The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  “There is no way for me to stay neutral,” she said.

  If I won’t support him, and I know him best, it looks like an attack. I would like him to be able to speak his ideas. I think they are really important and good and, for the most part, he’s right. It’s so hard for me, not only as a public figure but also as someone who believes in him, cares about him, is close to him and is on his side. I want to be on his side. I don’t see how I can not take a stand. It’s dangerous territory for me, that’s for sure. But if Frank Sinatra is going to do a benefit for Reagan, then I guess I have to do a benefit for Jerry.

  Asked if she ever thought about being first lady,39 she said: “Sometimes. It’s a pretty funny thought. But if I thought about it seriously, I would probably die laughing. I like my job. And the pay is a lot better.” Friends on both sides dismissed the tabloid speculation about a possible wedding, and neither seemed under any illusion their lives could fit together long term.

  When Carey McWilliams visited Jerry to write a column that assessed his presidential prospects, their conversation was interrupted twice by phone calls from “Linda,” and the writer excused himself after an hour so that the governor could go meet her, as he had been promising on the phone. In an era when push-button phones were just starting to replace rotary dials and every move brought a new number, Linda Ronstadt’s addresses and phone numbers spilled over onto card after card in Jerry’s oversize Rolodex—three dozen numbers, crossed out one by one as they became obsolete, for recording studios, agents, secretaries, and homes in Brentwood, Hancock Park, and Malibu.

  McWilliams found Jerry opportunistic, but with “genuine underdog sympathies”;40 a good listener who freely acknowledged he did not have all the answers; a skilled media manipulator annoyed with East Coast columnists who failed to understand him or California. “Tense, articulate, interested in ideas, eager for dialogue,” McWilliams wrote. “An exceptional politician, he could only have emerged to national prominence in California.”

  Barely six months into his second term, Jerry filed paperwork to form an exploratory committee for a presidential run. “My own feeling is that people are ready for an alternative,41 they’re ready for a blend of fiscal responsibility and yet a broad vision for the future. That’s what we lack right now,” he said. His campaign slogan was “Protect the Earth, Serve the People, Explore the Universe.”

  Tom Quinn went on leave to run the campaign. Quinn thought Carter was beatable, as long as Senator Edward Kennedy didn’t enter the race. Four months later, Kennedy announced. Jerry’s percentage of the vote in the early primaries was in the single digits. Quinn looked at the numbers and saw no route to victory. In early March, he returned to Los Angeles to take over the family media business. Jerry Brown, his first campaign manager concluded, could not shed the image that he was a flake.

  Then came Wisconsin. The Brown campaign had staked its hopes on a strong showing. A few days before the primary, Jerry delivered a major speech in Madison entitled “The Shape of Things to Come.” His friend filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola had arranged to use cutting-edge technology to broadcast the speech live to other locations around the state. The technology failed. Audiences watching the remote feed saw strange objects flying out of Jerry’s head as his face turned green, with black holes. Coppola was distraught. The Brown campaign was finished.

  His candidacy over, Jerry sat down with two Village Voice reporters who had recently compared him to Nixon as an ambitious, egotistical politician. Jerry proceeded to analyze his own failure with the detachment of a good Jesuit. He did not pay enough attention to the rituals, he affronted and irritated people on different sides of the spectrum. Prop 13, Doonesbury, the African safari, and his call for a balanced budget amendment all reinforced the flaky image.

  “I have a certain skeptical approach.42 I comment in a certain ironic way. That’s not a leadership posture. One has to be immersed and of this business, instead of slightly off, slightly standing aside. I think the paradox is that I become so involved in the political process, and reasonably good at it, and yet there is another aspect where I stand aside from the whole process and comment on it. That seems to be a detriment.” By his manner, he radiated disdain for “people who are very excited by very conventional ideas which I don’t think are really very interesting.” His response to those ideas communicated his lack of respect. “In short, I engender some resentment. And you know, it’s my fault. I’m in the world but not of it sufficiently.” The interviewers did not pick up on the reference to the Jesuit credo that lay at the root of Jerry’s dilemma. He had been trained to be in the world, but not of it.

  Jerry spent several weekends with key advisers, trying to salvage ideas from the campaign and form an agenda for his last two years. The recession was hurting income tax revenues. The surplus that had cushioned the effects of Prop 13 for the first two years was gone, and the impact of the tax cuts was becoming clearer. In Oakland, twenty-four of thirty-five branch libraries had closed. The legislature passed an $18 million library appropriation bill, which Jerry vetoed. He insisted there be no tax increases. “For the first time since World War II,” he told the legislature, “state government spending will clearly not keep pace with inflation.”43

  His relationship with the legislature worsened. His vetoes were overridden by the Democratic-controlled houses more than a dozen times, a new record; before Jerry took office, there had been only two veto overrides since 1946. At cabinet meetings,44 the remaining Brown loyalists lamented the negative press that portrayed their governor as brilliant but ineffective. Diana Dooley, who had risen to become the governor’s legislative counsel and one of the most powerful women in the administration at twenty-eight, had the unenviable task of selling his program to the legislature. “He’s a very uncommon person,”45 she said about her boss. “His intellectual capacity is phenomenal, and his appetite for information is insatiable.” To try to ease the acrimony, she and her husband, Dan, chief deputy director of the state Department of Food and Agriculture, hosted backyard parties for the legislators at the end of session. That Jerry attended was considered a victory. “His idea of small talk is to ask a member what bill he’s working on,” Dooley said. “He just doesn’t have what people typically think of as personal relationships with people.”

  Then Jerry was attacked for the one thing that had never been questioned, his integrity. State workers had entered lists of campaign contributors on a state computer for future political use. A formal investigation found bad judgment but no prosecutable offenses, and no suggestion that the governor had known about the acts. But “Computergate” undermined a core strength of the Brown reputation. That it had happened at all reflected the slow erosion of spirit and control in an office that had started out with such high ambition and exuberance.

  Then a tiny pest46 unleashed a crisis that pitted environmentalists against the agricultural industry and left the governor looking indecisive and ineffective. On June 5, 1980, two Mediterranean fruit flies were discovered in San Jose. Medflies ruined fruit by laying larvae under the skin; a widespread outbreak could devastate the agricultural industry. The state began trapping, hoping to contain the flies before they spread from backyards to orchards. Within a month, twenty-one medflies had been captured and larvae found in orange and loquat trees. To avoid spraying toxic chemicals, state officials released sterile male flies, designed to breed with females and halt the spread of infected larvae. Six million sterile flies arrived from Costa Rica. More came from Hawaii. By the end of September, agriculture officials had released 341 million sterile flies by land and air and quarantined all fruit from trees within a 450-square-mile area. But in October, flies were found in Alameda and Los Gatos, then even farther away in Palo Alto and Morgan Hill. State and federal officials flew to Mexico to plead for more sterile flies.

  As a state report later concluded, “Everything that could go wrong, went wrong.” Traps weren’t out as early as they should have been, there were delays in reporting and iden
tifying the first flies, the invasion was too large to handle with sterile flies.

  On December 24, 1980, after 1.309 billion sterile flies had been released, the governor declared a state of emergency. Still hoping to avoid aerial spraying, the most effective eradication technique, state officials tried a multipronged attack all winter. Massive amounts of fruit were stripped from trees and destroyed, sixty-two thousand homes were sprayed every day for six weeks, and sterile flies were released at the rate of 100 million a week. The agricultural industry, losing tens of millions of dollars, pushed hard for aerial spraying. Environmentalists argued that spraying malathion, a potential carcinogen, could cause short- and longer-term health risks. Hundreds of citizens from the affected communities packed a state hearing to plead against aerial sprays. As the number of larvae increased, Jerry announced one last effort to avoid aerial spraying by using the National Guard to strip all fruit in the quarantine area. The next day, the U.S. Department of Agriculture threatened to quarantine the whole state and block the sale of any California produce to prevent the spread of medflies through larvae in contaminated fruit. The governor ordered aerial spraying.

  Helicopters took off during the night of July 13, 1981, from a hilltop cemetery, having been denied access to the local airport. Within a week, they had sprayed 160 square miles. Crews went door to door, destroying 17.7 tons of fruit. State police stopped more than a million vehicles at checkpoints and confiscated fruit from more than thirty thousand cars.

  The spraying enraged environmentalists, and the delays infuriated the agricultural industry. Amid the outpourings of anger, a few people sent words of cheer and small gifts—which Jerry now accepted. Chris Bragg made a pet rock in the shape of a medfly. Joe Nelson at the state agriculture department sent YOU BUG ME buttons and a medfly T-shirt. “As depicted on the shirts,” Jerry wrote in a thank-you note, “the fly is a beautiful creature47 for being so destructive.”

  Even Bohemian Grove became a problem for the Brown administration. A coalition of Northern California peace and women’s groups formed the Bohemian Grove Action Network and held a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil at the entrance gate to the grove to protest decisions being made by men in secret that affected the survival of the world. In June 1981, the Brown administration sued the Bohemian Grove for discrimination because the club would not hire any female staff. Pat Brown was outraged. “Women would ruin it,”48 he said. “Men should be allowed a brief period of time to get away. Getting together without women is part of the complete release from the conformities of society that Bohemians strive for.”

  Seven years after he had taken office, Jerry Brown’s poll numbers had fallen from the unprecedented heights of his first term to near record lows. Forty percent thought he was doing a poor or very poor job while only 26 percent49 rated him as excellent or good. They had lost faith in him for the very reasons that he had first impressed: By 1981, the Field Poll reported that only 39 percent thought the governor worked hard and just 23 percent thought he was restoring faith in politics. Now he was seen as just another politician who did what he needed to win elections.

  Running for a third term seemed precarious. Jerry aimed instead for an open Senate seat, where the baggage of his first two terms might not weigh as heavily. He began his last year in office on a different tone. His State of the State address, unusually long at twenty minutes, was also unusually philosophical, even for Jerry. He looked back at the California pioneers, including his great-grandfather. He read from August Schuckman’s diary about crossing the Plains, and then from the State of the State delivered by the first elected governor, Peter Burnett: “Nature, in her kindness and beneficence, has distinguished California by great and decided natural advantages: and these great natural resources will make her either a very great or very sordid and petty State. She can take no middle course.”

  Jerry concluded with lines that he agonized over until minutes before the speech, words that closely echoed his comments at the prayer breakfast before his first inaugural: “Our obstacles are not the lack of money, or gold, or raw materials,” he said. “We have these or can get them. What we need to find anew is the spirit that built this state50 and sustains us even now.”

  On March 10, 1982, Jerry announced his candidacy for the Senate, his parents at his side. He again highlighted four issues: jobs and the economy, equity for the elderly and the poor, environmental quality, and scaling back the nuclear arms race. “California during the last seven years51 has proved that good wages, strong environmental laws, and unparalleled job growth go together,” he said.

  He faced Pete Wilson, a solid Republican who had been elected to the Assembly three times and then to three terms as San Diego mayor but struggled in earlier efforts to break through as a statewide presence. He was knowledgeable and articulate, but dull. From the start, the race was a referendum on Jerry Brown.

  Jerry said that from his losses he had learned patience and a respect for the political processes he had alternately shunned and mocked. He analyzed his failures with less detachment. “I mistakenly thought52 that I could bypass the normal political process which I had observed my father going through when I was growing up,” he told historian Kevin Starr near the end of the campaign. “I thought that because I had been there before I was exempt from it: the handshaking, the lobbying, the showing up before this or that group.” He had always found haunting the image of Thomas Jefferson, the only president to insist on walking to his own inauguration, pointedly eschewing the trappings of political royalty. “And so I mistakenly played the iconoclast, thinking that I was working against the cult of personality in government, even to the point of not sending my picture to a six-year-old girl when she requested it.”

  This time, Jerry welcomed his father’s support. Pat campaigned around the state with a dozen stops a day for radio, television, and newspaper interviews. “Jerry is way behind in the polls,”53 Pat wrote to his former finance director Hale Champion in July. “It reminds me of our 1966 campaign. I don’t know what we will do, but we will do all we can.” He added a handwritten postscript: “Jerry is gaining and will win!”

  As in 1966, many liberal Democrats were disenchanted. “I might refer you to the latest Field poll which shows that an overwhelming majority of the people in this state do not like your son,”54 Max Palevsky, who had been one of Jerry’s earliest supporters, wrote to Pat. “I do not think Jerry has any broad set of political principles—I do not think Jerry believes in anything very deeply. Practically without exception, the liberal activists in this state are not backing your son.”

  As Pat had prevailed upon Fred Dutton to return in 1966, Jerry called Tom Quinn. Quinn drove through a snowstorm from his Reno home to Sacramento and offered help with television spots. He dug up a quote from Wilson about the possibility of cutting Social Security and fashioned an effective ad that urged voters “take another look” at Jerry Brown. He moved up in the polls and pulled almost even. Then the campaign switched to an ad in which a little boy said “I want to go on living” as a nuclear bomb exploded in a mushroom cloud, implying that Wilson would escalate the nuclear arms race. The ad reinforced Jerry’s flaky image and backfired. They pulled it after a week, but the damage was done.

  Jerry lost by almost 7 points. On election night, he conceded the race had been a referendum on his own performance. He sat eating tortilla chips at El Adobe, still absorbed in watching the last of the television broadcasts, until finally heading home at one A.M. Later that morning, he was cheerful as he met with the press, responding with a half laugh when asked if he intended to run for president again. “I believe the people of California would like a respite from me55 and in some ways I would like a respite from them. Each of us will withdraw from each other and after a period of time, my services will be available in some interesting capacity.” He told his friends he had three plans: to write a book, run a marathon, and maybe get married.

  He still had fans. Alex Hutton, who worked in remittance processing in DMV, left a
single yellow rose at the governor’s office with a note that said, “Hang in there always.”56 Jerry’s friends were loyal, none more so than the original Brownies, young people on whom he had taken a chance. “So many of us were nonentities before we joined this governor,” said B. T. Collins, a former Green Beret and Vietnam veteran who served in various positions in the governor’s office. “He made us something.57 He gave a lot of people tremendous opportunity to show their stuff.” He predicted Jerry would be back. “He’s a warrior. Public service is something he’s got to do.” They would be ready when he returned. “Not many of the old gang will turn their back on him,” said Marty Morgenstern, who headed employee relations.

  In the governor’s race, George Deukmejian had defeated Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, returning Republicans to power. There was one more loss for the Brown family on Election Day. A referendum to authorize the final piece of the State Water Project failed overwhelmingly. Proposition 9 would have authorized the state to construct the Peripheral Canal, which was designed to increase the flow of water to Southern and Central California and bypass the environmentally sensitive Delta. Northern Californians saw it as a water grab, the largest growers in the Central Valley rejected the environmental restrictions attached, and many environmentalists objected that the protections were not strong enough. Together they financed an expensive campaign and overcame lukewarm support in Southern California, where users would have been the major beneficiaries.

  Pat Brown, who lamented the loss more than his son did, had long wished to see his name permanently connected to some piece of the water project. “It is immodest58 at the least for me to suggest it, but it is something I really want,” Pat had written a friend while Reagan was in office. “I know it is not necessary because history will record the fact that there never would have been a water project if it were not for me.”