Karabian, Walter: Moscone's legislative charm
Abstract
Walter Karabian: Well he was right on the issues from my vantage point. He was a great salesman. If he wanted a bill passed in the Assembly, he would go to Jack Knox because Knox would doggedly work the floor and never give up. The same for Moscone. He would doggedly work the floor, and he did it with a charm and a grace. It was just impossible to not like him. Knox came to me once on a bill and said “I notice you haven’t voted for this.” I said “No, Jack it’s a horrible piece of garbage.” He said “Well of course it is. To hell with the bill, you vote for the author.” And because he was a charming guy and we all loved Jack Knox, I realized that that was going to get me along better than a lot of other things. Not a lot of young legislators – I got there when I was twenty-seven – understood that. Moscone didn’t have to explain that to you. You wanted to vote for whatever he put out there because you liked him so much.
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Type
Interview
Date Original
2010-08-27
Relation
The Moscone oral history interviews are part of the George Moscone Collection, MSS 328.
Contributing Institution
Holt-Atherton Special Collections and Archives, University of the Pacific Library
Recommended Citation
Rubin, Jon and Karabian, Walter, "Karabian, Walter: Moscone's legislative charm" (2010). Moscone Oral Histories. 86.
https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/moscone-oralhistories/86
Rights Information
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