The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  When Jerry took office, Assemblyman John Knox had submitted a bill to name the aqueduct after Pat Brown. “And Jerry called me up59 and he said, ‘Dad, I think it’s a mistake to call the project after you at this time. When you’re dead, then they’ll name something after you,’ ” Pat recalled. “I said, ‘Hell, I won’t know anything about it then!’ ” But he accepted Jerry’s rationale; people had voted down a proposal to name the Sacramento auditorium after Earl Warren. “The people don’t like to have you name something after yourself.”

  Ron Robie, head of the water department, tried again a few years later. “As we discussed60 yesterday, Governor Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown was the real ‘father’ of the State Water Project,” Robie wrote Resources Secretary Huey Johnson on June 1, 1981. “It was the major accomplishment of his administration. He has not been recognized in any way regarding the Project. Mr. Brown has frequently remarked on this to my deputy directors and I believe it would be appropriate to name the California aqueduct after Mr. Brown in recognition of his accomplishments.” He planned a ceremony for two days later. The governor vetoed the idea.

  Finally, at the water commission meeting the Friday after the 1982 election, Robie pushed the motion through. He called Jerry, told him there would be a ceremony on December 11, and suggested it would be nice if he showed up.

  Pat rented a bus,61 and most of the family was at the Edmonston pumping plant, which powered water almost two thousand feet up and over the Tehachapi Mountains.

  “The aqueduct is symbolic of the whole project, for it is the one facility that bridges the whole state, delivering water from north to south,” Robie said in his opening remarks.

  “This is a project that transcends any one particular administration, but it certainly does reflect, to a very large degree, my father’s interest,” Jerry said. “In fact if I would say there’s one thing he’s talked about more than anything else to me, it’s the water project.” He referred obliquely to the failure of the Peripheral Canal bond. “There are battles, some of them have been won, some of them have been lost. But I think there has been a forward movement. And as we construct these facilities over time, new realities intrude, such as the cost of energy, the understanding of the integrated consequences to the ecology and the environment. And yet we see the initial wisdom of this effort. If we waited until now to build it, it probably would have never been built.”

  Family members arrive at the dedication ceremony for the Edmund G. Brown state aqueduct, one of Jerry Brown’s last official acts as governor in December 1982. (Courtesy of California Department of Water Resources)

  He and Robie held up a poster of the nameplate that would be engraved in bronze and mounted on the Edmund G. Brown Aqueduct. The guest of honor took the microphone, free this time to talk as long as he wanted.

  “I couldn’t help but think that it’s much nicer to be here today and be alive to hear those things rather than to hear them after you’re gone, which is usually the way with things that they name after you,” Pat said. He talked about his grandfather praying for water at the Mountain House, about the water cases he handled as attorney general, and about the work that all the people in the room had done to pass the largest bond in California history and make the State Water Project a reality. “We’re not through yet,” he said, casting the failure of the Peripheral Canal as only a temporary setback. “I hope that the dedication today and the naming of this dam will cause all of us that love our state and love our fellow man, that we will rededicate ourselves to investing in those that are not yet here, the future of California.

  “I just want to leave on one note. You’ll notice it’s the Edmund G. Brown aqueduct. And centuries later, they won’t know whether it’s the father, or the son.”

  17

  Winter Soldiers

  In the summer of 1984, the Democratic convention returned to the Golden State for the first time since 1960, when the party had nominated John F. Kennedy. Unlike that unruly, suspenseful gathering, the 1984 political convention in San Francisco followed a predictable script. Walter Mondale would be nominated to challenge President Reagan, who had brought to Washington the vision of government he had honed in Sacramento.

  The lasting memory from the San Francisco convention was a passionate attack on the Reagan vision, delivered with perfect pitch by New York governor Mario Cuomo. America, he said, was not the shining city1 on the hill that the president invoked, but rather a tale of two cities. “There’s another part to the shining the city: the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one, where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate. In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it … There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.”

  In the deep cadences of his native Queens, Cuomo rallied Democrats with an attack on “social Darwinism” and a call for government to protect the most vulnerable. “The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak, are left behind by the side of the trail … We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once, ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees.”

  Cuomo’s keynote address embraced the values that mattered so much to Pat Brown, the governor who had welcomed Democrats to his state in 1960. Then, all things had seemed possible, as California surged past New York to become the nation’s most populous state and Californians united to build water works, roads, and universities. A quarter century later, Reagan’s rise had helped propel Republicans back into power in Sacramento. Proposition 13 had eroded public services and exacerbated the growing gap between rich and poor. Poverty was increasing in California faster than the national average rate. The spirit of a greater public good had given way to parochialism that pitted communities against one another and deepened racial divides.

  For the first time in decades, no Brown played a formal role in the presidential campaign. Pat attended the convention as an honored VIP, happy to see old friends. Jerry wrote two guest columns for the San Francisco Chronicle that hammered familiar themes: the party must find ways to engage the majority of citizens who felt it not worth their time to even vote. He lauded the choice of Geraldine Ferraro as the vice presidential nominee, the first woman on a major party ticket. “In a very basic way, Geraldine Ferraro defines the difference between Mondale and Reagan,”2 he wrote. “One embraces diversity and engages the future. The other fosters privilege and plays the melodies of a bygone age.”

  Jerry Brown, private citizen, had embarked on what became known among friends as “the wilderness years,” a combination of soul-searching, plotting, and penance. After leaving office, he holed up in Laurel Canyon with a parting present from the staff, a new Apple computer. From the start, he and his loyal followers assumed the political exile would be temporary. They formed a political action committee to help Democrats regain control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans had won a majority in 1980 for the first time in five decades. Jerry started two nonprofit organizations, the National Commission on Industrial Innovation, funded by business and labor organizations, and the Institute for National Strategy, a think tank designed to give him global experience and contacts with influential thinkers.

  The strategy was to target the next generation of political leaders. To identify young leaders and arrange introductions, Jerry turned to three men: Occidental Petroleum chairman Armand Hammer, a friend of Pat’s with long-standing ties to the Soviet Union; Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau; and Richard Nixon. The three became what the director of the institute, Nathan Gardels, called “our tutors.” Jerry and Gardels spent a day discussing Ru
ssia and China with Nixon at a hotel in Orange County, where the former president was planning his library. Hammer’s fixer arranged a trip to the Soviet Union, which included a meeting with the dissident writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Jerry sought out literary figures on all his travels; in Mexico, he held back-to-back conversations about American intervention in Central America with Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, writers with sharply divergent politics.

  “I’m advancing ideas,3 but in a very quiet way,” Jerry said in early 1985. “I’m interested in building an international network of people who want to shape the future, who feel because of their knowledge, or their ability, or their contacts, that they can make a difference in what happens in the world.” The institute published a quarterly and sponsored symposia on subjects such as nuclear proliferation and the future of NATO. Excerpts from a conference on the future of American politics were published in the New York Review of Books.

  Jerry saw his work as a corrective to the well-financed and organized conservative think tanks that had shaped political thought for a decade and facilitated Republicans’ success. “A series of John the Baptists4 ran around the country, clearing a path for President Reagan,” Jerry said, while liberals were slow to respond with organizations that might build support for more enlightened leadership. “That is really the opportunity for those in the private sector. Power is not located in an office. It is diffused throughout society—in institutions, interest groups, the media, campaign contributors, labor unions, and other groups.”

  His travel was paid for by the institute or by foreign countries. He signed on as an associate with the New York law firm of Reavis & McGrath, which paid him a $50,000 annual retainer to act primarily as a rainmaker. His parents gave him $20,000 each year, as they did each child and grandchild. He earned honoraria of up to $5,000 for speaking engagements.

  “I certainly feel the need to be out of active politics5 for a significant amount of time,” he said in January 1985. “I don’t know how long, but certainly a long time yet. Not eighty-eight. It’s not plausible. My present state of mind is that is just not a reality.”

  Nonetheless, his political action committee commissioned a top secret survey conducted the same month to assess Jerry’s chances as a presidential candidate in 1988. The conclusion by the Washington firm Belden Research: slim to none. The telephone survey6 of Democratic leaders and activists across the country found the greatest support for Mario Cuomo, largely driven by his 1984 convention speech. Although he was considered a creative thinker with good ideas, Jerry had support in the single digits. Of nine potential candidates, he had the highest unfavorable rating. He was viewed as “eccentric,” “a little nutty,” too “California,” too flamboyant, too liberal, and too opportunistic. “Governor Brown,” the report concluded, “will never get the opportunity to prove his worth as the party’s messenger of the essential ideas and programs unless he can overcome the pervasive perception that he is not someone to be taken seriously.”

  Jerry headed to Japan to study Buddhism, reflect, and write.

  Thousands of miles away, Jerry did not have to confront the unraveling of many of his signature accomplishments. Though Democrats controlled the legislature, the Republican administration of George Deukmejian gradually undermined the Brown legacy. Deukmejian shut down the Office of Appropriate Technology. Appointments to the state Agricultural Labor Relations Board were unabashedly pro-grower, to balance what Republicans called years of favoritism toward the UFW. The most significant undoing of the Brown era, both in substance and symbol, was the unprecedented recall of three California Supreme Court justices.

  In his determination to shake up the white male judiciary, Jerry had appointed his college friend Rose Bird as chief justice, the first woman on the state’s highest court. He could not have selected a lawyer the legal establishment would like less. Bird was principled, outspoken, accustomed to breaking gender barriers, and controversial from the start.

  Some of Jerry’s advisers, concerned about Bird’s brusque temperament, had urged him to appoint her as an associate justice and elevate Stanley Mosk or Mathew Tobriner to the court’s top job. Bird insisted the obstacles to the revolutionary change the governor wanted would be so great that she could make progress only if she were in charge. Her reception seemed to justify her fears. Mosk, angry that he had been passed over, greeted Bird in 1977 with a line he repeated for years: “I certainly cannot blame you for being here, but I blame Jerry Brown7 for putting you here.” Her intelligence and jurisprudence were never in doubt; in thinly veiled sexist critiques, detractors inside and outside the court attacked her personality and her politics. Ostracized and undermined by colleagues, she was condemned for being insular and unfriendly. In a bureaucracy resistant to change, judges and staff were so upset by her decision to rotate the conference table8 in her chambers that she moved it back to its original position.

  In 1978, Bird was on the ballot for an up-or-down vote and overcame a last-minute smear campaign to narrowly prevail in what normally would have been a routine confirmation. Her efforts to wrest administrative control of the vast court system continued to roil the judicial establishment. Then critics seized on an issue with popular appeal: her opposition to the death penalty. No one had been executed in California in almost two decades, and a revised death penalty statute was undergoing challenges and refinements. Under Bird’s leadership, the court found legal grounds to overturn every death sentence it reviewed.

  A coalition of conservatives, law enforcement officials, and crime victims tried for several years to force a recall vote but fell short the necessary signatures. In 1986, Bird faced the voters again in a retention election. Two of Jerry’s other appointees were on the same ballot, Joseph Grodin, a protégé of Mathew Tobriner, and Cruz Reynoso, the first Latino on the court. Both were esteemed legal thinkers, and both had supported Bird during her stormy tenure. Neither voted in lockstep with the chief justice. But the organized, well-funded opposition lumped the three together as “Jerry’s Judges.” The three did share a long-standing commitment to farmworkers and the UFW, Bird through her role in negotiating the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, Grodin as a member of the first board created under the act, and Reynoso as a founder of California Rural Legal Assistance. Much of the money raised to unseat the three came from agricultural interests.

  The overtly political campaign against Rose Bird, only the second woman in the country to lead a state high court, attracted national attention. “At stake is a choice9 about fundamental principles and the kind of government we want. How independent should our judiciary be?” Jerry Brown wrote in an op-ed piece. “When I made appointments to the Supreme Court, I did not look for individuals who would take the path of least resistance. I wanted those who were strong and independent, who knew the law and who were willing to apply it with compassion. I did not want justices who followed public-opinion polls.” He noted the campaign was essentially a personal attack on Bird, whose decisions differed little from those of her colleagues or predecessors. “She has not embraced the powerful forces of the day or the biases of the moment, but has insisted on the underlying logic of the laws she interprets. She takes the longer view of society and her role in it at the very time when immediate gratification and near-instant response express the ethos of the age.”

  The campaign against the three was without precedent, and they were hesitant how to fight back. Pat Brown chaired a committee that raised money, but it fell far short of the $10 million spent by recall proponents. For Pat, the fight was personal; his own Supreme Court appointments were among his proudest accomplishments, and he was a passionate defender of a court widely viewed as one of the most progressive and influential in the country. “What’s a father to do?”10 Pat wrote in a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. “I said the power brokers would never accept a woman at the top. So what does my son do? He not only picks a woman, but a tough one at that—Rose Elizabeth Bird—and makes her Chief Justice.” Pat condemned the rec
all as a power grab by Governor Deukmejian, an outspoken Bird foe, who would be able to pack the court with conservative allies.

  Bird was voted out by a two-to-one margin; Reynoso and Grodin lost in slightly closer tallies. Pat’s prophecy came true, and the court slid into years of relative obscurity. Yet the barriers broken by Bird, Reynoso, and dozens of other women and minorities Jerry had appointed to the bench ensured that the California courts would never return to their earlier homogeneous state.

  While Jerry combed through his past in search of enlightenment about the future, his father entered his ninth decade at peace. Pat still signed all his letters “Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown, Governor of California, 1959–1967.” The Browns had added a third bedroom to the modest Beverly Hills home in anticipation of needing a full-time caretaker in the not too distant future. Pat and his partners still owned the Schuckman homestead in Colusa, which they leased to local ranchers. Though he rarely visited, he felt a sentimental attachment to the Mountain House. “I kind of hope the grandchildren will have some interest in it, will want to return to the soil,”11 he said.

  Pat and Bernice still held out hope there might someday be an Edmund G. Brown III, though their only son showed no inclination of getting married. Jerry and Linda Ronstadt had drifted apart, remaining friends. In his typically uninhibited, gregarious manner, Pat still embarrassed both his family and friends with his inquiries and efforts to marry off his son. Bernice scolded him for public comments about Jerry’s private life. “This is the thing about Jerry: I think he’ll get married when he finds a girl he wants to marry—and when he feels like getting married,”12 she said. She predicted her son would elope because “he thinks big weddings are ridiculous. He once told me, ‘When I get married it’ll be an accomplished fact when I let you know.’ ”