The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  Through the San Francisco Zen Center, Jerry met Sim Van der Ryn, an architect who had founded a quasicommune in Sonoma County to experiment with ecological design, the seeds of what would become the sustainability movement. Van der Ryn had taught at Cal in the 1960s, until the trauma of seeing National Guardsmen fire tear gas and rip out flowers in People’s Park, which he had helped to create. The man who had fled the Netherlands as a child during the Holocaust fled Berkeley. By the time he met Jerry, Van der Ryn was crusading with Buckminster Fuller for low-flush toilets; he got in trouble with zoning authorities for building a compost privy on his compound without proper permits. When Jerry recruited Van der Ryn as state architect, he turned the job down, wary of rejoining the establishment. Baker Roshi, abbot of the Zen Center, persuaded Van der Ryn to change his mind. “The first few months were very euphoric,”10 the architect said a few years into his service. “I was able to start putting into practice a lot of things I had been thinking about. There was a great power to that.”

  Van der Ryn insisted on “a separate office11 that would be a ‘David challenging the Goliath’ of bureaucracy and its tendency to resist innovation and new ideas.” Jerry set up the Office of Appropriate Technology, borrowing a phrase from E. F. Schumacher. With a logo of a mule with his snout in a bag of oats, the office grew to 350 people and a $12 million budget. OAT sponsored trainings around California on solar technology, vegetable gardens, biofuels, drought-tolerant gardens, and bicycle-sharing projects. Van der Ryn developed the first energy standards for state office buildings and pioneered the concept of sustainable buildings. He oversaw construction of a block-long state office complex built around a four-story atrium courtyard topped by skylights and filled with plants. Solar storage, solar-powered water heaters, and a rock bed under the atrium floor absorbed and stored heat during the day to maximize energy efficiency. Louvers on the roof automatically closed in summer, screens deflected sunlight in the winter, and canvas tubes hanging in the atrium recirculated air. In 1981, during a day-long celebration entitled “The State of Things to Come,” Jerry Brown christened the building in honor of the cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, who had died a year earlier. Bateson’s life, Jerry said, like the building, represented “a quest for underlying unity12 in all living things.”

  The governor’s actions were watched across the country, not only because of California’s power to establish standards and trends, but because of his political ambitions. From the moment Jimmy Carter was elected, the president’s political consultants warned of a likely challenge in 1980 from the candidate who had beaten Carter in most primaries he had entered. Traveling to California to study the likely contender, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis described Jerry as detached, ambitious, arrogant, and full of far-fetched ideas.13 “His budget message included such off-beat energy ideas as building giant windmills, with 100-foot blades, to generate electricity, and using wood chips converted into gas to heat the capitol,” Lewis wrote in January 1978, dismissing technologies that would within a decade become commonplace. Others were equally dubious, if somewhat gentler. Jerry showed a Washington Star reporter a vial of jojoba bean oil, which he suggested might become an ingredient in cosmetics, another far-out notion. “Of course skepticism has long since fled,” she wrote in the profile. “Somehow it seems entirely plausible that Jerry Brown’s jojoba bean14 can solve the problems of California. Of the world, perhaps.”

  Those who knew Jerry best were not surprised by his forward-thinking focus and interest in technology. “He’s always been the one15 who brought the new bestseller or new idea or place to eat or gimmick or gadget or new important book into my life,” said his sister Kathleen. “He has the capacity to build a bridge into the next century.”

  Jerry found gadgets intriguing and practical science captivating. But he also saw an intimate connection to environmental imperatives, sometimes for destructive purposes, as in the case of nuclear power, but often toward constructive ends. “Ecology and technology16 are two profound and pervasive themes that affect the human spirit,” he said. “What I’m attempting to do is find the synthesis that can link the better parts of both of them.”

  He was in the right place. The epicenter of the technological revolution was on the peninsula just south of San Francisco, where apricot orchards and vineyards had given way to nondescript concrete buildings full of entrepreneurs whose work would change daily life around the world.

  The roots of technological innovation in the Santa Clara Valley went back to 1951, when Stanford decided to use part of its 9,000-acre endowment to establish one of the first university-sponsored industrial parks. For decades, most of the land deeded to the school by Leland and Jane Stanford had been leased to farmers. Facing financial difficulties in the postwar years, Stanford adopted a plan to develop low-slung buildings in a parklike setting and recruit science-based research companies whose work would dovetail with the school’s mission and provide jobs to ensure that engineering graduates did not need to go “into exile” in the East. With bucolic scenery, a Mediterranean climate, and easy access to San Francisco, Stanford had little trouble attracting the critical mass of talent and capital that would soon cement the reputation of both the university and the valley.

  By 1954, Hewlett-Packard, a small tech company started by two Stanford graduate students, had moved from a Palo Alto garage into the industrial park. Two years later and three miles south, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory opened in a concrete shed in Mountain View, housing what William Shockley called his “PhD production line.” Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics that year for inventing the transistor. A year later, eight of his PhDs moved into another concrete shed twelve blocks away and formed Fairchild Electronics, a bold and unusual defection that became the prototype for what would later be known as start-ups.

  The leader of the group known as the “traitorous eight” was twenty-nine-year-old Robert Noyce, as charming as he was brilliant. In 1959, he invented a way of putting all the functions of the small but still clumsy transistors onto a tiny integrated circuit made of silicon. The microchips were so tiny and light that they revolutionized the development of everything from missiles to the Apollo spacecraft. Unlike most companies in the valley, Fairchild did not rely on government dollars to fund its research, although it sold chips primarily to aerospace companies that depended on defense department contracts. Within a decade, Fairchild had twelve thousand employees and sales of $130 million. Its founders, who had been given stock, went from average salaries to enormous wealth, setting a pattern in the valley that would soon be named after the silicon chip.

  In its first decade,17 Stanford’s industrial park had grown to about twelve thousand workers at forty-two companies. Hewlett-Packard’s research lab was joined by IBM, and both companies raced to use the emerging electronic technology to build a functional computer. As the large influx of federal research funds during the Cold War transformed universities into economic engines for communities, Stanford led the way. Clark Kerr articulated the idea of a “multiversity”; Stanford executed it.

  Robert Noyce had a profound impact on the culture of what became known as Silicon Valley as well as its inventions. He eschewed the hierarchical corporate model of the Eastern establishment, finding its layers and status stifling. Noyce abolished private offices, reserved parking spots, chain of command, and dress codes. In Fairchild’s first decade, more than two dozen spin-offs were started by defectors, dubbed the “Fairchildren,” who took that spirit and culture with them. In 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore became Fairchildren themselves, leaving to form Intel, which focused on computer memory chips. They gave most of the employees stock options, and deli sandwiches and soda to eat at their desk for lunch.

  By the late 1970s, most of the more than four hundred thousand tech jobs in California were in Silicon Valley. Jerry Brown liked to point out in 1978 that 20 percent of the people in California worked in industries that had not existed a decade earlier.

  The first Ap
ple computer was produced in a Los Gatos garage in 1976. Four years later, although only about half a million personal computers had been sold, Jerry predicted computers would become common18 in elementary school classrooms within ten years. He compared the revolution in technology to the Protestant Reformation, “when people began to obtain their own Bibles and make their own direct contact with Christian knowledge and tradition through the Bible, instead of having to go through the priest. Today the same kind of revolution in the secular sector realm is taking place, because through computers, and through telecommunications, people will be able to access directly information which is now within the custody of specialists and various other managers of knowledge.”

  At his old elementary school, St. Brendan, Jerry signed a bill providing tax breaks for companies that donated computers to schools. He coached the kids on his new slogan, the three C’s: computing, calculating, and communicating through technology. “A personal computer is going to be like a pencil, everyone is going to need one,”19 he said. “There will be personal computers that will be the size of a book before the end of this decade, and that book will link people to huge databases that will enable that individual to pick up information on everything from the weather to sports, mathematics to the price of hamburger.”

  That democratization of knowledge, he predicted, would have practical applications for government. “I see the day when we may have a thousand television channels,”20 he said in early 1978. “You’ll plug in University of California lectures, the boardroom of a major multinational corporation, the governor’s office, Congress, the supermarket. By pressing a button you’ll get more and more information on the decision making going on. That’s a fact, and that tends to break down hierarchy.”

  The sophistication of television cameras, just a decade after arguments as to whether they should be allowed at governors’ press conferences, had already changed the balance of power. Any group that came to see the governor and walked out of his office could talk to a television news crew, “and they will have the same access to the people of this state as the governor of California. That’s our democratic government, and that’s what’s changing … That information is the equalizer,21 and that breaks down the hierarchy.”

  Silicon Valley became an integral and growing part of the California economy. One out of four new jobs during the first seven years Jerry was governor were created, directly or indirectly, by the electronics, aerospace, and related industries. “Here again we see the energy of character22 in the pioneering contribution of our citizens who have miniaturized the computer from huge room-sized machines to dimensions smaller than your fingertip,” Jerry said. He contrasted that innovation with obsolete national economic priorities. He outlined a program to invest in new technologies and alternate energy sources, train skilled workers for tech jobs, and look to new markets in third world countries.

  “I see the future of America,23 and California, tied to the ability to store, retrieve and transmit ever greater amounts of data at ever higher rates of speed. This technology is coming along and it’s going to happen one way or the other,” Jerry said. “I’m going to do what I can to make sure that America does take the leadership position and that California is at the lead of this scientific-technological trajectory.”

  He saw technological change as the defining hallmark of the era, comparable to the impact of the railroad in the late nineteenth century. The new frontier, which came to dominate conversations in the late 1970s, was outer space. And one of the interesting people Jerry’s adviser Stewart Brand brought to meet the governor was Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart.

  Brand had befriended Schweickart after hearing a speech that became something of a cult classic, “No Frames, No Boundaries,” in which the astronaut’s emotional description of gazing at the earth from space while circling the planet left half the audience in tears. In early 1977, Brand brought Schweickart to Sacramento, where he spent most of several weekends schooling the governor about space. Schweickart was surprised by Jerry’s intensity, intelligence, and interest. More than half of NASA’s contracts were with firms in California, and Jerry began to prod the federal agency to move faster. When that didn’t work, he created a job for Schweickart. The NASA employee went on loan to the California governor as his chief science adviser, trading a slow-moving and stodgy federal bureaucracy for a boss whose mandate was “Make it happen. Fast.”

  Jerry Brown, who had built a career on his curiosity and instinct for staying ahead of the curve, became intrigued with space exploration as an exciting, pragmatic solution to the earthly problems of overcrowding, energy depletion, and environmental damage. “Ecology and technology,”24 he said, “find a unity in space.” Prominent physicists argued that space colonies would become realistic alternatives to an overcrowded earth. “It’s not a question of whether25—only when and how,” Jerry said. When movie sensation Star Wars opened at Grauman’s theater in the spring of 1977, Jerry went to see the space epic with Schweickart and Linda Ronstadt.

  The movie coincided with a milestone in the nonfictional exploration of space. In the Los Angeles desert, NASA engineers were preparing to launch the first space shuttle on its first free flight. To piggyback on the event, the Brown administration organized a gala Space Day. On August 11, 1977, more than a thousand guests gathered at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Exposition Park near downtown Los Angeles for the program orchestrated by Schweickart and cosponsored by the aerospace industry, which had a big economic stake in the space program. Speakers included leaders of NASA, astronomer Carl Sagan, deep-sea explorer Jacques Cousteau, and Beat poet Michael McClure, who closed the event by reading a new poem, “Antechamber,” as footage from a recent space mission ran in the background.

  “The Earth map is drenched26 in the blood of a thousand, a million conflicts in recorded history, but when we look at Earth and the human species from a few hundred miles up, we can’t help but sense the oneness of the human race,” Jerry said, speaking in front of a giant NASA photo of Earth from space emblazoned with the Space Day motto, CALIFORNIA IN THE SPACE AGE: AN ERA OF POSSIBILITIES. “Going into space is an investment.27 It’s not a waste of money, it’s not a depleting asset, it’s an expanding asset, and through the creation of new wealth we make possible the redistribution of wealth to those who don’t have it.”

  The next morning, many of the Space Day participants joined thousands who gathered expectantly at Edwards Air Force base in the Mojave Desert outside Los Angeles. The Enterprise, the prototype space shuttle, would inaugurate a new era of reusable spacecraft that could carry supplies, satellites, and people into orbit—and then return safely to Earth and prepare to launch again. Built by Rockwell in nearby Palmdale, the shuttle was named after the starship on the television show Star Trek. With two astronauts aboard, the Enterprise was towed on the back of a 747 jet to 27,000 feet and launched into flight, after which it glided for five minutes and twenty-one seconds before landing successfully back on the base.

  By early 1978, Schweickart had persuaded Dan Richard, a friend and NASA colleague in D.C., to uproot his family and take a job as his deputy, to help organize the California space program. Hughes Aircraft, one of the many defense contractors in Southern California that had flourished during and after World War II, had started a space and communications group to diversify in the peacetime economy. Hughes had produced a lightweight satellite called Syncom, short for “synchronous communications,” that could transmit images and sound around the world. The invention revolutionized the field and started a new industry, centered in Southern California.

  By the time Jerry focused on space, Syncom 1, 2, and 3 had been successfully launched by NASA. Hughes’s new contract was to build larger satellites that would fit in the specially sized bay of the new space shuttles. Jerry proposed a California satellite that would be launched from the space shuttle and provide transmissions that could enable a range of sophisticated communications, from teleconferencing for state un
iversities to emergency communications during disasters. Data that took a week to move between campuses manually could be transmitted “like that,” Jerry said, snapping his fingers. The drum-shaped satellite, 14 feet wide and about 10 feet tall with a 13-foot antenna, was called Syncom 4. The project would cost $5.8 million over three years.

  The satellite, eminently practical, fed all the national stereotypes about California and its young, ambitious governor. JERRY BROWN: THE FAR-OUT CANDIDATE WHO PUZZLES ALMOST EVERYBODY was the headline on a June 1976 People magazine cover story. The Chicago columnist Mike Royko dubbed Jerry “Governor Moonbeam,” and the name stuck. Royko came to regret the flip line. As he listened to the governor and studied his programs, Royko found Jerry an unusually thoughtful, farsighted politician who grappled with concrete ways to plan for a future in which two billion more people would sorely tax the resources of the earth. “We cannot sustain a way of life that uses one-third of the world’s basic resources for but a few percent of its people. But we can invent new ways to live better,” Royko wrote. He looked past President Carter’s reelection campaign to the next open presidential election. “I hope Brown is still around28 in 1984. I think the moonbeam has landed with his feet on the ground.”

  16

  The Fall

  In the midst of one of the worst droughts in California history, Pat Brown was asked to give a talk on water. The audience in July 1977 would be more than a thousand of the richest, most powerful men in the world who gathered annually in a secluded 2,700-acre redwood grove for the summer “encampment” of the Bohemian Club.