The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  The consequences quickly became clear. A month after Chessman’s execution came the California Democratic presidential primary. Pat was on the ballot as a favorite son, not because he had a realistic path to the nomination, though he briefly harbored long-shot hopes, but as a strategy to hold together the always fractious California Democrats and leverage their role at the convention. California was one of only sixteen states that held primaries in 1960; most delegates were chosen at closed-door caucuses, and the decisive votes took place at the convention. In March, Pat had met with John F. Kennedy at the senator’s Georgetown home and urged him not to enter the California contest, which he would likely win but at the cost of splintering the state party. As a favorite son, Pat would hold the large block of delegates together, uncommitted until the final moment, then deliver them to Kennedy at the convention. In return for staying out of the California primary, Kennedy asked that Pat promise not to accept a vice presidential nomination from another candidate. Such a move would of political necessity pit the two Catholics against each other. Pat agreed. He came away from the meeting impressed with Kennedy. “He has around him the best brains11 in the country,” he wrote in his diary that night.

  The Kennedys were everything Pat Brown was not: polished, glamorous, wealthy, Harvard-educated, and ruthless. The Lowell yell leader was always out of place in Camelot, no matter how hard he tried. He would always be slightly awed and uncomfortable in their presence. At the same time, his success confounded the Kennedys, who never understood how such an effective, accomplished governor could prove such a weak political leader. The Kennedys shared the view of California common among the East Coast political establishment: a byzantine world of geographic divisions, weak party discipline, and a lamentable lack of party bosses. Tom Lynch told a story about Pat’s bewilderment12 when Abraham Ribicoff, a Kennedy cabinet secretary and former governor of Connecticut, asked Pat who had decided he should run for governor. I did, Pat responded, baffled at the idea that party bosses would make such decisions.

  Pat was justifiably apprehensive on June 7, as he played his traditional Election Day golf game with Bernice. His opponent in the presidential primary was little known, but he had attacked Pat for the Chessman reprieve. The governor won, but with far less of the vote than he should have had. He was shaken, and the loss of prestige eroded his position heading into a convention that should have been a triumphant celebration of the coming of age of his beloved state.

  In the days leading up to the convention, the Kennedys pressed hard for Pat to release the California delegates and publicly endorse the Massachusetts senator. Pat refused, arguing the move would backfire because of strong support for rival Adlai Stevenson. The governor expected the California delegation would fall in line once the depth of support for Kennedy was clear. He misjudged. In a rancorous session on the eve of the convention, a majority rejected Pat’s plea to support Kennedy. Liberal Democrats stuck by Stevenson, who also became a stalking horse for Lyndon Johnson, who hoped to deny Kennedy a first ballot victory. “Stop Kennedy” leaflets called him “the candidate of an overly ambitious father with unlimited wealth.” Pat struggled to muster a majority for Kennedy. “I pleaded, urged13 and cajoled,” he wrote. “It did no good. I told them it would humiliate me. It did no good.”

  The delegation’s vote on the convention floor gave Kennedy 33½ votes, two more than Stevenson. The Kennedys had known they didn’t need the California votes to win on the first ballot, but Pat’s determination to hold the delegation neutral till the last minute only reinforced his image as a weak leader. “I tried to let the people know that this was an Independent Delegation not controlled by me. This was my first and fatal mistake,”14 he wrote in his diary. “A Governor Can Not Abdicate Leadership. It is better to lose.”

  His friend and adviser Hale Champion put it this way, writing a friend: “Pat is just not a whipcracker at heart and people know it and like him for it. This time, however, this reputation for being a nice guy15 hurt instead of helped.”

  Dutton stressed familiar points: Pat needed to focus, deliberate in private, and act decisively in public. Dutton’s keen political instincts had impressed Kennedy and would soon lead to a job in the new administration. In his last days in Sacramento, Dutton again demonstrated his foresight. Pat needed to transition to become a leader for the new decades, Dutton warned: “Less reliance on approaches fashioned for the 1950s in California and more scrutiny of the realities of the present16 and immediate future.”

  Those realities emerged sharply from the 1960 election: Political power in California had begun to shift from north to south. Future campaigns would be run on television, not in print. And cracks had appeared in the infatuation with growth, presaging the time when bigger would no longer be better.

  From the time the first limited access highway in the country opened in 1940, connecting downtown Los Angeles and Pasadena, the state could not build roads fast enough to keep up with traffic. Consequences of the unbridled growth became more apparent. The spike in traffic accidents led to so many personal injury lawsuits that the legislature authorized fifty new judgeships. Pat proposed mandatory blood tests for suspected drunk drivers, who were responsible for increasing numbers of fatalities. Despite millions of dollars allocated for new highways, traffic at key intersections did not improve. With five million passengers17 a year arriving at LAX, access roads to the airport were jammed; a key interchange designed to handle two hundred thousand cars a day was already carrying three hundred fifty thousand.

  Congestion emerged as more than an inconvenience. Recent research had conclusively linked traffic to smog, upending earlier assumptions. The low-lying Los Angeles basin had long suffered from polluted air that remained trapped between the mountains and the sea, sometimes limiting visibility to a few blocks. For many years, stationary sources had been blamed for the yellow-gray air that hid the nearby mountains and irritated eyes and lungs. In 1947, Los Angeles had formed the first air pollution control district in the country, empowered to regulate emissions from power plants and oil refineries. But the noxious smog only worsened.

  In his Pasadena lab, Caltech biochemist Dr. Arie J. Haagen-Smit, who had made his name as a scientific detective by identifying the compounds that gave pineapple its flavor, started to investigate what was causing discolored leaves and stunted flowers in his garden. His experiments pinpointed the culprit as ozone, a substance created when sunlight interacted with molecules in car emissions. Though the automobile industry disputed the finding, by the time Pat became governor there was a widespread consensus that cars were the primary source of smog. Local officials lobbied for the state to take action. “The industry which causes air pollution18 should be required to solve it,” Los Angeles County supervisor Kenneth Hahn wrote Pat, urging the governor to call a special session of the legislature. A landmark law passed a few months later required new cars to be equipped with the first types of pollution control devices.

  Warren Christopher tackled the air pollution problem on another front during his brief tenure with the Brown administration. Before state officials could regulate air quality, they would have to create agreed-upon standards. Christopher traveled the state visiting local officials who had initiated antismog efforts and scientists who studied air pollution. His findings led to the creation of the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, which made California the first state empowered to promulgate and enforce air quality standards.

  In his zeal to master issues like air pollution and be well read, Pat always carried around at least two briefcases, so overstuffed with books and documents that they never closed. Sometimes his executive secretary went through the contents to create a priority reading list, an exercise that revealed an eclectic assortment of journals far removed from state business. Pat dragged the briefcases with him on planes and in the car and took them home on evenings and weekends.

  A favorite reading spot at home became the pool, added to the Mansion during 1959. When they first moved in, Pat ofte
n threw a bathrobe over his swimsuit and walked across the street to use the pool at the Mansion Inn. Bernice, with her strict sense of decorum, was mortified to discover that the governor changed in a hotel bathroom. Friends raised money for the kidney-shaped backyard pool, which became a place where Pat could mix work and family. On weekends he caught up with reading while children and grandchildren played. His daughter Cynthia and her husband, Joe Kelly, had moved into the Magellan Avenue house and had two small children. Barbara and her husband, Pat Casey, had two sons. Pat took particular delight in his oldest grandson, Charlie, who laughed at his grandfather’s jokes.

  Many mornings, Bernice would get halfway down the back stairs in her bathrobe only to hear Pat already at work, deep in conversation in the breakfast room. Often the guest was Bernice’s younger sister, May Layne Bonnell, who had known Pat since she was six and now worked as his appointments secretary. Bonnell had followed her sister to Cal and majored in political science, then learned typing and shorthand in order to get a job. Her lack of political experience or connections made her an ideal appointments secretary, loyal only to Pat. She found the best time to get his attention was in the breakfast room around seven thirty A.M. Even then they would be interrupted by calls.

  Bernice slowly embraced her new public role. She looked the part. Whereas Pat struggled with his weight and wore rumpled socks, Bernice was svelte and strikingly elegant. After years of wearing black, she added colors to her wardrobe. With her usual intensity, she focused on the art of entertaining, with meticulous attention to style and detail. Finding only mismatched sets of silver at the Mansion, she ordered a special pattern with a design drawn from the state’s Bear Flag. She requested round tops to be put over card tables, to facilitate conversation. When she noticed legislators all talked shop while their wives sat silent (there were only two women lawmakers), she had guests pick numbers to ensure they sat at different tables from their spouses. She ordered tulip-shaped champagne glasses she had liked at a White House reception, selected by Jackie Kennedy.

  Fred Dutton admired Bernice, whom he viewed as an analytical thinker who could have been an intellectual had she not opted for the more traditional female role. Her combination of dignity, candor, and reserve was often mistaken for coldness, but close friends found her warm and witty. Dutton knew Pat relied on Bern in private, and he thought she could be an asset in public as well. He encouraged her to develop greater comfort with public appearances through visits to state social services institutions, comparable to Eleanor Roosevelt’s activities as first lady of New York.

  By their second summer in Sacramento, Bernice appeared regularly before women’s groups, where she spoke about life at the Mansion, catering to unexpected guests, and babysitting grandchildren. In her forthright manner, she made clear that she had political opinions, which she chose not to share. A wife, she said, should be a good listener and a sounding board and contribute a suggestion from time to time. She continued to say she would never have chosen life in the political world, “but of course I’ve become deeply interested.”19

  She had witnessed huge changes in politics since going door to door on San Francisco streets for her twenty-three-year-old boyfriend more than three decades earlier. Now she had a front row seat for the first presidential election of the modern era, when television had become the dominant force. By 1960, almost nine out of ten American households owned a television set—a tenfold increase in a decade. TV coverage ushered in a radically different age of campaigning, in which style and sound bites could matter more than deep knowledge or well-thought-out positions. Television would soon lead to profound changes in the role of money in campaigns as well, as candidates needed to raise larger and larger sums to buy TV airtime.

  Senator Kennedy, the young, relatively inexperienced underdog, lagged in polls against Vice President Nixon, a well-established politician and California native. When the two met in the first high-level political debate since Lincoln-Douglas, the televised images propelled Kennedy into the lead for the first time. Radio listeners judged Nixon the winner, but his gaunt, sallow looks, shifting eyes, and five-o’clock shadow cost him with the estimated 70 million viewers who tuned in on September 26, 1960. The charismatic senator from Massachusetts looked straight at the camera, his telegenic looks and vigor giving him the clear edge over the dour Nixon.

  Pat’s mother, Ida, who steadfastly shied away from political events, made an exception for a campaign tea at the Fairmont Hotel hosted by Rose Kennedy, the candidate’s mother. Ida was given a place of honor on the dais and introduced to the crowd of a thousand women. “When I saw this report of the crowd at the tea, I was a little uneasy20 but your mother tells me the affair was ‘very, very nice,’ was handled very well,” an aide wrote to Pat. “I think she was pleased although she said she would have preferred just to have remained in the crowd.”

  Ida resumed her low profile. She refused to let her son send a car and took the bus to visit Sacramento. “Why should I trouble anybody?”21 she said in a rare interview. When Pat wanted her to come to a senior citizens event, she told him her hair was a mess. Bernice suggested a chartered bus to bring Ida’s friends to the Mansion for a birthday party. Ida said they’d need a fleet of ambulances. She downplayed her role in Pat’s career, or in any of her children’s successes. “They were go-getters from the start. It’s their drive, not mine.” “Go-getter,” her children said, was a word they had learned at home.

  As always, Pat and Bernice’s wedding anniversary fell a week before the election. Pat rose early, took a swim, and played golf with Bern. They celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a family dinner at the Mansion, joined by Ida, Pat’s brother Frank, Barbara, Cynthia, Jerry, Kathleen, and four grandchildren. “They may say I vacillate (I don’t) but from the moment I saw Bernice Layne I knew I loved her,”22 Pat wrote in his diary. “Never in 37 years have I regretted my choice. I should tell her more often—I should have told all the family at dinner … Wonderful day.”

  Pat predicted Kennedy would carry California by a million votes. The legislature had abolished cross-filing, which meant that no candidate could win both parties’ primaries. As a result, all state and local races were contested on the November ballot. Democrats had conducted voter registration drives, which gave them a majority for the first time in all eight southern California counties. Orange and Santa Barbara were last to flip. The most prominent registration drive was financed by the national labor movement and targeted California’s growing Mexican American community, a campaign overseen by a young community organizer named Cesar Chavez. Mexican Americans were drawn to the charismatic young candidate vying to be the first Catholic president, and Viva Kennedy clubs sprang up in the barrios. All told, 1.6 million new voters registered, an increase of more than 28 percent.

  On Election Day, more than 70 percent of the registered voters in California cast ballots. The result was so close that the count took several days. Nixon eked out a 36,000-vote victory amid a record turnout of 6.6 million. Nationwide, Nixon lost the popular vote by a tiny percentage—113,000 votes out of 68 million—but lost the Electoral College decisively. At his press conference the day after the election, Nixon raised the possibility of running for governor of his home state in 1962. “He would be tough opposition23 but I would have united democratic support,” Pat wrote in his diary.

  By the time Nixon announced his candidacy for governor on September 27, 1961, Pat Brown’s approval rating was at an all-time low. Only 38 percent thought he was doing a good job. Nixon led in polls by as much as 16 points. He had never lost a race in California. He had the backing of most major newspapers, wealthy supporters, and ruthless professional advisers. Pat had confidence in his ability and pride in his accomplishments, but doubts about his skill at conveying those achievements. He was self-conscious about his lack of education and occasional mispronunciations, worried about his image as a bumbler, and aware he was not viewed as what he called “a great brain.”

  Nixon’s inter
est in the governorship was widely seen as a precursor to another presidential run. Although the Kennedys viewed Pat as politically inept, they had a strong interest in denying Nixon a platform from which to run another national campaign. So the president made several trips to California, where his approval rating was roughly twice as high as that of the governor.

  “Pat Brown said that I would carry this state by a million votes,” Kennedy opened his talk at a November 18, 1961, fundraiser at the Hollywood Palladium,24 good-naturedly ribbing Pat. “Cruel!” said Pat, laughing heartily along with the crowd. “And I prophesy he’s going to win, which is the important thing,” Kennedy continued. “This state above all others in the union must continue to move forward.” The president singled out Pat’s commitment to doubling the size of the higher education system in California as a national model. “He recognizes that this country will be as strong and as free in direct proportion to how well educated and motivated our children are.”

  Kennedy’s greatest contribution to the campaign was to bolster Pat Brown’s self-confidence. Early in 1962, Pat delivered one of his best speeches to a packed room at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. With command of facts and figures, he talked confidently about the state he knew so well and all that had been accomplished during his three years as governor. He contrasted his own experience to that of Nixon, with a national pedigree and foreign policy expertise but little knowledge of his home state. This would be Pat’s most important campaign theme: Nixon was interested in Sacramento only as a stepping-stone to the White House. Pat’s performance at the Press Club was so strong and his ode to California so persuasive that when he asked for questions, there was a long pause, until someone stood up and said, “Governor, what’s the price of a one-way ticket?”