McCarthy Says Wilson Got Shockley Donation

SACRAMENTO —  Injecting the issue of race into the campaign for the U.S. Senate, Democratic challenger Leo T. McCarthy charged Tuesday that Sen. Pete Wilson accepted campaign money from a Stanford professor who has long argued that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.

According to Wilson’s campaign contribution report, the Republican senator accepted a $1,000 campaign contribution in May from William B. Shockley, winner of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956 and a proponent of the theory that blacks are genetically intellectually inferior.

Darry Sragow, director of Lt. Gov. McCarthy’s Senate campaign, questioned “Sen. Wilson’s willingness to accept money from someone who is openly racist” and called on the senator to return the donation.

George Gorton, a strategy consultant with the Wilson campaign, defended Wilson’s acceptance of the contribution and said, “Just because somebody supports us doesn’t mean we support them.”

“We can’t provide an ideological test for more than 130,000 separate contributions,” he added. “We’re not planning to return any money for ideological reasons.”

Gorton also noted that Shockley was one of 12 Senate candidates Wilson defeated in the Republican primary in 1982. Shockley received 8,308 votes in that election, or .04% of the ballots cast.

“We beat him and his ideas at that time,” Gorton said.

The 78-year-old Shockley could not be reached for comment.

The McCarthy campaign’s disclosure of Shockley’s contribution was part of a continuing effort to offset any political ground that Wilson may gain while participating in the Republican National Convention this week in New Orleans.

On Saturday, the lieutenant governor’s campaign accused Wilson of accepting more than $68,000 in campaign contributions that exceeded the federal $1,000 limit on such donations.

Wilson’s staff is reviewing those contributions now, Gorton said, and expects to return some of the money to the individuals who made donations exceeding the limit.

Shockley, a co-inventor of the transistor, has long been controversial. In an August, 1980, interview in Playboy magazine, he said, “The major cause for American Negroes’ intellectual and social deficits is hereditary and racially genetic in origin and thus not remediable to a major degree by improvements in environment.”

Shockley also told the magazine, “ . . . the evidence is unmistakable that there is a basic, across-the-board genetic disadvantage in terms of capacity to develop intelligence and build societies on the part of the Negro races throughout the world.”

Sragow, in criticizing Wilson’s acceptance of money from Shockley, said, “We are talking about someone whose strongly held views are repugnant to the fundamental principles underlying our Constitution.”