O.C. Politician and Ex-Senator Kuchel, 84, Dies

Thomas H. Kuchel, U.S. senator from California for 16 years and the last major officeholder from the progressive Republican line in state politics that stretched back to Earl Warren and Hiram Johnson, has died at age 84.

The Orange County politician died Monday night at his home in Beverly Hills of lung cancer, Dick Arnold, Kuchel’s law partner and friend, said Tuesday.

A friend and protege of Warren, Kuchel was appointed by Gov. Warren as state controller and as U.S. senator before he was elected to those posts in his own right.

Kuchel first was elected to public office at 26, winning an Assembly seat from Orange County. By 52, he was the Republican whip in the Senate--the second most powerful Senate leadership post in his party. But for the four years he held that office, he refused to endorse four leading Republican candidates for public office in those years: Richard M. Nixon for governor of California in 1962, Barry Goldwater for President and George Murphy for the U.S. Senate in 1964, and Ronald Reagan for governor in 1966.

In 1968, Kuchel lost his bid for a third full term, beaten in the Republican primary by right-wing educator Max Rafferty, who was then defeated by Democrat Alan Cranston in the general election.

Rafferty’s defeat of Kuchel was the Republican right-wing’s revenge for Kuchel’s recalcitrance toward conservative candidates, and it spelled the end of the proudly outspoken progressive era in California’s Republican Party. Later, when the essentially moderate Pete Wilson was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican, he was careful to support Reagan and other candidates of the Republican right.

Kuchel never apologized for being out of step with the rightward drift of the GOP, which was particularly marked in California.

In an interview long after his retirement, he extolled the virtues of progressivism, the essence of which he said had been defined in the 19th Century by British statesman Benjamin Disraeli, who remarked that the main purpose of government was to “distribute the amenities of life on an ever-increasing scale to an ever-increasing number.”

“Progressive Republicans brought to politics the philosophy of governing for the many,” Kuchel said. “What comes particularly to my mind is Medicare. If it weren’t for Medicare today, there would be tens of thousands of Americans living in the poorhouse, with no care. It was a baker’s dozen progressive Republicans in the Senate who agreed we would vote for Medicare. . . . I was their spokesman, and we provided the necessary margin for passage.”

Kuchel also expressed particular pride in the progressives’ support of civil rights bills for the enfranchisement of blacks and desegregation of public facilities during the 1960s.

By contrast, he said with characteristic disdain, the main feature of “right-wing Republicans,” as he understood them, “was militant anti-communism. . . . They seemed convinced we were about to be invaded by the communists.”

Kuchel was born Aug. 15, 1910, in Anaheim, where his father, Henry Kuchel, was a newspaper publisher who had crusaded against the Ku Klux Klan. His father became blind the year the senator-to-be was born, and as a boy Kuchel used to read the Congressional Record to him.

When Kuchel spoke at a graduation ceremony at UC Irvine in 1969, he talked about his ties to Orange County.

“This county has been my family’s home since before the Civil War,” he said. “My immigrant forbearers came here seeking freedom. And the kind of guidelines they sought to give their descendants would surely not be dissimilar from those on which the University of California was founded.”

Graduated from USC in 1932 and from USC Law School in 1935, Kuchel’s debut in politics came in 1936 when he was elected to the State Assembly to replace Edward L. Craig of Brea. In that year of the Roosevelt landslide, he was the only Republican candidate to be elected to partisan office in Orange County, a fact he credited largely to the good name of his father, who was publisher of the Anaheim Gazette for 48 years.

Kuchel defeated his Democratic opponent, James H. Heffran, a sports writer for the Anaheim Bulletin, by a mere 1,159 votes.

Kuchel’s next move up the political ladder came in 1940 when he won a State Senate seat vacated by Democrat Harry Westover.

When he was 30, Kuchel was elected chairman of the Republican State Central Committee, the youngest man ever to hold that position.

When World War II erupted, Kuchel joined the Naval Reserve and was called to active duty.

In 1944, when his Senate term ended, Kuchel was still in the Navy. However his friends nominated him for a second term in the Senate. Although his mother had to do his campaigning, he was easily reelected and became senator in absentia. He was known as Orange County’s Phantom Senator until 1945, when he was able to return to office.

It was during his legislative years that he first met Warren, who became state attorney general in 1939 and governor in 1943.

“I saw him quite often,” Kuchel later recalled. “I was single and living in the Sutter Club during the legislative sessions, and he’d stay there too when he was in Sacramento. We developed a good friendship.”

It was to be the decisive relationship in Kuchel’s career. When state Controller Harry B. Riley died in 1946, it was Gov. Warren who called Kuchel, then a state senator fresh from World War II Navy service, and told him, “It’s a fine job, and I think you have the qualifications.” Six years later, when then-Sen. Nixon was elected vice president, it was Warren who insisted, despite some reluctance from Kuchel, on appointing him to the U.S. Senate.

Warren was shortly to go to Washington himself, as chief justice of the United States, where he became a leading judicial liberal and eventually came under bitter attack from the far right. It was appropriate that his protege, Kuchel, was to emerge as the Senate’s most outspoken Republican foe of the far right.

In fiscal matters, the senator was a conservative. He strongly supported American involvement in Vietnam for a long time. Even after the devastating Tet offensive by the North Vietnamese in 1968, he remarked, “I don’t want this senator, or any U.S. senator, to indicate by his words that there is dissension among us” on Vietnam policy.

But he worked hard for such moderate causes as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and favored the atomic test ban treaty and other steps toward detente with the Soviet Union.

Kuchel always traced his trouble with the political right to his response to a surge of mail that he got from members of the then-obscure John Birch Society shortly after John F. Kennedy became President.

“I got thousands of letters telling me that Chinese communists were in Mexico preparing to invade California,” he recalled. After checking with military authorities, Kuchel penned a short form letter in response. “We have no evidence of communists gathering in Mexico, Chinese or otherwise,” it said.

Shortly thereafter, Kuchel learned that he was being labeled a “Comsymp,” a term he had not heard of until then.

“I got a little teed off, and prepared a carefully researched speech critical of the John Birch Society and that kind of mentality,” Kuchel remembered. “I kicked them around, and they never forgave me.”

About the same time, Kuchel’s refusal to endorse his fellow Republicans began to nettle not only the party’s right wing, but also many of the more orthodox conservatives who made up the majority of the GOP rank and file.

When Nixon announced his plans to run for governor of California, the same year that Kuchel was standing for reelection to the Senate, the former vice president said he would run an independent campaign and endorse no one else on the Republican ticket.

Kuchel, feeling turnabout was fair play, decided to avoid endorsing Nixon. But when Nixon ran into trouble against Democratic incumbent Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, the senator was pressured to give him a hand.

Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote Kuchel a pointed letter, asking what kind of Republican he was for not giving such support. Eisenhower backed off when Kuchel responded forcefully that in California it was traditional to run one’s own campaign and not get involved with others and that Nixon had been first to restate the tradition.

“Dear Tom,” Eisenhower responded. “Thanks for straightening me out.”

Kuchel was reelected that year, 1962, by more than 700,000 votes. Nixon lost to Brown by 300,000.

Two years later, when Goldwater ran against President Lyndon B. Johnson, Kuchel refused to endorse him, explaining later, “I would have been a hypocrite if I had campaigned for Goldwater, so I kept my mouth shut and campaigned for other Republicans across the country. I considered myself the Republican. I considered what Barry Goldwater was saying was hardly Republican doctrine.”

On his refusal to support George Murphy, who ran successfully as the Republican candidate for the other Senate seat from California that same year, Kuchel said, “I never coveted public office enough to become a wholesale hypocrite.”

Two years later, when Reagan ran for governor, Kuchel withheld his endorsement. He said he had given a Reagan emissary, Leonard Firestone, an assurance that he would endorse the future President but only on condition that Reagan repudiate the John Birch Society. When Reagan would not do so, Kuchel made no endorsement, even though he said he had been told at one point that if he did, Reagan would guarantee that he would have no primary opposition in 1968.

That certain elements of the far right would stop at nothing to get Kuchel was indicated during his last term of office, when his Los Angeles assistant received an affidavit claiming that the senator, who was married and had a daughter, was homosexual.

Kuchel was shaken. “My God,” he said years later, “I almost dropped. I flew out to California within two days, and I asked for a meeting with the district attorney and the Los Angeles chief of police. They said they would undertake an investigation.”

Quietly, with little press notice, a Los Angeles police officer who had assisted in preparing the affidavit was fired. He and a New Jersey publisher pleaded no contest to charges of libel filed by the authorities. They claimed that it had been a case of mistaken identity.

But Kuchel later said, “It damaged me. Even though the perpetrators took a plea, it hurt me.”

Some political insiders felt that the senator lost much of his zest for political life after that episode. But there appeared to be other reasons as well for his inability to put on a dynamic defense of his seat when he was challenged by Rafferty in the 1968 GOP primary.

As Kuchel admitted, “My Achilles’ heel was money raising. I hated to indulge in it, and my campaign expenditures usually were the lowest amount of anyone.”

With Rafferty charging hard, declaring up and down the state that Kuchel was not a true Republican, the senator seemed on the defensive, and often inarticulately so. A dispatch by then-Times political writer Richard Bergholz said of the incumbent:

“He talked in generalities, haltingly, with little force or emphasis. . . . (He) later conceded that he was something less than brilliant. . . . ‘I was tired,’ he explained. . . . It was midafternoon on a campaign day which had only one appearance earlier in the day.”

When the votes were in, on a primary day most remembered for the assassination that night in Los Angeles of Democratic presidential contender Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, Rafferty had defeated Kuchel by 69,000 votes of 2.2 million cast.

The senator went to New York to attend Kennedy’s funeral. There, he ran into an aging Warren, who only a year later was to retire as chief justice. He told Kuchel, “I just feel so badly about your defeat, I can’t talk about it.”

As he left the Senate, Kuchel expressed pride in his record, even though it appeared to have contributed to his loss.

“Some of the votes I have cast I know have been very costly to me politically,” he told the Senate on Oct. 14, 1968, in his formal farewell. “I think, however, if there is one measure of satisfaction in the life of a legislator, it comes at the time he tallies the votes which he believed in his own mind were right, just and appropriate, even if he knew that the balance of public opinion was against him, and, sometimes, violently against him. . . .

“I think it is not only permissible but, indeed, vital that the Senate of the United States lead public opinion instead of following it. That is the difficult path but the only one to tread if our republic is to remain.”

Shortly afterward, Kuchel joined the law firm headed by Eugene Wyman, a former Democratic National Committee member from California. After several years of representing the firm in Washington, he returned home to California and practiced law with the firm in Los Angeles until his retirement as a partner in 1981, although he continued to be active.

Kuchel is survived by his wife, Betty; their daughter, Karen Peterson, and two grandsons, Jason and Peter Smith.

A public memorial service is planned for 3 p.m. Nov. 30 at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills.

Times staff writer Leslie Berkman contributed to this story.