by Miriam Pawel
In New York, Kathleen gained new appreciation for the expansiveness of California, in space and people. She could drive through several states in the Northeast in less time than it would take to drive the length of Los Angeles County, without traffic. She found New Yorkers quick to make judgments about outsiders. “People here don’t have time for newcomers,16 so they make fast connections based on who you are, whom you’re married to, whom you know,” Kathleen wrote after five years in the city. Her life didn’t fit into the neat boxes. “In California, there’s more openness to new people and new ideas.”
In early 1987, she returned home. Sauter, who had risen to head of CBS News, was ousted during a management shuffle. After six years away from California, Kathleen was eager to revive her political career, and the family moved back to Los Angeles. Kathleen had started work as a bond lawyer in the New York office of O’Melveny & Myers and she transferred to the firm’s home office in Los Angeles. The junior attorney’s small cubicle was strategically located next to the office of senior partner Warren Christopher, once an adviser to her father, now an influential city leader.
By fall, Kathleen had made her first move. She was named by Mayor Bradley to a seat on the Board of Public Works, a plum appointment that involved overseeing trash, sewers, lights, and contracts for major construction projects. By early 1988, she had all but declared as a candidate for state treasurer, a post that fitted her interests and expertise in municipal finance and looked like a winnable race after the death of longtime incumbent Jesse Unruh.
Big Daddy Unruh, the shrewd, flamboyant Democrat who had run the Assembly and feuded with Pat Brown, had never ascended to the governor’s office he coveted, denied the chance when Pat ran for a third term and then defeated in 1970 by Ronald Reagan. Instead, in 1974, Unruh was elected state treasurer, and over the next thirteen years he transformed the post into a powerful political and financial platform. As treasurer, he found no shortage of opportunities to act on the adage he popularized: “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” He oversaw investment strategies for the $17-billion-a-year state portfolio and sat on boards that invested another $50 billion in state pension funds. Wall Street firms competed for the business, and Unruh was quick to leverage campaign contributions for Democrats. He became what the Wall Street Journal called the most powerful public finance official outside the federal treasury. When Unruh died in office in August 1987, Deukmejian appointed as his successor Thomas Hayes, a little-known Republican who had been auditor general. His first campaign would be the race for a full term in 1990.
At the national Democratic convention in the summer of 1988, Pat Brown hosted a poolside brunch at the Atlanta Hilton for the California delegation. At eighty-three the oldest member of the delegation, Pat introduced his daughter as “the most astute politician in the family.” Back home a week later, Pat sent Kathleen a story about the event. “I intend to send you all my clippings—you can save them, treasure them or throw them out,” he wrote his daughter. “In every speech I make, I tell them that you will be Governor17 one day. Sometimes I even mention that you are also running for State Treasurer (!)”
Pat was at his daughter’s side when she made her formal announcement on March 5, 1988. “It seems everywhere I go18 there are people there to tell me they were touched by some positive activity of my father’s or my brother’s administration,” she said.
Her campaign coincided with Jerry’s term as chair of the state Democratic Party. He joined his parents in cosponsoring Kathleen’s first fundraiser, a $1,000-a-person dinner at Chasen’s, a Hollywood favorite of the older entertainment crowd, with booths named after regulars like Frank Sinatra, James Stewart, and Groucho Marx. A few weeks later, Kathleen held a $500-a-person fundraiser at the old Governor’s Mansion where she had grown up, long uninhabited and now a state historic site. She used a line that she would proffer dozens of times in the coming months: “I’m a different shade of Brown.”19
Kathleen was comfortable with the political nuts and bolts her brother eschewed: raising money, mingling with crowds, talking one on one, closing deals. “Kathleen is more natural,20 I think,” Pat said. “She says things that she believes and she says them well. Jerry is more serious. He’s more intense in his political views.” Asked about a report that at Jerry’s fiftieth birthday party, Pat called Kathleen the “real politician in the family,” Jerry responded, “Well, she is. Anyway, what makes you think I want to be known as a politician?”
“She finds the time to do nice little things, thank people, and people complained that Jerry didn’t do that,” Bernice said. “Jerry creates very strong feelings, one way or the other. People are either devoted to him or they don’t like him at all. Everybody likes Kathy,21 Democrats and Republicans.”
Family and friends from earlier years still called her Kathy; those who knew her professionally called her Kathleen. She cited as role models the wives of two television anchors, Meredith Brokaw and Jean Rather, and Texas governor Ann Richards, who had jumped to the top office after serving as state treasurer. Being a Brown, Kathleen said, was a two-edged sword. “The first test in politics is to get your name known, to rise above the noise level of the crowd … I have an advantage there. Once people identify and become familiar with me as a Brown, my task is to color Kathleen Brown in. I am not my father. I am not my brother. I hope I am the best of both22 of them. And why not?”
Roger Ailes, who ran her opponent’s campaign, derided Kathleen as “Sister Moonbeam,” interested in the treasurer’s job only as a stepping-stone to the governorship. Kathleen called Ailes “the mudslinging media guru who made Willie Horton a household name,” referring to the infamous ad against Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. She ran a $1.5 million blitz of television commercials in the final two weeks. Hayes ran a last-minute ad that asked “Remember Jerry Brown?” Kathleen eked out a narrow victory, carrying the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and coastal counties to win by fewer than 232,000 votes out of more than seven million.
Despite her slim margin and bare-bones political portfolio, she became a national name overnight on the strength of her personal charm and political pedigree. Washington Post columnist David Broder noted that California Republicans had appeared on seven of the last ten national tickets, while no Democrat from the most populous state ever ran as the party’s presidential or vice presidential candidate. With Kathleen as state treasurer, Broder wrote, “California will finally have a statewide Democratic official with the potential to be on the national ticket.”23
California law required that state officials be sworn in by a judge or prosecutor. The Los Angeles district attorney deputized Pat Brown for a day so that he could do the honor. A welcome rain broke weeks of drought and a crowd of a couple hundred stood under umbrellas outside what would be Kathleen’s new office. Dozens of relatives came, and some of Pat’s old staff members. After Pat administered the oath of office, someone asked why he had never sworn in his son. Pat laughed. “He never asked me.24 He didn’t need me. You know Jerry.”
Timing was everything, Pat Brown often said. Kathleen might have been anointed as the next gubernatorial candidate regardless, but timing turned the process into a virtual coronation. She took office the same year Republican Pete Wilson became governor, as California struggled through a deep recession at the end of a decade that had not been kind to the Golden State. The number of Californians who rated their state as “one of the best places to live” dropped from an average of 75 percent in earlier years to 60 percent in 1989. Even a 1989 hometown World Series, pitting the Oakland Athletics against the San Francisco Giants, turned from celebration into tragedy. Millions watched on national television as the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake disrupted game 3 with an interminable fifteen seconds of shaking that left sixty-seven people dead, caused $7 billion in damage, and flattened parts of two major freeways.
By 1990, a decade of living under Prop 13 had left overcrowded schools, broken-down parks, and crumbling roads. Many supporters of th
e tax cut initiative had not favored reduced services—they just wanted property tax relief and believed government could find other ways to pay for programs. The state surplus that cushioned the first few years evaporated. The loss of billions of dollars in property tax revenue, compounded by dramatic drops in income and sales taxes during the recession, led to deficits and budget cuts.
Education suffered most severely. In 1990, California spent $4,000 per pupil, about half of what New York State spent on its students. Schools and public colleges that had once drawn so many to the state now posted test scores among the lowest in the country. Los Angeles schools struggled to educate students who spoke a hundred different languages, and the trends with which Kathleen had grappled a decade earlier had spread across the state. Voters approved another milestone (or millstone, some would contend), Proposition 98, designed to guarantee a minimum level of spending on kindergarten through community college students. The formulae that stemmed from that 1988 initiative were so complex that only a handful of people even understood them. The increased reliance on “ballot box budgeting” left state officials even less flexibility.
The first budget Governor Wilson signed in July 1991 included $7 billion in tax increases and $7 billion in spending cuts. Over the next year, the state lost tens of thousands more jobs. In 1992, a sixty-four-day budget deadlock forced the state to issue IOUs in lieu of tax refunds for the first time since the Depression. The state’s credit rating plummeted, which increased the cost of borrowing. As manager of the state’s $24 billion investment portfolio, Treasurer Brown had a pulpit from which to criticize the state’s precarious fiscal condition, and its Republican governor.
Californians had approved term limits; if Kathleen ran for reelection and served a second term as treasurer, the governor’s race would be wide open in 1998. But the pressure for her to challenge the incumbent grew. The Draft Brown movement gained momentum in June 1992, when Californians made history by electing women in Democratic primaries for both of the state’s Senate seats. “It’s a great day to be a girl!”25 Kathleen proclaimed at a luncheon fundraiser she hosted for Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, who would go on to represent California in Washington for many years. Kathleen traveled the state helping women candidates for local offices. Magazines wrote about her with headlines like BORN TO RUN. Her friends were quoted saying it was destiny. Kathleen appeared to be less convinced. “It’s kind of scary26—people talking about me running for governor, putting their cards in my pocket,” she told Gail Sheehy in the fall of 1992 when the writer visited the treasurer’s office.
Crime rates, unemployment, and tuition fees at the university all went up. Wilson’s ratings sank to an all-time low. Three quarters of the people polled by the Los Angeles Times in March 1993 believed the state was on the wrong track. In a hypothetical matchup, Kathleen led Wilson by 22 points. The Economist portrayed the governor as a brooding king in his castle. “Outside the walls, the kingdom, after many years of plenty, has fallen on unhappy times. Natural disasters—drought, flood and fire—roll across the land. The people feel accursed. Support is ebbing away to a fair princess,27 whose brother and father both ruled the land before her.”
In the months that followed, in the candidacy that became an inevitability, Kathleen Brown struggled to find her voice, to define a rationale under the constant glare of electoral combat. She changed campaign managers midstream and seemed to doubt her own political instincts. But she did not waver in her core values, among them, family. “I am incredibly proud28 of my brother’s and my father’s legacy in this state,” she said. “They touched something, each in their own distinctive way, very powerful, that is part of what I think the California dream is about, the California psyche is about, and to be part of that legacy is pretty daunting.”
She forfeited a prime-time speaking slot at the 1992 convention because she supported her brother and refused to endorse Bill Clinton. “I’m not into repudiating family,” she said. “I’m a Brown and I’m proud of it and I’m not going to do anything that would not make me feel good to be a Brown at the end of the day. Family transcends politics.”29
She grimaced good-naturedly about her mother’s response when asked on national television which of her offspring was smarter. “I think Jer—well, I—Kathy is smart. Don’t misunderstand. But Jerry’s brilliant,”30 Bernice said on 60 Minutes.
Kathleen disregarded advisers who saw Jerry as a liability and prevailed upon her reluctant brother to join family members on February 8, 1994, when she announced her candidacy on the steps of the San Francisco police station where their Grandfather Layne once worked. “I wanted him there and it was important to me. He’s my brother,”31 Kathleen said. “I said, ‘Hey, this is family.’ ” In the end, he unexpectedly bounded on the dais and kissed his sister. The public confusion mirrored the more worrisome confusion behind the scenes—a candidate buffeted by conflicting advice and unsure whom to trust. At the end of every day, Kathleen gave her cell phone to her press secretary, Michael Reese. Jerry had a habit of calling in the early morning hours. Kathleen didn’t want to be awakened, but she wanted to hear his thoughts. So Reese took the calls.
Pete Wilson was a seasoned politician, a veteran of multiple statewide campaigns with a strong, experienced team. By the time the campaign got under way, the unpopular tax increases had improved the state’s financial stability. Kathleen might still have won an election that was a referendum on the Wilson record. Instead, he skillfully focused the campaign on issues that put her on the defensive—crime and immigration. Once again, a candidate piggybacked on that powerful California weapon, the initiative.
At the December 9, 1993, funeral of Polly Klaas, the twelve-year-old Petaluma girl whose kidnapping and murder became a national symbol of wanton crime, Wilson endorsed a Three Strikes ballot initiative. The measure that became Prop 184 was the strictest such law in any state, doubling sentences for second offenders and making life sentences mandatory no matter the severity of the third offense. Four days after Klaas was mourned by thousands and eulogized by Wilson, Kathleen outlined a detailed agenda to combat crime. She hoped her plan would neutralize her personal opposition to the death penalty.
It didn’t. By June, when it was clear that Republicans were effectively exploiting the death penalty issue, Kathleen returned to her childhood home, the Mansion at Sixteenth and H. She stood in the room where her father had wrestled with life-and-death decisions and told reporters that no daughter who had grown up watching the agony of Pat Brown could in good conscience support the death penalty. She recalled walking into the house through crowds of chanting demonstrators each time an execution approached. She talked about sneaking downstairs when her father went to sleep to read the black binders filled with the details of each case, the photos and letters from families of victims and death row inmates. Pat Brown had commuted twenty-three sentences and allowed thirty-six executions to proceed. He took office believing capital punishment was a necessary evil and left believing it was morally wrong, an ineffective deterrent, inequitably enforced.
“There is no way that I, Kathleen Brown, could possibly change my personal views on capital punishment for they are too rooted in the values32 that were passed on to me by my father,” she said. “A change would represent a repudiation of what he taught me, of what he endured for his beliefs, and for what he instilled in me about the fundamental responsibilities that come with holding public office.”
She pledged to uphold the law of the state, regardless of her personal beliefs. Ultimately, she supported the Three Strikes proposition, too. But her opposition to capital punishment, and the record of her father and brother, enabled Wilson to capitalize on what should have been a weakness—crime rates had risen for a decade under Republican administrations. Instead, Wilson played to voters’ stereotypes of women as weak on criminal justice issues. His media consultant, Don Sipple, did commercials for gubernatorial candidates in California, Texas, and Illinois, all running against women, that underscored t
he same theme. “Kathleen, you lack the courage,”33 Wilson said in a debate.
Fears about crime, the number one issue in polls, tied into an equally potent issue, immigration. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese internment to mass Mexican deportations during the Depression, immigrants had often served as a convenient scapegoat in times of stress. For the still overwhelmingly white California electorate, frustrated with a sluggish economy, burdened by new taxes, worried about crime, and apprehensive about becoming a minority, Mexicans who had immigrated illegally became an appealing target.
California had always had an above average percentage of foreign-born residents,34 starting with the Gold Rush that drew immigrants from around the world. From a high of 38 percent foreign-born population in 1870, the share declined gradually to a low of around 10 percent from 1950 through 1970, still almost twice the national average. When immigration quotas were abolished in 1965, the numbers climbed rapidly in California, much faster than in the country as a whole. By 1990, more than one out of five Californians had been born in another country. Those 6.5 million people accounted for nearly one third of all immigrants in the United States.
Because of geography and opportunity, California also led the country in the number of immigrants who arrived without legal papers, eager to escape poverty and violence and to work at minimum wage jobs that still paid far more than they could earn back home. Of the six million people who moved to California in the 1980s, the best estimates suggested more than a quarter were undocumented immigrants. Most crossed the relatively porous border from Mexico, in flows that correlated closely with the vicissitudes of economic opportunity. In the early 1980s, when the California economy was relatively stagnant, about a hundred thousand undocumented immigrants arrived each year, working primarily in agriculture, gardening, construction, and service jobs. In the second half of the decade, the California economy picked up, wages in manufacturing jobs in Mexico declined, and the value of the peso dropped dramatically. The number of illegal border crossers surged, peaking at around two hundred thousand in 1989.