The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Classes began at 8:40 A.M. and ended at 2:35 P.M. Attendance at the 8:00 A.M. daily mass in the chapel was mandatory on the first Friday of the month, encouraged on other days. Students studied Latin all four years, five hours a week, no exceptions. Honors students took Greek, the only other language offered.

  Jerry distinguished himself on the debate team, a premier sport at St. Ignatius, which had a long-standing reputation as one of the strongest California teams in the National Forensic League. He won the Freshman Elocution Medal and was chosen as one of three to compete in the annual Silver Medal Debate18 between the freshman and sophomore classes. His team argued against the proposition that “all Americans should be subject to conscription for essential service in time of war.” They lost to the older classmen.

  The next year, Jerry won the Sophomore Oratorical Award and watched the juniors and seniors face off in the Gold Medal Debate. One of the judges was Attorney General Pat Brown. As a junior, Jerry argued in the Gold Medal Debate (“Resolved: The McCarran Act should be repealed,” a debate on the 1950 immigration law approved over the veto of President Truman, who condemned as “un-American” the sweeping powers to investigate and deport immigrants deemed Communists or subversives). Again, Jerry’s team was bested by the older classmen.

  The debate team traveled by bus to tournaments around Northern California (once picking up Jerry at Magellan Avenue when he overslept). Though he was not one of the team stars, Jerry found the competition intellectually stimulating. The readings on issues like NATO and free trade deepened his knowledge and interest in current events and political affairs.

  The debate team regimen would prove relevant and useful in his future career. “It trains the student to read between the lines19 of newspaper and magazine articles, and to determine the causes and the solutions of difficulties presented to our democratic government,” noted the Ignatian, the school yearbook. “Debating to the student, therefore, is a furthering of one’s self in the poise and presentation of a subject; and the preparation for speaking with logic in future life.”

  Jerry mastered those skills at a young age, quick on his feet and self-assured in presentations that often ended with a quote he had garnered at the breakfast table: “As Attorney General Pat Brown says …” The very top debaters, like Jerry’s friend John Coleman, put in more time on research. Coleman was one year ahead, a state champion, and a member of the teams that beat Jerry in the intramural battles. The son of a carpet layer, Coleman was as serious about his competition as Jerry was blasé. The rivalry did not diminish their bond in the small, intense world of high school debaters, who formed lifelong friendships.

  Outside of the forensic league, Jerry was the quiet one in a close-knit circle of friends, almost all extroverts. To the extent he led it was by intelligence, though he was not a diligent student. In classes that he deemed a waste of time, he let his grades slip to barely passing. In classes he found intellectually stimulating, he engaged. The Jesuits’ Socratic method fitted Jerry’s penchant for asking questions, to the occasional annoyance of his teachers. Nor had he grown any fonder of rules. He was threatened with expulsion after tossing an Animal Crackers wrapper in the gutter; the vice principal, who had issued an antilittering edict, happened to observe the miscreant from his window. When the attorney general was informed, he “was about ready to explode,”20 but he calmed down and ordered Jerry to return and apologize, which he did.

  Every so often Jerry did something out of character, demonstrating an innate sense of the value of surprise and timing. He volunteered for the Senior Fight Night boxing match against his old friend Pete Roddy, who didn’t bother training because Jerry was not much of an athlete, though the two frequently played golf together. But Jerry, determined to beat his friend, practiced at the Olympic Club, a San Francisco institution that proclaimed itself the oldest athletic club in the United States. Jerry knocked Roddy down and won on points, a victory he would lord over him for decades. Jerry also signed up as a cheerleader his sophomore and junior years, an uncharacteristic move for a nonjoiner who studiously disdained the rah-rah spirit that had marked his father’s high school years.

  St. Ignatius drew students from all over the city, its reputation based on achievement rather than the social stature of parents. Working-class kids mingled with children of the elite, embodying the California idea of education as the great equalizer and avenue to upward mobility. Jerry’s crew included his Magellan Avenue neighbor Mark McGuinness and his cousin Baxter Rice, whose father was a liquor salesman; Peter Finnegan, one grade behind, whose uncle was vice principal; and Bart Lally, the son of a policeman. Their core group studied together, worked together, played together, and dated together. When they were young, Jerry and Bart went to the Boy Scouts’ Camp Royaneh on the Russian River, and when they were old enough to drive they went up to the river on weekends and stayed with friends who had second homes or summer rentals. Sometimes Bart and Jerry went up to Sacramento with Pat, a ninety-mile trip that would take all day because Pat stopped to talk with people at every restaurant or bar along the way. He simply loved talking to people, and they responded to his warm, gregarious nature, his conversation punctuated by superlatives, and his memorable belly laugh. Bart lived nearby and spent a lot of time in the Magellan Avenue house. He viewed Pat as a surrogate father—supportive, respectful of Bernice, and paying special attention to Jerry, eager to expose his only son to his world.

  Most of their teachers at St. Ignatius were Jesuit seminarians, fulfilling the three-year scholastic commitment that was part of the long path to becoming an ordained priest. The teachers were smart, dynamic, and not much older than their students. Their communal lifestyle was attractive for its social as well as religious aspects, and in their dedication they epitomized the Jesuit ideal of marshaling intellectual and moral force to change the world. The Jesuit education imparted a sense of destiny; the students as well as the teachers were chosen to lead and take on worldly challenges. The seminarians represented one path toward that goal, a life that seemed spiritually and intellectually exciting.

  Jerry’s seventeenth birthday fell on Holy Thursday in the spring of his senior year. He was late for his party because he stopped to worship at St. Brendan’s Church. He liked the ceremony: the candlelit, incense-laden procession to place the blessed sacrament in the tabernacle, and the mysteries commemorated in the mass. When he finally arrived at the party, Pete Roddy had a black cassock waiting as a present for his friend. Jerry informed his father that he wanted to enter the Jesuit seminary. Pat refused to give consent, which would be necessary until Jerry turned eighteen. In another compromise, he enrolled for the fall at Santa Clara University, the Jesuit school that had been the first college in California.

  On June 10, 1955, Edmund G. Brown Jr. graduated from St. Ignatius High School with a classical diploma. He lacked the requisite years of Greek to receive the honorary classical diploma that Bart Lally and several others in their group achieved. Lally was also headed to Santa Clara in the fall. First, the two friends set out in Jerry’s 1946 DeSoto for a summer in Idaho. Pat had gotten them jobs with the Ohio Match Company, owned by his friend Norton Simon. The teenagers cleared roads, part of the process of logging trees that would be cut down for matches.

  Pat Brown had started his second term as attorney general after an easy election in 1954, when he won both the Democratic and Republican primaries. He was even supported by the Los Angeles Times, a rare break in the paper’s practice of endorsing only Republicans. The token opposition didn’t stop Pat from traveling the state to campaign. “I hope I do not seem too much of a glad-handing politician21 because I genuinely like people and like to talk with them,” he wrote his cousin Burt Chandler after a campaign cocktail party. Pat left a week before the November election on a lengthy trip to South America, part vacation and part business. He was up in the Andes in Cuzco when the polls closed and didn’t hear the results for several days.

  Jerry Brown and (left to right) Mark McGuinness
and Bart Lally at their junior prom. The Class of ’55 friends would remain close the rest of their lives. (Courtesy of Bart Lally)

  During Pat’s second term, power shifts began within the California Republican Party that would soon affect both the state and the nation. Pat enjoyed strong professional and warm personal relationships with both Earl Warren and his successor in the governor’s office, Goodwin Knight, another moderate Republican. They shared the sense of a common good and a belief that personal relationships trumped political affiliation among members of the “Party of California.” Pat had visited Warren in Sacramento several times a year until he resigned in 1953 to become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Pat admired the older man’s moral integrity and his dignified, gracious style, so different from his own. Over long lunches at the Del Paso Country Club, the longest-tenured governor in California history dispensed advice. Don’t ever let them see your cards, Warren counseled the forthright and voluble attorney general.

  Whereas Pat was almost always ready to forgive, Warren had a long memory. One of the people Warren never forgave was Richard Nixon, who had betrayed Warren in his long-shot bid for president in 1952. Nixon, then a U.S. senator, had publicly supported his fellow Californian, who hoped to emerge as a compromise candidate at a brokered convention. Privately, Nixon lobbied delegates to support Eisenhower and wangled the vice presidential nomination for himself. Eager to run for president in 1960, Vice President Nixon played an increasingly high-profile role in California Republican politics. Unlike Warren and Knight, Nixon continued and encouraged the red-baiting that had helped him initially win election to Congress. Although Pat was not yet a target (he worried a little that it was because they didn’t think he was intellectual enough to be a Communist), he became enmeshed in the consequences.

  The nation’s Cold War battles played out most dramatically in California in Hollywood and at the University of California. The blacklisting of actors, writers, directors, and musicians began with the House Un-American Affairs Committee hearings in 1947 and the subsequent prosecution of the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions before the committee and were sentenced to prison for contempt. California had its own Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Affairs, which proposed in 1949 that the legislature assume the power to determine the loyalty of all university employees. To preempt such action, the University of California president suggested faculty sign a loyalty oath. The Regents adopted the requirement; students and faculty immediately denounced the oath as an impingement on academic freedom. Governor Warren, who sat as president of the Regents, led opposition to the oath. Supporters of the oath tried to oust a Warren appointee who was a sitting judge, arguing he could not hold both positions. At Warren’s request, Attorney General Brown issued an opinion that allowed the Regent to stay. After months of negotiation and litigation, the Regents eventually rescinded the original oath requirement.

  Pat was warned about Nixon by Democrats and Republicans alike. Liberal Carey McWilliams followed California politics closely, though he had moved east to edit the Nation magazine. Concerned about Nixon’s rise, McWilliams sent Pat a story that detailed the vice president’s strategy-planning dinner with Republican leaders, hosted by the Los Angeles Times political editor. In the capital, Pat heard more about Nixon’s potential menace. “In a conversation with Governor Knight22 at 2:30 P.M. on April 19, 1955, at Sacramento, Mr. Brown was told that Governor Knight considered Vice President Richard Nixon one of the most dangerous men in the world,” Pat wrote in a confidential memo for his files. “Knight told Mr. Brown that he had been double-crossed by Nixon on two occasions; that [U.S. Senator Thomas] Kuchel, [U.S. Senator William] Knowland and Warren had been treated the same way by Nixon; and that Nixon would in the opinion of Knight be the worst man imaginable for the Presidency of the United States.” In a few years, Pat would spend a great deal of time worrying about Richard Nixon.

  Two days after the conversation with Knight, Pat Brown turned fifty. His brother Harold threw a black tie birthday bash at the Nob Hill Room of the Fairmont Hotel. Friends chipped in to buy him a club chair and ottoman. In some ways, he was still the kid who joined every club. He was a dues-paying member of the Jonathan Club, the Native Sons of the Golden West, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Lawyers Club of San Francisco, the Moose Lodge, the Lowell Centennial Committee, the California State Auto Association, the State Bar, the Northern California Golf Association, and the Order of Elks. He subscribed to the Catholic Lawyer,23 National Geographic, Atlantic Monthly, Democrat Free Press, Frontier Magazine, the New Republic, and America magazine.

  During his reelection campaign, Pat had made a speech in Los Angeles to a group of young professionals called the Diogenes Club. Two members were law school classmates and coeditors of the first Stanford Law Review, and both would become important advisers to the attorney general. Warren Christopher had clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglas and returned to his hometown to join O’Melveny & Myers, Los Angeles’s oldest law firm. Fred Dutton, a young lawyer interested in Democratic politics, was working for the gas company. He began to send Pat memos with suggestions. Pat arranged for Dutton to work on Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign in California and then join the attorney general’s staff. Dutton thought strategically about ideas and politics in ways different from the longtime friends and San Francisco Irish politicians who formed Pat’s inner circle. Pat, always reading, recognized the need to broaden his sphere.

  He and Dutton were thinking ahead to 1958, when the offices of governor and U.S. senator would both be on the ballot. Dutton articulated several precepts that Pat had learned about the realities of California politics. The first problem was the ineffectual Democratic Party, out of power for so many years, weakened by the lack of patronage jobs, the great mobility of the electorate, and the cross-filing system. Pat could not rely on the party structure; he needed to build a loyal team, committed to him. The geography of the state dictated a corollary hurdle: The Tehachapi Mountains divided Northern and Southern California into separate worlds, with different histories, economies, social structures, and leaders. Any future campaign would need two separate teams and strategies. Third, the era of campaigning largely in print was over. Radio and television were going to become the key media. Pat and Dutton began to talk regularly to formulate plans.

  “California is a tremendous state,”24 Pat wrote his cousin Burt Chandler. “As you go from one end of the state to another, you realize that California is destined to be the largest state in the Union. To think that I will have some part, good or bad, in shaping its destiny is sobering. I hope that I am not conceited because I know my limitations, but I do know also that with firm principles a person does not have to fear in the slightest degree. I know what is right and realize when I err.”

  6

  The Governor and the Seminarian

  On the afternoon of August 14, 1956, as Jerry Brown and Frank Damrell approached a small town nestled in the Santa Clara Valley, they fished coins out of their pockets and tossed them out the car window onto State Road 17. They would not need money where they were going.

  Damrell had met Jerry in high school when they competed in debates. His father was a judge in Modesto, in the heart of the state’s Central Valley, and the two sons of Democratic politicians had gravitated to one another. They had both entered Santa Clara University and roomed together in Kenna Hall. Damrell, elected freshman class president, seemed most likely to follow in his father’s footsteps.

  Jerry was known for his night-owl hours, which included frequent visits to the senior who lived down the hall, Marc Poché, a scholarship student who earned extra money as a resident adviser. Jerry sought out Poché with atypical questions. He wanted to probe the difference between Kant and Greek philosophers, or the failure of democracies, or the reasons people didn’t vote. The colloquies often ended with Poché sending Jerry to bed. Jerry continued to debate in public, too, and was chosen as one of three to compete against rival S
t. Mary’s in the fifteenth annual Foch Medal Debate. The Santa Clara Broncos argued successfully that the multiparty system in the French parliament was detrimental to government stability.

  Pat wrote his son regularly. He scolded Jerry for not paying his bill for the San Francisco Chronicle and emphasized the importance of a good credit rating. He lamented Adlai Stevenson’s disappointing showing in the New Hampshire presidential primary. He urged Jerry to come back to Magellan Avenue on weekends. “Everybody at home is very well,1 but we miss you every single day you are away,” Pat wrote.

  His parents held out hope Jerry would stay at Santa Clara, but he had not wavered in his determination to become a Jesuit priest. Damrell made the same decision. So in June, Pat wrote friends on the East Coast and asked them to help entertain teenagers who wanted one last fling before embarking upon a monastic life. The friends spent a week in Boston, a week in D.C., and a week in New York, where they saw four plays. “A tremendous opportunity,”2 Jerry wrote to his uncle Harold, “living like millionaires with an apartment on Park Avenue.”

  Eighteen years old, imbued with the confidence that he could play a significant role in the world, Jerry embraced the Jesuit seminary as a path to public service—and an alternative to the commercial politics of his father’s world. “The prospect of a life devoted to religion3 and service of God struck me as far better than making a name in business or law or acquiring material goods,” he explained fifteen years later. “The material world didn’t interest me as much as a life of quiet contemplation. I didn’t have any ambition to have a rich or powerful family, and I didn’t want to lead an ordinary life in the suburbs. I thought it would be much more exciting saving the world for Christ.”