by Miriam Pawel
Pat had not always had the smoothest relationship with his eldest daughter, who shunned politics and resented the intrusion of her father’s life. But as Pat and Bernice approached their fifty-sixth anniversary, he sent Barbara a copy of a letter she had written years earlier, “the best and most beautiful letter we have ever received.” Barbara had enclosed comments from her son’s teacher, who praised Charlie’s contributions to class and interest in government. “I guess that in a way I am attempting to tell you of the strong influence13 that you have had on me in spite of the different path I choose to follow in my life,” Barbara wrote. She had gotten her doctorate and worked as a school and family counselor.
In their major philanthropic effort, Pat and Bernice donated a million dollars to Cal, one of the largest bequests to the university. Pat’s beloved university system had so far educated Bernice, her three sisters and one brother, two children, four grandchildren, and several nieces and nephews. The gift funded the Bernice Layne Brown Gallery in the foyer of the Bancroft Library and a new biology building, where the eatery was named Pat Brown’s Café.
Pat’s annual birthday parties became fundraisers for the Pat Brown Institute, which had grown out of conversations among his friends and former staff members about how to influence government policy. As the institute grew and convened conferences on specific issues, it became a nonprofit organization, eventually housed at California State University at Los Angeles.
The man who worried about his financial well-being when he lost the 1966 election had become wealthier than he had ever imagined. The fervent civil rights supporter did not seem troubled that he earned much of his fortune through the Suharto regime in Indonesia, a repressive, brutal dictatorship characterized by massive corruption. Pat sold his interest in the Indonesian oil firm at a large profit and took pleasure in spending money on his family. Bernice, frugal in all other respects, had pushed Pat into what became a sacrosanct tradition: Each Christmas, they took the extended family on a beach vacation, to Hawaii, or the Caribbean, and once to Tahiti. The trips fostered ties among the four generations and created unusually close bonds among cousins, nieces, and nephews who would otherwise have had only passing acquaintance. Jerry was the family member most likely to miss the outing; when he did show up, Pat always noted his presence with pride. In 1986, their eleventh trip, Pat and Bernice spent ten days in Jamaica with two dozen children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Jerry flew in from Japan for four days. “I don’t think Jerry’s through in politics by any means,” his father said in an interview. “I think he was a good governor.14 I think he has an attractive political personality. He’s good looking. He’s studying all the time, traveling all the time … Look at the people who’ve been elected after they were counted out.”
In Japan, Jerry immersed himself in the study and practice of Buddhism, a religion that echoed many Jesuit precepts. On a 1986 trip to Japan, Jerry had met a Jesuit priest who was expert in Zen. He sent Jerry to a roshi, master teacher, who worked as a hospital administrator and tutored students at night in his backyard meditation room. The roshi invited Jerry to come study. Jerry lived in Kamakura, a seaside town an hour south of Tokyo, where a group of students gathered each night at the zendo, temple, in the master’s yard. “It is about grasping the immediate,15 and breaking through the conditioning that limits every human mind,” Jerry said. He practiced Zen meditation daily and participated in four one-week retreats, two at a Buddhist center and two with the Jesuits.
He grew a beard and spent his days working on a memoir. “What I’m doing is writing for myself,”16 he told a reporter who tracked him down. “I’m comprehensively looking at my experience, both in politics and before, trying to understand more deeply the principles that best describe what I’ve tried to do in politics.” Jerry wrestled with the same questions about power and leadership that had driven him into the seminary, then into politics, and now into the wilderness. The Jesuit motto “Contemplation in Action” sought to mold men who wielded influence through actions based on insights gained through meditation. “All religious traditions aim at the same thing, and that is the removal, or the minimizing or reducing, of the delusions of the self,17 the deceptions of the ego that interfere with a clear understanding of who one is and what life makes possible,” Jerry wrote. “This is all clouded by delusory thinking.”
Three decades after they had entered the seminary at Los Gatos, Jerry sent Frank Damrell a copy of the photo Bart Lally had snapped when he dropped his friends off at Sacred Heart. “Just look at the expression on those faces!”18 Jerry wrote. “What worlds came and went since then! Despite the intervening years, those first, uncertain steps reflect a common purpose that may still be with us.”
En route home from Japan, Jerry stopped in Calcutta, where Damrell’s son was working with Mother Teresa. The three weeks Jerry spent in India made an outsized impression and became a stock paragraph in his biography.
Calcutta assaulted his senses, with polluted air and teeming streets. During the daily six A.M. mass, where several hundred nuns sat on a canvas-covered concrete floor, street noise occasionally drowned out the prayers. At the House of the Pure Heart, fifty dying men lay on two rows of metal cots. Jerry bathed patients, fed them, washed soiled blankets, handed out pills. “I experienced a directness and immediacy that I have rarely before encountered,” he wrote in a Life magazine essay in April 1988. “You see the gratitude or the pain on faces.19 Nothing is filtered by a need to impress anyone.” About a dozen patients died during his three-week stay. Each was wrapped in a white cotton sheet and taken to the small room in back that served as a morgue. Jerry thought about what the nuns at St. Brendan school had said: Pray for a happy death.
“Mother Teresa challenges our whole way of life,” Jerry wrote. “She lives as if it were God himself lying there in the street, crying out for help. What does that mean for how we live each day? This is a question I can’t get out of my mind today, back in America. I think of politics. After all, that’s what I spent a good part of my life doing. Beyond the fascination, the excitement, the ambition, is it possible to really change anything?”
He returned to California on February 8, 1988, the day of the Iowa caucuses, two months shy of his fiftieth birthday. Some of the old Brownies organized a lavish reunion-birthday party, in hopes of jump-starting his political career. They raised tens of thousands of dollars and invited a thousand guests; Jerry vetoed the plan at the last minute. “We tried to hold a 50th birthday party for your son, but he killed the idea.20 That’s what I mean when I say he doesn’t know how to deal with people,” his former top aide B. T. Collins wrote to Pat in frustration. Jerry further alienated some of his staunchest supporters by briefly taking up the cause of antiabortion activists, saying he was inspired by Mother Teresa’s commitment to life.
In his ongoing effort to meld the spiritual with the political, Jerry began to describe politics as “the grammar” of his family life. He layered on that foundation the vocabulary of the Jesuits—Ignatian detachment from creature comforts; being in the world but not of it; the importance of agere contra, going against oneself. His time in Japan had convinced him of the universality of those ideas. “To make change,21 people have to start changing themselves,” he wrote. “Start with yourself. That’s where all the healing takes place. Things take a lot longer than I used to think they did. I used to think big changes happen overnight, but it only happens in a slow growth pattern. No quick fixes around the corner.”
Jerry’s next move was as far from Buddhist meditation as Berkeley in the sixties had been from the seminary. He had found something to run for that he could win: the chairmanship of the California Democratic Party. He would engage in the activity he had so condemned, raising money, and transform the ultimate political hack position into a noble undertaking. Agere contra. “I know in my bones22 what politics is—both its evil and its splendor,” he wrote, “and I see what it can become: the common endeavor through which people come to trust themse
lves and thereby create a community that works, not by repressing difference but by honoring our diversity. It is for that which I am offering myself. Not as another candidate climbing the ladder again, but as a person chastened by experience and fully understanding that the opportunity—the greatest opportunity imaginable—is to serve and serve completely.”
Party rules required that the chairmanship rotate between a Southern and Northern Californian. To qualify, Jerry switched his registration to San Francisco in time for the November 1988 election. He sold the Laurel Canyon house and, with the help of his parents, bought a $1.2 million historic home in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, a restored firehouse built in 1893 for Engine Company 23.
“Yeah, I’ve got some baggage23 out there,” he said as he campaigned among the twenty-eight hundred delegates who would vote in February 1989. “Guess what? I made some mistakes. I made some enemies. Not every appointment turned out the way it should have. Well, I’ve been six years doing penance. And I’m asking you to take me back.” He promised to transform a little-noticed post into something big (“the most exciting Democratic Party in the country”), just as he had done as secretary of state. He promised a major voter registration drive. He promised to meld the old grassroots spirit of the California Democratic Council clubs with the latest high-tech tactics. “My greatest strength,” he said, “is envisioning what hasn’t been and bringing it about.”
The California Democratic Party was in sad shape, weakened in part by the growing divide between rich and poor. The diversified economy that had slowly emerged after World War II looked healthy on paper: California added three million jobs during the 1980s. But the statistics masked a loss of industrial, middle-class jobs. The split was evident across the state—shining cities on the hill with higher-paying jobs for professionals, and struggling cities in the dust with low-paying service jobs and growing numbers of undereducated, unskilled immigrants. Through the 1970s, the poverty rate in California had been roughly the same as the national average, taking into account regional differences. The lines began to diverge sharply after the passage of Prop 13, with California’s poverty rate rising more steeply. In the late 1980s, while the rate declined in most of the country, the number of Californians who struggled on incomes below the poverty level kept climbing. By the end of the decade, more than a quarter of Californians were poor.
The residual impacts of Prop 13 exacerbated the disparities. Affluent communities passed special assessments and bonds to improve their roads, schools, and libraries, while services in poorer communities deteriorated. Blacks and Latinos attended schools that lacked the required courses or quality of teaching to qualify students for admission to the public universities, the traditional route to upward mobility. In 1985, 13 percent of white high school seniors qualified for admission to the University of California, compared to only 4.9 percent of the Latino students and 3.6 percent of the black students. “It appears to me that unwittingly we are evolving into a de facto educational apartheid,”24 Assemblyman Tom Hayden said at a hearing. Tuition and fees had doubled over the past decade, another bar for the working poor. Latinos, the fastest-growing ethnic group, made up one quarter of the population, but only 10 percent of the university enrollment.
Those in the shining cities, who were far more likely to vote, increasingly identified with the Republican Party, which had steadily gained enrollment through the 1980s. No Democratic presidential candidate had carried California since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
“Some would say this is a vindication. I call it a heroic challenge,”25 Jerry said in his acceptance speech after he easily won election as party chair. “People have raised the question as to whether I have enough nuts and bolts26 to make it work.” Democrats in the room laughed. “And only time will tell.” Responding to the Republican glee at the return of Governor Moonbeam, Jerry said theatrically, with his half smile: “For those of you who are worried about this negative aura, remember! I can become the media dark hole that sucks in all the negative feedback and allows our candidate for governor to go into battle unscathed! To victory!”
Political parties, weak or strong, had an institutional longevity comparable only to that of churches and universities, Jerry reasoned. Analyzing his own failures as governor, he concluded he had given experimentation a bad name, in part because there had been weak external support for cutting-edge initiatives. Solar power, wind power, and cogeneration had all been dismissed as flaky ideas, though they eventually became mainstream. A strong Democratic Party, Jerry argued, could move politics off the cautious, poll-driven course that had become the norm. The solution was a party that coupled innovative technology with the neighborhood appeal of old-fashioned political machines, built around the disenfranchised constituencies—immigrants, the poor, and the young.
Jerry hired Marshall Ganz, the former farmworker organizer who had worked on his earlier campaigns, to build an operation for voter registration and organizing. Jerry’s main job was to raise money, and there was never enough. During his first year as chair, the party raised a record $2 million—and spent it all. Alan Cranston, the U.S. senator who had helped found the California Democratic Council and rebuild the party in the 1950s, had been at Jerry’s side when he won election to the party post and promised his support. He had championed Ganz as the person who could help shape the new iteration of a grassroots party. Within months, Cranston became ensnared in scandal for his efforts to help a major donor, Charles Keating, rescue his failing savings and loan.
Democratic registration slipped below 50 percent for first time in fifty-six years, while Republican enrollment neared 40 percent. Jerry lost interest in the organizing plan. He dismissed Ganz and half a dozen staff and abandoned the voter registration drive as too costly. In November 1990, former San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein lost a close race for governor to Pete Wilson. Both were centrists; Feinstein was far to the right of Jerry, and her supporters were not the disenfranchised voters Jerry had hoped to win back. He was blamed for not having done enough to help her campaign. He gained weight, from a lanky 165 pounds to a portly 215, and worried that he looked round, like his father. He had promised to serve four years and not use the party post as a springboard to run for office. “I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll stick to the nuts and bolts,’ ” he recalled in January 1991, after less than two years. “I want to get off the nuts and bolts.”
Two months later, he quit. He expressed disgust with the growing role of money in politics, a particularly acute problem in the vast state of California where campaigns depended on expensive television commercials. He said he would likely run for an open Senate seat the following year. After a few months of reflection, and the reality of a difficult primary against Congresswoman Barbara Boxer, he changed his mind.
In a ten-page letter, Jerry Brown announced to friends and supporters that he would run for president a third time. The campaign would be a quest to reclaim a corrupt political process. He would not accept donations of more than $100. He would raise money through a 1-800 telephone number. “Not for a moment27 do I believe that I am the only person—or even the best person—to undertake this effort,” he wrote in the September 6, 1991, letter. “However by experience, conviction, and circumstance, I am in a position to help open the political door through which many others might walk.” At a campaign kickoff with supporters the same evening in the Firehouse, his Pacific Heights home, underneath a banner with his toll-free number, Jerry compared his quest to Václav Havel’s party in Czechoslovakia and Pat Brown’s organization to restore faith in San Francisco government, the New Order of Cincinnatus. “In a similar vein, what we’re awakening here is that spirit of citizenship, that spirit of democracy28 that’s bursting out all over the world.”
Jerry made his official announcement in Philadelphia in front of Independence Hall, handing out an eight-page speech with four footnotes. He ended with a reference to Thomas Paine’s “American Crisis,” the December 23, 1776, pamphlet that opened with the f
amous lines, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” Pleading with his weary troops to stay through the bitter winter at Valley Forge, George Washington had used Paine’s words to rally the men, and they stepped forward.
“At that moment, America was born,” Jerry said. “These were the Winter Soldiers. And they are why we are here in Philadelphia today. Let each of us step forward and enlist as winter soldiers in the cause of America. Join with me.29 And then, first by the tens, then by the hundreds, then by the thousands and then by the hundreds of thousands, until by the millions, ‘we the people’ reclaim our democracy.”
From the start, the campaign was not so much about winning as being in the game—and carving out a new way to play. Jerry liked to campaign, and he had little to lose. He talked about the “unholy alliance of private greed and corrupt politics” that blurred the lines between the parties and “the hostile takeover engineered by a confederacy of corruption, careerism and campaign consulting.” His anger attracted followers disenchanted with the status quo, and it repelled the establishment. “I’m setting up this campaign in such a way that the emphasis is not on the candidate but on the candidacy, and not a campaign but a cause,” he said. “I am trying to do my best to be a catalyst30 for people to sense that they can now make a difference.”
Like a reformed alcoholic, he swore off the system he had used, worked, and built. He spoke of expiating his political sins and urged others to repent. He castigated his own flaws; who could more expertly condemn the corrupt system than he who had lived with it his entire life? Of course his judgment had been influenced. He was ashamed of the “wining and dining31 of corporate elites … what an absurdity to get money from tobacco companies and the savings and loan industry to fund get-out-the-vote drives among low-income citizens and other victims of corporate misconduct.” He had raised $18 million for campaigns in the last twenty years, he told the Laborers’ International Union convention at Bally’s Resort in Las Vegas. “You have to beg for money32 from the very people who have got to be brought under control. I can tell you, when you’re sitting around the table and you’re having your third glass of wine out of your silver goblets and they serve you the sorbet, you’re not going to talk about fighting for anti-strike-breaking legislation and you’re not going to pound the table, because you’re afraid the crystal will fall over.”