The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  “Mr. Brown is not interested in the mechanics of law as such,” Tobriner wrote in his recommendation to Yale. “He is one of those who wants to probe deeply16 into the meaning of the legal process.” He described Jerry as mature, unspoiled by his father’s status, and a B+ student. “My conversations with him disclose that he is thoroughly versed in political theory; that he has a philosophical and searching turn of mind.”

  Jerry was interested in Yale because it had no required courses after the first six months. Private law schools cost money, so Pat called upon his friend Louis Lurie, a San Francisco financier and real estate mogul with a fondness for the Browns. Lurie could be found most days at lunch at his table at Jack’s, the French restaurant and San Francisco institution that had counted among its regulars Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Ingrid Bergman, and Ernest Hemingway. Lurie gave Pat movie and theater passes, which he often passed on to his mother, in an era when such gifts were commonplace. Lurie also had set up a fund to help pay tuition for children of politicians, on the grounds that they sacrificed more lucrative professions to serve the public good. Lurie had donated to Sacred Heart. When Jerry enrolled in Cal, he gave him ballet tickets and took him to lunch at Jack’s. “Uncle Lou” said he would be delighted to help Jerry with tuition at Yale, but he teased Pat about his son’s choice: “I thought you were a real Californian17—what’s the matter with Cal or Stanford?”

  Jerry took for granted his father’s connections and his own privileged position, but he also wanted to escape. He headed to New Haven, where no one would know his name—in contrast to his college graduation, at which Governor Edmund G. Brown had welcomed the graduates and their families and then personally bestowed a diploma on a slightly embarrassed Edmund G. Brown Jr.

  Jerry had already left Berkeley when President John F. Kennedy came to speak the following spring at Charter Day, the annual celebration of the university’s founding in 1868. Extra chairs were placed on the Memorial Stadium field to accommodate the record crowd of ninety-two thousand students, alumni, and guests. Kennedy spoke about the university’s importance in the civic and scientific life of the country. He harkened back a hundred years, to the foresight of President Lincoln, in the midst of the Civil War, in signing legislation that created the nation’s land grant colleges. Among the first graduating class at Cal, often referred to as the Twelve Apostles, were a future California governor, congressman, judge, assemblyman, clergyman, doctor, and lawyer. “This college therefore from its earliest beginnings has recognized and its graduates have recognized that the purpose of education18 is not merely to advance the economic self-interest of its graduates,” Kennedy said, running down a long list of more recent prominent graduates who had gone into public service.

  A year earlier, Kennedy had famously promised to put a man on the moon. Berkeley researchers played critical roles in the space race, and the president paid tribute to the university’s contributions to science, through its faculty as well as the Los Alamos and Livermore labs that it operated. Clark Kerr had built a multiversity that boasted more Nobel laureates than any other faculty in the world. “It is a disturbing fact to me, and it may be to some of you, that the new frontier owes as much to Berkeley as it does to Harvard University,” said the man from Massachusetts, and the governor of California applauded loudly.

  Kennedy ended with a story about the French marshal Hubert Lyautey, who asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree grew slowly and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. In that case, the marshal said, we have no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon. “Today a world of knowledge, a world of cooperation, a just and lasting peace, may be years away,” Kennedy said. “But we have no time to lose. Let us plant our trees this afternoon.”

  During the eight years Pat Brown was governor, the University of California doubled in size, to eight campuses, with eighty-eight thousand students and seven thousand faculty. Its presence spread from the nineteenth-century Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton to the Riverside smog station, from the agricultural station in the Salinas fields to the Scripps marine research facility in San Diego. In anticipation of the university’s centennial, Kerr commissioned a project to document the size, scope, reach, and potential of the university. He asked renowned photographer Ansel Adams to capture in images the history of the university and project its future. “It is a bold and challenging idea,19 and we are naturally deeply moved by the thought that you want to consider us for it,” Adams wrote to Kerr.

  Adams spent four years visiting every campus, research station, and outpost. He produced a body of work second in size only to his images of Yosemite. He became convinced, as he updated university officials, that “the University and the State of California are inseparable.” He sought to document “the intimate and effective relationship20 of the University and the people of California,” the symbiotic relationship that touched every aspect of life. Adams photographed the nuclear weapons lab at Livermore, the medical school opened by a doctor who had come to San Francisco during the Gold Rush, the Irvine campus rising phoenixlike in the midst of citrus groves. He illustrated cutting-edge projects—videotaped lectures that could reach thousands, bicycle-only lanes on the Davis campus. He published a book of selected images he titled Fiat Lux, the motto of the university: “Let there be light.”

  “To look at the University of California21 is to look at California itself—its land, its people, and their problems—into the civilization rushing toward us from the future,” Adams wrote in the introduction. “What happens—or does not happen—to California in its attempts to solve the problems of population and industrialization will affect the world. The challenge to the University of California today is nothing less than to help bring forth the civilization of the future.”

  8

  Down but Not Out

  Only a bit of smog marred the view as Democrats from around the country arrived at Los Angeles International Airport to mariachi serenades, fresh California orange juice, and a winking donkey logo for their luggage. A thirty-five-piece brass band greeted each governor with his state song. A car and driver whisked them downtown where they found a fifth of liquor waiting1 in their hotel rooms as a welcome present from their host, Governor Pat Brown.

  “Your Party, and mine,2 has chosen to recognize the growing strength and influence of the West by holding its great quadrennial nominating convention in Los Angeles,” Pat wrote in his welcome message to the Democratic Party delegates who gathered July 11, 1960, for the first Democratic National Convention in the City of Angels. Home to six million people, more than one third of the state’s population, Los Angeles County had grown by almost half over the previous decade. “Here, where growth of population and expansion of the economy are regarded not with timid concern, but with enthusiastic vigor, let us begin to meet the challenges of the modern world with courage and confidence.”

  Two hundred fifty “Golden Girls” offered tours of the area’s attractions—Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Capitol Records, the Griffith Park observatory, the Santa Monica beach. Disneyland, which had opened five years earlier, had just added the 147-foot-high Matterhorn, the first tubular steel track roller coaster in the world and the tallest structure in Orange County. Delegates were invited to the Miss National Convention Beauty Contest at the Ambassador Hotel swimming pool and a premiere of Inherit the Wind at the Screen Directors’ Guild Theater. “Modern Los Angeles is a city bulging with muscle; vibrating with confidence and enthusiasm; always looking ahead to things that can be accomplished in the future,” the program explained. “Here, in the fastest growing area in the United States, extraordinary statistics have become commonplace.”

  Pat loved to show off California, and the national convention had promised an opportunity for both the man and the state to shine. Instead, the four-day party left him politically weakened at home and tarnished in the eyes of the Kennedy clan who would soon be ensconced in Washington, D.C.

  His first year as governor had seen su
ccess after success: bipartisan support for new taxes, agreement on a major water project, a fair employment commission. By the end of 1959, the New York Times Magazine profiled Pat Brown as an influential figure in the upcoming national campaign, a dark horse candidate for vice president, or even a compromise presidential choice.

  Then came the case of death row inmate Caryl Chessman. The political missteps that sent Pat’s popularity plummeting were rooted in a case that would be a relatively minor historical footnote, yet would dog Pat the rest of his life.

  Chessman was an infamous career criminal, nicknamed the Red Light Bandit because he shined a light into the cars of couples parked in secluded spots in Los Angeles, robbed them at gunpoint, and in two cases raped the young women. Convicted in 1948, he was sentenced under a statute passed after the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, which made assault while kidnapping a capital crime. While in prison, Chessman wrote several bestselling books, including Cell 2455, Death Row, which became a major motion picture. His case became a rallying point for death penalty opponents, partly because his crimes did not involve murder, partly because of his flamboyant personality. His books were translated into a dozen languages, his case became an international sensation, and religious leaders and celebrities rallied to his cause. He proclaimed his innocence, said he had been coerced into a confession, and insisted on representing himself at trial. He found ways to delay his execution for a record eleven years, during an era when death row inmates were executed relatively swiftly.

  An execution date for Chessman approached a few months after Pat Brown took office. His executive clemency secretary, Cecil Poole, buried himself in files that dated back to the Earl Warren years. Advocates of the death penalty were as vocal as the Chessman defenders, deluging the office with calls and mail. By the time it was over, the governor’s office had installed extra telephone lines to handle the volume and Poole calculated his office had received 2.5 million communications from around the world.

  Poole was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914 and grew up in Pittsburgh. An African American lawyer with degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard, he worked for the National Labor Relations Board until he was drafted. In officer training school in Alabama, Poole refused an order to do his swim training in the blacks-only pool. He had friends in Oakland and decided to move there after the war, part of the second great migration of blacks to California. Three years later, he became the first black deputy in the San Francisco district attorney’s office. In his job interview, Pat told Poole there would be some cases he wouldn’t want him to handle, such as a black man arrested for assaulting a white woman. Poole got up to leave, and Pat’s friend and deputy Tom Lynch intervened. With his trademark candor, Pat apologized and said he was wrong. Poole took the job. When Pat became governor, he brought Poole to Sacramento, where his job included reviewing death penalty cases.

  “Chessman hearing. Toughest decision I will make,”3 Pat wrote in his diary on October 15, 1959. “11 years on death row and they are still crying for blood. It seems barbaric to me but I must like everyone else obey the law. Chessman is a tough guy but to me it is the state that suffers not Mr. Chessman—open minded but leaning towards clemency.” After consulting Poole, Pat concluded that because of Chessman’s prior felonies, the governor could not commute the sentence without permission from the California Supreme Court. In private conversations, the chief justice told Pat he did not have the votes to make that happen. “Wrote statement at 3:30 am4 denying clemency to Chessman,” Pat wrote on October 17. “My conscience tells me to commute his sentence but my reason tells me that if I do I will be unable to commute anyone else on the row or if I do everything else will be measured against this emotional issue.”

  Pat Brown the lawyer had correctly concluded he had no legal recourse. Pat Brown the Catholic humanitarian longed to find a way to avoid a state-sponsored killing that he felt was morally wrong. He believed Chessman was guilty but should not face the death penalty. After appeals and delays that dragged on for months, Chessman’s attorneys exhausted all options. The execution was scheduled for February 19, 1960.

  The Winter Olympics would begin the same day in Squaw Valley, a remote California ski resort in the Sierra Nevada. Pat was to have taken part in the opening ceremonies the night before. Because he needed to stay by the phone during the execution, he dispatched Bernice and Kathleen to represent the family. On February 18, three of his aides took Pat out to dinner—Poole, press secretary Hale Champion, and travel secretary Dick Tuck. They knew Pat’s big heart and impulsive nature, and they loved him for it. They wanted to take no chance that he would change his mind at the last minute. After dinner, Pat went home while Poole and Champion returned to the office. Protesters ringed the capitol, and thousands of telegrams arrived every hour, urging the governor to spare Chessman’s life. When Poole’s phone rang, he knew from the special white light that it was the governor. Pat said he was thinking about a sixty- to ninety-day stay, in hopes that he could persuade the legislature to overturn the death penalty. Poole ran down the hall to get Champion; they grabbed a state car and raced the dozen blocks to the Mansion.

  “And there was Pat.5 He had been talking to Jerry,” Poole recalled, years later. “When we walked in there I said, ‘Pat, I don’t know how you can do this. You can’t get the court; you won’t get the legislature.’ And he said, ‘Well, talk to my son.’ And I did talk to him. Then he [Pat], Champion, and I sat there in the Governor’s living room and went back and forth over this thing, back and forth, back and forth. The Governor was determined to do it. We tried to point out to him all the consequences, conceding the depth of his feeling about it.”

  Pat had also talked to Sacramento bishop Joseph McGucken and California Episcopal bishop James Pike, who had been crusading on Chessman’s behalf. But it was the argument of Jerry, just a month out of the seminary, that gave Pat the excuse he wanted: Even if the chance were a thousand to one that he might save Chessman’s life, shouldn’t he take the chance? The legislature would never overturn the death penalty, Poole reminded Pat. The chief justice had repeated a day earlier that he could not get a majority on the court. The phone rang. They had a rule that only Poole or Champion would take calls. When the guard said it was a reporter, Pat grabbed the phone and blurted out the news. He was going to give Chessman a reprieve and ask the legislature to repeal the death penalty. “Champion and I looked at each other,” Poole said, vividly recalling the scene seventeen years later. “Because … when it gets down to it, he’s the governor. And he had made a decision.”

  One hundred miles to the northeast, Squaw Valley had been transformed from a wilderness outpost to the first Olympic village. Bernice and Kathleen watched an opening pageant orchestrated by Walt Disney, featuring a cast of five thousand people, two thousand doves, and thirty thousand balloons. Disney’s role as chair of the Pageantry Committee, coupled with the first sale of live television rights, turned the formerly low-key athletic event into a spectacle that set the pattern for all future Olympics. Bernice had been concerned about leaving Pat alone and tried to call home before dinner, but the swarm of international press tied up the phone lines for hours. By the time she got through, it was too late. “I often wonder6 how the course of history would have changed if I had gotten him,” she said years later. “I don’t know whether I would have been able to prevail … But he was sitting there alone in that Mansion. It’s a big house, and he was sitting there alone and pondering this thing. Then Jerry called, and Jerry can be persuasive.”

  The governor’s old friend Mathew Tobriner applauded and sent Pat an article about the racial inequities of the death penalty. “I have no doubt7 but that your handling of the Chessman matter will add to your stature. Whatever the initial reaction, the longtime evaluation will prove you to have been not only ‘courageous’ but merciful and humane.” Tobriner was a distinct minority. Death penalty supporters were angry, opponents unappeased. Pat was pilloried in the news. His staff was sullen. H
e brought his mother, Jerry, Cynthia, and Kathleen to the opening game at Candlestick Park, the San Francisco Giants’ new stadium, only to be booed. Pat and Bernice escaped for a few days on a fishing trip in Mexico, where he read a biography of Roosevelt. “Greatest attribute of Roosevelt—able to sell his product. My greatest fault8 inability to do the same,” he wrote in his diary.

  “Since the Chessman reprieve it has been very tough—no sleep9—boos—attacks by your own members of the Democratic party,” Pat wrote in the early morning hours of March 10, the day the legislature would debate his proposal to abolish the death penalty. The arguments went on past one o’clock, but the outcome was a forgone conclusion. To spare Pat as much embarrassment as possible, the committee rejected the measure by one vote.

  The stay ran out. On May 1, the eve of the execution, picketers marched and chanted around the Mansion all night. Pat went out to talk with them in the morning, then headed to the capitol and sat at his desk, a few feet from where Cecil Poole camped out in a secretary’s office on the phone with an open line to the warden at San Quentin. Preparations had begun. “It is now 9:50 AM. Chessman will be executed10 in 10 minutes,” Pat wrote. “I feel that it is better to get it over. Up until now I have had a terrific sympathy for Chessman but now that it’s almost over I feel quite calm.” Poole came in the office with an update. “Just heard the Warden stated that Chessman said he was ready to go. You have to be governor to know the context but there is nothing I can do—I am happy that I have not the responsibility.”

  Pat’s handling of the Chessman case, morally courageous and politically suicidal, earned him the epithet Tower of Jell-O. Even those most angry about Pat’s actions, like Fred Dutton, thought the characterization unfair. Pat often sought advice endlessly, responded to people he should ignore, and debated his decisions out loud. That engaging style earned him ridicule, but the image belied a more complex intellect that sought information to grow. Pat was always in motion, physically and mentally. You don’t need brains to succeed in politics, he used to say, you need good glands. Dutton was frustrated that Pat had sacrificed credibility and effectiveness for a futile gesture. His handling of the Chessman case would reinforce an image of indecisiveness that Dutton felt was debilitating, if undeserved. He believed Pat when he said Jerry just gave his father a reason to do what he wanted. Dutton also agreed with Pat’s assessment of the long-term damage: He would never fully recover politically.