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INTRODUCTION

The Comeback Codger

I’ve been in office and I’ve been out of office. And if I were to choose, I’d rather be in office.

Jerry Brown to George Skelton in “Capitol Journal,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2004

Three thousand people crowded into Sacramento’s cavernous old Memorial Auditorium on the sunny morning of January 3, 2011, all eager to witness a century-and-a-half-old ceremony. Most of the state’s political establishment was there. The VIP list included Gray Davis, the cautious former governor who was recalled in 2003;¹ seated next to him was Arnold Schwarzenegger, smiling broadly as he enjoyed his last few minutes as governor of California, although within six months he would face horrific personal scandal. Next to him was his glamorous wife, Maria Shriver. Nearby was Gavin Newsom, the handsome mayor of San Francisco who had been elected lieutenant governor. He had defeated Republican Abel Maldonado, the son of immigrant Mexican American farmworkers. In keeping with the bonhomie of the occasion, the two men hugged each other while waiting for the festivities to begin. House speaker Nancy Pelosi, soon to become House minority leader, was seated close to Dianne Feinstein, the U.S. senator and former San Francisco mayor who some polls showed was the most popular politician in the state. In row after row of seats were most of the 120 state legislators. The crowd was boisterous and happy. Everyone was in a good mood, including those with famous names.

But the spotlight was not on them. Instead, all eyes were on a bald, slim, seventy-two-year-old in a severe dark suit who raised his right hand shortly after eleven o’clock and was sworn in as the thirty-ninth governor of California. Nearly four decades after his first inauguration, in one of the strangest journeys in American politics, Jerry Brown had once again stepped into the spotlight of America’s most idiosyncratic, troubled, and glamorous state—a state that in many ways seemed ideally suited to a politician of Brown’s talents and personality.²

He stumbled slightly while reciting the oath of office. It called for him to say that he took on the office of governor “without any mental reservation.” Brown seemed to hesitate over the word mental, then smiled, turned to the audience, and said, “Really—no mental reservation.” The crowd roared with delight. It was vintage Jerry Brown—informal, quotable, doing the unexpected.

He might have thought about the mental reservation. When he recited the oath of office, California had the worst credit rating among the fifty states, a bitterly divided Legislature, and an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent. It was one of the five states with the highest foreclosure rates in the nation. Pundits and political elites had taken to asking, without irony, if California had become ungovernable. It was too big, too diverse, too ideologically divided. It was saddled with a patchwork of governance hopelessly out-of-date and unable to deal with the complexities of what its boosters liked to describe as a twenty-first-century nation-state. A widening sense of malaise had overtaken the state’s traditional buoyant optimism.

The pointed questions were put aside for the day, but they were on the minds of many in the 1927-vintage auditorium as well as those of California’s thirty-seven million residents. Would Jerry Brown be able to ease a series of state government fiscal crises? What about the drooping economy? The environment? And water? Most of all, would he be able to restore the fabled California spirit? The new/old governor had become the man of the hour in a state that had lost its way.

Jerry Brown, in his eighth decade a man of seemingly inexhaustible energy, was now charged with solving the twenty-first-century problems of the most populous and complex state of the union. Even with his gymnastic abilities in navigating the shoals of American politics, this was an intimidating mandate. Whether he could prevail was an open question. But Jerry Brown’s journey to this point had provided some clues that he would not be a victim of the formidable mix of economic travails and political gyrations that have permeated the twenty-first-century nation-state of California. One gleans, from his life story, both a flexibility and a resilience that have been central to his political survival for more than four decades.

Some additional light on Jerry Brown may come from a whimsical piece the decidedly unwhimsical Brown released during the 2010 gubernatorial campaign:

25 Random Things about Me

I’ve seen lists of “25 Random Things about Me” that people are sending around Facebook. I thought I would share my own list with you.

1 I got my first dog 13 years ago, a black Lab named Dharma.

2 At Yale, I took “Psychiatry and the Law” from Anna Freud, Sigmund’s daughter. I also studied Roman law.

3 In 1958, I took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Later, Pope John XXIII dispensed me from these obligations.

4 I took marriage vows for the first time 3 years ago.

5 I practiced Zen meditation under Yamada Roshi and Father Enomiya-Lassalle in Japan.

6 My official portrait as Governor was quite controversial and the legislature refused to hang it. My Father said if I didn’t get a new one, I could never run again. It is now hanging and I am still running.

7 I am not fond of Mediterranean fruit flies, or of Malathion. Both are bad.

8 I dislike shopping.

9 I started 2 charter schools in Oakland, the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute.

10 When governor, I decided not to have an Inaugural ball and my inaugural speech was 7 ½ minutes. For the inaugural dinner, we went to Man Fook Lo, a Chinese restaurant in the produce district of Los Angeles. It was once a favorite of Mae West.

11 I am a part owner of a ranch in Colusa County. It belonged to my Great-grandfather.

12 I worked with Mother Teresa in India at the Home for the Dying.

13 I’ve been duck hunting with Chief Justice Warren, but not with Vice President Cheney.

14 I sued Richard Nixon’s lawyer for helping the President cheat on his income tax.

15 I like arugula and broccoli.

16 On my honeymoon, my wife and I canoed down the Russian River.

17 I was a cheerleader at St. Ignatius High School.

18 I knocked my opponent to the canvas in a 3 round boxing match at Senior Fight Night.

19 My favorite cereal is Flax Plus Multibran.

20 My first car was a 1941 green Plymouth. My most famous car was a 1974 blue Plymouth.

21 I own a colt 38, given to me by my father.

22 I went to Bangladesh as a CARE ambassador.

23 I hiked to the top of half dome. My first trip to Yosemite was when I was 4.

24 The first time I became Governor, I followed an Actor (Ronald Reagan).

25 My maternal grandfather was a San Francisco Police Captain. My paternal grandfather ran a poker club in the Tenderloin.

In this biography of one of the most idiosyncratic politicians in California history, I will explore the unique persona that is Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., son of California political royalty who forged his own unique political style against the tumultuous backdrop of a huge, balkanized state that goes its own, sometimes errant, way, shoved to and fro by complex currents. Plumbing his visionary impulses as well as his grandiose ambitions, my aim is to portray Jerry Brown through the lens of paradox: the intellectual who has thrown himself into a mean public arena, an idealist who has been willing to negotiate with all comers, a spiritual soul who has triumphed as a backroom politician.

Only in California could someone of such unusual traits emerge. This state on the edge of the continent has been a haven for outcasts for more than 150 years. The gold-seeking forty-niners, as adventurous and peculiar a bunch as one could imagine, were unhampered by the traditions and strictures of their old homes. Class and family background would no longer confine ambition. What a man—men were the only ones who counted—could accomplish in the here and now was what was important. The state was populated by family black sheep, adventurers, and hustlers from its beginning, but later waves of immigrants brought their skills, muscles, and hopes, increasing diversity in an already diverse population. By the twenty-first century, Californians had established the most diverse society on the planet, at one time or another home to Marilyn Monroe and Herbert Hoover, Steve Jobs and John Muir. The University of California claims fifty-six Nobel Prize winners; the state was also headquarters of the Flat Earth Society. Just south of Yreka, in the shadow of Mount Shasta, a sign promoting the State of Jefferson is painted on the roof of a large barn, one of the few remnants of a 1941 movement to create a new state from twelve of the northernmost California counties and seven southern Oregon counties. At the same time, several hundred miles to the south, a motorist in central Los Angeles can drive for block after block and see pink, turquoise, and red neon signs advertising various businesses—all in Korean.

At home and on the campaign trail with his father at a very young age, Jerry Brown absorbed California in all its grandeur and excitement. And while Pat Brown was an honest and effective public servant, his son quickly learned that politicians and the public live in two parallel universes: the things politicians talk about among themselves are a far cry from their utterances to the public. If a candidate or cause is to be successful, matters have to be presented in a particular way to voters, who are more worried about whether the refrigerator will hold up for another year than they are about whether state law should permit podiatrists to treat ankles.

“Except for brief interludes, the political history of the state has not been politically inspiring,” historian Henry Cleland once observed.³ Cleland’s observation is debatable. It is lamentably true that California’s political history has been marred by repeated outbursts of hysterical anti-immigrant agitation—particularly against Asians and later against Hispanics and “Okies”—but it is also true that while Californians were mining gold, developing the movies, and farming the Central Valley, they were concurrently creating a system of government that was intended to emphasize openness, honesty, and responsiveness to the electorate, virtues that Brown has touted consistently throughout his political career. Reform-minded progressives in the early years of the twentieth century gave California the initiative, the recall, cross-filing, and the referendum. These were designed to give the people a direct voice in how their state is governed, taking power away from what had become a corrupt, unresponsive, and lobbyist-riddled state Legislature. Historians point out, accurately, that the idealism only came in reaction to the power of the railroads and other big interests that had a stranglehold on the Legislature, but the outburst of idealism nonetheless did occur. No one at the time knew that the initiative process would become a fearsome tool of special interests that a hundred years later would reduce the Legislature to increasing irrelevance.

Jerry Brown’s California is an abstraction, of course. His life has been shaped by an enormous and diverse place of 156,803 square miles and thirty area codes created by imaginary lines that emerged from war and were then embedded in law and treaty. But the state is more than that. It is a place that for more than 150 years has held forth a promise of life with a difference—warmer, sunnier, easier, a state where, if dreams don’t always come true, they can come closer to realization than they can anywhere else. California promoters from Mark Twain to Southern California real estate hustlers have painted the state as a burgeoning, swaggering, wide-open place for anyone with talent who wants to break the mold, whether in business, science, show business—or politics. Because that fantastical picture grew from the real nature of California, Jerry Brown’s ambition and idealism had great freedom and were even encouraged to develop. Brown has always been his own man, of course, but he could envision a political career for a person such as himself more easily in California, because in that freewheeling state it has been more acceptable for a political hopeful to be a little bit of an odd duck, wandering across the landscape of ideas and finding new intellectual playthings. In no other state would Jerry Brown have been as likely to achieve great success as a politician while talking openly of Zen, Mother Teresa, Catholicism, and the virtues of austerity. The tolerant, free-and-easy ethos of his home state has allowed Brown to blaze a trail of innovation in his appointments, his priorities, and his lifestyle. In California, he was a radio talk-show host long before this role became fashionable for politicians or even before talk radio became a national phenomenon. Jerry Brown lived in an ad hoc commune in Oakland, California, worked with Mother Teresa among the dying in Calcutta, studied Zen in Japan—and then, back in California, ran successfully for a third term as governor. Surfers and scientists, entrepreneurs and farmworkers, originators of social trends and the butt of mockery by some for “have a nice day” and alfalfa-sprout entrées, Californians developed as a separate breed, eager to move forward into whatever lay ahead. And so did their governor.

But paradoxically Jerry Brown has met political success in his freewheeling native state by consistently telling Californians what most state politicians would never tell them—that there are limitations on government’s ability to make things better. Austerity had worked politically for him thirty-seven years earlier, when he proclaimed that Californians were in an “era of limits.” Considering the difficulties the state faced in January 2011, limits would probably be front and center again as he began his third administration.

Jerry Brown’s father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was also an idealist, didn’t much believe in limitations. He was the perfect man to govern the rapidly growing California of the 1950s and ’60s—eager to build more educational institutions, more freeways, and more water projects. Pat’s philosophy meshed perfectly with his exuberant California. Jerry Brown has shared Pat’s ambition but in many respects has been his exact opposite. Jerry has preached frugality, limits, and realistic views of what can be accomplished, yet at the same time has practiced his own brand of push-the-envelope idealism, appointing unprecedented numbers of women and ethnic minorities to high positions. In the post-Pat ’70s, Jerry’s particular alchemy created a political persona that sold well among Californians, who were recovering from a twenty-year building binge and beginning to worry about higher and higher taxes.

Jerry Brown’s idealism has been shaped and enhanced by a powerful California institution—the Catholic Church, whose ranks include roughly one in four Californians.⁴ From the fourth grade through his twenty-first year, the serious-minded and idealistic Brown was educated in Jesuit institutions. The cumulative effect of those many years was that he took the teachings of the Jesuits to heart more than did most of his peers. He took them seriously enough so that by the time he was seventeen, Jerry had determined that he wanted to become a Jesuit priest. He devoted three and a half years of his life to an austere, demanding, but limited seminary education. Although he eventually left the seminary, he has never entirely turned from his idealism or intellectual bent. The two characteristics have merely been expressed in different ways. Brown is one of the few politicians who examines an idea for its intellectual charm as well as its political value. Few politicians sprinkle the occasional Latin phrase into public conversations. Jerry has, declaring at the end of his 1991 announcement for president “Annuit Coeptis”—“may God bless this undertaking.” Fewer still allow it to be known that they are interested in the devotional pronouncements of St. Ignatius as well as the party registration numbers in Fresno.

A second paradox in Jerry Brown is that, along with the intellectualism and idealism, he has a great understanding of California’s unique, stainless-steel political system coupled with an unmatched ability to recognize and seize opportunities. When no one else did, ambitious Jerry realized the political possibilities in an obscure state office and made full use of them to catapult himself into the governor’s office. When aspiring Jerry ran for governor in 1974, he realized more than any of his contemporaries and rivals did that California voters were suspicious of Sacramento after eight years of antigovernment rhetoric from Ronald Reagan. Californians feared their heritage was being eroded by secretive deals in Sacramento. Brown campaigned, therefore, on a platform of bringing honesty and transparency to the Capitol. Four years later, again sensing the public mood better than anyone, he campaigned on a platform of limiting the malevolent influence of lobbyists. In 2010, Brown divined that even during a national tide of revulsion against incumbents, Californians wanted an experienced hand in the governor’s office, not another “run government like a business” type. Voters rewarded him with the governorship each time.

Whether from conviction, or his keen political antennae, or both, Brown as governor cannily manipulated symbols designed to show voters that he was not going to live luxuriously on the taxpayers’ dime. He loudly refused to live in the new governor’s mansion; he eschewed the gubernatorial limousine. Early on he realized that the Golden State, its romance frustrated by what many regarded as Sacramento’s insider politics, was made to order for his own designer-brand mix of populism and idealism. In a media-soaked state of more than thirty-seven million people, a few limited, large brushstrokes work best, and Brown has made use of them better than anyone.

To my knowledge, it has been nearly thirty years since a biography of Jerry Brown has been published, and millions of Californians know relatively little about the man who has become their thirty-ninth governor. His story is alternately heartening and discouraging, but it is always a California story. Trailblazer will discuss the changes that have occurred within Brown himself over his forty-plus years in the political arena, from a thirty-six-year-old governor to the seventy-two-year-old Comeback Curmudgeon. The following chapters chronicle the biography of this larger-than-life politician against the template of this larger-than-life nation-state.

The son of a governor, Jerry Brown grew up in an intensely political household and began absorbing politics with all its splendor and heartbreak while still in his high chair. While growing up, this offspring of Protestant and Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland became more and more interested and involved in religion, specifically the teachings of the Jesuits. In addition to tracing his background and youthful development, chapter 1 will describe the election of Jerry’s father, Pat Brown, as a result of William Knowland’s bullheaded ambition, the idealist Jerry’s conflict with his father over the Caryl Chessman case, and the Pat Brown–Ronald Reagan gubernatorial election of 1966, with its continuing ramifications for California politics and its effect on Jerry Brown.

Some might describe him as altruistic, while others might call him flaky, but Jerry Brown is one of the most ambitious, canny, and opportunistic politicians around. He made a very well-calculated entry into elective politics, using his famous name to win a spot in 1969 on the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, and quickly established a reputation as a social liberal and fiscal conservative. Jerry’s decision to go statewide by insightfully running for secretary of state, his hunt for headlines on the fringes of Watergate, and his preparations for a gubernatorial campaign are the themes of chapter 2.

The campaign that followed came amid a crowded and rancorous field of seventeen candidates, but Brown easily won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1974. He went on to be elected to the governorship over the Republican Houston Flournoy in the general election. Jerry’s deft use of voter-pleasing symbolism and his political idealism in the governor’s office make up the themes covered in chapter 3, along with his romance with Linda Ronstadt, his first run for president, and his paradoxical liberal/conservative “canoe politics.”

Four years later, despite being distracted temporarily by his presidential ambitions, California’s popular young governor won a landslide victory and a second term over the Republican attorney general Evelle Younger. The campaign’s high point—of a sort—included the advice of the Republican gubernatorial hopeful Ed Davis on handling airplane hijackers: “Hang ’em at the airport!” Also making up chapter 4 are descriptions of the governmental malpractice that resulted in Proposition 13, the “Governor Moonbeam” nickname, Brown’s 1980 bid for the presidency, his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, the nosedive in his popularity, and his Proposition 13 and Medfly flip-flops.

Out of statewide office after twelve years, Brown turned to spiritual matters—temporarily. He spent years studying Zen in Japan, working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta, and hosting the We the People talk show from his Oakland loft residence on the left-leaning radio station KPFA. I examine the concurrent and contradictory spiritual/political course of his years in Oakland and his friendship with Catholic philosopher-priest Ivan Illich in chapter 5, as well as the beginnings of his political comeback, serving as chairman of the California Democratic Party.

The former governor evolved from California’s philosopher-prince to a pothole-filling mayor interested in downtown development and education during his eight years as mayor of gritty Oakland. He also got married at age sixty-seven to his longtime companion Anne Gust, a high-powered woman who was to influence him greatly both personally and politically. Brown reentered the statewide political scene by becoming California attorney general in a bitter election that ended in an overwhelming win for him. All that is described in chapter 6, along with his actions as attorney general, including the high-stakes Countrywide financial settlement and his controversial refusal to defend Proposition 8.

Continuing his lifelong tactic of using one office as a springboard to another, higher, one, Brown sought to return to the governor’s office in what became one of the more remarkable political campaigns in recent American political history—how, with a small paid staff and relatively meager budget, Attorney General Brown defeated the Republican candidate Meg Whitman, who brought a mostly self-funded $180-million war chest to bear. Some strategists argue that the bitter Republican primary, and even the oceans of cash available to the Whitman campaign, may have ultimately been fatal to her hopes. Chapter 7 puts that campaign in its historical context, describing the invention of modern campaign techniques in California, a defense of the Whitman campaign from none other than Brown’s campaign manager, and what it all augers for the future of California politics.

California’s morale at the time of Brown’s third inaugural was at a low point, with polls showing a large majority of citizens saying the state was headed in the wrong direction and, as we’ve seen, some pundits pronouncing the state as ungovernable. What might a man of Brown’s background and temperament bring to bear on California’s multiple and daunting challenges in governance, education, and infrastructure, along with a host of others? Can Jerry Brown make the planet’s most diverse society work in an era of severe budget restrictions at all levels of government and in the face of a pallid economy? Can the onetime apostle of frugality and lowered expectations be an effective state cheerleader, restoring to an enormously changed state the robust “can do” spirit that motivated California fifty years ago? Has he even wanted to be an effective cheerleader? With comments from allies and adversaries, chapter 8 addresses those vital questions.

Barring the unexpected, Brown will continue to write additional chapters in California’s history. The wide assortment of problems he faced in the first year of his third term would in all likelihood require a wholesale reworking of California’s political culture to solve with any degree of permanence, and they may not be solved at all. What I hope the reader will gain from Trailblazer is a better understanding of what has gone into the makeup of this quirky and idealistic man and the state that has nurtured him. It is a story unparalleled in American political history.