by Miriam Pawel
“With this big entrance of Arnold Schwarzenegger … it is going to be like a tidal wave,” Jerry said on Fox News television hours after the bodybuilder and action movie star jumped into the race. “He’s like a tsunami coming at us.”48 Jerry saw little chance that Davis could retain his job.
Asked whether he, too, would enter the race, Jerry said, “No. It’s not my time right now.” He had a different path to Sacramento in mind.
Schwarzenegger, a moderate who would have had difficulty winning a primary among the state’s conservative Republican voters, dominated the short, spectacular campaign. He had no difficulty with name recognition and offered an exuberant alternative to the staid, cautious Davis. “Hasta la vista, car tax!” Schwarzenegger declared, updating his famous line from Terminator 2 as he watched a crane drop a 3,600-pound wrecking ball on an Oldsmobile painted with the words “Davis Car Tax.” Married into the Kennedy clan, he attracted Democratic support through his wife, Maria Shriver, who took a leave from her television news job to campaign for her husband. Schwarzenegger vowed to end the dysfunctional culture in Sacramento. “Money goes in. Favors go out. The people lose,” he intoned in his Austrian accent on one of his television spots.
“Though Schwarzenegger ran as a Republican, he was the candidate of voter rebellion49 who came from outside the party machinery,” Jerry said on election night, speaking as something of an expert on running as an outsider and crusading against the role of money in politics. Davis was overwhelmingly recalled, and Schwarzenegger coasted to victory in the October 7, 2003, election. Jerry knew better than the governor-elect what he would soon face, trying to stabilize a financially precarious budget with little room to maneuver. “The governor, in reality, has discretionary spending capability of about one half to one percent,” Jerry said. “The idea that a governor of California has any real decision-making capacity is highly exaggerated.”
One of Davis’s last acts in office was to appoint Kathleen Kelly to the San Francisco Superior Court, where she was sworn in by her uncle, Oakland mayor Jerry Brown. Her application had been stalled for years amid concern that there might be a political backlash against Davis as a result of her family’s well-known opposition to the death penalty.
Kelly’s greatest advocate, perhaps most responsible for the appointment, did not live to see her granddaughter sworn in. Bernice Layne Brown doted on all her grandchildren, but pretty much everyone believed Kathleen Kelly was her favorite. Kelly had devoted her career to juvenile justice, working for the San Francisco city attorney. Convinced that her oldest granddaughter belonged on the bench, Bernice felt so strongly about it that she lobbied Davis herself. Bernice, the precocious student who grew up to be the governor’s wife, was simultaneously content with her own life and full of the highest aspirations for her granddaughters, whose options were so vastly different in the twenty-first century.
Bernice had been in poor health for several years, confined to a wheelchair and blind, but her mind had remained sharp. She died on May 9, 2002. “She was the steady hand50 behind my father, and made everything work in the family,” Jerry said. “She had a very strong will.” He arranged the funeral at St. Brendan’s Church, near their old Magellan Avenue home, although his mother had never had any use for religion. In her eulogy, Kathleen Kelly recalled the frugality that led Bernice to use assorted souvenir dishes from golf tournaments instead of fine china and to pinch the stems out of strawberries with tweezers so as not to waste any fruit—and the generosity Grandma showered on her offspring, especially during their annual Christmas trips.
Jerry spoke of how his mother had broken down in tears when he went into the Jesuit seminary, one of the two times anyone remembered Bernice losing her composure. He had only just learned that from his aunt Connie. He returned to a familiar theme—the comfort of structure. “The thought I kept having was she created the order51 so I could indulge in disorder. The order was so powerful and all-pervasive that I never had to worry about how much chaos and disorder I would create.”
By the summer of 2003, just six months into his second term as mayor, Jerry began to talk about running for attorney general in 2006. “I would say that nothing in my past52 shows that my ambition is limited,” he said to filmmaker Stephen Talbot, who was working on a documentary about the Oakland mayor entitled The Celebrity and the City. Jerry paused. “I’m too old to change that.”
After a six-year hiatus, he rejoined the Democratic Party in August 2003. A year later, he moved out of the We the People commune, and moved in with Anne Gust. They lived in a loft in the old Sears Roebuck building on Telegraph Avenue, which had been renovated into fifty-four live/work units around an open atrium. From the rooftop patio they could see a Korean barbecue restaurant, a check cashing store, a metal plating shop, and a crack house.
Around the same time, Jerry parted ways with his longtime friend Jacques Barzaghi, who had worked in City Hall since Jerry took office. Pressure to jettison Barzaghi had increased since an investigation triggered by a sexual harassment claim revealed that all nineteen women who worked around him complained about inappropriate comments or gestures. The city settled the case for $50,000 and he was demoted to a nonsupervisory job. With a loyalty that surprised few of his longtime friends, Jerry stubbornly refused to believe the complaints. “Jacques is a catalytic element in the mix of advisers I have,” he said. “I understand he’s not everybody’s favorite53 person, but he’s quite remarkable.” In July 2004, when Barzaghi’s sixth wife called police to report she had been pushed down the stairs, the Brown-Barzaghi alliance finally came to an end. He was fired, and left town.
In Oakland, the debates would continue over who profited most from the symbiotic relationship between the city and its celebrity mayor who would soon be moving on. Community groups criticized his focus on downtown and market rate housing, arguing that other neighborhoods got shortchanged and the crisis of affordable housing had worsened. He antagonized black supporters and roiled City Hall when he abruptly fired the black city manager, acting in a manner the city attorney compared to “an eight-year-old with an ant farm:54 Turn it upside down and shake it to see what happens.” The military school struggled, with high staff turnover and mixed results. Crime went down and the police force increased from 620 to about 800 officers, but homicides spiked at the end of his tenure, and the police department weathered a major scandal. Property values rose, good for some, difficult for poor people more likely to face eviction.
Jerry came close to his goal of ten thousand new people downtown, and stores and restaurants began to follow. He attracted an estimated $1 billion in investment. He gave the city spirit. They had a famous mayor who walked around the worst neighborhoods by himself and reported drug dealers and slumlords. An Oakland Tribune columnist55 at a journalists’ convention in Ohio reported that her peers were excited to see Oakland on her nametag and asked about the mayor, not the crime rates.
In the end, Jerry left Oakland with what he needed. Two decades after the consultants had said Jerry would have to be taken seriously in order to have a political future, he finally was. A dozen years after he had been a political has-been fighting to deliver a speech in Madison Square Garden, he had become a player once again.
Always interested in disseminating his message unvarnished, Jerry jumped on the latest trend and became one of the first politicians to blog. In its first six days in early 2005, the Mayor’s Blog got twenty thousand hits. Jerry blogged about new solar power installations, charter schools, and parolees. He described the inauguration of Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Mexican American mayor of Los Angeles, and the groundbreaking for a Whole Foods that would be the first major supermarket in downtown Oakland in decades. He quoted Schopenhauer, who said “extracting truth from oneself required putting one’s mind on a rack and subjecting it to relentless interrogation.” He mused about Mortimer Adler, Saint Paul, and Allen Ginsberg. And he announced more personal news.
“I’ve been absent from the blogosphere, but for
a good cause,”56 he posted on April 15, 2005. “I got engaged and will be married on the steps of City Hall in June.” He had proposed to Anne Gust on her birthday, after cooking her chicken and peas for dinner. She was in no rush and assumed they would have a long engagement. Jerry had other ideas.
In the same blog post, he announced professional news: “I am writing this from the press office in the Los Angeles Convention Center, where California Democrats have gathered for their annual convention. I am here seeking support for my candidacy for state attorney general.”
His two big pieces of news were not unrelated. Anne would become both his wife and key adviser, inseparable partner at home and work. Jerry had said many years earlier that marriage was incompatible with his job because he did not have time to focus on both. He solved the problem by eliminating the distinction. He viewed the marriage commitment as the creation of “indissoluble bonds” that extended to the political world that had been for so long his natural habitat.
Anne had greater assets than Jerry, and her financial adviser had suggested a prenuptial agreement. Jerry rejected the idea out of hand; the notion that the indissoluble bonds of marriage might be anything less than indissoluble was not even worthy of consideration.
In the end, the wedding took place across from City Hall, in the Oakland Rotunda. Anne would have preferred a small wedding; better yet an elopement. It was Jerry who wanted a gala celebration, befitting the mayor of the city and the Irish-German Catholic son of San Francisco. Anne acquiesced because it seemed so important to him. She agreed to handle the caterer; everything else was up to him. He planned the ceremony, down to the Gregorian chants. His friend Diane von Fürstenburg designed Anne’s dress.
On June 18, 2005, Edmund G. Brown Jr., sixty-seven, and Anne Baldwin Gust, forty-seven, were married by Senator Dianne Feinstein, with a guest list that included pretty much all the political royalty in California. The closest friends and family sat in the courtyard; the rest of the almost six hundred guests were assigned, in descending order of importance, to the rings of terraces on higher floors.
After the festivities, a small group took a bus across the Bay Bridge to St. Agnes Church. In the same San Francisco chapel where Pat and Bernice had exchanged vows seventy-five years earlier, Jerry and Anne were married in a religious ceremony performed by Father John Baumann. Baumann had entered Sacred Heart Novitiate in 1956 with Jerry Brown and ended up in Oakland, where the two men reconnected after many years. Baumann ran a faith-based organizing group. He understood Jerry’s bond to the church, his attachment to the structure and rituals, and the importance of the Jesuit traditions. When Jerry called and asked him to perform the ceremony, Baumann went to talk with him and meet Anne. Jerry had a stack of books about marriage he was reading, including The Constitution of the Jesuits.
On their honeymoon, the Browns canoed down the Russian River. Then Jerry took Anne to meet his old Berkeley professor Sheldon Wolin, who lived in a tree house in Mendocino.
Jerry’s last entry in the blog was on June 22, 2005. “Fourth day of marriage.57 Bliss endures.”
20
Son of Sacramento
On January 8, 2007, Jerry Brown stood at the foot of the grand staircase in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall and pointed to the spot a few feet away where he had sat sixty-three years earlier to the day. He was not yet six when he watched his father sworn in as district attorney and wondered aloud if the man he had beaten would show up to be sworn out. “I’m very glad to come back to the place where I guess I got my first glimpse1 of political, should we call it, power, responsibility, opportunity,” Jerry said. “Anyway, I got the first sense right on these steps.”
At sixty-eight, Jerry Brown was following in his father’s footsteps once more, deliberately, and with pride. Jerry had easily defeated a Democratic opponent in the primary and a Republican in the general election to assume the second most powerful job in California, that of attorney general. Pat Brown had always said it was the best job he ever had. That, Jerry told friends, was part of the reason he had run.
Judge Kathleen Kelly stood on the steps of City Hall with the man who had sworn her in to office three years earlier. Now it was her turn to do the honors. “Uncle Jerry, I know I speak for the entire Brown family proudly gathered here today when I say that you’ve inspired and challenged each of us,” Kelly said. “And even though a casual conversation with you often feels like an oral argument before the Supreme Court, we are so grateful for the profound impact that you’ve had on all of our lives.”
Uniformed cadets from the Oakland Military Institute stood at attention along the banisters of the grand staircase. Gregorian chanters sang the Latin hymn “Te Deum.” Jerry reflected on his swearing-in as governor more than three decades earlier, noting that his seven-and-a-half-minute inaugural address remained his most popular speech. “No one remembered what I said, but they remembered how few words I took to say it. I want to keep in that spirit.”
He spoke about the need for common sense and mentioned, as he did often, that at one time people thought common sense was an organ, behind the pituitary gland. He promised to follow the edict his father had laid down sixty-three years earlier: Prosecute, not persecute. “I want to make sure that our laws that protect working people are vigorously enforced,” Jerry said. He rattled off relevant laws on overtime, workers’ compensation, minimum wage. “All these are meant to create living, fair conditions in the workplace, or in the fields.”
He singled out environmental protection, particularly landmark actions championed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to combat global warming. The state had been sued, and it would fall to the new attorney general to defend the efforts to shift the state to a more sustainable energy future and to limit emissions of greenhouse gases.
“The law is not a game,” he concluded. “It’s not a business; it’s a calling.”
When Pat Brown left the attorney general’s office, his staff gave him a life-sized mosaic by Beniamino Bufano, an Italian American sculptor who had settled in San Francisco during World War I and focused much of his work on themes of peace. The mosaic given to the first Attorney General Brown showed a woman embracing a multitude of children of different colors with the inscription ONE WORLD, ONE PEOPLE, ONE DESTINY, ONE JUSTICE. Pat Brown had kept the mosaic in his office as governor and pointed to those words as his guiding principle on civil rights. His son inherited the artwork, which would now become a mantra for another attorney general.
“I think about my father now,” Jerry said after his inauguration. “The law is not just about change, it’s about tradition.”2
One major change since the last time Jerry had held statewide office was Anne Gust Brown. By the time she held the Gust family Bible as her husband took the oath of office, his wife of eighteen months had established herself as a full and omnipresent partner in Jerry Brown’s political career. Her role was in some ways only logical. “I am married to a person who likes to work seven days a week,” she said. “He loves what he does and finds it not only his vocation3 but his hobby.”
When they got engaged in the spring of 2005, Anne had already decided to leave the Gap, where she had worked since 1991 in a variety of senior positions, the last five years as chief administrative officer. She loved the work, but was ready for a change. Jerry was beginning to plan his campaign. “I might have gone on more boards, things like that, but Jerry really did want me to get involved with helping him on running his attorney general campaign and then helping in the attorney general’s office,” Anne said. “It’s been fascinating4 and fun in terms of the work, and it’s strengthened our relationship, too.”
During the many years they dated, even when they lived together, Anne had a separate life and career. When they married, she had had some trepidation about the amount of time she and Jerry would spend together as they merged personal and professional lives. But Jerry wanted and needed a partner, and Anne plunged in. She was smart, confident, incisive, and completely devoted to
Jerry’s best interest. Anne had started as his campaign finance chair, then quickly established herself as the de facto campaign manager. Once again, Jerry had turned to someone outside the traditional political establishment, whose instincts he trusted and who understood him well. Jerry described their working relationship as a natural extension of their marriage: “There are a lot of businesses where a husband and wife run the business. We live together. We work together. We go to the gym together … It’s a life that we’re leading,5 and it so happens that at this moment in time it includes this campaign.”
Anne provided the structure that Jerry always sought. Where he was nonlinear, she remained on point. She was a corporate executive accustomed to organizing and running things. She worked hard and stayed on task. Friends described her as tough, fierce, funny, decisive, unforgiving, analytical, and quick to size up a situation, with an intelligence and wit to match her husband’s. She credited Jerry with teaching her almost everything she knew about politics.
After Jerry won the election, the couple visited offices in the state Justice Department to plan the transition. “Some of you may have noticed my wife, Anne, accompanying me as I have made the rounds of the various offices,” Jerry wrote in an email to his future employees. “I find her advice pretty invaluable6 and very practical.” By the time he was sworn in, she had been appointed an unpaid special adviser. “If you can’t get in to see her,” Jerry said at his inauguration, “you probably won’t be allowed to get in to see me.” She functioned as a chief of staff, bringing legal acumen and management experience to an office of eleven hundred lawyers. “It is a broad title,”7 Jerry said when he made the appointment. “And she certainly will have a broad mandate, because her experience is very broad.”