Kamala's Way

by Dan Morain

  Like other rookies, Harris handled misdemeanors, many of them driving under the influence cases, and the very early procedural stages of felony cases. She went on six-month rotations to branch courthouses in Fremont, Hayward, and, in December 1991, back to the Wiley Manuel Courthouse, all the while learning the questioning skills that would serve her when she became a U.S. senator.

  No young lawyer could have ignored what was going on in Washington in October 1991. U.S. senator Joseph Biden was chairing the Judiciary Committee during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Law professor Anita Hill appeared before the all-White, all-male committee and testified that Thomas had pressured her for dates and talked about pornographic films when she was his underling at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Men on the committee insulted and minimized Hill. Thomas denounced the hearings as a “high-tech lynching.”

  The Judiciary Committee sent Thomas’s nomination to the Senate floor without a recommendation, and senators confirmed him 52–48. Biden voted no, but his performance angered the many women who believed Anita Hill.

  A year later, in October 1992, Harris took on an assignment to work in juvenile court. It was tough duty. Oakland schools were so troubled that half the district’s fifty-three thousand students scored below the 50th percentile on standardized tests. Truancy was rampant. The California State Legislature had installed a trustee to oversee Oakland school finances in 1990, as the district teetered on the brink of insolvency. Everything that happens in juvenile court is confidential. The cases she handled are sealed. But Harris talks often of hearing the stories of children being abused and exploited sexually. She would use that experience in later years when she got into positions to affect policy and shape law—and as she was thinking about elective office.

  * * *

  On election night, November 7, 1992, Harris drove her Corolla across the San Francisco Bay Bridge to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill, where Democrats were celebrating. It was a good night to be a Democrat. Bill Clinton had been elected president, and Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein were basking in their respective victories in their U.S. Senate races. Boxer, the more liberal of the two senators, had been one of seven Democratic congresswomen who marched to the Senate in 1991 demanding to discuss the Thomas confirmation with Senate Democrats, only to be denied admittance to their regular Tuesday caucus, a closed event. Boxer used Anita Hill’s mistreatment and Thomas’s confirmation to energize voters and win election in 1992, the “Year of the Woman.”

  No one could have imagined that Kamala Harris would go from being a twenty-seven-year-old face in the crowded Fairmont ballroom to replacing Boxer as U.S. senator in 2016 and then gaining a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But there she was, twenty-seven years later, when Christine Blasey Ford, a psychologist from the San Francisco suburb of Menlo Park, took the brave step of coming forward to testify that Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers. The parallel to the Thomas confirmation hearing was unmistakable, and the outcome was the same.

  Democrats had tried without success to elicit Kavanaugh’s view of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 abortion rights case. Harris used her time and the skills she learned in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to cut through the clutter:

  “Can you think of any laws that give the government power to make decisions about the male body?”

  Kavanaugh tripped over his words: “I’m not aware—I’m not—thinking of any right now, Senator.”

  Harris’s path to that hearing went through Sacramento.

  * * *

  Harris’s life took a turn in 1994. She had become involved with one of the nation’s most talented politicians, California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. The relationship was imbalanced; he was thirty years her senior. But they shared the common traits of drive and intelligence, and they both rose from little to attain a great deal, though Brown’s path was especially daunting, coming, as he did, from Texas during the days of Jim Crow.

  In order to rise to a position of dominance, Brown had to make himself known, and so he forged a crucial friendship with San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. Caen told me one of the secrets of his success: San Francisco was not a town with celebrities, so he had to create them. It’s one way his three-dot column became a must-read for San Franciscans for fifty years. He defined the city, was its champion, its scold, its arbiter of class, and the classless. And no one played a bigger part in the world he chronicled than his good friend Willie Brown. They had Friday lunch dates at Le Central bistro and traveled to Paris. Ever clever with a quip, stylish in his Wilkes Bashford suits and fedoras or riding in his new Ferrari, Brown was a regular ingredient in the snappy, irreverent, melancholy, funny, never-dull columns that appeared next to the Macy’s ads.

  On March 22, 1994, Brown provided Caen with especially rich material. Brown celebrated his sixtieth birthday at billionaire Ron Burkle’s estate, known as Greenacres, a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot villa originally built by silent film star Harold Lloyd on fifteen verdant acres in Benedict Canyon. Burkle and Brown were friends, and for a time, Burkle retained Brown as one of his lawyers. Throughout the 1990s, Burkle hosted political fund-raisers for President Clinton and other prominent Democrats at Greenacres. The Los Angeles Times called it the Versailles of fund-raising venues. Caen reported that Barbra Streisand was at Brown’s sixtieth and that Clint Eastwood “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” It was quite a public introduction of Brown and Harris’s relationship.

  Over the course of the relationship, Brown gave Harris a BMW, and she traveled with him to Paris, attended the Academy Awards with him, and was part of the entourage that flew to Boston with him in 1994. While he was in Boston, Brown got a call from New York billionaire Donald Trump. Trump wanted to discuss a hotel project he had in mind for Los Angeles and sent his jet to Boston to fly Brown and his friends, Harris included, to New York City. The jet was gilded, had valuable paintings on its cabin walls, and had notes left for Trump by his then wife, Marla Maples. Brown and Trump had lunch at the Plaza Hotel. The Los Angeles deal never materialized. Trump and Harris likely did not meet then, but she was a long way from the Wiley Manuel Courthouse.

  * * *

  In 1994, Willie Brown was facing the term-limited conclusion of his time in the assembly. The beginning of that end dates to 1986, when businessmen from Georgia persuaded a legislator to introduce a bill to allow for the construction of a shrimp processing plant and greased the legislation’s path by handing out money. The bill passed both houses of the legislature. But there was no shrimp processing plant or businessmen. It was all a mirage, part of an FBI sting. The scandal became public in 1988 when the FBI agents searched the capitol offices of several lawmakers. Like other reporters who covered the scandal, I assumed Brown was the target, as did he. A dozen legislators, lobbyists, and others were convicted or pleaded guilty. But Brown knew the rules and the law and hadn’t stepped over any lines. There was, however, another more lasting price to pay. Capitalizing on the scandal, conservatives promoted an initiative in 1990 to impose term limits on legislators. Dislodging Brown, who had famously called himself the “Ayatollah of the Assembly,” was the immediate goal. Campaign mailers using unflattering images of Brown were sent to voters in more conservative parts of the state. Voters in San Francisco overwhelmingly opposed the term limits measure, but it passed statewide, 52 percent to 48 percent. The 1994 election would be Brown’s final assembly election. His end would be more abrupt than he had hoped.

  In 1994, Governor Pete Wilson won reelection over California treasurer Kathleen Brown, Pat Brown’s daughter and Jerry Brown’s sister, on a platform that included support for capital punishment, the anti–illegal immigration initiative known as Proposition 187, and a singularly harsh version of three strikes, Proposition 184. Funded by the California Correctional Peace Officers Association an
d the NRA, California’s three-strikes law led to life sentences for many people convicted of shoplifting. Analysts predicted California would need twenty-five new prisons to house the coming deluge of as many as one hundred thousand prisoners.

  Nationally, Republicans led by Newt Gingrich took control of the U.S. House of Representatives. In California, Republicans flipped the assembly for the first time in twenty-five years, gaining a 41–39 edge. That meant Willie Brown would lose his speakership when the legislature convened in December, or so it was thought. First, though, Brown had plums to pass out.

  In 1994, Harris took a leave from her job as Alameda County deputy district attorney when Brown placed her on the state board responsible for hearing appeals from people who were denied jobless benefits. The term for that position would end on January 1, 1995, beyond the point where he would still have power. So in late November, he placed her on a separate part-time board that oversees California’s Medi-Cal contracts, then a $72,000-a-year job, the salary paid to legislators. She would hold that post through 1998, three years after their relationship ended. The first time I wrote about Harris was when she got that appointment. She declined to be interviewed at the time, and Brown’s office ducked my calls. Republicans protested but were powerless to stop it.

  “It’s safe to say that these are not appointments we would necessarily make,” Phil Perry, the spokesman for Assembly Republican Leader Jim Brulte, the man in line to succeed Brown as Speaker, said at the time.

  * * *

  Brown didn’t leave the speakership quietly. I was in the assembly chamber on December 5, 1994, the day of the speakership vote, taken by roll call. When the clerk got to Assemblyman Paul Horcher, a back-bench Republican from a town east of Los Angeles, Horcher banged his fist on his desk and roared, “Brown,” creating a 40–40 split and sending the house into chaos. For a year, Brown managed to maintain control by installing Republican allies as Speakers. The inevitable occurred in 1996 when Republicans managed to install their own Speaker, though the GOP lost the house in the 1996 election and haven’t come close to regaining it since.

  By then, Brown was gone.

  In 1995, after representing San Francisco in the assembly for thirty-one years, Brown decided to challenge the incumbent mayor Frank Jordan, an affable former San Francisco police chief who was seeking a second term. Harris often was by Brown’s side as he campaigned for the mayor’s job, going to fund-raisers, engaging in strategy sessions, learning the details of how to wage a campaign. Jordan might have eked out a victory, except that inexplicably, he agreed to a stunt pulled by two Los Angeles disc jockeys by disrobing with them and stepping naked into a shower. The embarrassing photo of the mayor with the disc jockeys, all of them naked, was front-page news in the San Francisco Examiner for no fewer than five days in the week leading up to the election. Jordan tried to laugh it off by saying he was squeaky clean and by calling on Brown to prove he had nothing to hide. It didn’t work.

  Brown held his election-night victory party at a union hall near Fisherman’s Wharf. As the happy results came in, Harris stepped up to Brown and presented him with a baseball cap with the words DA MAYOR emblazoned in gold lettering on it. He beamed, as did she. That was December 12, 1995. On December 14, Caen ran an item describing Harris as the “new first-lady-in-waiting.” It wasn’t to be.

  Years before, Brown had begun living a separate life from his wife, Blanche, the mother of his children. He made no secret that he dated other women. But Brown and Blanche have never divorced, and never will. When that became apparent, Harris and Brown split.

  The end, like the beginning, played out in Herb Caen’s column, on the day after Christmas, 1995, with one final three-dot item.

  “‘It’s all over,’ ” Caen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle. “With those words, mayor-elect Brown let word get around over the weekend that his long affair with Kamala Harris, an Alameda County asst. district attorney, has ended.”

  For Harris, who is intensely private, the idea that her personal life played out in Caen’s column must have pained her. But the relationship was unbalanced from the start. Brown had all the power. He used that clout to open doors for Harris early in her career, part of a long tradition in politics of mentorship and patronage. No one rises on his or her own: Phil Burton had helped young Willie Brown. But once those early doors were opened, Harris had to make her own way. She moved on, got married in 2014, and long ago stopped discussing Brown publicly, making no mention of him in her autobiography. In 2019, Brown, the octogenarian, still spoke of her, telling a radio interviewer that he was not as committed to the relationship as she was. He also made clear that it was all about him: “It was a real love affair. I loved me and she loved me.”

  * * *

  On January 8, 1996, 7,500 people crowded into a downtown square in front of San Francisco’s main memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. for Brown’s inauguration. A telephone, specially installed at the podium for the event, rang. An operator put the mayor-to-be on hold. Brown feigned being offended and returned to his seat, and the Reverend Cecil Williams, the iconic San Francisco pastor and civil rights leader, proceeded with the ceremony, briefly.

  Then the caller in chief came on the line.

  “Willie?”

  “No, this is Cecil Williams, Mr. President.”

  Brown hustled from his seat to the dais and took the phone.

  “You should be here with us. It is just incredible. There is no snow and no Republicans,” Brown told his old friend President Clinton, then in the midst of an epic battle with Speaker Gingrich over the Republican-led government shutdown.

  “Can the people hear me there?” Clinton asked.

  Loud and clear.

  Clinton got to his point, praising Brown for his “tenacity, determination, and the never-surrender attitude, and the worldview you have that I think is the biggest issue we’re facing today: that our future has to include everybody in our community.

  “You know, the City of San Francisco has a commitment to community, to the idea that diversity is our strength, that I want America to embrace.…

  “This great battle we’re fighting here in Washington today is not a battle over balancing the budget. It’s over whether we’re going to be a winner-take-all country or a country in which everybody has a chance to win.”

  The call from the president was a reflection of the position Brown held in American politics at the time. Clinton was warm and gracious. His words reflected the self-image of many San Franciscans. That was years before Twitter, Google, Uber, Facebook, Juul, and a hundred other new economy companies vastly increased San Francisco’s wealth and deepened the gap between the haves and have-nots. Housing prices, for decades high in San Francisco, would reach into the stratosphere in the 2000s. The city that Herb Caen knew would become prohibitively expensive for cops, teachers, waitstaffers who served fine food at fancy restaurants, and the Uber and Lyft drivers who chauffeured San Francisco’s tech titans to their destinations. Mayor Brown and his successors would preside over a high-rise building boom, while the city’s homeless population would reach crisis proportions.

  All that was to come. On this day, Brown gathered a select group on the stage: his three grown children and a grandchild. He raised one hand to take the oath of office and placed the other hand on a Bible owned by his mother so many years before in Mineola, Texas. Holding the Bible was his wife, Blanche.

  * * *

  In 1995, Harris decided to return to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Tom Orloff, who had prosecuted Huey Newton twenty years earlier, had become the Alameda County district attorney and welcomed Harris back.

  “She was very bright and personable. Juries liked her,” Orloff said. “We had 150 attorneys then. She was one of the ones who was very good.”

  Harris busied herself by prosecuting people accused of felonies. In one of her trials, she won a conviction of a man who used a shotgun to kill another man. He’s doing life behind bars. In another, she
prosecuted three people who committed a dozen armed robberies. She sometimes used California’s new three-strikes law to seek lengthy sentences against repeat offenders. Her cases rarely attracted press attention, though there was an exception. A man high on meth and rum used a Ginsu knife to slice a four-inch square out of his girlfriend’s scalp. He had tried this once before, only to be foiled because the blade was dull. She survived. He’s serving life in prison.

  “It’s appropriate for what he did,” Harris said after the sentencing, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1996. “The manner in which this crime was committed was incredibly sadistic.”

  Nancy O’Malley, the current district attorney, could see that Harris was especially good in dealing with young victims of sexual assault. She could calm them and reassure them. Some would contact her long after their cases were over, believing that Harris understood what they were going through.

  Harris and O’Malley also began talking about the young prosecutor’s career options. She had ambition. Richard Iglehart, an old boss in Alameda County and the one who had lobbied for California’s assault weapons ban, was working for the San Francisco district attorney, Terence Hallinan, and he had a job for Harris. That was 1998. The move made sense.

  Having gotten a taste of politics, she wanted more.

  5 Setting Her Sights

  Kamala Harris left the storied district attorney’s office in Alameda County at the start of 1998, drove 12.7 miles west across the Bay Bridge, and arrived for work in the hothouse of San Francisco criminal justice politics. The district attorney’s office, the police department, the courts, the coroner, the sheriff, and other agencies all shared the same building they called the “Hall.” Right out back, on the other side of the parking lot, was the jail.