Gavin Newsom

California Governor Gavin Newsom is clearly running for president and — surprise, surprise — has a new memoir coming out. In an interview about the book, he recounted attending his mother’s hastened death. From the Washington Post story:

It was the spring of 2002 when Gavin Newsom’s mother, Tessa, dying of cancer, stunned him with a voicemail. If he wanted to see her again, she told him, it would need to be before the following Thursday, when she planned to end her life.

Newsom, then a 34-year-old San Francisco supervisor, did not try to dissuade her, he recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. The fast-rising politician was racked with guilt from being distant and busy as she dealt with the unbearable pain of the breast cancer spreading through her body.

Newsom’s account of his mother’s death at the age of 55 by assisted suicide, and his feelings of grief and remorse toward a woman with whom he had a loving but complex relationship, is one of the most revealing and emotional passages in the California governor’s book, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” which will be published Feb. 24.

Some call it assisted suicide, but it appears to have actually been homicide because she was lethally injected by a doctor:

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.