I always love the part where he declares “negotiate what?”
I was a kid so don’t recall much of his time as governor.
Although we’d moved to Piedmont to get away from the radicals, we still attended the campus church from time to time (the Newman Center). The Catholic church, at that time, was undergoing many changes in worship form and they’d introduced “Prayers of the Faithful” which allowed anybody in the congregation to stand up and spontaneously offer his own prayer. It was a particularly solemn Sunday because (during a riot the previous week) a man, watching out his window, had been shot and killed by the National Guard.
So, it was not a surprise when somebody stood up and offered a prayer for “James Rector who lost his life...”. But, the next following prayer was from somebody who stood up and asked us all to pray for “John XXXX who is having finals...”. Everybody laughed. It wasn’t long after that that they stopped allowing people to speak out at random during the Mass.
Interesting times. People have asked us how come (as Bezerkeley alums) we could be so conservative. I always tell them that it’s because we lived through all of the turmoil and watched those various groups wreak havoc on all around them.
RR was a wonderful Governor.