Peter Schrag writes in the LA Times:
Not only was Unruh a central player in the forging of California’s great postwar highway, university and water systems and the creation of its progressive governmental institutions, he also was a man with a voracious appetite for food, drink, sex and power — a larger-than-life personality that matched his political career. It’s those two things combined that makes this story so compelling.
Boyarsky sheds a lot of light on California’s less-than-sedate politics in the decades after World War II, providing a telling perspective on the present state of our political affairs. To paraphrase a bon mot attributed to Will Rogers: Things in California politics were never as good as they used to be.
…The twice-married Unruh "was always on the prowl," Boyarsky writes. As Assembly speaker, he famously said of the lobbyists who funded the extracurricular benefits afforded Sacramento’s underpaid politicians, "If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, . . . take their money and then vote against them you’ve got no business being up here." We learn that Unruh, never physically attractive, refused prostate surgery — the cancer would kill him — because it could leave him impotent.
