Chief Executive Officer
Governor…the chief executive office of the Commonwealth…the pinnacle of state political power, prestige and public policymaking in Pennsylvania. Only a select few of the many who aspire to it actually succeed in getting there.
Six different men served in that high office in the time that I walked the corridors of the Capitol, laboring daily in and around the affairs of state government, from the mid-term of David L. Lawrence of Pittsburgh in the early 1960s through two terms of Robert P. Casey of Scranton in the mid-1990s. Three happened to be Democrats; three were Republicans. But whatever their political affiliation, each had his own particular set of public policy priorities and his own distinctive style of governing to achieve them.
What follows are subjective reflections on the tenures and the records of the Governors who toiled as I traveled the Capitol in my professional pursuits, along with some comments and insights into their personalities and styles of governance gleaned by personal observations and/or up-front-and-personal experiences. Let’s take them in their order.
Governor. David L. Lawrence (1959-1963)
Pittsburgh’s David L. Lawrence was “Mr. Democrat” to many in Pennsylvania for more than a quarter of a century. He was elected Governor in 1958 after a very successful, four-term run as the Renaissance Mayor of western Pennsylvania’s most metropolitan city.
Governor Lawrence was mid-way through his term when I arrived in Harrisburg in the spring of 1961. So, my impressions of him were formed from a distance. But they were very positive. As a person, he struck me as a cordial, pleasant sort…the kind you’d love to sit around a table with and listen while he traded political stories with his peers. He had an easy manner with people, and a ready smile often on his face. Yet, he also was very businesslike in his public demeanor and dress, even in the most social of settings.
There was a long-established tradition when I arrived in Harrisburg for the Governor to entertain the Capital Press Corps and their families each summer at a pool party at the Indiantown Gap Military Reservation where the chief executive lived at the time. I went to my first one that summer of 1961. The press corps, their wives, their kids and the gubernatorial staff were dressed casually as befitted the occasion. Governor Lawrence, however, was wearing his ever-present business suit, white shirt and tie.
Bout mid-afternoon, a group of senior reporters were about to start a card game of Hearts—hearts and poker were the journalists’ card games of choice—over a picnic table in a shaded area off the pool pavilion. Lawrence shed his suit jacket and sat in. That, in itself—the Governor of Pennsylvania playing cards with a group of crusty reporters—was fascinating to me. But it was nothing compared to what was to come.
One of the players was a Harrisburg radio and civic personality, Pete Wambach Sr., by name. I first met him as a speech writer in the office of Lawrence’s lieutenant governor, John Morgan Davis. He also doubled as a disc jockey and announcer in the early evenings on one of the local radio stations. He broadcast from a studio at a suburban Harrisburg restaurant and bar, which made the place one of the Capitol crowd’s favorite evening gathering places. “There’s Jack Lynch of the Associated Press and Gene Harris of United Press International,” Pete would announce to his listening audience if you happened to walk in while he was on the air. “Good to see you fellas. Do your wives know you’re out? Well, they sure do now,” he’d chuckle.
Wambach, the gregarious semi-celebrity that he was, certainly wasn’t in awe of the political figures or other Capital personalities with whom he regularly came in contact. That, as I was soon to find out, included the Governor of Pennsylvania.
Midway through the game, Wambach dropped the dreaded Queen of Spades on the Governor. “Take that, you old sunuvabitch,” he exclaimed with a broad smile on his face. I was kibitzing near by and I was stunned at what I had just heard. “My God,” I remember reacting, “he just called the Governor of Pennsylvania a sunuvabitch! I can’t believe it.”
Lawrence was non-plussed. He calmly collected his cards with a touch of a smile on his face. He looked at Pete and said very quietly: “You will pay, Peter my boy, you will pay.” One reporter, I forget exactly who, quipped very quickly: “Don’t open any official looking envelopes tomorrow, Pete. You never know what just might be in it.”
David L. Lawrence of Pittsburgh was the last of the old-time pols to reach the Governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania. He rose through the ranks of his party (U.S. Collector of Internal Revenue for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Secretary of the Commonwealth in 1934, Democratic State Chairman that same year, Democratic National Committeeman); he had a Harry Truman sense of public policy priorities and governing about him; and an old-school premium on party principles, party loyalty and, above all, the bond of one’s word to another in the political process.