The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  By Thanksgiving, it was clear that Pat would face a campaign in which “Berkeley” and “Watts” were shorthand for a state out of control. Pat put that aside as four generations of Browns gathered at the Mansion for the traditional turkey dinner. “We have an awful lot to be thankful for,”40 Pat said, surrounded by his eighty-seven-year-old mother, his three daughters, and their families, including eight grandchildren. “The turkey’s bigger than you are,” Pat said to the youngest, newborn Hilary Rice.

  Hilary was the daughter of Kathleen. In 1964, the fall of Kathleen’s sophomore year at Stanford, she had reconnected with a junior she had known in high school in Sacramento, George A. Rice III, known as Jeep. Kathleen had volunteered to canvass for President Lyndon Johnson in the largely Mexican American neighborhood of East San Jose, and she invited Jeep to come along. He was just back from a year studying in France that had turned him from a nominal Republican into a liberal Democrat, and the heady atmosphere of Stanford was pulling him further left. He came from a family of educators who had attended and taught at Cal. Like Kathleen, he had defied tradition by choosing Stanford. He, too, had liked the challenge, one of only three in his high school class admitted. He was prelaw. They quickly became a couple. Like her parents, Kathleen decided to elope. Just as Pat and Bernice had done, Kathleen and Jeep were married in Nevada. Like her parents’ elopement, Kathleen’s marriage was front page news,41 with a photo of the couple on skis at an impromptu reception at the Lake Tahoe chalet where the family was staying. As the Laynes had done, the Browns welcomed their new son-in-law despite the surprise announcement. When Hilary was born, the photogenic baby quickly became the youngest member of the family to live in the public spotlight, showing up with her grandfather in photos during budget deliberations and campaign literature. When Kathleen turned twenty-one and registered to vote, Hilary shared the photo in the Sacramento Bee.

  Kathleen would cast her first vote in what shaped up to be her father’s toughest race. On January 4, 1966, Ronald Reagan formally opened his campaign for governor with a scathing critique of moral decay and disorder in California, couched in optimistic tones. “Our problems are many,”42 he said, “but our capacity for solving them is limitless.” Reagan faced a primary challenge from an established politician and moderate Republican, San Francisco mayor George Christopher. In the first of many political miscalculations, the Brown team covertly sabotaged Christopher, believing the inexperienced actor would be an easier opponent. Reagan, an amiable, conservative outsider unencumbered by political ties, a fresh face with a strong television presence, was the ideal foil to Pat Brown.

  Two-term governors have accumulated baggage. They have said no to too many people, or, in Pat’s case, he had said yes to too many people and then failed to deliver. He so hated to disappoint people that they often left his office believing they had his support, only to discover later that an opposing party believed the same thing. Pat’s feud with Assembly Speaker Unruh meant the governor’s agenda had been largely stymied. The defense industry was battered by cuts, housing starts were down, unemployment was up, and the governor was blamed. Pat was pilloried by the right for Berkeley and Watts and derided as a supporter of minorities at the expense of the white majority. He was abandoned by the left for his handling of student protests and his support for President Johnson and the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Pat Brown was a creature of the 1950s fighting to stay alive in a radically different decade.

  “The Watts problem43 is likely to have more effect on the November election than all your TV spots and local campaign appearances combined,” Fred Dutton wrote Pat in May 1966. “For many people the situation will unconsciously but inevitably be a prime test of how effective a governor you now really are.” The second time Pat called and asked for his help, Dutton put his private Washington law practice on hold and flew out to California, though he suspected it was too late. He found a governor who had grown more comfortable, less creative, and less hungry, no longer the scrappy Irish kid from South of Market and now the established politician chauffeured in black limousines. Pat was still lovable, gregarious, and prone to very human gaffes. He had always been an easy target to caricature and proudly displayed the framed cartoons on his wall. Now his verbal missteps were used against him, objects of ridicule, derided by Reagan as “Brownisms.”

  Pat faced a primary challenge from Sam Yorty, a conservative known for red-baiting, race-baiting, and opposing progressive causes such as recycling. Nominally a Democrat, the Los Angeles mayor had openly supported Nixon over Kennedy in 1960. In the primary, Yorty won a substantial 37 percent of the Democratic vote, further weakening Pat. Demoralized, the governor took a few days off to go fishing.

  Dutton saw the primary results as a warning,44 not just for California. He wrote to Bill Moyers, a senior White House official, to impress upon the Johnson administration the national implications of the California contest. Contrary to the East Coast view, Dutton pointed out, California “has followed national voting trends throughout this century with startling closeness.” The state’s voters were a mix from all regions, and included the highest proportion of young voters, who would be key in the 1968 presidential election. Though Lyndon Johnson and Pat Brown differed significantly in personality, both came from an older generation. Neither was wearing well as the country underwent “a major political cultural watershed,” Dutton wrote. He warned that for liberal Democrats, Vietnam had become the overriding issue. “They feel more intensely about this issue than anything since the mid-1930s and cannot be taken for granted or disregarded without lasting consequence.”

  Pat’s failure to understand the importance of symbolism had undercut his support with another small but important constituency, Mexican Americans. By 1966, the civil rights struggle in California had become most visible in an unlikely venue, the impoverished farmworker towns and labor camps that dotted the length of the Central Valley. The Mexican American civil rights movement gained prominence first in the fields, and the face of la causa was Cesar Chavez, the improbable charismatic leader.

  Chavez began in the fields because that was the world he knew best; he had come to California as a twelve-year-old in a migrant family that had lost its Arizona ranch at the end of the Depression. Farmworkers were excluded from virtually all labor, health, and safety laws, underpaid, fired at will, treated like just another farm implement. It was the loss of dignity and the lack of respect as much as the physical and economic hardship that drove Chavez’s anger, and when he grasped the potential of community organizing, he leaped at the opportunity to force change.

  He had a ten-year apprenticeship working for and then directing the first grassroots organization for Mexican Americans, the Community Service Organization, founded in Los Angeles in 1947. His first experience with farmworkers and labor came in 1959 in Oxnard, just north of Los Angeles, when he fought to win jobs for local workers who were being illegally passed over in favor of Mexican guest workers. His ally was the newly elected governor, who dispatched labor officials to help. Two years later, Pat Brown proudly signed a law that had been the CSO’s top priority for several years, making noncitizens eligible for state-funded old age pensions. He would later cite the bill as one of the things he felt best about—the state rectified a historic injustice and provided a little money for people who had earned it, an action that would change their lives.

  The victories in organizing field workers in Oxnard propelled Chavez to leave the CSO and set out on his own in 1962 with the quixotic goal of forming a union for farmworkers. By 1965, he was leading what would be a five-year strike in the vineyards of the San Joaquin Valley, challenging the most powerful industry in the state. He took lessons and gained volunteers from the civil rights movement, and he understood, just as Allard Lowenstein had understood in Mississippi, that it was the eyes and voice and power of outsiders that would be needed to win. He didn’t just invite outsiders to the union’s headquarters in Delano, in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley; he brought
the struggle to them. In the spring of 1966, Chavez led farmworkers on a three-hundred-mile pilgrimage from Delano to Sacramento, walking along Highway 99 up the spine of the valley, with a rally every night in a different town. The images told the story. Chavez, limping. The banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexicans, leading the march. Farmworkers doing what they could never have imagined, walking along the highway proudly waving a union flag. The march swelled at each stop until thousands massed in the park outside the state capitol on Easter Sunday. They demanded to see the governor.

  Pat had made plans to spend Easter with his family at the Palm Springs home of Frank Sinatra. Jerry argued that his father should go to Sacramento. Pat refused to change his plans; Easter vacation in the desert oasis had become a family tradition. He offered to meet on Saturday or Monday. Chavez declined. He would meet on his terms or not at all. Chavez thrived on having a good enemy, and the governor’s absence only made the rally stronger.

  A few months later, Pat interceded in a matter of far greater consequence to Chavez. The farmworkers had targeted the DiGiorgio Company, the largest grower in the San Joaquin Valley, urging consumers to boycott DiGiorgio produce until the company recognized the union and negotiated a contract. Pat prevailed on his former neighbor Robert DiGiorgio, whose daughter had accompanied the Browns to Europe and been a guest at the inaugural ball, to allow the state to conduct an election to see if workers wanted union representation. Pat appointed a special mediator, who proposed ground rules that gave Chavez’s union a fighting chance. The victory in the first secret-ballot election for farmworkers was an enormous boost for Chavez and the union’s credibility.

  As governor, Pat appointed Mexican Americans as judges, commissioners, and staff, in all about sixty-five appointments, compared with only three during the four terms of his Republican predecessors. The Viva Pat Brown45 campaign literature in 1966 included endorsements from key Mexican American leaders, including Chavez: “In its first statewide political endorsement, our union has unanimously voted to support the reelection of Governor Brown … Governor Brown made history in bringing about the first free and open representation elections for farm workers in the history of agriculture in America.” But the lasting image was of a governor relaxing in Palm Springs while the pilgrims rallied outside his office in the capitol.

  “I’ve had a rough campaign46 out here and I’ve got my work cut out for me,” Pat told President Johnson in a phone call after the June primary. He described Reagan as “part of the kook crowd in the United States. He’s to the right of Goldwater.” Johnson tried to be reassuring. “I know all your weaknesses and all your disadvantages but I don’t want you to point them out because you’re selling everyone on the fact that you can’t win. I think we got to get our tail up, get bushy tailed and chin up, and let’s go.”

  The Democrats’ attempt to paint Reagan as a know-nothing actor and a kook backfired, at odds with the genial, reasonable-seeming candidate the public saw. Reagan’s political consultants turned his lack of experience into a positive. They billed him as a citizen politician whose ignorance of state issues was a refreshing counterpoint to the career politician. Working-class Democrats defected, embracing the outsider image that would soon gain national appeal. In 1958, Pat had been supported by 78 percent of white union members and their families. Against Reagan, his support dropped by 20 points.

  In Democrats’ polls, the word “Berkeley” consistently elicited the strongest negative response. Berkeley meant drugs, hippies, lack of order, sit-ins, and antiwar protests. “Clean up the mess at Berkeley” became a Reagan slogan and applause line. He received fresh ammunition in May 1966 when the state Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities issued a report that blamed Clark Kerr and liberals for turning Berkeley into what Reagan called “a rallying point for Communists47 and a center of sexual misconduct.”

  The same month, the California Supreme Court struck down Proposition 14, which had gutted the fair housing law. Ruling in a suit brought by the NAACP, the court declared that Prop 14 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. When the decision was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, both Pat and his friend Tom Lynch, the attorney general, refused to defend Proposition 14. Reagan pledged to find a way to overturn the Rumford Fair Housing Act, a bad law, he said, that “invaded one of our most basic and cherished rights—a right held by all our citizens48—the right to dispose of property to whom we see fit and as we see fit.”

  Liberal voters who should have applauded Pat’s commitment to fair housing instead deserted him over his refusal to denounce the escalating Vietnam War. The draft ratcheted up, and so did protests on campuses, where student deferments were no longer automatic. Only students who scored high enough on a test designed by the Selective Service, or had grades that translated into a sufficiently high college rank, would be exempt. At Stanford, David Harris led a three-day occupation of the president’s office to protest the testing policy. Pat tried to duck the issue by saying Vietnam was a national problem. But when pressed, he supported the president. He was booed at the convention of the California Democratic Council. Ramparts magazine ran a cover with Reagan and Brown labeled Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  Friends and family tried to help. Longtime supporters hosted star-studded fundraisers. Jerry, who had recently moved to Los Angeles, spent some time in the campaign office. Tony Kline stayed with his law school friend for a few months while he headed Young Democrats for Brown. Bernice campaigned and discussed substantive issues for the first time. She had become an early conservationist, warning people to “guard your environment” and protect the state’s natural beauty. She cited predictions that the state’s population would double to 38 million by 2000. “That means double everything49—homes, schools, libraries, freeways. It’s almost frightening. We have to prepare for this tremendous increase in population.” She was optimistic that Californians were starting to think beyond their narrow self-interest: “I think people have really developed an environmental conscience.”50

  By the final week of the campaign, Pat looked unusually grim51 as he took his seat on the dais at the candidate forum sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility. Chairman Robert Gerdes remarked that they had started together as young lawyers but Pat beat him to the bar by one year. “He has kept well ahead of me since that time in all respects except one: I have an easier time getting reelected than he does.” Pat burst into his trademark infectious guffaws, mouth wide open, head tilted back.

  Then he stood up with his big binder and read a speech that was, like most of the campaign, defensive. “I have to base my campaign against him on three things,” he said, then caught himself, too late: “Not against him—my own campaign.” Reagan would end free tuition at the university. He would cut down trees. How could the people trust someone who had no experience at all, a motion picture actor?

  When it was Reagan’s turn, he was introduced as “the boy next door”52 who “made good on everything he took on in life.” Relaxed, occasionally consulting note cards, he spoke of a new spirit and ridiculed Pat as a career politician: “I’ve never held public office—and he’s never held any other kind of job.” Reagan said his aides had asked if they should go around and tape Pat’s speeches, the way Pat had aides follow Reagan around with a recorder. “I agreed on one condition: that I don’t have to listen.” He received a standing ovation.

  On Election Day, Pat asked his son-in-law Joe Kelly to set up lunch with a group of his old San Francisco friends at the Merced Golf Club. Afterward, Kelly drove Pat to the airport so he could fly down to Los Angeles to await results. When Pat said he needed to stop en route to visit his mother, Kelly knew that Pat had given up hope.

  Pat entered the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after ten o’clock that evening to prolonged cheers, though some in the crowd were already weeping. “The people of California have been very, very good to me.53 I can only say that I have tried to recipro
cate,” he said in his concession speech. “We have a fight to keep going. Our principles are right. We lose a battle but we’ll win the war.” The developer Ben Swig found his friend almost in a daze.54 Later, Pat would remember Swig’s kindness, and his immediate assurance that he would put Pat on retainer as a legal counsel at $10,000 a year for five years, whatever firm he chose to join.

  The next morning, a small crowd waiting on the tarmac in Sacramento broke into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”55 as Pat and Bernice stepped off the state plane. Bernice said she was relieved to have the campaign over; Pat was philosophical. In the final count, he lost by almost a million votes, out of 6.5 million ballots cast. The only statewide Democrat who prevailed was his childhood friend Tom Lynch, whom Pat had appointed attorney general when a vacancy occurred in 1964.

  People had trouble staying mad at Pat. George Christopher, who had lost the Republican primary in part because of smears by the Brown campaign, wrote to set up a lunch date.56 “Now that our political careers have ended perhaps we will have a little spare time to see each other and to reminisce about the old days when we were just fledgling aspirants in the political world.”

  Before he left office, Pat signed a contract with the state’s three major utilities to pump the man-made river of water over the Tehachapi Mountains. Bill Warne hurried to finish up as much of the water project as he could; thirty water districts had signed contracts, providing funds to repay the original bonds, although water would not reach the southern San Joaquin Valley until 1968 and Los Angeles a few years later. The governor made a raft of last-minute appointments, filling many judgeships. He promoted his brother Harold to the appellate court; criticism about nepotism no longer mattered.

  Of all the letters and telegrams that poured in after the election, one that mattered perhaps the most to Pat came from a Republican, a throwback to the generation that grew up in the Party of California, without partisan elections. “Nina and I voted57 for you two weeks ago and since then have been praying that there would be enough thinking voters in California to insure your reelection,” Earl Warren wrote. The Chief Justice sought to reassure Pat that he was the victim of forces beyond his control: