The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Afterward, Pat went to the White House, where the president, briefed on Pat’s speech, greeted him warmly. Kennedy sat with Pat in front of a fire and reminded him what happened when national politicians tried to go home: It didn’t work. The presidential support coupled with the successful speech helped change the narrative. Don’t count Pat Brown out yet, the national press wrote, a refrain soon echoed in California papers.

  Pat took lessons in Los Angeles to improve his appearance on television and better manage his feet and hands. He worked on his diction. And then his diet. For a month, he and Bernice went out at six every morning and played golf without a caddie or cart, walking as fast as they could and playing the course in half the normal time. He lost thirty pounds by cutting out carbohydrates and alcohol, dropping to a comfortable weight of 180 on his five-foot ten-and-a-half-inch frame. In February he made a three-day retreat at El Retiro, the Jesuit center. He gained self-assurance and improved his performance on the campaign trail. By spring, Pat had inched ahead of Nixon in polls for the first time.

  Pat’s friendship with Earl Warren had deepened during the latter’s years on the Supreme Court. Though Warren’s deep dislike of Nixon was well known, as chief justice he could not play a role in the campaign. But his son, Earl Warren Jr., became a prominent Brown supporter. And Warren found ways to help. On an official appearance in California, the chief justice went out of his way to laud the state’s economic health, stable taxes, and lower unemployment. The chief and the governor were often photographed on their annual duck hunts at a Colusa ranch owned by a friend of Warren’s. Warren was fond of traditions; the weekends always began with a cracked crab dinner on Friday night, followed by a poker game. Warren often brought his sons, and during the Christmas break in 1960 and 1961, Pat brought Jerry.

  On one trip to Colusa, Pat took Jerry for the first, and potentially the last, time to see the old Mountain House. Frank Schuckman had died in the spring of 1959. With his frugal habits and money lending, he had amassed an estate worth more than $1 million, which he divided among his nieces and nephews. Pat’s brother Harold was executor of the estate, and in the probate process, the Mountain House was put up for sale. “Let’s buy this place.25 We can probably borrow substantially on it and I think we ought to keep it in the family,” Pat wrote Harold. But the brothers lacked sufficient money, and their siblings had no interest.

  In the summer of 1962, uncertain whether he would still have a job in a few months, Pat took action. At the last minute, with a sale of the property all but closed,26 Pat and Harold recruited several wealthier friends and purchased the Mountain House with a corporation they called Rancho Venada. (They were so distant from the place that they misspelled Venado.) “I guess I’m an old sentimentalist,”27 Gertrude Schuckman Rosenback wrote to her cousin Pat, in appreciation of his action. She was “all Schuckman,” Gertrude added, and loved conversations with her Aunt Ida. “When she talks to me it is as if I heard my father.” Pat replied that he, too, was a sentimentalist. “When I think of our grandfather and grandmother coming across the plains and building the things they did, it gives me greater determination as Governor of this State to get more things accomplished,” he wrote back. “I bought that old Mountain House28 just because I didn’t want it to go completely out of the Schuckman family.”

  By the end of the summer, Pat was even in the polls, though the majority of voters viewed him unfavorably. He had strong support among Catholics, Jews, and blacks, but had made no headway with Protestants, who favored Nixon by a large margin. Overwhelmingly, voters believed Nixon’s real interest was the presidency, while they viewed Pat as sincere and acting on behalf of Californians, particularly minorities and the elderly. Strategists urged Pat to do as much as possible in person, where his warmth and friendliness shone in a way that did not translate on television, even at his best. “The battle between the two titans of California politics is on for keeps,” reported a confidential Harris poll29 done for the Democrat. “And it will drive straight to the wire.”

  Pat hammered Nixon as a shady political opportunist. Billboards advertised the governor as “The Man Californians Can Trust.” Nixon relied on the strategy that had worked in earlier campaigns, attacking his opponent as soft on Communism. His own pollsters cautioned Nixon that the tactic fell flat. Pat Brown was well known as a Catholic, and not an exceedingly liberal Democrat.

  Events conspired to help the Democrats. First, the campaign was relegated to the back pages in early October by one of the biggest sports stories to hit a state that had only recently acquired major league teams: The Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants finished the season with identical records and played a tie-breaking series to determine the National League pennant. The first game coincided with the only joint appearance by the two candidates for governor, much to Pat’s glee.

  Warren Christopher, Pat’s negotiator, had worked to minimize debates without appearing to shirk them. Pat was nervous at the prospect of going up against a college debater. The compromise was one joint appearance before the UPI Editors Meeting at the Fairmont Hotel, broadcast live on radio and television. Pat opened by saying California would soon pass New York as the largest state, an event he had thought about and planned for since he took office. Contrasting his upbeat views with his opponent’s gloomy demeanor, he concluded, “I tell you that we are on the way to the stars, and I want to be the navigator for the next four years.”

  Nixon spoke in generalities about the need for new leadership, lower taxes, and removing “chiselers” from welfare. “I have never lost California,”30 he said. “I am not taking the easy road to win it.” Just as in the Nixon-Kennedy debates, he came across worse on television than in person or on radio. Though Pat lacked Kennedy’s polish, his sincerity and nice-guy image contrasted well with Nixon’s pugnacious manner.

  For the next two weeks, political news took a backseat as the Giants battled the Yankees in the World Series, a competition not decided until the seventh inning of the seventh game in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Three days after the Giants’ loss, the California poll showed the Nixon-Brown race a virtual dead heat, with 8 percent undecided and Nixon gaining. Three days later came the Cuban missile crisis.

  Pat flew to Washington for briefings at the Pentagon, one of six governors who met with the president and secretary of defense. He returned home and announced he would suspend campaigning during the crisis. For once, Bernice got to spend a quiet wedding anniversary at home. A frustrated Nixon compounded the damage by buying a half hour on television to speak “not as a candidate but as a private citizen.” The effort to demonstrate his foreign policy expertise backfired. “Nixon climaxed a shoddy campaign31 with an attempt to turn the Cuban crisis into personal political gain,” said former lieutenant governor Harold Powers, one of several prominent Republicans who defected. “Nixon has failed to come up with a single, solitary program beneficial to California.”

  When the votes were counted, Pat defeated Nixon comfortably, with 52 percent of the vote. He joined Earl Warren and Hiram Johnson as only the third California governor elected to two consecutive terms in the past century, and the first Democrat. The significance of the victory transcended Pat Brown: The results marked the return of the two-party system to California. The Democratic sweep of 1958 that broke the Republican stranglehold had not been a fluke. Democrats had significantly increased their registration edge—4.29 million to 3 million Republicans. They exploited control of the reapportionment process to carve out favorable districts for Democrats at a time when the phenomenal growth had given California eight more congressional seats. Democrats emerged from the election with twenty-four of the thirty-eight House seats.

  The openly partisan California press, long controlled by the Hearsts, Chandlers, and Knowlands, had achieved a new maturity that played a role in the election, too. The most significant change was at the Los Angeles Times, whose new publisher, Otis Chandler, had hired professional political reporters from other papers. Unlike
earlier years when the paper’s political editor hosted gatherings of Republican leaders, the new team covered the news straight. Nixon, accustomed to favorable treatment from the paper, was surprised and angry. He blamed the reporters, whom he singled out in his famous, bitter concession speech: “As I leave you, I want you to know, just think how much you’re going to be missing. You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

  When Kennedy called the Mansion to congratulate Pat, the two agreed that Nixon was finished. “I will tell you this. You reduced him to the nut house.32 God, that last farewell speech of his,” Kennedy said. “I don’t see how he can ever recover,” Pat said. “I really think that he is psychotic. He’s an able man, but he’s nuts.” Before he hung up, Pat asked the president for a favor. “Would you just do one thing for me? Just say hello to my son, Jerry, who came back from Yale Law School and really put me over in San Francisco?” The president greeted Jerry, who assured Kennedy he would carry California by “ten times as much as you did before.”

  A few weeks later, the governor was in Washington, D.C., with Hale Champion, who had become state finance director. Pat was scheduled to have dinner with Earl Warren, and he invited Champion along. The celebratory meal included many toasts. “They were two happy old buddies33 who’d just scored one of the great victories of their lives,” Champion recalled some years later. “And every once in a while they would lift the glass and say, ‘To what’s-his-name, wherever he is tonight.’ And would laugh and pour it down.” Champion left them in the restaurant, talking and laughing and toasting the great victory late into the night.

  9

  “Water for People. For Living”

  In a way, the problem of water in California was simple. Most of the water was in the north, most of the people were in the south, and in the center lay a rich alluvial plain the size of Denmark that could grow more food than any other valley in the world.

  From its earliest days of statehood, California wrestled with whether and how to move water from where it fell, flowed, and flooded to the semiarid climes where the people and the crops always wanted more. The fights pitted north against south, fields against cities, land barons against family farms, developers against environmentalists.

  Pat Brown knew when he became governor in 1959 that no other issue he tackled would have a more profound impact on the future of California. With his innate exuberance and optimism, he turned the decades-old water wars on their head. The charged political battles had revolved around how to allocate a scarce resource. Pat started from the assumption there was plenty of water for everyone. The question was how much to move and how to move it. He reframed the debate as an engineering challenge, and that helped him to negotiate where others had failed.

  “I want you to know that I consider the water problem1 the most vital in California and I think that its satisfactory solution is a key to my entire administration,” Pat wrote to a Northern California newspaper publisher his second week as governor. Pat did not see himself as the adjudicator of regional disputes; his role was to unify his state behind an audacious water project that benefited everyone, including him.

  Pat traced his interest in water to his pioneer ancestors who had settled in the northern California county of Colusa. When he visited the Mountain House as a boy, he saw life on a ranch without well water, where the household and the farm depended on rainfall. His mother told him that when she was a child, her father gathered the family after he planted and everyone knelt and prayed for rain. Sometimes the prayers were answered, sometimes not. Drought wasn’t the only worry. The pioneers also contended with floods, when the rivers swelled from heavy winter rains and spring snowmelts in the High Sierra peaks. August Schuckman had noted in his diary that he sought land on high ground, far enough from the Sacramento River to avoid the annual floods that washed away livestock, crops, and people.

  In the late nineteenth century, floods were exacerbated by the large-scale hydraulic mining operations that replaced the solo prospectors of the early Gold Rush years. The mining companies diverted the Sacramento River and its tributaries, redirecting massive volumes of water under high pressure to blast away gravel and soft stone. The mining debris was dumped into waterways, where the silt and gravel choked rivers used for navigation, increased erosion, and poisoned water that farmers used to irrigate their fields. Hydraulic mining was eventually outlawed. But the miners had shown that ditches and canals could be used to move great quantities of water from one place to another.

  As early as 1878, the year Ida Schuckman Brown was born, California appointed its first state engineer and allocated $100,000 for a comprehensive inventory of water resources. Over several years, William Hammond Hall surveyed the Sacramento, Feather, American, and San Joaquin rivers and assessed irrigation needs in the Central Valley. He proposed a long-range plan to redistribute water that would include storage reservoirs in the north and aqueducts to carry the water south. A half century later, his plan would form the basis of a federal water project.

  In the meantime, groups of landowners and local governments tackled the problem on their own. In 1887, the state legislature embraced the idea that providing water was a public service and established a new legal entity, the irrigation district. Dozens formed. They created small canals and dams, as well as a tradition of turf battles between powerful independent districts. Epic legal fights over water rights ensued. When Hiram Johnson was elected governor in 1910, the Progressives moved to assert more state control. A 1914 referendum established municipal water use as a priority over agriculture and set up a state water commission to resolve claims, though the commission had little power over court cases.

  The two largest metropolitan areas, meanwhile, had temporarily solved their own water needs. Southern California, still relatively sparsely populated, infamously grabbed water from the Owens Valley on the northeastern edge of the state and built a 233-mile aqueduct that ended in the hills north of the Los Angeles city line. Water began to flow in 1913. “There it is, take it!” the engineer William Mulholland said, as crowds in suits and long skirts clambered over the hills to watch the first water pour through the sluice. The aqueduct facilitated development of the San Fernando Valley, enriched a small group of prominent landowners, and eventually doubled the size of Los Angeles, making it the largest city in the United States.

  San Francisco had obtained permission from the federal government in 1909 to dam the Tuolumne River and flood the spectacular valley of Hetch Hetchy, on the northwest edge of Yosemite National Park. John Muir led a lengthy battle to derail the project, which would irrevocably damage the park he had fought so hard to protect. The dam would submerge a valley comparable in beauty to Yosemite itself, Muir pleaded2 with President Theodore Roosevelt, who had camped in the park with Muir just a few years earlier. Roosevelt and his two successors declined to intervene. Before the valley disappeared underwater, the Sierra Club led a final mournful outing to Hetch Hetchy in 1914, months before Muir died on Christmas Eve.

  Pat followed the developments during his regular summer pilgrimages to Yosemite. He entered night law school just as the dam was completed in 1923. Though the course was not relevant to anything he anticipated needing in his practice, Pat enrolled in a summer class taught by Simon Weil, the preeminent Western water lawyer of the day. Water rights had become a complicated legal specialty. And the most critical water issues revolved around the 425-mile-long Central Valley, the heart of the state’s largest industry.

  Two principal rivers flow through the Central Valley, dividing the giant plain into the smaller Sacramento Valley in the north and the San Joaquin Valley, roughly twice the size. The Sacramento River starts high up in the Klamath Mountains near the Oregon border, wends its way south to within a mile of the state capitol, and then enters the vast Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, a sprawling estuary and ecosystem that leads to San Francisco Bay. The San Joaquin River forms a lopsided U, starting in the High Sierra and h
eading southwest into the San Joaquin Valley past Fresno, then turning northwest past Modesto, Merced, and Stockton to feed into the Delta. From there, the rivers squeeze through the narrow Carquinez Straits and rush out to sea through San Francisco Bay.

  The annual rainfall in the south end of the San Joaquin Valley was less than five inches. Even in the wetter north, rivers and streams dried up in summer, just when the water was needed most. Crops required reliable sources of water at certain times of year. Landowners with limited or no access to river water relied on wells, forced to dig deeper and deeper every year, extracting so much water that the ground began to sink. The deeper the wells, the costlier the power to raise the water up to ground level. Growers kept paying, until the Depression hit in 1929.

  The Depression fueled both a greater demand for government intervention and greater bipartisan support for major public works projects, to provide badly needed jobs. The idea proposed decades earlier by the first state engineer gained new currency: Build dams on the northern ends of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers to create reservoirs that stored water, and aqueducts to function as man-made rivers transporting the water south. In 1933, the California legislature passed a $171 million plan that was approved by voters on December 19. But in the midst of the Depression, the state had no way to float bonds to raise the money. So officials turned to the federal government.