The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Those who spent time with the two Governor Browns in private described their relationship as that of a typical father-son, neither warm and easy nor full of friction, despite all the speculation to that effect. Jerry’s lack of interest in his father’s counsel, particularly his suggestions for appointees, reflected a desire to establish a separate identity but also grew out of his starkly different worldview. They shared core values; they differed fundamentally in philosophy, politics, and personality.

  Pat’s warmth was so genuine, his belly laugh so contagious, he immediately put people at ease and seemed like an old friend after a five-minute conversation. “Let me use my good offices to help you” was his standard response to the myriad people who called asking for favors. “Perhaps my best quality is that I like people,”5 Pat said, comparing himself with the son whose diffidence Pat defended as shyness rather than arrogance. “I never can believe that I can’t make people like me.” Pat hugged strangers; Jerry shook hands with his father.

  Jerry disdained small talk, often appeared aloof, and was most comfortable with those who did not want anything from him. He tried to preserve his privacy and relaxed with visits to the Tassajara Zen Center and a Trappist monastery in Northern California. “You know, Thomas à Kempis cites Seneca to the effect that ‘every time I leave my cell6 and go out among men, I come back less a man,’ ” Jerry said on the eve of his election. “Sometimes I feel that way.”

  Pat plunged into group activities, as he had since childhood. He founded a policy group he called the Wild Ones and eagerly took part in the One-Shot Antelope Hunt in Wyoming. “I may not be a great lawyer or a successful politician, but I am a damn good joiner,”7 Pat wrote a friend, urging him to come to the male-only Bohemian Club’s annual retreat on the Russian River.

  Jerry described himself as an observer, whether in Mississippi during the civil rights movement or outside San Quentin prison protesting an execution. Even while immersed in politics, he viewed his own actions from a certain distance. His idea of fun was reading Oliver Wendell Holmes or matching wits on television with William F. Buckley on Firing Line.

  Pat had married his high school sweetheart; Jerry dated movie stars Liv Ullmann and Natalie Wood. He said marriage was incompatible with his job. “For two people to be together constantly takes a lot of consideration and attention. I don’t have the time8 right now.” Nor did he want to subject a family to the role of political prop. “Too often people display their families,” Jerry said. Each time Pat Brown had filed paperwork to run for office, he had commissioned a family portrait that became a campaign handout. “My father liked to share his family with the body politic. We were always paraded9 out front,” Kathleen told Time magazine.

  “I was attracted and repelled10 by what I saw of politics in my father’s house,” Jerry told an interviewer. “The adventure, the opportunity. The grasping, the artificiality, the obvious manipulation and role-playing, the repetition of emotion without feeling, particularly that: the repetition of emotion.” Pat had run for district attorney the year after his son was born; there was never a time Jerry was not exposed to his father’s brand of politics. “I’ve always felt I could see its limitations11 because I was brought up in it,” Jerry said. He also readily acknowledged that he would not be governor and perhaps not a politician at all if not for his father’s career. He described his conflicted feelings as typical of any father-son relationship. “Some would say that carrying on the family business12 is a high form of admiration,” he said shortly after taking office.

  Jerry dismissed the idea of image (“I have always felt uncomfortable13 with the notion that I had an image, something separate and apart from what I really am”) even as he quickly acquired one. He shunned the state’s Cadillac limousine and opted for a blue Plymouth. (Actually, two; one in Sacramento, and one in Los Angeles.) He denounced the large suburban home the Reagans had chosen as the governor’s residence and lived in an apartment furnished with little more than a box spring and mattress on the floor. He flew commercial. He discontinued the purchase of new briefcases for state officials (forty thousand were already in use) to slow “the blizzard of state paperwork”14 and jettisoned three paper shredders in his office. He got rid of the automatic signature pen; nothing would go out under his name that he had not read. He banned the acceptance of any gifts. These were the things people around the country would remember about Jerry Brown long after they forgot his accomplishments or failures.

  Father and son shared core values, but approached the job of governor in radically different ways, a function of their personalities and the times in which they governed. (Courtesy of the office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.)

  His choices required little sacrifice, given his penchant for a spartan lifestyle, and they proved politically popular and symbolically valuable. “To the extent that what I’m doing has some basic connection with where we’re going in this country, it can symbolize the restraint15 and the limits that all people are up against,” Jerry said. He returned hundreds of gifts16 in the first few months, including an encyclopedia, a painting assessed at $2,000, seventy-five books, season tickets to UCLA football, a membership in the St. Francis Yacht Club, a gold Frisbee, an edition of Peter Rabbit in Latin, and the Gold Pass to Disneyland. A package of marigold seeds was sent back with a form letter explaining the new policy. A handmade paperweight was returned to the daughter of Marc Poché, Jerry’s freshman dorm adviser. When a flag from the Veterans of Foreign Wars was rejected, an angry barrage of letters followed. “No, Governor Brown doesn’t consider the flag just another gift,” his press secretary wrote apologetically.

  Jesuit priest and antiwar activist Daniel Berrigan sent a copy of one of his books with a note that acknowledged the no-gift policy and suggested the governor consider it a loan. “I appreciate the ‘loan’17 of your book,” Jerry responded, “but I think I’d like to keep it permanently, so enclosed is my check for the cost.”

  Secretary of State Brown had been happy to send autographed pictures; Governor Brown refused. “He feels that distributing such memorabilia contributes to a misplaced cult18 of personality which too often grows up around our political leaders,” read the reply to hundreds of requests received each month. Mark Leonard, a Cub Scout in Boise, Idaho, who had collected forty-nine gubernatorial photos, wrote Jerry three times, enclosed a stamped envelope, and then appealed to Pat Brown. “I know you want your autographed pictures to be collector’s items and I know that you are a very, very busy19 Governor, but I assure you that complying with a few requests would not be burdensome,” Pat wrote Jerry. To the Cub Scout, he was philosophical: “I have written my son and told him that I thought he should send you an autographed picture. Sons don’t always pay attention to their fathers, however.”

  Jerry drew from his Jesuit education a detachment about exercising power and a predilection to question everything. He viewed information with skepticism, challenged the source, and sought alternative views. He tested arguments for depth, cut people off and circled back later to test for consistency, probed for courage of convictions. He told a story about the time he had accompanied his father, when Pat was governor, to a multistate conference to discuss the construction of bomb shelters. Jerry wanted to know why they were needed, a question dismissed as unworthy of consideration. “Conventional wisdom20 and group thinking almost conspire to prevent serious challenge to widely shared assumptions,” Jerry said. “I take it as a very important thing in government that assumptions in the inner circles be challenged again and again.”

  To that end, Jerry built an unconventional inner circle composed of friends from all parts of his life and interesting characters he met along the way. For the group that called themselves Brownies, it was a heady time. The governor preached an era of fiscal limits, but there were no bounds on the ambition or novelty of ideas. Like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who were building the prototype of the Apple 1 in Jobs’s Los Altos garage, the Brownies needed minimal capital, just vision and determina
tion.

  Jerry filled key positions with people who were smart, curious, and eager to challenge preconceptions. If anything, experience was a black mark. “He is contentious,21 an intellectual provocateur,” said Tony Kline, who left his job at the nonprofit public interest law firm he cofounded to become Jerry’s legal affairs secretary, an amorphous title with a broad mandate. “He has contempt for the ability of people, particularly politicians, to question fundamental assumptions. Should government be involved in this? Can government do anything about the problem? Should anything be done? That can appear to be contempt for the process itself, or for people.”

  In response to Watergate, Jerry was adamantly opposed to gatekeepers. He would have no one in a role comparable to that of Bob Haldeman or John Ehrlichman in the Nixon administration. Tom Quinn and Richard Maullin were placed in key positions—but outside the governor’s office. There would be no suggestion, as had surfaced during the campaign, that his advisers were calling the shots. Quinn and Maullin took over the Air Resources Board and the Energy Commission, respectively, two recently created commissions with sweeping regulatory powers. Neither had any background, and both spearheaded groundbreaking regulations that dismayed industry.

  Many of Jerry’s first calls went to old friends. Two days before the inauguration, around midnight, Jerry called Marc Poché, his friend since Santa Clara college days, and asked him to serve as finance director. Poché protested that he was totally unqualified. He also had a wife, three children, and three jobs. Jerry insisted Poché go to Sacramento the next day to meet people. Poché made the two-hour drive; Jerry was not there. Poché wandered around the capitol and drove home. Jerry called again. He had arranged leaves for Poché from his academic and congressional jobs. Poché became legislative secretary, with the often thankless job of introducing the governor to older lawmakers wary and resentful of Pat Brown’s son.

  Uncomfortable with displays of gratitude, Jerry avoided making formal, or even informal, job offers. After the Political Reform Act passed, he started talking to Dan Lowenstein about what would need to be done to set up and run the new Fair Political Practices Commission; Lowenstein, knowing his boss, understood that meant he was being offered the job. He became the first chair of the new commission.

  Don Burns, an ex-seminarian and friend from Yale, was practicing law in Washington, D.C. Finding himself in San Francisco the week after the election, he called to congratulate Jerry, who invited Burns to Los Angeles. They stayed up until three A.M., just as they had done in law school. Jerry asked Burns to help in the transition and signal if there were a job that interested him. Burns shut down his law practice, worked on the transition team, and didn’t talk to Jerry again for weeks. Only when they walked out of a big group dinner at Lucy’s El Adobe did Burns find out he would be secretary for business and transportation.

  Rose Bird, a friend from when she and Jerry both lived in International House, had been a public defender and taught criminal law at Stanford. When she declined Jerry’s offer to head the environmental agency, he made her cabinet secretary of the Agriculture and Services Agency. Baxter Rice, a friend from St. Ignatius High School and the seminary, took over the Alcoholic Beverage Control Department. Eli Chernow, Jerry’s former colleague at Tuttle & Taylor, went to work for the Air Resources Board. Ray Fisher took a leave from Tuttle & Taylor to work as a special adviser and help fulfill one of Jerry’s only campaign promises, collective bargaining for state employees. Mary Jean Pew was appointed to the California State University Board of Trustees. Several of Pew’s former students ended up on the governor’s staff, part of a cadre of twentysomething Brownies thrust into a world they found transformative.

  Michael Picker had grown up in a blue-collar family in Garden Grove, an Orange County suburb. After high school, he worked as a printer. Prodded by his former guidance counselor, Picker entered Immaculate Heart College, where Pew changed his view of education. Since Picker worked part time at a liquor store, Pew recruited him to tend bar at a Democratic fundraiser in 1974. After graduation, Pew put him to work in the Brown campaign, running errands and driving the candidate. Picker watched Jerry get into the car, pen in hand, mark up a press release, get out, mark it up some more, and wait while the staff retyped the handout. Picker studied the way Jerry crafted his message. At the end of the campaign, the twenty-two-year-old helped close down the Los Angeles office, returned campaign cars, and prepared daily news summaries, clipping articles from the Southern California papers and shipping them overnight on PSA Airlines to the capitol. Then he moved to Sacramento for a job in the mailroom. In his off hours, he volunteered with the farmworker support group and joined Tom Hayden’s new organization, the Campaign for Economic Democracy. Suddenly Picker was thinking further ahead than the next semester.

  Diana and Dan Dooley had grown up in the small Central Valley town of Hanford. First in her family to graduate from college, Diana was happy to land a civil service job and then thrilled to be chosen for a spot in the governor’s office as an assistant to the labor relations adviser. Dan came from a farming family and had just graduated from law school. At a backyard barbecue, he met Rose Bird, who was seeking attorneys who understood agriculture. At twenty-six, he went to work crafting state policy on pesticide regulation.

  The Brownies soaked up the intellectual ferment in an office that filled with a rotating cast of eclectic thinkers. Wendell Berry gave poetry readings. E. F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful, which Jerry often cited and made required reading, gave a talk for the staff. Gary Snyder, a Zen master and Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, became the first chair of the California Arts Council.

  Jerry had met Snyder through the San Francisco Zen Center. Shortly after his victory in 1974, the governor-elect had arrived unannounced at the gates of Tassajara, an isolated Buddhist monastery run by the Zen Center, deep in a forest near Big Sur, at the end of a steep fifteen-mile dirt road. The head of the Zen Center was summoned, and eventually Jerry was admitted to Tassajara, the first Zen training monastery established outside Asia. Thus began Jerry’s friendship with the Zen Center’s abbot, Richard Baker, and Jerry’s entrée to the salon of intellectuals and artists assembled by the charismatic Buddhist leader.

  Jerry traced his interest in Buddhism back to a 1961 lecture by Aldous Huxley at a San Francisco symposium. Huxley had condemned modern education. When Jerry asked for an explanation, Huxley told the college senior to read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. The book of short Zen stories and riddles intrigued Jerry. After his election as governor, Jerry became a frequent overnight guest at the Zen Center, a complex wedged between a freeway and a housing project in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood. Drawn to the combination of community and monastic life, the governor became a regular at dinner parties hosted by the abbot, known as Baker Roshi. Some of the guests became Jerry’s friends. Some became employees.

  Through Baker, Jerry met Stewart Brand, publisher of the counterculture classic the Whole Earth Catalog, a technologically and ecologically oriented journal that fused essays with reviews of products and tools, broadly defined. Jerry hired Brand as an adviser; his job was to bring interesting people to Sacramento. Brand ran a speaker series for the governor’s staff that he called “What’s ACTUALLY Happening,” with guests like Ken Kesey, Buckminster Fuller, and Amory Lovins. Others were less well known names doing cutting-edge work: Ridgeway Banks, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore Labs who had built the first engine out of nitinol, an alloy with shape memory; Milton Kotler, an activist author who advocated a return to strong neighborhood government control; Jay Forrester, a pioneer in the field of computer modeling who was applying the approach to urban problems and population growth.

  The liberal Democratic activist Allard Lowenstein moved his family across the country and into Jerry’s Laurel Canyon house for a summer to work on special projects. “Al was like an energy source,”22 Jerry said a few years later, describing his friend as someone in perpetual motion. “He was a source of inspiration, and
my sense of government is this inert mass of conventional thinking, and it needs to be constantly agitated, pushed, confronted, challenged, inspired, energized. He had that quality of openness and playfulness, or excitement.”

  Committed to the idea that government must look more like the governed, Jerry appointed women and minorities to hundreds of high-level jobs and commission posts, many for the first time. Women assumed visible, nontraditional jobs, becoming the secretaries of agriculture, transportation, navigation and ocean development, and veterans’ affairs. Ed Roberts, a paralyzed polio victim who crusaded for the rights of the disabled, became head the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation—an agency that had once deemed Roberts too disabled to hold a job. Jerry signed a law mandating that lay people be the majority on boards that regulated most industries, and then enraged doctors by appointing chiropractors to committees that reviewed physician discipline cases.

  In his most prominent and lasting effort to subvert the established power structure, he reshaped the state’s judiciary. California courts had three times as many judges as the entire federal system. Almost all were white men. The first year, half of Jerry’s fifty-seven judicial appointees were black, Mexican American, Asian, or female. The judicial establishment, accustomed to having great input in appointments, found the traditional ways of doing business challenged and upended.

  “I’m like a windshield wiper,”23 Jerry said, “cleaning the windows so we can see where we are going.”