Jerry Brown | Interview 5 | March 19, 2019

SHAFER: This is the beginning of session five. Scott Shafer with Todd Holmes and Governor Brown, and we're up here at the ranch in Colusa. So--1973-74. You're starting to--thinking about running for governor.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: There were others who wanted to run, and did run for governor that year. You know, how did you assess the field when you looked at who was running, what the climate was? It was post-Watergate--Nixon was resigning that year.

BROWN: I don't know about assessing the field. The main focus was on what I was doing in the campaign. You look at other candidates, and you read polls, and think about this one and that one, but that's more of a journalistic approach. You know, let's assess the candidates. Well, each candidate is thinking about 00:01:00himself and where he's going. [laughing] And what he has to do, and what his problems are. So--

SHAFER: You didn't sort of size up the other Democrats?

BROWN: Well, I mean instinctively--I size up things and I have a political mind, and so any kind of political phenomenon is something that is drawn to my attention. But yeah, I don't know what that would mean. I mean, obviously, [Joseph L.] Alioto was a dynamic character, a very forceful speaker, and he was very charismatic in his own way.

SHAFER: Well, maybe more so the climate, you know--that era. The country was going through a lot of turbulence. Reagan was done. He'd done two terms. Like how did you see this as a good time for you?

BROWN: Well, there wasn't an incumbent, and I was the only statewide officer. I think it was a good time. I can't remember if we took some polls, but I think I 00:02:00showed good enough. That was just a trajectory. It doesn't work the way you think it does. You know, I was secretary of state; I want to run for governor; I'm running for governor. [tapping on table for emphasis] What does it take? Let's do it. So there's a lot of just operational--raise the money. That's endless. Go from one place to the other, traveling around, scheduling very, very--

SHAFER: Routine.

BROWN: No, very intensive, very activity filled. So sitting around pondering--I guess that's political talk. You know, let's sit around in a bar and talk about the candidates. But the candidate is more interested in advancing his cause--or her cause. That's the way I experienced it. Or at least the way I remember it.

SHAFER: Yeah, and how did you think about advancing--like what was your path?

BROWN: Well, the path is all very simple. You have to make news, raise money, 00:03:00and avoid mistakes. This is simple stuff. [laughing] Not simple--well, a good part of the political environment is already given. It's thrown in front of you, and then you enter it. So you don't alter what people are thinking. Oh, you do a little bit, but that's it. You go someplace, you give a speech. What are you going to talk about? In fact, I think I gave one written speech at town hall. I think I quoted that famous essay on the closing of the frontier. Tom and I spent time writing it, and I just found that a written speech takes a lot of work, and it doesn't make any difference to the press release. And I kind of marveled at that--first of all, even the speech itself. In those days, we could get a press 00:04:00release out and printed by AP, or sometimes the other newspapers, and then that would be the same as giving a speech. But we had to go to places. And I guess there wasn't that much coverage to begin with, except for secretary of state stuff. It's hard to get coverage, even then. Now harder even, today--even harder.

So I remember what Tom said. He says you've got millions of voters. So the candidate knows two hundred people, five hundred people--two thousand? Meets, shakes hands--five thousand, ten thousand--some number like that. Okay. There's millions and millions and millions more. The only way to get to them is through some mass media, which is newspaper stories, radio programming, television--or 00:05:00you pay for it, in a thirty-second ad. Or you might write a letter. That's it. And therefore, the most important thing is you need to have enough money to do that. And that's what all campaigns are now built on. Although that alone doesn't do it, because there has to be--the candidate and the time have to fit, and that's something that you don't invent. You fit the time, or you don't.

SHAFER: Well, talk about that. How did you fit the time, do you think?

BROWN: Well, I mean I was a reformer. We had Reagan there for eight years. He was a Republican, so I was different. I was the change. So the political reform was something, but it wasn't enough. You know, in the primary, because the 00:06:00ballot measure was on the ballot--and once that passed, that issue, I think, faded. And at the same time, the election got a lot closer, so it became Democrat/Republican. And then [Houston I.] Flournoy could attack on harvest-time strikes, public employee strikes, capital punishment, this and that. So yeah, a lot of the issues were not favorable to me, I would say. The political reform was, in the primary. But in the general, it then shifted. And Nixon pardoned by Ford, threw the Republican candidates back--Flournoy back, even though he had nothing to do with it. But after that wore off--and it did appear to wear off--then it got closer and closer. So it was a close election, and it wasn't clear how to run that election.

SHAFER: Talk about Prop. 9 [Political Reform Act] because--

BROWN: Prop. 9, I want to emphasize, was strictly up till June. Then it passed, is over. And as we know, one thing about news is it rots fast. It's like a ripe fruit in the sun. It's gone by the afternoon, or what we'd say, by the news cycle. So you have to constantly be moving. And that particular issue, which I hadn't really thought about that much, really did disappear. There was probably some residual in people's minds, but it wasn't the decider when it came to Flournoy.

SHAFER: How did Reagan, Governor Reagan, feel about Prop. 9?

BROWN: I have no idea.

SHAFER: He didn't react, as governor?

BROWN: I don't know. Is there any written evidence of what he said or thought?

SHAFER: Well, I think he--it was around that time that he pushed--

BROWN: He probably didn't, he didn't endorse it, I don't think.

SHAFER: It was around that time he pushed for making the secretary of state's job nonpartisan, and maybe--

BROWN: He didn't push very hard. Well, he couldn't--the Democrats controlled the legislature. He pushed for that, but it was a bit halfhearted, I thought.

SHAFER: Talking about the times, and there was a lot of turbulence. You were very young. You were thirty-six, I think, when you were running. How did you see that--as an advantage, a liability, something you had to overcome?

BROWN: Yeah, a little bit something to overcome, a little young. The other candidates were more experienced. So yeah, the whole question of experience becomes an issue that obviously everybody wants to know.

SHAFER: Did you see it as like, well, on the one hand I'm inexperienced, but on the other hand, I'm young, and that's dynamic and new and different? How did you see that?

BROWN: I was talking on more of the things, more of the political reform in the 00:09:00primary. And then issues did become difficult in the general but the idea of thinking about, "Oh, I'm young, I'm not young," I don't know what you do with all that. It's winter, it's fall--okay. It is. So, I don't think that goes anywhere.

SHAFER: Looking back on it, do you think it was an advantage? Or--

BROWN: I don't know about that. Why would that be relevant? What if I were ten years older? I didn't look that much different ten years later. I'm not sure. That's an interpretation of one aspect of a candidacy. It is what it--it's there.

SHAFER: Yeah, talk about, if you would, that your campaign headquarters on Sunset. Where was it, what was it like in that--?

BROWN: It was abuzz--it was lots of activity, a lot of people, like typical 00:10:00gubernatorial campaigns. A lot of fun. A lot of meetings. A lot of constituency groups coming in. But again, the most part was media. You have to reach the millions and millions of people, and you can't do that knocking on doors. You can only do that through news, or through the purchase of advertisements. And that's what we did--make news, raise money, buy ads.

SHAFER: What kind of people did you attract as volunteers, do you remember?

BROWN: No, some of them, we had a group from Immaculate Heart College showed up. Some of them are still my friends. Some Latinos went on to become leaders in the 00:11:00labor movement, or become legislators or businesspeople. So you know, it was just a wide group. I'd have to get the roster out and kind of go over it.

SHAFER: But I mean because of Watergate, did you--I mean a lot of people were just turned off to politics. But did you feel like it--?

BROWN: I think that's another one of those little memes. Most people are not interested in politics. Well, not most, but a lot of people aren't. And then some people are. And young people, you know, if I go speak on a campus, then some of them would be excited and say, "Gee, this would be fun. Let's do it." And campaigns are one of the more open institutions. They don't fingerprint you when you come in, they don't do a back--at least we didn't, do background checks. Don't check your grades, don't find out do you have a degree in 00:12:00something? And people come in and they could do almost anything. Research, work in press, work in scheduling, drive people, secondary scheduling, help build crowds. So there's a lot you can do. And people with skill came in. Jodie Krajewski [Evans] came in, and she helped raise money. She was good at that, and she was very young. And you get right in there. If you were good--if you can raise money, or if you can write a press release, you would just go right to the top, I would think. Now, maybe other campaigns are more rigid. But they tend to be kind of open. If anything, they usually have too many people in them, and I tried to keep it fairly modest in size. Because every dollar you spend on an 00:13:00organization, you're not spending on the media.

SHAFER: So that was the main thing, the TV--and radio.

BROWN: Well, if you're thinking of communicating with eight or nine million people, is there another way? You can go get a megaphone and stand down on Pershing Square and start yelling, but (a), it won't be effective, and (b), nobody's going to hear you. So there is only one road, and it's called news and money--and the candidate, and his or her intelligence and values and charisma. But those are the mechanics. In football, you've got to get the ball from where you are to the other guy's goal line. That's what you've got to do. So when you're there, you've got to get the vote--or people don't know who the hell you are, to vote for you, not for the other guy. That's it. A subset of voters is 00:14:00very informed. And then as it goes down the spectrum, they get less informed. But they're all affected, one way or the other, by a campaign.

It's my view--this is not an archival factoid--but I would just say that campaigns, in many cases, although not all, are just the candidate, the issues, and the other candidate. Sometimes you win because the other guy's so bad. Sometimes you win because you're just what is wanted at that time. And then other times, you get these very clever campaign advisors and consultants, and they help you shape a campaign. But I would say that's sometimes, but not always.

SHAFER: Did that happen with you?

BROWN: Well, I don't know that we had campaign consultants.

SHAFER: What about Tom Quinn?

BROWN: Well, he worked in the campaign. He was employed by the campaign. That was his job.

SHAFER: But he was part of like image making, and that kind of thing?

BROWN: Well, he wrote press releases, and he also directed the campaign. Yeah, he was a campaign manager. That's a little different. Consultants offer advice, and I don't want to get off onto that whole story. But it was a simpler structure. And the only people that were professional were the cameramen, and they did the commercials--and the pollsters, I think, for the most part. Is that it? Maybe the mail house. But today, if you take Meg Whitman's campaign, there were over 150 employees, so it's getting layered and hierarchical. And 00:16:00government's getting like that, so there's a lot of layering. And I think we had a flatter organization, simpler. It was Tom Quinn, Richard Maullin, myself.

HOLMES: Governor, there's always a lot of talk about coalitions, when we look at party politics. When your father ran in 1966 to when you're running here in '74, I guess the coalition of the Democratic Party had shifted quite a bit. What were your observations on that--the coalition, if we want to use that term--?

BROWN: Well, coalition sounds like the British government. You have a coalition of the liberal party and the conservatives. Now you're talking about an electorate, where people aren't in a parliamentary hall cutting deals. So the party was different. You had Earth Day. You had something called the 00:17:00environment. You had the assertion of black power, of civil rights. That became something different, so that it was simpler than in Truman's day, or even the '58 campaign. Yeah, there is more of a fragmentation, and today it's even much more so.

I kept thinking of the black/brown coalition. That's what Tom Bradley--he had a guy, Maury [Maurice Weiner] that was one of his advisers--and their whole deal was to get the Mexican Americans and the African Americans working to elect Tom Bradley. And I guess that was embryonic of what's going on today. You know, that's kind of a social-science way of looking at it. And campaigns are getting 00:18:00very micro targeted, but I don't think we thought in micro-targeting terms--swing voters. I didn't know about the swing voter.

We knew about the voters in South Gate that had voted against fair housing, and voted for Sam Yorty in the primary, that there was a conservative Democrat. And Yorty got about 43 percent of the vote, as I recall. So that's a factor, so you're always thinking, "Well, how do we get to people in South Gate?" Because you're not going to win if you lose all of what were called the Yorty vote, you're not going to get elected, so somehow you have to get that vote. And that gets complicated when these things get divisive, and you get issues like abortion and cross-town busing, and things like that that politicians do like to 00:19:00avoid. And when you're from a particular district, you champion one side or the other. But when you're running statewide in a very diverse state, you tend to want to be more generic, and then that has its own challenge. And so, obviously, I've followed in that tradition, as do all candidates who turn out to be elected.

SHAFER: Coming back to the primary for a minute. Prop. 9--you embraced it, you supported it. And I think your two opponents, [Joseph L.] Alioto and [Robert] Moretti, did not. Did you use that, do you remember--against them?

BROWN: Well, I don't know if they--I think [Jerome L.] Waldie endorsed it. [John F.] "Jack" Henning, from the AFL-CIO, denounced it--in terms that have turned out to have some truth to them. But did I use it?

SHAFER: To differentiate yourself.

BROWN: I can't remember. Well, obviously, I would use that. But whether I took 00:20:00an ad out--use it how? Use it in a speech to two hundred people? Or use it in an ad that goes to two million people? I hate to be so picky, but details matter, as to what we're talking about. You have a lot of conversations. When you're in a campaign, you're going every day, talking politics. And yeah, the fact that we lost the endorsement--that highlighted political reform. I was on the good side.

SHAFER: And I can imagine, in an election like this during the middle of Watergate, where you would use it to say look, these guys are part of the old system.

BROWN: Well, I don't know that I attacked them as much. I don't think our ads attacked them--I'm not sure. Someone would have to go back and look. I think this attack is more recent. Well, I mean it comes back. It's been around in 00:21:00California a long, long time. But the goal was to get known and win over a majority of the voters. And a year before I started, I think I remember seeing a poll, I was around 35 percent, and when the vote came in, I was around 35 percent, a year later, after all the activity. So that's my point, that things get fixed. I represented a certain loyalty, fondness for the Brown--the memory, the Brown memory, the name, kind of. Maybe the political reform, maybe younger--it was a combination of those factors.

SHAFER: Did you--you've mentioned TV a few times, and I don't know--you may not remember exactly what the slogan was, but you know, how did you--I know you're not going to like this word, but how did you like--package yourself. How did you convince all these voters?

BROWN: You should go collect the films, and go look at them. You can see for yourself.

SHAFER: Well, we'll do that. But I'm just--what's your recollection?

BROWN: Well, in a very attractive way, I thought. Although I've listened to some of the ads, and the voices get a bit distorted, so they seem a little bit hollow to me right now. But I think that's the sound. The sound doesn't last long on recordings. Did you know that? Have you heard things from thirty years ago?

SHAFER: Yeah, it deteriorates.

BROWN: Big time. I'm sure political reform was part of the primary, I would think. Obviously, that was a big defining issue, I would think. But it's hard to remember. I've had a lot of these campaigns. I've done a lot of ads. Yeah.

SHAFER: So Tom Quinn--there's a quote from Tom in the LA Times, and I'm not sure 00:23:00quite what the date is, but here's what he said, "We wanted," looking back on the campaign, "We wanted to avoid any discussion of substance. We found obscure, boring issues, and talked about them. Jerry's real ideas were dangerous."

BROWN: That's Richard Maullin, isn't it?

SHAFER: It was Tom Quinn, I think, in the LA Times. So what is he--?

BROWN: That was at a conference. That's, again, the political campaign manager talking, you know, like he's in charge--which really isn't true. The candidate is the one that runs the campaign, for the most part. That was an overstatement of the obvious point, that strikes at harvest time and giving public employees the right to bargain, which would imply the right to strike, or capital punishment, were not winner topics, so you do want to avoid that. So, that's the 00:24:00avoidance of unnecessary controversy. Now, the ads were meant to be exciting, meant to be memorable, not to be boring, but to not being a flame throwing, extreme candidate. You could go into a debate or something and say, "Look, I'm standing here, and I tell you, if I'm governor, we're going to have strikes from Stockton to El Centro at the height of harvest, and that fruit's going to rot, unless César Chávez is an equal bargaining agent with the farmers of California." You could say that, right? But you'd be a damn fool.

SHAFER: Not a winner.

BROWN: Well, why would you even say it, anyway? It's not even diplomatic. The whole notion of collective bargaining was framed in terms of a secret-ballot 00:25:00election of choices. So, I think, looking back, I had a lot of the ideas in this campaign. I don't want to say all the ideas, but most of the ideas.

SHAFER: What were the ones--what are the ones you're most proud of.

BROWN: These are not things you're proud of. It's all situational. When you're at a dinner, talking to your wife twenty years ago, what is the thing you're most proud of? I mean, that's a silly question.

SHAFER: Or what kind of ideas are you talking about?

BROWN: A lady, Mary Ellen Leary, wrote a book called Shadow Politics, or something. Do you know that book? [Phantom Politics: Campaigning in California]

HOLMES: Yes.

BROWN: You've read it, or looked at it?

HOLMES: I have.

BROWN: Okay, that's what that whole book was about, right? And the book was kind of boring--it was boring. [laughter] She was a very nice lady, a friend of my 00:26:00father's. She had dinner at our house one time. But she was upset there wasn't enough substantive debate. But, it's hard to have a substantive debate in a press release. There's, well, all I can tell you--the question is what am I most proud of.

This is not a business of walking around patting myself on the back, "Boy, am I proud." Of what? You know what I mean? It's a very exciting, engaging activity--politics, campaigning, and serving in office. And it certainly has always struck me that I'm doing something valuable and important--and that's it. That's what we, that's what they call, in Buddhism, a gaining idea. It's extra. 00:27:00You've added it--you don't need that. Just sit, you know? The rivers flow, the mountains are here. So, campaigning, governing, we're just here. We're doing it. And there could be a moment that is a--but also, being proud, see that, to me, connotes gloating or some kind of vanity, that strikes me as not virtuous or not--and almost leading to problems.

SHAFER: Well, you just said that you thought of most of the good ideas, so I thought, you know, what were they?

BROWN: Well, whatever ideas there were, they were good because they won! They're certainly the ideas in the secretary of state's campaign. Those were my ideas. We had the idea of, I think if you look at that first press release, clean skies 00:28:00and good schools. What was the third one? Energy. I think it was Governor Cuomo who said, "You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose," so there's a little poetry there, I would guess. But they did hint where we were going. I did stuff on education, I did some on clean air. Dramatic, more moves--more state intervention to reduce air pollution than any other state, and then that evolved into doing something about climate change. So talking about clean air, coming out of the smog of LA--that was an important idea, and that idea lived.

We also had an idea--it really wasn't my idea. It came from Ken Gostein, who's now dead. He was a reporter from little minor magazines. He was an unusual 00:29:00fellow who just showed up somehow. And we proposed train systems, from downtown LA to the San Fernando Valley, and to San Bernardino, and to Long Beach. That all came to be, and I'm still promoting trains. So trains and clean air. Those are two important ideas that I've promoted. I don't think the campaign did that many substantive issues, if you go back and see the commercials. I don't know if they exist anymore.

HOLMES: There's television archives.

BROWN: Have you ever looked at them?

HOLMES: Not from this campaign specifically, no.

BROWN: So I think that, as they say in the law, res ipsa loquitur. The thing 00:30:00speaks for itself. So I think it would be good to look at that. But also, you've got the newspapers, but those are just the stories of the moment. I don't know if there was that much press. Remember, I was ahead by, in some polls, fifteen points, sixteen, seventeen, something like that. So do I want to call attention to the opponent? [laughing] Even the Warriors, when they're ahead, do they keep shooting? Like if they were behind? No, right? And does any candidate? I don't think so. I mean candidates may say that, or a political scientist may say that, or a journalist may say that. But generally speaking, it's a contest, and you have a winner and a loser. So when you're ahead--now, you have to be careful. If you're ahead and you don't say anything, pretty soon the other guy starts saying things, and you start slipping, because people think there's nothing there. So 00:31:00you have to be mindful of that, and I think I was.

HOLMES: Governor, it seems that you were also, as you were just describing, somewhat following Randy Collier's advice, of--

BROWN: Not as much as some people would think I should have.

HOLMES: The four key areas of education, environment, economic growth--

BROWN: By the way, when you look at contemporary candidates, and I know this is not what this is all about--I won't mention any names--but people who have taken a lot of positions over their lifetimes, they can run into trouble. And if they had taken fewer positions, they might have gotten just as far but be in a better position. Well, that's the voice of experience. Randy Collier was the longest-serving state senator, over thirty years, so he had his thoughts. But I did pop off on a lot of issues.

HOLMES: So looking at these four areas: education, environment, economic growth, and political reform. In addition to those, did you also speak in regards to the 00:32:00Agricultural Labor Relations Act--with the UFW and farm labor--during the campaign?

BROWN: I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm sure I said--not clear. You'd have to look at the record. You know, that's the whole thing, even when you're elected. How many issues can you put before the legislature?

HOLMES: Well, because you did pass that the following year, in 1975.

BROWN: Yeah, well, right. But did I run and say I was going to pass a gas tax? No. In fact, in doing the gas tax, a lot of legislators didn't want it. And 00:33:00should I have had a press release? Would that have been the more upright thing to start? I'm running for governor, Meg Whitman, and yes, I'm going to do--well, I said you wouldn't have any tax without a vote of the people, so I couldn't have done it in the first four years. I didn't say that for the second term. This is an art as well as a science, and people who have never practiced the art may not understand all the ingredients that go into doing a good job. Anyway, so I must have said something about farm workers, but I don't know that I highlighted that.

HOLMES: Well, that was my question, because I know there were some statements--I think they're more press releases, but I think they were delivered by the UFW more than--

BROWN: About what?

HOLMES: About the Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

BROWN: Well, we didn't even know what that was at that time. That's a whole story, by the way--there are books written on this topic. César Chávez didn't 00:34:00even want a labor relations act, but he was pushed in that direction by [George] Meany and the AFL--at least some people say that. That whole story of the function of law and how it works, it's a very important question. I did ally with the farm workers. I took away the short-handled hoe right away, and I signed a bill in my first year and said at my state-of-the-state speech that we should have collective bargaining for those who work in the fields. I did say that, but whether I said that precisely before, I'm not sure.

And by the way, those aren't issues. Issues are the news of the day. You have to understand: the American media, the Western media in general, is very 00:35:00constrained by news of the day. Now, I may be overstating that, but that's the way it strikes me. And so you have to roll with the news. And I don't know that agricultural relations was--it's maybe an issue in Fresno or Stockton, but it wasn't in most other places, in the big media markets.

HOLMES: Well, I mean we can get to that, but it was--they were waging national boycotts for--

BROWN: They were.

HOLMES: Since '68. And by the 1970s, it was--

BROWN: So the question is are you for boycotting grapes, yes or no? Yeah, I probably did avoid that question. Are you for boycotting lettuce? I said we should not buy non-UFW lettuce for the cafeterias of the junior colleges. I said that. So I always wanted to be measured, and because this is not a college 00:36:00oratorical contest, where you're there to excite the audience--you're there to communicate your position, what you're running for, why you're running, but to do so in the most effective manner, and that's what every candidate does. And the game of the reporters is always to get you to say something that you shouldn't say, if votes is what you're trying to get. Now, a reporter can say, "Well, votes--you shouldn't try to get votes, and you should try to say something that I want you to say, or that I think would be hard for you to say. Or I'm a sadist, and I just enjoy your squirming"--I tend to think that's also part of a journalistic mentality.

But nevertheless, the democratic system is not perfect, and the campaigning is not a perfect correlate with the governing. George Bush said that in some way he 00:37:00was going to do something about climate change, and as soon as he was elected, he switched that off, because that's where the Republicans were. So like it or don't like it, it has a long storied history in modern American politics.

SHAFER: You mentioned the 2020 election, in passing. Beto O'Rourke, last week, said that he was born to run this race for president.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Do you feel that at all, looking--at the time, did you feel like this--?

BROWN: That sense of destiny is not a storyline that grabs me. Born to--yeah, I mean I had a lot of advantages, and I think I benefited from those advantages. But when you say born to, that could be interpreted that it's your destiny. And 00:38:00if it's your destiny, there's a certain metaphysics behind that. Did God ordain this? Is it built into the structure of the physical laws of the universe? Is it some cultural configuration? Or is it just a feeling that you have? Or something else.? You'd have to ask him. That's an interesting question. But I would never say, "I was born to be governor." Definitely, that strikes me as a very alien thought.

SHAFER: California's a big state, and you've talked a lot about the importance of mass media, but there is traveling around and shaking hands. Of course as you 00:39:00got older, you campaigned in different ways.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: But in '74, what did you like most, and least, about campaigning?

BROWN: I think I liked most of it. There wasn't anything I didn't particularly like. I had fun going on trips, going to small towns--particularly going to these small towns. They were fun. Yeah, I think the whole thing--it was exciting.

SHAFER: The glad-handing and all that stuff?

BROWN: It's not glad-handing. If people come up to you, they want to see you, talk to you, it's obviously flattering to your sense of yourself. What's not to like? Have you ever had hundreds of people pushing to shake your hand? And if they did, I'm sure you wouldn't say, "Oh no, I'm sorry. Please stand back." [laughter] So no, I don't think it's bad at all.

But I'll tell you I tend to think that a lot of this activity, so called 00:40:00touching the flesh, is just for the cameras. Even the so-called rope line, for the president. That's a camera phenomenon, because it's such a small subset of the electorate. So I find that a little questionable. I do. Yeah, so in that sense, maybe I didn't--well, it's also maybe the enthusiasm too. The enthusiasm builds, it spreads. People say, "I went to a rally. It was exciting." Yeah, that's true.

These cell phone photos have really taken over a major part now. You used to be able to talk to people. Now, for the most part, they want to get that picture. And to get it, it often will take five or six seconds. So that means, if you see ten people, that's a minute just taking those ten. So before you'd shake hands, 00:41:00go down the line. It's of the evolutionary process of campaigning. And in general, I think it was pretty good. But I did feel performing for the media was difficult. So that's why, when you're being observed, it's hard to not be conscious that you're being observed. And if you're being observed, you're not fully engaged in what it is you're engaging in. So I think that's a challenge that I'm sensitive to.

SHAFER: Yeah. Here's a--this is a quote from one of the articles in September of 1974. It says, "Brown promises to pursue a constitutional amendment to merge the senate and the assembly." And then there's a quote, "Jerry Brown has been," this 00:42:00is from the senate president pro tem, James [R.] Mills, I think, at the time.

BROWN: Jim Mills, yeah.

SHAFER: Jim Mills. [reading aloud] "Jerry Brown has been attacking the legislature since the beginning of his campaign, and it seems apparent he intends to continue. It's time for him to stop, if he wants to develop a close working relationship with the legislature." Does that ring true?

BROWN: Yeah. Yeah, obviously. [laughing] You can't keep attacking the legislature and working with them. But--those are ideas. I don't know where that idea came from. So maybe I overstated it when I said most of the ideas. There were a lot of ideas that came in from different sources. So that's a reform idea. When you're trying to figure out a reform, you know, do the Political Reform Act, everything I'd thought of, and other people had thought of, and Common Cause--it was in the initiative. So now, what's the next one? Well, create a unicameral legislature. Both houses are kind of redundant. One used to 00:43:00represent the more rural areas. But it doesn't do that anymore, after one man, one vote. So yeah, I don't know--what is your question?

SHAFER: Well, I guess, did you feel--?

BROWN: Is your question do I think he's right, and I'm wrong?

SHAFER: Did you feel, given who you were as secretary of state and the times and Watergate did you feel like it was to your advantage to be seen as running against, you know, the government?

BROWN: A little bit. Well, a little bit. Right. There's an element of that. You know, Clinton ran against the government, and Reagan said, "Government is not the solution, government is the problem." So that was in the air. That was the environment, and since I've been around a while, I've seen different things get in the air. And government is the problem, was a meme that they got hold of. They also got hold of the window of vulnerability, that the Russians had more 00:44:00missiles. It turned out to be completely untrue. So there's a lot of things, true and untrue, that become common wisdom. And just like news of the day, you can't deviate from the common wisdom as a mainstream candidate.

It is an error, I've thought, to talk too specifically about the mechanics of government. And it's also an error to talk too much about Democrat versus Republican. In California it's always been a more centrist program. Earl Warren always was trying to bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats. My father tried that. He said, "I want to be governor in the tradition of Hiram Johnson, a progressive Republican, and Earl Warren." So yeah, that was the spirit.

Now, the legislature periodically runs through these scandals, and they're up there, and it's just the way it is in democracy. I don't care whether you're in Brazil, or whether you're in some country in Europe, the Ukraine, where you have endemic corruption. This legislative body is fodder in media circles. See, we're talking '74: you had the Arab oil embargo; you had the Vietnam War--what did we lose, fifty-five thousand, and the Vietnamese lost at least two million? That was pretty serious--that was government. That was the best and the brightest. 00:46:00Then we have Nixon, and we have Watergate, and we have the manipulation of the CIA and what have you. And then you have all these other things about government.

So yeah, since government is more and more part of our lives, government is going to be more and more part of the problem. And people felt that, certainly in '74, because, well, the price of gasoline went up, the president was impeached, and we lost the first war in history. So that's going to make people feel pretty restive about government. And that's true today, being in the Afghan war for now going on seventeen years, people are going to say wait a minute. This is a big problem. And that went--I think a lot of--behind Trump. If you're asking me does anybody talk about government as the problem? In one form or 00:47:00another, they do that.

Now, my father didn't talk about that, and Nixon didn't talk about that when he ran for governor. That was their era. But we're in a different time, and people think definitely of the government. Reagan could say, "I'm here from Washington, and I'm here to help you," or something, and everybody laughs. So I don't know if they would have said that a hundred years ago, nor would they have said that during the Depression, so it's just one of the memes that we've got to live with.

SHAFER: When that was happening during the campaign in '74, did you think, "Well, if I win, when I win, I'm going to have to work with these guys, and I'd better--?"

BROWN: Well, yeah. Well, I started working with them. I had some legislative endorsements. Not many, three, but they were powerful. But I think this idea of government, nothing works. And we have that today: the schools don't work, 00:48:00health care doesn't work, can't afford to buy a house, too much crime in the streets. So democracy feeds on this discontent, and it is escalating. So I think that's normal.

I don't think I shied away from activism as a leader in government. I mean, there were always things we did. And Henry Ford [II] came out to California my first year and spoke to Tom Quinn, who was then the head of the Air Resources Board. He [Ford] complained California was going to mandate a significant reduction in sulfur emissions, and he asked us not to do that, but we did it anyway. So that's government, coercively pushing for a certain objective that's 00:49:00in the public interest. So yeah, government is very important, and I believe it's important. But at the same time, people think it's a problem--but they want it to do something. So there are a lot of contradictory streams and elements that you have to negotiate as a leader of this thing, government, which has so many different shapes and forms.

SHAFER: At that time, I think you were hanging out with--define hanging out the way you want--Natalie Wood, Shana Alexander--

BROWN: Let me tell you, Natalie Wood and Shana Alexander have nothing in common. So hanging out with them, in regard to politics?

SHAFER: Well no, just personally, as part of your personal life.

BROWN: So what's the question?

SHAFER: I guess as a bachelor running for governor, you had opportunities to you 00:50:00know, have dinner or lunch or whatever, with whoever you wanted to. I mean did you feel--?

BROWN: Not whoever I wanted to. That's a big overstatement. But more than the guy down the street. First of all, Natalie Wood was somebody that someone introduced me to. I did go out with her a few times. Shana Alexander was someone who followed McCarthy and was a person who would sit around, as I've mentioned before, and we'd talk about politics and other things. She was a sophisticated person. I think her father was a music producer, or something or other. Anyway, she was interesting. And McCarthy enjoyed her company, and I enjoyed both of their company. Maybe three or four times, when there were rallies in California. So those two events seem very different to me.

SHAFER: I guess part of the context of the times too was, you know, drugs. 00:51:00People were partying. LA was very--there was a lot of glamour, it was glitz, you know, and you were in that world, right? I'm just wondering, did you see yourself as part of it, or apart from it?

BROWN: What world? See, that world already is--that's a construct, if I ever saw one. Yeah, there's millions of people living in Los Angeles, and more in California. Yeah, in the world, being a part of--I didn't think of myself as being a part--or not a part. I was just going about my business. I'm a lawyer at Tuttle & Taylor, I'm secretary of state, running for governor, talking to people, trying to make friends, raise money, look good, do good--keep going. So "this being a part of" is a way somebody writing a book or a treatise about some 00:52:00era, and you've got to fill in with that kind of imagination. But as an actor, as a player, down there on the field, you're blocking and tackling and running. You're not thinking about well, what's going on in the stands? That's my metaphor explaining that, yeah. [Shafer laughs] You've got to get down on the field. And you've never been on the field. You don't want to know what it's like on the field. [laughing]

SHAFER: Um, did you use drugs at all?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: Never?

BROWN: No, I'm not going to say all of my habits, of which are not perfect. But it's not a topic that I've indulged in. And I've gone this long, and I don't intend to change it now.

SHAFER: Okay. What else? [laughing] I want to ask you about another thing that was going on in that time frame, which was Patty Hearst. Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974, from--you know, she was in San Francisco, got kidnapped, newspaper heiress, went missing for a good part of the first year you were governor. How did you think about that, how did that play into--?

BROWN: I have no idea how I thought about that. And that's a very interesting question. How do you think about it? I think, but how I think, that's another question. I think I followed the story. It was very interesting. Symbionese Liberation Front, the burning building, Patty Hearst. The picture with a machine gun. Yeah, that was all very interesting. But I'm not sure how I would think about it--I mean as a what? I don't even know where to go with that question. 00:54:00Are you saying that you can extract some social meaning from that, or some cultural conclusion? I don't know--you can say different things. You can talk about her father and the times. I don't know, but those are very sophisticated thoughts, that certainly didn't come into my head. And what year was this?

SHAFER: Yeah, '74.

BROWN: In '74, I'm running for governor. I've got to worry about Alioto, Flournoy. I raised millions of dollars--everything else is kind of out there. It's way out there. It's a newspaper story. It was news of the day, and it went on for days.

SHAFER: Years, a couple years.

HOLMES: And to piggyback on that, could you discuss the change you saw in the counterculture during that time, which I think dovetails with the Patty Hearst kidnapping? Because we went from having, say, activists in civil rights or even 00:55:00hippies--if we want to use that term--against the war to, by the early 1970s--as you mentioned earlier--the Weather Underground, heavy drug use, and even violence coming into that. What were your observations on the changing of activism during that time?

BROWN: Well, now you've conflated a lot of things, for sure.

HOLMES: I'm a historian. I'm pretty good at that, Sir. [laughing]

BROWN: Conflating. Hippies and antiwar, those are a little different. I remember when I was in Berkeley, and some girl talked about the hippies--and she met hippies in Mexico, or something. I think I heard that term in '64, and I said, "What the hell--what's a hippie?" But that's the first time I ever heard that. The first time ever heard the term beatnik, I was in the novitiate, and the assistant--Father Meehan was his name. He was the assistant to the master of novices, said, "There's this beatnik movement. They're talking about chewing 00:56:00razor blades." I remember being kind of interested in this. This is kind of interesting. What is this all about? Hippie, I didn't know what to say.

[break in recording]

BROWN: What was the last question?

SHAFER: We were talking about counterculture, hippies, and all that stuff.

HOLMES: Yeah, the changing of activism, from say the mid-1960s to by the time that you're running for governor,--this turning of say civil rights activism to violence, to the Weather Underground--activism had certainly changed.

BROWN: Yeah, and then I was in a pretty--you might say conventional path. Antiwar through the peace slate, '68, on the ballot in '68, running for the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, running for secretary of state, 00:57:00running for governor. These are very mainstream activities. You don't run around with a feather on your head, or a bandana, or earrings or something--at least you didn't at that time. And the people I hung out with are people who were related to what I was doing in some way. This is not an avocation. You know, "Oh, let's go run for governor!" It doesn't work that way. This is what you do! This is the activity. And you get up in the morning, and before you go to bed, this is what you think about. And that's what I thought about, and that's how I got to be governor at the age of thirty-six. So you can't go wandering off over here or there. I saw things.

HOLMES: That's what I was asking, more about your own observations.

BROWN: But I didn't see much. I wasn't in San Francisco, so I missed that. I 00:58:00came down to LA, left in October of '65 from San Francisco, and didn't go back to live there until the end of '88. I think I was in Elysian Park once, and they had kind of a little "be-in" of some kind, and there was a couple lying under a blanket having sex or something. That's probably the most hippie-ish thing that I personally observed. And there was a few psychedelic shirts and tie-dyes, and that kind of thing.

But running for office is a discipline in itself. You go from starting at the starting line. It's quite strenuous, so that's what you do. It's politics. It's 00:59:00office holding, it's parties--Democratic parties. I would go to events for Technion, or the Hebrew University, at the Hilton Hotel. I remember once going there when--who was the prime minister in '74? The Israeli prime minister--but anyway, it was actually the fall of the Shah. That was later. It must have been about 1980.

SHAFER: That was, yeah, it was '79.

BROWN: Who was that--who was the prime minister in '78?

SHAFER: Menachem Begin, maybe?

BROWN: Menachem Begin, probably. Was that Menachem Begin? [ed. note: Begin was Prime Minister of Israel from June 1977 to October 1983] Yeah, I think he was there. Yeah, it was Begin. I remember passing by him and talking about Iran, and he said the Shah was such a good man, such a friend of Israel. I just remember that, sitting there at the dais behind--kind of talking in his ear. That's what 01:00:00I extracted from Menachem Begin. [laughing] That the Shah was a friend of Israel.

So that's a far cry from the Jefferson Airplane, which I never saw, or even the Grateful Dead. So yeah, it was more something you read about. But then, in LA, I don't know if LA was the same way as San Francisco. LA was a little more diverse. Yeah, I mean I was in Laurel Canyon. I met Mama Cass once. I stopped by her house during the day. But that was that.

SHAFER: It seems like, almost like you were in the eye of the storm, in a way. There's all this cultural and political upheaval going on, and to hear you 01:01:00describe it, you're saying, "Well, I was focused on running for governor."

BROWN: Well, I read the LA Times every day. And so I had a running commentary. When you're talking about the campaign, there's nothing more important than winning in November. So do you think things that aren't going to help you win are all that interesting? You know, I wasn't going to football games--or maybe I went to a movie. I don't know. I doubt it. I mean, this is what you do. Maybe it's kind of hard for you to think about it, but it's a full-time job. And then if you don't have a family, you don't have a wife--what else is there to do? I don't want to just come home and turn on the television or something. Got to get out there and make hay, make friends, raise money, talk to people. That's what you do. Maybe that's a revelation. But it's very exciting, by the way. Very exciting. I found it such. And certainly not boring.

SHAFER: What is it that's exciting?

BROWN: Just the whole--it is exciting. Now why it is exciting, I'll have to leave to philosophers and psychologists.

SHAFER: Yeah. I want to ask you about a moment in the primary in that year--

BROWN: By the way, I could maybe elaborate. It seems like two plus two equals four. This is important. The governorship of the largest state in the union--that's not chopped liver. And the issues--every issue that government deals with. And then, the problems and being asked these impossible questions. So it keeps you on your toes. It's exciting. It's anxiety provoking, and it's certainly engrossing. I think that should describe why it would be something that one would be drawn to. But whether drawn to exciting or not, this was the 01:03:00path I was on. So it wasn't like a job in the brokerage business down on Spring St. waiting for me. You know, there wasn't a winery that I was going to operate. There wasn't a law firm that I wanted to join. So there wasn't anything else. This was what I was doing.

SHAFER: No plan B.

BROWN: No plan B.

SHAFER: Yeah. I want to ask you about a moment in the primary. I think your opponents, Alioto and Moretti, were wanting to debate, and I think you were maybe--I don't want to characterize it, but maybe not that eager to debate?

BROWN: Kind of like Feinstein today. How many times did she debate? Once, right?

SHAFER: And it wasn't really a debate, but--yeah.

BROWN: Yeah, okay. So--

SHAFER: So it was a strategy, maybe?

BROWN: No, well who says that debating is a requirement for being governor? That's just--that's a--that's a construct. It's a thought.

SHAFER: But it's become tradition.

BROWN: Not for winning candidates. A lot of losing candidates like debates. And maybe other candidates like debates. Kennedy/Nixon--that was a good series of debates.

SHAFER: But what I was going to ask you about--I think you were doing consecutive press conferences, in 1190, at the capitol. Moretti--

BROWN: Oh yeah, Moretti barged in. Yeah.

SHAFER: What happened?

BROWN: I don't know--he was there, we had a little impromptu debate.

SHAFER: I mean he barged into your press conference, or--?

BROWN: So what else is new? What--so what are you saying? Should I be aggrieved? I mean what does that mean? We were in a contest. Why not? He's trying to make some news--that's news. You guys love that. The reporters love that. So obviously, I understand it. But then, he's there, so now you've got to have a little debate.

SHAFER: You didn't feel like, sort of, you know, sandbagged?

BROWN: What does that mean, sandbagged? I mean you're in a contest to be governor of the state. All is fair in love and war. You know, hopefully it's all legal. But people do stuff.

SHAFER: Did you kind of admire it in a way?

BROWN: No. Didn't admire it--didn't like it, particularly. But I thought well, that was clever. I could see it. I don't think you understand. I mean we're in a contest, and people are running around and it's a contact sport--and this was a pretty mild campaign, for the most part. I do remember one thing Moretti said. He said something about, if I couldn't get around to meet everybody else, my next thing I'd like is for everyone to meet you. And I said, "Well, Moretti, you're not that good looking." I do remember that comment.

SHAFER: What did he mean by that?

BROWN: He meant that I was not pleasing to the voters. And I don't know whether he meant he was pleasing to the voters, which I didn't think was the case. I think my campaign, the language, the topics, was alien to his world that had served him well in his rise in politics. So he identified his thoughts with the thoughts of the larger electorate. And so he said, oh, if we just get all these ideas--probably because if you just talked to everybody, I'd win. Which I think was pretty far off, and maybe was, it's showing that he wasn't in touch with the electorate, as it is. In touch with the legislature--and it is a club and a close-knit group, and you have to have a close-knit group to be very effective. 01:07:00So the very skills and emotions that work in the legislative body, can be very counterproductive for the electorate, as a whole.

SHAFER: You were quite a debater in high school.

BROWN: Not really. I was a debater. I wouldn't say quite a debater.

SHAFER: You were a debater in high school. [laughing]

BROWN: Yeah, well, I'm being accurate.

SHAFER: Yeah, so did you, was there a part of you, that you, in the campaign, either in that moment--where you wanted to debate? You wanted to sort of show him?

BROWN: No, I wanted to win. So these are all means to an end. [laughing] Debating is a stressful kind of undertaking any way you look at it, particularly in a high school debate. You had eight minutes, then you had your rebuttal. And no, actually, I find it very interesting, and that was exciting. But the trouble with a debate is you can say something stupid, or you can look weak, or you can 01:08:00look awkward, so that--it's not a controlled environment. Political handlers would never allow things like that to happen again. So, there it was, it was a moment, it was a spontaneous moment, at least for me--

QUEENA KIM: Do you remember that moment? Is it something you can visualize? Were you at the lectern?

BROWN: I can't--I haven't thought about it much.

KIM: Yeah, it's just not a big searing memory.

BROWN: It's not a big searing memory. I mean, if you ask me what is a searing memory, I'd have to reflect on that. Actually, looking at the elk on my hill out here is a memory. They're not there now, but they were there. A few days ago there were about nineteen of them up on that hill.

[break in audio]

BROWN: All right. Searing moments! That's good. Have you had a searing moment? That's my searing moment.

MARZORATI: It happened right there in [Room] 1190? He just walked right in?

BROWN: He [Moretti] walked right in. That was life. Now we've got everything all guarded and protected.

KIM: Where is--what is 1190?

BROWN: That's just the room.

SHAFER: That's a conference room in the capitol, just down the road from the governor's--down the hall from the governor's office.

BROWN: I don't want this all to be so subjective. Don't you want more the historical--you weren't asking all these questions of my father. I don't know--I didn't read it. These are just ponderings.

SHAFER: He's one of the strands. Well, it's your take on your life.

BROWN: By the way, I read a book on historiography. I got it from my grandniece who teaches at Michigan. She gave me a book on theory and history, and I got the key word in history: temporality. [laughter] You see, these are all social sciences. You have anthropology, you have sociology, and you have history. What's different about history? Temporality, right? It's the times, the sequence 01:10:00over time.

HOLMES: Yeah, change over time.

BROWN: I didn't know that before, when it's so obvious. Did you know that?

SHAFER: No.

BROWN: So that's what interests me. Then when I heard that, when I picked that book up--and then they have things like the social turn, and then the cultural turn. There's such a language that didn't exist--you asked me about rock and roll. I'm more interested in language, that is now new, that didn't exist before--and that people use as though this is an obvious description of reality, and not many years ago, well, this didn't even exist, this term, right? There's a lot of theory, and it's breaking down. The social sciences are deteriorating, degenerating, into more and more abstract theory about the theory about the 01:11:00theory--and it isn't very concrete. And graduate school is a complete dysfunction, because everything you learn disables you from teaching undergraduates. Because you're learning things that people are not going to want to learn, because you have to keep new. Your doctorate has to be a new thesis, right?

HOLMES: Mm-hmm.

BROWN: What happens if there is nothing new in the world? Well, there would be no newspapers, I guess.

KIM: We'd be out of a job!

BROWN: So a lot of this is just make-work for college graduates. But we've got to do something. This is your welfare, and then you have all the people who do the real work, with their hands. And you guys are just spinning little webs of silliness. [everyone in the room laughs] [interruption in recording]

[break in audio]

BROWN: I have to amend what I said about charter schools. I mean I know I've read books about homeschooling. It seems like the ability to shape the lives of your children yourself, without a paid intervener, in some kind of institution, sounds like more liberty than not. But a lot of people would recoil at the idea--and I've never done it. But it does take a certain type of person. And it's just different people. The next-door neighbors have turkeys. They were slaughtering turkeys yesterday, and one of their helpers is a friend of theirs, and she came up. She had a one-year-old, so they have five children, and they're doing independent study at home through a charter school, so they're in fact 01:13:00doing homeschooling, five people. But how many young ladies do you know who have just had five children, because the oldest is only eight or nine, ten or something.

SHAFER: The governor is just blown away.

BROWN: Blown away, but it's just interesting to me. There's a lot of people, particularly around here, who do physical work. They work with their hands, and they fix fences, they chase after cows. There's a guy on a machine that went up there, he's probably going to put salt in for the cows, whatever. So they're outdoors, and they're doing stuff. That's very different than going to the office and writing about it. There's a guy named Ivan Illich, who was a friend of mine, and he wrote a book called, Deschooling Society, which I was very excited by. And I read another book by Paul Goodman. He wrote the book, Growing up Absurd, which everybody read at one time--which you've never heard of.

SHAFER: Never heard of it.

BROWN: In the 1960s, very well-known guy, very well known. He wrote a book, which I came across at the Yale bookstore called, Compulsory Miseducation, and you can imagine what that's about. So I've always thought alternatives were a good idea. But they can't be on a very widespread--you've only got a million people in homeschooling, and there are 60 million kids in the country.

SHAFER: Getting to the election of 1974, so it's you and Houston Flournoy.

BROWN: Houston I. Flournoy, yeah, I think it was.

SHAFER: Yeah, what--what do you remember from that campaign?

BROWN: I remember we had a debate in Irvine, worked pretty well.

SHAFER: What were his, like, strengths and weaknesses did you think?

BROWN: His strength was I think he had some of the issues on his side, but he 01:15:00certainly didn't want public-employee unions to be striking the government. I think that was not popular. You put it to a referendum. He was older. It's just the Republican brand was more solid, I think, in '74, except for the fact that it wasn't so solid because of the Nixon impeachment. Had Nixon been a success, it might have been a very different election. There would have been no Watergate.

SHAFER: Was he on the defensive because of that, do you think?

BROWN: He was. I mean the campaign was; I don't know if he personally was. Well, they got caught up in that. Yeah, with the Ford pardon, that becomes the news of the day. And that's it, over and over again. So--and he was a Republican, so 01:16:00that was a problem. And he was very obscure--he wasn't that well known. He got elected in the Reagan landslide, so he lucked out. He lucked in, and against me he lucked out--or didn't luck out, but he got thrown out. It was a very close election. He was gaining, according to the polls that we took. We took daily polls at that time.

So what do I think? We would try to put out a press release before each debate, about a point I would make in the debate, to try to make sure our point got captured by the news or the television. And that seemed to work. And then--yeah, what was there? He would say his little talking points. I kind of found it 01:17:00difficult to find what my real points were going to be. I think he had government, too much government, big government, taxes--just the same approach--maybe a little more so than Reagan. And that was still popular at that time. It was still popular, because Deukmejian and Wilson won on essentially that same message.

SHAFER: How many debates did you do?

BROWN: I think we did six.

SHAFER: Six?

BROWN: I think we did six. Yeah, they weren't all of the same type. But on radio--yeah, we did, and we did some debates in the primary, so I debated. So this whole idea of we don't want Brown to say anything, well, in a debate--of course the key is you don't want to make a mistake. Was it Gerald Ford--1976, so 01:18:00that came later--but he said Poland wasn't behind the Iron Curtain. Is that the biggest thing he made a mistake in? You know, you can't remember a name--anybody here at this table could forget a name, but it [a mistake] becomes bigger than life. So yeah, people don't want to make a gaffe, so you are being controlled, except being interesting and provocative at the same time. That's the challenge. So I think we talked about stuff. He asked his questions.

But you know, there is a tension. The press are doing their job under the First Amendment. I want to give all the deference to that that is appropriate. [laughing] But there's also, in the more recent idiom, the idea of clickbait, and so the reporter doesn't just want to get information to the electorate, 01:19:00although that's what he puts in his head. But he also wants to get news, and get something flashy and first. So everybody's trying to promote their particular cause, even though that's not the way it's framed.

But I think the journalists asked a lot of questions. I answered a lot of questions. I remember the first question, the day of my press conference--see, you probably didn't read that story. That was opening the first day, my press conference in LA.

SHAFER: The first day of your being governor?

BROWN: No, campaign. Was it the primary, or the general? I think it was the primary. Anyway, the story, if I recall right, it was written by Richard "Dick" 01:20:00Bergholz, not that I remember all these little things. [laughing] But I do! Well, that story, I have some interest in, because I'd sent him my press release, which I haven't read--I don't think I've read it in forty-five years. I would combine all the agencies that dealt with the environment into one agency, and the ones in energy in another agency--we kind of said that. It was a press release kind of idea. But I didn't know, institutionally, how that was going to work. In fact, I had a relatively thin grasp of all that, but I liked the idea of it! Here we have all these different departments--they should all be unified. It's called government reorganization--actually, a very boring topic, and one we did some of.

But Bergholz said to me, "Now, you say you're going to reorganize these energy 01:21:00departments, environment, all into one department. Now tell me, what is the first step that you would take to do that?" And I said, "The first step, what--?" I suppose I'm going to pick the telephone up and call somebody? Call a meeting? I'll be damned! I couldn't figure out what's the first step. And my face got a little red, and I thought: I really blew that one! I didn't say it quite as openly as I'm saying it now, but that stumped me.

SHAFER: What did that tell you?

BROWN: Well, I don't know what it told me then, but it would tell me today that I should have had a more developed idea, or I should have had a better verbal way of handling it. And the way I learned to handle that in later debates, as I 01:22:00got a little more adept at this, we used the concept of pivot. So step back, restate the question, and then take off on your own aspects.

So how we would reorganize it? How you would do that? My first thought was, "Well, I'd have all the relevant parties in the room, and we would talk about it." But I think what he means is how would the geothermal department be matched with somebody in the Department of Water Resources--I'm not sure. So the truth is, I didn't know enough about the departments, and of course in a campaign, the people who are--like Tom Quinn--know less than I do. And we knew more than anybody else. But unless you're there, and we're not there, because that's 01:23:00Sacramento, and what are you going to do? Call up Reagan's department heads? Or you could call some analysts, and we could have. But that isn't relevant. In a campaign, you're rushed for time, you've got to get it out, it sounded good. It isn't a bad concept. Consolidation certainly is better than fragmentation. It's kind of a tautology. It's obvious.

SHAFER: Well, kind of show too like--you weren't for bigger government, you were for maybe more efficient government?

BROWN: Well, yeah, bigger government wasn't on the table, in any event. But you had to be for something. You've never run for governor, but if you're running for governor, you say, "Now, what the hell am I going to do?" Well, how do you find that out? Oh! Well, if you're running for governor, you must know. Well, I must know, why? Why? Well, maybe I know now. I've been sixteen years as governor, four years as attorney general, and four years as secretary of state. 01:24:00But if you ask me some things--and a lot of things I don't know about--a lot of things! In fact, almost nobody knows very much about government, and the number of people who do are very limited. There are a few staffers in the legislature.

But, so, yeah, I didn't think of that question. It seemed like a reasonable proposal. I don't know how Bergholz came up with that question. "What's the first thing you'd do?" Maybe that was a good question. What's the first step you'd take? I mean the first step is so simple. I guess it did illuminate the fact that I didn't have a plan. I guess that's what it did. Do you have a plan of how you're going to make the skies bluer? Find out how he's going to do that? Well, I'm going to appoint Tom Quinn to the Air Resources Board, and he's going to figure it out.

SHAFER: Well, I wonder if you think like, sort of that these ideas in the campaign are less about what you're going to do, and more about who you are?

BROWN: Well, they are related to what you're going to do, because you can't say I'm going to open an embassy in Moscow. You can't do that, so you have to talk about what government can do. So I think that's a good question to ponder--what's the first thing you would do to bring that about? I don't even think it was in the paper, by the way. He made some veiled reference to it, and if you read the story, he pooh-poohs it a little bit, but it wasn't a harmful story. So that was that, at least I still remember it, not that I've been thinking much about it. But what's interesting to me is I still might have a hard time answering that question. And you know, I've been governor, successfully, for sixteen years. So you would have to say well, you don't need 01:26:00to be able to answer that question to be an effective governor. We know that now, empirically. But probably a little bit of extra research--and we didn't have that many people. We're just outsiders. We didn't have all these people--maybe Dan Newman would have done a little more research. [laughing]

SHAFER: Given you some talking points. [laughter]

BROWN: So think about what's the first thing you'd do? [laughing] I would really like to go back and get that question, but we don't have a transcript, and it didn't show up that much. But anyway, it's a hell of a question to ask an opponent and what you don't realize is if you just start talking, the TV will just play it, and you just kind of motor on. That's another way to do it. So, there is knowledge, there's tactics.

HOLMES: Governor, can you talk a little bit about--especially here in the 01:27:00general election, which I think dovetails with the story you were just retelling--about the advisors in your campaign? I believe you had Warren Christopher?

BROWN: A little bit.

HOLMES: Stephen Reinhardt?

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: And then also someone, I think who was with you for quite a while, Jacques Barzaghi?

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

HOLMES: Can you discuss a little about them and their role in the campaign?

BROWN: Well, Christopher, I think talked to Tom more than he talked to me. And I think he might have advised us on the debates. And he was the kind of a guy that you'd run an idea by, and you could feel confident of him. Reinhardt was a labor lawyer, and he did something pretty damn impressive. He got the culinary endorsement for me. How the hell he did that, I don't know. But they endorsed 01:28:00me, not Alioto. Now, I guess they did it because they thought I was going to win, and they wanted a winner. But after it was there, they never really asked me anything.

SHAFER: For anything, you mean?

BROWN: Not for the workers. I think Herman Leavitt, known as Blackie at that time, a few years later wanted to be on the racing commission, so I didn't appoint him. But that was it. I signed a few bills, but he didn't lobby me on the minimum wage or anything that related to--today there'd be a lot more. But he got the endorsement, so that was pretty important. Steve talked a lot with Tom. Jacques was a guy who--a sister of an old girlfriend of mine said, "Oh, 01:29:00you've got to meet this character." And they were making a movie, and he was an assistant director, and they said, "He's a very clever guy." So he came along, and he had a good sense of commercials. He had a different sense, different insight.

So we had Tom, who had his news--make it not as explosive, but make it--don't worry about the senate, don't worry about anybody else, just news, you've got to make news. Richard was a political scientist, had a PhD, and he'd have his view. Sometimes I'd agree, sometimes I wouldn't. And then Jacques, he would maybe have a different idea. And then I had all these different opinions, and then I'd have my own idea, and then we'd argue about things, and so that's how that worked.

I remember what we'd argue about. I remember we made a commercial, and we had one commercial we filmed, and it was the lighting that had me turning around or something--Jacques liked that commercial. And I said, "That looks pretty dramatic. I kind of like that. The lighting made me look very--I don't know--[laughing]. It was a very interesting commercial." But Tom, he said, "This is awful! This is a terrible commercial." So I didn't do it, so it's just kind of a risk averse--very important to hear what could go wrong, and then avoid it. I kind of look at the down side and say, "Okay, now, how do we stay away from that?" And so then, either Tom would say something wasn't good, Jacques would 01:31:00say something--and they often were very different. So yeah, it was interesting.

And he had a sense that I thought was good. He didn't really listen to the words. He wanted, you know, in a speech, he wanted to know what was the impact? He'd worked in movies with [Jean-Luc] Godard--at least he said he did. I never saw it. And then he came over here. So, that idea was kind of a new thought. It's not your words, and I tend to be kind of word conscious. But it's the impact--what's the impact on the audience? So he would kind of note that, and he might say, "You know, that didn't work," or something. So that was helpful. It was nice to have a diversity of opinion, and those three--they were around a 01:32:00lot, and they chimed in a lot, so that's kind of the way it worked. I guess other people had consultants. I don't know who made our commercials. I think maybe we did--. I don't know where they are today. They were friends of Richard Maullin.

So that's how that worked--a lot of this stuff is media. This is putting on a performance every day, and a lot of your performances don't go anywhere. So you both want to attract, win over, and avoid bloopers or blunders--so that's the name of the game. And it's hard to go through a campaign without blundering. It's hard to go through the governorship without stepping in something, and for some reason, this last eight years there weren't any blunders that I know of. That's very unusual.

SHAFER: You must have learned something the first time, maybe?

BROWN: Well, I learned something, and I'm pretty knowledgeable--and imaginative. And I do think, although I've repeated--my question, what's the first thing you'd do?

One of my advisors--this is why I have a little bit of a jaundiced view of advisors. Wilson [A.] Clark, [Jr.] was a smart guy, kind of a boy wonder in the energy-environment field. I don't know that he went to college, but he wrote a very fine book on alternative energy. [Energy for Survival: The Alternative to Extinction] It was cold in the Midwest, and he said, "You've got to order California gas to be sent through the pipelines to the people in the Midwest." He wrote that up, and so I had a press conference. And I said, "Today I've ordered that the gas lines--the Southern California gas company send this gas," 01:34:00whatever it was, PG&E. And Dan Walters raised his hand and said, "Governor, the PUC ordered that yesterday." [laughter] So my face, once again, got rather red, and that was a screw-up. So, but of course Wilson Clark didn't appreciate the niceties. They went, "Oh, here's something the governor ought to do. It's a good idea." And they have their own idea of politics--and that's the governor is going to look good, or whatever was in his mind. He is just one of the, as we sometimes say, the little people, trying to come up with things.

And so, based on that, more than probably Bergholz's question, I did develop a healthy concern and skepticism for things that could go wrong. And I couldn't put a lot of confidence in what people told me, because Wilson Clark--no one knew more about energy than he did. We could write good plausible press 01:35:00releases, Tom could, but that didn't mean that he could figure out this thing. There are things that you've got to think about, you've got to turn around in your mind and see it like a kaleidoscope, and look at it. So that's how I learned--that is a characteristic of how I've governed. I don't know how common it is, but I don't care who that person is. I always say, "Now, wait a minute--what is the basis of that?" "Oh, well, I read it." "Well, you read it where?" You try to eliminate error that can put error in my mouth as I speak it. And yet at the same time, we did a lot of things, so it wasn't that I was paralyzed by doubt or skepticism.

I think that's a very important part of how I governed, and it's also part of the way I tried not to get on all these issues. You know, how many issues can the system take? How many issues can the legislature take? How many issues can your image, your persona, if you're all over the place? If you notice, a person like Reagan--something I could learn from Reagan. Reagan had a unified image. There was something about the guy. I mean he was not just against government, but he was for America, a better America, an America where we didn't have bloated government and welfare queens, and we didn't have the evil empire. He was able to speak--it wasn't a hundred things you thought of when you thought of Reagan. And yet, when you're in the legislature, they passed twenty-four hundred 01:37:00bills--they introduced twenty-four hundred bills. They dropped twelve hundred on the governor's desk. And then to talk about them, you've got to think about them. And then you'd begin to speak like that, and no one knows what the hell you're talking about, and it's all very mechanical. So it is important, so I am conscious of that. There were, remember, a lot of good things. But that's why, and now maybe I'm rationalizing, but I do think you can only do so many. Now, we did a lot--really quite a lot. I think, historically, I think it's more than anybody.

SHAFER: And we're going to get into that.

BROWN: Yeah, we will, but I'm now thinking of the process by which we did that. I both was hesitant, cautious, but bold in some ways. The term that somebody used, that I liked, "Don't be like a dog that barks at every truck that comes 01:38:00along." You know, save your bark.

SHAFER: Pick your trucks carefully.

BROWN: Yeah, but they're all exciting, and the media's going to put a microphone and say, "Well, what do you think?" And the tendency is you don't want to say--well, I've got to have an idea. I'm not stupid. And like--want to hide. But if you have an idea about everything, and this reporter is not worried about destroying your public personality, because he needs his clickbait--or whatever we might have called it twenty years ago.

SHAFER: Governor, I sense a lot of hostility to the media. [laughing]

BROWN: None, no, but I have the same--that's another point. [Shafer laughs] You interpret honest conversation with hostility but that's just science. That's inquiry, as opposed to advocacy, and most people live in advocacy. But I think the preferable path is to live in inquiry.

SHAFER: Here's an inquiry. Why do you think that the--you were ahead for that whole election?

BROWN: I was ahead with a diminishing lead.

SHAFER: Yeah, and so what was that about at the end? Why did the lead--?

BROWN: First of all, what is that about? What is the behavior of millions of Californians who I don't know? You're asking me a very sophisticated survey research question, which obviously, I don't have the answer to.

SHAFER: Do you have a hunch?

BROWN: A hunch? A hunch is what? A hunch is worth nothing. Yeah, and I used to have more opinions about these things. But the more I know, the more I know there are variables that are not easily encountered. It's hard to tell.

First of all, I may never have been that much ahead in any real--well, I was ahead, that's what the polls said. But what was the strength of the approval, 01:40:00and what was it based on? You'd have to look at the polling, and you'd have to know--are these Republicans who just went back to their normal being a Republican, voted for Flournoy? Tom and Doug Fagan would be writing press releases talking about campaign reform of one kind or another. And I did a number of the releases. But the lead, I couldn't see it. It didn't move the crowd. And so I, when I speak, I have to engage the crowd in such a way. And it just--it always felt like I was running out of things to talk about. And what was there to talk about, really? A Republican says, "We're not going to renew taxes, and we're going to lock them all up. And we're not going to let those 01:41:00unions take over our government, much less take over our food supply." You know what I mean? That's an aggressive forward-moving line, but that is not available to whatever the Democrat was.

So somehow we had to be progressive; we had to uplift the downtrodden. We had to help all these constituencies, but we couldn't encroach upon the conventional sensibilities--and we couldn't raise taxes. That's a box. And you can talk about the environment. First of all, that wasn't that interesting. What are you going to talk about? Well, clean air. We'll have good schools. What are you going to talk about? Are you going to pay the teachers more money? How are you going to do that? There was a big issue, Serrano v. Priest, and that was the case that equalized spending among school districts. And to equalize [spending] you weren't going to lower districts, you had to raise them. Well, the raising all 01:42:00districts--and they had ones in Emeryville, Beverly Hills, that were outliers, because of the value of property--billions. So they say what are you going to do about that? And where was the money? And you have to just dance around the issue. Now, we did find an answer to that, which I found later when I was governor.

But why we lost [support]? I think, it's hard to tell. I was better known. I think the primary had more news. I think I was a more--the name, it's probably something to do with, you know, with Nixon and Ford and the idea of giving the pardon. People didn't [think] it was right. A lot of people. And I think that 01:43:00the Flournoy issues had more traction at that time. But now, do we know that for sure? No. And did I know a lot at the time? No, I know more now. So I'm saying things to you now that I didn't realize in the same way during the campaign. In fact, it was a surprise to me. We've gone down in the polls. Well, we're still ten points ahead, and then a couple of days later--now we're seven points ahead. And then the day before the [the election], we're like three points ahead, or even, so that was not a helpful message.

SHAFER: And I think it was the closest governor's race since '46, right?

BROWN: What was it, 1.7?

SHAFER: 2.9.

BROWN: Oh, 2.9?

SHAFER: 2.9, I think.

BROWN: Well, 2.9 is not bad. [Shafer laughs] So there's been a lot of closer elections than that. Tom Bradley's was only what, 0.3?

SHAFER: Yeah. You were not married then. And--which is somewhat unusual, I 01:44:00guess. Most candidates tended to be married.

BROWN: Except Grover Cleveland. [laughing]

SHAFER: And James Buchanan.

BROWN: Oh, I didn't know about James Buchanan.

SHAFER: Yeah, he was a bachelor.

BROWN: And he founded the Democratic Convention, you know.

SHAFER: Grover Cleveland?

BROWN: He started the idea of the Democratic Convention. No, I thought Buchanan did--maybe he did. I can't remember.

SHAFER: Oh, he was mayor of Buffalo. I'm from Buffalo.

BROWN: Oh, that's why.

SHAFER: [laughing] But anyway, to come back to my question--and there were, rumors were spreading that you were gay.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And Alioto at one point said you were effeminate, and then he said, "Come out of the closet and debate," kind of hidden messages.

BROWN: That was a concern, at that time. Obviously.

SHAFER: How--what kind of concern?

BROWN: What do you mean what kind of a--not winning, that's all. There's only one concern in this race, okay? Don't get arrested, and win. [laughing] Now, I'm putting it a little too bluntly, but this was not a time when gay was a popular 01:45:00topic. In fact, when I met with some gay activists in San Francisco, we met in the basement, and it was a very quiet meeting. Nobody knew about it. This was not in the mainstream, not even in the Democratic mainstream. So we figured Alioto would play that, and you imagine in the worst-case scenarios, that this could be a problem. That's all. So you try to--what can you do about it?

SHAFER: And you thought that could be like a deal killer, or something, with voters?

BROWN: A deal killer. No, this is about an image, which people who don't know who the hell I am, hear and read about things, and they either like me more or 01:46:00like me less, and vote. That's the way the system works. So this would be, in the minds of some voters, not a trait that would incline them to vote yes.

SHAFER: And how did your campaign counteract that?

BROWN: Well, there was no way to counteract it. Oh, we could go throw stuff at Alioto, and they did some primitive opposition research. I mean pathetic compared to what they do today.

SHAFER: What did they have?

BROWN: They have all of these campaign reports and stories--nothing, not like it is today, where they go back and get property tax records--it was utterly amateurish. And so you had the Look story on Alioto.

SHAFER: That was sort of implying that he was--

BROWN: Moretti had certain deals. Why did he get this contribution from the racing people, or what about this? I know after the campaign, at that UC symposium, Quinn and maybe Maullin, but certainly Quinn, they would say, "Oh yeah, we had dossiers, and we were going to do this." It was primitive research, from public records, that we didn't use, in part, because it wasn't that effective. And what was it? You look at all that research--I threw it all away, years later--but there's not much there. And even Alioto--what is there? He won the suit against Look. So that was that. I think they overstated that case, that 01:48:00Tom did, for whatever reason, because news is always a little bit exaggerated. I always notice, like an AP story, you say something that has certain qualifications. But then when the AP translates it, it's sharper. It's more black and white, because you've got to get the news. You've got to get the mind, and got to get in. Tom had worked in Chicago, a very hot town. It was very tough on the mayor, and so that's kind of the way it was.

And there was the other problem--going negative has its own risks, because there are all these people that liked Alioto. I mean, he got 18 percent, and Moretti only got about 11 [percent], I think, so they weren't that much of a threat. And 01:49:00there wasn't that much material--now today, you take something, and if you have enough money, you make a mountain out of a mole hill. Or as some people say, you take a thread and you weave a rug--and that can be done, à la Willie Horton. So you don't need a story that carries itself, but you can, by the context, do quite a lot of damage. But we didn't have that money, and we didn't have that sophistication. We had an agreement on not spending, so we were not spending a lot of money. No sides were. Things just weren't that much money in those days. People didn't think they could spend all this much money, and donors didn't think they should give all this much money.

HOLMES: Governor, by the time you're running in 1974, the Democratic Party, the 01:50:00one you grew up seeing, that your father operated in, had splintered into a number of different factions, or at least in comparison to perhaps what we observe historically.

BROWN: Well, I'm sorry, but it was factions before. In Southern California, you had the Stevenson/Paul Ziffren crowd, and you had the Unruh/Carmen Warschaw group--you had different elements.

HOLMES: The Burtons in San Francisco.

BROWN: They came a little later, but yeah.

HOLMES: In running this campaign, how did you overcome some of these factions? Was that part of the calculation, or were you just running your campaign and seeing where the chips--

BROWN: More of the latter. What do you do about that? You just avoid dividing 01:51:00people by saying things that divide people. That's why they always think politicians talk funny, speak with a forked tongue. They're trying to get people to vote for them who, if in one room, would probably fight with each other. So if you're only going to get one group, that's not politics. That's factionalism. That's activism. But the less glorious route, of majoritarian elections and governance, is something else again.

HOLMES: Would you say that it was more or less difficult in 1974 to do that than say, to speak from, again, your own experience, in 1970?

BROWN: 1970? It was easier. Well, it was easier for me. What are you trying to compare?

HOLMES: Just to see the change over time, sir. Would you say that there were 01:52:00more factions to navigate in 1974, than perhaps in earlier times, in the Democratic Party?

BROWN: Uh, I'm not sure. You had building trades, you had different unions. You had regional--north and south, urban and rural. I'm not sure of that. It certainly seems a lot more fragmented today--and we are more fragmented. Multicultural, we're breaking up into tribes. I always thought when Timothy Leary had the Human Be-In at the Polo Grounds, in 1967, said something about the fact that we're going to retribalize. And I said, you know, there's a lot to that, and we've been retribalizing ever since. [laughter] That's the way I saw 01:53:00it. But so, it wasn't so bad in '74. What was bad, for a Democrat, was that the mood was not for government. Now in '74, I don't know exactly why that was, but there was still a conservative mood. You know, look at these states, like Alabama or Missouri. Missouri used to elect a lot of Democrats, and then they've become very conservative, so these moods take over. We used to have a Democratic governor in Utah, and today you'd find that not likely. George McGovern was elected from South Dakota. So, the mood is not stable, and politics isn't about--thank God--these life-and-death questions. You know, Shiites and Sunnis, 01:54:00or Hutus and the Tutsis.

I mean those things end up in--or the Bosnians, Muslims and the Serbs--I mean that's warfare. So it's not satisfactory that our politics have a certain banal quality, a certain rubbed off the edges, but it's better than war. That is the alternative. If everybody is going to go to the barricades, saying my issue is life and death--well, that means I've got to shoot you, or you've got to shoot me. So politics is more of a game than that, and it's a game that also creates a government that is accepted as legitimate--at least it has up until now. How long that lasts, that's another question.

But so, I don't think '74--the issue was not the fragmentation of the Democratic Party. The issue was the emerging majority of the Republican Party, as well described by Kevin Phillips, and earlier described in the analysis of the 1964 election in California by Howard Elinson, and I think in his PhD thesis, which I'm sure you're aware of. [laughter] He wrote on South Gate. He was a partner of Michael Berman, Howard Berman's brother, and they were the first people, that I heard of, that talked about the importance of what they called the South-Gate Democrat, and that they were for some economic issues the Democrats were associated with, but they didn't like the social. And then you had all that Vietnam War--where the guys working on buildings wore their American flags, and 01:56:00they didn't like the antiwar protestors. So that war thing was a real division. But that wasn't the big division in '74. It was just the rising concern about issues that favored the Republican, the conservative view of things.

SHAFER: I want to ask you a question about post election--so you win by about 3 percentage points roughly, and there's a quote in the New York Times Magazine, where you told your father, "I almost lost because of you."

BROWN: That was Mr. [Richard] Reeves's quote. It's an incomplete quote.

SHAFER: What's the complete quote?

BROWN: The complete quote is something to the effect that--whether I said it before or afterwards--I won because of my father, and I almost lost because of my father. So that's the point. But Reeves had a theory that I was a very clever 01:57:00politician, but a very unlikable politician. He had kind of the Moretti view, although I've talked to him since then, and he's a pretty good writer. But that whole thing of father/son, that kind of Freudian narrative, I don't think--there are differences. But I meant it, and I can remember saying that. I was a little surprised when they viewed it that way. I was trying to be a little ironic, and a little self-deprecatory, if you really listen to the idea. That the name certainly was a big factor of getting there, so that's what I was saying. It was close, and maybe it wasn't my father. Maybe it was just the Democratic ideas. Those issues that Flournoy could jump on, which were similar to Reagan's.

SHAFER: About big government?

BROWN: It isn't big government, it's bloated government. It's welfare spending, it's Trumpian, that is some of the same thoughts. It's that some people are working hard all day, and then they look at other people that are not working as hard, and there's resentment there. So, and then there's fear--and there is fear of big government, when government is into everything. I mean I think this is not an illegitimate concern, and that I share that concern. I mean this rush to institutionalization is not something that excites me.

SHAFER: What do you mean by that?

BROWN: Well, that's to get your child just as quickly as you can to a civil-service bureaucracy, to be shaped by endless ever-changing rules, as 01:59:00opposed to being brought up in your family or your neighborhood. They want to get it in the institution, and then they want to measure, according to many metrics, and they want to put it in a computer called CALPADS [California Longitudinal Pupil Achievement Data System], and that data will follow you, every year, until after you graduate--and probably beyond, to see how successful your later life has been, and they can then judge preschool based on that. And they're going to spend endless sums of money, until there's a recession, and then they're going to cut all the programs back.

That's why maybe I like homeschooling, because people--"Oh, well, we're taking care of our kids." Not everybody can do that, but the idea that the government--it's a dangerous idea. Maybe in Scandinavia it works because it's a 02:00:00very small, homogeneous culture. But in a culture of great difference, trying to run everything through the government machine--and maybe it's better than I think it is. I was brought up differently. In our Catholic school, we were on the lookout for the government, the secularism, and we wanted to be in a good Catholic school where we learn the truth, as opposed to those other places. So I have a little bit of that us and them. We're us--what is that, yeah, that us and then there's the world, and the world is this place which is really screwed up. So that is a little bit of how I frame that in my mind.

So yeah, first of all, government costs a hell of a lot of money. And to do everything would take--will take massive tax increases. And we know every time 02:01:00you do that, it works for a while, but then it doesn't work. I mean they don't have labor governments in England; they don't have labor governments in Germany; they don't have a labor government in France. And they didn't have a labor government in Spain until six months ago, and that's hanging on by a thread, and we don't have a labor government in Brazil. There's a rhythm here. And so that's why, I think, keeping within certain boundaries--and that makes it hard because certainly today, unlike '74, the demands on the Democratic Party candidates are, if totally embraced and financed, would require massive increases in taxes, even though people say just the rich, and oh, we'll take--and then people wouldn't do that. It would never happen. But so then that's kind of the imaginary, it's like 02:02:00the Trump imaginary has things that will never happen, the Democrats have something--not similar, but analogous.

SHAFER: This is going to seem really out of left field. But on election night, when you won, there was--one of the performing groups was a barefoot Sufi choir from Berkeley. And I'm just--

BROWN: Yeah, the Sufi Choir.

SHAFER: Yeah, what--who were they?

BROWN: I'd met them before. I'm interested in Sufism--I'm interested in things like that. So their bare feet--have you ever seen, been to, never been to a dance show? Have you been to an Indian dance show, usually--Indian from India, they often have bare feet? I guess--that's not unusual.

SHAFER: Yeah, in Hawaiian dancing they do that too.

BROWN: The Sufis are a very exuberant, colorful group. It's a subset of Islam, 02:03:00goes back to the eleventh or twelfth century, and I came into contact with Sufism, and I found it interesting, and I met the choir. [William] Allaudin [Mathieu]--the head of it, I put on the Arts Council. He's quite a good guy. He's a noted musicologist. So yeah, and I liked the sound of it.

SHAFER: I guess I asked about it because it's not a--

BROWN: Well, it's better--I could have had a jazz band, I suppose. But if you ask me, I would rather listen to the Sufi Choir.

SHAFER: Exactly, and it signaled that you were a different kind of candidate, I think. And you may--you may reject that notion.

BROWN: I also had a big sign on the wall that said, Age Quod Agis. Did you know that?

SHAFER: No.

BROWN: It was a big banner, and that's the slogan of the Oakland Military School, and that's what they said in the novitiate, age quod agis--that's the Italian pronunciation. And what that means is do what you're doing. Do what 02:04:00you're doing. So you're drinking a glass of water? Drink the glass of water. [rapping on table for emphasis] If you're putting down a pavement over there--do that. The same with all these other things.

SHAFER: What does that mean--what did that say about governing?

BROWN: Well, it says more about living, which is to fully attend to that which you're doing, and don't be so divided and scattered, which is becoming increasingly difficult in a scattered world.

SHAFER: And was that a conscious thing, or was that, you know--?

BROWN: It was my idea. It wasn't Tom Quinn's idea; it wasn't Maullin's idea; it wasn't Jack's idea. I liked the Sufi Choir. In fact, I went once to a place where they were doing Sufi dancing. I liked it. I liked--jai rom is what they 02:05:00were singing, and they would keep repeating that, so that's all.

SHAFER: So you say it was your idea, and you thought it was a good idea--why?

BROWN: First of all, I won, and I could do it. And it added a certain, I don't know, mystique, a certain spirit. I am aware of the oppressive banality of the everyday politics, the repeating of the same speech, the performing. And now we have this later stuff about how everybody is so great and amazing, which is very unhistorical. People didn't talk about how everybody was great and amazing. There was a little bit of praise, but nothing like the super-praise we get today. So that's a fresh, human, artistic, real piece in the celebration, so I 02:06:00thought that's the way I would do it. And I had them there at my prayer breakfast too. In the Chronicle, the great Chronicle, with all its multiculturalism, seemed to be shocked. But that shows a certain intolerance and a certain lack of understanding of different cultures, so this would be an early example of insensitivity to a different way of doing things. I thought I'd create a good feeling. I had a good feeling, so I figured others would too. I think the sound was good. You should listen to it on your phone--go check it out. [laughter]

SHAFER: Did you feel like you were pushing the envelope a little bit?

BROWN: No, no, because it's a campaign, then it's over. It is not news. It is 02:07:00not going to go anywhere, and it didn't.

SHAFER: Is it surprising to you that here we are, all these years later, talking about it?

BROWN: Well, it's surprising because nobody's talked about it--you're the first people who've brought it up since 1974. In fact, nobody brought it up. A little bit at the prayer breakfast, because that was in the morning, so that fits in a little better with the news cycle. But a campaign--you know what happens in a campaign. The returns start coming in at ten or eleven, so the Sufi Choir is after the newsies are in bed. [laughing] I thought it would be good for the people.

SHAFER: What do you mean?

BROWN: Motivating the people there.

SHAFER: Do they have instruments? What kind of instruments do they play?

BROWN: They have some instruments. It's dancing.

SHAFER: Governor, we talked yesterday about the letter that you wrote to your father.

BROWN: Yeah. You've got it? Can we read it?

SHAFER: Yeah, would you read it? Yeah.

BROWN: Yeah, I think there is an excerpt. Oh, I don't want to read it. You can read it. You want me to read it into the record, as it were?

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah.

BROWN: Why?

SHAFER: Well, because, in the end, this is going to be a produced--it's not going to be just you talking. It's going to be produced with other people, and with music, and it's--

BROWN: Will you have the Sufi Choir?

SHAFER: Maybe--we absolutely will. [background talking and commenting about the Sufi Choir]

BROWN: They've got records, call [Allaudin] Mathieu. Peter Coyote knows how to get hold of him. He's in Sebastopol.

SHAFER: The fact that they're barefoot will be lost on the radio audience.

BROWN: I never even thought of that. That never even came to my attention. And I 02:09:00think the--bare-chested, that was what they might have known, because that's news! That's clickbait.

SHAFER: Early clickbait. [laughter]

BROWN: Everybody is in the business of grabbing eyeballs today--got to grab attention, grab votes--so the politicians, "You politicians are always trying to get votes. We newsmen--we're only trying to get news." So that's why we work together. [laughter]

SHAFER: It's symbiotic.

BROWN: Anyway, there's an analogy there, which I think a little self-reflection--and some reporters, there's a guy they were talking about at the campaign--anyway, the guy who wrote about--I don't even know if I can see this, oh yeah, with my glasses.

[Side conversation deleted]

BROWN: I can edit this right now and tell you what you'll use. All right, you want the whole thing? Let's see: [reading] "The basic question seems to me to boil down to this: Where will you have the best opportunity of doing the most 02:10:00for God and country, which two ends are necessarily the same? As senator, you would have six uninterrupted years, untroubled by election entanglements, to devote to your work. You would be the only senator, of the majority party, from the biggest state in the union, if the population continues to grow at the present rate. If you are really interested in national health insurance, and flood/calamity insurance, capital punishment, and other sundry plans that you have talked to me about in the past, you'd do far more to further these ambitions as one of our national leaders. To wit, a senator. In my opinion, if you are ever to emerge from local politics--by that I mean California politics--you will have to do it pretty soon. The question you must answer is where can I do the most in solving these problems? Will I be able to do more as a senator or as a governor? When you come right down to it, I can't say much about your political future, except that you have a duty to God and your 02:11:00neighbor and your religion, upon which your decision ought to be made in accordance with. Please excuse inaccuracies in this brief analysis, as I have only experienced them far away from the political scene. With love, Jerry. P.S. My advice; make a retreat, and ask God's help. You can't do it all alone."

SHAFER: Does that bring back any memories for you?

BROWN: No. [laughter] No, not really. It's interesting, a little formal. Not as chatty then.

SHAFER: How old were you?

BROWN: Eighteen or nineteen.

SHAFER: Eighteen, yeah. That's--not a lot of eighteen-year-olds write letters like that. [banging sounds]

BROWN: Is that true?

SHAFER: I never did.

BROWN: I don't think it's true. I think for some of these things, the state is better. I think my point, or at least I think my point is. And when you're 02:12:00dealing with things fifty years later, it's much harder to know. But I thought the national, the world, because--and the Jesuits were talking about it. We're talking about the world, you know? Souls, the missionaries, the Church. It's not a state. A state seems very local. We read history, the history of the Jesuits, and that was exciting stuff, very interesting. So the senate is dealing with that. And I think we were dealing with nuclear/atomic questions, and Cold War, Russia--that was big stuff. I think that's why I was interested. And the senate is a higher--it is, in some ways. But on the other hand, you don't do anything. You just sit there and vote.

SHAFER: Yeah, especially now.

BROWN: But I didn't think of that.

KIM: Do you agree with your younger self there?

BROWN: I think there's a time and place. A governor's got a lot--but these 02:13:00things are not that available. Let me be precise. What you can do, depends upon what the circumstances are that you find. [tapping table for emphasis] The work to help immigrants, that we are doing now, could never have been done when Pete Wilson was governor. And you couldn't even get elected with those ideas. Now, change in population already--and then with Trump. So, as governor, it's pretty challenging. There's a lot of stuff that can go wrong. The spending, crime, congestion--now it's affordability of houses. That's not something the 02:14:00government's going to solve. It's not going to solve it very easily.

SHAFER: It's--a lot of it's outside your control.

BROWN: Well, that's right, there is a lot. Now, as senator, you're a speechifier, I guess. So it really depends on eloquence, and I think my father knew he was better suited, his preparation to--district attorney, attorney general--to be a governor, now that I would think about it. That fit him pretty well. I think that's true.