The Browns of California
Page 19
Pat spent some time with Earl Warren, hosting a dinner at the Mansion before the inauguration and joining Warren at the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena and the East-West Shrine Game in San Francisco, traditions the chief justice observed faithfully. Pat often sought Warren’s advice and envied his calm, relaxed demeanor, a contrast to his own peripatetic nature. “I have a deep sense of urgency13 in a state that is growing as fast as California,” Pat wrote to Warren, enclosing his inaugural message that outlined plans for the second term. “There are some of these that I am sure we will win and others that I am sure we will not, but I thought this was a great opportunity to speak out on all of the things I believe in.”
It soon became clear he would lose more than he would win. Pat did not have a million-vote majority to strengthen his hand this time, nor did he have support from Democratic Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh, who had his own gubernatorial ambitions and little interest in helping the incumbent. He had barely started his second term when aides urged Pat to fight hard on losing battles—to set the stage for a future campaign. “Everything you say should be aimed at the people,14 over the heads of the senators,” press secretary Jack Burby wrote. He urged Pat to open up press conferences to television. “It is an inevitable move and you may as well be known as the governor who took the step and get the credit and the gratitude of the television industry.” (Print journalists, on the other hand, were so annoyed when TV cameras were allowed at the press conferences that they used obscenities in questions to render the video footage unusable.) Burby echoed advice Fred Dutton had passed on four years earlier when Pat’s first chief of staff visited other states: “I no longer believe it is possible15 to quit campaigning altogether. You can never stop being a candidate and be only the Governor any more than you could stop being Governor and be only a candidate during the recent campaign.”
Politics and government blurred seamlessly in an era with few ethical qualms or rules. State staff worked on campaigns. Neither officials nor lobbyists reported dinners, Christmas presents, or gift memberships. Movie theaters sent free passes, which Pat often passed on to his mother. When Frank Sinatra saw Pat’s shabby golf clubs, the entertainer surprised the governor with a new set. Pat was among the select few who received a Disneyland Gold Pass each year, signed by Walt Disney, good for free admission and VIP treatment for six guests.
He received similar treatment when he traveled abroad. In the summer of 1963, the Browns embarked on a leisurely European trip,16 combining a minimal amount of work with six weeks of sightseeing in seven countries. They were welcomed with roses and champagne, fruit baskets and designer scarves. A San Francisco television reporter who tagged along captured memorable moments, both serious and lighthearted: At the Berlin Wall, the Browns climbed onto the platform where Kennedy had delivered his famous address and peered into East Germany. In London, Pat’s desire to visit Parliament lost out to Bernice’s wish to visit Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-on-Avon. In Paris, Bernice visited Givenchy and Yves Saint Laurent, where designers compared her figure to that of Jackie Kennedy.
In Paris, the Browns also reunited with Jerry, who was working as a summer intern at NATO headquarters, a job arranged through Fred Dutton. Jerry traveled with the family to Rome, where they had an audience with Pope Paul VI. The third-year law student told a reporter that he intended to become a trial attorney in San Francisco and that his role model was Vincent Hallinan, a Jesuit-educated Irishman who had run for president for the Progressive Party. He would succeed, Jerry said, “without help from Dad. I’m going to make it alone.”
His sister Kathy brought along on the trip her best friend and former neighbor from Magellan Avenue, Barbara DiGiorgio, whose father was one of the largest grape and vegetable growers in the San Joaquin Valley and a staunch Republican. In Paris, Kathy drew notice when she went off to see the Eiffel Tower in a miniskirt. “A pretty good politician in her own right, Kathy says also that Paris is great—but her favorite city remains unaltered—it’s San Francisco,” reported KGO-TV.
Kathleen returned from Europe to enroll as a freshman at Stanford, a campus roiled by twin forces reshaping the political landscape—the civil rights movement and student protests.
In June, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been assassinated in Mississippi. As the Browns toured Venice, hundreds of thousands of people converged on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington. Millions more watched on television as Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed on August 28, 1963, “I have a dream …” While the Browns gazed at the Berlin Wall, court-ordered school integration in Birmingham was foiled by explosions. The Sunday before freshman orientation at Stanford, Ku Klux Klan members planted a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls.
Thousands of miles removed, the palm-lined drives and red-roofed limestone quads of the Stanford campus had a direct link to the civil rights struggles in the South. The charismatic young political activist Allard Lowenstein had taught at Stanford until two years earlier and maintained close ties with the university. In late October 1963, he was coordinating voter registration campaigns in Mississippi and called friends at Stanford with an urgent plea: Send student volunteers to help organize a mock election with “Freedom Ballots,” an effort to demonstrate the extent of black disenfranchisement. Four Stanford students left the next day, their departure bannered on the front page of the Stanford Daily, overshadowing news about the football team’s upset victory over Notre Dame. Two more carloads left the day after.
The Stanford undergraduates became the first orchestrated contingent of students to work under civil rights leaders in the South, a prelude to the Freedom Summer that followed. On campus, students collected $5,000 to help cover bail expenses in Mississippi. When Lowenstein announced the funds at a rally, “the place went wild,”17 he told the Daily. “This is what can stop the intimidation, the force of someone from the outside.” The presence of the overwhelmingly white students drew media attention and more visible federal law enforcement. Braving violence and threats, more than eighty thousand black voters cast ballots at polling places set up by the civil rights activists—four times the number of blacks allowed to vote in the state-run election for governor.
Students returned to Stanford shaken and energized, eager to share stories about fear, police brutality, and heroic struggle. Stanford became the western hub where national civil rights leaders coordinated student recruitment for what became the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project. Students from dozens of western colleges gathered in Palo Alto in April for a three-day conference with a keynote address by Reverend King. “Human progress never merely rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. There is always a right time to do right … and that time is now,”18 King told the overflow crowd. “Come south this summer to help create a movement so large it cannot be ignored, pressure so great the federal government will be forced to act.”
Kathleen, crammed into the back of Memorial Auditorium on April 23, 1964, found the message so powerful she signed up; Pat promptly vetoed the idea as too dangerous. Kathleen helped raise money instead. Even her decision to attend Stanford had required a minor act of rebellion. She had spent the last two years of high school at Santa Catalina, a small Catholic girls’ boarding school in Monterey. After a mediocre Sacramento public school, Kathleen found the intense intellectual environment life-changing. She applied to Stanford because it was hard to get in (she was one of 1,282 freshmen and just 434 women) and because almost everyone else in the family had gone to Cal. She sidestepped an argument with her parents by signing their names on the application, then enlisted the diminutive but steely school principal, Sister Mary Kieran, to overcome her father’s steadfast conviction that his daughter belonged at Cal.
The Stanford freshman class had students from almost every state and sixteen countries. Kathleen mixed easily in different groups, from the preppy crowd to the existentialist intellectuals in black turtlenecks. She got her ears pierced and decided to major in social science
s. Like her brother, she received tuition assistance from Louis Lurie, the San Francisco financier and family friend, and wrote him letters in exchange. “My Brown brain19 has been taxed considerably and the reward has been neither in a monetary nor in a grade sense, but rather as an achievement sense, self earned and self satisfying,” she wrote. “I love it. I have discovered the excitement of spontaneous seminars that last until the wee hours of the morning and which encompass such a range of subjects, from politics to love. These gab groups are composed of my motley contemporaries who are perched upon that same precarious brink of discovery that I find myself upon. It is all new and excitingly different. I guess that I have inherited that extemporaneous gift for gab that my illustrious ‘pop’ has.”
The summer after her freshman year she raised money for the Mississippi project, worked at the Saks Fifth Avenue store in San Francisco, then went to Washington to help on the Democratic platform committee under the direction of Fred Dutton. “Being in that international political hot-bed made my head spin and what’s more convinced me that I must go back there after graduation and work for the government,” she wrote Uncle Lou. “Once again the ‘father’ in me crept out of its hiding place.”
Her brother wrote letters to Uncle Lou, too. Jerry was a not particularly diligent student with eclectic interests. At Yale, he took classes in Roman law, psychiatry and the law (taught by Anna Freud), and secured financing, which he found absorbing. “This is a new field for me and quite fascinating,”20 he wrote to Uncle Lou in an annual appeal for tuition assistance. “Don’t tell my father, but I’m finding these financing problems as interesting as politics. Who knows, I might even become a banker.”
Jerry followed California politics closely from New Haven, requesting from his parents clips about political events and subscriptions to the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner. He did not advertise his connections—his close friend Tony Kline, who lived in the same entryway, did not realize for several months that Pat was Jerry’s father—but did not hesitate to use them, either. When Yale students were recruited to help in Mississippi in 1963, Jerry went but stayed only a few days. The level of fear he witnessed was so strong he thought it prudent to check in for protection with Governor Ross Barnett, a Democrat but a committed segregationist. Jerry wrote his father repeatedly on behalf of a South African doctor and antiapartheid activist who faced extradition and needed a waiver of a Justice Department rule. “Would you please be sure to do something as soon as possible,”21 he wrote, urging Pat to contact Attorney General Robert Kennedy. “I know this is a minor detail in comparison to the hundred and one problems that are facing you now, but I think it is worth your doing whatever you can.”
In the summer of 1964, Pat faced his own civil rights battle. With his ingrained sense of equality, Pat had pushed during his first term to establish a Fair Employment Practices Commission to police discrimination in the workplace. In 1963, he proudly signed the Rumford Fair Housing Act, named after its sponsor, William Byron Rumford, a Berkeley pharmacist who had been the first black elected official from Northern California. The act outlawed discrimination by landlords on the basis of race or ethnicity, though it had been watered down to exempt single-family homes not financed with government-backed loans, and apartment dwellings of fewer than five units. The real estate industry immediately launched an effort to nullify the law through an initiative, framed as a crusade to protect property rights. Proposition 14 easily qualified for the November 1964 ballot. The campaign was a thinly veiled appeal to prejudice, wrapped up in Californians’ fierce attachment to property. Homeowners, Prop 14 supporters declared, should be able to sell or rent to anyone they chose. Their slogan was “A Man’s Home Is His Castle.”
Pat Brown passed on to his family his love of the outdoors. He and Jerry hiked in Desolation Wilderness, which straddles the Sierra Nevada. (Courtesy of the office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.)
“In any California vote where human rights conflict with what people choose to call ‘property rights’—in this case the right to discriminate—property will win,”22 observed Wallace Stegner. “It will win because from the multi-million-dollar development corporations to the littlest tract dweller with a GI loan, the state is property-crazy.”
Proponents of the Rumford Act portrayed the Prop 14 supporters as right-wing, out of touch, and opposed to basic civil rights. Dozens of officials of both parties and mainstream organizations urged a no vote. The Unitarian Church campaigned to save the Rumford Act, only the second time the church had adopted a political stance since the Civil War. The moral issue seemed so clear-cut to Pat that he did not hesitate to call Proposition 14 supporters bigots. Some advisers grimaced, aware that the term would antagonize middle-class whites who saw themselves as beleaguered homeowners, not racists. Pat campaigned the way he always did, sure that if he could just reach people, one by one, he could win them over. By Election Day, he was realistic about the prospects. But he was shaken by the two-to-one margin of defeat. The results revealed deep fissures that would only harden in coming months. “You could draw but one conclusion from the vote on 14 and that is that the white is just afraid of the Negro,” Pat wrote to Kathleen a week after the election. “The Negroes have a long way to go23 before there is any acceptance by the white majority in our state. There is absolutely no reason to feel this way about it, but it is something that all of the eloquence in the world cannot change.”
The 1964 elections brought other harbingers that California was on the leading edge of a political transformation. In California’s GOP presidential primary, conservative candidate Barry Goldwater defeated New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, a moderate Republican in the tradition of Earl Warren. The high point of the Goldwater campaign came in a nationally televised speech delivered October 27, 1964, by his surrogate Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor who had switched party allegiance a scant two years earlier. Reagan’s thirty-minute address, “A Time to Choose,” articulated basic conservative principles: Government was bloated and meddlesome, taxes were too high, Communism was a serious threat. The speech was an immediate hit. Washington Post columnist David Broder called it “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic convention with the ‘Cross of Gold’ speech.” By the time Reagan spoke to the election night crowd at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was the conservatives’ rising star and presumptive candidate for governor two years hence.
In Northern California, events were unfolding24 that would provide Reagan with his most potent rallying cry in that gubernatorial campaign. The hub of campus protest had shifted from Stanford fifty miles north to Berkeley, the school and city whose name would become synonymous with student rebellion.
Like their Stanford counterparts, Cal students had increasingly been caught up in the civil rights movement. In the early 1960s, campus branches of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized protests that focused on bias in hiring. With pickets and sit-ins, students drew attention to the increased discrimination that had followed a shift in the Bay Area economy as San Francisco transitioned from an industrial center to a financial and tourist mecca. Blacks who had been able to find work in manufacturing and industry were denied the more visible jobs in banks, hotels, stores, and restaurants. Picket lines by Cal students that targeted well-known businesses like Mel’s Drive-In, Lucky grocery stores, and the Palace Hotel raised political consciousness on campus in ways that would help fuel the coming struggles.
Students had some reason to believe their protests would be supported by Pat Brown and University of California president Clark Kerr, outspoken civil rights advocates. “I say: Thank God25 for the spectacle of students picketing—even when they are picketing me at Sacramento and I think they are wrong,” Pat said in a 1961 commencement speech at Santa Clara University. “The colleges have become boot camps for citizenship.” When hundreds of students were arrested for blocking the entrance to
the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, the governor and Kerr defended the students’ rights to practice civil disobedience.
Kerr and the Regents had liberalized several rules, including an earlier ban on controversial speakers that had blocked such mainstream leaders as presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson from speaking on campus. In 1963, the Regents revoked a ban on Communist speakers and allowed student groups to invite speakers without permission from the administration. Carl Schorske, Jerry’s professor, moderated a conversation with the first American Communist invited to speak on campus. But the university continued to make a distinction between free speech and political advocacy. The infamous Rule 17 banned students on school property from collecting money for political causes or soliciting participation in demonstrations—activities that had become central to the increasingly politicized students.
The battle that birthed the Free Speech Movement began, on its surface, with a bureaucratic tussle. Student groups had traditionally used an area just outside a campus gate to solicit for political causes. When the university took that land for a new building, Kerr proposed that students shift to a small area at the intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph on land the university would donate to the city. As students returned to school in September 1964, they were informed the land had never been transferred and political advocacy was banned. Student leaders, fresh from the Mississippi summer, imbued with passion for fighting injustice and sophistication about the mechanics of orchestrating protests, reacted with outrage.
On September 30, 1964, student political groups set up tables in Sproul Plaza, the entryway to campus. Five student leaders were told to report to the Dean’s Office for disciplinary action. More than three hundred showed up. The following day the chancellor announced eight students would be suspended indefinitely. As students assembled to protest, a campus police officer arrested Jack Weinberg, a recent Cal graduate manning the CORE table, and placed him in a police car. Hundreds of students swarmed the car, lying down in front and behind. A charismatic student leader named Mario Savio removed his shoes, jumped on top of the car, and enumerated their demands: The university must drop all disciplinary actions and agree to meet with students to revise the freedom of speech regulations. “I am right now publicly serving a notice of warning, and I should say, threat, to this administration they will be subject to continuous direct action by us, and it’s going to be damn embarrassing for them. We’re going to get foreign press, we’re going to get domestic press, we’re going to get all sorts of organizations against them until they accede to these legitimate demands.”