The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Where he sought expertise, Jerry looked outside the traditional Democratic networks. Ron Robie had graduated from Cal one year ahead of Jerry and worked on water issues, first as a legislative aide during Pat Brown’s administration and then as a member of the state water commission. Allied with environmentalists, Robie had been frustrated by the power of special interests like the utilities to block progressive measures. As the new head of the Department of Water Resources, Robie found himself part of an administration that didn’t care who was important and flaunted its independence. Ideas and persuasive arguments were the currency that mattered. He was exhilarated by the spirit of exploding traditional ideas of power.

  “Anyone who had energy and talent24 and was philosophically disposed to want to make government more interesting and responsive and creative, then they were welcome,” Jerry reflected a few years later. “My general methodology—which I think is somewhat unique—I could be sitting in a restaurant and if someone would engage me in conversation I would start talking with them and they might be working for me two months down the road.”

  Marty Morgenstern, a union organizer who had consulted with the Brown campaign briefly, ended up as the governor’s labor adviser after running into Jerry in a restaurant and debating the merits of binding arbitration for public employees. State labor leaders were unhappy that the governor’s chief negotiator came from outside their ranks, another pointed reminder that Jerry bypassed traditional Democratic channels. Though Morgenstern came from an East Coast background and lacked the long-standing ties of some in the inner circle, he fit in well as an intellectual sparring partner. He had recently turned forty, which made him the old man in the crowd.

  The pace and lifestyle was geared to the young, mainly single, staff. Their work days often started in late morning and ended at three o’clock the next morning. Jerry’s habit of arriving around eleven A.M. and eating takeout hamburgers and fries drew concern from the state health department nutritionist, who worked with the capitol cafeteria to provide healthier alternatives. The governor was notoriously late, kept people waiting for hours, and refused to adhere to a schedule that would cramp his ability to pursue conversations as long as he wished. He thought nothing of making calls at any hour, or directing others to do so. Cabinet meetings began in the early evening and might run till midnight; Jerry rarely attended, and it was left to his chief of staff, Gray Davis, to try to impose order. The conversations continued into the early morning at David’s Brass Rail, across the street from the capitol. At the legal closing time of two A.M., David locked the doors and served free liquor. City transplants stuck in a small, provincial town, the Brownies formed a close-knit community and lifelong friendships. In Los Angeles, the staff sometimes met at El Adobe, or at the Malibu home of Jerry’s girlfriend, singer-songwriter Linda Ronstadt.

  Jerry was still infamous for never having any money on him; his friends joked that the vow of poverty in the seminary was not one he had had trouble obeying. When a businessman’s friends refused to believe his story about a chance encounter, he wrote Jerry: “Dear Governor Brown:25 I am still trying to convince my friends and associates that Jerry Brown borrowed 10¢ from me to make a telephone call. Can you be of any assistance in my plight?” (Jerry wrote back and sent him a dime.)

  When Jerry’s advance man Wally McGuire was in Sacramento, he sometimes stayed in the other apartment on Jerry’s floor, kept empty for security reasons, and furnished with a futon bed. The two men often talked into the early morning hours. Later in the day, Jerry might walk past McGuire in the capitol and barely say hello. Those who were bothered by that level of detachment didn’t stick around. “This is no place to be if you need positive feedback to keep going,” said Rose Bird. “Jerry doesn’t need approval26 and he doesn’t think other people do.”

  Jerry immersed himself deeply in the details of issues that interested him, ignoring that which bored him or intruded on his focus at a given moment. When Assemblyman John Knox, a Bay Area Democrat, arrived to discuss a judicial appointment, the governor was on the speakerphone with a turtle expert in Florida. Jerry had to decide whether to sign a bill that would allow a Grand Cayman Islands farm to export green sea turtle meat to California. Jerry drew Knox into an hour-long conversation with the professor about the endangered species, ultimately convincing the legislator he had voted the wrong way on the bill.

  “Green sea turtles27 make soup, pretty shells and cosmetic oil,” Jerry wrote in his veto message. “Once there were tens of millions, now there are only thousands making their mysterious voyage through the seas from nesting beaches to distant feeding grounds. Some say farming green sea turtles in captivity will bring them back. Others see such commercial ventures as just expanding the appetite for this threatened creature. I incline to the latter and believe what turtles need is less people taking their eggs and depleting their species.” The Los Angeles Times editorial board called it one of the best veto messages they had ever read.

  Jerry used the budget, the most far-reaching tool for setting an agenda, to demonstrate both his command of details and his commitment to limits. In his first news conference, he invoked “a time of lowered expectations” and expressed pessimism about revenue projections, “probably based on my theological training28 more than my economic analysis.” He trimmed the published book that outlined the budget by more than half, briefed reporters on the overview, and invited them to return and quiz him about the document once they had had time to read it through. “I went over it word by word, comma by comma,” he said about his budget message. “I want you to understand my philosophy.”29

  The budget laid out three core principles: Government should not spend more than it takes in, larger expenditures do not equate with better government, and there are no sacred cows. In many ways, the proposal resembled those of Ronald Reagan more than those of Pat Brown, with reduced spending for some state agencies and minimal increases for others. Jerry supported spending that achieved clear impact, such as an increase in grants to the aged, blind, and disabled. “This is money that goes to people,”30 he said. “They get the checks and they can use them for their own judgment. It does not go through a pretzel palace, it does not hire planners, it doesn’t expand the Xerox machine capacity of the state, it doesn’t write comprehensive plans … one of the few things that government does well is to send out checks. When it gets more complicated than that, watch out.”

  He advocated and implemented a flat pay raise for state employees, from “judges to janitors,” rather than a percentage increase. All state workers received an extra $70 a month in 1976, a boon for lower-wage workers like Mike Picker in the mailroom, whose monthly pay was $440. “We should reduce the great disparities31 that exist in public service,” Jerry said. “I think often times those at the top have meaningful jobs and shouldn’t really get paid additionally for them but ought to be happy for the opportunity to serve people in that particular capacity. It’s kind of a variant on ‘virtue is its own reward.’ … I grant you that is not the orthodox perception but that’s the way I think.”

  In response to those dismayed by his failure to restore cuts imposed during the Reagan years, Jerry pointed to the issue that had drawn him into politics: Vietnam. The billions of dollars the United States spent in Vietnam failed to win the war. “There is an overblown rhetoric and an overblown expectation32 that if there is a problem, there must be a program to solve it. I think that in many ways is the lesson of Vietnam … we lost because we lacked the political will to carry out a particular objective,” he told William F. Buckley on Firing Line, filmed before a live audience in Sacramento in a conversation called “The Practical Limits of Liberalism.” Students sat on the studio floor watching Jerry, gray sideburns, dark hair long enough to touch his jacket collar, dark gray pinstripe three-piece suit, purple tie tucked into his vest.

  “Creative inaction” was an underrated option, Jerry argued. Additional laws, like additional funds, were often the wrong remedy. He refused to support
a law that would abolish minimum milk prices, citing their effectiveness during the Depression when price controls were hailed as a great reform. “Before you dump something over,33 you better figure out what it is you are doing … precipitous action is rarely needed, and then only with adequate justification.”

  A strong leader knew when not to act, Jerry said. “In my view, a leader has only a few great decisions34 to make or, perhaps, a few colossal mistakes to avoid,” he said. President Johnson’s political victories in establishing social programs were overshadowed by his legacy in Vietnam, Jerry argued. “If President Johnson had had the detachment and the vision that a great man should possess, it’s conceivable that he might have foreseen the Vietnam debacle and avoided it.”

  All the personae of the young governor—intellectual provocateur, skeptic, self-confident antiestablishmentarian, cheapskate, and public servant—coalesced in his prolonged struggle to change the culture of the University of California, a painful, frustrating experience for all concerned. To compensate for budget cuts under Reagan, the university had imposed an “educational fee” that amounted to tuition. By 1975, California undergraduates paid $630 in annual tuition and fees; affordable, but a symbolic break with the commitment to free tuition. Battered by Reagan-era cuts but still stewards of the best public system in the world, university leaders had expected Jerry to be their champion. Instead, the university found itself under attack. In public and in private, Jerry tried to jolt the academic community out of its traditional ways and sense of entitlement, to inculcate the idea of limits, and to refocus the school in accordance with his vision of a liberal arts education as a force for communal good.

  In his first year, Jerry cut the budget request from $567 million to $542 million and vetoed additions that state lawmakers restored. He reminded the Regents they were competing for dollars with the old, the disabled, the unemployed, public schools, and every other state agency, and dismissed their complaints as “delusions of grandeur.”35 He criticized university president David Saxon’s $60,000 salary: “Low salaries draw better people into public service. Look at Gandhi;36 he didn’t make any money and he was pretty successful. And Ho Chi Minh and Mao. What have they got going for them that we don’t have?” One Sunday, Jerry showed up without warning at Saxon’s house and stayed to talk for six hours. Saxon had a saying:37 Reagan hated public institutions; Jerry hated all institutions.

  Jerry dismissed the university’s five-year plan as an example of “the squid process38—an abstract statement that tells me absolutely nothing … spurts of ink spread across many pages in patterns that look like words but mean nothing.” He bemoaned the lack of transparency and difficulty obtaining answers to basic questions. “To identify anything requires a Sherlock Holmes approach on the part of not only the department of finance but myself. I find it extremely difficult to extract a clear sentence about what those people want to do—about anything.” At Regents meetings,39 he outraged academics by questioning basic precepts: Why were smaller classes better? Why weren’t admissions officers weighing essay questions more heavily than standardized tests? Why were no women or minorities considered for a chancellor’s position? What did marginal students do after they graduated and how did they contribute to society? He suggested professors accept lower salaries because their work should provide “psychic income.”

  The questions reminded Richard McCurdy of the restless mind in his English class at St. Ignatius High two decades earlier. “If you made a statement, he could push you to the wall to back it up. You couldn’t get away with anything,” said McCurdy, the teacher Jerry credited with instilling in him an appreciation of literature. McCurdy had entered the seminary with Jerry, become a Jesuit priest, and returned to St. Ignatius as principal. “He learned the Socratic approach40 to learning,” McCurdy said about the young governor. “Some of the things that have happened in Sacramento, like his responses to complaints from the University Regents, are traceable to this approach, which is also the Jesuit way.”

  Jerry appointed the first Asian American and the first Latino Regents. As an ally in challenging the educational status quo, he recruited Gregory Bateson, an English anthropologist and idiosyncratic intellectual who pioneered the science of cybernetics. Stewart Brand had decided Jerry should meet Bateson, who taught part time at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Brand and Bateson arrived at the capitol for a six P.M. appointment; the conversation began at eleven thirty P.M., the tape recorder running as they sat on Jerry’s office floor. Bateson told Jerry that the elite students he taught knew very little.

  “They don’t know the multiplication tables. They don’t know the Lord’s Prayer.”41 “In English or Latin?” Jerry interjected. “Certainly not in Latin, but they don’t even know it in English. They don’t know any Shakespeare or any Blake.”

  “And these are the best. So what are we getting for our millions?” Jerry asked. “God only knows,” Bateson responded. Among his students, he said, “there are really ten percent who are worth teaching.” Jerry appointed Bateson to the Board of Regents.

  After a year as a Regent, Bateson wrote the chairman that he was “simply unable to decide42 or even to have an opinion on most of the matters … To correct my incompetence and ignorance, it would be necessary to do a very great deal of work.” He was not motivated to do the work for matters he considered trivial. He wondered what Saint Augustine would say if he attended a Regents meeting. Jerry engaged Bateson in colloquies at meetings and defended his appointment: “He’s added a new dimension43 and proven that even Regents can think and consider the important issues, and that the governance of a University is about ideas, as well as parking lots and capital improvement.”

  “The fact that the U.C. law schools are listed as being among the top 10 in the country is not a sign of glory,44 but of failure,” Jerry wrote, arguing schools were measured by the wrong criteria. “Never before has education been so irrelevant for so many kids in this country … That is why I raise questions about the University. Not because I don’t respect, not because I don’t even love them, not because I don’t think it is a great place, I believe it is. It is the greatest in the world. But I look at the law schools and I ask myself, how does that affect the least of the people who live in this society?”

  No matter how provocative or persistent, he ultimately had little impact on a giant bureaucracy resistant to change. Unable or unwilling to negotiate with a power structure that viewed him as an alien threat, Jerry succeeded largely in making the university more defensive, while his budgets, on top of the Reagan cuts, weakened the schools.

  His critiques, however, consistent with Jerry’s other public comments, resonated with a larger audience. In national polls, Americans overwhelmingly agreed about the need to reduce consumption, a trend that dated back to the recession that followed the oil embargo. Before the end of his first year, 85 percent of Californians viewed Jerry Brown favorably. “He’s a phenomenon45 of sorts, because as a result of his promising less, he’s the most popular governor the state has ever known,” said Morley Safer, in the introduction to an interview on 60 Minutes.

  “He has been elevated from Mr. Clean to Junior Enigma,”46 wrote Sacramento Bee editorial page editor Peter Schrag. “He goes around town with a sandwich board that says ‘Repent.’ Is he running for Vice President or for the still-to-be-created position of Public Monk?”

  East Coast journalists descended to dissect the phenomenon. They gravitated to the shibboleths about wacky California. The governor sleeps on a mattress on the floor, drives a Plymouth, works all night. “ ‘What’s your program?’ That’s all you Washington reporters want to know,” Jerry said to David Broder, who was writing a piece for the Atlantic. “What the hell does that mean? The program is to confront the confusion47 and hypocrisy of government; that’s the program.”

  “Jerry Brown is different,” reported the New York Times Magazine. “He is the most interesting politician in the United States. And, at the moment, he is one o
f the most popular”—despite the fact that “he is not a particularly likeable young man” who asks “hostile and irreverent questions.”

  Poet and City Lights bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti asked if Jerry would agree to have his writings included as part of a series of small books that would consist of quotes from “original brains—we hope to make it a really catalytic series of seminal works48—short books in pocket format, no more than 64 pages.” The slim book of collected quotes from the governor, Thoughts, sold seven thousand copies in two weeks.

  “In all the Western states I visited there is a great deal of interest49 in you, in what you are saying and in the popularity you have gained and maintained in California,” wrote Henry Grunwald, managing editor of Time magazine, after interviewing Jerry over arroz con pollo at El Adobe. “Your notion of ‘lower expectations’ has become a ready reference point for most political discussions. I also find that many professionals are fascinated by your attitude of not trying to give ready answers to major problems, but rather trying to define the questions. Frankly, they are also wondering just how long you can keep that up.”

  His father, as baffled by his son as he was proud, wondered, too. “You haven’t paid very much attention50 to me during your first six months and I think that is all to the good, because if you had you wouldn’t have achieved what I believe to be a great first six months,” he wrote. Pat frequently recommended job candidates, undeterred by the knowledge that his suggestions were, as he put it, thrown in the wastebasket. “I do have some feeling for the problems of a former governor51 who is a strong proponent for his son,” Carlotta Mellon, the governor’s appointments secretary, wrote to Pat. “I am only sorry that I have not been able to make your batting average better … Hang in there.” Many of Jerry’s staff viewed Governor Pat with great affection and were happy to take calls that always opened with a simple question: “How’s Jerry doing?”