The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Despite his long-standing opposition to the war, Jerry took a conservative position on student protests. Students who broke rules should be suspended or expelled. At a fundraising event organized by Ben Swig, Jerry said he favored a statewide campus police force operating under the governor. He argued that the unrest and violence at public schools would only hasten support for imposing tuition. “We are going to have a lily-white system of public college26 education in California open only to the children of the rich and the middle class,” he told students at Valley Community College. “The poor, the black, the people who are out of the mainstream who really need education won’t get it. This violence is a real indulgence that the radical students don’t think a lot about.”

  The campaign for secretary of state, a low-profile job with little-known responsibilities, garnered unusual publicity because of Jerry’s name and obvious ambition. He did little to dampen speculation. “I don’t intend to remain secretary of state27 as long as Frank Jordan,” Jerry said, referring to the most recent office holder. “I’m interested in the office itself. But after that, who knows?”

  In the primary, Jerry easily defeated Hugh Burns, the conservative Fresno Democrat who had led the Senate and helped push through Pat’s water plan. On Election Day, Jerry defeated Republican James Flournoy by almost 5 percentage points, carrying most of the large counties. He lost Colusa by only two votes. He lost the solidly Republican coastal counties of Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Monterey, and Santa Cruz but carried most of the Central Valley, which boasted a Democratic enrollment edge. With a margin of victory of just over 300,000 votes, he became the only Democrat in a statewide constitutional office. Ronald Reagan easily won reelection, defeating Jesse Unruh.

  After a scant year and a half on the local school board, Jerry was sworn in to statewide office on January 4, 1971, in a dark blue pinstripe suit and polka dot tie. Recently retired Chief Justice Earl Warren administered the oath of office, another portent the new secretary of state would have far from the usual low profile. “I want to thank my mother28 for having the good sense to name me after my father,” Jerry said. “I never really liked that name, but I came to appreciate it as the campaign wore on.” He thanked his father for giving him the inspiration to run.

  “Times change,” Pat said after the ceremony. “The young must take over. Little did I think four years ago that I’d be up here for my son’s inauguration.” Jerry was thirty-two. He had barely been sworn in when the chatter began about his possible gubernatorial candidacy in 1974. “You can never tell,” Pat said. “Funnier things have happened.”

  Dozens of old friends, from the Magellan Avenue gang through his Yale classmates, sent congratulatory notes. Rose Bird, a friend from International House who had become a lawyer, thanked Jerry for the invitation to the inauguration and welcomed him as “a breath of fresh air29 in that oppressive police state atmosphere which Governor Reagan has created. There are many of us in the hinterlands who look forward to your administration and hope that it is only the first step in a long and successful political career.”

  For all but two of the past sixty years, the secretary of state had been a Jordan: Frank C., from 1910 until 1940, and his son Frank M. since 1943. The elder Jordan was an ally of the Southern Pacific Railroad, so Governor Hiram Johnson had stripped the office of much of its power. Many of the duties involved routine registrations, licenses, and election oversight. Nonetheless, Jerry found plenty of laws that had gone unenforced.

  He threatened to prosecute 134 candidates for failing to properly report campaign contributions. He sued nine who refused to correct the mistakes and said he would bar them from running again unless they complied. Five were Democrats. Campaign finance laws, which dated back to the nineteenth century, had been generally followed until the 1940s, when the increased costs of campaigns prompted candidates to fudge the sources of donations. “When Mr. Shanahan, known incidentally as the Tall Sycamore30 of Shasta County, introduced the bill in 1893, he clearly intended that these be intelligible statements that people could understand and that the amounts and the names and the nature of the items referred to be specified on the report,” Jerry said. He was quickly getting a reputation for rhetoric that invariably included Latin phrases or historical references.

  Jerry sued the campaign committee that had defeated a proposition to divert gas taxes from highway construction to smog control and mass transit, forcing the committee to reveal that they had received $65,000 in contributions from Gulf and Standard Oil. He personally argued the case before the California Supreme Court and won a unanimous decision that established the need for full disclosure by corporations and organizations that contributed to ballot measures.

  In his first three months, Jerry issued more press releases than Jordan had in four years. By the second year, he churned out an average of three a week. He lobbied for lower postal rates for political mail and equal time requirements for candidates on radio and television. He foresaw that candidates would increasingly need to be independently wealthy: “Public office rapidly is becoming a rich man’s preserve.”31 He explored voting by mail, which would not become widespread for more than a decade. His office distributed the first voters’ guide materials in Spanish.

  Secretary of State Jerry Brown and his younger sister Kathleen work on a voter registration campaign in 1972. (Courtesy of George A. Rice)

  The escalation of the Vietnam War had intensified demands that those old enough to be drafted should have the right to vote. A few months after Jerry took office, the national voting age was lowered to eighteen, which set off a legal battle over whether students could vote from their school address. The Republican attorney general had ruled that California students must register at their home. When Jerry was named as a defendant in a lawsuit challenging that decision, he turned around and sided with the plaintiffs, filing an amicus brief on their behalf. They prevailed. Richard Maullin, who had become a deputy secretary of state, estimated the lower voting age could add 1.2 million first-time voters32 in California. Jerry wasted no time reaching out to his future constituents. “The collective voice of students33 will be heard,” he told students at Berkeley High School. He explained the Greek derivation of democracy and exhorted them to civic participation. “Self-government should occupy as much time as baseball or TV.”

  Speculation about his political future increased, fueled by media interest in the story of the two Browns, the younger one so little known that writers still referred to him as Gerry, Ed, or Edmund Jr. A father-son appearance on The Merv Griffin Show reached a national audience and drew letters from old friends. “What impressed me34 the most was how much you are the same” as the Yale student she remembered, wrote Peggy Byrnes, whose brother had been a law school classmate. “I remember your being so quietly proud of California and all that was being done for education and prison reform. You were so confident that the Democrats were the better party, saying they were twenty years ahead of the Republicans.”

  Early polls on the 1974 gubernatorial race showed Jerry as the leading Democrat in a crowded field of seasoned politicians. The most common reason cited35 for a favorable view of Jerry was his father. The most common reason cited by those who viewed him unfavorably was his father.

  Memories fade fast. Jerry was well aware that to exploit his father’s name, he needed to move quickly. As he had done in the past, he capitalized on his father’s reputation and connections even as he sought to distance himself from Pat Brown’s style.

  “I don’t quite enjoy the crowds36 and the handshaking like my father did,” Jerry said soon after he took office. “I don’t take to it like a duck to water. I’m not yet ready to sentence myself to a life in politics.” He did not disguise his doubts about the power of government to solve problems nor his dislike of the political trappings. “I think you get stale staying around politics too long … public life is spiritually debilitating—the falseness, the applause, the phoniness. To get mesmerized by all this folderol is a
mistake. I view with some skepticism the ability of government to make people happy.”

  His youth and intensity, his unconventional path and habits, and his disarming frankness generated attention wherever he went. So did his piercing eyes, bushy eyebrows, and graying sideburns. He accepted speaking engagements around the state and answered all his mail. He wrote notes and outlines for speeches on whatever was handy. A list of assignments on a cardboard shirt insert from the cleaners. Notes for a speech37 to the Native Sons of the Golden West Grand Banquet on the program menu: “Asked what sec do? Asked aren’t you rather young to be sec” scrawled over Shrimp Louie Salad and Cross Rib of Beef. He edited himself heavily, crossing out sentences and moving paragraphs around. He reviewed routine responses to correspondence and frequently red-penciled staff drafts,38 impatient with loquacious answers. “This is bureaucratic mush!” he wrote, a red line through the four-paragraph answer to a query about a school bingo game that didn’t fall within his jurisdiction. “Mush!” on another. “Too impersonal!” “Wordy!”

  There had not been a California governor younger than forty in more than a century. In interviews, he dismissed talk about a run for higher office. “But you have to have a goal, don’t you, or at least a reason to live,39 something to keep you moving?” he said, as if in a colloquy with himself. “That’s what I like about the stars, I guess—in politics and the movies. They have a certain quality, an élan vital, a sense of being alive and vibrant. So many people these days act like they’re dead, just going through the motions.”

  He rented a house in Malibu that belonged to the dancers Marge and Gower Champion. “It’s quiet on the beach,” he told an interviewer. “I can be alone.40 In politics, you’re always being thrown in with other people, all day long. You don’t get much time by yourself, for privacy and reflection.” Neither he nor his deputies, Quinn and Maullin, wanted to live in Sacramento, although the office was based in the capitol. Jerry spent a day or two a week there. He toyed with the idea of renting an office in Santa Monica (“if that wouldn’t be too outrageous,”41 he wrote to a friend). They ended up with an office in West Los Angeles.

  On April 7, 1971, Jerry turned thirty-three. He was in Sacramento that day and his father sent a telegram to the state capitol. “Dear Jerry, congratulations, and happy birthday.42 I was 33 when you were born. You can’t match that. But you’ve gone further in politics than I at your age. You have a great future, and we’re both very proud of you. See you Saturday. Best wishes. Love Mother and Dad.”

  Another birthday card came from an old girlfriend. Jerry wrote back and described his new calling:

  I have been almost totally absorbed in my work.43 I’m beginning to get a sense of just what I can do in politics. It is very important. The world is so shaky and what we do in this country could make quite a difference. And there are so many jerks running things. I’m learning what can be done and that I can do it. It is a crazy job I have. It seems to fit just what I can do and what I like doing. Now that the furniture is out of the way I’m re-organizing these 140 strange souls entrusted to my care. Within a year or two I’ll have this place doing as much as it will ever do for the state. After that and after the next president is elected, then the real fun begins.

  12

  The Candidate

  In its prime, the Alexandria had been the fanciest hotel in Los Angeles, the first to boast centralized steam heat and private baths in every room. The Beaux Arts building with opulent ballrooms and a Tiffany skylight opened in 1906 and hosted Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Charlie Chaplin danced in the lobby. Over time, the hotel at Fifth and Spring fell into decline along with the rest of downtown. The city’s financial center shifted west, leaving behind the elegant Art Deco buildings and theaters in the once bustling commercial corridor along Broadway and Spring. The Alexandria Hotel sheltered transients instead of movie stars.

  Decades later, the landmark building was restored by S. Jon Kreedman, a carpenter from Detroit who had become a major developer in Southern California. Kreedman had learned construction as a teenager and settled in Los Angeles after serving in World War II. He started building tract homes during the postwar expansion and made his name with big, innovative projects on the west side of Los Angeles. He built the first high-rise apartments in Beverly Hills. He converted the I. M. Pei–designed Century City Towers into some of the earliest condominiums. In 1971, he refurbished the Alexandria as part of a largely unsuccessful effort to revive downtown Los Angeles.

  Two years later, room 343 of the Alexandria Hotel was the staging grounds for far more sweeping change, and the vanguard of the revolution was an ex-nun who taught political science at a small Catholic liberal arts college.

  The role of radical was nothing new for Mary Jean Pew. She had grown up in Los Angeles and, like Jerry Brown, postponed her entry into the novitiate by a year because her parents insisted she try college first. She persisted and spent nineteen years as an Immaculate Heart sister. She left in 1968, shortly before the Los Angeles nuns’ proposals for modest reforms led to a standoff with conservative Cardinal James Francis McIntyre. Their battle foreshadowed the coming feminist struggles within the Catholic Church and led to an internationally publicized schism with the Vatican. The entire community of more than two hundred nuns renounced their vows. Pew had a PhD in government and had taught at Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood since 1961. As chair of the History and Government Department, she hired Tom Hayden to teach a class on Vietnam and the antiwar movement using the Pentagon Papers as a text; Hayden, one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society, was free on appeal from his conviction as one of the Chicago Seven, charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention.

  Pew had heard Jerry Brown speak at Immaculate Heart College on behalf of Eugene McCarthy during the 1968 presidential campaign. She was a Kennedy supporter, but she found Jerry impressive. Two years later, when he called the school seeking student volunteers for his secretary of state campaign, Pew decided to sign up herself. She thought she should get some practical experience after years of teaching political science and social justice. Pew was smart, witty, passionate, and organized. She fit in on the unorthodox, ragtag Brown campaign team. She also drew the attention of a Tom Quinn protégé, Doug Faigin, who had taken over running Radio News West when Quinn went to work full time for Jerry. On their first date, Faigin took Pew to the Santa Claus Lane Parade, a traditional Hollywood extravaganza the Sunday after Thanksgiving.

  By 1973, Pew and Faigin had married, Faigin was Jerry’s press secretary, and Pew had been recruited by Quinn as campaign coordinator to lay the groundwork for a gubernatorial race. She set up shop in room 343 of the Alexandria Hotel because Kreedman offered free space. At age forty-four, Pew was often the oldest person at any strategy session. “It’s largely an ad hoc job,”1 she said. “None of us has ever run or been involved to any great degree in a gubernatorial race before; we’re all kind of learning. It’s creative, in its best moments.”

  She spent the fall of 1973 working to find a state headquarters, recruit volunteers, and develop contacts in the black and Chicano communities. Still carrying a full-time teaching load, she worked on the campaign at least forty hours a week, every afternoon into late evening and weekends. When Pew and Faigin went to see The Sting at Christmas, they both fell asleep in the movie theater.

  Pat’s initial response to Jerry’s earliest musings about a gubernatorial campaign had been alarm. Pat took Quinn to breakfast at the Polo Lounge to try to persuade him that Jerry was too young and inexperienced. A run for governor in the crowded Democratic primary field in 1974 would ruin his career. Quinn was unfazed. Jerry was undeterred. Like his father before him, he was in a hurry. Once the decision was clear, Pat embraced the campaign. In the dozens of letters he dictated each week, barely a missive went out that did not include a reference to Jerry. When early polls showed Jerry would beat Ronald Reagan, Pat sent copies to dozens of opinion makers, including every U.S. senator an
d California representative and newscasters Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor. Pat enclosed a short note: “I thought you might be interested in knowing that I have a son2 to carry on.”

  Reagan, however, declined to run for a third term, creating the first gubernatorial contest with no incumbent since 1958, the year Pat Brown was elected. The wide-open race drew several prominent, experienced contenders, including Assembly Speaker Bob Moretti, San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto, and Congressman Jerome Waldie.

  Reagan had chosen not to run for reelection so that he might focus on a presidential bid, a decision predicated on the assumption that Nixon would complete his second term and the 1976 race would be wide open. Events intervened; the Watergate break-in and subsequent investigations would culminate in Nixon’s resignation and enable Gerald Ford to run for reelection as an incumbent. As inconvenient as Watergate proved for Reagan, the drama that played out in 1973 could not have come at a better time for Jerry Brown.

  Watergate resonated with a theme Jerry had hammered since his campaign for secretary of state: the corrupting influence of money and the importance of campaign finance reform. On a subtler level, the unfolding scandal generated interest in fresh faces. In a gubernatorial primary against established old-school politicians, Jerry’s relative lack of experience became an advantage, just as it had been for Reagan in 1966.