The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  At first, he was again dismissed as Governor Moonbeam, a California oddity, and scolded for playing the angry spoilsport. Then he raised millions of dollars. And drew overflow crowds. He opened each rally by asking for a show of hands of those who had never given $1,000 to a politician. He won the Colorado primary, and then Connecticut. “The people of Connecticut said, ‘Get lost, we’re taking back our country!’ ” he said the next day to a standing ovation at a union convention,33 where he touted the Agricultural Labor Relations Act as the sort of labor protection he would bring to the nation. Then he went to New York for a $20-a-person fundraiser at the Ritz Club where he was the opening act for the B-52s.

  A new generation in the family took to the campaign trail. Jerry’s oldest niece, Kathleen Kelly, traveled to various states as a surrogate speaker, often with her infant daughter. The campaign didn’t feel hopeless. The crowds seemed buoyed by the message that individuals could make a difference. “What’s dangerous about him to the establishment is he knows how to play the game and he’s good at it. He is a master of the process34 he hates,” said Tom Hayden, who was campaigning for a state Senate seat, having made the transition from outside agitator to elected official.

  “Because Jerry is so irritating35 to many people, offensive to many in the press, there is a proclivity to say he’s a jerk,” observed the political consultant Richard Maullin, Jerry’s friend who had worked on his campaigns since the earliest days. “But there is a segment of the electorate that is a natural constituency for him.”

  Campaigning in New Jersey in March 1992 with the New York skyline in the background. (Courtesy of Brown family)

  That constituency was passionate, if limited. He did well in Maine, Utah, and Washington, though he trailed front-runner Bill Clinton. Running on four or five hours of sleep a night instead of his usual seven, Jerry had lost the excess weight. He was energized. He talked about the dangers of global warming, the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, and the path to create millions of jobs by investing in high-speed trains and energy-efficient appliances and lights. He urged investment in new technologies and fuel-efficient cars that would facilitate a lifestyle more compatible with the environment. Mostly he talked about the corrosive influence of money in politics and its connection to the two-tiered society that Mario Cuomo had decried two presidential cycles earlier. “This is a very provocative contradiction36 that I’m pushing in people’s face,” Jerry said in an interview with Rolling Stone, which endorsed him. “And it’s not pleasant. And I don’t do it as well as I should. I’m sorry that I’m strident. I would like to be charming and elegant, but I will tell you that as a person enmeshed—in my genes I’m part of this political system—for me to cut out its cancer is almost to cut myself out. And I don’t do it with the grace that I had hoped.”

  In April, a few days before the New York primary, Jerry spent an hour with the New York Post editorial board.37 He stayed beyond the point when aides nudged him to leave, insistent on making his case:

  I have always been for political reform, for protecting the underdog, for environmental protection, for innovation and creativity of all kinds. Am I a perfect person? No. I’m not a saint. I’ve been in politics twenty years. I grew up with a politician. At the dinner table every night. It was politics. It was labor leaders. It was Jewish leaders. It was black leaders. It was San Francisco Irish politics. That is my upbringing. But I also have a moral commitment to justice …

  When you see the exile of a whole generation of Americans, be they black, Latino, white, red, or Asian, it’s not right. The coincidence of political corruption, mass cynicism at the process, failing competiveness, a loss of decent, high-paying jobs, is combining to unravel the fabric that everyone in this room takes for granted.

  A few weeks later, in a tragic illustration of that unraveling, Los Angeles erupted. The most deadly riots in the country began on April 29, 1992, hours after a jury acquitted four police officers in the beating of black motorist Rodney King, a brutal attack that had been videotaped by a nearby resident and broadcast over and over to the world. A shaken Mayor Tom Bradley said the acquittal was hard to reconcile with the beating so many people had seen with their own eyes. He declared a state of emergency. Governor Pete Wilson activated the National Guard. For five days, the violence unfolded on live television. More than sixty people were killed, ten shot by law enforcement officials. More than twenty-three hundred were injured. Looting and arson devastated sections of the city, damage of close to $1 billion. Unlike Watts in 1965, the riots were not contained to one area, nor was the racial tension solely between blacks and whites. Reflecting Los Angeles’s evolution into a complex multiethnic mix, Latinos were victims and perpetrators, and much of the violence was between blacks and Koreans. Tensions had been high for months after a Korean merchant shot a fifteen-year-old black girl she suspected of stealing a bottle of orange juice; the girl died clutching the bills to pay for the drink. The merchant was sentenced to a fine and probation.

  Jerry cut short campaigning to return home. “There is a systematic, institutionalized injustice38 across the country,” he said, blaming both parties for having failed to respond to unrest in Watts and other cities with investments and jobs. He visited the areas hardest hit and slept on a sofa bed at the home of a black campaign volunteer whose father was a carpet installer; the street was still smoky from fires that burned down nearby stores. At a community meeting, he jabbed his hands in the air in frustration. The violence and despair stemmed, he said, from a political system that deliberately excluded and abandoned groups of people. “The global economy has enshrined the principle of so-called efficiency which requires Americans to be deprived of their high-paying jobs so that people in the third world can be exploited with low-paying jobs to satisfy the needs of those who manage our global corporations … The rich are getting richer,39 the middle class is disappearing, the poor are ground under, and the resulting violence requires more and more of a military response, with a more authoritarian government.”

  That he had in some ways contributed to this growing gap was just one of the contradictions of Jerry’s zigzag political trajectory. As governor, his administration had frozen cost-of-living increases for welfare recipients, cut programs for the mentally ill, and set the state on a path that invested more heavily in prisons than in higher education. In his wilderness years, he lived in part off financial practices he now denounced—as a rainmaker, a board member of a biomedical company run by a longtime campaign supporter, and investor in a tax shelter. Questioned by a Washington Post reporter about the dissonance between his personal finances and his campaign rhetoric, Jerry said, “I think you’ve got a good point.”40

  He did not shy away from the contradictions. Opponents denounced him as hypocritical; supporters saw his unscripted honesty as an asset that allowed him to maintain credibility even as he moved from major fundraiser to critic. He seemed more reconciled with his own past. “What I’ve learned is that the absolute, the moral principles41 on which I grew up with, are the anchor,” he said. “The anchors that I had growing up are what I believe are the only rudder and the only compass that both keep me going and can keep politics moving in a direction it has to go.”

  One of those anchors, Bernice Brown, went out on the campaign trail as a surrogate for her son. She had become an accomplished speaker, mixing wit and substance with stories from his youth. One of her favorites was about an irate neighbor who found handprints in the fresh cement of his driveway. The culprit was not hard to find: Jerry had added his initials. He was for full disclosure at an early age, Bernice said. “I’ve always said Jerry’s just ahead of his time,”42 she said. “I don’t know if everybody else will ever catch up.”

  Pat Brown was not strong enough to campaign. On the day before the first major round of primaries in March, Pat made one of his last public appearances. He was honored by a rare joint session of the legislature on what Governor Wilson declared Pat Brown Day. Escorted into the Assembly chamber
by the seven legislators still in office who had served while he was governor, Pat was greeted with thunderous applause, hailed as a “California pathfinder,” an almost mythic leader from a happier time. Speakers noted his ability to forge bipartisan coalitions, now sorely lacking. In the midst of a crippling recession and multi-billion-dollar budget gaps, they paid homage to achievements that loomed even larger in the rearview mirror. “Pat Brown offers us the spirit with which he governed the state, an unflinching faith43 in the future of California,” Wilson said.

  Shortly after he had become a private citizen, Pat had written Ronald Reagan in dismay over his decision to jettison the Grizzly, the propeller plane on which Pat had flown around the state, often peering out the window. “A chartered jet flies too high and too fast for you to get a good look at this great, golden state as you fly over,” Pat wrote to Reagan. “And that is one of the genuine satisfactions of being governor of this State—soaring over the cities44 and towns; the farms, the dams and canals; the colleges; the National Guard firefighters on five-minute alert; the highways; all the things that make California the leader among equals in this nation.” At the celebratory luncheon on Pat Brown Day, historian Kevin Starr said he pictured Pat someday “soaring over this state … a sort of benevolent seraph.”45

  Jerry missed Pat Brown Day. He was immersed in the campaign, committed to the effort to fashion out of politics the sort of movement he had long admired. In many ways, the day-to-day campaign resembled nothing so much as the old days of the UFW boycott. Volunteers, mainly young, traveled on the cheap, slept on couches, and operated on a shoestring. Creativity was at a premium; people who could make things happen gained power. Volunteers cut stencils and spray-painted their own signs. State coordinators and local hosts were recruited through calls to the toll-free number. “Politics finally has made sense to him, based on his Jesuit upbringing. He can, in essence, be a missionary,”46 said political consultant Patrick Caddell, an adviser to the campaign.

  “I think he feels that his goal is to play out a destiny47 to help set things right,” Tom Hayden said about what drove his friend. “He has a very strong sense of the world’s being out of whack. And all he knows to try to right it is a combination of spirituality and politics.”

  For twenty years he had wanted to be president, Jerry told New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd. He quoted Sister Alice Joseph about the virtue of perseverance. “Obviously I’m attracted to this or I wouldn’t be going through it,” he said. “But I’ve also studied in schools of humility where they put you in your place, whether in the Jesuit order, whether being ridiculed by the press for years, or whether it’s working with the dying in Calcutta … I have a lot of ambition48 and a lot of ego. But I think this experience serves me well in a process that is so disorienting as the one we have.”

  As Bill Clinton became the front-runner, Jerry was the only other Democrat who could afford to stay in the race. He had seven paid staff members, no paid consultants or speechwriters, and little advertising. The campaign was memorable for the sharp, personal clashes with Clinton, many involving the ethics of the Arkansas governor and his wife. The more lasting political relevance was the Brown campaign’s innovative use of the toll-free phone, early-generation computers, and the rapidly expanding world of cable television. With lots of time to fill, cable channels offered an effective way to bypass the traditional media and avoid the cost of network television commercials. Cable was the state-of-the-art technology to deliver an unfiltered message, tailored to a niche audience. C-SPAN covered many of Jerry’s speeches in their entirety, and he gave the network access to private fundraisers and editorial board meetings.

  By the time of the California primary in early June, some ninety thousand people had donated more than $5 million in small amounts, mainly through the toll-free number. But Clinton had almost clinched the nomination. In New York, where Jerry had needed to do well to stay competitive, his announcement that he would choose Jesse Jackson as his running mate torpedoed his chances; Jackson was still controversial for anti-Semitic comments he had made in 1984 about New Yorkers. “We influence, we shape,49 and we’re going to affect the destiny of politics in this country for a long time to come,” Jerry told supporters as they awaited results of the California primary. “This is a long-term, day-by-day, slogging through the mud, moving up and taking the mountain. But we’ll get there.” Clinton beat Jerry by more than seven points in his home state, where they knew him best.

  Jerry did win over one voter who would ultimately prove more important than all the rest. In 1990, when he was Democratic Party chair, Jerry had been invited to dinner by Anne Gust, a corporate lawyer who lived a block away from him in Pacific Heights. She wanted to set him up with her roommate. During the evening, Jerry recounted an ongoing legal battle with a disgruntled candidate who had sued because he was denied the right to speak at a Democratic Party forum. Gust said the case sounded ridiculous; he should just move for dismissal. Good idea, he said; why don’t you handle it? She did. For free. Instead of dating her roommate, Jerry began to see Gust.

  Anne Baldwin Gust had grown up in a political family, too—Michigan Republicans. Her father ran unsuccessfully for Congress and lieutenant governor, on a ticket with George Romney. Anne graduated first in her high school class in Bloomfield Hills and headed west, won over by the beauty and intellectual rigor of Stanford. She majored in political science, which offered flexibility for a prelaw student and enabled her to take art classes and study in Italy. She interrupted her California sojourn to attend law school at the University of Michigan, alma mater of her father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, then moved back to the Bay Area to work as a litigator and then a corporate lawyer. She was on a fast track at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison; the San Francisco firm wanted to make her the first female partner in Silicon Valley. The prestige and title didn’t mean much to her. She walked away just short of becoming partner, weary of the grind, the focus on billable hours, and a culture that viewed sensible decisions—wearing pants, commuting in late morning to miss rush hour—as acts of defiance. By the time Jerry ran for president, she had quit (against his advice) to become a counsel at the Gap, where she found a mentor in the man who had recruited her, Gap founder Donald Fisher. In 1992, Gust registered as a Democrat for the first time so that she could vote for Jerry in the California primary.

  California was the last contest. In July, Jerry Brown arrived in New York for the Democratic National Convention with a detailed, thirty-four-page “We the People” platform and 614 delegates, representing some four million votes. They shunned cocktail parties and receptions at which they would not have been welcome and held a picnic in Central Park, in the rain. The Hotel McAlpin, where the buoyant Brownies had stayed in 1976, was long gone. Jerry worked out of the office of Rolling Stone, spent a night helping at a homeless transition shelter, and stayed the rest of the time with his friends the writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. He was no longer the thirty-eighty-year-old wunderkind in demand by every network anchor, but a fifty-four-year-old ex-governor very much at odds with those who controlled his party. Minicams from around the world buzzed around the dissident when he appeared in public, at odds with what was, for his friends, an elegiac occasion. It was all over.

  In the Madison Square Garden Convention Center, where Cesar Chavez had nominated him sixteen years earlier, Jerry was persona non grata. His platform, which opposed NAFTA and endorsed single payer healthcare and campaign finance reform, was rejected sight unseen. He would not be allowed to speak unless he agreed to endorse Clinton, a deal Jerry rejected. “In a democracy, debate, vigorous, robust difference, is healthy,” he told his California delegates at breakfast as the convention opened. “And what we want is not conformity, not uniformity, but unity, based on the spirit of this party. Stand up. Act up. Take back America!” Jerry decided to address the convention during the twenty minutes allotted to place his name in nomination, a move the party leaders could not contest.

  “
Whatever the odds, whoever the adversaries, however long it takes, we will create the power for the powerless, for there is no other reason for a Democratic Party to exist,” he said in his address. “For many, many years I believed we that could change politics through a series of changes. Some small, some large. But all incremental, within the framework of politics as we know it. Progressive appointments. More money for college scholarships. Good environmental laws. Urban assistance programs. Yet when I was governor, I’m sorry to acknowledge, wages toward the end started to fall. Factory jobs started moving abroad. And the numbers of the poor began to grow. Ten years later, South Central Los Angeles exploded. How I tried to make that system work as governor of California!”

  He had embarked on the campaign for president, he said, “to give people, especially those who stopped believing, a real choice, and an equal opportunity to participate. That’s why we limited donations to a hundred dollars. We wanted people who had no access. They didn’t know any particular person with power. We wanted them to take ownership of this cause.”

  Bernice and Kathleen Brown were there to cheer Jerry on. “My God, he went the distance!” said Kathleen. “I admire his guts50 and I admire his staying power. This was about ideas, about his passion to reform the political process and the Democratic Party. And, from his perspective, he had to go to the end.”