After the war, he came back to Utah and was active in party politics. He also mounted unsuccessful campaigns for the state and U.S. senates. As a lawyer, he practiced in Utah, specializing in transportation and tax law, and also argued cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

But Rampton was skeptical about his chances in a governor's race when he first launched a gubernatorial campaign against Mitchell Melich, after incumbent Republican Gov. George Dewey Clyde announced he would not seek re-election. Even so, Rampton says, "Somebody whispering in your ear sounds like a mighty chorus, and I said, 'Yeah.'"

Rampton had worked with LBJ in Washington and fully expected a congratulatory call from him after they both won their elections.

"He never did call me and congratulate me, and I felt quite hurt," Rampton says.

He asked his secretary, "What's the matter with Lyndon? He must not know I was elected. I would think he'd be calling me." But Johnson didn't call, even after Rampton first took office.

"A week went by and (my secretary) came in all breathless one day and said, 'The president is on the phone,'" Rampton recalls. "I picked up the phone and said, 'Yes, Mr. President?' and he said, 'Cal?' and I said, 'Yes, sir?' 'I understand Bob McNamara is at some place called Alta.'"

McNamara, the Vietnam War-era secretary of defense under both Johnson and John F. Kennedy, was on a ski trip to Utah and was snowed in. No one was getting in or out of Little Cottonwood Canyon, Rampton says.

Following an attention-getting expletive, all Johnson said was, "Get him out of there." Then "bang" the phone slammed, and Johnson was gone.

"First I tried with a National Guard helicopter, and they couldn't get the altitude safely to carry two people," Rampton says. McNamara was still stuck.

Rampton then went to a private helicopter operator. "I had no money to do it, but I rented one of his helicopters and paid for it with Democratic Party funds, rather than public funds, and brought him down that way."

A week or so previously, outgoing governor Clyde had met with Rampton the day after the election to facilitate a transition. "He said, 'There are 157 different departments in the state government that report directly to me. A lot of them I've never seen.' He said you need to reorganize government, so I decided that would be one of the things I would present to the Legislature initially," Rampton says.

The Legislature established the Committee on the Reorganization of the Executive Branch that became known as the Little Hoover Commission, taken from a federal-government restructuring initiative created by Franklin D. Roosevelt.