The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  In the fall of 1969, he attended an event on the University of California, Santa Barbara, campus in honor of the Santa Barbara News Press publisher and editor, Thomas Storke, whose crusading editorials about the John Birch Society had won a Pulitzer Prize. The building dedication was bittersweet. One of Governor Reagan’s first acts had been to fire Clark Kerr. “When I looked at that Santa Barbara campus15 I couldn’t help but think men do effect change and men do things and it is important who publishes a paper and who governs a state,” Pat wrote to Storke. “In my opinion Reagan has done more to wreck the greatest university in the land and hinder the whole educational system than I ever thought possible.” Then, ever the optimist, he looked ahead. “I have a son, Edmund G. Brown, Jr., who made a speech at Santa Barbara a few weeks ago and everybody tells me it was very good. He is stronger than the old man because he is just like his mother.”

  Unlike his mother, however, Jerry Brown was very interested in politics. Under the Master Plan, junior colleges continued to be run by individual school districts. By 1965, the Los Angeles Unified School District16 operated with a half-billion-dollar budget that financed 7 two-year colleges, 28 adult schools, 126 secondary schools, and 438 elementary schools. Pressure grew, especially from faculty, to split off the colleges so they would receive more attention and be differentiated from the high schools. A state law created the Los Angeles Community College District, which would be governed by seven elected trustees.

  When elections for the new board were announced, Jerry went to see Joe Cerrell, only a few years older but already an experienced political operative. Cerrell had started the Trojan Democratic Club as an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, worked on Pat Brown’s campaign in 1958, and become director of the state Democratic Party the following year. Cerrell was from Queens, and he understood the difference between politics on the East Coast and in California. If he had stayed in New York, he would have started as an assistant precinct captain; in California, he became state party director at twenty-four. By 1968 he had forged a new path as a political consultant, a specialty that had been the provenance of Republicans. Jerry asked Cerrell what he needed to do to win a seat on the new college board. The answer was, put his name on the ballot. BROWN’S SON IN FIRST BID FOR POLITICAL POST, read the headline in the Los Angeles Times on January 1, 1969.

  Though he had been known his whole life as Jerry, Pat Brown’s son launched his political career as Edmund G. Brown Jr.

  Unburdened by the need to campaign seriously, Jerry began to build the network of relationships that would be central to his future career. He enlisted help from a friend he had met several years earlier during a trip to South America. Richard Maullin, a doctoral student at UCLA working for the Rand Corporation, had met Jerry in Bogotá, Colombia, at a dinner hosted by a Yale Law School classmate. Maullin reconnected with Jerry during the 1966 gubernatorial campaign. He did not know Pat Brown, but Maullin volunteered out of gratitude for the Master Plan, which had enabled a kid from Boyle Heights who put himself through UCLA cleaning swimming pools to attend a first-rate school, tuition free. Maullin never considered Ivy League colleges, though he had the grades, because of the cost and the quotas for Jews. During the 1966 campaign, he went out every weekend and registered voters in his old neighborhood, now largely Mexican. Jerry went along sometimes, interested in the process, asking questions about the mechanics. Maullin had limited political experience but a sharp mind for data and a wide-ranging intellect. When Jerry announced for the community college board, Maullin agreed to help with the campaign.

  At a Democratic candidates forum, Jerry met Tom Quinn, a young journalist running for the school board. He, too, was following in the family business; his father, Joseph, had worked for Mayor Sam Yorty, been the Los Angeles bureau chief for United Press International, and then founded City News Service, a wire service that covered Southern California. Tom had majored in journalism, worked at a Sacramento television station, spent a year at City News, and then started an audio version called Radio News West, which sent feeds to forty-five stations.

  One of the popular ways to campaign in California was on “slate mailers,” a postcard or brochure sent to voters that endorsed a list of candidates. The principal criterion for the endorsement was the candidate’s willingness to pay to join the slate. Quinn, always enterprising, decided that rather than pay to join someone else’s slate, he would form his own. Edmund G. Brown Jr. seemed like a good name to have on a slate, so he approached the community college board candidate with the proposition of an education-oriented slate. The two hit it off and continued the conversation at a Chinese restaurant, then closed a bar at two in the morning. Their respective offices were nearby, and Jerry began dropping in to Radio News West to talk strategy with Quinn.

  Jerry also sought advice from his old mentor at Los Gatos, Bill Burman. Burman had left the seminary in 1962 and taught for a couple of years at Santa Clara University. He fell in love with one of the students in his summer class on Horace. He was released from the Jesuit order in 1964, married, and moved to Los Angeles to start a family. Jerry had stayed in touch throughout the years. The Burmans attended parties at the Mansion and at Pat and Bernice’s summer home in Los Angeles. In 1969, shortly before the college board election, Burman was promoted to associate professor of philosophy at Valley College, one of the Los Angeles junior colleges to be run by the new board.

  Voters could choose seven board trustees in the April 1, 1969, primary. Out of 133 candidates, Edmund G. Brown Jr. finished first. He received 186,000 votes, 50,000 more than his nearest rival.

  Though the novelty of the college board election garnered some attention, the contest that dominated the news was the race for mayor of Los Angeles. City councilman Tom Bradley, an African American, had forged a coalition of black and Jewish support that enabled him to mount a strong challenge to the incumbent, Sam Yorty. Bradley, a retired Los Angeles Police Department lieutenant, won the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times and bested Yorty in the primary, nearly clearing the 50 percent threshold necessary to avoid a runoff. Yorty rebounded with a race-baiting campaign that portrayed Bradley as a tool of Communists and the Black Panthers. The scare tactics were so effective that more people voted in the May 27 runoff than in any Los Angeles mayoral race before or since. Yorty won with 53 percent of the vote.

  Jerry finished first again among fourteen candidates in the runoff for the school board post. Taking office on July 1, he found himself on the losing end of most votes on a board with a conservative majority. None of the trustees had held other office or had any experience on a school board; several viewed it as a springboard to higher office. Six weeks after they were sworn in, the board voted 5–2 to dismiss two Valley College teachers for reading in class an allegedly pornographic poem that one of them had written. Jerry called the dismissals rash, paternalistic decisions likely to be overturned in court. “Students can assess what they hear. The central fact of the case is that students are not infantile17 and can make up their own minds about what they can or cannot read.”

  The conservative majority meddled in affairs of the eight colleges to such a degree that they endangered the schools’ accreditation, engaging in what Jerry termed paranoia and “partisanship that binds them so closely it’s like a religious cult.”18 In one of the more publicized episodes, the board rejected, by its customary 4–3 vote, a request by students to honor Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trustee Michael Antonovich called King a lawbreaker and compared him with Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy.

  From the start, Jerry evinced a frugality that he attributed to his mother. His lack of interest in material goods also made for good politics. He opposed the board’s decision to spend $700 per trustee on new office furniture, arguing that the metal desks and plain chairs were sufficient. He condemned an extra $23,000 for public relations as “press agents to toot our own horns.” He chastised the board for its focus on trivial issues like the placement of vending machine
s. “The people who never come to community colleges or who drop out in a few weeks are the problems we should try to solve,”19 he said. “We have an $85 million budget but we do not know how to make major decisions about it.”

  By August 1969, less than two months after Jerry took office, his father told friends his son might run for California secretary of state the following year. Frank Jordan, who had held the office for more than a quarter century, had suffered a stroke and was incapacitated. The race would be wide open. In December, Pat hosted the first fundraising lunch for Jerry at the Century Plaza Hotel.

  Jerry asked Tom Quinn to manage the campaign. Quinn was twenty-five, had never run a campaign, and did not hesitate to accept. He would redirect into politics the combination of charm, chutzpah, and connections that had served him well as a journalist. (When Robert Kennedy visited Los Angeles amid rumors he was about to declare for president, Quinn figured out he might be staying with Pierre Salinger, whom he knew, talked his way into the house during a rainstorm, waited while the senator napped, and got his interview.) Both the candidate and the campaign manager had supreme confidence in their ability to craft a strategy superior to that of any Democratic establishment politicians. Jerry sent Quinn to Pat, who set him up in the law library of his Beverly Hills firm with a stack of “mee-mos” from Fred Dutton. Dutton had also been a political novice in 1958 when he masterminded Pat’s campaign. The memos were Tom Quinn’s education in running a statewide campaign.

  Jerry had a clear sense of what he did not want to do. He would not wear silly hats, a literal position that came to stand metaphorically for a rejection of the traditional political trappings. He did not hug people or kiss babies. He rarely smiled. Bernice had coined a term for her husband’s old-style campaigning: low comedy. Jerry avoided it at all costs.

  He also did not want to take money from people who expected favors. His desire to take office not beholden to supporters dovetailed with what emerged as his central theme: the need for transparency in campaign finance reports, which were regulated by the secretary of state. Looking for issues to run on, Jerry had researched the law and concluded the office had far greater power than had been exercised. Most candidates listed their source of donations as “various friends” or “cocktail party” or “other.” Money had become increasingly important as campaigns moved into television, which made Jerry’s demand for accurate reporting a potent issue.

  On March 2, 1970, Jerry made his formal announcement, first in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco. He said he would insist on detailed reports of all campaign contributions and refuse to certify any election whose funding was not clearly itemized. He called the dependence on money from lobbyists and special interests “inherently corrupting.”20

  Quinn wanted a Northern California setting that would emphasize Jerry’s roots in San Francisco, so they staged a press conference at the Magellan Avenue house where he had grown up, now home to Jerry’s sister Cynthia and her husband, Joe Kelly. Jerry met the press in the living room, surrounded by three nieces and a nephew who were allowed to play hooky to attend the event. “I wanted my grandmother to be here,”21 Jerry told reporters. “But she’s ninety-two years old, and you guys scare her.”

  Asked what sort of advice his father dispensed, Jerry parried the question: “Actually, he doesn’t give me political advice as much as personal advice. For instance, he tells me when to get a haircut.” In another interview, he addressed the impact of his name in a typically straightforward manner: “Pretty simple: some people will vote for me because they liked my father; some will vote against me because they didn’t like him.”

  Pat’s excitement over his son’s interest in politics was tempered by his own dashed, fleeting hopes of a comeback. Lacking a strong candidate, some Democrats had approached him about running against Reagan again. The same day as Jerry’s announcement, Pat’s secretary requested the necessary state filing forms.22 But Bernice said there could not be two Edmund G. Browns on the ballot, and it was Jerry’s turn. “I do think I was a good governor23 and sometimes almost great, but I don’t think I was ever able to articulate my inner philosophy of life,” Pat wrote to Tom McBride, a friend and former assemblyman, now a federal judge, who scolded him for even considering another run.

  Pat had many friends, and he turned to them all for help. He even appealed for votes for his son in Colusa, one of the most Republican counties in the state. Pat and Harold had hired a local rancher in Williams, Floyd “Bud” Marsh, to oversee the Mountain House. Marsh reported “a good crop of barley this year, but we need rain in the next few weeks to keep it from maturing too rapidly.” Illegal hunters had cut fences and killed one of Marsh’s cows. In reply, Pat wrote, “Anything you can do to help24 Edmund Jr. would be very much appreciated by me. Colusa County is not very big, but every vote counts.”

  Pat’s former campaign finance chair Ben Swig hosted events in his Fairmont Hotel penthouse suite. Jerry reported in May that he had raised $38,404, plus a $10,000 loan, half from his father and half from the son of one of his father’s friends, department store magnate Cyril Magnin. Several of Pat’s friends donated $1,000 each, including actor Burt Lancaster and oil magnate Ed Pauley.

  Jerry’s younger sister, Kathleen, helped out on the campaign, too, in between raising a family and finishing up her Stanford degree long distance. She had left college a year early when her husband, Jeep, began Harvard Law School. For the daughter of California’s greatest booster, who had imbued his family with the notion that California had it all, Cambridge had been a revelation. She loved the seasons and the community. She returned from visits to California with a suitcase filled with artichokes and tortillas and cooked the exotic food for friends who had never heard of tacos. When Jeep graduated in 1969, they chose to live in Los Angeles, for much the same reasons as other members of the family. They both liked its openness and entrepreneurial culture. Los Angeles had mountains, beaches, the entertainment industry, ethnic communities, and opportunity. Jeep joined forty-one other lawyers at Latham & Watkins and advanced quickly, working on complex cases that would have required years of seniority at an older San Francisco firm. Jeep, who had grown up with a typical Northern California sense of superiority, found that in Los Angeles, merit, wits, and hard work were more relevant to advancement than connections.

  Tom Quinn sent Kathleen to campaign as a surrogate for her brother in small media markets, where her arrival was guaranteed to be big news. She was a good speaker and enjoyed the campaign. Her father always told all his children they should run for office; now friends and strangers began to tell Kathleen the same thing.

  Early in the campaign, Jerry did an interview at Channel 9 in Los Angeles, on the Paramount Studios lot on Melrose Avenue. Quinn was with him; they finished around noon and decided to try the Mexican restaurant across the street. El Adobe was owned by Lucy Casado and her husband, Frank, one of the founders of the Mexican American Political Association. When Casado overheard a conversation about politics, he joined the table. By the end of lunch, he asked for Quinn’s card. Quinn didn’t have cards, so he gave Casado the number of the campaign office. Quinn had taken Pat’s advice not to waste money on rent and found free space in the basement of a building at 3540 Wilshire Boulevard, a few blocks from the Ambassador Hotel. Casado called and asked Quinn to hire his daughter to work on the campaign; her father would pay her salary so she could get experience. Patty Casado had recently graduated from high school. Quinn needed a gofer. She was not only a good worker, she brought food from the restaurant for lunch. The staff began hanging out at El Adobe for the free dinners, and then for the friendship. The Casados had built a business where they served in loco parentis for a generation of young musicians and journalists. Jerry became as comfortable in Lucy Casado’s kitchen as he had been in Mark McGuinness’s home on Magellan Avenue.

  Mexican Americans were emerging as a political force in Los Angeles, as Frank Casado’s generation gave way to more militant activists who turned the word Chican
o from a term of derision to a source of ethnic pride. Inspired in part by the farmworker movement and the success of Cesar Chavez, Chicanos had been demanding improvements in their second-class schools and city services. School walkouts in East Los Angeles in 1968 increased political awareness. Young leaders protested police brutality, racism, and a Selective Service System that disproportionately drafted Mexican Americans, who were less likely to have college deferments. The Chicano Moratorium on August 29, 1970, drew more than twenty thousand antiwar marchers to the streets of Los Angeles and into Laguna Park, where the marchers were gassed and clubbed by sheriffs. Three people died, including Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar, hit in the head with a projectile a deputy sheriff fired through the window of a restaurant where the reporter was having a drink.

  Across the country, there had been more than three hundred major protests on college campuses since the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964. The tenor of the clashes changed markedly, especially after the violence and arrests at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Berkeley again was in the vanguard. In the spring of 1969, a coalition of students, radicals, and neighbors had taken over an abandoned university-owned lot a few blocks south of campus. Families and students, counterculture hippies and political activists joined together to lay sod, plant flowers, and create what they christened People’s Park. On May 15, 1969, acting on orders from Governor Reagan, police surrounded and seized the park, ripped out the improvements, and fenced it off. Led by Mario Savio and other veterans of the movement, students rallied on campus and marched toward People’s Park. Police fired tear gas and then shotguns. One bystander was killed, another blinded. The next day, Reagan sent two thousand National Guardsmen with rifles, bayonets, and tear gas. Violent clashes continued for two weeks. National Guard helicopters sprayed tear gas over much of the campus. Almost five hundred students were arrested and dozens injured. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Sheldon Wolin called People’s Park “the first application of systematic terror25 directed at an American campus by its own authorities,” shocking violence that soon became commonplace. Within a year, four unarmed students were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard during an anti–Vietnam War demonstration at Kent State University.