George Deukmejian, a perennially popular two-term Republican governor of California who built his career on fighting crime, hardening the state’s criminal justice stance and shoring up its leaky finances, died on Tuesday. He was 89 years old.
Deukmejian, who was elected governor in 1982 and 1986, died at his home in Long Beach, according to a statement from his family.
During his many years of public service, including 16 years as a state legislator and four as state attorney general, Deukmejian sponsored the successful “use a gun, go to prison” bill, oversaw development of a workfare program for welfare recipients and negotiated with the Democrat-controlled Legislature to create an $18.5-billion, 10-year transportation plan.
The son of Armenian immigrants, Deukmejian had years of public office on his resumé before winning election as governor and emerging as the most prominent Armenian-American politician in the United States.
His identification with Armenians, who were victims of a genocide during the early 20th century at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, would infuse his life with a determination to ensure the rule of law.
Never, during a career that spanned three decades, did he waver from his law-and-order crusade or his passion for public safety.
Steven Merksamer, Deukmejian’s one-time chief of staff and longtime advisor, said that one way to understand his former boss was to realize that, for him, public safety — whether it be crime control or retrofitting bridges for earthquake protection — was part and parcel of a basic philosophy.
“The paramount reason he ran for governor in the first place was his commitment to public safety,” Merksamer said in 1989. “It has been the hallmark of his whole life —much more so than taxes or other issues. It’s something he has told me he was brought up with.”
After serving as California’s attorney general, he rode the crime issue into the governor’s office in 1982 and, during the eight years he governed the state, guided the criminal justice system toward tougher sentencing. He also oversaw the expenditure of $3.3 billion to build eight new penitentiaries. The number of felons in prison tripled to nearly 97,000 during his tenure.
He also moved vigorously to put judges on the bench who took a hard line on crime.
Deukmejian had watched as his predecessor, Gov. Jerry Brown, appointed liberals to the court, including making the controversial Rose Bird the chief justice of the state Supreme
Court.
When it was his turn, Deukmejian backed an initiative campaign — which voters overwhelmingly approved — to oust Bird and two other high-court justices, Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin. As a result, Deukmejian was able to almost completely remake the court, appointing five of the court’s seven justices.
“The governor wanted justice to be sure as well as just, and to be perceived as such by Californians,” said Douglas W. Kmiec, who was constitutional legal counsel in the Reagan and the George H.W. Bush presidencies. “Deukmejian’s judges tended to be law-and-order judges. They knew the law well and they did not look to make new law from the bench.”
Besides remaking the state Supreme Court, Deukmejian appointed a raft of conservatives, including many prosecutors, to the state’s lower courts. His appointments reached 1,000 by the time he left office in 1991.
In all, Deukmejian spent almost 28 years in Sacramento, enjoying a reputation as someone of unquestioned integrity but someone whose manner was so severe that he earned the nickname “Iron Duke.”
Deukmejian said he was not trying to be difficult but merely trying to “stick by my position and stick by my principles.”
Charles E. Young, who was chancellor of UCLA when Deukmejian was elected governor, said that he had wondered at first if he would be able to work well with Deukmejian. But Young came to view Deukmejian as one of the great modern-era governors of California.
“I believe he never took a position that he didn’t believe sincerely, and if he believed sincerely in it, it didn’t make any difference what anybody else thought,” Young told The Times.
Deukmejian was popular with voters who were anxious about crime. Unlike others before and after him, however, he did not try to ride his popularity to the White House, though he once conceded that, had he been asked to be George H.W. Bush’s running mate in 1988 instead of Dan Quayle, “I might have agreed to it.”
Although he played a part in California politics after he left office, attending Republican events and supporting various GOP candidates, he maintained a largely private profile. In 1991, he joined the Los Angeles office of the Sidley & Austin law firm, retiring 10 years later.
Deukmejian liked not having to run the state after he left office.
“You get up every morning and you don’t have to worry about 30 million people, deal with 120 legislators, deal with the press,” Deukmejian told The Times’ George Skelton in 1992. “It took me about five minutes to adjust to a private, normal life without all those concerns and headaches.”
Courken George Deukmejian Jr. was born on June 6, 1928, in Menands, N.Y., a small village set among the rolling hills and aging brick factories along the Hudson River near Albany, the state capital.
At home, Deukmejian’s parents spoke Armenian, Turkish and English but taught George and his sister, Anna, only English. This experience left him with the belief that any child could learn another language and cemented his lifelong opposition to mandatory bilingual education classes in public schools.
Source: http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-george-deukmejian-dies-20180508-story.html