by Miriam Pawel
Jerry Brown stands in front of the Lourdes Shrine on the grounds of Sacred Heart Novitiate in October 1958, two years into his studies to become a Jesuit priest. The shrine was a replica of the French grotto. (Courtesy of the office of Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.)
In both Rome and Sacramento, changes with profound implications for sacred and secular institutions were on the horizon.
On November 4, 1958, almost 80 percent of California voters cast ballots, a record for a nonpresidential year. Jerry, five months shy of his twenty-first birthday, was not among the seminarians at Los Gatos who went to the polls. The one television at the Sacred Heart Novitiate was off limits, but that evening the authorities made an exception. “After early election returns33 indicated the strong Democratic trend,” the minister recorded in his logbook, “Bro. Edmund G. Brown was allowed to view telecast made by his father Governor-elect Edmund G. Brown.”
Pat Brown won 60 percent of the vote, and his million-vote margin led a Democratic sweep. For the first time since 1889, Democrats captured every statewide office except secretary of state. They gained seven state Senate seats and ten in the Assembly to take control of both houses. Clair Engle was elected to the U.S. Senate, and the congressional delegation flipped to a slim Democratic majority.
The following day was equally historic. At Los Gatos, all the novices and juniors were allowed the rare opportunity to watch television: a live broadcast of the coronation of Pope John XXIII. His reign would prove momentous. Even before the pope convened Vatican II, the church council that would redefine the relationship of the Church to the modern world, the sense of impending change and concomitant apprehension began to permeate a novitiate where customs and practices had changed little for centuries. The rector at Los Gatos worried that the new Spiritual Father who worked with the juniors was too outspoken in his comments about the need to reform outmoded practices, which “caused some uneasiness34 and considerable discussion among the Juniors about their Novitiate training.” Old-timers bemoaned changes in how Latin was taught, a de-emphasis that presaged the Church’s decision to switch from Latin to the vernacular in saying the mass. And the authorities worried about the lengthy conversations that Father William Burman,35 a well-liked Latin teacher, engaged in with some juniors, including Jerry.
Jerry was granted the unusual privilege of leaving the seminary in January to attend his father’s inauguration. Pat snatched a few quiet moments in a car on the way to Sacramento to dictate a letter explaining how Inauguration Day would unfold. “When your calls average thirty to thirty-five a day and then, in addition, you have from forty to fifty people coming into your office, you have very little time for what would be called in your institution ‘meditation,’ ” he wrote. The thought of governing a state of 15 million people, larger than most countries, weighed on him, especially the responsibility to do right by those most dependent on the state. He would summon his best salesmanship to overcome parochial interests and unite the vast and varied regions of the state, making “above all an appeal to legislators to recognize the greatness of California36 and all its potential.”
Pat had prevailed upon Warren Christopher to take a short leave from his position as a partner in O’Melveny & Myers and help launch the new administration. Christopher believed he could help set a tone and sketch out what he called “the architecture” for the new administration, then leave the building to others. His first job was to draft the inaugural address. Explaining the governor’s philosophy, Christopher coined the phrase that would become Pat Brown’s mantra: “responsible liberalism.”
Inauguration Day was a celebration tailored for the former yell leader from Lowell High. The ceremony ended with the state song, “I Love You, California,” the sentimentality of its lyrics matched by the sincerity of Pat’s devotion to his state:
When the snow-crowned Golden Sierras
Keep their watch o’er the valleys’ bloom,
It is there I would be in our land by the sea,
Every breeze bearing rich perfume.
It is here nature gives of her rarest. It is Home Sweet Home to me,
And I know when I die I shall breathe my last sigh
For my sunny California.
Afterward, the Browns headed to the Governor’s Mansion at Sixteenth and H for a private dinner, although the family would not move in to the historic home for some time. “You see, this is the only time we will have an opportunity37 to be all together,” Bernice told a reporter. “Jerry is at Sacred Heart Novitiate in Los Gatos studying for the priesthood and this will be his only chance to see our new home. It is really for him that I arranged this family party.” They posed for photos around the dining room table, Ida Brown with a great-grandchild on her lap, Jerry standing in his cassock.
In the evening the first couple made a grand entrance at the inaugural ball, Bernice elegant in a satin gown designed for her by the Academy Award–winning costumer Charles LeMaire, who chose turquoise blue to set off the first lady’s silver-streaked hair and blue eyes. To headline the ball, Pat had chosen Nat King Cole, known for his activism as well as his voice. Cole had used his celebrity to speak out against racism on a national stage and then closer to home, when his move into the all-white Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests. Legislation to bar discrimination in employment and housing were among Pat’s top priorities.
Pat assembled a cabinet that included minorities and women along with lifelong friends. Fred Dutton, the chief of staff, fired off what he called “mee-mos”; Pat studied them intently. He underlined words Dutton used over and over: The governor must show “decisiveness, strength and stature.” Pat’s warmth and humanity were enormous assets, Dutton wrote, but as governor he was an administrator and policymaker who must establish his image as a clear-thinking, knowledgeable, decisive political leader.38
The state had doubled in size in the last ten years. The tax structure had remained largely unchanged, revenues falling far short of spending needed to accommodate the growing population. Pat faced a $100 million budget deficit. He presented a budget that asked for $202 million in new taxes, a combination of income and sales levies, including a three-cent-per-package tax on cigarettes. “I think they were rather shocked,” Pat wrote the day he delivered the budget to the legislature. “It was a courageous, challenging budget.39 I have nothing but contempt for those who say that no taxes are necessary. I have difficulty concealing it from the press.”
For the first time in his life, Pat Brown tried to keep a diary. He was not a writer, and the sporadic entries were mostly short, prosaic sentences, scrawled in bad handwriting, usually in the early morning hours when doubts kept him from sleep.
“Worried very much40 about Gridiron speech—don’t like it but can’t think of anything better. Could be worst flop in history. Worried about mother. Can’t see her because of work. Haven’t heard from Jerry who is out of this world. Kathleen is disruptive. Slept very badly.”
The traditional, off-the-record keynote at the Gridiron Club dinner, an annual gathering of Washington politicians and journalists, had to be witty. Warren Christopher, a serious, soft-spoken lawyer who did not consider himself funny, was an unusual choice to draft the address. He enjoyed the assignment and enlisted help from various people, including the humorist Art Hoppe, a columnist at the Chronicle. The speech was a hit. “California seems to have come up with a new product suitable for export to other states for national use,” reported Hearst news. “His name is Gov. Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown, a Democrat of California. Brown passed with highest marks41 a test that has knocked off the aspirations to national office of many a politician.”
Pat marveled at it all. “It amazes me sometimes42 that I am writing letters on the stationery of the Governor of the State of California,” he wrote to a friend. He tried to execute Dutton’s mantra of decisive leadership by using his big victory to push an ambitious agenda quickly. “I can see some real thunderheads43 in the offing because we are really treading on some
pretty sacred cows,” he wrote to Jerry. “I am trying to be very, very fair, but I sometimes find out that politics is not a matter of fairness but really doing something for your friends (which is human nature, I suppose). We have a labor bill, a water bill, and a budget that will really cause consternation. If all the forces join together, I am afraid both Governor Brown and the State will be in trouble. There is one thing I am certain they won’t say, however, and that is that I am indecisive or unable to make up my mind. People closest to me know that I really want to accomplish things and that I am not too much afraid of people I think are wrong.”
He celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday in the Mansion on April 21. Ida came by bus from San Francisco. “Happy birthday Daddy love Kathy,” his daughter wrote in Pat’s diary. “The tough part is ahead44 however but I do not intend to retreat on what I think is best for all the people,” Pat wrote beneath his daughter’s birthday greeting. He was clear about his goal: to make “life a little more comfortable for the average human being.”
When the legislative session ended in June, Pat faced decisions on whether to sign two thousand bills. “The mere reading of them is laborious let alone the responsibility of making right decisions,” he wrote in his diary. “I want to give California the best administration it has ever had. I wish Jerry was with me. He is missing a stimulating life45 as the son of the governor.”
Jerry was finishing up the June vacation week at the Villa Joseph. The seminarians played bridge, swam, entertained high school students from St. Ignatius, picnicked at Lower Lake, barbecued for visitors, and held song fests at night. The more relaxed pace at the Villa also presented opportunities for breaking the rules with private conversations. Several juniors, careful to avoid the rest of their peers, began to share doubts about their vocation. Jerry struggled with the idea of unquestioning acceptance of church dogma. The clandestine conversations with his childhood friend Peter Finnegan and his high school friend Frank Damrell went largely unnoticed by their peers, but not by their superiors. The juniors were admonished46 to discuss concerns with priests, not one another. Juniors had been allowed to walk on outings in pairs; they were made to walk in threesomes again, so that conversations could be better monitored.
Jerry turned for counsel to Bill Burman, a kind, quietly charismatic scholar twenty-five years his senior. During dozens of visits, Jerry talked, and Burman listened. A worldly, multilingual intellectual who had studied in half a dozen countries, Burman was going through his own vocational crisis. As the censor of books, he had his own library. He lent Jerry two proscribed books that influenced him profoundly. In Man’s Search for Himself, existential theologian and psychologist Rollo May wrote about the path to understanding self. In Spirit and Reality, Nikolai Berdyaev, a Russian Orthodox Church theologian, criticized Jesuit asceticism as inconsistent with freedom of the spirit. He offered a religious alternative to Jesuit obedience.
Burman felt a responsibility to counsel the juniors, and he was unapologetic when his conversations were reported to the rector as subversive behavior. “I felt that the best service I could render would be to lend them a willing ear47 as they worked out their own solutions,” he wrote in response to a complaint. “I wanted them to feel free to talk about anything that troubled them. It was my firm intention not to influence them in any way. It was certainly not my desire to criticize the training of the Society or the guidance that they had received from any individual.”
The conflicted juniors continued their furtive conversations during the late August vacation at the Villa, with visits to one another’s tents in between the Follies of the Saints variety show and the ball games between teams dubbed the Octopii and the Eucalyptii. The juniors’ conversations were reported to the rector, who spoke to each at length, chiding them not to talk to one another during Villa days and not to discuss vocational doubts.
On the Sunday before Christmas, Pat visited Jerry alone. The two took a long walk. The rector watched from his window and felt certain he knew what they were discussing.
“I visited my son48 at the Sacred Heart Novitiate,” Pat wrote in his diary that day, December 20, 1959. “He is a fine wonderful boy. He told me that he would probably leave his studies for the priesthood. He felt that it had been a wonderful 3½ years, that his Catholicism was stronger than ever but that what they had taught him had caused him to logically feel that the ‘rules of Obedience’ were not valid. That there were times when freedom of the conscience was more important. He stated that he would like to go to the University of California, take some premed courses and then study medicine. I didn’t advise him one way or the other but told him that I would help whatever choice he made.”
Ten days later, the rector received the visit he had been expecting. Brother Edmund G. Brown requested a dispensation from his vows. “His reason? No vocation,”49 the rector wrote to the Father Provincial. “To do what he is obliged to do by rule, is not difficult, he says; but to do it because of the rule is not for him. ‘Don’t fence me in’ seems to express his attitude toward rules, regulations, and, it seems to me, even vows.” Ever since he took his vows, the rector noted, Jerry had demonstrated “his manifestations of nonconformance.”
Jerry’s dislike of rules would continue the rest of his life, as would his nonconformism. At the same time, his Jesuit training would shape his core beliefs. He would repeat the mantra Age quod agis—Do what you are doing—and confer the motto on one of the institutions that mattered to him most. He would retain the Jesuit idea of thinking about the future while acting in the present. But he would have agency over the decisions and paths he took.
The rector made little effort to counsel Jerry to stay. “I know that his father, and especially his mother and grandmother, opposed his entrance into the Society … Frankly, I see no hope50 of saving the young man. And I doubt seriously about the wisdom of trying further to save him. Considerable unrest has been caused among the Juniors by the attitudes of Brothers Brown [and] Finnegan.”
Two days later, Finnegan made the same request.51 The rector agreed that he, too, should leave.
Jerry had told his parents he was in no hurry and might stay another month or more. He left on January 23, 1960. Frank Damrell stayed several more months. By spring, the rector reported happily to his superiors that the spirit among the juniors had improved considerably:
The California Juniors who were given their papers during the past year seem to have developed the same attitudes toward religious life.52 And they expressed those attitudes in about the same words. They stated that their personalities and abilities could not develop in an atmosphere where rules and regulations and common life are considered to be so important. All seemed convinced that they possessed abilities which would better develop in the freer atmosphere of the world. All openly stated or intimated that the Society’s methods of training were antiquated, effective in the days of St. Ignatius, but not so today.
Jerry’s return to civilian life elicited joy in Sacramento. His mother understood the issue clearly: Her son could not abide quashing his inquiring mind and spirit in the name of obedience to dogma. Jerry’s father was equally glad to have his only son home, though he did not dwell on the reasons. Pat no longer made annual retreats, but the Jesuits’ lessons stayed with him.
During the day, the governor would effusively greet each person he encountered. When Pat walked out of his office for lunch and saw schoolchildren in the halls, he went up to them and said, “Do you know who I am? I’m the governor!” He wanted the kids to know they’d met the governor. He took an almost childish delight in his position and wanted to share that joy with everyone he saw.
At night, when he said his prayers, Pat remembered what he had learned on his first Jesuit retreat. They had knelt and prayed for the most forgotten soul53 in purgatory, that their prayers might help that soul reach heaven. Every night when he prayed in the Governor’s Mansion, Pat later recalled, “I’d pray for the most forgotten soul in the State of California. That somewhere, the
works that I did would reach out, and reach that most forgotten soul in California.”
7
Fiat Lux
In the summer of 1930, just before Bernice Layne Brown eloped, a revolutionary dormitory opened on the campus of her alma mater. International House welcomed Cal students to the first coeducational dorm west of the Mississippi, a cultural center that would be a rare mingling place for men and women, Americans and foreigners, whites and blacks.
The sprawling Spanish Colonial Revival building with its Moorish tiles and ceilings, sunken patios, and domed tower was known as I-House, the second such facility underwritten by John D. Rockefeller Jr. He had opened I-House New York near Columbia University six years earlier “as a laboratory1 for a new kind of experiment—the day-to-day practice of international fellowship among men and women.” Its success led Rockefeller to donate $1.8 million to construct the dorm at Berkeley, a window to the Pacific, with a particular mission to draw Asian students out of substandard, ghettoized housing. Its founders deliberately located I-House on Piedmont Avenue, the same street as the Cal fraternities and sororities that excluded Jews, blacks, Latinos, and Asians. When the project was discussed at community meetings, hundreds turned out to protest the integrated dorm.
I-House opened2 with 338 men and 115 women, mostly graduate students, living in single rooms. I-House hosted Sunday suppers, concerts, and cultural festivals. In 1942, the director spoke out against the Japanese internment and helped delay the deportation of Japanese students. After the war, Holocaust survivors were in residence. I-House students led efforts to desegregate restaurants and housing in Berkeley and helped the city test compliance with antidiscrimination laws. Heated debates between radicals and conservatives from around the world were commonplace in the lounges and dining hall. THAT BROTHERHOOD MAY PREVAIL was the motto on the International House seal.