The Man at the Wheel

As any Washington bureaucrat could see, something was wrong in Utah. All the computers and calculators of the U.S. Bureau of the Budget clicked off the same answer: Utah wasn't spending enough money, wasn't drawing her full allowance of federal grants-in-aid. Quicker than he could count up the digits in the national debt, an investigator was winging his way toward Salt Lake City to find out what was the trouble.

The trouble turned out to be sinewy, easy-smiling J. (for Joseph) Bracken Lee, the first Republican governor to sit in the copper-domed Utah capitol in 24 years. The budget man called on Governor Lee, told him of Washington's concern. Says the governor: "I asked him how old he was. He said he was 31. So I said to him, 'Young man, it's too bad you never lived in a free country.' He got a little red-faced and said 'I do live in a free country.' So I said 'Well . . . I remember when the paycheck I got was my own and I could spend it as I liked. Can you spend yours as you like?' " A few minutes later, the governor showed the bewildered budget man the door.

Man of Promise. Brack Lee, at 51, is as ruggedly independent an the pioneers who settled in the shadows of the bleak Wasatch range. A 32nd degree Mason and member of no church in predominantly (74%) Mormon Utah, he had defeated Mormon Democrat Herbert Maw in 1948 by promising to run the state just the way he had run his real estate business in the coal-mining town of Price (pop. 10,000).

This meant, as anguished Republicans soon discovered, that he would give a state job to anybody who was competent. "I'm fed up with most politicians anyway," said Lee briskly, "and that goes for Republicans as well as Democrats." He cut the governor's own office staff to a secretary and two clerks, fired his chauffeur and wheeled the governor's official Cadillac himself.

By last week, Brack Lee's trail was littered with the bones of sacred cows. Early this year, he flatly refused state funds to hire more help for veterans' affairs, although he was a World War I infantryman himself. "I favor all help possible to injured veterans," said he, "but veterans who returned without physical or mental damage should deem it a privilege to have served their country, to say nothing of the experience and travel they gained."

When anxious Republican policymakers asked his opinion on farm price supports he replied: "I would say to the farmers, 'The price of freedom is the same to you as it is to everyone else--a little hardship when times are adverse.' "

He campaigned against federal aid to education, slashed the budget of the University of Utah. "If it's necessary to close every school in the U.S. for a year to save the Government, close them," he said. Once he flatly refused $100,000 of state funds for the Salt Lake City Symphony, suggested that a good hillbilly band was just as entitled to help from the state.

Saving Millions. The Democratic legislature showed its feeling about Lee soon after election. It transferred the governor's $30,000 annual "contingency" (i.e., office expense) funds to the Democratic attorney general. Then it voted nearly $9,000,000 more than Lee had recommended to run the state. By an unprecedented use of the veto, he snipped this down nearly $4,000,000--and grieves that he has no such control over the national capital. "I sometimes think," he says, "that I am more afraid of the spenders in Washington than I am of the Russians."

Brack Lee's term has two more years to run. Despite the doubts of politicians and newsmen, he thinks his kind of small businessmen's government will get him reelected. If it does, after he has alienated just about every pressure group in the state, politicians will be flocking to Salt Lake for lessons. If he doesn't get reelected, he knows that at least his methods work in the real estate business back in Price.

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