The Browns of California

by Miriam Pawel

  When Jerry took the podium in Madison Square Garden to deliver his defiant address to the national convention, he waited till the chants of “Jer-ry, Jer-ry, Jer-ry” died down and then thanked all his supporters. “I want to thank,” he began, and then choked up, “one other person, who’s not here tonight”—he blinked and swallowed hard, struggling through the sentence—“and is missing his first—convention—since the Depression.” Then his voice regained its strength, as the audience cheered. “A man who beat President Nixon in 1962 and almost stopped Ronald Reagan in 1966, and in my view is the greatest Democrat in this country! My father, Pat Brown!51 Dad,” he said, looking into the camera and raising his arm in salute, “thanks a lot for all you’ve done.”

  After the speech, Jerry called home to see what his father thought of the address. Pat had been having fewer and fewer good days. He had fallen asleep and missed the speech.

  18

  A Different Shade of Brown

  The guest speaker looked poised, sipping coffee in salmon blazer and black skirt, as Pamela Harriman delivered her introduction at the Woman’s National Democratic Club luncheon in April 1992. Harriman, whose Georgetown home had become a social mecca and fundraising machine for Democrats-in-exile during the 1980s, opened with an anecdote. “I happened to be seated at dinner next to one of our nation’s most influential political writers the other night. And of course the conversation turned to national politics. Out of the blue, he said, ‘I’ve met the woman most likely to be president in my lifetime.’ ” Harriman paused, grinned as applause and a few whoops rippled through the room in anticipation, then slowly delivered her punch line to accentuate each syllable: “Her name—you guessed it—was Kath—leen—Brown.”

  Kathleen wrinkled up her face, a combination laugh and wince that conveyed modesty, excitement, embarrassment, and ambition all at once. The guests had been invited to lunch with the California state treasurer. The subtext was a chance for Washington power brokers to meet the youngest and most promising Brown, with her father’s charm, her mother’s style, and her brother’s political instincts. She had not quite realized what she was walking into. She might have dressed differently, or written a different speech.

  “I am a proud Californian,1 fourth generation, so I kind of take in stride a lot of this East Coast bad-mouthing of California,” she began, with gentle jabs at journalists who delighted in endless stories about California’s imminent demise and New Yorkers who viewed the state as little more than an exporter of fruits, nuts, and oddball trends. “I don’t even mind it when they say, ‘Oh, that California, they just brought America hula hoops, channelers, Ronald Reagan, and … Jerry Brown. It’s okay. It speaks to our diversity. It speaks to our ability to generate and manage new ideas and new trends.”

  In a talk imbued with her father’s spirit, she focused on California’s exceptionalism, its resilience, and its role in defining America’s future. The recent recession had caused multi-billion-dollar budget deficits and staggering jobs losses, particularly severe because of retrenchment in the defense spending that underlay so much of the state’s economy. But the downturn forced a diversification that repositioned California well. Defense spending was now less than 10 percent of the overall state economy. California had added six million people in the past decade, many of them young. “It means that our state constantly changes, constantly evolves, and we reinvent our self almost in whole each decade, because twenty percent of our population is new,” Kathleen said. “It means we can’t be stuck in our old ways; it means we have got to be future-looking.”

  She pointed to the cutting-edge environmental standards for cars and appliances that California had enacted years ago—initially denounced by corporate America as implausible, eventually emulated worldwide. California led the country in its diversity, an advantage in the emerging global economy. The state was home to more Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese, Mexicans, and Russians than anyplace outside their home countries. Demographers predicted the state would be “majority minority” in less than a decade. “I suspect that if we were to seek clues as to what our nation’s future is going to be all about,” Kathleen said, “we would do well to look at California.”

  East Coast journalists’ schadenfreude notwithstanding, California had rebounded after each boom-and-bust cycle since the Gold Rush. To make the point more personal, Kathleen finished with a story about her son, whom she had dragged cross-country from Los Angeles to New York and then back. After his first day at yet another new school, she asked the fifteen-year-old how he was doing. “Mom,” he said, “what fails to destroy me will only make me stronger.” Where, she asked in surprise, had he learned that? “Uncle Jerry.” The audience laughed.

  Though the teenager got the Nietzsche quote from his uncle, the sentiment was pure Kathleen. She described herself as a relentless optimist, a risk taker who believed that the worst misfortunes were great opportunities in disguise. Her path to the Washington podium was as nonlinear as her brother’s political career, and the influence of family loomed even larger. She had the benefit and the burden of not only her father’s history, but her brother’s.

  Like Jerry, Kathy had grown up in politics, with more exposure and less ambivalence. Ever since Election Day 1958, when cameras flashed and the thirteen-year-old daughter of the governor-elect found herself looking “extremely goofy” in the paper the next day, she realized she lived in a fishbowl. Her father’s unhappiness at the lack of history requirements in her junior high school became front page news about curriculum reform. She made the state police drop her off blocks from school to minimize embarrassment. She traveled the world, a teenager dining with heads of state. She enjoyed VIP seats at Olympic events. Always competitive (her earliest campaign slogan was “Give the Crown to Kathy Brown”), she won election as class vice president her first year in Sacramento junior high and lost a race for secretary the next, to her father’s chagrin. “I suppose I am prejudiced but I think she is a wonderful girl,”2 he wrote in his diary.

  Pat doted on Kathy, and she returned the affection. If he told everyone they should run for public office, he told his youngest daughter twice as often. “Everyone thinks that Kathy is Pat’s favorite,”3 Bernice said. “But that’s only because he always liked the baby and she was the last so she’ll always be the baby.”

  Born a few months too early to officially count as a baby boomer, Kathy grew up in an era just beginning to accept that women could have careers. A mother at twenty, she had left Stanford and put a professional life on hold while her husband attended law school. She juggled childcare with finishing her degree long distance. Back in Los Angeles, her plan to become a social worker was derailed when the graduate school at UCLA refused to place a pregnant woman in a work assignment.

  Like her father, she connected with people on a personal, human level. She remembered names and faces and facts. At a phone bank fundraiser for Stanford, if a hundred alumni were making calls, the prize for the one who raised the most money would go to Kathy. When she campaigned for her brother, she focused on issues that interested her, education and women’s rights. She talked about the need to revamp textbooks that showed women only as nurses, never doctors. Her speaker biography listed her hobbies as photography, tennis, skiing, tap dancing, macramé, and reading historical novels.

  Within weeks of Jerry’s victory in November 1974, Kathy Brown Rice announced she would challenge J. C. Chambers, a sixteen-year incumbent and archconservative on the Los Angeles school board. She planned a $50,000 radio and mail campaign and was endorsed by both California senators, five congressmen, and dozens of state legislators. Governor Pat sent out a fundraising letter and Governor Jerry took time after a Regents meeting to campaign with his sister at the Farmers Market, a Los Angeles landmark. Kathleen dealt with the family issue with the forthrightness common to all the Browns: “I was raised in a family where public office is one of the highest callings4 we can aspire to,” Kathleen said. “I would not expect anyone to vote for me beca
use my name is Brown,5 but I would not expect them to hold it against me.”

  The siblings’ styles drew inevitable comparisons, usually in Kathleen’s favor. At twenty-nine, she had been hosting dinner parties for years, and the Rice house in the upscale neighborhood of Hancock Park was a social hub. Jerry felt comfortable bringing dates there, out of the public glare. And he preached limits to his sister even as he enjoyed her hospitality. “He always comes here and says I should lower my standard of living,”6 Kathleen told an interviewer.

  Kathleen Brown easily defeated an incumbent in her first campaign in 1975, becoming the youngest person ever elected to the Los Angeles school board. (Courtesy of George A. Rice)

  Her 1975 campaign coincided with a concerted effort to groom more women candidates in California, where they were all but absent from elected office. One woman sat on the Los Angeles City Council, one each on the school board and community college board, one in the forty-three-member congressional delegation, and two in the state Assembly. No woman had ever been elected to the state Senate.

  Kathleen won the school board race in a landslide. No one kept records, but she was believed to be the youngest member ever on a board viewed as a stepping-stone to higher office. “I’m twenty-nine and a half,7 and I don’t intend to stay on the board of education until I’m eighty,” she said when asked about her aspirations. She was sworn in on July 1, 1975, along with Diane Watson, who would become the first black woman (and second woman) elected to the state Senate, and Julian Nava, who would become the first Mexican American to serve as U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

  Kathleen sat on the board during a period of wrenching change in the nation’s second-largest school district, reflecting demographic and political trends that reshaped not only the Los Angeles schools, but all of Southern California.

  The dominant issue facing the board in the mid-1970s was whether and how to comply with a court order to desegregate schools that were starkly divided by race. The case dated from 1961, when Mary Ellen Crawford, a black teenager, was denied admission to South Gate High School, near her home and 98 percent white. She was sent to the more distant, all-black Jordan High. Two years later, the ACLU filed a class action suit on her behalf, citing a precedent-setting case out of Pasadena in which the California Supreme Court had ruled that segregation violated the state constitution, regardless of whether or why racial separation occurred. In federal court, plaintiffs had to prove that a school board officially sanctioned segregation. The lower threshold in California courts meant an area like Los Angeles could not use its long history of exclusionary zoning and racist covenants as an excuse to maintain segregated schools.

  “For more than a decade this court has adhered to the position that school boards in this state bear a constitutional obligation8 to attempt to alleviate school segregation, regardless of its cause,” Supreme Court Justice Mathew Tobriner wrote in a June 28, 1976 decision that affirmed the order to desegregate Los Angeles schools. In the thirteen years since the Crawford case had been filed, Tobriner wrote, the school board had stonewalled and made no effort to improve the second-rate conditions, faculty, and curriculum in the ninety-two schools that were more than 90 percent black.

  Like many things in Los Angeles, the sheer size of the district complicated an emotional, highly charged political process. The Los Angeles Unified School District had six hundred thousand students in six hundred schools, spread out over 714 square miles. The far-flung geography compounded the isolation of the different communities and the logistic difficulty of integration. The predominantly white schools amid the postwar tract homes of the San Fernando Valley were separated from the heavily black areas to the south by the Santa Monica Mountains.

  The election of Kathleen and Diane Watson restored a liberal majority on the board, sympathetic to the goal of integration and willing to comply with the court order. Kathleen’s position fluctuated, as did the board’s, veering from voluntary to mandatory busing plans and back. She respected the right of black children to quality education, and the anger of white parents who felt their children were being punished for societal injustice. “So here I sit9 as a board member, trying to balance these rights, these interests, and these very, very legitimate concerns,” she said at a board meeting in 1977. “I don’t think that integrated education ought to be a punishment. I have said I don’t think it should be a penance. I think that it should be the best quality education that this district and public education can provide.”

  In September 1978, a thousand buses carried more than forty thousand students to new schools. Within six months, about thirty thousand students, 15 percent of the district’s white enrollment, had withdrawn from the public schools. White students, a majority in the district just a few years earlier, now made up just 20 percent of the lower grades. Despite the court order, Kathleen voted with the majority to end the integration trial in hopes of stemming further white flight. She defended the switch as a bow to reality. “I think reasonable people can have honest differences10 about what in the end will achieve the goal of an integrated society,” she said. “I have lost, in some ways, my tolerance for those who shouted at us at the hearings, for those who said, ‘Hell no, we won’t go.’ I don’t buy that. But I also have strong feelings about those who, in the name of righteousness, have shown a certain arrogance to basic human and paternal feelings, whether they are brown, black, or white.”

  The political ramifications long outlived the busing fight. Los Angeles’s traditionally liberal Jewish community splintered, leaving a conservative faction in the San Fernando Valley. Bobbi Fiedler, one of the leaders of the opposition to busing, was elected to the school board, went on to unseat a Democratic congressman in 1980, and then led efforts to turn the San Fernando Valley into what would have been the nation’s sixth-largest city. State legislation temporarily derailed the secession campaign but did little to dampen the underlying sense of a separate identity in the suburban communities north of Mulholland Drive.

  The second demographic trend with far-reaching consequences during Kathleen’s tenure on the board was the burgeoning number of non-English speakers, mostly Mexicans, who would soon become the largest ethnic group in Los Angeles. Although essentially left out of the Crawford case, Mexicans were the fastest-growing ethnic group in the city and the schools. Latino students outnumbered whites for the first time in 1977 and two years later made up almost 40 percent of the district’s enrollment. While classrooms in the San Fernando Valley had more and more empty desks,11 Union Avenue Elementary School near downtown struggled on double sessions to educate more than two thousand kids in a school built for half as many. The majority were recent immigrants from Mexico who spoke little or no English. Asians were a relatively small but growing percentage of students in the district, as Southern California became the prime destination for immigrants from Southeast Asia. Because mass immigration was often triggered by crises abroad, the sudden, unpredictable waves of non-English-speaking refugees overwhelmed the schools. When thousands of Vietnamese refugees moved into a Los Angeles neighborhood in 1979, the local schools faced severe overcrowding.

  As the Los Angeles school district grappled with the difficulty of educating an influx of English learners from an increasing number of countries, the state assumed control of public education financing in the wake of Prop 13. The combined fiscal and educational challenges crippled the district, leading even more middle-class parents to opt for private schools. By 1979, the Los Angeles district had so few white students that integration became largely moot. The same year, voters approved a constitutional amendment that relieved districts of the responsibility to desegregate through mandatory busing, abolishing the stricter threshold that had been imposed by the California Supreme Court.

  Kathleen was easily reelected in March 1979, amid speculation she would soon run for higher office. Interviewers began to ask whether she planned to become the first woman elected governor in California. Then on Memorial Day 1979, her husband told her he was leav
ing her. She stayed in the house for days, then fled to her childhood home on Magellan Avenue in San Francisco, where her sister lived. But just as she would later describe the resilience of California, Kathleen bounced back. In July, she went on a blind date with Van Gordon Sauter, the manager of television station KNXT and a frequent conservative commentator on the local CBS affiliate. Sauter had seen Kathleen on television and wondered how anyone so attractive could have such bad politics. Incensed over a recent decision to ban candy bars from school vending machines, he called school board members “chronic bedwetters12 and mystical social engineers.” Kathleen agreed to the date as an opportunity to argue with the man who regularly lambasted her positions in editorial commentaries. Sauter, dressed in his customary bow tie, blue blazer, khaki pants, and shoes without socks, told her over dessert at Le St. Germain on Melrose that they would marry. A year later, they did.

  Two weeks before the wedding, Sauter was named president of the CBS Sports Division in New York. After considering options that included commuting on weekends, Kathleen decided to resign from the school board and join him in New York. “It was a matter of love,”13 she said after moving into a Park Avenue co-op. “It was also a matter of priorities, and a belief that I’m only putting my career on hold.” Her oldest daughter stayed with her father, while the two younger children moved to New York. “If someone had told me two years ago today that I would be remarried, living twelve stories in the sky in this town, had quit my job on the board of education and abandoned my political career in California, I would have asked them what they were smoking,” Kathleen said. “But my life changed.”

  She settled into the role of corporate executive’s spouse, with a weekend home in Connecticut. Tom and Meredith Brokaw lived downstairs and became close friends. Kathleen organized neighbors to fight a proposed high-rise around the corner. She described herself as “the house radical14 … bringing my California environmental understanding to New York.” She thought about opening a Tex-Mex restaurant to have a place to drink margaritas. Instead, she enrolled at Fordham Law School. Riding the subway downtown to the Manhattan district attorney’s office for a summer internship, in the popular New York uniform of Walkman and running shoes, she had a sense of wonder. “I looked uptown at that skyline and said, ‘I cannot believe this, a Magellan Avenue kid15 … I work in New York City and I’m going to be a lawyer.’ It was pretty special.”