The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  You have given our state good, progressive government for eight years and that is all any man could have done … Some day the people of California will comprehend just how silly and shallow was the campaign to unseat you, but until that time arrives, I hope you will content yourself with a sense of duty well performed, which in the last analysis is the greatest satisfaction that can come to any public servant.

  Pat was always prone to superlatives, which reflected genuine feeling at the moment of the utterance. Every dinner with friends was “the best one yet.” His response to Warren reflected a more lasting sentiment: “I think you know that I respect and admire you more than any man I have ever met. To have earned your respect and admiration too, the greatest Governor in California’s history, is something that makes all of the effort and all of the troubles (and even the defeat) worthwhile. You were Governor of California longer than any man in its history. I wanted to equal or even better your record, but it just couldn’t be done.”58

  11

  The Browns of Los Angeles

  Though their past life and friendships had been closely tied to Northern California, Pat and Bernice Brown decided to build their future in Los Angeles, a place that seemed to hold the most promise for new beginnings. Pat accepted a position as a rainmaker with Ball, Hunt & Hart, a well-known and politically connected law firm. Bernice found a house she liked atop Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills, with a pool where Pat could swim and a view of the Santa Monica Mountains that reminded him of Yosemite.

  Los Angeles was not like their San Francisco, where everyone knew your parish and your parents and politics was personal. Los Angeles was a city in transition, with an aging Protestant elite and never-ending streams of newcomers, a spreading metropolis where a history of rigid racism was giving way to large emerging ethnic communities and predominantly white suburbs. The vast sprawl, condemned by sociologists and planners, masked the city’s kaleidoscope appeal, the sense of movement and openness, the tabula rasa personality that matched the landscape. By the end of the 1960s, Los Angeles had a Mexican American congressman, a viable black candidate for mayor, and Jewish law partners. The geography of dramatic extremes, from the Santa Monica Mountains to the Mojave Desert to the Malibu beaches, attracted settlers and industry: Hollywood, aerospace, science and technology, and a booming port. All had been enticed and nurtured by the sunny, dependable climate. Los Angeles, Carey McWilliams wrote, was “a paradox: a desert that faces an ocean.”1

  People in the Bay Area might regard Southern California with disdain as a cultural wasteland, but people in Los Angeles didn’t much care. The city was developing cultural institutions of its own. In 1964, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had opened in downtown Los Angeles, anchoring the Music Center that would be home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Opera, familiar to millions from televised Oscar presentations. A year later, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened, and two years later the Mark Taper Forum, which premiered groundbreaking theater. The mingling of classes began to break down long-standing cultural barriers. The Music Center was the first institution to integrate Jews into the philanthropic world of greater Los Angeles. The openness to experimentation produced creative collaborations. Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention teamed up with Zubin Mehta and the Los Angeles Philharmonic to perform a concert at UCLA.

  The Browns’ move to Los Angeles marked a symbolic end to the era when the locus of political power was firmly in the Bay Area. The clout of Southern California had been further strengthened when the legislature finally complied with federal court orders and reapportioned the state Senate on the basis of population. In 1966, Los Angeles went from one senator to fourteen. The eight Southern California counties controlled more legislative seats than the other fifty counties combined. More than half of California voters lived in the Los Angeles television market. Among Pat Brown’s miscalculations had been underestimating the degree to which political power had shifted south.

  His son was not going to repeat that mistake.

  Jerry Brown accepted a job at Tuttle & Taylor, a boutique law firm in Los Angeles with a reputation for hiring former U.S. Supreme Court clerks and the highest-achieving law students. The partner who had handpicked most of the firm’s dozen lawyers was Bill Norris, a gregarious optimist who loved the law, politics, and public service. Norris was the fourth lawyer when he joined the firm in 1956, the same year Warren Christopher brought Norris to Adlai Stevenson’s headquarters and introduced him to Fred Dutton. Norris became active in the California Democratic Council and was appointed by Pat Brown to the Board of Education and then the Board of Trustees for the California State University system. He viewed Pat as a mentor, and when he heard his son was looking for a job in Los Angeles, Norris reached out to Jerry.

  Tuttle & Taylor had about a dozen lawyers when Jerry arrived in March 1966. Eli Chernow, who joined at the same time, was a more typical hire. He had grown up in the San Fernando Valley after his parents moved from Pittsburgh, drawn like so many by the promised health benefits of the warm, dry climate. They ran an upholstery business and settled in North Hollywood, delighted to find a house with a big yard and five fruit trees. Chernow joined the Young Democrats at Hollywood High School and then formed a chapter when he attended Caltech. Bill Norris met Chernow when he was active in the 1960 campaign, tracked him through Harvard Law School, and offered him a job. Chernow admired Norris’s commitment to a life that combined law with public service, a value Tuttle & Taylor embraced. The firm’s average of sixteen hundred billable hours per lawyer per year, far below the demands of larger corporate firms, left plenty of time for outside interests.

  Tuttle & Taylor’s thirteenth-floor office was at the top of a 1925 terracotta and enameled brick building at the corner of Sixth and Grand, a Spanish Romanesque structure designed by the architectural firm of Walker & Eisen, whose work dominated the 1920s Art Deco building boom that shaped downtown Los Angeles. Around the corner was the Yorkshire Grill, the office hangout and lunch spot. Jerry was notorious for never having any money. His colleagues found him smart, unconventional, and inquisitive. He had reverted to night-owl hours and was as likely to be found in the office at three A.M. as at three P.M. He arrived for meetings at the last minute, rushing down the hallway, tie flying behind him as he struggled into his jacket. He often filed papers right on deadline, racing to the courthouse in the old white Chevy Malibu that his father had given him as a consolation present when he failed the bar exam. Gloria Lujan, one of the secretaries, had to slide over and out the driver’s side to run up the courthouse steps because the passenger side door was tied on with rope. Lujan was about the same age as Jerry, and she appreciated his curiosity, candor, and lack of pretense. Her parents were Mexican American, and Jerry often asked about their views.

  Los Angeles did not become a magnet for young people nor a symbol of the counterculture in the same way as San Francisco, where the Summer of Love in 1967 ushered in cultural and social change that lasted long after LSD became illegal, the Grateful Dead left Haight-Ashbury, and psychedelic rock went mainstream. But the spirit of protest, liberation, and experimentation permeated Southern California as well. Lujan and the other women in the office joined the National Organization for Women soon after it was founded in October 1966. Their workplace protests were small and well received. One day all the women wore pantsuits. They ended the ritual of fetching coffee for their bosses when they arrived each morning. They attended rallies and demonstrations, for the farmworkers and against the war.

  As the American bombing campaigns and casualties escalated, the Vietnam War dominated conversations and divided the country, institutions, and families, including the Browns. Pat staunchly supported the president. Jerry opposed the war. Vietnam became the cause that drew him into his first political foray.

  By 1967, the civil rights and antiwar movements increasingly overlapped. Leaders from Martin Luther King Jr. to Allard Lowenstein argued that not only was the war immoral, but the billions
of dollars spent on the conflict deprived communities like Watts of the funds needed to combat the pernicious effects of decades of racism. “If we spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an ill-conceived war in Vietnam and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, we can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet, right now,” King said at Stanford on April 14, 1967, in a speech he called “The Other America.”2 Millions walked the streets looking for jobs that did not exist, he said, “perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.” The struggle for economic equality in an increasingly divided country was harder than the civil rights battles of a decade earlier, King said. “It’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good solid job.” Then he flew to New York to appear the next day at the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, while his wife, Coretta Scott King, addressed the West Coast peace rally in San Francisco.

  The California Democratic Council, the grassroots group formed back in 1953, voted at its annual convention to field a Peace Slate in the 1968 presidential primary, with delegates pledged to a cause rather than a candidate. Easterners thought they needed a candidate before building an organization; the California approach was to create the grassroots movement, which would attract a candidate. The strategy, CDC president Gerald Hill argued, was to demonstrate that President Johnson was so unpopular he could not win reelection.

  By fall, the California idea had gained momentum around the country. National Democrats awaited the outcome as twenty-five hundred CDC delegates and observers gathered on September 30, 1967, at the Long Beach Arena. After four hours of debate, delegates approved a resolution that called for a slate pledged to a candidate who promised an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam and negotiations to withdraw all American forces. A walkout by blacks was averted with a compromise that included more minority representation on the steering committee and a clause tying the end of war to the struggles of oppressed minorities.

  “We are still in control of our destiny.3 There is still a difference between the right course and the wrong,” said economist John Kenneth Galbraith, the national chair of Americans for Democratic Action, in his keynote address to the convention. “As liberal Democrats, we need not accept either the apologies of conservatives or the reproaches of the left.” He told them public sentiment had turned against the war as people began to understand the conflict better.

  Among the seventy-five delegates elected to the CDC steering committee to oversee the Peace Slate for the June 4, 1968, California primary was a familiar name, Edmund G. Brown Jr., who also volunteered as finance committee chair for Southern California. Eli Chernow joined his colleague on the committee, along with two young politicians launching their careers after leading the Young Democrats, Henry Waxman and Howard Berman.

  By mid-November, the steering committee for the Peace Slate urged Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy to enter the race, but stopped short of an endorsement to appease a faction that hoped New York senator Robert F. Kennedy would jump in. When McCarthy announced his candidacy on November 30, the CDC voted a formal endorsement. McCarthy met with the steering committee4 in Fresno on January 12, 1968, at the Hacienda Motel (the Peace Slate got a special rate, $9 per room). Jerry was named to the committee that would sponsor the McCarthy slate for the primary, joining major liberal Democratic donors like Max Palevsky and Stanley Sheinbaum.

  For thirty-year-old Jerry, who had been around politicians all his life, Gene McCarthy offered a strikingly different and appealing model—a former seminarian, an intellectual, a poet with an ironic wit. His campaign stressed ideas rather than personality, and the importance of institutions rather than the individual. He disdained the traditional trappings of politics that Pat Brown embraced. Speaking on the candidate’s behalf at a Democratic women’s meeting in the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks on February 8, 1968, Jerry pointedly dismissed the politics of “hoopla and streamers.”5 The McCarthy campaign was serious. “It’s time for a voice of reason and McCarthy is that voice,” Jerry said. “The past two weeks of horror and destruction in Vietnam has made it a thousand times more necessary.”

  One week later, Cesar Chavez began a fast to protest violence closer to home. The grape strike was in its third year, some of the union’s supporters had grown frustrated, and incidents of violence threatened to mar the image of the United Farm Workers and undercut its support. Like the march to Sacramento two years earlier, Chavez’s fast became a powerful symbol. His sacrifice drew hundreds to the union’s headquarters in Delano for the nightly mass and drew the world’s attention to the farmworkers’ struggle. On the twenty-fifth day, too weak to walk, Chavez broke his fast sitting next to Robert Kennedy. Five days later, Kennedy announced his candidacy for president.

  The same day, March 16, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the California Democratic Council convention and praised the decision to endorse McCarthy, “one of the truly outstanding, capable, brilliant, dedicated Americans.” King spoke again about the two Americas:6 one that flourished, with food, culture, and education for all, the other with millions of unemployed, substandard housing, pitiful overcrowded schools, “a daily ugliness about it that transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair.” Again, he tied the problems to the war in Vietnam: “It has made the great society a myth and replaced it with a troubled and confused society.”

  Less than three weeks later, King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

  By then, President Johnson had stunned even his close advisers by withdrawing from the race, facing, as Gerald Hill had predicted a year earlier, the strong likelihood that his own party might reject him. Vice President Hubert Humphrey scrambled to win over the Johnson delegates. Fred Dutton became Kennedy’s campaign manager in California. Pat Brown split with his former Svengali and supported Humphrey.

  “I have been trying for weeks7 to get my father to support McCarthy,” Jerry said. “Of course Humphrey is a good man but he represents the old guard of the party. We need new blood in the Democratic Party and we need a presidential candidate free enough from past mistakes that he will be able to chart a new course for the country. As far as I can see, Gene McCarthy is the only candidate who can do this.”

  Cesar Chavez was a Kennedy delegate, loyal to the man who had lent his charismatic support to the farmworkers’ cause. In the final weeks of the campaign the veteran organizer brought a hundred farmworkers and volunteers to Los Angeles, where they methodically canvassed Mexican American neighborhoods in East Los Angeles. They set up a headquarters in one house on each block and visited every voter at least twice. On Election Day, turnout in some precincts was 100 percent. The votes were key to Kennedy’s narrow margin of victory, 46 to 42 percent over McCarthy.

  Fred Dutton was part of the scrum guiding Kennedy toward the press room after his victory speech at the Ambassador as he walked through the hotel kitchen, shook the busboy’s hand, and was shot three times. Dutton rode in the ambulance to the hospital, where Kennedy died the next day. “The lights went out for me,”8 Dutton said later, explaining why he never worked on another campaign.

  Jerry was not the only member of the Brown family to oppose the war. His aunt Connie and her husband, raising two children in San Francisco, participated in antiwar demonstrations. Like her mother, Connie was involved with the Unitarian Church. She joined a study group on Islam. When her children were in high school, she went back to finish college and became a teacher. Ida lived nearby and shared her daughter’s liberal politics and opposition to the war. Ida had voted for the progressive Henry Wallace9 when he challenged Harry Truman in 1948 (which she proudly announced to Truman’s campaign manager at a cocktail party hosted by Pat, much to his chagrin). Ida told her daughter that President Johnson should be chloroformed.

  Ida continued to rebuff suggestions she move in with one of her children. She loved to walk in the fog in ne
arby Golden Gate Park. She drank scotch on the rocks, several times a week. Her children organized a birthday party each January, though Ida preferred to avoid the spotlight. “I like it quiet,”10 she said at one of the parties. “My son Pat says I’m anti-social.” She was content to read and listen to the radio in her studio apartment decorated with photographs of the family, handmade birthday cards from her great-grandchildren, a map of the United States, two Italian miniatures from Harold’s wife, a watercolor painted by one of Kathleen’s friends, and a print of “The End of the Trail,” the famous image of an American Indian, slumped over on his horse, despondent. “The foregoing might not say much for interior decorating, but it says an awful lot to me,” Connie wrote to Pat. “Pride, love, involvement,11 acceptance—so very much.”

  Pat was still adjusting to life as a private citizen in a new city. “The first two years out of public service12 have been interesting and stimulating, but I would be less than frank if I didn’t tell you that I miss the challenge of public office,” he wrote in a holiday letter to friends. He was more open with his brother Harold: “I am trying awfully hard13 to get re-established here in Southern California.”

  Pat and Bernice traveled extensively, first for pleasure, then for business. At the coronation of the king of Tonga, where he was sent as a representative of President Johnson, Pat stayed in the presidential palace and played golf with General Suharto, who had recently seized power and become president of Indonesia. That connection would lead to Pat’s most lucrative business enterprise. He became an adviser to Pertamina, the Indonesian military dictatorship’s oil company, and the authorized agent for importing oil into the United States. “It seems to me that, for 23 years, I have fought hard for things that I think are right. I would like to assure myself of some degree of material security14 in whatever years I have ahead of me,” Pat wrote to a friend.