Dick Murphy returns!

Murphy (seated, middle) with fraternity, 1965
- Photo courtesy of Sunbelt Press

“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.” —Bill Watterson

“God was pointing me toward the exit.”

That’s how former Mayor Dick Murphy sums up his resignation six years ago.

In his new memoir, San Diego’s Judge Mayor: How Murphy’s Law Blindsided Leadership with 2020 Vision, the former Superior Court judge and mayor portrays himself as a well-trained, hard-working man who believes in walking through doors that God has opened for him.

But has the public already shut the door on the man who resigned in 2005 just a week after Time magazine included him among the three crappiest big-city mayors for his failings in coming to grips with a ballooning pension-deficit crisis?

Time—and bookstore-autograph sessions—will likely tell.

Now, a memoir being a memoir, Murphy has every right to depict his four-year, eight-month reign as mayor in any light he chooses. But this 192-page book could have been so much more.

Instead, it’s an autobiography of an orderly man seeking relevance—Murphy even offers 10 “new” goals—six years after he stepped away from the political spotlight.

While the omissions are numerous—and no, Spin Cycle’s not begrudging any lack of reference to the slew of nicknames it bestowed on Murphy, from “Mayor 10Goals” to “Mayor Flippy-Flop” to the 2003-wildfire-inspired “Dancing Dick and the Yellow Jackets”—the most glaring is the Time smack-down.

Not. One. Word.

At the time, the Union-Tribune quoted a defiant Murphy from his Del Cerro driveway as saying: “People should be proud of what we have accomplished in this city. Tell Time magazine that they just don’t understand what’s going on.”

In his book, Murphy rehashes the old argument that other large cities were undergoing similar cataclysmic financial woes and that San Diego was no exception. Unfortunately, he writes, a “hostile press” went berserk.

“Most of the media had usually been fair and objective during my first term as mayor,” Murphy explains. “But as my second term unfolded, some reporters abandoned any pretext of providing a balanced perspective on pension issues. The hostile press coverage eroded public confidence in City government, further inflaming an already-incendiary situation.”

That led, he writes, to protesters “camped out in my front yard, creating a security threat to my wife and family. I received death threats that at times required 24-hour police protection from my security detail….”

Never mind that the protesters who camped out were interested in human rights, not how Murphy was slow to act on the pension mess. But is this the same guy who, when he first ran for mayor in 2000, referred to himself at coffee klatches as the “Hangin’ Judge”?

Former City Councilmember Donna Frye, who challenged Murphy as a write-in candidate in the 2004 mayoral race that Murphy now admits he should not have entered, told Spin Cycle she found the first half of Blindsided that focused on his pre-mayor years “quite enjoyable.”

Murphy offers some keen insights into his upbringing by his strict Midwest educator parents. “My childhood and high-school years weren’t exactly a prairie idyll,” he starts off Chapter 1. And the Oak Park, Ill., native—who turns 70 in December—spins an interesting yarn of his college years. (There’s even a picture of Murphy with his Illinois college frat buddies hovering over a Playboy!)

He notes that his wealthier colleagues later at Harvard Business School “had a certain swagger that I probably lacked.” But, he writes, he eventually learned that “hard work and persistence can trump pedigree and wealth.”

Murphy talks about meeting his wife, Jan, a physical therapist from Massachusetts he happened upon at a Harvard Medical School mixer he and a roommate decided to crash. “[M]y future bride was not impressed, especially when she found out I was not going to be a physician,” he writes. “But my persistence and patience eventually won her over.”

And there are thoughtful memories of his time as a Vietnam-era White House military aide under presidents Lyndon Johnson (often “tired and grumpy”) and Richard Nixon (“a little stiff and formal”).

But Frye said the second half of the book left her empty, as if his insight gauge somehow shut off. “Frankly, the second part of the book reads like a report to the City Council,” she said.

And by that she means there’s a whole lot missing, far beyond Time’s worst-mayors omission. “That doesn’t bother me,” she said. “But if you’re going to tell the San Diego pension story, how do you do that without mentioning Diann Shipione? That is a glaring omission.”

Shipione, the former pension-board member who first sounded the alarm over the city’s underfunding of its pension system, is indeed nowhere to be found in Murphy’s book. While he cops to some mistakes—his pension vote in 2002 that compounded the deficit, for one—Murphy seems to have convinced himself that larger forces were simply beyond his control.

Still, he snipes, the Securities and Exchange Commission might have used its resources better by “investigating Bernie Madoff.” (Notably, the dozen pages he de votes to the pension crisis can be found in Chapter 11.)

“Could I have handled some matters more deftly?” he writes. “Possibly, but I wasn’t sure how to do that without compromising my integrity.”

Former City attorney Mike Aguirre, whom Murphy calls “recalcitrant” in the book for stoking public furor by accusing the mayor and council members of securities fraud, hadn’t read the book but had his own take.

“The Dick Murphy story is how he came upon two paths divided, and he went down the wrong path,” Aguirre said. “To his credit, Murphy at some point realized he’d made a mistake, and he resigned. But he’s still in denial. He rigged his own pension. He was in on the largesse.”

Ironically, Murphy, the former judge, does touch briefly on his personal finances. If he’d lost the mayor’s race in 2000 and returned to the bench, he laments, “I’d probably have a better pension at this point.”

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