Legislator John Vasconcellos
retires in November.
July 2004
Vasco’s Legacy
For Three Decades, John Vasconcellos Has Brought Insights from the Human Potential Movement to the California Legislature
by David Kupfer
On a hot day last April at his Santa Clara condo, Senator John Vasconcellos (D-San Jose) was fielding calls from friends concerned about his recent cardiac emergency. During an official visit to Brazil, Vasco (as his friends call him) suffered an angina attack and spent a week hospitalized in Salvador. On Good Friday, his Sacramento chief-of-staff asked Governor Schwarzenegger to ok the use of a California National Guard Medivac plane. Vasco was picked up and, 13 hours later, delivered to Moffett Field. On the tarmac, his cardiologist immediately whisked him off to the hospital for three angioplasties.
The experience left the 72-year-old legislator with profound gratitude for his doctor’s talent and for life itself. The flight cost taxpayers $147,187, but Vasco is glad the governor authorized it. “I was on a trip on behalf of the state, and they got me home. I’m grateful,” he said. “When your life is at stake, money is not something you think about.” Never a dull moment for Vasco.
John Vasconcellos is a phenomenon in Sacramento, where he’s known as both the conscience and dean of the California Legislature. He’s been a Sacramento mover-and-shaker since 1966, when he was first elected to the Assembly to represent Santa Clara. Today, he remains a catalyst for progressive legislation. During 38 years of public service, this pragmatic idealist has left his imprint on virtually every major issue from education to economic development, energy, the internet, public safety, medical marijuana, and letting 16-year-olds vote. He has chaired five committees and served on four others. Vasco is part of a brain trust of heavyweight senators — including John Burton, Byron Sher, and Dede Alper —all of who will retire this year, due to term limits.
The Road to Sacramento
Before the human potential movement was even named, Vasco was a practitioner. He entered therapy the same year he entered the legislature, working to become a “self-actualized person” through the aid of such notables as Abe Maslow, Carl Rogers, Virginia Satir, and Rollo May. His priorities and legislative initiatives reflect that personal growth: the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, Personal and Social Responsibility; Inspirations for Learning; and his bills supporting natural childbirth, hospice care, holistic health, and social diversity. As a defender of affirmative action, Vasco fought to open access to California’s Community and State Colleges. Before any other state politician, he recognized California’s evolving racial demographics. “My work,” says Vasco “is about the faithful vision of our human nature, in all its various forms.”
The condo where he’s lived for 25 years conveys no hint of senatorial hubris. Indeed, it looks more like a 30’s-something bachelor’s pad. Jazz, Brazilian, and classical piano can be heard on the stereo, while books by John Irving, Russell Banks, and Pat Conroy clutter the coffee table along with heaps of photographs and note-filled yellow pads. Scott Stossel’s new biography of Kennedy clan Peace Corps founder Sargent Shriver sits atop the heap.
Like Vasco himself, the place isn’t messy, just very, very busy. At 6’2”, with curly, silver-flecked hair, Vasco is a warm and towering figure whose Portuguese heritage is obvious from his profile and olive skin. He greets me just before the most hectic week of the legislative year: Within the next few days, all bills must get out of committee if they are to have any chance of getting passed by the full senate. Amidst a budget catastrophe, there’s a lot on the line.
No Bill Left Behind
John Vasconcellos was born in nearby Santa Clara County Hospital, and his parents are buried two blocks away. He grew up in a Catholic household deeply ingrained with the ideal and expectation of commitment to public service. His father was a grade-school math teacher and his grandfather was considered unofficial mayor before the town was incorporated.
As Vasco tells it, he first campaigned in the 8th grade, running for class president: “Being the breast-beating, ‘I am not worthy’ Catholic boy that I was, I illogically voted against myself — and lost that election by one vote!” At Santa Clara University, he fared better, winning four elections in a row. “That launched me into law school,” he recalls, and later into one of San Jose’s most prominent law firms. There, he favored high-profile public interest cases that became front-page news. The exposure fueled his first state assembly campaign in 1966. Sensing his potential, his Jesuit dorm counselor brought him to the attention of then-State Attorney General Pat Brown. Several years later, he became Brown’s travel secretary.
“Whenever he left his corner Governor’s office in the Capitol,” Vasco’s says of his apprenticeship to Brown, “I was by his side, like a general’s aide, assuring all went well. Pat was my most significant teacher, role model, and coach.”
Several days later, we’re in an austere chamber of the Capitol’s Senate Education Committee Hearing Room. It’s crunch time, 8:30AM. Vasco, wearing a rumpled, blue camel hair jacket, corduroy slacks, and tennis shoes, chairs the meeting. The committee’s backlog is brutal: emergency loans for the Vallejo School District; financial aid for college students; a four-day school week; school accountability; and Vasco’s drug and alcohol testing bill. “We’re trying to put bills in place that will help the state recover and improve the educational system, grades 1-to-12 and higher,” says Vasco. “But many of the best bills are hampered because the state is mired deep in red ink and in fiscal crisis.”
Vasco is visibly frustrated as he waits for fellow lawmakers to show up: there are only three hours to consider 40 bills. He’s forced to be disciplinarian, quieting the overflow crowd several times and keeping things moving like a rip tide.
Eating yogurt and a sandwich for lunch during the hearing, Vasco is now debating Senate Bill 1566, which bans sales of sugary sodas and junk food in elementary, middle and high schools. Vasco does not mince words as he lectures a lobbyist from the soft drink association: “It is not the State’s role to endorse poisons to young people!” The bill passes out of committee.
At a time of widespread distrust of politicians and cynicism about government, Vasco’s dedication tells a different story. Senator Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), who calls Vasco the legislature’s “long-term-vision guy,” pulls no punches about his enduring legacy: “He’s made [education] more accessible, accountable, and inclusive. His work has benefited millions of California kids.” He has never shied away from controversial stands. When friends made him aware of the medical benefits of marijuana, he pushed for legislation to legitimize its use. “After it had been thrice vetoed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson,” he says “I supported the creation of Prop 215 and that took the issue to the voters directly. In the afternoon, Vasco adjourns for a quick conflict-resolution meeting in his office. Staffers and lobbyists are struggling over SB 1168, which calls for an end to providing commercial milk formula samples to women leaving the hospital after giving birth. Following this diplomatic gambit, John naps in his office, surrounded by photos of Martin Luther King, Pat Brown, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evans, and family.
I ask his chief of staff, Sue North, who has known him since 1968 about his character. “What’s not well understood is his fearlessness,” she says. “From archconservatives to the very liberal people JV works with, without question, they all value his truthfulness, integrity, and willingness to say what he feels.” She cites his public criticism of former Governor Gray Davis and his Republican usurper Arnold Schwarzenegger. “There’s no quieting him,” she says. “He’s no different in private than in public. He’s a transparent politician — the real McCoy.” And while the media tends to peg him as the guy with the goofy ideas, North has found him to be thoughtful, deliberate, and efficient. Her praise is tinged with sadness: “This place will miss him desperately because he fixes things every day of the week, negotiating compromises, designing solutions, taking on complex problems and solving them.”
The Politics of Trust
Vasco heads down to the Capitol basement to accept a lifetime service award from the California Development Coalition and the California Association for the Education of Young Children. After a quick speech, photos, and greetings to old friends, it’s back to his office for a briefing with fellow Senators on the 22 bills suspended in the Education Committee. The next day, we drive in his silver- blue Chrysler Sebring Convertible for a speech before a government class at San Jose’s Evergreen College. En route, Vasco reflects on his core belief that politics is not distinct from the rest of the life: “In each of our human interactions — from the most intimate to the most public — life is truly about faith and relationships, and the trust that binds them altogether. That covers most of what I know. And my skills in that way are a result of all my years in therapy groups. The same hang-ups that occur in our bedrooms appear in our corporate boardrooms, as well as in our churches or schools. Politics is not that different, and we humans are not that different.”
A week later, Vasco has good news: his blood pressure is 124 over 60 — about as good as it can get. “I’m touched by the enormity of the happenings in my life, work-wise, otherwise, opportunities, challenges, and my capacity to find my own sense of priorities, how I can lead my life in ways that give me a lot longer to enjoy it as I get ready for retirement in November.” And one of those priorities is jazz piano. Vasco played it as a kid, practiced daily, then took a 57-year break. Last year, he bought digital pianos for his homes in Santa Clara and Maui. “That’s one of my of retirement goals: to learn and to write some compositions.”
His retirement is four months away, and he plans spending half his time in Maui and the half in Silicon Valley. His only commitment is to be a scholar-in-residence at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute. “I’m going on sabbatical next year, to get rested and empty out, to decompress and see who really lurks deep within me and let that person choose how to proceed with the next pages of my life.”
Part of Vasco’s work will be continued through the 4,000-member Politics of Trust Network. When he began his final senate term, he convened a group of friends to discuss what they could do to leave an imprint. That effort morphed into the “politics of trust” — “not the cynical view of human nature that informs most of us in both political parties, but rather a faithful view of human nature, the sort that Carl Rogers discussed in 1985 before he died. Rogers said ‘human beings are innately inclined toward becoming life-affirming, constructive, responsible, trustworthy.’” It’s the kind of affirmation that Vasco has been following throughout his career.
Amazingly, 38 years in the legislature have not left him cynical. “The future of politics and the future of life,” he says, “can be found in believing in ourselves, not shaming or battling ourselves or each other. I am far more hopeful now than when I arrived in the state Legislature about our innate human capacities to build a better world. I believe in trust and faith. I believe in the inherent orientation of human nature toward good.”
To learn more about Vasconcelos and his Politics of Trust Network, go to: democrats.sen.ca.gov/senator/Vasconcellos, or www.politicsoftrust.net, or read his book, A Liberating Vision: Politics for Growing Humans.
Berkeley freelance journalist David Kupfer has written for Whole Earth and The Progressive.
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