985. He also
blocked attempts to halt University of California pension investments
in firms doing business in South Africa.
“Initially, I was looking at it from a legal standpoint and not saying
too much,” Deukmejian, now 85, recalls. “I believed we legally had a
fiduciary responsibility” to invest in companies that returned the
most earnings for UC and government pension funds.
Legally, that was correct, Deukmejian’s then-chief of staff, Steve
Merksamer, told me. “But sometimes the law is an ass. Segregation was
the law in America for generations, too. Sometimes the law is just
frigging stupid.”
Merksamer, who now runs a highly successful political law and lobbying
firm in Sacramento, had also heard ancestral horror stories. “I had
family killed by the Nazis,” he says. “My grandmother lost everyone.”
Life was becoming more violent for South African blacks by 1986,
Deukmejian and Merksamer remember. Both concluded they couldn’t live
with themselves if the governor continued to oppose divestiture.
“More people were being injured and killed,” Deukmejian says. “I began
to think about it a little differently and remembering the many
stories I had heard when I was growing up from my Armenian parents and
family.
“They were in Turkey and nobody was helping. A lot of refugees were
hoping to get on British and French ships and be rescued, but those
countries didn’t come through. They were left on their own with no
means to protect themselves.
“I was equating that in my mind to what was happening to blacks in
South Africa.”
So Deukmejian pulled what is known in political parlance — usually
disparagingly — as a flip-flop.
“California cannot ignore the deteriorating situation in that
country,” Deukmejian wrote in a letter to the UC Board of Regents. “We
must not turn our backs on black South Africans at this moment of
great crisis.”
The governor added: “Given the extent of the violence and unrest …
we have sufficient economic justification to question the soundness of
California’s investment in any enterprise” pouring money into that
country. “I also believe that we have cause to question the business
judgment of any company that has not begun plans for an expeditious
departure.”
This did not sit well with Deukmejian’s primary constituency in the
private sector.
“All the business people opposed him because they were making money in
South Africa,” recalls Allan Zaremberg, then the governor’s chief
legislative lobbyist and now president of the California Chamber of
Commerce.
Soon afterward, in an impassioned speech, Deukmejian persuaded the UC
Regents to divest $3 billion in funds over a four-year period. And the
Legislature the next month passed a bill ordering the total sale of up
to $12 billion in state investments, the largest divestiture plan in
the nation.
“We are condemning apartheid in the strongest possible terms that we
can within the powers we have in this state,” the governor told
reporters before signing the measure in Speaker Brown’s hometown of
San Francisco.
Deukmejian also chided his old ally, President Reagan, for not being
tougher on South Africa.
After California acted, more than 100 firms — ranging from IBM to
Coca-Cola — severed direct ties with and sold subsidiaries in South
Africa.
There was some speculation at the time that Deukmejian’s main purpose
was to undercut his 1986 reelection opponent, Democratic Mayor
Bradley, who had been hammering the governor on divestiture. But
looking back, that cynicism was nonsense. Bradley wasn’t ever in the
game that year and lost by a landslide.
Deukmejian showed what can be accomplished by one governor with the
courage to rethink his position and cross his base — certainly a rare
commodity in today’s politics.