Jerry Brown | Interview 2 | March 18, 2019

HOLMES: This is Todd Holmes with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. Today is March 18, 2019, and we have the pleasure of sitting down for our second session with Governor Jerry Brown. We are here at the Brown ranch in Williams, California, and I am joined by our partners from KQED: Scott Shafer and Guy Marzorati. Governor, thanks for spending another day with us.

BROWN: Sure.

HOLMES: In our last session we ended talking about your time at Santa Clara University. And between Santa Clara and going to the seminary, you took a trip to New York?

BROWN: Yes.

HOLMES: Can you tell us a little bit about that?

BROWN: Well, I went with two other friends, Frank [C.] Damrell and Peter [M.] Finnegan. Peter is now deceased. We went to New York, Washington, and Boston, so we visited the capital, we met some friends of Frank's father, who was a judge in Modesto, and we went to New York City. Peter Finnegan knew someone, I think at Finch College, and we heard a talk there by Eleanor Roosevelt, in a small living room. She stood up and she spoke, and that was very interesting. And then we went to Boston, where Frank had an aunt, and then we came back.

HOLMES: Was that your first time on the East Coast?

BROWN: Yes.

HOLMES: How did you think it compared to, say, California.

BROWN: Well, I mean New York was exciting. Also, New York would allow you to purchase alcohol at age eighteen, so that was one of the first things we did was to buy a few six packs of beer, and we went down to places in Greenwich Village. I remember being there and having a beer there, and went to different restaurants. I think we might have seen a play. I'm not sure. But well, New York City is so much more dynamic and full of people and cars and tall buildings, there's nothing like it in California. San Francisco is getting a little more like that, but in 1956, San Francisco and New York were totally different, so 00:03:00the East Coast was very interesting to me.

I think I went up in the Empire State Building too, so that was a thrill, and I think we went and climbed the steps at the Statue of Liberty. I remember doing that, and I can't think of another time when I would have, so it was probably then.

SHAFER: I'm just wondering, you're sort of on your own really, with your friends, away from your family. A lot of kids would kind of go a little wild or be--?

BROWN: No, when I was on my own, going to the Russian River, going to Idaho to work in the Ohio Match Company lumber operation--I was essentially on my own at Santa Clara. You have your own room and people aren't--well, they did check on you there. We did have rather closer surveillance than you'd have today. But 00:04:00nevertheless, my parents would not be aware of what I was doing.

The world has changed. I've often remarked on that, because I hear the conversations between people who work for me or work with Anne, and it's always very odd to me, these daily conversations. Of course, we didn't have phones. It was a long-distance call from Santa Clara to San Francisco, and you'd have to go down and get a pay phone, so it was a little bit more cumbersome. But there just wasn't the connection, and the same was true of high school, or even grammar school. Parents, at least my parents, were not involved at all--and most parents 00:05:00were not involved. I was a yell leader at St. Ignatius. I guess they called them cheerleaders then, and I can't remember parents at all being there, being at the games. I just don't remember any of them ever being there.

SHAFER: What was Greenwich Village like?

BROWN: Well, it was interesting. Of course it was not as developed. It had fewer people, cheaper beer and food, more room. It was 1956, both in Greenwich Village but also at Santa Clara, there'd be a bar or restaurant, kind of an older building, not a lot of people in it. I wouldn't call it run down, but not this kind of modern, shiny restaurant/bar look that is more common today. I guess 00:06:00there was more space than there were people. And I don't know that to be the case, but there was some reason that rents were cheap, that people could have establishments with a much cheaper entry fee. Probably the insurance was minimal, the health inspections--I'm speculating--were not much. So the barrier to entry was much different, and therefore very modest people could operate very modest establishments, and I certainly found that in Greenwich Village. I just have a memory of being at a bar there, and the picture of it looks old fashioned today.

SHAFER: What do you remember about it?

BROWN: I just remember the tables, the chairs, the bar, just old fashioned. So 00:07:00there are a few around San Francisco like that, even today. But not the same way.

SHAFER: Did you hear any music?

BROWN: I did hear music. Not during that trip, but later when I was at Yale I went to Greenwich Village, and I think I heard Bob Dylan at Gerde's Folk City. I didn't know he was Bob Dylan, but I remember just from what he looked like, and I remember he had a little railroad cap on, a little conductor's cap, and he was playing--and I'm pretty sure it was him.

HOLMES: Well, before we leave that section, you said you also went down to Washington, DC during that trip? Is that correct?

BROWN: Yes, yes.

HOLMES: What was your impression of DC? That was your first time there, in the 00:08:00nation's capital?

BROWN: Hard to say. I think we went and saw the Senate or the House. We had some lobbyist that had taken us around, or a lawyer--I don't think he was a lobbyist, he was a lawyer, kind of an insider. You know, it was a lot of politics, nothing that unusual to me.

HOLMES: Okay. So then in August you enrolled there at the Sacred Heart Novitiate? And this is founded in 1887 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Can you discuss, maybe, your decision to enroll in the seminary?

BROWN: Yeah, well, I'd thought about it before, over the years, and I decided to 00:09:00go to Santa Clara, and I liked Santa Clara very much. And I would just make a point of Santa Clara that I applied to two colleges: UC Berkeley and Santa Clara, and I decided to go to Santa Clara. But I would distinguish that from the custom today, which is at least five or six--and maybe ten. And I guess the difference is that there's more people and not so much college, I guess. And I think that it seems to be fewer spaces, fewer seats, relative to the number of the people who want to go, and therefore the getting in is, I think, much more difficult than it used to be. When I applied, it was just: yeah, you can go to Berkeley if you get fifteen Bs in fifteen solid subjects, as they call 00:10:00them--that's it. They didn't have AP then.

So I decided I wanted to go to Santa Clara. Some of my classmates were going there. I had no idea as to Santa Clara having some--they were an engineering school, but I was not interested in that. And so I didn't have a particular course matter or particular line of study leading to a particular line of work. I hear a lot of young kids today, they say, "I want to go to this college, because this program is the best program." So there was no U.S. News & World Report. That didn't even come up. We knew more because Santa Clara used to have a football team. And it was a Jesuit school, I knew that, and it was a pretty campus. So I think there were maybe twelve, or maybe more, kids from St. 00:11:00Ignatius. So it seemed like a good thing to do. They were all going there--far more than were going to UC. So I only point this out because it seems like the decision to go to college is totally different today than it was then. The idea that my mother or my father would take me to Santa Clara, much less to Berkeley, and show me around wasn't a thought that even entered anybody's head. And so somehow between then and now, these notions have evolved and have become standard. So that was the way it was.

So I went to Santa Clara. We lived in a dormitory, which I liked. We were 00:12:00assigned roommates--first I had three people. And then I was able, after a semester, to pick a roommate, and I picked this guy Frank Damrell. So it was, as I recall, about 1,300 undergraduates, I think, in the day school--all boys, in the day school--and that seemed like a pretty good-sized school to me. And I did like it, but after being there for a while--and I was thinking I'd want to be a lawyer--but then I decided no, I'd rather go to seminary. I met, one of the guys that I was in school with had a brother who was at the novitiate

Yeah, so I went up there one day, and we looked at it. It looked pretty 00:13:00interesting to me, and it was a different dimension. I didn't know quite how different it was, but it was the full-time practice of preparing to be a Jesuit priest. I'd had encounters with the priests because of St. Ignatius and then Santa Clara, and that idea of the schools was very congenial and it seemed interesting. It seemed intellectual, and then the seminary seemed solid. I had a sense that this would be a place where I could dig into the deeper meaning of 00:14:00things. I don't know starting when, but certainly when I was at Santa Clara, the reflection on life and what it all means, those were important questions to me. And so the material pathways of normal living seemed not exciting, and somewhat boring and pedestrian, or mundane--something not exciting and not very deep. So I thought the seminary would be something different and profound, and so, then I just had the idea that's what I'm going to do, so then I did it.

SHAFER: I think you were seventeen when you decided to do that, right?

BROWN: Yes, yeah, probably seventeen.

SHAFER: And I think you had to be eighteen to do it without your parents?

BROWN: No, we don't know that to be the case.

SHAFER: Would you have gone into the novitiate faster, or--?

BROWN: No, because you can't--in those days, the customs were very defined. It took fifteen years to complete your training, and the beginning was the novitiate--two years. And that always began the evening of August 14, and August 15 was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that's when, two years later, you take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. So no, there's no going in before. Today I think there's more flexibility. It's not fifteen years; it's a shorter period of time. Novices are not right out of high school; they're usually in their mid-twenties or older. So that too, through the 00:16:00late 1960s, radically changed in many, many ways. When I went there, it was up on that hill, [pointing to a photograph] as you can see, at the big white building. And when you look back into the Santa Clara Valley, in 1956 it looked a lot different than it does today, a very vast plain there that you could see, especially from the hills, and we hiked in those hills. So that was the story in August of 1956.

HOLMES: What was your parents' reaction when you told them that you wanted to join the seminary?

BROWN: Well, they did not agree. They didn't like that idea. They wanted me to finish college. So we talked about it--not a great deal. But I decided no, I'm 00:17:00going, so that was that.

SHAFER: You know, just looking at the calendar, it seems like your decision to do that was roughly the same time that your dad's political career was really, you know, taking off. He was talked about as a potential candidate for president even or--

BROWN: Well, he ran as a favorite son in 1952 against Kefauver, but it wasn't that successful--like Kefauver won two to one, as I recall. And then in '56, I think Stevenson and Kefauver ran. But I think the convention was right around the time, right around that time, in August.

SHAFER: I guess I'm just wondering was your decision maybe--?

BROWN: I don't think it has anything to do with what my father was doing. It's more my being in school, in school with Jesuits, having hours and hours of contact and conversation. And seeing it as a different way of life--it seemed 00:18:00definitely a higher-order undertaking than going through school and getting out and getting a job and things. That seemed to me not as interesting. The novitiate was more mysterious--just a wider horizon in my mind.

SHAFER: Where did you see it leading?

BROWN: Well, learning to be a Jesuit, and that was one of the powerful religious orders in Roman Catholicism. And the Jesuits are teachers, missionaries, they go 00:19:00to different parts of the world. They're involved in advocating and strengthening Christianity in the world. And of course, things were a lot different in 1956 than they are today--or even ten years ago. The missionary spirit is different. And now, with decolonization and multiculturalism, the notion that we're going to send some guys from America over to Korea or Burma, or even Africa, and say now we're going to convert everybody--or try to--that doesn't have the same resonance. And in fact, there's much more of Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries just being present and trying to do good works in those countries. But I would say that the shift from missionary activity defined 00:20:00as converting the pagans, as they often were called, or the unbaptized, and then shifting to well, everybody, has a different path and we have to respect that. That's a sea change in the way I understand Catholicism.

SHAFER: You've mentioned the vows of poverty, obedience and--

BROWN: Chastity.

SHAFER: And chastity. Which of those was the hardest?

BROWN: No. They're not particularly hard, actually, because you're in a peer-pressure environment. It's a totally isolated environment, so there's no radio, television, newspapers, girls, entertainment, you don't have that. So you 00:21:00have reading, you have exhortation, you have meditation, you have the Mass, you have minor bits of manual labor--it has a kind of medieval quality, that is quite full in and of itself. And so your normal well, what is it like not to go out on Friday night? That doesn't show up, because that's the world I was choosing. And so it's not hard, because everybody else is doing it. In fact, to do something else would be to depart from the norm.

SHAFER: You know, when I think of the person you became as an adult, questioning everything, looking at things in different ways, it seems very different from the structured environment. Was there a point where you got tired of that or 00:22:00just felt it was too confining?

BROWN: Well, I think my inquiring mind was evident much earlier than that. In fact, I remember one time in my eighth grade, Sister Alice Joseph said to me, after I'd asked her a certain question, she said, "Do you stay up nights thinking of these questions?" So I guess, from that, I was asking a lot of questions.

I don't know where I got my sense of being able to discern when evidence is not present. And I do have that sense that most of the time people are operating on belief. There's a lot of talk of evidence-based--in fact, I was just talking to 00:23:00somebody this morning, that there's a bill asking for evidence-based, that all programs at the Department of Corrections shall only be evidence-based. And I'm very skeptical of that, evidence-based, because it's just another belief system. So we have a lot of beliefs, and it's not just the fanatics in ISIS that are in belief, there's a lot of belief in our own society.

So I guess I developed that because of the extreme conformity and uniformity of beliefs in the seminary. And even there, there was some questioning. Not a lot, but of course the nature of religious belief is that it's not verifiable. The 00:24:00idea of ritual is that you perform the same movement or gesture over and over again, for hundreds--maybe thousands--of years, and that you do it in the group of believers and that there's no variance. If you think of the Our Father, or you think of certain Jewish prayers, they haven't changed in thousands of years. So the key is invariance expressed in a community of believers, and that it not be verifiable.

I believe that economic growth will be 4 percent next year. Now, that would be 00:25:00verifiable and refutable. I believe in God Almighty, hell and heaven, and the saints--well, you can't verify that and you can't verify that Moses promised to make the people his own back there. I was just reading about that in Ur to Abraham, that was his compact, give them the land. Well, they got land there and that's still a controversy. So the belief, the articulation, whether it's at the Mass or what they call litanies, where you have certain responses. Someone says something short, a prayer, very short, like a phrase, and then you 00:26:00respond--those are called litanies. So these are things that bind the community together, but they're not something you question, because there's nothing to question. You have no basis to question it. So it's not empirically-based, but through that, I certainly did have my questions and my doubts about things as time went on.

It was a very intense experience. And I suppose that with all intense experiences they tend to wear off, and as then they wear off, that intensity, that fervor, diminishes. And then as it diminishes, you see things in a different light. And so yeah, I did have that experience, and that's probably the essential reason why I left. But I also have carried that spirit with me. So 00:27:00when I'm in a room with people, I don't say I relate it back to the novitiate, where everybody said the same thing and believed the same thing. But there's a little bit of that--or maybe there's a lot of that--whether it's the legislature, whether it's the governor's office, whether it's a family gathering, whether it's this group right here. I find that groupthink, which was a term developed first, I heard, in connection with the Vietnam War, and that all these best and bright people went along. They called that groupthink. And then now we hear terms like peer pressure.

But I think we're social animals, and the need to be bonded together is 00:28:00facilitated, is fed by, common understandings. And those common understandings are beliefs--and I don't care whether it's the New York Times or KQED--there's a string of beliefs. And other people have different beliefs. You see that in foreign policy, and I could elaborate on that. But I don't take things, generally speaking. If it's a proposition, that if you say something and you put that into some terms--it's an assertion. Okay, but what? How do we know that's true? And there's a lot of that stuff. One of the things that interests me, did interest me, that people would say that brain science tells us. And they often 00:29:00use that phrase: research tells us. It's kind of like--God told me. I often plug in God for research, and it tells you that the brain, by three, you've got to start preschool, kindergarten's too late. And so I've looked at some of the studies, not in a deep way, but I came across a study that challenged that. And there is a professor that debunks that, and debunks the studies on which people rely, even though they've never looked at the study.

I'm trying to connect the evolution of my way of looking at the world. And it's not that I'm sitting here doubting everything, because we accept things for granted. But I'm impressed with how much belief there is. The New York Times 00:30:00editorial pages would be different than papers in Britain, say the Guardian. There's just a lot of belief going on. I don't care if it's the Democrats, the Republicans, the Socialists, certainly the Communists, the right wing--there are a lot of beliefs. And if you sit down and list their beliefs, they'd say, "Now, what can we prove?" You'll find it's very little. And then you get down to probably look at the conflicts in the world that lead to these wars, and you say, "Well, it's about beliefs." In the First World War, Germany believed one thing, Russia believed something else, France believed something else, and pretty soon they're killing each other. So you'd say, "Well, if we'd just get the facts right." Well, it may not be about facts.

SHAFER: [laughing] Isn't that what the climate deniers are saying?

BROWN: Yeah, well--they're denying that which we have a lot of scientific evidence on. But I would say that the conflicts in the world, say the Russia-America conflict right now, there's a lot of belief about things, not just about forms of government, but interpretation of events. And so as the interpretations get more and more divergent, and people feel more and more strongly about them, and then they internalize certain emotions, the next step is killing people. I used to think, "Well, we're going to get to a point where--gee, if we get over the Vietnam War everything's going to be fine." But it doesn't appear that that pathway has been pursued by the countries of the world.

HOLMES: Governor, I wanted to ask a little bit more about your experience at the 00:32:00seminary. Maybe starting with what was your first impression that first year of life in the seminary?

BROWN: My first impression was that it was a little awkward coming in. Most people all had their cassock on, and the thirty new men that came in with me, we didn't get our cassock for, say, a week. And how you file into the dining room and do some of the things that you're assigned to do--wash dishes or other kinds of work--it took a while to get into the routine. But within a week or two, it all felt very natural. And then a year later when the next crew came in, I could 00:33:00see that they were awkward. They didn't quite get how to be at the table, because we're in silence, and they'd look around--you're not supposed to look around. It's called modesty of the eyes, or some people call it custody of the eyes. So you're not supposed to. This is a whole other world, where your whole focus is interior. You're trying to establish a relationship with the spiritual world, with God, and not with the normal stuff that most people, that all people, deal with. So that was an impression of that.

It struck me as very medieval. There is a concept of the will of God. And the will of God was told to us as expressed through the rules, of which we had 00:34:00fifty-two rules, in a little rule book, and through the directions of the superior, Father Master--that was what he's called, the master of novices. And so that idea that following the superior was following the will of God--I'd never heard that concept before. In fact, I haven't heard much of it since I left. But that is a fundamental concept, that the church carries on the tradition of Christ; that the Jesuits, under St. Ignatius, were formed by the church; that the Jesuits appoint superiors, and the superiors there are running things, wherever you are, in a novitiate or a college or something. And so it's a very hierarchical program, and it's tied in with divine sanction. So I found 00:35:00that--and find that--difficult to accept. But that's what it was. And evidently, that's been around a long time. So there was a lot of practices, Catholic practices, that when you get into reading the Lives of the Saints or other materials on the church history, you find, "Oh yeah, this has been going on for a long, long time." But just in the normal education and growing up, we didn't hear about that stuff, so that was a very different kind of world.

But it was an interesting world. The fact that a group of people were involved in something that was intellectually stimulating, spiritually challenging, was 00:36:00not boring in any sense. And if you think about it, the individualism of modern life is very powerful. And people try to overcome that by taking trips. You find a lot of the older people, they want to go to Rossmoor, or they want to be in a communal situation. So on the one hand, everybody wants their little private house; but on the other hand, they do a lot of things, like go to a noisy restaurant to be subsumed into this collective experience. So that's part of the power of this novitiate: it's a collective experience. And because you're wearing the same cassock, the same cubicle you sleep in, the bell rings at 5:00am, the bell rings every 30 or 40 minutes to do something else. So you're 00:37:00all doing it together, and that in itself is a very--I don't know if I would say exciting, but as an antidote to the extreme individualism and skepticism of the modern world, I would say that, obviously, was very welcome in my imagination.

SHAFER: At what point did you begin to think maybe it wasn't the life for you?

BROWN: Well, after about three years, maybe a little before that.

SHAFER: Like was there a moment?

BROWN: No, not a moment. I began to read different things. After the novitiate, we started to get exposed to books. In the novitiate it's only the New Testament. Not as often, but we also could read part of the Old Testament, and 00:38:00we read lives mostly of Jesuit saints. We have a book, I don't know if I showed it to you, because I have it here, by [Alphonsus] Rodriguez, the Practice of Perfection. That's what we're reading. So you do that for two years, and then you walk across the building to what was called the juniorate, and this was like college. And they had a library with a lot of good books in it, so I started reading things like that.

And I don't know when it was, but a guy came--I think it was after I started thinking about leaving. But he came to visit my friend Peter Finnegan, because we could have visitors there. I didn't have very many--I think almost none--except my parents once a month. And this guy, his name was Neil, and he 00:39:00actually lives down the street from my nephew. But he was reading Albert Camus. I can't remember whether I saw him or whether Peter Finnegan related it to me, but he talked about the absurd, that he elaborates in the Myth of Sisyphus, and that whole idea I found very exciting, the idea of the longing of the human heart for meaning, and the utter silence of the universe in return. And so, I took a liking to Camus.

There was another book that I got there called Spirit and Reality, by a man named Nicolas Berdyaev. And Nicolas Berdyaev was an Orthodox Christian, Orthodox 00:40:00Catholic, Russian, who was around Russia in the time of Lenin, but he left. He didn't like Lenin's materialism, and he went to Paris. He died shortly after World War II, but he wrote a number of books, and I read two of them: Spirit and Reality, and one was Slavery and Freedom. Anyway, he was somewhat interested in the Holy Spirit, and the phrase, spiritus spirat ubi vult, or, "the spirit listeth where it wilt," is the way the King James Bible has it. And the spirit is this free, unconstrained divine presence, and he was focused in this book, 00:41:00and it's a somewhat complicated book to say the least, but he also criticized Jesuit obedience and Jesuit asceticism. So here was a guy writing, and his writing seemed very fresh to me, seemed very alive compared to Rodriguez, which seemed very dead. So that was the beginnings--and I still have the book. I've got a copy that I've kept with me, and I've gone back and tried to read. It's not that easy to read. But I think the very notion that this Russian was talking about Christianity, and doing so in a way that not only implied, but expressly required or described this freedom of the spirit that could not be constrained 00:42:00by blind obedience, which was the essence of the Jesuits. So that gave me pause.

Then I also came up with another book--which I also have to this day--called Man in Search of Himself [Man's Search for Himself], by Rollo May, and he lived in the Bay Area. He was from New York, and this was an interesting book. And in the book, he talked about Erich Fromm and Nietzsche, and other people. But it was an exploration of awareness, and how most people were going through life without any sense of themselves, without any ability to really know what they feel. He was a psychotherapist. So between the Spirit and Reality and Man in Search of 00:43:00Himself, that did open up a more--a more open orientation toward things. And therefore, it made the Jesuit framework feel confining and not as real as it appeared a couple years before.

SHAFER: So you decided at some point then to leave?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Yeah, but you didn't leave right away, right? You decided, but then you stuck around --?

BROWN: Well, I don't know if I was deciding, so--

SHAFER: And when you finally left, how did you feel about the decision? What did your parents say? What was that transition like for you?

BROWN: It's hard to remember these things. We're talking decades and decades ago. Yeah, I told my father. His response wasn't that clear. Now, I've read about it in the books where they quoted him. I did not get that at the time. He 00:44:00didn't seem--I don't know what I would say--it's just like he wasn't sure, or something, almost like a slight. It seemed a slight negative, yeah, just slight, but not some empathetic response. And the leaving is difficult, because you're in this bonded community, so it's very anxiety provoking. So I definitely mulled it over for, I don't know, several weeks--maybe even a few months. I'm not sure how long it was.

But when I left, I remember I went to the Jesuit provincial, Father Carroll, and he lived in the house on Lyon St. where [Dianne] Feinstein lives. That's where the Jesuit house was, the provincial's residence. And he gave me a little piece 00:45:00of paper and said, "When I give you this piece of paper, now you're not going to be a Jesuit anymore," and his little clock chimed about that time, I think, if I recall right. I remember walking down the stairs--you know at the end of the road it's a dead end, rubs up against the Presidio, the eucalyptus trees and the fog and the dew, the moisture from the trees was there and evident. And as I walked down the stairs, there's a stairway you walked out. I thought it was like we're leaving Communist China, because I'd been in a totally controlled environment, and now it was totally open. So yeah, that was my experience--a real liberation kind of feeling.

SHAFER: Hold that thought. Before we get to that, I want to kind of go back a little bit. In 1958 you were still in the novitiate, right?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: So your dad is thinking of running for governor. He's attorney general. And if the accounts are correct, you try to convince him to run for the senate.

BROWN: Well, I wrote him a letter, and the letter speaks for itself, and I haven't read it in years, so I hesitate to comment on it.

SHAFER: [laughing] Letters won't work on the radio though, yeah.

BROWN: Well, if we had the letter--

SHAFER: What do you remember about your thinking about that? How did you think about it?

BROWN: Well, how did I think about it? Well, I thought about the senate as being more international, and I was a young Jesuit novice. We're thinking about the world. The Jesuits started, I think, around 1541, and within fifty years, they're all over the world, with universities and advising government ministers 00:47:00and what have you. So this is (a), it's historical, it's European, but it's also very worldwide. You might call it global today. And so the governorship seemed more parochial to me, more mundane. What is a governor going to deal with? Compared to, you know, these are serious issues--war and peace, the large questions. Those are what interest me. And I think after my father was elected, Khrushchev came to California, and to Disneyland, and he came to San Francisco, and they had some kind of a dinner for him. And I wrote my father a few thoughts on what he should say to Khrushchev. I'm interested in the Russians, so I'm interested in Khrushchev as well as Berdyaev.

But this perspective is not the perspective of the governor's office. As the 00:48:00governor, they want you to deal with bills, and they want you to deal with roads and schools and water and taxes and crime. If you get out of that box, then you're not doing what you're supposed to. So I've always had a certain amount of tension--I was looking at the world, thinking it's very dangerous. We might blow it up. We certainly felt that way with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and in fact, we almost did blow it up, but I didn't know that in 1958.

But I did know the world, and we spent a lot of time reading about the lives of Jesuits. Matteo Ricci went to China and made contact at the court there, in China. Francis Xavier went to India. And they were all involved in the politics 00:49:00of Europe. So that's interesting. That's more of an international focus. You might think well, we're sitting away in that mountaintop there, but the books we're reading are very historical and very international, and because we're not going to movies and we're not going to TV and we're not running around going skiing or something, the books and ideas have a lot more weight, and I noticed that, and I liked it. I really started reading more, because that's what you could do: read, think, and talk, and those are the big thoughts. Well, some people talked about little silly things, but I always would be talking about large issues, and I'm still doing that.

If I see somebody that there's some relationship to some issue I'm interested in, I just launch right in, whether it's climate change or prisoners or Russians--big issues have always been important. As a matter of fact, the novitiate dealt with much bigger issues than Santa Clara dealt with. At Santa Clara, you're studying English, religion, ROTC, French. Okay, so that's pretty mundane. Now we go to the novitiate, we're talking about saving the world. Not 00:51:00talking about saving San Jose, about saving the world, you know, India, China, Africa--that's a big thought. So that's kind of my orientation.

HOLMES: Were you able to hear news about when your father was running for governor?

BROWN: No, no.

HOLMES: It was just maybe on the monthly visits?

BROWN: No. Monthly visits--which I was not interested in. I was very absorbed in this path of perfection, religious pathway. But I did know the evening that he was elected, they let me come and watch the television for fifteen minutes. That's it. But we didn't look at the outside--we weren't interested, and the outside information was not pleasant. It wasn't on what we were talking about. We were talking about virtues, prayer, meditation, contemplation, lives of the 00:52:00saints, the rules. That's why I went there, that's what I was interested in, and that's what most of the other people were interested in. So the world, as we called it--that falls away. That's lower order.

HOLMES: Well, Governor, let's talk about after you left the seminary and started at UC Berkeley, in January of 1960. Could you discuss that transition, because you went from being in a very closed seminary up in the Santa Cruz Mountains to a very large public university. What do you recall of that transition?

BROWN: Well, first of all, I would say I don't use the word transition. It's one of these new terms you've developed. Not you, but it's common--recent. But I do 00:53:00know that it was different.

SHAFER: Actually, before you start, help us with some dates. When did you start at Cal? Was it January of 1960?

BROWN: Yes. Sometime in January, mid-January. Well, I started there, and I went to see Professor [Gerson W.] Rabinowitz, who was the head of the Classics Department, and he evaluated my transcript from Santa Clara, which also contained the work I did at the novitiate, since it was affiliated with Santa Clara, and I had over ninety units. So I didn't need too much more to graduate. In fact, I needed, I think three courses, nine units in classics, so that's what I did. So that's the first thing I did. And because I only needed nine units in 00:54:00my major, then everything else was optional. And I originally thought I wanted to be a psychiatrist, so I enrolled in chemistry and physics, but after about ten days I saw that was not for me, especially the lab. I was just not something I could really do. So then I shifted to psychology, and so I then took a couple courses in psychology, and I took other courses as well.

I got into the I-House [International House], had a room there. And they, of course, have a cafeteria, and so that's similar to Santa Clara, in that sense, sort of group dining, and I got to meet different people there. And yeah, it was 00:55:00very different. Berkeley was so vast. I kept thinking like it's a supermarket, where you open the catalog and look at almost anything, and so that was a difference. It was interesting courses. I had a lot of interesting courses at Berkeley, and a lot of interesting conversations at the I-House. So it was quite a bit different, and it created a certain amount of anxiety.

But that's what it was, and then pretty soon it's time for the summer. I guess 00:56:00that was 1960, that would be when the convention was, and so I roomed with a couple of guys, graduate students, and one of them lives about forty minutes from here. He's a farmer, and he was studying that stuff. And so did Frank Damrell, with me, so I met some people. And it was different, in that Santa Clara and the novitiate were all very focused. You take whatever you want. Go look in the catalog. Now, most people have majors, so they're constrained, and they have requirements, but I had done all that. Oh, I think I had to do a physical ed. course, so I took that, and I had to take--what else? Oh, I hadn't had history, so I had to take a history exam, and I passed it. So I didn't have 00:57:00to take a history course. Then I needed a math class, so I took a statistics class. I think I didn't do very well in it, but I passed it, so that was all right.

SHAFER: Why did you choose I-House?

BROWN: My sister had gone there, and she talked about meeting interesting people from different countries, so that was good, so I liked that. But there was a lot of politics, you know, in Sproul Plaza--the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. There was a group of students supporting farm workers, and I went with them to Stockton one day, and we picked strawberries for a morning. And then we met a labor organizer, the predecessor to [César] Chávez. Then we met with Dorothy Day the next day and she talked. She's always on pilgrimage, going to different 00:58:00places, Catholic Worker houses, strikes--that was her whole life, so that was pretty interesting. She was a pretty famous figure. She became more famous, I think. But I remember asking her, "How could I learn more about what you're talking about?" And she said, "Well, read Paths in Utopia, by Martin Buber." So I've read Paths in Utopia twice, as a matter of fact, about utopian Socialism. So that was a pretty interesting experiment. And there was a lot of political discussion around the campus. It was exciting. It was not Free Speech Movement yet--that came later. That came after I graduated from Yale. But it seemed like 00:59:00there was a lot of ferment there, just talking to the people at lunch and dinner, from different countries--just very interesting.

SHAFER: What was it about the farm worker issue that caught your attention?

BROWN: Well, just the fact of farm workers, and we were going to go there and see what their conditions were like. I don't think I realized that Dorothy Day was going to be there as well, but she was.

HOLMES: And you mentioned you met--was it Larry Itliong, the head of the Agricultural Organizing Working Committee?

BROWN: I think I met him later, when I lived in LA and we went on that march to Calexico. I joined it partway--I think that's when I met Larry Itliong. Chávez 01:00:00didn't start in '60. There was a guy named [C. Al] Green, who worked for the AFL, and they were trying to organize the farm workers, and they were having a tough time. And they never did, until César came along.

SHAFER: What was it like going to Stockton and picking strawberries?

BROWN: Well, it was hard work, and I don't know that we really were sent out in a serious way--probably the growers were suspicious. And there were guys who were hard up, hard luck kind of people. I don't know that these were migrants that we saw. I think these were more down-and-outers kind of, that would pick for a few hours and then quit. But we talked about it, and there was a group 01:01:00that went there from Stiles Hall--that was the spot that it started from. Oh, this was the time of the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] demonstration. I didn't go to it, but some people from the I-House went there, and they talked about it when they came back.

SHAFER: What were they exploring at that point, the HUAC commission?

BROWN: They were just holding a hearing, as they did, although I think their hearings were probably winding down, but this was still a time when they took testimony, and then of course people, students would protest, and that caused a conflict, and they dragged them down the city hall steps.

SHAFER: That was in San Francisco, right?

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: And I believe it was called SLATE, which was the student political committee.

BROWN: SLATE, right. Yeah.

HOLMES: Did you have any interaction with SLATE or its affiliates?

BROWN: No, no.

HOLMES: There was no inclination to get involved in student government at that time?

BROWN: No, no. Just studying, and talking to people, and taking it all in.

HOLMES: You mentioned the political fervor there at Berkeley, which as you were mentioning, this was before the free speech movement. As the son of a governor, did that--?

BROWN: No one knew I was the son of a governor, for the most part. Maybe at the International House, but not on the campus.

SHAFER: You preferred it that way, I assume?

BROWN: Well, I would have to announce it or something. It's just not something that shows up. It's not something people notice--or didn't notice, at that time.

SHAFER: Different world.

BROWN: Different world. They knew my father was the attorney general, at Santa Clara. But Berkeley's a lot more impersonal, or you're not talking to very many 01:03:00people. It's a pretty small subset of people whose names you actually know and you talk to more than once. That's one of the big differences. It's pretty impersonal, and then, certainly the I-House, where I met people--I did meet people there. In fact, I marvel that I took a class, we studied the play Alcestis, by Euripides, in Greek. And at the end of the semester, I didn't know the name of anyone in my class. When it was over, people just walked away. So, I noted that. That seemed a little different at Santa Clara. We lived there--we were there in the evening, went for breakfast, and so there'd be, I guess, three meals that we'd share together. Whereas, when you take a Greek class three days a week--there it is, and then you're gone. But it struck me about the impersonal 01:04:00quality of the university.

HOLMES: In regard to the political environment there at Berkeley--I know a lot of the coffee houses around campus were places for a lot of political discussions. Did you interact in those kind of discussions?

BROWN: I'm trying to remember. I stuck mostly at the International House. There were some coffeehouses later, but that was when I came back.

SHAFER: I want to ask you about an issue that you obviously have cared about your entire life, but which really emerged when you were at Cal with your dad, and that's the death penalty. I believe it was May of 1960, and you contacted your dad to talk to him about the pending execution of Caryl Chessman. Can you talk about that and why you felt so strongly about that issue?

BROWN: Well, I guess I'd never encountered anything quite so directly as an 01:05:00execution, and then Caryl Chessman, of course, was this famous character that wrote that book about his experiences. And as it turns out, he hadn't murdered anybody, but he did commit a horrible rape, and he'd been there a long time. So he became somewhat of a heroic figure in the minds of a lot of people. Letters came from Brazil and all over, I think even from the Vatican or something. So it just struck me that killing him, at that point, didn't seem right to me. So I talked to my father about it, and he said, "Well, I can't do anything about it." I said, "Well, you can ask the legislature to abolish the death penalty." So 01:06:00then he finally said, "Yeah, I'm going to do that," which kind of surprised me. Now, at that time, I guess he didn't have the idea of having an indefinite reprieve, he thought it was limited.

It was an awkward situation, because Caryl Chessman's lawyer, I think an ACLU attorney, had already applied to the Supreme Court for a recommendation of clemency, and they voted 4-3 to deny clemency. So the law is pretty clear, that if you've been convicted of a felony before the murder crime, that you're looking at the death penalty. You cannot be commuted by the governor. In fact, I 01:07:00asked the Supreme Court, on nine occasions, and they said no. So those people didn't get commuted. These were life-without-parole types, although I did several hundred. So my father couldn't do anything about it, and the legislature certainly didn't like it. The legislature felt he threw the hot potato on them, and so they voted it down in committee. And I didn't know any of that. I'd been living this isolated life for almost four years, so I didn't have the sense of the world of Sacramento, and the world of political beliefs. I just had one sense--well, you can't kill this guy. That doesn't seem right.

SHAFER: How long was the conversation? Like what do you remember about it?

BROWN: I mean--not that long.

SHAFER: Was it brief?

BROWN: No, it wasn't--two minutes, and it was an extended conversation.

SHAFER: And for your dad, was it more about the political considerations? Or was it more--?

BROWN: I can't speak--yeah, well you asked me to get into his mind. I think it was about the moral aspects of--he probably knew this was not a death case. And, of course, today it wouldn't be a death case under the laws of California. So it seemed like a senseless kind of execution, and today we would say it was rather senseless, although the people after he commuted him--after he gave him a reprieve, thousands of letters showed up in the governor's office, and we heard from the other side, which was pretty extensive.

HOLMES: In the wake of that decision, your dad--well, many believe that that hurt him politically. I think he's booed at the Winter Olympics.

BROWN: It hurt him, but not so much as to enable Richard Nixon to win the 01:09:00election two years later.

HOLMES: That's correct.

BROWN: So yeah, definitely at that time, it didn't help. From a political point of view there was definitely damage.

HOLMES: What was your view of that damage?

BROWN: What do you mean my view? Whether I thought it existed, or whether I thought it was unfortunate?

HOLMES: In regards to the damage.

BROWN: It's kind of a reality.

HOLMES: I guess you're correct on that. I mean what was your perception.

BROWN: You mean what was my reaction to it.

HOLMES: That's correct.

BROWN: That's a little different than a view, I would say. [laughter] Well, I'm trying to remember. It definitely seemed like a big controversy. And yeah, I was 01:10:00surprised at the reaction, definitely. I was coming from another, simpler world, and it just struck me this was surprising in its intensity.

HOLMES: To follow on that, did it give you a new appreciation for the position of your father as governor, in weighing in on these kind of issues?

BROWN: I think I probably thought more about the issue. Do I think about how my father felt about life as governor? I might have, but I can't remember if I did, imagining how he saw things. That's a pretty sophisticated state of mind, which I don't know that I attained in 1960.

HOLMES: Maybe in regards to his position as governor on these kind of 01:11:00issues--you're coming at it from a moral standpoint, and that his job requires more complexities than just what he may morally believe.

BROWN: Right, so what--?

HOLMES: Did this situation give you maybe a deeper appreciation for the position that put him in?

BROWN: Well, I would say that the fierce negative response was surprising, so I got to see that, and obviously that's not a pleasant situation to see your father in that kind of negative, hostile public response. So yeah, I saw that. I mean, it's different than wandering around with your eyes cast down saying Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I mean, that was one world, and this is the world of 01:12:00outside and California in 1960. So I did see that, and I saw a lot more things, in the succeeding months and years, about how the world worked.

SHAFER: You're going to hate this question, but if you had it to do over, would you have--knowing now--?

BROWN: That's a counterfactual that I can't--

SHAFER: [laughter] I thought I would try.

BROWN: Would I do it over again? Might not have, because it caused trouble. Well, certainly because it didn't go anywhere. But I had no idea it would go nowhere, and I thought my father would probably know that. So that's a hard decision to understand, if he fully understood that there was no votes, then why would he do that? Yeah, so what were the options? You have a vote, get delayed 01:13:00by moratorium, or which we see now--indefinite reprieve--but somehow that didn't come up. So that's very undeveloped--I can't tell you why. Either he underestimated it, or at the moment didn't think about it, or was overcome by the morality of it--a lot of things. The trouble with the death penalty is that it has a finality to it, so you always are hesitant to pull the trigger, as it were, because you can't unpull it. So there's not many things like that in what governors do, so it's difficult to say. And I certainly didn't understand the full gravity or the implications as I would now.

SHAFER: You were about twenty-two, I think, at that point, and your dad was the governor of the state of California.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And you pick up the phone on an important issue that he probably understood maybe better than you did.

BROWN: Well, I hope he understood it better than I did.

SHAFER: And yet you convinced him to change his mind. That's kind of extraordinary.

BROWN: Well, it is. It's very extraordinary, but it happened.

SHAFER: Do you think your argument was that, like what--?

BROWN: Well, my argument was great, obviously. Well, this is the argument if you can have--if there's a chance to save somebody, you take that chance, and that chance was to let the legislature decide. That was the idea. Now--had I had the insight of Nancy McFadden, who could always read the legislature, or of [Jesse M.] "Jess" Unruh, who could count votes, as they say, which is an art of knowing 01:15:00what someone's going to do, in many cases better than the legislator himself or herself. I don't know whether he would have done something that didn't go anywhere. So he must have felt, in that moment, that he had a chance to do something. And that was good. I think it was very admirable. It was part of his moral--not just moral, his human empathy for the underdog. I think it's built in part on that he was a lawyer and a prosecutor, and I think he understood the case, and there was a bit of a lynch-mob mentality at that point.

Oh, the lynch mob, I have to say, that victims feel the same way now. In fact, I have friends who've had people [in their lives who have been] killed, and they don't want to see any kind of clemency. They feel it very strongly. So I guess 01:16:00until you've had that experience, you're focusing more on the death of the perpetrator rather than on the death of the victims, so there's two life experiences there that have to be understood together.

SHAFER: Just for a moment, I'm going to jump ahead a few years, because your dad did lose. Four years later he lost--or I guess it would be six years later at that point. And to quote [Frederick G.] "Fred" Dutton, is Humpty Dumpty--you couldn't put Humpty Dumpty back together again after the Chessman thing.

BROWN: Although they did. That's not true, he won substantially. Nixon was ahead substantially, double digits, I remember one poll, and he [Pat Brown] won, ran a very good campaign. But there were other things. The Vietnam War was heating up, the Sproul Hall protests, the arrests of six hundred people dragged down Sproul 01:17:00Hall, the Watts Riots, not being in the state. Glenn [M.] Anderson was not all that decisive, although I don't know how you would be decisive in the Watts Riots more than they were. So, the cycle turns. Eight years of what is exuberant spending all of a sudden becomes too much. The budget was only like a billion or two, and Reagan was able to exploit a feeling that wow, this thing was never this big. Well, it's true it was never that big, because of eight years of Democrats. And under the previous governor, [Goodwin J.] Knight, there was a lot 01:18:00of deferred programs and needs, and my father started filling those--and he raised taxes on a number of items. So that wears down.

Now, after Reagan, then I got elected, so then what do you attribute that to? So there's a pendulum swing. You go from Bush to Clinton, Clinton to Bush, Bush to Obama, Obama to Trump--those are pretty different people, and so that happens in state government. There is a swing. So part of it is the individual, his personality and how he's perceived in these stories that unfold, and then there's issues of the times. And then there's just a certain hope that whatever 01:19:00the problems are, they could be better under a thing called change. And change is a relatively empty term, but it's something that people feel--don't even need a definition. "Time for A Change." That worked well against the Democrats in 1952, "Time for A Change." So that's what happened. I think all those factors explain Reagan's victory.

SHAFER: The convention of 1960 was in Los Angeles, right?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Jack Kennedy got nominated there. Did you say you went?

BROWN: No, I did not go.

SHAFER: No, you didn't go. What do you remember about that though?

BROWN: Well, I remember what we read in the papers, the certain chaos with the delegation going in different directions. And part of that was, I think--and I 01:20:00don't know what it all came from--but I think my father tried to have the different candidates represented in the [California] delegation--Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson. But, of course, it turned out that it didn't work so well, because then they split three different ways, and he couldn't deliver it like Governor [David L.] Lawrence of Pennsylvania, or [Michael] DiSalle of Ohio, or [Robert B.] Meyner, I guess it was, in New Jersey. These people had a more eastern discipline and control, which probably never happened in California, and that's probably what happened. You can reflect on how much my father knew about it, how much he was thinking one thing and the other--who knows. You'd have to check his history to find that out. I don't know.

SHAFER: You know, a lot of young people of your generation were really drawn to 01:21:00public service because of JFK and the Peace Corps and other things--what effect did his election have on you?

BROWN: Well, I thought he was an exciting candidate. No one since then has had the same charisma, the same presence. He was a very exciting person to encounter, and his speeches had a right measure of dignity and irony and humor--seriousness. A combination that I haven't seen since. Maybe a little bit in Gene McCarthy. So what did--well, I don't know. I was going to law school and that was my focus at the time. I'm very interested in the issues, but I wasn't joining a lot of things.

HOLMES: What do you recall from that campaign between Nixon and Kennedy? What stands out to you?

BROWN: I think the debate. I think when Nixon talked about Truman swearing or something, and telling Kennedy he should do something about it--I kind of remember that. Quemoy [or Kinmen] and Matsu--I remember that, those two islands. Kennedy looking pretty good. I remember watching the debate.

HOLMES: He tanned very well in Florida.

BROWN: Is that what it was?

HOLMES: Yes.

BROWN: Yeah, well he was pretty pasty-faced otherwise probably. No, he looked good, and there was the excitement, the first thousand days, and [Arthur] Schlesinger and [Theodore C. "Ted"] Sorensen--they promoted this thing, the whole Camelot--again, after Eisenhower. So you had Communist Korea and corruption, and then Eisenhower came along, which was unusual, because he just 01:23:00wasn't that partisan, and he tried to hand it over to Nixon. But again, it was time for a change, get America moving. There had been a recession in '58, and Kennedy was very vigorous. And Nixon didn't have the same charisma, even though he had a lot of experience. And he had that strange aspect to his presence, to his face and his personality. But then again, just a few years later, he wins. So that's the way these things go.

HOLMES: Your father worked in support of Kennedy during that campaign. Did you get a chance to meet the Kennedys?

BROWN: Yes, I met--Teddy came out to the governor's office. I had time to speak with him. It's interesting, when Teddy came out I had a book on capital cases 01:24:00that I was thumbing through, and I showed it to Teddy Kennedy when he was waiting to talk to my father in the back office there. And then I met Jack Kennedy. He came down and gave a speech--I think his speech was in Oakland, late in the afternoon/early evening. It was very interesting to see. I noticed one thing, Jack Kennedy--some woman came up to him and said, "Can I have your handkerchief?" And he, very dignified but firm, said to one of his aides, "My assistant will give you one." Yeah, but he wasn't about to take out his handkerchief, so I always thought that was very self-composed. I also asked him 01:25:00about China, Red China. I said, "Why don't you recognize--are you going to recognize Red China or let China into the UN?" And he said something about our vital interests, and I remember--now what's a vital interest? We hear about that often, vital interests, a very vague term that covers a lot of ground.

SHAFER: How did it strike you, if at all, that you had opportunities to talk to the President of the United States? Your friends didn't, I assume.

BROWN: No, but, I don't know how that would. You ask me did I reflect on that and say something or think something?

SHAFER: Well, like boy, what a privilege.

BROWN: That's a level of self-consciousness that I don't, I didn't--I mean, obviously, I knew it was because my father was governor, and going to the 01:26:00governor's mansions, and you were going to the governor's conference. I met Eisenhower, Hershey, Pennsylvania, at a governor's conference--briefly, but nevertheless I got to meet him. Met Truman, met Stevenson--all these people came by. Met [Charles] de Gaulle at the Fairmont Hotel, but my father was doing the talking. I met Tito in Yugoslavia, so these were things you get to do. That's just the life I've lived.

HOLMES: Did you ever get a chance to meet Robert Kennedy?

BROWN: No. Never met Robert Kennedy. But I have a book that he signed that I'm told is very valuable. [laughing]

SHAFER: In '61 you graduate from Cal, and the commencement speaker was the governor.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: Yeah, what do you remember about that?

BROWN: I don't.

SHAFER: Nothing?

BROWN: No. No, I can't remember that. I think Clark Kerr was there giving out the degrees. It was a big crowd in the Memorial Stadium, so there were a lot of people there. I don't think people were listening to the commencement. I don't think the kids were that excited.

SHAFER: How did you feel?

BROWN: Well, it's always a little embarrassing to have your father there talking, because it's a little stressful. He's going to give me my degree? I probably would have felt that same way if he'd come to my school, which he never did. Oh, one time I think he came to Santa Clara, when Goodwin Knight was giving a talk. But you know, you're in that vast sea of people. It's the whole school 01:28:00graduating. They don't do that anymore. They break them up into different schools. Political science has their own graduation; English has their own graduation. I gave commencements at both, and they're just these little--it's not the same, the big one was big. So that's all.

Yeah, I don't know. I should reflect on that more, when people ask me to give commencements, because the kids are not that interested. In fact, I gave a commencement at Berkeley, the Political Science Department, because I knew the professor that asked me, and she'd had the same teacher I had, Professor Wolin, and I wrote out the speech and thought it through. But either it wasn't given that eloquently, or the students had other things on their minds, but I don't 01:29:00think students are that interested in commencement speeches. Now, maybe from Kennedy or from somebody--Steve Jobs or something. But short of that, I think it's very hard to give a commencement speech. I certainly don't recall--other than just sitting in this big sea of people waiting to go up on this artificial stage, get my diploma, and get a picture with Clark Kerr and my father.

SHAFER: You still have that photo somewhere, I'm sure?

BROWN: No--it's around somewhere. It's probably in one of my boxes.

HOLMES: Well, Governor you then, after your graduation from Cal, head over to Yale University for law school in, I believe, 1961. What inspired you to go to law school?

BROWN: I couldn't think of a better alternative. And that was not my original idea. The original idea was thinking of becoming a psychologist, but I soured on 01:30:00that idea. The reality of it didn't, after meeting some psychologists and finding out about their work, it didn't touch me that much. So law seemed fine, and Yale--after the first six months you could choose any course you wanted, so I thought that would be good. And I'd been at Berkeley, so now to go to the Ivy League, and to study at Yale seemed like an intellectually exciting thing, which it was.

HOLMES: What was your impressions of the school?

BROWN: By the way, I should say that the notion of knowing in high school or college what you're going to do--I didn't have that experience. Although I did study to be a Jesuit. We were told at Santa Clara that we were getting a liberal 01:31:00education, particularly in English class, Fr. Perkins, we had a book called Reading for Understanding [by Fr. Maurice B. McNamee]. Not reading just for information, but reading for understanding. And we read essays by Mortimer Adler, by Robert Hutchins, who was the young chancellor at the University of Chicago, promoter of the great books. We read articles by John Ruskin, by Cardinal Newman on the idea of the university, and other essays and short stories. But the message was we're getting a liberal education, we're broadening our mind, and the idea of what job we were going to take was very secondary. Now, engineers--maybe they had an idea; maybe people in business. Many of my 01:32:00friends looked down on people in business. That seemed kind of the easy path that you do that.

So I also saw Yale as a more liberal arts kind of school, but more professional, more concrete. Today people are very vocationally oriented. I meet people who came to work for me, I said, "What did you study?" They say, "Studied communications." He studied communications, Mr. Evan [referencing to assistant Evan Westrup in room.] I said, "Why did you study communications?" "I suppose I thought I could get a job." Well, not him--but somebody, somebody else said that. [laughter in background] So I just didn't think of what I was studying related to getting a job. I thought my job was to broaden my mind, to learn the best writings on ideas in history and philosophy, and things like that. So that 01:33:00was a different world. And Yale was a very free place too, although it was rigorous. There were a lot of smart people there, very smart people. In fact, I've noticed that each school I went to the people seemed to get--well, let me put it this way, the people who come out of Yale tend to be rather successful. And their wives tend to be rather successful. They found museums or theaters or hospitals and do all sorts of things, so yeah. I didn't realize it, but Yale is at the epicenter of American power, or at least it was.

SHAFER: Yeah, and I know you met, probably, some people who were important in 01:34:00your life going forward from there, like [J.] Anthony Kline, Tony Kline.

BROWN: Yes.

SHAFER: How did you guys connect?

BROWN: Well, I think he was in the same Entry, we called it--Entry, I think, Entry L. This was a residential hall right on campus, so he was one of the people who was there.

SHAFER: Yeah, more so than at Cal did you find that you were engaging in campus life and the life of the school?

BROWN: No, at Cal I was engaged--particularly at the International House. There was a lot of things going on there. At Yale, of course you had the cases, you had politics, you had the New York Times. I didn't read the New York Times, that was an experience I never had. But at Yale, oh yeah, read the New York Times every day. So that already orients me to the national/international issues. And of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of '62, we really did--I did, 01:35:00thought it was over. Maybe I should get to Vermont if it's going to get worse. That was a real nail-biter. And it turns out now, in retrospect of course, that the Russians had nuclear-armed weapons, and had we made the wrong moves, we might have had a full-scale nuclear war and killed billions of people. That might have happened. So I didn't know that--we know so much more now how close we were to catastrophe, but even at that time it was pretty scary.

SHAFER: You mention that with each successive school you went to--it sounded like you were about to say the people got smarter. [laughing] Did you feel intimidated at all when you got to Yale?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: Not at all?

BROWN: No, I felt that most of them were better than I was at their study habits 01:36:00and the way they attacked cases. They were good. They'd stand up in class, and they always knew quite a lot.

HOLMES: What was your impressions of not just Yale, but also, the surrounding city of New Haven? The city is quite different than, say, San Francisco.

BROWN: Yeah, this is before, I think this might have been before redevelopment, or it was just in the middle of Mayor [Richard C.] Lee's redevelopment. He'd written a book on--no Dahl, I think, wrote a book on democracy, Robert [A.] Dahl, and New Haven was the model. But I didn't spend a lot of time in the surrounding area. I didn't have a car, and I was pretty much, you know, there at the school. Did a lot of talking.

SHAFER: You did?

BROWN: Yeah, a lot of listening--but a lot of talking. Well, it's very interesting, all the different cases and criminal law, constitutional law, labor law, the conflicts of law among different states, psychology and the law--all that. Psychiatry and the law actually--that's what it was.

HOLMES: Was there a certain focus in law that you were gravitating towards at that time?

BROWN: I liked labor law. I did like labor law. I took psychiatry and the law, and I had Anna Freud as the teacher, Sigmund Freud's daughter. She and another woman taught the course. That was interesting. The only thing I can remember is that she said that men and women were different in this respect: that a woman could bond with a baby not her own, but men seemed to require their own physical child for them to really form an attachment. I don't know whether that's true or 01:38:00not, but I remember her saying that, so it's an interesting gender difference if it is such.

SHAFER: It seems like psychiatry and psychology, that's really interested you in the course of your--

BROWN: Well, yeah, yeah, and we had another guy teaching--oh yeah, in psychiatry and the law they had Jay Katz and a guy named [Joseph] Goldstein. Jay Katz was a psychiatrist. I took two courses: one was criminal law, and the other was psychiatry and the law. But we had this question of, which was very interesting in criminal law: What is a crime? Who is a crime against? And also, insanity defense, which comes from the McNaughton [or M'Naghten] rule of common law. And then they had a couple that would change it, and it's a little different--the McNaughton rule is: Did he know the difference between right and wrong? If you 01:39:00don't, then you're insane, the insanity defense will hold. The other one is: Did he do this crime as a result of mental illness? Now, the reason I'm bringing this up is these matters, these topics, were always brought up and then they were dissected. How do you know if it's a mental illness? What does that mean? What's the causation there? And so the whole notion of the insanity defense was questioned--along with everything else.

The law school case method was to look at a set of facts from a case, and then explore the outer limits of what the rule of law could be. And one guy, Fleming James, who taught me procedure, he said that, "Your task here," I think he might 01:40:00even have said the answer. "If you want to have an answer to the question here, it's the range of arguments that an astute lawyer could make given the facts of this case." So that's a very different orientation. What is the rule in this case? Because you're studying law. What's the law? And the law is the range of arguments that an astute counsel could make. Now, someone who has an absolutist view of the world would be jarred by that, but I found it congenial to my somewhat skeptical mind. So it's argumentative, and you're learning that trade--of making the best arguments you can. Of course if you're a lawyer, you 01:41:00have a case, you have a client, you've got to make the best arguments you can. And so cases were not viewed as: "The rule of this case is--." But rather, each case was an opportunity to explore possible ways of looking at the facts and interpreting them, so that fit in with my general intellectual development.

SHAFER: Well, how do you think that whole orientation way of thinking about things, how did you take that with you from Yale into public service?

BROWN: Well, I did exactly that. I look at the range of possible arguments or interpretations, and it is my experience that most people have an argument. But there was another teacher--I don't want to bore you with all my teachers, but it kind of indicates that I remember my teachers. At least I remember some things. [Friedrich] "Fritz" Kessler was a teacher of contracts. He taught me 01:42:00second-semester contracts my first year at Yale. He later went to Boalt Hall Law School. But he said, "Every"--he had a German accent, which I can't imitate--he said, "Every rule has a counter-rule." So you'd read a case, and this is the rule. Then you'd read a case that was very similar, but it would have a different rule. And so that idea that every rule has a counter-rule, that's interesting to me. That's significant. And I link it back to some philosophical axiom or notion. I don't know whether it was Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, or where the hell it came from, but the term is coincidence of opposites. So it's a coming together of opposites. It's a little different than every rule has a counter-rule, but again, it's similar, like in the Zen world that 01:43:00something--it's not one; it's not two. That's a Zen saying, not one, not two. So what does that mean?

The goal at law school, I think, was to develop your understanding of how judges have written these opinions, so you could understand how legal arguments need to be made, whether you're making them in a courtroom or advising a client. But you really begin to look into material, look into stories and fact situations, and see the full range of possible interpretations. And that sensibility, or that perspective, has grown with me. In fact, it's even growing now, as I was reading 01:44:00a review in the last couple of days, a review of a book on Gandhi. It was in the Times Literary Supplement. And the author, I think made some points, and then the reviewer made points about that. And I was just thinking boy, there are so many books written, and the books change over time, the perspectives on people change. So if they're changing over time, that means they could change right away. It's just we won't know it, or we won't express it for a while.

But that means if you get all the interpretations of people--they'll write books on Kennedy, they'll write books on Johnson, on Clinton, or any other historical 01:45:00figure--they're different biographies, and they don't seem to ever finish. So where that's true over time, it should be true in time. So you could say whatever somebody is saying, there is probably a whole different configuration that you could lay out. And if that's true of writing about somebody--writing about me or talking--it's true about most things. So then you kind of start edging into postmodernism and deconstructionism, and those are fields that I don't really spend much time on. But all these things seem to fit together as a way of looking at life in its complexity, and making sense of it, but not making sense of it by being simplistic or arbitrary--it's this or it's that. No, it's this and it's that, and probably several other things in between.

SHAFER: Well, how do you arrive at the truth though?

BROWN: Well, that's a good question. That's what Pilate asked Jesus. What is the truth?

SHAFER: What's the answer?

BROWN: [laughing] Well, you know, scientists don't talk about truth. They talk about evidence; they talk about verification; they talk about the null hypothesis. But they don't talk about truth. Truth is kind of a quasi-religious subject now, I would say. People talk about my truth, which is a very strange term--my truth--and then you aren't bringing it into relativism. So truth is what we think is, what the state of the world is. What did Wittgenstein say about whatever is the case, or whatever the world, all the facts? I can't tell 01:47:00you what it is. But people have been trying to state that question for a long time. [Wittgenstein, in Proposition 1.1 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, writes, "The world is the totality of facts, not of things."]

Certainly, we can say what error is, because we can then say, "Oh, we know the facts are different than you're saying." I think we ought to be trying to avoid error and correct things as much as we can. But I think we're definitely into approximation. Now, obviously, you know truth. If you pull a trigger, and you've got a gun and a bullet, and you fire at somebody, they're going to die. That's the truth. And so there are a lot of basic truths, but in between there are a lot of interpretations. That's why the literate people love words like hermeneutics and symbiotics, and they love to complexify, and the point is that it has become very counterproductive. In fact, the whole liberal arts, I think, 01:48:00has suffered, and I think it was much simpler. Now, maybe everybody says that, but if I look at my Reading for Understanding, it's a lot simpler than some of the writings that I've come across recently. So I think truth is a good goal to pursue.

SHAFER: You know, while you mention the Cuban Missile Crisis, and your dad's reelection was right around that time, against Nixon. How much attention were you paying to that?

BROWN: To what? To the election?

SHAFER: To the '62 election. Like what do you remember about that?

BROWN: I remember the Hughes loan. Nixon's brother got a loan from Howard Hughes. My father's campaign made a big deal out of that. I think Dick Tuck put it in Chinese and followed Nixon through Chinatown--What about the Hughes loan? 01:49:00in Chinese. [laughing] I remember Nixon, I think did talk about capital punishment. Or maybe he gave a speech at Davis on that. He might have talked about Communism. I'm not sure. But he once referred to the capitol as the statehouse, which now sometimes people use. But at that time, no one ever referred to the state capitol as the statehouse. There's the executive mansion, which they now call the governor's mansion. He seemed a little bit--not using the right words, and I don't know whether the electorate, they probably couldn't have known that.

But for whatever it is, the campaign was pretty solid. My father was physically very energized. He lost some weight, and it all seemed to fall together. I 01:50:00didn't know at the time, but no governor has ever been denied reelection for a second term in the history of California. That's true, and that continues true today.

SHAFER: Wow.

BROWN: But I didn't know that then. So that gives you a little bit of a boost there. And I think the reason for that is you have enough time to have some accomplishments. You have the legislature working with you, and whatever it is that caused you to defeat your opponent, gives you something to do that has some consensus behind it, and so you do it. So that works for four years. But now you've been there eight years, and no one ever tried to run for a third term 01:51:00except my father, Earl Warren, and myself, and I ran twenty-eight years after the first time I left office. So after eight years, the things accumulate. And Earl Warren was running during World War II, and he was an unusual figure and bipartisan. So anyway, I think that played a certain role into it, because you're the governor and things were good in '62.

We had the Cuban Missile Crisis. That kind of froze things in the campaign, and Nixon kind of liked to close strongly, and he couldn't really do much because the Cuban Missile Crisis shut everybody up. I remember Tommy Kuchel was the Republican candidate for the Senate, an incumbent, and he flew back to Washington, and he put on his pilot's helmet with the thing you strap over with 01:52:00little goggles up above his eyes, and that was a very good--what we call a photo op today. We didn't have that term then. But he flew back to Washington for that picture, and it was very effective. I think he was going to win anyway. So that was the campaign. I remember the debate, when Nixon said, "Are you saying I'm a crook?" Or something like "Are you saying I lie?" I forget what he said. And my father didn't really rise to the occasion. He didn't respond. I thought Nixon got that--that was pretty good.

SHAFER: What should he have said, do you think?

BROWN: Well, I think he had to be more accusatory instead of backing off. But it proves that debates aren't always that relevant, because how many people actually see them? These little moments, they can be big. I noticed that moment. 01:53:00But it just seemed to be a good campaign, because the water plan was popular, and the freeways, labor felt good. What became a problem was not yet a problem. And there was no dissonance, there was no Watts Riots, there was none of these social/civil rights activity, which didn't turn into a pressure on the Democratic governor like it did in '66.

HOLMES: What was your impression of Nixon? Earlier you had said that it was a really hard-fought campaign. Your father came back to win by--I think about 300,000 votes.

BROWN: Three or four points, I think, three points, four points, something like that.

HOLMES: But what was your impression of Nixon during the campaign?

BROWN: Well, I always thought, you know, Tricky Dick. His face always looked a little strange. I remember meeting him at the Giants Stadium, and I thought his 01:54:00handshake was a little weak. I think he had a hot dog. I remember seeing the mustard. I don't know whether it got onto his hand, but I still remember that mustard and the hot dog, and shaking his hand. But I met him several years later, and we had a very good conversation. And he did look quirky, but he seemed very insightful. And I think the turn to China was pretty bold. Of course the prolongation of the Vietnam War was scandalous and bad. Henry Kissinger thinks he had a better sense of strategy than any other American president. That's what Henry thinks. Hard to say, because he took over, and he said he had a secret plan, then he kept the war going, went right to the end there until 01:55:00after him. So, but I understand you can't retreat.

Bush, the second Bush, some evidence, not conclusive, of some kind of weapons of mass destruction allowed him to go in and pulverize Iraq or bomb them and disrupt and all that came out of that. So the tolerance for some kind of setback is very low, even if you have to blow the world up. I think that's a very somber thought, that the ego or the face, maintain face, whatever you call that in America, that'll have to be. So if the Chinese want to push us somewhere, the Russians may have to respond, because of this psychological quirk. And if we 01:56:00respond, we may kill billions of people. So Nixon didn't want to say, "Okay, we did lose in Vietnam--we get the hell out of there." But if he'd said, in '69, "This is a dumb war. I'm getting out." I don't know if the Vietnamese wouldn't let him or he didn't want to have that defeat. So it was better to kill, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of people, rather than have that appear to be what actually happened. Now is not as clear--except to people who carefully look at it.

SHAFER: We're going to take a break in a little bit, give you some time off to have lunch or whatever. But you've talked about Vietnam. How big an issue was it while you were still at Yale, and what was your impression of it? It was Kennedy's war, and then it was LBJ's war.

BROWN: I think I remember President Kennedy talking about Laos, and that was a problem. In '62, there was a picture of my father bowing down to some Laotians, and it turned out the picture was doctored, and the campaign made a stink about that. I don't know that it was Nixon, but it was some part of his extended campaign operation, or some independent. So Laos was an issue. I remember Indochina and the Viet Minh and the defeat of the French. I just remember advisors going in there, and I didn't think that was a good idea. So I wasn't 01:58:00for the Vietnam War from day one. After Johnson's big victory, I think somebody wrote an article for the New York Times, a more conservative author and said, "This is going to take about 500,000 troops, which is what it took." Well, it took that, but it didn't work. So I guess that would have been when--1964/65? I do remember there were some Vietnam protesters at my father's campaign headquarters in '66. Yeah, they showed up, but it wasn't news.

SHAFER: There was the whole domino theory. You just didn't buy into that?

BROWN: No.

HOLMES: Or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution?

BROWN: When was that? That was '65?

HOLMES: 1964.

BROWN: Is that '64? So I would have been back at Berkeley then. I remember the 01:59:00atmospheric testing was an issue, and that was a big issue. Edward Teller at a debate, I think, with Linus Pauling, and he was for it--didn't say it was a problem. I remember the Kennedy speech at American University, and that was very impressive. I've gone back to read it--it is impressive. You never hear a speech like that today.

SHAFER: What was the focus of it?

BROWN: That we all breathe the same air, our children want the same thing, so we've got to stop these weapons, stop this testing, stop these terrible weapons. You'd never hear--it's not even thinkable today that somebody--very eloquent. So then to Vietnam, and Johnson was not as attractive as Kennedy. His, when he spoke, he didn't have the eloquence, didn't have the charm, from my point of 02:00:00view--and I don't think he did. So then that war really started heating up. I got active with the California Democratic Council in August of '67--I don't think Vietnam was an issue.

SHAFER: Yeah, we'll come back to that.

BROWN: I don't think it was an issue in '66.

SHAFER: It was right around that time that you went to Central America.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: You went to Mexico City, I think, and then you went elsewhere. Why did you go down there?

BROWN: I wanted to learn Spanish, and I thought I might not have another chance. So I thought between working with the California Supreme Court and going to work in a law firm, I should spend four or five months--and I did. I traveled all over different towns.

SHAFER: What do you remember about that? Did it make an impression on you?

BROWN: Well, I stayed in Mexico for a month, then I went to Central America. And I went to Nicaragua. There's no Sandinistas at this point that I knew of. We heard, when we went to El Salvador, that fourteen families ran the place. It was all tourism kind of stuff, and I went with the Advertising Council, to the five Central American countries. Then I went down to Venezuela, and one of my friends had a cousin there, and so I stayed at their house. Then I went over to Colombia, and then down to Chile where there was a Chile-California program, so I did something with that--not very much. And then I circled back and got back 02:02:00around, I think, March or April of '66.

SHAFER: One big thing we haven't asked you about, Governor, is the assassination of President Kennedy.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: You were at Yale at that point?

BROWN: I was at Yale.

SHAFER: Yeah, what was that like on campus? What do you remember about it?

BROWN: I remember I was in a class on the Uniform Commercial Code, when the teacher dismissed the class. And it was shocking, of course, and I went down to Washington. I don't think I went outside, but I watched it on television. My father was there and a couple of other people. They flew to Washington. But I remember they talked about it on television all day, and that gets a little 02:03:00tiring. But it was very moving, obviously, very moving. No president had been assassinated, that I can think of, in that time. So yeah, it was unbelievable. It had a big impact. I can't say it changed my life, but it was a major event for those few days. I didn't stay around the campus. I went to Washington.

SHAFER: And why did you go down there?

BROWN: Because my father was going back there, and I thought I'd go be part of the ceremony or be part of the process, closer to the process.

SHAFER: How did it make you feel about the world? You know, like suddenly this guy who was so charismatic and articulate and inspiring is suddenly gone.

BROWN: Well, I don't know what I can say about that. Yeah, it's always shocking 02:04:00that someone that young and vital is gone. I think these things have longer-term consequences. So at the moment, there's the funeral, and that famous horse and the boots backwards, and the little son there saluting. All that was very memorable and very dignified, and so was Jackie. So that world seems very removed from where we are today, for our president, for our president's wife. Even the stories that have been written about Kennedy have turned darker than was the case then. So it was, I think, a very high minded, almost glorious 02:05:00moment--that I certainly felt. And then it was over.

HOLMES: Governor, in the years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, there was many theories and discussions around the assassination itself. As a man who thinks outside the box, who doesn't always take the typical story or questions it, what was your reaction to these various theories that were thrown about?

BROWN: I don't know that I thought about that. There's Oswald--I remember watching on television when he was shot by [Jack] Ruby. I remember Mel Belli went down there to defend Ruby. I don't know if I talked to him or not, but I heard him talk about it. I was not a conspiracy theorist. A lot of these things 02:06:00have come out later, which we didn't know about. You know, Oswald went to the Russian embassy, and there's this stuff with the Mafia in New Orleans--there's a lot of smoke around there, but we didn't know any of that then.

SHAFER: Do you think the fact that Earl Warren was the head of the commission that investigated it, did that give you more faith, do you think, in the findings?

BROWN: I think it was the fact Kennedy's dead. That was it. It wasn't the precursor of some invasion or some foreign intervention. So I don't know that I thought any more about it.

HOLMES: Well, Governor, before we take a break we just wanted to also ask, in 1964, during spring break, you went down to Mississippi?

BROWN: No, in '63 on spring break.

HOLMES: Oh, was it '63?

BROWN: Yeah. Well, but the Mississippi summer was in '64.

HOLMES: In '64.

BROWN: That was a year later.

HOLMES: Okay. Can you discuss your impression of when you went down there. You also talked with the governor as well?

BROWN: I did. I did that for my own personal safety, since it definitely felt dangerous. There was a guy named Bill Higgs who gave a speech. So I said, "Well, I'd better come down." He said, "Come down to visit." So me and another Yale law student, Ozzie was his name, we went down there, and we visited a few places. He was filing a couple of lawsuits--I think I might have helped him with a lawsuit, which was kind of the purpose for going. I remember being in Greenville, I think. He was a lawyer--maybe a lawyer--and there were only three lawyers, black lawyers, in the whole state. And this guy, I remember he pulled the shades down, 02:08:00and I think he served some Pepsi Cola--and I think he even served some bourbon. But this is before [Michael] Schwerner and those guys got killed. But it definitely felt like we were in a very dangerous foreign country, and that's why I went to see the governor, just to say, "Hey, I'm here. Don't do anything to me." And he called my father, and he told my father, "Get him out of here." Soon thereafter I went to New Orleans, and flew back to New York, and then to Yale.

But I think you really had a sense--I had a sense--I'm trying to be concrete about it, but there was fear. You were really kind of watching out when you met 02:09:00with people. I believe I met with Medgar Evers. He hadn't been shot yet. I didn't meet with [James] Meredith, but I did meet Evers. It's just a normal kind of town, but the division between black and white was so strong. And the denial of votes--I was focused on the denial of voting rights. There was no voting, essentially. This is before '64, when you had the freedom delegations, so this is a year ahead of time, and there's nobody else down there. I went there because it seemed like, "Boy, this is a piece of history." I had to see this for myself. And yeah, that was the mood, at least what I sensed to be the mood.

HOLMES: How did this impact your--I don't want to use the word view--maybe a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement? Before then, it was maybe what you saw on TV or what you read in the newspaper, but to actually be there in the South.

BROWN: Yeah, well it was quite shocking the way it was. And of course we go back to Yale and another kind of life. We had an African American guy there who was studying to be a lawyer. He was very active in this, and yeah, there was a lot of things. I remember him telling me about Emmett Till. I didn't know who Emmett Till was, but he did. Emmett Till died in '56, and I was in law school in '61. I must have heard about it fairly soon thereafter. But he'd talk about, in the South, that there were black farmers that had horse-drawn plows. He said it's 02:11:00like a hundred years ago in the United States of America, kind of making that point: "What the hell is going on here?" So that was a perspective I hadn't heard before.

But I'll tell you, I did have the feeling that this is something that I, as an outsider, I wasn't going to affect. It was going to take the people who were there, because it was just so alien, and we drop in, we leave--we're not going to affect anything. So then I came back, came back to Yale, and we talked about law and whatever we talked about then.

SHAFER: Did that seem like a safe refuge, in a way, from the world at that point?

BROWN: Well, school always is. It's an artificial environment, where ideas and 02:12:00cases--for me, it's very stimulating, because the professors are smart. Not all of them, but a good number of them are pretty eloquent, and they're interesting. It's not the normal conversation. Spending a week at Yale, going to law school, is not like your normal week, because everybody is very intelligent, and they're exercising their intelligence on subject matter that is interesting and challenging. So it doesn't get any better than that, from my point of view.