Cities: Magnet in the West

CITIES

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Senator Kennedy: You might not have the responsibility in each one of these fields, but you certainly are mayor of the city and therefore we need some leadership.

Mayor Yorty: I do not need a lecture from you on how to run my city.

Kennedy: One of the problems is not just a question of people going around promising Negroes or the poor all kinds of things, but the fact that these people expect to have as much of a chance as you and I have had.

Yorty: Well, certainly they will not have the chance you have had, but I hope they have the one that I have had.

Senator Ribicoff: I would say that the city of Los Angeles right now, from your testimony, does not stand for a damn thing.

Yorty: Well, it stands for a lot. We are a great city.

Up to this point, the atmosphere had been light and friendly all week in stately, colonnaded Room 318 of the Old Senate Office Building, once the scene of the McCarthy censure hearings. One by one, the mayors of eight of the largest U.S. cities took their place behind a makeshift wooden table to describe their problems to the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, holding its second week of hearings on the plight of U.S. cities. The subcommittee heaped lavish praise on Detroit's Jerome Cavanagh. It had kind words for Oakland's John H. Reading, praised New Haven's Richard C. Lee and Atlanta's Ivan Allen Jr. Chairman Ab raham Ribicoff of Connecticut and New York's Robert Kennedy, both Democrats, went so far as to pose with New York Republican John Lindsay after some good-natured repartee during Lindsay's testimony. Grinned Bobby: "It must be National Brotherhood Week."

Brotherhood Week was quickly suspended when Samuel William Yorty, 56, the tough and peppery mayor of Los Angeles, appeared on the scene. His city had attracted national attention with the Watts riots, and a second McCone report last month drew attention once more to the needs of the Negro there. Yorty, who disdains reading from prepared texts, appeared with an assortment of somewhat disorganized exhibits that seemed to affect the committee much as a red flag affects a bull. And, not least, Bobby Kennedy and Abe Ribicoff, who as Governor of Connecticut had been among the first to support Jack Kennedy's presidential bid, saw before them a maverick Democrat who supported Richard Nixon in 1960 and wrote a pamphlet called "I Cannot Take Kennedy."

"Extremely Unfair." Yorty had come prepared to explain to the committee the peculiar, almost unique government of the city of Los Angeles: a bewildering entanglement of jurisdictions that intertwine with county and state and deprive the mayor of authority over most of the city's major functions. The subcommittee, which obviously had not done its homework in certain vital aspects of Los Angeles government, was not interested. As soon as Yorty had finished his opening statement, its members turned to the problem of Los Angeles' disadvantaged minorities and what Yorty was doing about them. Kennedy and Ribicoff zeroed in with question after question, frequently demanding statistics that Yorty was unable to supply. Unlike any previous witness, Yorty was at times barred from referring queries for specific details to a subordinate. Complained he to Kennedy: "You are being extremely unfair. I