The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  The week the Senate Watergate Committee began the riveting, nationally televised hearings that helped bring down a president, Jerry spoke at a Town Hall Forum in Los Angeles. He decried the secrecy and lies that caused people to lose confidence in government. Ten years ago, he said, 75 percent of the people trusted their government; by 1972, the figure had dropped to 45 percent. “Without secret money,3 the Watergate scandal would have been impossible,” he said in the May 1973 speech. “Secrecy is dangerous, but something far worse often follows it—government deception. Nothing is more destructive of public confidence than outright lying by those in high places. Yet, in the last ten years, deceit by public officials has become commonplace.” Jerry called for Nixon’s impeachment.

  His father wrote to the president expressing sympathy. Pat always wanted to think the best of people. He still thought Lyndon Johnson must have been right on Vietnam. (“He wanted to be a great president4 so much, and he wanted to do so many things for people, and I just can’t believe that a man that would do the things for the poor and the blacks, that he would be such a great man in that field and such a villain in the other.”) Watching Nixon’s troubles deepen, Pat recalled a small gesture of kindness in 1960 from the then vice president. “You and I were at the opening of the new baseball stadium at Candlestick Park in San Francisco,” Pat wrote to Nixon. “This was soon after I had given Chessman a 60-day reprieve. I was booed unmercifully.5 I will never forget your quietly saying to me, ‘That is nothing, you should have heard some of the booing I have taken.’ ” Pat offered to help Nixon in any way.

  A week later, as the U.S. attorney general designate reviewed candidates to appoint as a special Watergate prosecutor, Nixon made a suggestion, more calculated than it sounded. “I threw in a name,”6 he said to his chief of staff, Alexander Haig. “Pat Brown … Former district attorney, attorney general, governor, Democrat. Ran against the president. He’s a decent man. Everybody would believe him.” The idea went nowhere.

  Jerry had another Watergate card to play. More than a year of delicate negotiations with two citizens’ groups had produced agreement on the Political Reform Act, a far-reaching initiative better known as Proposition 9. The measure would limit spending on statewide offices and ballot measure campaigns; require complete disclosure of contributions by candidates for state office; bar lobbyists from contributing to campaigns, limit their gifts to elected officials and staff to $10 a month, and require monthly disclosure; establish conflict of interest rules; and create the Fair Political Practices Commission to administer the new law. In the wake of Watergate, what might have been a backburner initiative became front page news. Prop 9 easily qualified for the June 1974 ballot—when Jerry would compete in the gubernatorial primary. “This commission will absolutely prevent Watergate scandals in California,” Jerry said when he filed the initiative. “It is by far the most powerful body7 of its type ever conceived in the United States.”

  He calculated that lobbyists in Sacramento spent an average of $6,875 a day to entertain state officials. Adding in their salaries, Jerry estimated they spent $10.4 million a year to influence state policy. “Two hamburgers and a coke” became the campaign’s shorthand for the proposal to limit lobbyists to $10 per month per public official. That alone was an affront to the social and political culture of a capital accustomed to doing business over expense account meals, drinks, and cigars. It was only a sign of things to come from the brash young candidate.

  The primary drafter and negotiator of the initiative was Dan Lowenstein, one of two aggressive lawyers Jerry had hired to invigorate the ossified Office of the Secretary of State. Lowenstein had grown up in New York City, attended Yale and then Harvard Law School, graduating at the time that the first legal services organizations started. He took a job with California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA), a federally funded group that helped farmworkers, and moved to Modesto, in the heart of the Central Valley. He met his wife there, a Japanese American who had been born in an internment camp. One of the founders of CRLA who had been at law school with Jerry heard that the secretary of state needed an attorney and recommended Lowenstein. Lowenstein shaved off his beard and registered as a Democrat for the first time, not because he thought Jerry would care, but because his politics had changed. He could no longer be a Republican after watching Reagan attack government and cut services for those most in need.

  Lowenstein, five years younger than Jerry, admired his boss’s intelligence. He grew comfortable with his management style and adept at reading his sometimes enigmatic cues. Not everyone did. The characteristics shared by the small staff foreshadowed the qualities Jerry would look for when he recruited dozens of high-level appointees. Lowenstein never worried about what he said to Jerry. He could be blunt and even insulting. He could argue any position, on two conditions: that he gave Jerry all relevant facts, including ones that might not support his own view, and that he accepted and supported the boss’s final decision. People who worked for Jerry didn’t need or expect his approval; they were a self-confident bunch. “I want ideas from them,” Jerry said when he took office. “I don’t want a bunch of sycophants around me.8 I want bright guys who aren’t afraid to tell me what they think.”

  Lowenstein respected Jerry’s ability to immerse himself in details and focus so intently on a problem that he found solutions that others had overlooked. While Jerry Brown the public official dived into issues in minute detail, Jerry Brown the candidate worked hard to do the opposite. The campaign strategy he devised with Quinn and Maullin was to stay as vague as possible. Jerry outlined four key areas of focus: education, environment, economic growth, and political reform. He took a handful of general positions. He was for decriminalization of marijuana, equal rights for women and minorities, progressive taxation, and collective bargaining for public employees. “I’m against the death penalty. I’m for Cesar Chavez.” He condemned junkets and called for an end to “back-room politics.” His campaign slogan was geared to the times: “Edmund G. Brown Jr., Democrat for Governor. He could make you believe in government again.”

  Jerry took lessons from his father’s defeat eight years earlier. Reagan had effectively packaged the idea that government was the problem, Sacramento was out of control, and a fresh face was necessary to clean up the mess. Jerry saw those themes as critical to electability, and he adapted and adopted them as his own. “A new spirit” became his campaign mantra. “California has its problems,”9 Jerry said in his formal announcement on January 28, 1974, an echo of Reagan’s announcement eight years earlier. “But I love this state … and I intend to do all I possibly can to see California develop in a healthy and worthwhile manner.”

  A March campaign piece sent to Democrats opened with dramatic white block lettering on a black page: THE NEXT ELEVEN WEEKS. Inside was a long letter to the voter, in a conversational style. “A lot of people are running for governor. I know because I’m one of them. And though I don’t look forward to the fatigue, the confusion, the loss of privacy, my job is going to be easier than yours. You have to listen to all of us. You have to judge, interpret, separate and distill a clutter of promises and positions. Maybe I can help you with my part in that process.”

  Jerry dealt with the issue of his father head-on: “Anyone who says I’m lucky to have my father’s name is absolutely right. I’m also lucky to have his counsel and support. But he’s not running for anything this year, and I am. I ask you to judge me, my record, and my ideas.”

  Behind the scenes, Pat played an active, indispensable role. He set up a campaign office in exile at his law firm, hired his own travel secretary, and arranged meetings with old friends and supporters around the state. He made introductions, hosted events, and collected checks. Wealthy individuals could contribute unlimited amounts, and the bulk of the campaign’s funds came from a handful of people. Others sent Pat money for Jerry in gratitude for favors long ago. A Central Valley farmer sent $50010 because Pat had helped Kern County get water—and written a law school recommenda
tion for his son.

  Big donors wanted to meet the candidate. Jerry was uncomfortable at the small gatherings with his father’s friends. Sometimes he escaped to the kitchen, more relaxed talking with the workers. “Jerry is much more like his mother11 than he is like me,” Pat wrote to a friend who found the candidate diffident, cocky, and brash, criticisms Pat heard frequently. “His aloofness is not arrogance but rather bashfulness. I know he doesn’t come through this way, but that is the way he has been all of his life.”

  On occasion Jerry found common ground with one of Pat’s friends, like Joseph Houghteling, a Yale graduate, antiwar activist, and environmental planner who owned a string of small papers in the Santa Clara Valley. Houghteling had started as a kid on the Sunnyvale Standard doing a little of everything, shooting photos of high school football games and selling ads in the planned community of five thousand with the slogan “Watch us grow!” He wasn’t yet twenty-five when he bought his first paper in 1949, the Gilroy Dispatch, circulation thirteen hundred. The biggest event in town was the annual rodeo, upstaged a few years later by the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Houghteling volunteered on the 1952 Stevenson campaign and made friends among the Jewish business community in San Francisco that supported Democrats. One night Houghteling ended up with Jerry at the bar at Rickey’s, a Palo Alto institution. Jerry asked why the newspaper publisher would support him. Three reasons, Houghteling said. You’ve done a pretty good job as secretary of state. I admire your parents and respect your father’s record as governor. And third, you’re going to win. Jerry made Houghteling treasurer for Northern California.

  Even more than his father had done in 1958, Jerry campaigned outside the Democratic Party structure, relying on his own instincts and an ad hoc team led by Quinn and Maullin. Lucy Casado became a director of Californians for Brown, and her El Adobe restaurant displayed campaign literature. Jeep Rice took a six-month leave from his law firm and worked full time as a travel secretary for his brother-in-law. Joe Kelly worked on the campaign committee in San Francisco. Ray Fisher, a top litigator at Tuttle & Taylor, drove Jerry around in his Alfa Romeo. Pop star Helen Reddy emceed the opening ceremonies at the campaign headquarters at the corner of Sunset and Vine, a couple of blocks from her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Brown headquarters was above the legendary Wallichs Music City, named after Capitol Records founder Glenn Wallichs. The music store had been the first to seal record covers so they could be displayed and browsed in racks. The glass listening booths where customers sampled records drew a young trendy crowd into the early morning hours, about the time the campaign staff straggled out and headed home.

  In the L-shaped office, volunteers sat along the windows that overlooked Sunset. The executive staff had offices along Vine. Mary Jean Pew, on leave from her teaching job, recruited a handful of her recent students. In an era of changing mores, Pew served as a role model for young women as she worked to dispel stereotypes that lingered even among her colleagues. “There’s still the notion that a woman is best suited12 to typing and doing the secretarial work,” she said. “It’s a struggle for some of them to accept a woman as a thinking being. But most of them, I must say, in four years I’ve noticed a real change. They’ve become more conscious of how they have looked on women in the past.”

  The Brown campaign did compete for the support of two traditional Democratic groups that could turn out votes in a primary— organized labor and the California Democratic Council.

  The Bay Area had long been the heart of organized labor in California, a union stronghold since a bloody 1934 longshoremen’s strike led by Harry Bridges turned into a general strike that shut down the city. Now, forty years later, San Francisco mayor Joe Alioto counted on an endorsement from the state labor federation, which could be decisive in a close contest. He did not know he would have to reckon with Stephen Reinhardt and Blackie Leavitt. Reinhardt, a politically active liberal Democrat and labor lawyer in Los Angeles, had been an informal adviser to Jerry since 1970. One of his clients was Leavitt, head of the Los Angeles board of the Culinary Workers Union and a vice president of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International. Leavitt wanted an entrée into politics. The Culinary Workers were powerful enough to block Alioto from winning the state labor federation endorsement. Instead, the organization voiced support for all four leading candidates.

  A few weeks later, the labor federation, as much a part of the political culture as the business lobbyists, voted to pull support from any candidate who would not disavow the political reform act that Jerry had negotiated. Moretti and Alioto reversed themselves in order to retain labor support; Jerry lost the endorsement but gained the high moral ground, which he used in effective attacks on his opponents.

  Jerry also sought endorsement from the California Democratic Council, a shadow of its former self but still a grassroots group that could deliver votes. It was close to midnight on February 9, 1974, by the time the gubernatorial candidates spoke to the CDC convention in the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium. Jerry was nominated by Gerald Hill, who had chaired the organization and led the fight for the Peace Slate that became McCarthy delegates. Jerry had the flu and was running a temperature of 103. He spoke extemporaneously,13 as usual:

  It’s a little hard to talk at this hour of the night. It’s hard to talk sense. After listening to all those speeches, I get tired of words, too. I get tired of the attempt to sell candidates like packages of soap and go through the usual rhetoric of what they’re going to do and what they have done and what the other candidates haven’t done. I’m here tonight to ask you to stand with me as I have stood with you …

  I think the test of leadership is the test of imagination, the test of creativity, the ability to think ideas that have never been thought before. The problems we’re facing in this country are so different and so changing that it takes a governor, a leader who can entertain new ideas to open up this society. I see in this state schools that don’t educate, mental hospitals that push people out into run-down board and care homes, a transportation system that instead of bringing people together makes it easier for them to run away from the city, out into the suburbs, destroying the prime agricultural land and the kind of landscape that made California the kind of place we all wanted. I’d like to change that. I think we have to humanize this society, and to do that takes a lot of opposition to forces that are very strong, entrenched interests. I think if you look over my record, you’ll see a willingness to fight for what I thought was right.

  After two rounds of voting the next morning, Jerry placed third.14 That was enough to block the council from endorsing anyone else.

  In the only vote that really counted, though, Jerry came out way ahead. He won the June primary with twice as many votes as second-place finisher Alioto. Proposition 9 also passed overwhelmingly. On election night, the Sheraton Universal ballroom was packed with Democrats eager to retake the office they had lost eight years earlier. Their new standard-bearer was still an enigma, but everyone knew his name. Jerry kissed his mother and shook hands with his father. The man who drove a car with the license plate EX GUV badly wanted to address the crowd. But the candidate kept his father off the stage.

  “I think the night my father lost15 to Reagan and the night Jerry won were probably two of the most difficult nights of his life,” Kathleen Brown said a few weeks after the primary. “Because when Jerry won, it brought home to him that he was old and it wasn’t in the cards for him to be in the spotlight anymore.” Yet Pat could not have been prouder. And to the extent that the vote was a referendum on his name and record, he, too, could claim victory.

  As the general election campaign began, polls showed Jerry comfortably ahead of State Controller Houston Flournoy, a moderate Republican who talked about bringing back the era of Earl Warren. The Brown campaign strategy for the next five months was just to hold on to the lead. Pew and Reinhardt negotiated a remarkable agreement that limited media coverage of the six debates—they could not be rebroadcast or carri
ed outside the limited coverage area where they occurred, nor could clips be used by candidates in ads. The candidates also agreed to cap paid campaign advertisement expenses at $900,000, with no more than $800,000 to be spent on radio and television commercials.

  Quinn, Maullin, and Faigin had worked closely together for years; they understood one another, they understood Jerry, most of the time, and they understood how to work the media, particularly broadcast. To frame the story of the day, they called assignment editors first thing in the morning. They put out two press releases a day, one for afternoon papers, one for the next morning. California had twelve major media markets; Faigin aimed for live events that hit at least three a day, sometimes four. Because he and Quinn had run an audio news service, they knew exactly what to feed radio stations and when. Every radio station ran news on the hour, because the FCC required that 18 percent of airtime be devoted to news. Stations were eager for sound bites.

  The Brown campaign bus usually carried ten to twelve reporters, and alcohol at all times. Jerry made a point of being accessible, often hanging around at the end of the day when they arrived at a hotel. Then he called campaign headquarters to talk about the press release for the next day. Nothing went out that he had not read, or often written. Faigin faxed drafts to Jerry when he was on the road, or dictated if the hotel had no fax machine. Jerry made changes and faxed or dictated back.

  Toward the end of the campaign, the bus ended up late one night at a motel in Marysville, north of Sacramento. Jerry was drinking beer with the reporters. The San Francisco Chronicle correspondent tried to shake the candidate from his script. What was he really going to do about problems in the state? For real? Jerry started talking about his youth, in an unusually personal almost-monologue: