It bugged John Burton when people told him he or some other elected official was a man of his word.
“It’s supposed to be a given,” the former Congress member and California political giant, who died on Sunday, would grumble, usually after the person was out of earshot.
In the vanished political world Burton came up in, “your word” was a cornerstone. It was a world of compromise and camaraderie in which, like Shakespeare says, politicians of all stripes tilted mightily as adversaries but ate and drank as friends.
Much was made of the “novelty” of Burton’s close friendship with Ross Johnson, the state Senate GOP leader while Burton was the president pro tempore in the 1990s.
Friendships across the aisle weren’t a novelty when Burton, a Democrat so staunchly partisan he would go on to serve as state party chair, first came to the Legislature in 1964.
You’d vote against each other, speak out against each other’s legislation by day, but likely wind up hanging out together at Fat’s or the Senator Hotel at night. Finding a bit of commonality so you could better get the J-O-B done, as Burton liked to say.
Johnson and Burton carried legislation together to tighten the rules on asset forfeiture of people suspected of being drug dealers. Burton wanted to strengthen the rights of criminal defendants. Johnson was outraged by unreasonable property seizures. They passed the legislation over the state attorney general’s opposition.
They could also lay down a half-decent harmony on “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and shared a mutual love of Robert W. Service poetry.
Burton was a skilled and savvy politician who routinely lured the unwitting into believing he was half-crazy or half-there while using his smarts, charm and an encyclopedic knowledge of legislative rules and processes to achieve what he wanted.
What he wanted was no secret.
“My mother didn’t raise me to come up here and fuck over poor people,” he often said.
Or farmworkers. Or the elderly. Or the disabled. Or the environment. Or the hard-working men and women of the state’s labor unions.
Many of Burton’s most significant legislative accomplishments don’t have his name on them. Harry Truman used to say, “There’s no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t mind not getting credit for it.” Could just have easily been a Burton quote.
CalGrants, an extraordinary entitlement program, says if you apply yourself in high school and don’t have the dough to go to college, the state will pick up the tab.
It exists largely because of Burton, but none of the pieces of legislation creating CalGrants bear his name. Several of the authors of that landmark legislation were in competitive districts facing tough reelection challenges.
He cursed — famously. But a lot of the public face of John Burton was just a put-on. The person was far bigger than the persona.
He “cared a lot,” as his daughter, Kimiko, said in a statement announcing his death. He cared about people. His daughter and grandkids, chief among them.
Many of the remembrances of Burton mention some offstage kindness: a kind note, a helping hand, a piece of advice, a compliment. And those were handed out to politicians, staffers, constituents, friends. When Burton was in your corner, he stayed in your corner.
There are many people at the state Capitol whose addiction-derailed lives Burton helped move back on track. Sometimes with a nudge; sometimes a shove.
An oft-told story among Capitol insiders was asking Burton if he could do something for them. He would then erupt, order them from his office, maybe throw some paper at their back and then, a few days later, what they were asking for had quietly been taken care of.
He could be self-absorbed, bombastic for sure. And yet one of his go-to lunch companions and confidants was Tom Hannigan of Fairfield, the former assemblymember whose courtly and considerate temperament could easily be described as pretty close to the opposite of Burton’s.
At Hannigan’s funeral, Burton sat in the back — unlike many of the other politicians in attendance — and then blew off the reception to celebrate his friend with a hot dog at a burger joint they frequented in Vallejo.
John Burton is my daughter Katie’s godfather.
My wife and I didn’t expect John to be central to Katie’s spiritual upbringing in any way whatsoever, but we both knew that if anything happened to the two of us John would make sure that Katie got everything she needed to succeed in life.
That rock-solid certainty came less from witnessing his legislative efforts and more from demonstrations of his love for his own daughter.
At lunch, last month, he was quick to ask what his goddaughter was up to.
