The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  If you are really interested in national health insurance and flood (calamity) insurance, capital punishment, and other sundry plans that you have talked to me about in the past, you can do far more to further these ambitions as one of our national leaders—to wit, a Senator. In my opinion, if you are ever to emerge from local politics (by that I mean California politics) you will have to do it pretty soon.

  The question you must answer is: Where can I do the most in solving these problems. Will I be able to do more as a Senator or as Governor? … when you come right down to it I can’t say much about your political future except that you have a duty to God and your religion, upon which your decisions ought to be much in accordance with. Please excuse inaccuracies in this brief analysis as I have little experience and am far away from the political scene. With love, Jerry.

  PS My advice: make a retreat and ask God’s help. You can’t do it all alone.

  His son’s grasp of the political terrain surprised Pat. He acknowledged concern about the odds of a gubernatorial victory and worried whether he could win support from newspapers and raise sufficient money. But he also contended that issues facing California—providing water, energy, schools, and universities for the booming state—were as important as national concerns, and a governor could accomplish more than a junior senator. He planned to decide by October. “After I cross the Rubicon18 there will be no returning.”

  Fred Dutton, the politically savvy lawyer Pat had hired to expand his circle of advisers, thought the real choice was between a risky run for governor and secure reelection to a job Pat loved. Bernice might be warming to politics, but she understood a gubernatorial race would mean a quantum leap into the political fishbowl. Dutton impressed upon Pat the need to curb his habit of thinking out loud: “You have come into a position where what you say and do has a significant effect far beyond just you personally. I assume that is an uncomfortable status for you—and objectionable to your family. But it would still seem to be one of the inescapable realities.”

  Dutton’s comments were sparked by a July 23, 1957, story in the San Francisco Chronicle in which Pat sent signals in all directions: He said he had received an attractive offer from the private sector, a gubernatorial race would cost half a million dollars, national Democrats wanted him to run for Senate, he preferred to run for reelection, and oil magnate Ed Pauley would not help him run for governor. He left a damaging image of “vacillation, confusion, superficiality,” Dutton said. “You have to decide19 what you really want—in a personal and public sense. Then we need to go after it.… Only you and your wife can make that decision.”

  Eighteen years younger than Pat, Dutton was short, with a receding hairline, big glasses, a quick wit, and a ready laugh. He had grown up in San Francisco, interrupted his college education to join the Army, and returned home with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart after being wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and held prisoner of war. After finishing Cal and then Stanford Law School, he had been looking for a way into public service when he met Pat Brown. Dutton pushed Pat to run for governor. He knew Pauley supported Knight for reelection and wanted to maneuver Pat into a Senate race. So Dutton was concerned when Pat accepted an invitation for the family to spend ten days at Coconut Island, Pauley’s private Hawaiian compound. “They have slides in the bedrooms20 going down into the water, so when you wake up in the morning the first thing you do is to get onto the slide and slide right down into the ocean,” Pat wrote to eleven-year-old Kathy, who was away at camp, describing their upcoming adventure.

  Worried that Pauley would use the vacation to pressure Pat to run for Senate, Dutton had sent a survey to dozens of key California Democrats asking what Pat should do. “Run for governor” was the overwhelming response. Every day Dutton airmailed piles of letters to Pat in Hawaii. “I believe you should give serious thought to an early announcement21 of whatever your decision is,” Dutton wrote. Knowland would make his official announcement in a few weeks. Knight was clearly rattled. “We no longer have a conventional political situation.”

  Coconut Island would be Pat’s last break. “After that, it’s back to the salt mines and probably the most important year22 that I will ever face,” he wrote to Jerry. “I have almost determined to run for Governor even though all the odds seem to be against me … I intend to make no public announcement until after I have made a retreat because only in silence, meditation and prayer can I really work this one out.”

  Jerry spent his summer vacation at a different sort of compound. Once a week, the novices took a one-hour hike, three abreast in assigned trios, across State Road 17 and up a fire road that led to the Villa Joseph, owned by the Jesuits. In summer they camped out at the Villa for several weeks in June and August. They slept in tents among the redwoods, hiked, swam, played softball, and barbecued on the outdoor grill.

  The end of the summer brought another change of pace. Two thirds of the seminary’s financial support came from the Novitiate Winery, adjacent to Sacred Heart, which produced a black Muscat that frequently won prizes at the California State Fair. The Jesuits’ nearby vineyards had appreciated considerably as the area became a popular San Jose suburb and agricultural fields gave way to development. The Jesuits debated selling the Santa Clara vineyards and buying cheaper land farther away, but they postponed the decision in part because the grape harvest was integral to the novitiate experience. Each season, novices worked in the fields for about five weeks during harvest. Their work helped the winery’s bottom line and reinforced the virtue of manual labor. Each morning, two dozen novices in jeans and denim “grape jackets” balanced in the back of a flatbed truck for the drive to the fields, where they picked grapes in silence for an hour. Then the whistle blew, and they were allowed to talk. Competition was encouraged and the names of the five fastest pickers were posted daily. Just as in high school, John Coleman, the champion debater, always wanted to make the list. Jerry was noted more for asking provocative philosophical questions during the time they were allowed to talk.

  Before the grape harvest ended, Pat Brown had made his decision. On October 30, 1957, his twenty-seventh wedding anniversary, he announced his candidacy for governor. He promised leadership to meet the rapidly growing state’s needs for classrooms, highways, and water. He articulated a vision of ambitious expansion: “I deeply believe we have a great state23 to build.”

  A week later, Governor Knight walked out of the office of Vice President Nixon, whom Knight had called one of the most dangerous men in the world, and announced he would run for Knowland’s Senate seat. A bitter Knight had little choice. Nixon had mediated the deal to avoid a damaging intraparty fight. Delighted Democrats promptly dubbed the Republican maneuver “the Big Switch.” Instead of a popular, moderate incumbent, the Republican candidate running against Pat would be a conservative Washington insider with presidential ambitions.

  Dutton, the man Pat called his Svengali, began crafting the message for an election more than a year away. He recruited help from his friend Warren Christopher, who was becoming a prominent lawyer in Los Angeles. Christopher wrote position papers and speeches. Dutton commissioned papers from experts and writers, including author Wallace Stegner and journalist Carey McWilliams. Dutton and Christopher brainstormed about how to increase Pat’s profile in Southern California, where he still was not well known. “You will have the 4 major papers24 against you here in Los Angeles as far as editorial support is concerned. BUT you will have the majority of the working press for you,” journalist Adele Rogers St. John wrote Dutton. To offset the dominance of the conservative Los Angeles Times, the Brown team cultivated smaller Southern California papers whose editorial positions were particularly influential with the thousands of voters who had recently moved to California.

  California was growing so fast it was projected to gain at least six congressional seats after the next census. The 1958 election would be crucial because the next legislature would control reapportionment, the redrawing of congressional boundaries. For Cali
fornia Democrats, the election also became a test of a multiyear effort to rebuild, not through the weak state party but around it. In 1952, Democrats had fared so poorly that their Senate nominee lost his own primary. The only bright spot had been the energy of young people drawn to Adlai Stevenson’s candidacy, who formed local political clubs. The Stevenson Clubs became the nucleus of a grassroots organization called the California Democratic Council, known as the CDC, founded in early 1953. Within two years, the CDC had four hundred clubs, and their members helped Democrats win all the party’s primaries for the first time since cross-filing had begun. In addition to actively supporting Democrats before the primaries—which the state party was barred from doing—the clubs supplied dozens of volunteers to type, label, and send out flyers, important for campaigns that still depended on mailings. Though the liberal, intellectual CDC leadership was somewhat suspicious of Pat Brown’s roots in Irish San Francisco machine politics, he easily won their endorsement at the January 10, 1958, convention, where the Democrats’ emblem was a small silver broom with the slogan “Sweep the State in ’58.”

  Because the Democrats’ dysfunctional party had been out of power so long, Dutton traveled cross-country to glean strategies from five Democrat-controlled states—New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. He reported that top Democratic officeholders campaigned year-round.25 They spent “beyond anything conceived of in practical terms in California” and raised money year-round in a systematic manner. Unlike in California, successful Democrats didn’t rely on a small group of wealthy donors, nor did they allow donors to decide how money should be spent. Campaign professionals made those determinations. One result was in-depth public opinion surveys conducted several times a year.

  So Dutton consulted Lou Harris, a pioneer in the field who had recently launched his own polling business. “Survey research is rapidly being recognized as an indispensable arm26 of the modern election campaign,” Harris wrote Dutton. “Ticket splitting and switch voting have reached unprecedented proportions … more and more voters are casting their ballots for (or against) the individual man rather than for any party or set of party principles.” Given the weakness of party loyalty in California, this would be especially true. Dutton outlined for Harris areas they should poll:27 What was the popular image of Pat Brown? Stature? Honesty? Vacillation? Did Catholicism hurt a candidate? How did opinions vary between north, south, and central California?

  Pat’s personality—buoyant, optimistic, embracing—lent itself to the “nice guy” campaign Dutton designed. Pat avoided strong partisanship and appealed to independents and liberal Republicans, in the tradition of Earl Warren and the “Party of California.” Pat had spent the last eight years visiting all fifty-eight counties; he understood both statewide and local concerns. The results showed in the June 3 primary: Pat won 22.5 percent of the Republican vote, almost twice as large a share as Knowland’s 13.6 percent showing in the Democratic primary.

  Pat Brown’s logo in his 1958 campaign

  “The guy is as natural as an old shoe,”28 Republican voter Thomas Curry wrote George Brewer, a Shell Oil executive and childhood friend of Pat who had formed “New York Republicans for Brown.” Curry ran into Pat on the golf course, where the candidate abandoned his game and rushed over to the seventeenth tee to exclaim about their mutual friend’s support. “He was as elated as a sailor with a 6 day pass. In my book it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one day in the not too distant future he may very well land in the No. 1 spot in the White House. As an Irishman once said—may the wind be ever at his back.”

  Most of the larger donors to Pat’s campaign were Republicans. His campaign chair and principal fundraiser was Benjamin Swig, a real estate mogul, major philanthropic and political force in San Francisco, and close friend of Earl Warren. The businessman met the then governor in 1944 aboard the City of San Francisco when Swig traveled by train from Chicago to buy a San Francisco landmark, the St. Francis Hotel. By then, Swig was on his way to becoming one of the largest individual real estate operators in the country. A few years later, he bought the Fairmont Hotel, in part because his wife wanted to live in the penthouse, an opulent suite that would become the site of many political fundraisers. One of the first things Swig did was lift the hotel’s ban on black guests. Swig became a Democrat after sitting next to Helen Gahagan Douglas on a plane; he apologized for the dirty, red-baiting campaign Nixon had run when he defeated her for Senate, and then got so angry about it that he changed his registration. He still voted for Republicans like Warren and Knight, but he had become a major booster of Pat Brown. One of Swig’s storied techniques was to host a luncheon and tell people the doors would remain locked until they all wrote checks.

  As often happened in California, an unrelated ballot proposition played a critical role in the electoral race. Union membership and clout had been steadily rising in the 1950s. In response, conservatives placed on the ballot a so-called right-to-work initiative that would amend the constitution and deny unions the ability to require membership as a condition of employment. Knowland campaigned for the change; Pat opposed the measure. He thus became the indirect beneficiary of a million-dollar campaign to defeat Proposition 18, waged by national labor organizations that viewed California as a bellwether. Organized labor also conducted a voter registration campaign that helped Democrats widen their enrollment edge, though many of the new residents were conservative Democrats from the Midwest or South who often voted Republican.

  The fight over the proposition helped sharpen the ideological differences between the candidates. The Oakland Tribune, the Knowland family paper, did all it could for its favorite son, including a caricature of Pat with a dog collar that was captioned LABOR’S STOOGE. But the Republican campaign was so dismal that one of the three major Republican papers, the San Francisco Chronicle, rescinded its earlier endorsement of Knowland. By the end of the summer, Dutton predicted Pat would win by more than a million votes. They launched the general election campaign after Labor Day with half a dozen kickoff rallies in San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles, ferrying reporters on a presidential-campaign-style press bus outfitted with a bar, mimeograph machine, typewriter, and work space. Aides arranged for Western Union to pick up reporters’ copy at various times to meet their deadlines.

  For the first time in decades, a Democrat appeared poised to lead California. A Time magazine reporter trailed Pat for several weeks, filing reams of dispatches that captured how the candidate’s warmth put people at ease no matter where he went. Within minutes, strangers in restaurants and taxis called him Pat. The Time story portrayed Pat’s victory as all but certain and nationally significant, through an East Coast lens that marveled at how a “second rate administrator with a notorious inability to make decisions” could be so popular. The story mentioned Pat’s drooping socks and tendency to worry, but omitted many of the more thoughtful comments from friends and colleagues who portrayed him as more complex than the “Just Plain Pat” who graced the cover of Time on September 15, 1958.

  In one of the correspondent’s outtakes, Norton Simon praised Pat for surrounding himself with talent to compensate for areas in which he felt weak. “So few of us are willing to recognize our own inadequacies,” Simon said. “But Pat recognizes where true character lies and what to lean on. I have that feeling very deeply and I recognized this in Pat in his youth. This man is very, very real.”29

  Only once in a while did Pat feel his brilliant advisers took too much credit. As they sat around a Palo Alto swimming pool analyzing the primary results, Dutton and others focused on the impact of the recession and their weak opponent. Pat was hurt.30 “I know what you all are thinking, that I lucked into this one,” he said. “Let me tell you something. I’ve been selling Pat Brown for forty years. I’ve been working this. I had something to do with this election. The people like me.” Then he got up, in his trunks and Hawaiian shirt, and walked around the pool, stopping at the first table he reached. “My name is
Pat Brown. I’m running for governor …”

  At Sacred Heart, the novices finished harvesting grapes, and Jerry was deep into his new studies. On August 15, 1958, two years after he entered the seminary, he had taken his vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience and become a junior. Jerry plunged into a classical education and spent much of his time in the library. He marveled over Cicero’s speeches (“the clearest you would ever want to read and they roll out like a symphony. He worked over every line so the whole thing would be a finished masterpiece31 of literature as well as persuasive oratory”), discovered that English translations of Virgil’s Aeneid lost the music, rhythm, and imagery of the original, and found Socrates’s Apology “not only a well thought out defense, but an inspiring picture32 of a man that was ready and eager to die for his ideals.” He was less impressed by the survey courses in Shakespeare, Western civilization, public speaking, and English, which he felt rushed to cover too much ground. Jerry preferred to burrow deeply into one subject rather than skim the surface of many.

  The juniors could talk, study, read, and discuss ideas. But rules and regimen remained strict. Latin was to be used whenever possible, and conversations were to be brief; long discussions required special permission. The reading list was tightly controlled. Magazines and newspapers were off limits. No one told Pat that the subscriptions to the Atlantic, Fortune, Foreign Affairs, and Harper’s that he sent as gifts to the Sacred Heart Novitiate library were banned reading. For a small group of juniors, including Jerry Brown, the admonishments to unquestioningly follow orders, the repressive rules, and the restricted reading seemed to clash with their new intellectual course of study.