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CHAPTER TWO

Going Statewide

Learning the Ropes and Hunting Headlines

Nothing in life is so rigid that there aren’t developments. That’s true in politics. That’s true in theology. That’s true in personal relations.

Jerry Brown, speech to high school students, 1979

Just as Jerry had begun to settle into life in Los Angeles, his father found himself in the political fight of his life, scrambling to retain his governorship against a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan. The election that followed had repercussions that echoed down the years for Jerry Brown and all California politicians.

From the conventional political standpoint of the mid-1960s, even with its revolution against societal norms, Reagan was regarded by Pat Brown and his inner circle as an impossible candidate; movie stars did not run for office, even in celebrity-struck California. The famous, but probably apocryphal, story has movie mogul Jack Warner reacting when informed that Reagan was running for governor: “No—Jimmy Stewart for governor—Ronald Reagan as ‘best friend.’”

For the most part, elected officials in the state’s highest offices prior to Reagan had been people—almost all of them men—who had devoted their lives to politics. Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, William Knowland, and Pat Brown were experienced, professional, and used to making deals. They sought to win voters by talking about how their policies were good for people and their opponents’ policies were not. They did not rely primarily on personal charm, although it was regarded as an asset. They sought to project themselves as competent and reliable. Warren and Knight worked at having a cordial relationship with the state’s civil servants. Being charming on television was terra incognito.

Reagan upended that world forever, a lesson not lost on Jerry Brown. Reagan proved that a political outsider, one who had never before faced a general electorate and who had a background professional politicians would laugh at, could steamroll an experienced, competent incumbent through his appeal to the media. Dramatically exploiting themes that resonate with voters had long been a standard part of the political armamentarium and still is, but Reagan’s twinkly-eyed ability to connect with voters, especially on television, took the tactic much further. The trick is finding the themes. In California in 1966, the right themes were the perception of misbehaving students at Berkeley and the rioting blacks in Watts.

The late Mario Savio and other young firebrands of the 1964 Free Speech movement at the University of California’s Berkeley campus could not have known it at the time and would probably deny it today, but they and a group of conservative California businessmen formed an unknowing and odd combination that helped open the door for Ronald Reagan to eventually occupy the White House. They unwittingly helped elect him governor, and a California governor is automatically a potential president. Reagan would indeed be elected president in 1980.

The chain of circumstances stretched across many years. For nearly a century, the university had been a beloved California institution, enabling millions of young people from modest circumstances to receive an excellent education and move up the economic and social ladder. UC was, and still is, a major driver of California’s and the nation’s economies. But beginning in 1964, millions of voters discovered to their horror that the university had some students who engaged in unruly conduct, became active politically, defied police, and generally behaved in ways that, in the minds of many voters, university students were not supposed to behave.

The Free Speech movement was not the first demonstration for idealistic causes at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. Demonstrations for one cause or another dated at least back to the 1930s, and the campus was roiled by a 1960 demonstration against the ROTC. In 1949–51, the entire university system was embroiled in controversy over the Board of Regents’ decision to require a loyalty oath. In addition, students in 1960 went across the bay to be part of the San Francisco city hall demonstration against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was holding hearings in the same building. But the Free Speech movement was the seminal student activism event, leading to at least some consequences the demonstrators and their leaders never had in mind.

Reagan and his campaign strategists realized the impact the Free Speech movement was having on a large portion of the California electorate and moved effectively to seize the opportunity presented by offended voters.¹ Among those offended was Jerry Brown. When the Free Speech movement erupted at Berkeley, Jerry Brown, by then a Yale Law graduate clerking for state Supreme Court justice Matthew Tobriner, went over to the campus to take a look. He was not impressed by the students’ righteousness, reportedly saying that he didn’t see the point of breaking a law in support of some other grievance.

The campus unrest, combined with the Watts riots of 1965, was fatal for Pat Brown’s reelection hopes. The six days of race riots across eleven square miles of Los Angeles left thirty-four people dead, more than a thousand injured, and a feeling on the part of voters that Brown had not moved effectively to stop the violence. Brown had been on vacation in Greece when Watts began burning, and although he called out the National Guard and flew back to California once he realized the seriousness of the situation, millions of voters thought he was not on the job.

Handsome, stern, and reassuring Ronald Reagan promised to whip the university and its ungrateful students into shape. “Obey the rules or get out,” he declared. Voters eagerly gave him a chance to fulfill his promise. Reagan defeated Brown by nearly one million votes—3,742,913 to Brown’s 2,749,174. Reagan carried fifty-five of California’s fifty-eight counties, with more than 57 percent of the popular vote. Pat carried only 42.3 percent of the popular vote and won in only three counties.

Some political observers have argued that Jerry felt his father lost the election because he wasn’t agile and flexible enough—that he allowed Reagan to paint him as ineffectual in dealing with problems instead of nimbly leaping to the forefront of the attack against unruly students and rioting blacks. In subsequent years, Jerry Brown—the supreme opportunist—has proven himself able to take quick advantage of the tide of public opinion. The most blatant example, discussed in chapter 4, is Jerry’s overnight about-face on Prop 13. He had campaigned against it as governor, but hours after it won overwhelming voter approval, Jerry pronounced himself a “born-again tax cutter.”

With his new job at Tuttle & Taylor, lifelong Northern Californian Jerry Brown immediately wove himself into the fabric of Los Angeles. With the help of his parents, Jerry bought a house in Laurel Canyon with a swimming pool. He started forming acquaintanceships. If he was to launch a political career, Jerry knew he needed a foothold in Los Angeles—some sort of public office that could serve as a launching pad. Pat Brown, ever helpful, called a friend, Los Angeles County supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who promptly arranged to have the newly arrived Jerry appointed to the Los Angeles County Delinquency and Crime Commission. It was a start.

Those expecting a soft approach to crime from the son of the notably liberal governor Brown were in for a surprise. He reportedly told his fellow commission members that his philosophy was that it is better to catch people at the beginning, give them a sentence of a substantial time in prison but not a draconian period, then let them out, and if they fail again, bring them back and keep them longer.

At the same time that the newly arrived Southern Californian was delivering hard-line lectures on juvenile delinquency and feeling bored with routine legal work at Tuttle & Taylor, he took an interest in presidential politics and the Vietnam War. He wrangled an invitation to speak at a California Democratic Council (CDC) meeting in Long Beach and spoke in favor of an immediate cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam, advocating a prompt start of truce talks. That was not what many CDC members wanted to hear. They wanted a call for immediate withdrawal.

But Jerry, while seen as a moderate, was also dovish enough to be selected as the Southern California finance chairman of a CDC “peace slate” favoring the rebellious presidential candidacy of Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. Pat Brown favored Lyndon Johnson and thought his son’s advocacy of McCarthy was helping to destroy the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House in 1968. The situation grew more complicated when Robert Kennedy, the senator from New York and brother of the late president, entered the race and Lyndon Johnson declared he would not seek reelection.

The president’s decision to bow out placed McCarthy and Kennedy in head-to-head competition in the California Democratic primary. Jerry worked hard for McCarthy, finding him an agreeable intellectual companion, familiar with Latin and able to discourse on theology, poetry, and politics.

Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles minutes after learning that he had defeated McCarthy in the primary and telling his cheering supporters “On to Chicago!” After Kennedy’s assassination, Jerry and others briefly considered the possibility of resurrecting the McCarthy campaign, but it ultimately failed to gain traction. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president who had been endorsed by Pat Brown, won the Democratic nomination at a tumultuous convention chiefly remembered afterward for television footage of Chicago police beating antiwar street demonstrators.

Early in 1969, after Humphrey had been defeated by Richard Nixon, Jerry decided to run for the new Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. It was the next step up. Community colleges—originally “junior colleges” until educators decided “community colleges” sounded more grown-up—had been educating students for forty years when the state Legislature separated the nine-campus system from the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1969. The colleges would now be governed by their own seven-member Board of Trustees. Jerry Brown, working in corporate law at Tuttle & Taylor, saw election to the board as an obvious move in his nascent political career. Service on a school board has long been a traditional way for ambitious Californians to begin careers in elective office, and many Los Angelenos have realized that. There were 133 candidates for the seven trustee positions in the 1969 election.

Many would argue, justifiably, that Jerry breezed into his first elective office because his last name was Brown. His father’s friend Matthew Tobriner was not alone in observing that had Jerry’s last name been Green, he would not have achieved his immediate success. But it is equally true that Jerry worked hard and intelligently. His name and ambition alone would not have been enough to sustain a political career—certainly not one that has carried him to three terms in the governor’s office. They had to be combined with a high intellect, a canny political instinct, and a finely tuned sense of what gains favorable recognition in the media.

But because he was the son of a governor, the unproven Jerry Brown in his first elective venture had the widest name recognition and cruised to victory. He became one of the fourteen finalists selected in a preliminary round of voting and was the top candidate in the runoff, beating second-place Mike Antonovich by sixty-one thousand votes.

There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that Brown viewed his trusteeship as nothing more than a temporary, entry-level position and that even before his election, he had his sights aimed higher, undoubtedly at statewide elected office. Antonovich, not surprisingly, believes that Brown’s entire service on the board was aimed at creating an effective springboard for higher office. “I don’t think his heart was in serving on a college board,” he told Brown biographer Robert Pack. “I think that was all contrived to project his name in the paper and then to be elected secretary of state.”²

Brown was one of at least three newly elected board members who had their sights set on higher office. Brown, Antonovich himself, and Robert Cline were three intelligent and ambitious young men who all viewed membership on the Board of Trustees as a first step in their political careers. But ambition was about the only thing they had in common. Cline and Antonovich were Republicans. Brown was not only a Democrat; he was the son of a man who until recently had been the most visible Democrat in the state.

Antonovich, a conservative Republican and former public school teacher, later served three terms in the California Assembly before winning election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.³ Robert Cline, another conservative Republican, was also elected to the Assembly.

During his eighteen months on the board, Brown quickly established a paradoxical reputation that has remained with him throughout his political life: He is a dead-serious fiscal conservative and a social liberal. He voted against an appropriation to provide private offices for the seven trustees; comfortable in his own ability to generate media attention, he opposed hiring media relations people for the district as an unnecessary expense; he was a “no” vote on a sixty-dollar appropriation to allow Antonovich to attend a conference at Stanford University. He was mostly on the losing side in these issues, with Antonovich and Cline voting against Brown and with the majority. But, according to his conviction and his view of political necessity, he carved out a reputation for himself as someone distinctly different from his free-spending father.

On social issues, idealist Brown was a consistent liberal “yes” vote. He favored, for instance, recognizing Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday and opposed a requirement that district employees be fingerprinted.

Brown also came up with some off-the-wall ideas designed to show voters that he was not completely a squishy liberal. Keenly aware of the continuing public antagonism toward angry students, he advocated prohibiting students from transferring into the district if they had been convicted of a campus disruption sometime during the previous three years. In a notion that today sounds silly, he suggested formation of “an airborne campus strike force to curb student violence” that would employ “no-nonsense tactics” against the hated student disrupters. It would have a fleet of jets, and members of the strike force would equipped with crowd-control devices such as tranquilizer guns, wood pellet guns, and water cannons. He also suggested that the state’s nationally admired Master Plan for Higher Education be scrapped in favor of turning two-year junior colleges into four-year institutions. Although helicopters were used by Reagan to quell student disorders at Berkeley, the airborne strike force never flew, and the Master Plan for Higher Education has remained in effect. All of Brown’s suggestions were styled to receive maximum media attention, a practice Jerry was to follow through the coming decades.

The major liberal/conservative dispute during Brown’s time on the board revolved around Deena Metzger, an English teacher. A majority of the board voted to fire her after she read a poem titled “Jehovah’s Child” aloud in class. Cline and Antonovich were among the board majority who regarded the poem as advocating abnormal sex, among other things. Brown voted to retain Metzger but lost. The case became a Los Angeles cause célèbre, winning headlines for Brown as an advocate of freedom of expression.⁴

Almost simultaneously with his election to the college board, Jerry met Tom Quinn and began a friendship that was to benefit both of them immensely over the coming years. Brown needed favorable notice in the media if he was to advance his political career beyond the board. Few could equal Quinn as a master at creating headlines and using the news media to the advantage of a candidate or cause.

Quinn came by his abilities naturally. He is the son of Joe Quinn, a former executive at United Press International who, with former Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowren, founded City News Service. CNS is a local wire service that for eight decades has provided local news on a fast-breaking basis to media outlets, first in Los Angeles and later to much of Southern California. It features a daily morning “budget” listing of scheduled events such as news conferences, and it is avidly read by city editors and television assignment editors as an important resource in determining how to deploy reporters and camera crews.

Tom Quinn in 1966 had formed Radio News West, an audio version of CNS that feeds audio reports to radio stations. Such a background meant that Tom Quinn, more than most news executives, was from an early age acquainted with the news business—its customs, techniques, problems, people—and what makes a news story.

Brown and Quinn talked about what path might prove most beneficial in advancing Brown’s political ambitions and quickly settled on a target—California secretary of state. To say that the office of California secretary of state was obscure in 1970 is to elevate its profile. Few Californians, even those who worked in state government in Sacramento, had much of an understanding of, or cared to learn, what the secretary of state does. The joke around Sacramento was that the chief duty of the secretary of state is to polish the state seal.

In fact, the secretary of state is a sort of county clerk, except that he or she serves a state rather than a county. The office is responsible for a number of functions, nearly all of them boring. It oversees the state archives; it keeps an official record of all laws passed by the Legislature; it records the sales of farm equipment and the registration of farm names; it registers the names and insignias of fraternal organizations; it registers aircraft brokers and notary publics.

Not only was the office of secretary of state an obscure paper-shuffling backwater in 1970; it was also an oddity. Since 1911, with the exception of two years, 1940–42,⁵ it had been filled by Frank C. Jordan and then his son, Frank M. Jordan. Both died in office.

It was an office that most aspiring politicians thought little about. Who would want to wind up in such a dead-end job? But as Jerry Brown would many times in the future, he proved himself more intelligent than his fellow politicians and potential rivals. Unlike the hordes of ambitious individuals in Sacramento and elsewhere across California, Tom and Jerry took the trouble to study the duties of the office in some detail. They realized that the secretary of state was, after all, a statewide office, but because it was so lightly regarded by the ambitious, there would be little or no topflight competition. There was no incumbent. And while most of the office’s duties were dull, it had potential: the office interprets and enforces the state’s election laws. What could be a better platform for a clean-government crusader?

Jerry declared his candidacy on March 2, 1970, and zeroed in on the office’s hitherto-unrealized potential for creating headlines. Brown told reporters in a news release that he would “vigorously enforce campaign disclosure laws now on the books. These laws require candidates to report the precise source of all contributions. Yet most reports are so vague they’re actually more funny than informative.” He added, “I will refuse to certify the election of any candidate who fails to fully and honestly report every campaign contribution.”⁶ Brown and Quinn had seized upon a previously neglected potential headline grabber within the labyrinthine functions of the office of secretary of state. It was a masterly display of finding a political golden needle in a haystack.

The combination of Brown’s name identification, the headlines promising a crackdown on rule-evading politicians, and Californians’ distrust of Sacramento, encouraged by Reagan, combined to give Jerry 70 percent of the vote over two opponents in the Democratic primary. His chief intraparty rival was Hugh Burns, a Fresno Democrat who had been a major power in the California Senate for more than thirty years and, ironically, had been one of Pat Brown’s chief lieutenants in getting Pat’s huge water plan through the Legislature. He had achieved some notoriety through his chairmanship of the state’s Un-American Activities Committee, but by the time he ran against Jerry Brown, Burns, no longer in a Senate leadership position, was very nearly a spent force. His longtime financial backers absented themselves, and Brown spent two dozen campaign dollars for every dollar spent by Burns. Pat also helped, sending his longtime supporters a letter asking them to contribute a hundred dollars toward his son’s campaign. There was also money originally pledged to a 1970 Pat Brown comeback campaign for governor that never happened. Jerry Brown and Pat Brown biographer Roger Rapoport wrote that Pat was dissuaded from making the rematch race against Reagan by Bernice, who told him that two Edmund G. Browns on the ballot was not a good idea.⁷ Burns afterward found a sinecure through appointment to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board.

Brown’s Republican opponent in the general election was James Flournoy, an African American attorney in Los Angeles.⁸ With the backing of the Reagan forces, James Flournoy campaigned against Brown on a theme of toughening laws that governed corporations, declaring that there was some evidence of an underworld influence. He also said he wanted to bridge the “polarization gap” between the races, although it was uncertain how he could do that as secretary of state.

Sensing the growing voter distrust of politicians and all that went on in Sacramento, Jerry Brown said he would reduce the “hidden influence of lobbyists” in political campaigns by requiring candidates to file more complete reports on their campaign expenditures. He said election laws should be liberalized to allow voters to register as late as two weeks before election day and suggested that television stations be required to donate time to political candidates as a remedy for the vast amounts of campaign money that had to be sought on behalf of political candidates. Brown himself benefited from help given by Pat’s former financial backers, including San Francisco hotel magnate Ben Swig. Swig occasionally locked up potential donors in a hotel ballroom until they unlimbered their checkbooks.

Brown went on to a victory in the general election with a margin of three hundred thousand votes. He had 50.4 percent of the vote, Flournoy won 45.6 percent, Peace and Freedom candidate Israel Feuer won 1.7 percent, and American independent Thomas M. Goodloe had 2.3 percent.⁹

Jerry had achieved a Democratic victory amid a mostly Republican year. Ronald Reagan, whom Jerry regarded as an intellectual lightweight, was reelected governor by a 501,000-vote margin over Jesse Unruh, the longtime speaker of the Assembly nicknamed the “Big Daddy” of California politics.¹⁰ Houston Flournoy was elected state controller, Ed Reinecke was elected lieutenant governor, and Ivy Baker Priest was elected treasurer. All were Republicans. It was not, however, a complete Republican sweep. Wilson Riles became California’s first statewide elected African American official, winning the nonpartisan state superintendent of public education post. Riles was a Democrat; Max Rafferty, the incumbent that Superintendent Riles defeated, was a conservative Republican.¹¹ And Democrat John Tunney was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican incumbent George Murphy.

Reagan, justifiably confident of his own victory, campaigned hard for his old movie-days friend Murphy and was disappointed when Murphy lost. Murphy’s forlorn reelection campaign was handicapped by his undistinguished six years in the Senate plus throat cancer, which forced him to make platform speeches in a throaty whisper.

On January 4, 1971, Jerry was sworn into office by Earl Warren, with his parents, siblings, staff, and grandmother, Ida Schuckman Brown, looking on proudly. Standing before the 150 people assembled to witness his inauguration, the new secretary of state turned to his mother and thanked her for naming him after his father.

Early in his tenure as secretary of state, Jerry met Jacques Barzaghi at a party in Los Angeles and shortly afterward appointed him to his staff as a file clerk. That was the title, although Barzaghi was really a staff utility man, friend, political and spiritual adviser, futurist, confidant, decorator, and personal stylist. Barzaghi was an enigma to Brown’s other staffers. However, he was to remain at Brown’s side during the next thirty-plus years, far outlasting other members of the Brown team who eventually went their separate ways.

Despite being the son of a governor, Jerry Brown had spent little time in the state capital. He was a creature of San Francisco and then Los Angeles, where he had quickly become part of the city. The Sacramento that Jerry Brown confronted upon taking up his new position was, like Jerry, full of contradictions. It had a reputation of being dull. A long-standing quip had one of its residents saying, “Sacramento used to be a little cow town. Now it’s a big cow town.” Nancy Reagan was famously quoted as saying of Sacramento, “Nobody does hair there.”

Dull or not, Sacramento was the capital city of the nation’s most populous and complex state. And it was sophisticated. But the sophistication was political, much too specialized to be appreciated in the wider world. Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke once told me that, counting the 120 legislators, lobbyists, staff members, and reporters, only about 2,000 Californians were daily concerned and knowledgeable about what went on in the Capitol, while the rest of the state knew little about internecine Sacramento political happenings and didn’t much care. Back in the districts, constituents didn’t know much about the realities faced by lawmakers, who sometimes had to make ugly compromises to get desired legislation passed. Lobbyists got it; constituents didn’t.

The political players—legislators, their staffs, and lobbyists—had their own jargon, their own watering holes, and, in cow town Sacramento, a certain amount of well-hidden contempt for civilians unfamiliar with their tribal rites. In a quote that has been repeated for more than fifty years, Unruh once declared, “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and vote against them, you have no business being here.”

Unruh’s legendary quote has been accurately interpreted as a commentary on being independent and tough-minded in the face of blandishments by lobbyists, but it also gives insight into the prevailing atmosphere in Sacramento. Republican and Democratic legislators got to know one another at private parties that lobbyists hosted in the Senator Hotel, across the street from the Capitol. In his book A Disorderly House, James Mills, a scholarly legislator who was one of Unruh’s top lieutenants in the Assembly and later became the president pro tempore (leader) of the California Senate, tells of magnificent feasts with distinguished wines topped off by brandy and cigars.¹² State senators formed the Derby Club, where lobbyists paid for jolly lunches every Wednesday at Posey’s, a nearby restaurant that posted a black derby hat atop its sign. The California Assembly and Senate were gathering places for 120 extroverts, and because their wives and children were most often at home in the districts, they were on their own.

While they were guilty of occasional idealism, the eighty members of the Assembly and forty members of the state Senate, along with the constitutional officers who were elected statewide, had for the previous 120 years spent most of their waking hours scheming and posturing to move out of the Triple-A League politics of California’s capital to the Major Leagues, either by getting elected governor—and therefore becoming automatically mentioned as a potential president—or by getting elected or appointed to a suitably prominent position in Washington. There was nonstop plotting, maneuvering, and backstabbing.¹³ Everyone also wanted to do good, of course—whatever that might be—but most of all, everyone wanted to do well.

In 1966, four years before Jerry’s arrival in Sacramento, voters approved a measure authored by Mills to create a full-time legislature with an annual salary that went from six thousand dollars to sixteen thousand. The idea was that a more professional, better-paid legislature was appropriate for a complex state that in 1962 had surpassed New York to become the most populous in the nation. For many lawmakers, the higher salary allowed them to live in Sacramento year round, some with their families, and become even more wrapped up in the world of the Capitol.

Into this long-established cauldron of ambition, warfare, idealism, and sin came thirty-one-year-old Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit novitiate, austere idealist, and opportunistic antipolitician politician. “I would say it was a culture shock,” recalls Doug Faigin, Brown’s press secretary in the secretary of state’s office and later his press secretary as governor. “Reagan and his people would go to the Firehouse, which was about the only really fine restaurant in Sacramento at the time, but we would go to the Virgin Sturgeon. Sometimes Jerry would be there.”¹⁴

It took a year of simmering resentment before the Sacramento political establishment moved to put the brash, self-righteous newcomer with the famous name in his place. In June 1972, legislators did what they usually do when an agency head or elected official displeases them—they cut his or her budget. When he took office, Jerry had established his main base of operation in sleek Century City, not far from his previous perch at Tuttle & Taylor.¹⁵ Not only were the offices handsome and modern, but Jerry was driven to them every day in a Cadillac—a far cry from the famous blue Plymouth he later used during his years as governor as an emblem of his frugality. Then the Assembly’s budget committee took away the rent money for the Century City office and cut two positions from his staff, including an “editorial assistant”—a public relations position. The cuts were included in the budget that was sent to Reagan for his signature.

Brown was furious. He told Doug Willis of The Associated Press that the move was nothing less than revenge for his attempting to expose big campaign contributors. “For the first time, the secretary of state has made politicians report where they get their campaign money, and they don’t like it,” he said.¹⁶

But Willie Brown, the San Francisco assemblyman who headed the budget committee—and who was later to become mayor of San Francisco while Jerry was mayor of Oakland, across San Francisco Bay—said the secretary of state’s office was merely being made to comply with the restrictions placed on other offices. And anyway, there were vacant offices in state buildings. The state did not need to shell out fourteen hundred dollars a month for Brown’s Century City offices, Willie Brown pointed out. The irony of protesting the cutting of a public relations position from his office only a few years after he had voted against hiring media relations people for the college district was lost on Jerry, at least publicly.

“Some of the leadership in the legislature doesn’t want the public to know where their campaign money comes from,” Brown said. Asked by Willis which legislators were attempting to cloud campaign cash reporting, Brown replied, “I would single out the speaker and his lieutenants. They don’t want this done.”¹⁷

More was involved than mere displeasure or a simple budget cut. Willie Brown was a top lieutenant to Bob Moretti, the speaker of the Assembly who was eyeing a 1974 run for governor, as was Jerry Brown. Even as early as 1972, it appeared they would probably be opponents in the 1974 Democratic primary. The budget cut was a shot across the bow, letting Jerry know that he would not always have clear sailing if he persisted in crusading against lawmakers to gain traction for a run at the governorship. Brown himself said the Democratic primary was too far away to be “a main issue” in the dispute.

Willis’s story drew headlines across California—the then-named Long Beach Independent, Press-Telegram proclaimed, “Brown Says Top Solons Trying to Cripple Him.” It was just the kind of idealist-against-the-entrenched-establishment headline that Jerry sought.

Jerry’s indignation was part of a consistent program. No one in the ranks of Capitol reporters, legislators, staff members, or lobbyists doubted that ambitious Jerry Brown was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and become governor. His challenge was to find a way to turn a moribund office into a dynamic center of political reform and let California voters know about the good work that was being done.

To do that, Jerry and Tom Quinn had to raise Jerry’s visibility as an active, corruption-fighting political comer whom voters would be well advised to promote to a higher position in the next statewide election. To do that, they had to create headlines. And to do that, they had to find ways of entrancing the California news media, most particularly the approximately seventy men and women who made up what was usually called the Capitol Press Corps. The Sacramento Capitol reporters were not the only media people Jerry dealt with—he spent much of his time in Los Angeles, running the office with a telephone from poolside—but they were the single most important cluster of reporters in California on political subjects.

In 1970, every large- and medium-sized daily in California had at least one reporter in Sacramento. The Capitol bureau was considered a plum assignment. There were full-time television crews from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento as well as radio reporters from all-news radio stations. The four largest bureaus were those of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, United Press International, and The Associated Press. Competition was intense, especially between the two major wire services, UPI and The AP.

For the seven reporters in the AP bureau, the height of success in daily reporting (along with beating UPI on a breaking story) was to get a story on the “A” wire—the national wire that was put together by the general desk in New York and carried the top stories of the day around the world. Even better was to get a story on the A wire “budget”—the listing of the dozen or so top stories of that day’s news cycle. A story that went national on the A wire was a career booster. Because there were then both afternoon and morning dailies, there were two A wire budgets in each twenty-four-hour news cycle. There were also two California-only budgets a day for the top state stories selected by The AP’s hub bureau in Los Angeles.¹⁸

Jerry and his staff were well aware of the people and pressures that made up the Capitol Press Corps. They correctly surmised that the best angle of attack for them was the “clean up politics” theme, which would work particularly well against the backdrop of a famous and popular governor who spent much of his time attacking state government and the politicians in the Legislature. Adopting this theme was an ideal melding of Brown’s inherent idealism and his calculating political instinct. But there was an attendant challenge: Reagan’s antipolitician attitude was helpful as a sort of reinforcing backdrop, but would the “clean up politics” message that had carried Brown to victory in the election continue to win headlines when Reagan, embarking on his second term and with great ambition of his own, was still sucking all the oxygen out of the room in terms of major state and national coverage? What would be the follow-through?

Brown and Quinn felt they had to jump at every opportunity. They were not always certain when real opportunity presented itself, so they just kept jumping. Brown’s office thus began issuing what became a torrent of news releases. Many of them had only a tenuous connection to the work of the secretary of state’s office, but most of them managed to be of interest to reporters, even while they chuckled at their typewriters. Through his numerous news releases, Brown in effect became a commentator on the passing scene. He praised César Chávez for his work on behalf of farm laborers; he called for a “massive national debate” that would end with the impeachment of President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew;¹⁹ he announced support for a bill that would allow women to use “Ms.” before their names when registering to vote. (“Miss,” “Mrs.,” and nothing were also acceptable.)