Evan Mecham

This is just a place holder until I write something.

A collection of articles, speeches, notes and other materials regarding the impeachment of Arizona Governor Evan Mecham. This web site is intended to be a resource for historians, journalists, students and others who are writing articles or books about Evan Mecham.

I was the press secretary for Arizona Governor Evan Mecham for the last eight months of his short time in office (1987-88), when he was the first American governor to simultaneously face impeachment, recall and felony indictments.

Rough notes …

The spark of the idea to post some old stuff about Governor Evan Mecham came when Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was going through impeachment proceedings early this year. There were thousands of news articles that mentioned Mecham, and at least half of them got the facts wrong.

I am not an apologist for Evan Mecham. He made some dumb mistakes and he was too stubborn to see the oncoming storm. But, I am absolutely convinced that he was honest, far more honest than most politicians, and he was not a racist.

Further, Mecham had some very good ideas on how to boost the economy of Arizona — such as building an international cargo airport at Casa Grande, which he liked to point out would be only seven minutes of flight time farther than Los Angeles on flights from Tokyo and that small bit of extra fuel cost would be quickly recovered with Arizona’s much cheaper warehousing expenses.

But, above all, I believed in supporting the ideal of fair and honest elections. I was greatly bothered by contrived political scandals and the subsequent coverage by sensationalist news media. I realize now that until age 50 I had idealistic, utopian expectations for the democratic process. I realize now that almost any political system, capitalist, socialist, whatever, would work if it were not for corruption and greed. But, expecting to find political bodies and governments free of corruption is foolish.

Now, I know that I can’t control political and diplomatic decisions so I don’t much care about them. I do follow some news about current events, but only to learn what might impact family and friends.

I recently found some old disks that had my archives from my time in Mecham’s office, in addition some draft materials from two decades ago when I was thinking about writing a book. Then, I found a program that could read the old WordPerfect DOS files — some garbage control characters, but all the text was there. These old files included my contemporaneous notes. So, I started posting some of the old material along with my notes, which I am updating and adding more material.

Maureen Reagan and her husband, Dennis Revell, were the major factor leading to my becoming the press secretary for Arizona Governor Evan Mecham. Maureen was then co-chair of the Republican National Committee and Dennis was involved in the promotion of Arizona for the Superconducting Super Collider.

In 1986, I had leased a condo in downtown Sacramento. Two days after moving in, I learned that the unit directly above me was the home of Maureen and Dennis, and the unit next door to me was occupied by the Secret Service. My wife at the time had been a model, had owned a modeling school, and was then operating a casting agency and location scouting service. She and Maureen got along quite well, and the four of us occasionally socialized in Sacramento and in Los Angeles, where Maureen and Dennis had another home.

Both Maureen and Dennis were well aware that my political views were to the left of center on many issues. It was understood, but never discussed, that I did not vote for her father in his races for governor of California or for president of the United States. Maureen called one day from Washington to say that she thought I should consider interviewing for the job of press secretary to Governor Mecham. The Doonesbury cartoons lampooning Mecham had just started running and I had read the news about Mecham’s troubles. I told Maureen that I did not think my politics would fit well in the Mecham administration. She disagreed, saying there needed to be more balance in the Arizona governor’s office.

Earlier that year, Maureen had asked me to review the draft of a speech she was writing. After reading the draft, I told Maureen that she would certainly start a media firestorm, considering her position with the RNC and the fact that her father was in the White House. I was wrong. It barely caused a small blip. Here is the only news article I could find at the time.

Reagan’s daughter accuses North, Poindexter of treason
Associated Press, March 7, 1987
President Reagan’s daughter Maureen is calling for the court-martial of former national security advisor John Poindexter and his aide Oliver North, both of whom are military men. Maureen Reagan, who co-chairs the Republican National Committee, accused North and Poindexter of lying through omission. And she told reporters, “A member of the United States military who lies to their commander-in-chief is guilty of treason.”

That’s it. One paragraph. When Maureen died of cancer in August 2001, there was one sentence in her obituary mentioning her call for indictments of Poindexter and North on charges of treason. Quoting her father.

“I gave up arguing with my daughter long ago,” President Reagan explained to Republican leaders in 1987 after the Iran-Contra scandal when his daughter made headlines claiming that Oliver North and John Poindexter, his national security aides, should be court-martialed for treason.

((more to come))

Wall Street Journal
April 14, 1988

REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial)

The election called by the people was only a month away, ballots had been printed and candidates were campaigning.

Suddenly a court canceled the election, saying it no longer served a useful purpose. Americans know such banana-republic tactics are common abroad. The above events, however, occurred this week in Arizona. They highlight an antidemocratic trend in U.S. politics.

The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday canceled a scheduled May 17 recall election for governor because its target, Republican Evan Mecham, had just been removed from office by the legislature. The court’s decision allows Rose Mofford, the former secretary of state who replaced Mr. Mecham during the impeachment proceedings, to stay in office until 1991 without ever facing the voters.

The Arizona Republic, which helped lead the campaign to oust Mr. Mecham, editorialized that “there is no power of government or constitutional authority for canceling an election that has been called for directly by the people.

The court we fear usurped the rights of the people. GOP Senator John McCain, who called for Mr. Mecham to resign in favor of Mrs. Mofford months ago says, “I believe their decision was a political one.” What we are seeing in Arizona is the logical and unfortunate consequence of a recent political ethic that cares only about outcomes, an ethic that is causing a decline in respect for democratic processes. For certainly Arizona is not unique.

In 1983, after California voters rejected by two-to-one margins plans that would have gerrymandered their voting districts, some 600,000 voters signed petitions to put a “good government” redistricting plan on the ballot. The state Supreme Court, led by then Chief Justice Rose Bird, threw it off the ballot and permitted almost identical gerrymanders to become law. Finally in 1986, voters in turn threw her and two of her colleagues off the court.

The politics of outcomes is being learned by the young as well. The editors of the prestigious Yale Law Journal recently voted on an annual banquet speaker. The first vote produced Richard Nixon. The top editors didn’t like that. A second vote produced former Yale Law professor Robert Bork, a bad outcome. The editors canceled the banquet speaker.

The gerrymandering of the U.S. House of Representatives helps perpetuate one-party outcomes in that body. A President who won two landslide victories has seen one appointee of his after another pilloried and brought to heel on charges they engaged in conduct that is perfectly legal for a member of Congress. Others such as Ray Donovan and James Beggs were cleared by the courts of charges against them. All this has had very little to do with ethical piety and much to do with thwarting the uncongenial politics of a sitting President.

Measured by outcomes, much of this campaign has succeeded.

So we’re not surprised that Arizona’s political elite now is in the business of throwing out elections and creating a “governor” for three years. And we’re not surprised that for all the national coverage of the Mecham affair, it never dug deeper than the melodrama of the Mecham impeachment outcome, never tried to discover the reasons that a third of the electorate continued to support such an unlikely leader. We suspect the underlying politics of modern Arizona are exceedingly interesting, but the affair was represented to the country as a rolling circus. The outcome — removing Evan Mecham — was accomplished, and under an increasingly popular American political ethic, not much else matters.