Jerry Brown | Interview 3 | March 18, 2019

HOLMES: This is Todd Holmes, with the Oral History Center at UC Berkeley. Today's date is March 18, 2019. We are sitting down with Governor Jerry Brown for his third session in the oral history, and I am accompanied today by our partners at KQED: Scott Shafer and Guy Marzorati. Governor, thanks again for sitting with us today.

BROWN: Sure.

HOLMES: I'd like to pick up where we left off and maybe talk about leaving Yale Law School to clerk with California Supreme Court Justice [Mathew O.] Tobriner.

BROWN: Mathew Tobriner.

HOLMES: How did this opportunity arise?

BROWN: Well, I visited Matt Tobriner. He recommended me to Yale Law School, so I 00:01:00got to know him prior to his recommending. I went and had lunch with him. He's an old friend of my father's. They go back to the Russ Building on Montgomery St., where they had their law offices in the 1930s. I can't tell you how--I might have just called him, or something. I don't know how it happened, other than the fact that I knew him and I'd met him, and I think a law clerk was something--a clerkship is something you think about at Yale.

HOLMES: And how do you recall your experience? What stands out to you in that clerkship?

BROWN: I had to do a lot of writing every week. You prepare memoranda for the judge, basically for their weekly conference on whether or not to take a case or 00:02:00not. And also you can be called upon to help write opinions. But Mathew Tobriner did a lot of his own writing, so I wrote, but he wrote, obviously, more. And I would say that I got more experience writing there than I'd ever done before. That was the number one time, for me, for writing. And of course in those days, we had those old typewriters. And so we typed it on yellow paper. That's how it all went. So that was a very, very important experience in writing.

And I got one lesson from Mathew Tobriner. He always wanted me to change the passive to the active. He didn't like the passive--and I've always learned that, 00:03:00that if you really want to be clear, you put it in the active voice. If you want to be a little less clear, then maybe the passive is appropriate.

SHAFER: Mistakes were made.

BROWN: Yeah, mistakes were made, yeah. [laughter] So that was very good. And I got to read a lot of cases, and I wrote the memo. The most famous memo I probably wrote was, without question, the case of one man, one vote, which was presented to the court--and not something that people in Sacramento were thinking about. But the Supreme Court had already ruled on one man, one vote, and so this was a case where someone from Los Angeles challenged the composition of the state senate and said that too had to be one man, one vote. And I said yeah, you've got to take a look at this. But I was the first--I wrote that down 00:04:00and came up with that, and they went along with it.

HOLMES: Were there other cases that you recall working on during your clerkship?

BROWN: Some search-and-seizure cases, I think. We had a case every week! So a lot of them. Yeah, I did search and seizure, consent to a search, or viewing--seeing in plain view the contraband--those are some of the cases I remember.

SHAFER: While you were clerking, were you also studying for the bar, or did that come after?

BROWN: I was studying for the bar. I think I took off a little while and studied for the bar. Then I flunked it, and then I took off again, went to Sacramento, 00:05:00studied for the bar and passed.

SHAFER: A lot of people have flunked the bar. Were you surprised that you did?

BROWN: No. In fact two members of my class at Yale flunked the bar that year. Or was it from Yale? Somebody from Harvard did, yeah. And another guy from Yale did.

SHAFER: What was it like studying? What do you remember about studying in the governor's mansion?

BROWN: Well, I remember studying at the--I forget--the Mayfair Hotel across from the German-American Hall, which was the culinary academy. I stayed at that hotel, and I found it pretty boring and pretty difficult to pay attention to the notes. And the classes weren't bad, the review classes. In Sacramento, I didn't take a review course. I just reread the notes that I already had, and I got a little bit of help from a lawyer who worked at the Department of Corporations. 00:06:00And that helped. He was a bar coach or bar-exam teacher, and he helped. It only took a few times, and I got the idea pretty quick.

SHAFER: Did your dad try to give you any advice about the bar? [laughing]

BROWN: No. No, the bar changes--there's too much change.

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah. Was there anybody clerking with you that you became close to that you stayed in touch with?

BROWN: Richard [M.] Mosk was a clerk then. He was there. I think the guy who clerked with me was a guy named [David H.] Melnick--I don't think I've seen anything of him since I left. He's a lawyer in San Francisco.

SHAFER: And when you were doing the clerking, did it help shape your thinking about what kind of law you wanted to practice?

BROWN: Not particularly. No, that wasn't clear in my mind at that point. By the 00:07:00way, I was in a car pool. Frank Damrell was there, and he was working for the attorney general. And then the next year, '65, Tony Kline came, and he was there for a few months. And then we had a guy named Paul Halvanick, who I made a judge. He was working for the attorney general, living in Berkeley. And then we had another guy named--[Demetrios P.] Agretelis, Demitri Agretelis, and I appointed him a judge [in Alameda County]. So I basically, I appointed three members of the car pool out of five. One wasn't a lawyer. But we commuted, and different people would take their car for that week, so we shared and it worked very well. So that was interesting to commute. I always wondered why people 00:08:00weren't commuting, because it was so easy. And of course it's cheaper, because you're only paying the tolls and the parking fee once a week. You divide it up. So if you have five people, it's one-fifth each, every week, for five weeks.

As far as the law--I like criminal law, but I didn't want to go into the prosecutor's office nor the public defender. I looked at labor law. I interviewed with [Stephen P.] "Steve" Reinhardt, and one other firm, and then Tuttle & Taylor. And I met [William A.] "Bill" Norris, who became a federal judge later, and through him I decided to go to Tuttle & Taylor, which was a firm of only about thirteen or fourteen, but then it went up to about seventy. 00:09:00It became a very prominent firm in downtown Los Angeles.

SHAFER: When you were studying for the bar, at the mansion, did you get to see your father working more closely than you had?

BROWN: A little bit. There were dinners; there were conversations. There was the famous meeting with Jess Unruh. They were arguing about who's going to run for governor, and that was an important meeting for me, just listening to them--it was very exciting. And because of that, my interest, it was so spontaneously stimulated that I thought at that point, "Yeah, this is something I'd like to do." I like to think right then and there I said, "Yeah, I think I like politics, and I think I'll find a way to run for governor." So I decided right 00:10:00then and there, because the study for the bar exam is not very exciting. It's rule bound, you've got to do a lot of memory--it's drudgery, it's not interesting. I mean it could be interesting, if as you master the material it gets interesting. But then the excitement, the drama of these campaigns--and then there were other things that came up, like news stories that I would hear about. So I got a little view of the governor's office, and I talked to some of the people in the office.

SHAFER: What do you remember about--or you described it, I think, as an argument with Jess?

BROWN: Well, it was just talking. Unruh wanted to run for governor, and my father said no--that the party needed him. So each one was expressing their views. I don't know that the content of the conversation was interesting, but 00:11:00just something about the intensity, or maybe just the subject matter, interested me. And not interested me just intellectually, but it had a certain emotive feel to it, impact.

SHAFER: And these are two powerful men, obviously, going head to head.

BROWN: Right. Well, they were just by themselves, sitting there, on the first floor.

SHAFER: Yeah, what was your impression of Unruh?

BROWN: My impression of Unruh was: he's a tough character. Maybe a little mean, very smart. I didn't know him that well then. He was fighting with my father. I came to understand the legislature fights with the governor. It's a part of what the process is. But when I was governor, I had a chance to meet with him on a couple of occasions. So he was a lot older than I was and a lot more formidable. 00:12:00But I remember speaking with him at Frank Fat's in a booth, and I thought to myself, the man was very quick--I mean unusually. I don't know if there's anybody that I've met since that was that quick. Maybe Willie Brown. But Unruh had an incisive quality that I can see why he would emerge as the leader. He was intimidating, but he was insightful.

And what I most noticed and marveled at was that--and I can't remember the incidents, but he wanted me to do something for him. I did it. But then in talking about it, he was able to frame the encounter in such a way that it 00:13:00looked like he was doing me a favor, even though I was the one--or whoever the other person was--did him the favor. And at that time I saw how, in this legislative encounter, struggle, it's all about negotiation--it's not all about, but one of the skills is negotiation, and I think Unruh was highly skilled in that.

Now, he was tough, and his image was not as good as it could be or it might have been. But he was a guy from Texas, went to USC after World War II, and he rose to the top because of, I think, his just brute intelligence, and emotional intelligence, and real drive. So, I don't meet too many people like that.

SHAFER: So as you were listening to that conversation that the two of them were having, who would you have sided with? I mean, who made the better argument, do you think?

BROWN: I can't remember the content. I really just found the encounter very fascinating--not fascinating, exciting. And that's not an analytic description, it's just a statement or a description of my state of mind. Even though politics in itself is not always attractive to me, because it is the same old rhetoric and it's not the most visionary undertaking in the mundane give and take and detail that you have to indulge in, but I thought that was exciting. So, there 00:15:00were other things that were interesting. Hearing my father talk with [William E.] "Bill" Warne on the water plan. So it was interesting, but it's kind of a blur right now, because I was studying for the bar. I'm a student, I'm not in the life of Sacramento, didn't know anybody.

So there it was. I just studied and would come down and have dinner--my father had dinner at home. We had a woman there, a maid, that did the cooking, and it was a perfectly fine house. That's why I never know what the hell people are talking about when they said it's a fire trap or unlivable. I know when I told Maria [Shriver], I said, "Maria--you ought to live there. It's great!" she was 00:16:00shocked, and my wife was shocked. But then when I looked at--you know, the water above the first floor wasn't there, the toilets weren't working. They let it go--forty years, run down. It shows you've got to keep places up. But it was still quite a place. I remember, I don't know whether it was when I was there for the summer, but there were dinners that they had, and I found those--I mean, it seemed like a perfect thing to do. And that's why I moved back in, because I could see that was really an opportunity for the governor to make relationships and to have impact, to the extent that the meetings and socializing can do.

SHAFER: It's interesting that that one conversation that you overheard really sparked your enthusiasm, and you knew then that politics is what you wanted. And 00:17:00it's interesting, too, that you decided you wanted to be governor, because just a few years earlier you were trying to convince your dad to run for the senate. But it was this--you wanted to be governor. That's what you wanted to be.

BROWN: Well, the governor was there. [laughing] If he'd been a senator, it might have been a different story. Also, the path to governor was a little easier. Another Democrat, Tom Lynch, was the attorney general, and he lost, and I could see the path to the secretary of state. The guy had been there since 1942, Frank Jordan. So I said well, that's viable. Either he can be beaten, or he won't be around. So I figured I could do that. It seemed doable, practical.

I don't do this all the time, but I get ideas. I'm going to Santa Clara, I'm 00:18:00going to join the Jesuits. I'm going to Yale, or I'm going to LA. That was a big discussion in the car pool, "What the hell are you going to LA for?" I said, "LA's where it's at." In fact, there was a play, or maybe a novel, entitled, What Makes Sammy Run? Do you know that one by Budd Schulberg, maybe?

SHAFER: Hmm, don't know.

BROWN: You might look it up. Yeah, I'm going to make it big in LA! That's the money, the media--that's where it's at. Now, I knew that because my father used to live there during the summer and would carry on political activity during the summer. And a lot of the powerful people behind him were from LA. Now, San 00:19:00Francisco and Silicon Valley have become more powerful, but in those days it was savings & loan and other kind of people down in LA that made it. So it is unusual. In fact, it's hard for me to even believe that I said, "Okay, yeah, I'd like to be governor." And I don't know--I may even be making it up, because we're talking about 1965. That's a long time from now. But I also remember when I got my mother to give me the shares to this ranch, I said, "Okay, I'm going to restore the Mountain House," so that was 1998. And now you're shooting in Mountain House III. So I do things like that, not through a process, not through a stakeholder process. Right, Evan? We don't do too many stakeholder processes. We probably should have. [laughter]

WESTRUP: We did a number. You didn't always know about them. [laughing]

BROWN: Yeah, I think that's very important. People often ask me what's your process? Someone said the other day, "Now that you're not the governor three months, have you experienced closure?" Whatever the hell that might be. [laughing] Or I think you asked, "How is your transition?" You know, like there's something called a transition. It sounded like an initiation into the Eagle Scouts or something. I'm not quite sure what it is. But the reality is not as framed with such exactitude or formality. And I experience things in a flow of life and experience and feelings and ideas and opportunities. So that's why these questions to give order to life always strike me as a little overdetermined.

SHAFER: [laughing] Apologies. I want to just be sure I understand what you're saying about that conversation with Jess Unruh.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: So was it pretty much then that you saw the path to being governor was through the secretary of state?

BROWN: I can't remember. I had my eye on the secretary of state for a long time. [laughing] I used to look at the ballot pamphlet when it came out, because elections were--my father was always running for something, so I would notice the election, the primary and the general. And I noticed the ballot pamphlet always had Frank Jordan, secretary of state, with the great seal. I always thought that was such a great title--secretary of state. And then, at some 00:22:00point--I can't tell you when--I thought well, I've got a good name, Edmund G. Brown, and [if] I put secretary of state under it, that'll be a good path, and it was. That was the idea. And a lot of it is luck, because I was the only Democrat. There was no lieutenant governor Democrat, there was no attorney general Democrat--at that time. So it was a unique opportunity, and because the office had been, essentially, in the hands of two people since 1913--Frank Jordan and his father, with a slight interregnum of a guy named Peek, Paul Peek--there were a lot of things not done. And so it opened up the opportunity on the elections, and particularly the campaign reporting, which basically wasn't very strong at that time.

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

HOLMES: Well, Governor--we do want to talk about you entering politics, but 00:23:00before we get there, I wanted to talk a little bit about your dad's governorship.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: How deeply were you engaged? I know you had a lot of your own things going on, but how much were you engaged with his two terms as governor?

BROWN: It's hard to say. I went to a few governor's conferences. I came up to Sacramento probably for some family dinners. Maybe Thanksgiving or maybe Easter, Christmas, because that's where they lived. They lived in the mansion. That's where everything took place. Of course the legislature was out of session then, so I wouldn't be involved really. I'd sometimes come up with an idea or two. But the governor's [office]--it's organized, with all these professionals and departments and agencies, so those things run in their own universe.

During the campaign things are a little more open. There are campaign rallies and things. I did a little get out the vote in '62 in San Francisco, came home from Yale. I think I was doing a pretty good get out the vote--I remember where I did it, in LA on Bixel St. And I remember going to this one old apartment house. I had my little list and knocked on the door, and I think this couple must have been in bed, "Hey, you've got to come out and vote." But I didn't think that probably happened. Then somebody else, I knocked on the door and--"Oh yeah," they didn't respond too much. I might have gotten one person to go vote. And so that gave me a certain skeptical view of get out the vote, because I 00:25:00could see how hard it was, even for the son of the governor, totally motivated, to move people who otherwise had not decided to vote. So I was involved to that extent.

I was down in LA shortly after the Watts riots. I think I was in the hotel which was called the Town House. Now it's the Sheraton, on Wilshire, where [Warren] Christopher met with my father and formed the idea of the McCone Commission, and he suggested [John A.] McCone. That was Christopher's idea. So I listened. Not a lot I could add to that, and I went and visited San Quentin at some point, and Vacaville. I think I visited the juvenile facility as well, but I was doing that 00:26:00for my own understanding, my own learning about the system. Because at that point, when I wanted to be a psychologist, I wanted to go see how the group therapy programs worked in prison, and so that's what got me to that.

But as far as a role in the--yeah, for whatever reason, I don't think I was that active in the campaign. There's not much of a role. I mean you're either raising money, you're putting out press releases, you're doing scheduling, you're going from event to event--then you've got to pick one of those, and you've got people doing that.

It turns out in my campaigns we did have a lot of volunteers. And in presidential campaigns there's such a need for getting all around to a lot of 00:27:00rallies. But in gubernatorial campaigns, particularly now, it's mostly media, press releases. Although now, it's less press releases--now it's tweets.

HOLMES: Your father addressed a lot of issues during his two terms as governor. One was the California State Water Project.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: The addendum to the Central Valley Project that was started in the 1930s. Do you have any thoughts on that? It was, on one hand, it was a massive undertaking--billions of dollars passed in bond.

BROWN: $1.9 billion, I think, which is a lot of money in today's dollars.

HOLMES: Sure. It was a lot of money, especially in in 1959.

BROWN: Well, the budget wasn't even $1.9 billion, I think.

HOLMES: [laughing] Yeah. What were your thoughts in regard to the state water project?

BROWN: Well, I think he voted on that when I was still in the seminary. I think that was 1959. A lot of his more important initiatives: the taxation, [California] Master Plan [for Higher Education], Clark Kerr and all that, I think that was done while I was in the seminary. I've read about the master plan and how they negotiated with the state colleges, but that was just more of a label, a title. And the same thing with the water plan. This water plan--it's not obvious, and you really have to go study it, the pumps and the channels, and all the rest of it, and all the different tributaries and the water rights. And I don't think I realized that the California Central Valley Project has a pipe, and the California Water Project has a pipe. I'm not sure how long they parallel 00:29:00each other, but there's a lot to that. And once it was done, then they started building it. It was a campaign statement. It was something that was done because it was needed. My father felt strongly about that. But after it was over, it was just something you talk about, the great water plan. And then after he was done, nobody talked about it. It was very little talked about.

HOLMES: You also brought up the master plan. Both projects are huge undertakings, and even decades later, are looked at as California leading the way in these type of government-sponsored projects that benefit the state. Later on in your political career, did your father's undertaking of these kind of 00:30:00large projects also open up your horizons?

BROWN: I'm not sure.

HOLMES: About other large projects?

BROWN: I mean a project--they're all about the same size on television.

HOLMES: [laughing] That's true.

BROWN: And that's the only time you know about them, unless you're going to go sit there and follow the canal. And the water [project]--it was a controversy during the time of obtaining the votes. And I remember during the Kennedy election, when Kennedy lost--although I think he was ahead on election night--he lost on the absentees, where the bond won. And my father was very excited about that. It barely won. So that was a political issue, but I didn't fully grasp the significance.

The Metropolitan Water District, what the hell is that? And this little guy with 00:31:00a hat, Joe Jensen--he was like [Jeffrey] Kightlinger--he was the manager. And that was a big deal! The Metropolitan Water District--I didn't really know what that is. It's a big umbrella organization with a lot of water districts--very important. So they wanted the water. Then a lot of these growers wanted water, but I didn't know any growers, so it's a bit remote. It sounded important--it was important! It still is, and we're still fighting about it. But it's complicated, and it's expensive and has a lot of facets. That's why it has taken so long on the completion, with the tunnels. They'll spin wheels for another 00:32:00couple of years on that.

Well, my father did get the bond, and he got the bond with the power of the Department of Water Resources to make the decisions without the legislature. Now, I don't know whether that was in the bond or the Porter-Cologne [Water Quality Control] Act, but they said the legislature didn't really have a say in the water plan. So that was off-budget, as it were, and they just did it. So that's why that system worked pretty well.

But these issues--you know, what's hot? The Rumford Act [California Fair Housing Act] was a big thing, in '64, the fair housing. I remember going down to LA, and there was a housing tract that a guy I was staying with had said, "Come on down." I was in LA at that time, so we were going to go protest. I went down 00:33:00with him. I think it was at like 92nd and Avalon. And I remember a young couple, and they said, "Don't do this. This is the only place we can afford, and this is our house, our dream house," whatever the hell, and she had a baby in her hands. I remember I could see the anguish on the part of the people who wanted the neighborhood isolated, segregated. But we protested, so that was that.

And then when '64 came along, Unruh said to my father--my father, I remember him saying to me--"That Unruh. He licks his finger and puts it up to the wind, and he said, 'Pat, it's not time for this.'" And my father said, "Oh no, this is the right thing." So he did it, and then it passed overwhelmingly. And this was the beginning of the [Samuel W.] Yorty Democrat or the South Gate Democrat, which at 00:34:00that time were mostly white people, they weren't Latinos like they are today. And they were right on the edge, facing the African-American population. So that was a big deal, Prop. 64. Now, that was memorable, although that was in November, I was in South America in November, or maybe I was just leaving. So that was a big vote.

Unruh thought my father went too far. Then the people voted for it. And both the California and the Supreme Court found a way to invalidate it, the same way with [Proposition] 187. But you wonder what the Court would do today. But today, it's 00:35:00something that's accepted, although people are talking about housing. They don't talk about segregation, they talk about marginalized groups, they talk about the affordability crisis, they talk about the schools. So that was a big problem, and it's still a problem in one form or another. But life was a little simpler then. You know, you just do the right thing.

But then the initiative--that was the beginning. So you not only had the initiative to kill fair housing, then you had the initiative to bar health and education for immigrants, undocumented immigrants. Then you had Prop. 13, then you had the one on affirmative action [Proposition 209]. then you had all these 00:36:00crime bills. Capital punishment passed a couple of times. In fact, there have been nineteen initiatives imposing more draconian penalties in one form or another--it's eighteen or nineteen, and three now, in recent years, going in a more lenient direction.

So I think '64 was a breakup there of the Democratic coalition. It was a beginning--civil rights wasn't as prominent. Of course we hadn't had the environmental movement yet. We didn't have the women's movement. The Democratic Party was a more coherent group. But still, Republicans managed to win, even though the Democrats were more unified. [laughing]

I don't think I was that active in that--not in '64. I got out, I was studying 00:37:00for the bar. Let's see, in November I would have finished for the bar. I was working in the court. And that's kind of the world, and it was called the kid's world or a young adult's world. So that's why I always think that younger people tend not to vote. Their lives are exciting. They're exploring, and life's opening up, and they don't want to sit around and read newspapers and get into these issues of one party yelling at the other party. So I was not as active--the only thing that drove me into politics was the Vietnam War, and I joined the activists in the Democratic Party, called the California Democratic Council, and that was in '67.

SHAFER: Yeah, we'll get to that soon. I want to ask you about something else from 1965, which was the beginning of the grape strike, and César Chávez's rise, I guess, within the farm worker movement.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: What do you remember about that? I know you had worked with another farm 00:38:00labor leader earlier--?

BROWN: I didn't get involved in that until later, maybe '67, '68. I knew a woman who took food up to the farm workers every week, and there was this march to the border. That might have been '68, maybe '69, I'm not sure. That's when I got involved in that.

SHAFER: A little later on, yeah.

BROWN: Yes.

SHAFER: Okay. Let's maybe talk about 1966?

BROWN: Yeah, the law firm was a pretty busy time. It was challenging. It took time to get all that stuff done.

SHAFER: The election of your dad versus Reagan. Having been at Berkeley, and he made Berkeley--Reagan--sort of the centerpiece of his campaign against your father. Going into that election, did you think your dad could win or would win?

BROWN: No, I didn't think he could win. I didn't think he could win before I went to South America, and I expressed that view, but he said, "Somebody's got to run." He was not a man that liked to ruminate and reflect--and maybe I like to do that too much, but that question was closed. I don't know what the factor was. When I was at Berkeley, that breaks through the noise. When you take six hundred kids and have the [California] Highway Patrol and drag them down the steps of Sproul Hall, that sends a message. There is a problem, otherwise, why are you doing this? So you don't have to think about it. It's an iconic signal, 00:40:00message--and not a good one, from the point of view if you're the chief executive and order is supposed to be your responsibility. This was disorder. And then, of course, we had the Free Speech Movement--they had obscenities on signs.

And then you had the stuff of the welfare abuses. I think if you check, welfare starting the first year of Kennedy, maybe later, it really increased, more than two times, even though the economy was growing. The welfare rolls grew significantly, because some of the legal changes, they loosened up, and so there was a welfare growth. And then the Watts riots, and all that specter--so when 00:41:00you're the incumbent, that's bad news. When you're the change man, like Ronald Reagan--. He was always impeccably dressed. His suits were pressed, his hair was properly trimmed. And he was a matinee--I don't know if he was an idol, but he was a matinee figure that could easily slide in. So he was something they didn't quite know what to do with.

That was the political environment, a pretty tough environment to beat. And of course no one had made a third term. In fact, no Democrat had made a second term. Like second terms only started somewhere around Hiram [W.] Johnson, [he] was the first governor to get a second term. [Earl] Warren had three terms, but 00:42:00Warren was sui generis--he was his own kind. So that was a tough uphill battle, a third term.

SHAFER: How did your family, how did you, how did your dad react to the loss?

BROWN: I'm sure he didn't. It's never easy losing but he had a pretty remarkable buoyancy. He bounced right back. He had a good sense that he called his Irish sense of humor. So I remember that night he was feeling down, so that was poignant. But he got going, and did things, talked to people, got some law business going, and he was pretty dynamic, pretty active. They said about my 00:43:00father, and his brother, that they were go-getters. That was the phrase: go-getter, and he didn't stop just because he lost. I think it was kind of hard to pull away. He had a more literal belief in the democratic agenda, as it were. And I kind of see different sides of these issues and programs, and see some of their paradoxical consequences. But he really felt that what he was doing was right. And he felt, in later years, that Reagan was wrecking the government and putting the government down. And government, for him, was a good word. And government for Reagan was not a good word, and it became, even for Clinton, not a good word.

So I see these things as--you know, they're waves. The tide comes in, it goes 00:44:00out. And the wave of government enthusiasm--my father called it responsible liberalism--I think Fred Dutton gave him that term. Well, responsible liberalism, that didn't work in 1966. They didn't want liberalism, and they didn't want to take responsibility for all these things that my father thought were important. So the water plan didn't count, master plan--that was the sense of disorder in getting things back on track, when things worked in California. That was the Reagan idea for governor, and it was, I think, the Reagan idea for president.

HOLMES: What were your impressions of Ronald Reagan?

BROWN: I had lunch with him right after I was elected secretary of state. He served a hamburger on a tray, and a Coke, and we talked. Distant. It was really 00:45:00like being in the presence of a movie star. He wasn't like just chatting. It wasn't normal political talk. He was a little distant, and you felt the formality of it all. But he certainly looked the role. He played the role, he was the role, quite exactly. And I don't know what he was like as a human being. They say he was very friendly and was good to people on an individual basis. I know he had this notion that freedom--I remember listening to a speech that he gave in the governor's race, that if we don't stop socialism or the forces of what, anti-Americanism, the people who are in the coal mines, slaving away, will 00:46:00never forgive us. So he had these dramatic ways--they were dramatic, but they weren't threatening to the people he was winning over. So he spoke in--and this is not the best word, but it'll have to suffice--he spoke in more generic terms. He didn't talk about bills or numbers. It was always large issues, and you'd have to look at what he said. He was a good storyteller, he had a good sense of humor. I think he was a good writer, had a good way with words. I also saw him talk after he became governor--I don't know if I mentioned, I went to Carl Greenberg's retirement dinner at the Century Plaza.

HOLMES: Remind us who that is?

BROWN: We haven't talked about that.

HOLMES: No.

BROWN: Carl Greenberg was the political editor of the LA Times. A name that everyone in your position would know. [laughter] But like everything else, in time everything passes. So he was there, my father spoke and gave his talk, and then Reagan spoke--something about Hollywood, being an actor, the stars, the dream. I can't remember it, but it was a beautiful speech. It wasn't long, I just remember the word stars and Hollywood and maybe the word dreams. And so that was exciting. Just listening to him was exciting--I thought, anyway. Other people didn't. Democrats didn't like the sight of him.

But he had that image, and then later as president, the "Morning in America." 00:48:00You could see that it was morning in California, from his cinemagraphic rhetorical presentation. So that was interesting, and he had a sense of humor. He was against withholding, and then he had to adopt withholding. So he said, my feet are in concrete. He said the sounds you hear are the cracking of concrete--or something. Good sense of humor. So then he went for withholding.

SHAFER: Withholding being--?

BROWN: Withholding the income tax. They didn't withhold before Reagan. So he had something. His ideological antipathy to the Russians was pretty strong. He used 00:49:00the word evil empire. It's a strong phrase. And yet, after talking with George [P.] Shultz, and I presume others, he decided he could work with [Mikhail] Gorbachev. I think [Margaret H.] "Maggie" Thatcher liked Gorbachev too. So they [Reagan and Gorbachev] had their meeting in Reykjavik, and I guess he was prepared for that. That may have been the last meeting between a Russian and American president where they talked with such congeniality.

So whatever it was, he certainly was rigid when it came to a lot of democratic political ideas. But in the overall story--and of course his--he cut the taxes 00:50:00and built a pretty big deficit up, a huge deficit. He started that. Built up a lot of military, and came in there with Caspar Weinberger and the Committee on the Present Danger, and he really fanned the flames of fear. I don't know what impact, but it had some impact. But anyway, he could pivot. In the same way, but different, Nixon pivoted to China after making a career of attacking Red China. "Who lost China? [Dean] Acheson, Truman"--that was Nixon's game. So, they're very different men, but they were able to be effective on some things. And other things they did, particularly the deficit and the unions; he certainly was not 00:51:00friendly there at all. And so I'd contrast that with the polarized environment that we're finding now.

SHAFER: In '66, it seems like your father thought that Reagan would be the easier of the two.

BROWN: Some people around him must have thought that.

SHAFER: He didn't? He wasn't sure about it?

BROWN: Maybe he was. I mean certainly the people around him did, because they were thinking [George] Christopher, mayor, solid guy. Was he a lieutenant governor, Christopher? I'm not sure--

SHAFER: No.

BROWN: No, he ran for lieutenant governor. But by that kind of traditional calculus, Christopher had a strong biography, but they didn't calculate the mediagenic quality of Reagan, the visuality, and also the sound of campaigns, that Reagan mastered. So they didn't understand that--and also that you don't 00:52:00have to be a professional. I guess they didn't have an actor before--although we did have George [L.] Murphy. He was elected in '64, I believe, right?

SHAFER: Yeah.

HOLMES: Yeah, to the senate. [John V.] Tunney beats him in '68.

BROWN: No, but he was beat by [S.I.] Hayakawa.

HOLMES: Not Murphy.

BROWN: Murphy beat somebody. Oh, Murphy beat [Pierre] Salinger, and Salinger beat [Alan] Cranston. So Salinger was the Kennedy [press secretary]--right there in Camelot. You'd think he was really someone. He wasn't; he didn't look that good. He was a little overweight and a little short. He didn't look like Reagan, who was a man of great stature--in looks, anyway. So yeah, the actor won in '64, and the actor won in '66. So now you can have Trump, you can have other people. 00:53:00So it's open now. We're into this new media world, and I think Reagan was one of the pioneers.

SHAFER: What did you take from Reagan? Did you look at him and did you learn things? You're obviously very different people.

BROWN: Well, I learned that Democrats who leave deficits and spend too much money lose elections. At least that happened in one instance, because he was pounding away on the mountain of debt--he had a specter. And of course, in some literal way it's all very silly, because the budget was a billion or two, and now it's $200 billion. Now, depending on whether you're talking about the general fund or the overall budget, but that was the mood. These are moods. These are widespread shared beliefs, and he was able to flow with those beliefs 00:54:00and make his mark in that context. And other people, for whatever reason, don't pick up on that contemporary belief system, but he was pretty good at it. His moment was then, at that moment. But he also had the histrionic ability. The acting ability was pretty good.

HOLMES: Well, it's interesting too, considering that if you look at when Reagan left office, he also left a mountain of debt and also raised taxes during those eight years.

BROWN: Well, he did raise taxes. Taxes weren't the bogeyman for Republicans they are now. I remember Tom Quinn told me once that Sam Yorty told his father, who worked for Sam Yorty, that people don't mind taxes. I can't remember the context, but I remember the statement. And I think taxes are always a problem, but they're nothing like the article of faith that they have become for 00:55:00Republicans. It is almost their key--bigger than some of the religious issues. In fact, tax now is a religious issue. In fact, all issues are religious: abortion, gay marriage, climate change, taxes--they're all evil in some profound way that was never the case on normal issues. So that's what happened on that. Yeah, I think that idea you've got to watch spending.

And I didn't know, as I do now, that the business cycle is so regular and so inexorable, because it goes up and it goes down. I don't know why this wasn't obvious to everybody. Since the time of Reagan we've had a lot of recessions and a lot of recoveries. So if you chart that, you can see the regularity. And we 00:56:00know, from finance analysts, that the deficits are much bigger now than they would be under Reagan. Reagan's deficit, I thought, was $500 million on a $24 million budget. But it turned out that he didn't have a deficit--he was already in a recovery. And that's the problem with the budget. The budget is a moving target; it's a moving reality.

So I took over in January. That budget was put together in December, and they make a forecast. I forget what it was, but I would say, "Whoa, tax revenues don't look good." But over the next year, they started pouring in, so we had a $5 billion surplus, and we didn't know that we had that, because I'd reserved a couple billion for property tax relief, so that doesn't show as surplus. But 00:57:00when my property tax solution failed, then that money that was held aside went back into the deficit number, and the thing popped up to around $5 billion, and that's how it grows so quickly. That's how it's growing now. It grows very quickly until it stops growing. And [George] Deukmejian had the benefit of a recovery and a very large job creation, and then it fell apart in the recession that [Pete] Wilson experienced, which was very big and very challenging--and he had to raise taxes. And then the same thing happened to [Gray] Davis, and the same thing happened to [Arnold] Schwarzenegger. And I thought it would happen to me, but it didn't.

SHAFER: Yeah, you had good timing.

BROWN: That was very good timing. Both Deukmejian and I were fortunate that it was basically recovery all the way.

SHAFER: Let's talk about your move to LA, 1966 was it? What year did you move 00:58:00down to LA?

BROWN: '66, to be in my father's campaign.

SHAFER: Yeah, and so you worked at Tuttle & Taylor?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: How did you choose that law [firm]--?

BROWN: Sixth and Grand. Well, Bill Norris. I knew Bill Norris. He worked on my father's campaigns. He was vice president of the state board of ed., so I'd run into him. He came in to talk to me when I was a supreme court law clerk, and I said fine, I'll come down and interview. I did, so he made an offer.

SHAFER: What did you think of working in a law firm?

BROWN: I liked it. I wanted to learn about business. I didn't know anything about business, so that was my chance. We defended businesses--not defended, more, we did some litigation, but a lot of it was business, securities filing. We had to file with the SEC. You had to check everything out and make 00:59:00disclosures. It was tedious. It's not my normal cup of tea, but the people were honest, they were hard working. And probably my greatest experience there was I wrote my first memorandum. I'd been writing memoranda for thirteen, fourteen months in the supreme court. This was twenty-five or twenty-seven pages, and Bill Norris sat me down and he started crossing out. By the time he finished, we were down to seven pages. I couldn't believe it. It was a shocker, because nobody had ever given me that level of editing. And that left a very strong impression. I thought these were put together pretty good. But no, so he just crossed it out. So, that affected how I did things for the rest of my time--and 01:00:00still, as governor. I view a lot of things that are the equivalent of twenty-five pages, and they're worth, at best, six pages. And that's kind of what I experienced most of the--not most of the time--the overwhelming time of people presenting things.

SHAFER: Well, you were known for your short state-of-the-state speeches.

BROWN: Well, but I was taught by a guy who went to Stanford, was at Stanford--Warren Christopher, smart guy. That's what he thought. He was a federal judge, and he was a clever guy. He was a good lawyer. He was a top lawyer by far.

SHAFER: So you moved to LA, and you'd said a while ago that you saw that LA was 01:01:00where it was at--

BROWN: Oh, from a political point of view.

SHAFER: So say more about that.

BROWN: Well, I'd go to fundraisers during my father's '66 campaign--well, I guess I lived down in LA. I lived at his place on Muirfield Road He rented a house there, and so I stayed there during the campaign, probably when I came back from South America, from March through the election, through the end of the year. Well, I already had the law firm there, but it just seemed like more exciting. San Francisco, this is before, you know, the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane. This hadn't happened yet--I think. Yeah, '64--no, it's not around yet. So LA seemed more exciting to me.

SHAFER: Was it like partly the Hollywood thing?

BROWN: No, not the Hollywood thing. More of the business, the political. This is 01:02:00where--well, Unruh was from LA; Gene Wyman, my father's fundraiser, was from LA; [Lew] Wasserman was from LA. People that I met through him were in LA.

SHAFER: [Howard] Berman-[Henry] Waxman.

BROWN: Well, they came later.

SHAFER: A little later.

BROWN: I didn't know about them then.

[side conversation deleted]

SHAFER: Yeah, so 1968, big year. LBJ decides not to run, and you got connected with Gene McCarthy.

BROWN: Yeah--well, yeah.

[side conversation deleted]

SHAFER: Well, we were talking about 1968. The war, obviously, was heating up and protests were heating up. Lyndon Johnson decided not to run for reelection. But before we get to the presidential campaign, were you eligible to be drafted?

BROWN: Well, I was eligible--let's see, they didn't draft you after twenty-six, so I was twenty-seven when I graduated. I had a deferment to go to law school, and that's the only deferment I had, was law school. Of course when I was in the seminary, I also had a deferment. So yeah, no one got drafted out of law school that I remember.

SHAFER: Did you ever think what you would have done if you'd been drafted?

BROWN: No. I hadn't thought about it.

SHAFER: No. It never came up.

BROWN: Never came--well, it didn't happen. But I remember when I was in Chile, at somebody's house on some evening, there was a guy named Maurice Zeitlin, who was a teacher--activist kind of character. And he was saying how the CIA, they're bombing this and bombing that, and how bad Vietnam was. I remember 01:04:00thinking--the guy is a little extreme. So that was a thought in my mind. At least I heard that. Then, when I got back--this would have been the early summer of '67--so I think, it wasn't the Tet Offensive yet, but they were bombing.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: I just went to law school. I think that's 2-S or something, and I was twenty-seven when I got out. So, that's the last I heard of it. I didn't have a 01:05:00deferment after I left law school, but they weren't drafting at that age.

I remember I called up John [L.] Burton or somebody from CDC [California Democratic Council]--might have been somebody else, I can't remember. But they had a convention, and the CDC was an activist wing of the Democratic Party. Alan Cranston was an instrumental guy, and they were instrumental in my father's nomination in '58. And so they were having a convention, and I proposed a resolution to stop the bombing and start talks with North Vietnam. I don't know what it said, but we worked out a resolution. I think there were two resolutions. One further out than mine. And we had a bunch of people, and I 01:06:00spoke on it, and it was just kind of cease bombing/start negotiations. That's what it was. And so it passed, and I gave a talk.

That was August, and out of that came the peace slate '68, with [Gerald N.] "Jerry" Hill and a lady named Jo Sedita. And so that got formulated, and we put the peace slate on the ballot. I'm not sure whether McCarthy was part of that peace slate, or whether we endorsed him later, but the peace slate signatures qualified. I remember going down and appearing at the registrar, and it was in the newspaper. We qualified. And then McCarthy was coming around, and we picked 01:07:00him. It was very exciting. He lost in New Hampshire, but did pretty well. And then, it looked like he was going to win Wisconsin, and then Johnson pulled out, and then [Robert F.] Kennedy jumped in, and then it got more muddled. So I was in the McCarthy campaign.

SHAFER: What was it about McCarthy that you liked, besides the antiwar position?

BROWN: Well, first of all, he was the antiwar candidate, before Kennedy. So that gave him a certain purity, clarity, persuasiveness. And I liked his speeches; he was eloquent. He spoke in a very high-minded way, kind of akin to Stevenson in some ways. Bobby was a little more razzle-dazzle--just a different kind of speaker. McCarthy was a little cool, and people remarked on that. And I liked 01:08:00him; I got to know him. He had a reporter named Shana Alexander that would show around, and we'd sometimes have a drink after one of his speeches. He did a lot of talking, and it was fun to talk to him. He'd been studying for the priesthood briefly.

So the peace slate was all very exciting, going against Johnson. But somehow, when he got out, he didn't realize it, but after a few days or weeks it became a very different kind of race. And then with Kennedy, it became difficult, and Bobby was able to win California--and that was that. I was there on the night of 01:09:00the assassination. I was at the Hilton. That's where McCarthy was. In fact, I was sitting next to Robert Lowell when we heard that Kennedy had been shot. So that was another downbeat, as far as politics is concerned.

And then we went back to the convention, and I was an alternate delegate, alternate Kennedy delegate, which wasn't much of a role. But I spent time talking to McCarthy, talked to some of the other people. I didn't get involved in the activities down on the ground, in the park. I had a friend of mine, who was filming there. I met him, and I can only remember he said, "Electoral politics sucks." And he was doing a film. Of course, he moved to Canada and never came back. In fact, I'm still in touch with him, but I haven't seen him in 01:10:00years. So then I came back, because the convention didn't seem too satisfactory at that point. But there was going to be a Humphrey vote, and there it was.

SHAFER: And your father was supporting Humphrey at that point?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: You and your dad had a disagreement about the war too, right?

BROWN: We did a show where we took either side. Of course, it was very easy, because I'm on the outside; he's on the inside, and Johnson was very nice to him. So, I can see now that I'm an incumbent, that there's a very different positioning than when you just come out of the wilderness and you start saying things. It's easier.

SHAFER: [to Holmes] So do you want to talk about the first campaign?

HOLMES: Actually, yeah, in a minute, but I had a follow-up question in regard to 01:11:00your father's support for LBJ, and then later Humphrey.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: Some reports were saying that he thought that this splitting, this support for McCarthy was helping the Republican's chances.

BROWN: He never said that to me. See, a lot of people make comments based on plausibility. You can say well, Democrats are divided. That's helping the other guy. Well, that's a general statement. But empirically, is that true? Did it happen? And I can tell you it didn't happen.

HOLMES: How would you compare--?

BROWN: Because that's a political-science comment. My father was not a political science kind of thinker. He was a down-to-earth politician. He'd be more, "Do what you think is right," or something. That would be more of his point of view, 01:12:00not some political calculation.

HOLMES: Before we move on from the '68 campaign, what were your observations or even your own feelings about Kennedy and McCarthy going head to head in these kind of elections? Because in many respects, a lot of people would say they held the same positions.

BROWN: They were very different though. Kennedy appealed to more working-class minorities, Hispanic, African American. Kennedy won Indiana--that's a tough state. McCarthy won Oregon, a little whiter state. Kennedy was a little more working class--was able to appeal to the more of a working-class type. McCarthy 01:13:00was a little more highbrow. So yeah, he probably didn't connect with that part of the electorate, as witnessed by the results. But it was still a close election. And McCarthy, I would say, got some of his votes from the conservative areas that were not very pro-antiwar. Like I think he carried Kern County, and I haven't looked to see some of the other places. But I would bet that people knew that Kennedy was the Democrat that if you were a conservative, you didn't like--even a conservative Democrat, of which there were a number.

SHAFER: Do you think, looking back on it, you could see the beginnings of a racial cleavage within California?

BROWN: Oh, you could see that in Prop. 14 in 1964.

SHAFER: The housing.

BROWN: The fair housing. Yeah, so that was four years before. And even in the Reagan election.

HOLMES: You mentioned Kern County. Do you think also, with Robert Kennedy, because of his early support of Chávez and the farm worker movement that--?

BROWN: That might have--maybe that was it. Could be. There weren't many Latino voters then, like there are now.

SHAFER: I think the first political position that you had was you were appointed to the LA County Delinquency and Crime Commission.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: You were appointed by Kenny Hahn, I think.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: [An LA County] supervisor. Was that an issue that you had a particular interest in?

BROWN: I have an interest in criminal justice, but it was obviously something to--actually, it wasn't the first position. My father appointed me, in December 01:15:00of '66, to the narcotic evaluation advisory. It was an advisory board to the Narcotic [Addict Evaluation] Authority, I think in Norco or Corona, where they had an institution for civil committed addicts. And they had a special board, and that board existed until after I was governor. I wasn't on the board itself. I had an unpaid position for just advisory. So that was the first thing. That didn't amount to much, but I met [Raymond K.] "Ray" Procunier, who later became the head of Paroles [Board of Parole Hearings, appointed by Pat Brown], who later became the head of [California Department of] Corrections. We had a meeting in the prison. I don't know how many meetings I went to--not very many. But I got a sense of things, and that was helpful, because I'd visited prisons 01:16:00before. This gave me another chance at that.

The Crime and Delinquency Commission--I didn't think of it in political terms. It was something to talk about, and what did I have to offer, so that was something. And gangs were an issue, delinquency, which I didn't understand at the time--I understand now--these committees have limited impact, limited reach, limited authority. But I went to the meetings, and I think a former trade negotiator, Hill--not Hill, but she was a Republican type, and she was on the board, and she was pretty good. Not Norma. She was a trade negotiator, I think, 01:17:00under Reagan. But anyway, so it was interesting. I did that, and that was instructive. These were all opportunities to learn about how government worked, what this process was, and so I was trying to understand, just how does the political government process work? Most people don't really have an idea of what it is, but after you sit on a few commissions, work in a few campaigns, you begin to get a sense of what this activity is.

SHAFER: And seeing it maybe up close, as a member of the commission, did it give you sort of a--I don't know what the right word is--not inspire you necessarily, but did it make you feel like, government matters. It's important, it does things--or did it seem like kind of make-work in a way? Because you said it wasn't really going to have much of an impact.

BROWN: Well, I didn't know what it would do, but I learned things. It's hard to 01:18:00tell. These advisory commissions, they do reports, and supervisors listen. It's part of their political outreach; government just can't be in a room. It's got to have connectivity to the electorate, although the connectivity is very thin and very shallow in that sense. But I was interested both because it was something that I was able to do and say I was in, and it was interesting, it was on crime. Crime was a big deal. Reagan ran on crime, I think. So I thought that was a good position to be connected to.

I wouldn't say that it had a big impact either way, but it was valuable in the 01:19:00sense that it gave me a window into that county criminal justice system. And also, I had a chance to talk to Kenny Hahn, who had been my father's friend. But I got to talk to Hahn, and he was definitely a character out of the old system. You know, he talked: "Here's my black representative, here's my Catholic representative." He had all these bodies, all these people, that were in charge of these various ethnic populations and voting blocks. So that was a pretty overt inclusion of your political constituencies, that I thought--well, he didn't make any bones about it, and in an old-fashioned way. Today, they're 01:20:00doing the same thing, under the rubric of inclusivity and diversity. He didn't have either of those words, but he knew he had to have links, he knew he needed his blacks and his Mexican Americans and whatever--his pastors, and he did it.

So the reason I say that--when I went in to get sworn in, he walked me down the hall and pointed at the pictures of all these various people. He's in charge of this group, he's in charge of another group. It seemed old fashioned at the time. I won't say unsophisticated, because it was sophisticated at one level. But it wasn't sophisticated as you would see in a UCLA graduate seminar, where 01:21:00people would talk with much more high-blown language. This was just his gut-level understanding of how you get elected in the city of LA.

SHAFER: What did you take from that?

BROWN: Well, I thought he was a little bit of a caricature, to some extent. But then you knew he won, so I don't know what to--

SHAFER: That wasn't lost on you.

BROWN: No. But he was old fashioned. It wasn't something I'm going to do. I wouldn't do it that way. I wouldn't talk about--yeah, it seemed a little not right, to say, "Oh yeah, this is my black liaison," or something. You want to pretend you're kind of open to everybody and somewhat colorblind, but making sure you're covering all your bases. I think we like to be a little more 01:22:00dexterous in our maneuverings. He was just simple and right out there. So there was an honesty and a transparency that has been made more difficult by all the political correctness, the rules of all this behavior. You can do this, but you can't do that. I think we've added on a lot of taboos and rules in the last forty years, all in the guise of improving public trust. But it hasn't done that. It hasn't made the process any easier--a little bit in some ways, but not really in too many ways. Not much.

SHAFER: You mentioned that Reagan had gotten elected, of course, on this sort of clean up Berkeley, and there was concern about crime. And Reagan was definitely sort of a tough on crime kind of guy--

BROWN: And I don't know that it was about issues either. It was like there's a chance for something new. Maybe in today's terms we'd call him a shiny new object, and that seems to be very important. That hope springs eternal, and here's somebody we haven't seen. He's talking good, he's looking good, and he can bring together all the contradictions and make them sound not contradictory. And that's what he was able to do, and he kept that going for most of his governorship--for all of his governorship, I think.

SHAFER: At the same time, I think Sam Yorty was sort of a tough-on-crime mayor of LA, right? Is that fair to say?

BROWN: Well, he was there with Police Chief [William H.] Parker. It was Parker, and that's what they called him--his last name. The LAPD were tough. They didn't have the same size as other cities, I understand they had a smaller police 01:24:00force, but they made up for it by their tough policing. And so Yorty backed the police, and they would align against my father from time to time. So maybe that's another reason I thought of LA as being of some power.

SHAFER: But I guess my point was going to be that there you are suddenly on this commission, this crime commission and you're in this environment of--

BROWN: A big anticrime--yeah, there's a big law and order, definitely. It's hard to remember now, it's been so long ago. But that was the idea, to try to deal with that, come up with ideas.

SHAFER: I guess what I'm wondering is--you were obviously thinking about running for office, at that point, very much?

BROWN: Yeah, I was, yeah.

SHAFER: And you were thinking: here's an opportunity for me to meet people and make a name for myself and to be able to say, when I run for office, I did this 01:25:00on this commission. So how did you think about what you might do on that commission that might help you?

BROWN: Well, you know, I was looking for problems to solve: "Oh my God, these gangs are getting out of control. We've got to crack down on it." I wasn't sure how I was going to do it. I didn't know. But I certainly thought that I could do something, but it wasn't clear to me. And obviously, it's an advisory commission, so you tell the supervisors. But you highlight problems--you expose--so I knew that was a possibility. You could highlight gang activity. This was a time, by the way, when predators, young predators, they'd say, "These characters were incorrigible people. We've got to lock them up for a long time." It wasn't three strikes. That came in the 1990s. But they were in the beginnings 01:26:00of the law-and-order mode, which didn't exist during early Reagan, didn't exist in my father's time, didn't exist, I don't think, under Knight and Warren. So this was part of that.

And Yorty was a political character. He originally had been a left-of-center Democrat as an assemblyman, and then he became a conservative Democrat. So he got more conservative. I think he got elected on separating the garbage. I don't know if you've read that. But yeah, he was going to stop this separation of garbage. That was one of his issues, against [Norris] Poulson. And then, of course, when he was running against [Thomas J.] Bradley, it added a real racial 01:27:00element, but I don't think he had that in the beginning. It became an opportunity. You know, in politics, it's like a market. And you have opportunities, and you either seize them or somebody else seizes them, but you can't stand still. Somebody else will jump. So it's like Bobby Kennedy. He waited, but then McCarthy jumped in.

SHAFER: That's a good transition, I think, to your running for Community College Board of Trustees maybe. The legislature separated out community colleges from K-14.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: So how did you--and obviously that wasn't--you didn't think that was going to be your final stopping point. [laughing]

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: How did you see that?

BROWN: Well, it's very interesting. I had met this guy before, maybe in the McCarthy campaign. I later made him a judge. I was down in the hotel, down there 01:28:00in downtown, the old hotel--

GUST BROWN: That must have been The Biltmore?

BROWN: The Biltmore, the Biltmore. And I don't know, I was walking out of a meeting. We had some meeting. Bill Norris had a meeting called Committee for California. I don't know if that was it--may not have been. But anyway, I met this guy, and he shook my hand. And I said, "What are you shaking my hand for?" And he said, "Well, I'm running for office." I said, "What are you running for?" "I'm running for the Community College Board of Trustees." I said, "What the hell is that?" He said, "Well, it's this new board we've got in LA." Hmm, pretty interesting. So I walked out and I said, "Hey, that's what I'm going to do," so I did it. Just that simple.

SHAFER: Yeah, and you and 132 other people I think, right?

BROWN: Yeah, because it was a new board. So politicians love to go where there's 01:29:00no incumbent. I think it was 134 counting myself.

SHAFER: Yeah, I think you're right. So that was your first time you were on the ballot, right?

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: So how did you think that through?

BROWN: How did I think it through?

SHAFER: Yeah, I mean--how you were going to present yourself on the ballot, how you were going to campaign?

BROWN: Well, first of all, I went to my friend Richard L. Maullin, who I'd met in Bogota, Colombia, who died last week, and he was at RAND, and he introduced me to this guy. And I got a little bit of knowledge about program budgeting. I had a little interest in education. And I had a little skeptical view of education as well as a deep appreciation for it. But so I got a few ideas. We're going to make the budget connect with the policy of the program as well as the 01:30:00money. So I did have a little bit of substance there. And I didn't have much money. I went through my father's campaign list, and I raised $15,000 for the primary and $15,000 for the general--approximately $30,000. So I did one mailing. I did a few radio ads, and I had maybe twenty billboards that said, "Brown, Trustee," or something like that. And that was it. Now, I don't know, but I was Edmund G. Brown, and it was alphabetical, so I was pretty early up. And my father had only been governor three years before, I probably had 95 percent name ID, so that helps--I came in first.

By the way, that not only worked then, but it worked several years later [in 1998]. When I ran for mayor of Oakland, I came in first. And there were eleven 01:31:00other candidates--two Latinos and nine African Americans. And people said how are you going to win in this city? I said, "Well..." I did. [laughing] I knew it looked pretty good, because something that most people don't realize is that voters like to have a familiar name, somebody they know something about, as long as it's not negative. So that obviously made a big difference in those elections.

I had no idea whether I'd come out first [in the trustee election]. I had no idea how it would work out. It turned out that a guy named Kenny Washington, an African-American guy, same name as the famous football player, he came in somewhere in the top fourteen. And then we ran off, and then we had seven. And 01:32:00of the seven elected, it was Kenny Washington and me, and then there were four--a group of four very conservative people, including [Michael D.] "Mike" Antonovich and two other people that became assembly people, conservative Republicans. And one guy who'd run for congress against George [E.] Brown and lost. So there's four--a block of four conservatives, and they did whatever conservatives do, campaigning in South Gate and all those other places there. The school district had a lot of conservative areas: Burbank, Glendale, and that kind of thing. It was bigger than the city. And then a guy named Wyatt, and Wyatt was kind of an independent, and we'd worked together.

Now, how they elected--it's all very mysterious to me--one of their conservatives didn't make it. So that's why I've got a healthy appreciation for how it's difficult to really understand elections, and what makes what happen, particularly in these little ballot races when you're covering a territory almost as large as LA County. Not quite as large, but going from Bellflower all the way up to the Antelope Valley. That's a lot of territory. So how the hell do the voters know? Well, they somehow figure it out, and the conservatives were able to communicate their message. But my name ID and Kenny Washington's name 01:34:00ID--and then Mr. Wyatt, he was a former military man, maybe that's how he won. But there we were, there are the seven members of the board, so that's how it all happened.

HOLMES: What do you recall of the political environment in the Los Angeles area during that time, particularly around education. I know you had the blowouts in LA high schools during '68.

BROWN: Yeah, that guy who chained himself to the door, that Mexican-American guy. Do you know what his name was? He was a teacher--Saul, Sal--I forget his name. [Salvador B. "Sal" Castro]

GUST BROWN: Is it Ruben--

BROWN: Ruben Salazar?

GUST BROWN: Yeah.

BROWN: No, I think he was killed. He was killed.

HOLMES: That was an LA Times reporter.

BROWN: This was a guy who was--no, they were marching. There was some marching. This was, I guess, before busing. I don't know--was this busing yet? No.

HOLMES: This would be '69. You also have student activism as well, both high school as well as your community colleges.

BROWN: Yeah, but the activism at the community colleges--that's pretty invisible. You're talking about LA. It's so big, it just doesn't make it in the LA Times and it doesn't get on television. So there was a lot of noise, a lot of things happening, but I don't know what the mood was. The mood was what, in '69--we're talking about Vietnam then. And then after I'm elected, there's Kent State. I remember that. There's Chávez boycott of lettuce; that's an issue the conservatives didn't like--boycott lettuce in the cafeteria. We had a resolution. They of course voted that down. Yeah, it was kind of a board that interfered with the management rather than provided any particularly positive 01:36:00guidance, because none of them were educators. They didn't know anything. I mean, they knew things as a citizen, but there they were--very political. And three of them--well, myself, [Robert C.] "Bob" Cline, and Marian La Follette, and Antonovich, all ran for office. So these are springboards. You've got to start somewhere, and school boards often are, to city council, to legislator, and beyond.

SHAFER: To what extent were you, in that election, testing the brand, the Brown brand?

BROWN: Well, first of all, I never thought of myself as a brand. That's a new concept. We used to, in those days, have things called companies. Now we don't have companies--we just have brands. And that is because we're more attuned to the label, to the image, to the name, rather than the thing named. So it's not 01:37:00the people. It isn't the building. It's not even the product. It's the Gap, it's Amazon, it's Oracle--it's the brand, right? And that kind of is another way of talking about name identification. So the name is getting a little bit unhooked from the reality.

So I would frame it a different way. I was running because I knew this was about 35 percent of the statewide electorate. So obviously, I thought I could expose my presence to the voters, and they've got to know who you are. So that's why I 01:38:00decided to run. At one point I had thought about running for congress, in the seat that Glenn [M.] Anderson ran for, and we did a poll--we didn't do a poll. We looked at this particular seat, and I noticed that Sam Yorty did pretty well against my father. And based on that, I decided not to run. I can't remember what the voting was, but I think he might have beaten my father there--it's that Long Beach, Lawndale, Hawthorne kind of place. So I was thinking of that. But then the fundraising--how was I going to do fundraising? So the junior college board sounded--no, I could handle that. It's not as good as being in congress, but it's good enough. So I jumped, and I did it. I did know at the time that I 01:39:00was going to run for secretary of state. Clearly. I knew I was going to run for governor, so this was just the pathway I chose. And it was a pretty clear path, and I followed it and was successful--in some ways, relatively simple.

HOLMES: What was the role of your father in the campaign?

BROWN: Well, the role of my father was he had his name, and he had been governor of California up until January of '67. And I was running in the primary in March of '69, so that's not too much longer. So that's number one.

Number two, he had his fundraising list, and those are the first people I called. I got it from his accountant, his campaign accountant, Jules Glazer, and so we started there. I don't think he had a lot of advice--it wasn't my father's 01:40:00cup of tea. My father had been governor, he'd been attorney general, he'd sued Arizona. He was interested in the water plan, higher education, roads, freeways--this was the meat and potatoes of his responsible liberalism, or what he thought--he saw government as helping and doing important things. This junior college board thing was off to the side. He wasn't thinking name identification--I don't think he was thinking that. So he wasn't that interested, nor was he that interested in secretary of state. I think he thought I should have run for state senate or something. But of course state senate might have been harder, because a lot of people might have been known in a 01:41:00senate district, but they couldn't have the reach from Sacramento to San Diego. That you only could do if you had a name, which I had.

SHAFER: And so really, that election was in part, I would imagine, you were testing whether the Brown name--?

BROWN: No, I wasn't testing.

SHAFER: No?

BROWN: I was advancing. Testing, you're saying that maybe it wouldn't work.

SHAFER: Well, I guess your father had just lost, so was there some sense that maybe the Brown name--people are tired of Edmund G. Brown.

BROWN: I can't remember. I don't know what my thinking was, whether it was testing--I don't know whether that's relevant. I must have thought it was a good-enough chance that I should do it. And the chances of losing were not great, and if that did occur, it wouldn't make too much difference. But I thought the junior college board, education, that seemed like--I have a whole 01:42:00lot of ideas on education and always have. Even to this day it's interesting.

The community colleges--I've appointed people there. We have an online university, very innovative, so we're doing a lot of things. I wasn't thinking of this at the time--I was really thinking more of the political, but now I see the community colleges as very important. And the notion of going to Santa Clara and spending $65,000 seems very odd to me, unless you're extremely affluent, because you can do the same thing virtually for $12,000, because you can go for free. You've got to live at home, and two years later you're on your way to UC if you're any good--or a state college. But you don't have that rah-rah Old 01:43:00Blue, or whatever the hell it is. But this is a very expensive luxury right now. So I don't think I appreciated how valuable the community colleges were.

We had different controversies there. They wanted to create a central police force--they used to have it by campus, so I termed this the supercop, and I opposed it, but I lost. They liked the supercop--the conservatives did.

SHAFER: Knowing that you were going to be running for secretary of state and then governor, did you champion things that you thought you could parlay?

BROWN: Well, I don't know, parlay makes it sound like a poker game. [laughing] A 01:44:00lot of it was just how it struck me. I didn't want to centralize policing. I've had that same feeling, that you have to be careful about how much coercive authority we let loose in the society. And we wanted to memorialize the Kent State killings, and of course the conservatives didn't like that. And the boycott lettuce--that was political.

Oh, yeah, and they'd always be taking trips, and I voted against a lot of trips. And now, I might not even be right about that, because academia is all about taking trips, going to conferences and giving papers. When they came out at the end of the meeting, they'd have pages and pages of conventions. I said my God, we don't need this, and I'd vote against a lot of them. But I supported the 01:45:00teachers' union, which you might say is politically sensitive. It was the American Federation of Teachers. What else? Oh, I opposed their purchasing new wooden desks, because I thought the expenditure was excessive, even though it was only $25,000, but I thought our metal desks were adequate. We didn't need new wooden desks, that was my thought. I was kind of the fiscal watch dog, which just came naturally. But also, I was aware of the '66 campaign and how the bloated state government was a problem. I was aware of that.

But even today, and I guess it's just part of the way I see things, and the way my wife sees things, because we're careful. Just spending for the sake of 01:46:00spending is not something I think is a good thing. It's not one of my habits, and government has a tendency to overdo things, because you've got the purse, and you just keep spending away. There's a lot of substantive reasons against that.

But I do think that in exuberant times, doing a lot of spending, if the economy goes down, and instead of a big surplus you have a big deficit, people will look to your various items of spending. And things that don't look that necessary will be viewed as part of the problem of why we have such a big deficit, even though most of that problem--by far--is the economy, the market system. But nevertheless, as a leader, you're not positioned well if you are exceedingly 01:47:00exuberant prior to the downturn. I would say that was certainly not something that Davis and Schwarzenegger got right. Of course, Reagan spent a lot. His budget went up more than my father's and more than mine, but he was always fighting. But fighting more on welfare, fighting one segment of the spending. Whereas I've tended to fight most of the segments, except where I think it's worthwhile: tunnels, trains, climate change.

HOLMES: Well, and on that note, many have discussed your time on the board of trustees as a mixture of fiscal conservatism and also being a social liberal, and this is something that has carried on throughout your political career, these two characteristics. Do you think there's an influence, particularly of 01:48:00fiscal conservatism, from your time in the seminary?

BROWN: Could be, yeah. Probably, but I think it's more of growing up through World War II rationing. We never had any hardships. We had ration cards, when there was not enough butter and meat and milk and potatoes. But there wasn't much in the stores. And you didn't have balloons, because the rubber was used for the jeeps, and you didn't have caps because they told us you couldn't have this during wartime. So I remember that. And we didn't have all the building. You didn't have all these houses being built. And I thought that was the normal--so my awareness, born in '38, in '42 I'm four, '45 I guess I'm seven. I'm kind of noticing things. There's not a lot of stuff going on. The Doelger 01:49:00homes hadn't been built yet. Marin County was the country, down the peninsula was the country. So it was a more static world. You didn't go out to dinner. There weren't a lot of cars on our block. We grew up on Magellan Ave. A few, but not many. You go there today, you can barely get by, there's cars on both sides. So I guess the excess, and then tied in with Vietnam--that was all just spend more, throw more at it. Watergate--there was a lot of excess. And then we had the inflationary epidemic. Nixon in '69, '70, '71--that was a little more inflationary.

So there were external reasons why a certain prudence in spending, along with 01:50:00the Jesuit notion. They had a notion in the novitiate called tantum quantum. Tantum means so much; quantum means how much? And so the notion was, as they explained it, how much is necessary, so much should you take. Don't take any more than is needed. Don't take any less, but don't take any more. So that doesn't quite fit the capitalist model of excess. You buy what you don't need with money you don't have. That seems to be the model. Certainly the federal government, that's the model. The seminary certainly had some impact, but I think it built on my own sensibility and my own experience.

You know, growing up, we didn't have ice cream except on birthdays, or maybe now and then. It's not that we couldn't afford it, it's just this hyper-amazing existence that we now have, with anything, and everything, and more--that's foreign. That's a new development of our national culture and economy. And of course, since the economy is 65 percent consumer spending, if the consumer doesn't spend--. In fact, I've often had the idea that the worst threat to our market economy is if people have long, enduring relationships, so that all of a sudden divorce stopped, okay? Every time there's a divorce, there's now two 01:52:00households where there used to be one, and all of a sudden, that would cut the market massively. [laughing] So we depend on this proliferation of relationships, of spending, of needs. So I have that, that goes around in my head--and that's all. So luxury does feel a little uncomfortable to me.

SHAFER: We're going to wrap up in a minute, but I want to just ask you about one thing before we go. Because when we start tomorrow, we can start with the secretary of state race, I think. But where were you living in LA? Were you in Laurel Canyon at that point?

BROWN: No. I was on Sunset and Lucile, the second house in and the second floor of a two-story building. I was next to Ted's Grocery Store. And that's where I was when the moon shot occurred, when a man landed on the moon, and Kennedy had 01:53:00Chappaquiddick. I think those were the same weekend, so I remember that. My apartment was $85 a month when I moved in, and I never met my landlord. I got the apartment from the friend of a friend, a girl that I knew. It was her sister, and she moved out, so I moved in. I had a $75 a month apartment, and I moved up to $85, two bedrooms and a balcony. Now, that's probably a pretty fancy neighborhood, Echo Park. So that's where I lived, and then later I moved to a more respectable apartment later, when I was running for secretary of state. And then after I was secretary of state, I bought the Laurel Canyon [house].

SHAFER: The reason I ask, is because I want to ask you about sort of a seminal 01:54:00event in '69, which was the Manson murders, the Tate-LaBianca murders?

BROWN: 1969--when was that? What month?

SHAFER: It was in '69. I don't remember the day or the month. We can figure that out, but it was--I think it was in the spring or summer? [others speaking off-microphone] It was August.

BROWN: August '69, so I was already on the junior college board.

SHAFER: Yeah, What do you remember about that? Had you heard anything about the Manson Family before this?

BROWN: Oh, they caught them pretty soon after that. Yeah, well no, I hadn't heard about them. No. It was pretty horrendous what the hell had happened. Yeah, that was a big event in LA, definitely. And that certainly intensified the concern about crime. So yeah, I can't--that wasn't quite in my--what I was doing.

SHAFER: Did you know people that were, you know--?

BROWN: No, didn't know anybody connected to it. I later came to know Vincent Bugliosi, and helped him a little bit in his campaign, but he lost. Very close. I've gone back to see him, so I did know about that. But no, other than that.

SHAFER: Okay. I think that's good. We're good for today?