Jerry Brown | Interview 7 | May 6, 2019

SHAFER: This is session seven, May 6, 2019. Scott Shafer from KQED, with Martin Meeker and Todd Holmes from The Bancroft Library oral history project. So Governor, let's pick up--we were just talking about the legislature. Talk about your relationship with legislators, because I think when you got elected, maybe there were some who thought well, it's going to be Pat Brown III, like the third term of Pat Brown. And there were maybe certain expectations--but talk about your relationship with the legislature.

BROWN: Well, that's a big topic. I was there for eight years, four years before as the secretary of state.

[side conversation deleted]

I would say that I think the expectations in the legislature were colored by their relationship with my predecessor, Ronald Reagan. He vetoed many of their 00:01:00cherished bills, and they were looking for a Democrat. When I say they, not just legislators, because they have their own interest--whatever they may be, they're very involved in their district or the particular issues that move them. But I would say that democratic groups, like labor unions, like environmental groups--perhaps some other activist constituencies--they were looking to achieve what was denied to them by virtue of the governor's veto--and by his conservative philosophy. So I think there was that.

I don't know that people were expecting another term to be like my father's, because I was different than my father. I look different. There's a huge difference in age, and a lot of the people that were with my father had gone on. Also, the time was different. Just as my father's time, when he started, there 00:02:00was the right-to-work law, there was--the labor movement had 35 percent of the electorate, and he came in with over a million votes. And then, of course, after eight years, then Ronald Reagan himself came in with a million votes, so things change. And then after eight years of Ronald Reagan--Watergate, Vietnam, a lot of feelings of disenchantment with government. So I was coming in as someone who's going to make change, and they weren't, probably, clear on what that was--but they probably didn't know quite what to expect.

And there is a gap between the legislature and the governor. That's just the executive power separated from the legislative power, and they're different domains. The legislators have their own way of getting elected. They're very 00:03:00local in orientation, and in how they got to where they are. The governor does not need the same groups, but rather reaches statewide, will have individual people of influence and wealth that will back him up. It's just a different world. And you don't go to hearings, and you don't have the same backslapping process that is a legislative collective body.

So that being said, there's probably not a lot of thought other than now we've got a Democrat--let's get my bills passed. And that, I would say, after having done it so many years, legislators are very interested in their bill. And since there's 120 of them, there's 120 different views of things, and so the governor 00:04:00and his life is only a part--and maybe a small part--of what legislators are thinking about. So I would say that the expectations were not very deep one way or the other, but because they were older, they'd been around longer--I came in out of the blue, as it were, secretary of state. Before that, they hadn't heard of me, and then I was all of a sudden governor. Obviously, they were there longer. Some of the real veterans felt that my attack on lobbyists and secret campaign money was a veiled threat at them, so that created issues.

But we passed a lot of bills; we got along with people. I worked with Speaker [Leo T.] McCarthy very closely. And in general, I think there was a good working relationship. But there were differences and tensions, I think because of the 00:05:00age, the fact that I came from a statewide perspective and the parochial issues that dominated Sacramento were not familiar to me. They weren't things that I had to deal with. I lived in Los Angeles, I went where I had to go to get elected, and this was not Sacramento. I had three legislators that supported me, and that was good--that was all. But even those supporting me doesn't make the difference. When it comes down to the general election, which was very close, these are TV ads about topics that are either working for you or not, and the closeness of the election suggested that whatever I was presenting, it was acceptable--but only by a couple of percentage points.

SHAFER: Do you think the fact that your primary campaign was, you know, pretty intense with the speaker, Moretti--did that have something to do with it? Was 00:06:00there pullback in the legislature?

BROWN: Well, but he was gone by that time. And then he was looking for a job, so I had to give him a job on the Energy Commission.

SHAFER: But presumably a lot of his friends were still there.

BROWN: Well, yeah, but look, the problem is they've got to raise money. And at that point they raised a lot less than they do now, but I was making it more difficult by saying you've got--they didn't report it all, they didn't disclose it accurately, and I pushed them to do that. And that was difficult for them. It was a change in the temperament--not in the temperament, in the way things were done. And they were not done that way. In fact, I think I mentioned before, the way the disclosure laws were interpreted--very loosely. And that allowed a flow of money that was not as precisely regulated--even closely regulated or known. 00:07:00So I was pushing against the envelope.

But I would say that now that we have the Fair Political Practices Commission, and people file millions of pieces of paper on conflicts of interest, and on donations, and several reports a year--that has not retarded the increasing flow of money and influence. So that's something to reflect on: that reform can make change, but in altering the fundamental equations of our political economy--not so much.

SHAFER: I wasn't expecting to ask you this, but looking back on it, do you feel like that measure and the creation of the FPPC maybe didn't do what you thought it would at the time, or was it more of a--just a political issue to run on? I mean are you--?

BROWN: Well, I definitely thought there should be more honest disclosure. I didn't fully grasp how detailed and intrusive the bureaucracy gets, and how 00:08:00minor its activities are. I mean most of the people who run into trouble are amateur candidates. They're not the big pros, the big corporations--they all have lawyers, and it is a lawyer's game now. It can be very complicated. So this is a problem with a modern society, and it's true of the labor law. The labor law used to be union shop stewards representing workers. Now it's high-paid lawyers for unions, fighting high-paid lawyers for corporations--or for the government. And it is true that we are in a movement toward ever greater legal intrusion and legal complexification, and so the political reform got caught up in that process, which continues to the current day.

SHAFER: Some of the early newspaper clippings from your first few months in office suggested that Republicans were quite happy with you, and that some--many 00:09:00Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, were not. Do you recall that dynamic?

BROWN: Oh, I remember there was different dynamics. I appointed a Mexican American, Mario [G.] Obledo, who worked in public-interest law--and two of the Latino members didn't like it, and they had a press conference, because I hadn't consulted with them. And to tell you the truth, I hadn't even thought about consulting with them, but that's the way that you handle politics. You've got to consult and talk to a lot of people. Well, I didn't have a lot of old hands, and we weren't used to doing it all that much, so that was one thing. The other is that yeah, I wanted to keep government within limits, and I'm very aware that people get wary. If the taxes go up, the spending gets to be viewed as too 00:10:00excessive, that's bad. Politically, it's a bad thing.

And also, I was feeling my way about--what is really needed? What do we need here? Like even in education, I said, "Well, before we get more money, we ought to get more reform." Well, now I understand reform is a more problematic term--much more of a let's get them the money, and leave it more to the teachers. But still, the legislature, to this day, continues on micromanagement. They want more rules, more laws, more instructions from the central office--namely Sacramento, on what the teachers should be doing after the door is closed. And now I understand much more deeply than I did before that there's a limit to what one can do from the state capital or the nation's capital. There 00:11:00is a lot you can do--you can build high-speed rail, you can build roads, you can require electric cars. But in terms of shaping social/human outcomes, that's more difficult, and that very much is embedded in each community, in each school, in each family.

And yes, the state does make changes by what it values, and what it spends money on, and what it regulates. But I was a little skeptical. I wanted to understand these programs, and what I didn't understand--they've been working for these for years. So I come along and say, "Hey, wait a minute. I don't think I get this. I'm not sure, so I'm doubting this." So I would slow things down, and that's been my general view. It was true in '75; it was true in 2018, because I'm trying to manage and ride the tiger, and it's very difficult. Just two years 00:12:00before I took over the state had a $60 billion deficit. Today it's got a $21 billion temporary surplus, with a $14 or $15 billion rainy-day fund, but in three years, that can reverse itself. So it's not a stable environment. And therefore, I wanted to move more cautiously and understand things that the old-hand legislators already understood, at least to their satisfaction--and they wanted more.

But I would say--and I think I give some weight to their view for sure--but even today, when I look at the legislature, they want to do more and more stuff. And I know now, because I've had more time at it, they don't fully grasp what are the consequences, because you can't know, so you've got to be a little more cautious. And because we have problems, the Democrats presented themselves as the problem solvers, that we'll get it solved. And their tools are law, 00:13:00regulation, and taxes. And by more of all those three, they will get, whatever your problems are--solved. But I don't believe that, so we need to have a more thoughtful and in-depth analysis when we do large things. And so that was a tension. They knew what they wanted, they wanted it--and I had to say no.

But I would say my time as governor, my ninth term--or my ninth year, the first year of the second-time around, I had to veto the whole budget. And I had to go to the Democratic caucus in the assembly and the senate, and they were very emotional, very unhappy, and berating me and emotionally battering, as it were. But you have to still lay down a demarcation, and the only difference now is 00:14:00that I was able, because we had more money--I balanced my noes with yeses. And I did spend more time in working with them, and since I was older and they thought I knew a few things, and they were more ready to work with me--maybe even defer sometimes. Now, the first time around, when I'm thirty-six, and they're all in their fifties or sixties, that equation didn't present itself, so it created tension.

SHAFER: So you think it was a resentment--who's this young whippersnapper?

BROWN: Well, I don't know if it's a resentment, but there's always a fight with the legislature, they just are. My father and Unruh fought; Gray Davis and John Burton fought. I happened to get through the whole thing with very few fights. Oh, we had fights, but there was very good will on all sides. Well, one thing--we had a hell of a lot of money.

SHAFER: You're talking about the second time.

BROWN: The second time around.

HOLMES: In that first time, were you afraid that perhaps your relationship with 00:15:00the legislature was going to be damaged because of your time as secretary of state?

BROWN: I didn't think of that. I thought of it as a reencounter. They were difficult--I mean they're difficult because they didn't do what I wanted, and they thought I was difficult because I didn't do what they wanted. And in the separation of powers, you have an inherent tension, so don't be surprised that it's tense. You can't all agree. Now, with Obama and Mitch McConnell it went to an extreme, where he says his only job was to get rid of Obama. That's pretty extraordinary. Now, we had our own party, but they have their own--their own ways of doing stuff.

[side conversation deleted]

BROWN: What I'm saying is yes, there's tension. There's tension at the national level more than ever before, at least in my lifetime. And so we had tensions, and some of them more cranky than others. I got along very well with some 00:16:00senators and assemblymen, and not so well with others.

HOLMES: In that first year or two of office, you were discussing, in a sense, your learning curve of how to deal with the legislature.

BROWN: Well, and how to deal with issues. Like, for example, I vetoed an education bill, and I partially, I trimmed it down, because I was afraid we were headed for $500 million deficit. It turned out we weren't, but it looked like we were. And that's part of California's whole problem, that it's always volatile. You've got too much, or too little, and you don't always know where you are. So I wanted to finish four years without a deficit. But they're not worried about that in the same way. And we'll see right now they'll work it out and get it--thus it is ever the same.

SHAFER: You were, of course, as governor, on the Board of Regents as well.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And I think it was maybe three months in, in March or so you went to the 00:17:00regents, and somebody presented some grand--

BROWN: Yeah, that was the squid, the university plan, the five-year plan, which I called the squid process.

SHAFER: Say more about that.

BROWN: Well, it's in very vague terms. I'm sure I didn't give it the full--in fact, I know I didn't give it enough consideration, given all the smart people that worked on it. But it did not seem illuminating to me, and my finance department that analyzed it thought it was just a formula for expansion and more money. And I think the university still does this. It's its own world, and it keeps expanding. Now, having said all that, there's a lot of very wonderful things that go on in this world. But as far as trying to manage it and hold it to account, that's a whole other story, because it's huge--and you just find 00:18:00that right now. UC's got a big deficit, and they buy a stadium for $325 million, and they don't put up a penny; it's all borrowed money. So, yeah, we're not going to get into that. [laughter in the background] But my view is they need a leaner operation.

I understand that money makes a difference, and if you go over to Stanford, they have a hell of a lot more money, and it really does a lot of good things. So I mean there are two arguments here, and I've always taken a more fiscally prudent approach, and I think that creates tensions with the regents, and it creates tensions with the legislature. And it creates tension within the Democratic Party, because this is something--this is a field that Republicans are supposed to occupy.

SHAFER: Fiscal conservatism?

BROWN: Well, yeah, that--yeah, not spending programs, I mean. And the Democrats 00:19:00are becoming more--as the society becomes more unequal, they want more programs, but in order to get more programs, ultimately, you have to borrow more or tax more. And if you tax more, you're going to find yourself maybe not in power, and then the Republicans are going to come in and you're going to start all over again. So you can't avoid the necessity of dealing with a political electorate that only will go so far, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. That's why we change from one to the other. And so if you're interested in more longevity, you try to beat the odds, and to do that you've got to take a little of the fire from the opposition and incorporate it. That's just the way that--Clinton did that, in ways, not--that I don't always agree with, but he was able to survive in a difficult environment because he was not a stereotypical Democrat.

Now, that's just a function of reading the electorate. There's nothing absolute 00:20:00or ultimate about these kind of ad hoc political judgments--where are we? And that was the tension with my father and Jess Unruh. When is it time? Was it too soon to have a fair housing bill? I think Unruh thought it was. But my father wanted to--is it the right thing? Let's go do it. And then we got the initiative in '64, and repealed it by 60 percent of the vote and created the first Reagan Democrat. So you could say, "Well, is that the right thing to do? Is that the wrong thing to do?" And you could spend many hours pondering which way. And in the heat of battle you do things--and well, Unruh went along with it.

But then after a while, if it didn't work, then people don't like that either, and they say, "Oh Pat--Pat, look what you got us into." So you have to be 00:21:00careful not only in what you want to do, but what the legislature wants to do. And if you do too much that they don't want, and they continue to not want it, then you're going to create so much resistance and opposition that you're not going to get other things that you may want. So it's a very sophisticated, multi-faceted environment, where there are many players, many issues. And things don't stay the same, they're constantly changing.

SHAFER: Plus, you've got the voters.

BROWN: Well, the voters are part of, that's part of the equation. The politicians are just reading the voters' thoughts, for the most part. For example, property tax was not a big issue in 1975. In 1978, that was it. So this is the great dilemma. All the things you're talking about today--four years later they're totally different. And what you thought was great, pretty soon is 00:22:00coming up bad. So that's what makes it interesting, exciting, and why it's difficult to stay too long in politics.

HOLMES: Well, in regards to the UC, Governor, you came into office wanting to change Sacramento and do things differently.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

HOLMES: And from the legislature's standpoint, here we have a Democrat as well as a UC alum not going along with increasing funding.

BROWN: Yeah. Yeah.

HOLMES: Or even--as I think you even proposed, to freeze and cut funding to UC.

BROWN: Well, that was the professors' salaries, that I thought they should get--you know, even today this professor called me and there's a pause. I said, "Where are you?" He said, "I'm in Sweden, on sabbatical." So there's a lot of that, and I think it's wonderful. But it's, I thought--remember, I was at Berkeley during the--well, not, I wasn't there at the protest against the 00:23:00[House] Un-American Activities Committee--the Fair Play for Cuba. Then I came back a couple of years later. I lived near the campus when I worked for the supreme court--that was the Free Speech Movement. That was when--"take the machinery; there comes a time when you've got to put your body in the machinery and stop it, slow it down." That was Mario Savio, so I felt this juggernaut.

I read a lot, and I seek out independent intellectuals. The university is an institution, so it has its own bureaucratic imperatives. And so I was pushing against that, just like I do in Sacramento--and there's always a tension. You can't have just charisma, but you have to have bureaucracy. And if you don't institutionalize something, it won't last. But as soon as you institutionalize it, you lose all the flavor and the fervor. So that's why Mao Tse-tung, I guess, 00:24:00had a cultural revolution. That's what he said: you're trying to keep the fervor. César Chávez tried to generate more enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm wears down. This is the aging process, and some of us don't quite accept that, and so we're always trying to rev things up and create more--more dynamism, I would say. I don't want to make it sound like we're just excitement junkies, but I want something to be alive, fresh, not stale.

I had interesting professors. So, but they were not your go along, get along. I remember my last class, 1961, Mark Schorer, contemporary British literature. He's smoking on a cigarette, and he finally gets to the end, and he takes his cigarette and he drags, exhales, and he says, "Sorry, this class ends on a 00:25:00downbeat, but that's the way it is." And he walks off the stage. So that was my last class at Berkeley. So this is not cheerleading the institution, or cheerleading the Democratic Party--or cheerleading anything. This is a world in change, in ferment, and if you ask me where we are today, there's even more ferment going on! Or maybe different ferment, because there was a lot of ferment in the sixties and seventies. So that's why the regental dignity and process didn't always catch my allegiance, as it did to others, who were so happy to be a part of it.

Now, of course, in retrospect--and I now appreciate the old regents, because in the old days--this is a bit of a caricature, but it gives you the tone, they 00:26:00would go to the beautiful home of Clark Kerr there in Kensington, and they'd have brandy with Nobel laureates, and the next day they would sit at the fifty-yard line--and they don't do that anymore. Okay, so now it's all very serious, it's not as much fun, and the regents are a different breed of cat. And in truth, the university is not the regents. The university is the classroom, it's the research lab--that's the university. And up on top, the office of the president in Oakland, that's a whole other ball game--important, but that's not the spirit of Berkeley. Even the Berkeley campus is too big, or is big, and you're looking at the Physics Department or the Classics Department or the Anthropology Department--that's kind of where Berkeley lives, and UCLA lives, and all the rest of them.

MEEKER: Were some of these ideas coming from your conversations with the 00:27:00independent intellectuals that you're engaging with? These are people who might have taught at universities, but maybe didn't have the full tenure-track package?

BROWN: Yeah, I've known a lot of non tenure-track professors there.

MEEKER: Well, like I'm a non-tenure-track researcher at the University of California, so I might have a critique of the professoriate as a class. I recognize that I don't get the summer off, for instance. [laughing] So I can see how some of these folks would develop a meaningful critique of the way in which intellectualism is institutionalized and given all sorts of goodies at the university.

BROWN: Also, you get your own ideology too. Today there's a lot of themes going through the university. Remember, this was the period of the New Left, and there's a fellow named [Milovan] Djilas. He was a Yugoslav, in the time of Tito, 00:28:00and he wrote a book called The New Class: [An Analysis of the Communist System]. And this, The New Class, was quite heretical within the Communist world, that a class was created by the cadres, by the people who were running the Communist state, and they were serving themselves and not the people, and that was a very radical idea, and he was put aside by Tito, I believe.

But so the new class was generalized, so you could have a new class of professors or other Mandarins. So I read those ideas. And I didn't know him in 1975, but I got to know Gregory Bateson. One of the books that I gravitated to--and I don't quite know how or why, but I know it was at Yale, so that was before I was governor. I went into the bookstore and I know I picked it right 00:29:00off the shelf. It was called Compulsory Miseducation, by Paul Goodman, who also wrote Growing Up Absurd, which is a book everybody read. Today, nobody's heard about Growing Up Absurd, but that was the mood at that time. And, of course, existentialism was already passé, but it was still something that I encountered--the absurd. So these are all these ideas trickling into my mind. And when you're in the seminary, you know, there's no football games, there's no dancing, there's no entertainment--except ideas, in books and conversation. So you do a lot of talking and a lot of thinking.

So if you get to someplace, "hey this is the center of thinking"--but the thinking isn't all that exciting. They're talking about parking lots, or bond indentures, or pension return. That's what the regents talk about--or other things. Anyway, so I wanted to kind of inject a certain humanism--like separate 00:30:00the weapons lab. Should the university be in the business of making/designing nuclear weapons? I remember Gregory Bateson said, "Well, I don't think the university should be in a business, but I'd rather see them making pants than nuclear bombs," and he voted to separate the university. Of course, Mr. Henning, who came from the AFL-CIO, voted for it, because he's part of the labor movement.

So it's a very comp--it's not complicated, but it's a mixed bag of many points of view, and I represent whatever I represented. It wasn't the same crowd. Remember, these were all Reagan's old people. Some of them were my father's friends too: Fred Dutton was on there [the UC Board of Regents], for example. Ellie [Elinor R.] Heller and Norton Simon--so, but it was a different world. It wasn't something I knew much about. I guess you might say I was on a tear to cut 00:31:00back the spending. Not cut it back, because we weren't going to cut anything back--I didn't think we would. But to hold it in line, so we could have a four-year period without going into the hole again. And I knew that when that happens, then that undermines ones political credibility--it didn't help my father, it didn't help Gray Davis, and it didn't help Arnold Schwarzenegger. So this, like it or not, that people say the governor is in charge of the books. When the books look bad, then he looks bad. [rapping on table for emphasis] And there's another person standing in the wings saying, "You know, titch-titch. I think we'd better get in there and correct things." So I was trying to avoid that situation.

And by the way, you can't do it by just cutting a few things. You have to create the intellectual groundwork to delegitimize all the spending, because when the spending shows up, whether it's at the regents or in Sacramento, it's got a 00:32:00whole bunch of momentum behind it, and it's all good. So it's very hard to push it back. So you almost have to create your own intellectual constructs to undermine the plausibility of what they're asking, and we'll see how that works right now.

SHAFER: How much of it, do you think, was wanting to--I was struck by the sort of similarities of vetoing that first budget the second time you were governor.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

SHAFER: Going to the--one of the first regents' meetings, and sort of like blowing it up in a way, blowing up their plan. I mean how much of it was sort of like wanting to--like sort of like lay down a marker, like we're--this is different. We're going to--things are going to be different.

BROWN: Well, I--yeah, I know, but I don't think about laying down--of course I didn't know what a marker was then. See, what I did, and maybe it was a mistake. I think it had limitations, but I didn't hire, or appoint, a finance director, 00:33:00and that was usually the big thing that governors do.

So I did the budget. Normally, he never did the budget. I did that myself--now, not just myself, but with two outside consultants: [Leonard] "Lenny" Ross, who was a very brilliant man, and a guy named [Edward K.] "Ed" Hamilton, who worked in New York and was a consultant. With those two as my consultants, I then had the finance department, under men named [Edwin W.] "Ed" Beach and Roy Bell, and they were there under Reagan, and they were there under my father. And so we went over, for three weeks, the budget. And I found it very interesting, learned all about this stuff. We had ten-/twelve-hour meetings in the finance office there in the Capitol. And so I got pretty friendly with the finance department, and they were always--they were frustrated by the university, because they'd never know what the hell the university is doing, and they always felt they were hiding the ball. In fact, the finance department thinks that still! [laughing]--and they probably are, because that's the tension between finance 00:34:00and these substantive agencies. So I was influenced by finance, and I think somebody, maybe it was Fred Dutton, said, "You should never have a finance man as your chief of staff." So, because they say no to everything, and you have to have that tension between the push--the do, or maybe the vision in today's lingo, and then you have the counterpart, which is: "Well, what about the finances?"

But I was very much interested in the money and holding the money down. I was influenced by, you know, by Reagan's success, and how in government you can spend all this money, and people want it. But then after you spend it, somebody comes along, "Why are you spending all this money?" And they don't think of all the good stuff; they just think of generic government as out of control. And that was a stronger feeling, and it was still predominant in 1975. It was strong 00:35:00enough that you did get sixteen years of Republicans. So it was not a notion you could just say, pooh-pooh, just go for it--whatever the Democrats want, just spend. And we maybe are going to try that again, because the Democrats are even more into spending, because of who represents them now. And you can't do that, I don't think, unless people like just these taxes all the time.

SHAFER: But not appointing a finance director, that's so outside the box too.

BROWN: Well, because I sat there, and I said, "I can figure this out. What do I want a finance director for?" No--first of all, we have a finance director--it's called the civil servants. They had been there, they had gray hair, they were smart. They knew all these things: why do I want an intermediary between me and the experts? And I thought that way even as attorney general. We took one guy, [James M.] "Jim" Humes, put him in charge. And to the extent I needed senior 00:36:00legal advice, I had Anne [Gust Brown], and everything else? Just leave it, let the professionals do things. Because I had enough confidence--if there are some new ideas, I'll figure them out, or I'll get them from somebody. And I don't need to get my new ideas from the institution. I want the institution to shape them, but I'm constantly collecting thoughts, and encountering people on all manner of things. So even rewriting, I would say probably up until last year I'd say I rewrote, in some fashion, 90 percent--80 percent of every press releases. I'd rewrite the lede.

SHAFER: But the second time you were governor you did have a finance director, so why the difference?

BROWN: Oh, but I took the one that was there, [Ana] Matosantos--she was right there.

SHAFER: There was no one there the first time?

BROWN: No. They leave. First of all, it was Reagan's person, and he left. So I kept Matosantos because Ana was more in the middle, and then we got [Michael] Cohen. Cohen wasn't a political guy. He came from the legislative analyst. So those were very akin to what we had before. Ana, I don't know what her background was, but she was more the institutional person. I learned that, especially in those three weeks in November, they really lay out the issues. They are there, and then--decide. What do you want to do? Who could decide better than me? Because I'm the only guy that has to make the decision. So if you bring another person in but I didn't see the utility of that.

Now, when we're talking about all these other things, the Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture--yeah, you've got to have department heads. But on the money, even there, all these different departments were getting professionals, so who would be the professional--that's one of the characteristics of state government. You have to have people who know the state government, but then you also want to have enough outside influence, or fresh air, that you can do things that are outside maybe what people in the government are thinking. But the thing is so complicated--it is very expert driven, and you'd better have the experts. That's true of the attorney general's office. The attorneys that have been there know how the system works. We're run by expert agencies--the Department of Insurance, the Department of Water--this is not for a bunch of journalists saying, "Why don't we just run the department of--why don't we build a couple of tunnels?" [laughing] No, it doesn't work that way. 00:39:00When you spend hundreds of millions of dollars, you need really good engineers.

So we had really good people--those two guys, and I liked the fact that they served under my father, and they served under Reagan. And to me--who is this outsider? Who was I going to bring in? Who did I know that I wanted to entrust that to? Not my campaign personnel--they don't know what the hell is going on in state government. They know less than I do. So who was it? Some other character that would come from where? Now, had there been some wonderful person, I might have picked him, but that didn't exist. And I think we did have wonderful people--it's called the civil service leaders of the Department of Finance.

SHAFER: We've talked for a lot of today just about how unconventional your office was the first time you were governor.

BROWN: I don't know--do you think it was unconventional? Well, compared to Reagan it was unconventional. Because he was very structured. You know, when he did his veto messages or he signed bills--because the same guy worked for me 00:40:00that worked for him--he said that he'd have the sign box and the veto box, and he would just sign or veto. There wasn't a lot of engagement. And I think a lot of the governors are like that.

SHAFER: I guess my--but my question is do you--there was clearly a different style in the governor's office than had been seen ever before in California.

BROWN: Well, first of all, nobody remembers before Pat Brown, then--then it's ancient history from there on in.

SHAFER: Do you think--you know, the late-night meetings, the--like bringing in people who didn't necessarily have expertise but had good ideas and were smart--maybe winging it a little bit more, not being so driven by a schedule, this--were there downsides to that?

BROWN: Sure there are downsides to that. By the way, a lot of the people I brought in--I brought in Ken Kesey just to give a talk. I brought in [E.F.] Schumacher. I brought in the head of the--Arthur F. Burns, the head of the 00:41:00Federal Reserve. We brought in Herman Kahn, who wrote On Thermonuclear War or Thinking About the Unthinkable, on how to fight a nuclear war. So we had interesting people. I'll emphasize what I just said--the grooves of the government run in a certain way, and the people who have mastered that are the people who really have to operate things. People can have an idea, but taking an idea from the outside and then putting it in--it does take translation. And it's not that difficult--no, I mean it's not that easy. So what was the question about?

SHAFER: Well, the different style that you had. What were the downsides?

BROWN: Oh, the downsides? The downsides--

SHAFER: Either for the people working for you, or for the state, or for your own political--

BROWN: Well, politically--probably a more predictable, duller, kind of a more Deukmejian style has maybe a little longer shelf life. If you have a little too 00:42:00much flash, it burns out quicker. So I would definitely say--move more slowly.

SHAFER: Hmm. And--when you say burns out, do you mean just people, it's--people can't keep up, or they get tired of it? Or what do you mean?

BROWN: You get overexposed. I've often told the story of Aristides the Just. As they were going through, you know, kick him out--ostracize. They drop a little pebble in the box if they want him ostracized--out--and he was Aristides in Athens, went by, and this lady drops an ostracon, a pebble, in the box. "And why are you doing that? Why are you exiling me?" The woman says, "I'm just tired of hearing of Aristides the Just." [laughter] I always remembered that--just tired 00:43:00of the name. Meg Whitman spent a hundred million dollars before I spent my first million, so I was the fresh face for the media people.

SHAFER: Yeah, so speaking of fresh faces, which you very much were in that 1975-'76, when did you begin to think--maybe I'll run for president?

BROWN: Well, I always had that idea in the back of my mind. I don't know how long, but it certainly wasn't like a momentary thing. But when? I probably thought it more seriously when I saw who was running. First of all, Ford didn't look strong. It turns out he wasn't. The candidates didn't look that strong--kind of like the way it is today. So why are there twenty-one candidates? Because it all looks possible. It doesn't look shut down.

HOLMES: On that same note--Ronald Reagan threw his hat into the ring in 1968, 00:44:00and many criticized him for that. You know, "You were too early, barely into your governorship, and now you're throwing your hat in the ring." Were you aware of that, but also aware that you were risking the same thing by maybe throwing your hat in in 1976?

BROWN: Yeah, I was aware that Reagan--but I didn't think he lost a lot of ground for that. You must have done some good research to find much negativity to that. These conservative folks were happy with him, and he did pretty well. No, I probably knew it was a risk, but you know, you're younger, and then you're ready for more bold moves.

SHAFER: Well, you said you'd been thinking about it for a long time--

BROWN: I didn't see any great downside, I guess I didn't. I probably should have, but I didn't.

SHAFER: Why do you say you probably should have?

BROWN: Well, because you don't know the whole situation. You know, when you can 00:45:00perceive, you live, four or five presidential elections, you get a better sense. Certainly, I didn't have that perspective, but you know, governor of a bigger state--that's what politicians do. They're always moving, in one form or another. So it seemed like a possibility. And a lot of the issues that I liked were presidential, that would interest me--even high-speed rail. That's a presidential issue. Nuclear war, that's a presidential issue. Climate change--same thing, or you would call it the environment in those days.

SHAFER: So did you--you felt that you had something to add to the national conversation. Were you also sort of--

BROWN: Well, we didn't use the phrase national conversation. That word did not exist at that time, and I don't think we were talking about adding--we were talking about winning. See, you guys are always off onto these kind of marginal academic constructs, like something called a national conversation--whatever 00:46:00that might mean. No, it's an election. And the Maryland thing--I'm not even sure how it all came together, but it did.

SHAFER: Mmm. Were you bored being governor at that point?

BROWN: Well, I found some things more interesting than others. I think I can put it that way.

SHAFER: Was that a yes?

BROWN: [laughing] No! No, I've--I found it more interesting this time around. I think I did because there are more clear issues. There weren't as many problems then. The second time around, it was a real clear problem. We had a $27 billion deficit. Do something. What was the problem in 1975? Getting out of the deficit? What was the problem--it wasn't the oil depletion allowance. It wasn't collective bargaining. Maybe the farm worker was a problem, because Chávez marched and made it a problem. But how many problems were there? More money for 00:47:00schools? Staffing standards in the mental hospitals? It was pretty mundane stuff, from campaigning.

SHAFER: So it wasn't that challenging.

BROWN: Well, it was challenging, but the challenges were more subtle than I picked up at the time.

SHAFER: Hmm--say more about that.

BROWN: Well, I mean there's nothing you get done very quickly. It's all working at it slowly. And I had ideas that, and when it's on mental health, I'd studied--actually, I took a course from Sigmund Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, at Yale. I read a book on The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz--and I met Thomas Szasz. In fact, there's a dialog with him and me in CoEvolution 00:48:00Quarterly. So I was always a little skeptical of mental health--but again, that's an idea, so we have all these ideas. Now, you have people in mental hospitals--they're climbing the walls, so what do you do? And how much money do you spend? How much staff do you need, and what kind of credentials do they need?--and all the rest of it. And what's the fire and life safety? When you start managing, it gets into detail after detail after detail. But most of the intellectual world that I deal with are these rather grand ideas, so there is a gap between the grand idea and the mundane operation of a hospital, a prison, or even a particular office in state government.

SHAFER: So as a younger man, you found that less--more frustrating maybe?

BROWN: Well, not frustrating, but I was looking for things that would not have happened but for my being there--but what were those? I had to figure out what 00:49:00those were. They weren't self-evident. You don't just go around and have a whole pocketful of ideas about what the state of California should be doing. And people have a hard time writing their campaign platforms. If you read them, they're usually rather vague, and so they're not much of a guide. And as there weren't that many issues--and what were the issues? Statewide land-use planning, the Peripheral Canal, which wasn't an issue except for a few people. You know, these little things are made up--things were real stable. Ford was president.

MEEKER: There were some things that you tried to make issues, right?

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: Energy being one of them, and renewable energy.

BROWN: Yeah, right.

MEEKER: That wasn't an issue?

BROWN: No.

MEEKER: But that was something that you began to put on the table.

BROWN: Not an issue, but it was there. That was an idea. We definitely dealt in energy. I had a lot of energy advisors. A guy named Wilson Clark--I don't know if I mentioned him--at the Energy Commission. We had Sim Van Der Ryn in the 00:50:00Office of Appropriate Technology. We had people at the PUC that were changing incentives, to try to get more renewable energy, more independent distributed energy. So yeah, those were a lot of ideas that turned out to be very much on the mark, which one couldn't hardly foresee at the time. Energy always interested me, but energy was not that interesting. You know, and what was interesting--like the first meeting, one of the building trades came into my office with the president of PG&E, a guy named [Frederick W.] Mielke [Jr.], and Bobby Georgine, president of the national building trades [Building and Construction Trades Department of the AFL-CIO]. He came over and he said, "We want to make sure we can build Diablo Canyon. That's what the building trades want--build Diablo Canyon."

So here we're talking about energy regulations, different kind of fuels, more efficient appliances, all that stuff--by the way, those took a long time. To 00:51:00enter the building standards took nine years before they were promulgated, from the day I took office. So these things take a long time. But we got them done, and now they're even more stringent and more intelligent.

So, I do think that the ritual--I came to appreciate that--the ritual of governor is important. Certainly, Reagan enjoyed that, and you need to enjoy that. I think of it as the pope in his popemobile--what does the pope do when he drives by? He waves; he just waves. Okay. [laughing] A lot of what governors are supposed to do is just wave--other people will take care of it. But I didn't find that challenging, so I was looking for what else do you do besides wave to your constituents?

HOLMES: [laughing] Governor, what was the initial reaction of those in your cabinet, as well as even maybe your father and others, to your decision to run for president, as you began to explore that possibility?

BROWN: I don't think I heard a reaction.

HOLMES: You just told them that you're going to run for president?

BROWN: I just do it, and we did it. And we won! Yeah, I remember how.

SHAFER: Yeah, how--?

BROWN: So--it was bold. But first of all, I didn't see why not. I can still be governor, and it was interesting. It's a story. You've got to have a story here. Now, Deukmejian did, besides locking people up, in a way that I think went way over the deep end, but in general just being there. As long as the economy keeps growing, you're relatively popular. Stay out of the way. That's the conservative way.

But another way is to do interesting things, do important things. That's kind of the Teddy Roosevelt approach. And I'd never read about Teddy Roosevelt, but I know he charged up San Juan Hill, and I think he went hunting in Africa or something. But you've got to have a little romance in running for president. Obviously the people in Maryland thought it was pretty good, and I talked about all the things I was doing: the environment, spaceship Earth--these were the kind of terms I used. Planetary realism, that was one of the concepts and still we haven't quite reached planetary realism yet. Today in the New York Times they're talking about five hundred scientists who are reporting that a million species are going to be extinguished at the rate we're going. So we are not planetarily very realistic in the way we're conducting things.

So that was interesting--not interesting, but it's important, it's worthwhile, and if you want to have your conversation, you've got to be somewhere. [laughing] And that was a way to do that, and also I thought there was a possibility, and also then you would participate. In the old days, you'd go to conventions, and there was more room to make your voice heard, even if you weren't going to make it.

SHAFER: You--last time you were telling us how, and you kind of qualified it a little bit, but that you had decided you wanted to be governor when you were--I think in the mansion--?

BROWN: At least that was one idea, and I don't know how serious that--I mean I can't tell you, that was on a sign on my wall from that day forward.

SHAFER: Yeah, but in terms of running for president, like do you remember was there a moment?

BROWN: No, I don't think there are these moments. No. That's the Freudian theory, that a trauma in childhood affects you the rest of your life. Now people 00:55:00pooh-pooh that, and they don't think there was one event. They think it's more of a pattern or a condition. I do remember that event in the mansion. I recounted that, I think. That's true. Yeah, well, anybody who's running for governor is thinking about being president. Why not? I mean governors--if you can have a governor of Arkansas, you can have a governor of Texas--or a mayor of South Bend, Indiana.

HOLMES: Or in 1976, a governor from Georgia.

BROWN: A governor from Georgia, right. Certainly, that was part of the thought process. If one governor from a smaller state can be plausible, why not the governor of the bigger state? So yeah, that was part of the--I'm sure, but I can't remember at this point.

HOLMES: You ran an unconventional administration since coming to Sacramento. In 00:56:00many respects, people will say that your first run in 1976, for president, was also unconventional, not participating in many of the primaries--

BROWN: I was too late. So that was that. Yeah, that was too late. But it was the idea that things could happen. So you thought--well, why not? It wasn't that clear what the outcomes were going to be. Other people thought--what about Senator [Henry M.] Scoop Jackson? He failed? What about [Morris K.] Udall? He failed. Why were they running? They couldn't even get off the ground. So in that respect, not bad. I mean, I did, in the California primary I beat Jimmy Carter--I think 57 or something to 26--you check it out. It was a pretty big victory. So there was something there. People wanted to hear what I had to say, 00:57:00and I thought what I was saying was important for the country and for the Democratic Party, so I did have something to say, and it was not the same.

SHAFER: And you were--and you were at the height of your popularity.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: Right? It was like--I think you were in the eighties, probably, at that point?

BROWN: No, I don't know about eighties. It was--they polled differently. It was good, fair--you have to look at that. The polls were--

HOLMES: Well, you had like 7 percent disapproval, so if you wanted to look at it that way, at least eighty-something thought you were decent.

BROWN: Yeah, but I don't know--I don't believe that. But I think they polled it--the question was different. And of course today things are so polarized, the Republicans never go for a Democrat. And a Democrat's not going to go for a Republican, so it's very polarized today.

HOLMES: We were just talking about how weak, in many respects, the Democratic field was, which gave you at least some inspiration--this is possible. Did you also feel the same way about the Republicans? I mean this is right after Watergate, and no one--

BROWN: Yeah, well the Republicans were weak.

HOLMES: No one thought Gerald Ford was actually a very strong candidate to begin with.

BROWN: Right, so obviously, that was one of those moments. Probably too soon, but how many times do these moments come along? So I decided to take advantage of it. Could I have decided not to? Yes. I'm not saying that--maybe if I had more senior advisors, and took more time, I might not have. And would that have been a good thing? I don't think it was, I think it turned out all right.

SHAFER: I think one of the high-water marks of that was the Maryland primary.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: In which you stunned Jimmy Carter.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: You know--can you say what you remember about that, and what that was like? I mean--

BROWN: Just it was exciting, and there were big crowds. And I guess what I was saying had a resonance, talking about the environment, talking about--kind of demystifying government. That was really what we were talking about. And with 00:59:00Nixon and Vietnam, there was a desire for more authenticity, and kind of putting down the pretentious quality of campaigning, which is what I was doing--and yet have some substance.

SHAFER: Yeah, and one of the people who was instrumental was Nancy Pelosi.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Can you describe what was the connection there, and like how--did you call her? Or how did that work?

BROWN: Well, I'm not sure. But she was a friend to Leo McCarthy, and Leo McCarthy was the speaker, so I think Leo was the man who brought that about.

SHAFER: Yeah. And do you--like did she have an instrumental role? Obviously her dad was--

BROWN: Well, it was her brother [Thomas L. D'Alesandro, Jr.]. He was the former mayor. Her father [Thomas L. D'Alesandro III] was the mayor, but so was her brother, and I stayed at their house, and he definitely guided me through the whole campaign. He and [Theodore G.] "Teddy" Venetoulis. Yeah, they were there--and very key to the whole thing. Why even Maryland? They came up with the 01:00:00idea of Maryland.

SHAFER: What do you mean?

BROWN: Well, I think--what I mean--just what I said.

SHAFER: Came up with the idea of Maryland meaning--?

BROWN: To run in Maryland. There are fifty states. The first state I ran in was Maryland--why Maryland? Well, because of Pelosi.

SHAFER: They thought it was winnable.

BROWN: They did, and I had no idea whether they were right, because we didn't take a poll. It probably wouldn't have shown anything anyway.

MEEKER: Was the ultimate strategy here to force the decision in the convention, since you weren't able to enter into other states?

BROWN: Well, that other people would follow. If I had gotten on the ballot and won in Oregon, and depending upon what the--yeah, the last--there were three states.

HOLMES: And Rhode Island as well.

BROWN: Well, I won in Rhode Island. Yeah, it's a possibility. But probably a write-in vote was a--yeah, probably if you looked at the mechanics, it obviously was not in the cards. But you can look at it--I wasn't deterred by that. So it was possible, but we didn't have a way--and you can't tell today who's going to win, so you don't know. It depends on what fits the moment. Is [Joe] Biden the steady man for the hour? Or is it going to be somebody else that kind of seizes on mistakes and stuff that happens? So there is contingency, so that would be the idea of why it had possibilities.

SHAFER: What impact do you think your running had--you talked earlier that there was some tension, you know, between the Democrats especially. And you--and then you went off and made a huge splash nationally.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: I think I told you once, my father--you were the only candidate my father ever sent money to. And you know, but when you came back, you sort of came back to reality.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: And so what was that reentry like?

BROWN: Hard to remember. When we came back, we had that Chávez--had to deal with that. The Teamsters and Chávez fighting. I tried to get those two together, and tried to get the two unions--that didn't, couldn't make any headway at all. And then Chávez put that thing on the ballot. I think there was the funding, so there was the funding to get the board funded--if we could get the Teamsters and the farm workers to stop fighting. I tried very hard, and that didn't succeed. And then finally, that ballot measure--

HOLMES: Proposition 14.

BROWN: --that I got involved in, against my better judgment. It went down pretty strongly.

SHAFER: Can you maybe describe just the role of the farm workers in your campaign? Did they help you?

BROWN: Which campaign?

SHAFER: The presidential campaign.

BROWN: Yeah, they helped in Rhode Island--definitely. They helped in Rhode Island; they helped in Oregon. Marshall Ganz, he was working for the farm workers. So yeah, they were the active, the organizer. That was it! We didn't have our own independent organization. So that was pretty amazing in itself, that we were able to--I mean in Rhode Island we said vote the undecided slate. We put out a little piece of paper, "Vote the Undecided Slate. Beat Carter." Because we had people in every precinct, every poll, so that was a lot of farm workers. And when they're farm workers, they're not farm workers--they're part of the boycott or the greater farm worker support group, support network, so 01:04:00that's who that all was. And a lot of people would go to La Paz and then--or support the farm workers in some way, and they all came into the campaign. So I had César's support.

[side conversation deleted]

SHAFER: In addition to talking to you, Guy and I have been interviewing people--your sister we talked to, Gray Davis we've talked to, Jodie Evans is her name now, but she worked for you for many years. And especially Jodie described those months, when you were running for president, as catching lightning in a bottle. I mean it was--for them, it was a very exciting time.

BROWN: Very exciting--well, it is exciting.

SHAFER: So, I didn't hear that--

BROWN: I didn't know about that. I was just the candidate.

SHAFER: Oh, come on.

BROWN: I don't--I mean you just give talks, and all I know is they've got a microphone, and you've got to say something, and you try to avoid saying something stupid--that's the key. But well, when you win a primary for president 01:05:00it's exciting. And there were important issues. I mean the environment, you had foreign policy questions. It's a real education, in effect--it used to be. I don't know if running for president today is like that, where they ask you a lot of pretty serious things. But obviously the candidates--I mean the campaign volunteers, people like campaigns, even for governor--for mayor even, so I don't know what you can say about it. It has a life of its own--long hours, a certain amount of excitement, a bad press story that people get worried, what do you do? So there's drama, and that's better than lack of drama.

SHAFER: You know, to me it sounds--it sounds like it's a very intellectual answer, but was there--?

BROWN: Well, I'm an intellectual character, so--I'm not going to emote on your 01:06:00question there. But it's tiring. I mean the whole--it's campaigning, it's exciting, because basically the candidate is the center of attention, so most people like attention. You people like attention. [Shafer laughs] So if you get a lot of it, you're obviously going to feel better than if you get none. So in the middle of a campaign, there's that. And then there's content. Then there's emotion, you know, there's crowds, and it's a challenge to rev people up. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. But candidates--they're all working, and there's a camaraderie. It's like working on a play or something. You know, you've got the stage scenery, you have the drama each day after day. It's a drama--and it's like a jury trial, which I've done. So they're alive. It's not 01:07:00just one person--it's a real-life drama. That's a campaign.

HOLMES: But Governor, also--in reflecting on the campaign in 1976. It's not as if--you know, you had name recognition in California.

BROWN: Yeah, but not in Maryland. It was zero, zero.

HOLMES: My point is, in the sense of when you're able to attract crowds, when you're able to get that kind of energy--

BROWN: But we had television--I don't know how many television ads we had. That makes a huge difference. And then Carter is out there campaigning in different states. I have one state, one place where you focus. In the military they always say the other force may be stronger, but if you can mobilize your limited forces where you're greater than the adversary, then you can defeat them. That's exactly what happened.

HOLMES: But can you also describe a little bit of--because, correct me if I'm wrong, you probably experienced that before, of going to a different state and having people out there cheering for you, when you're only really known in California.

BROWN: Well, yeah.

HOLMES: So could you describe, maybe, your experience?

BROWN: They cheer right now with these candidates. You know, if you get media, you're in the media, either through ads or stories or whatever, the news--and people like to see--there's a celebrity quality. So people say, "Hey, I saw him on--he looks just like he does on television," or something. They show up. Then if you say something that they respond to, then they applaud, they get excited. But, you know, that's what's--I mean it's just a funny kind of process to pick candidates.

MEEKER: Did you feel like you needed to figure out how to translate your ideas from California to the rest of the country?

BROWN: No. What you've got to figure out is what can win the election? What am I doing? What do I stand for? You can't be for anything. I can't take Ronald Reagan's ideas. I'm a Democrat. So--what was I doing? I talked even about the 01:09:00low-flush toilet, that this is a symbol of conservatism. I talked about that in Maryland. The people liked that. And the limitations--that some people interpreted that maybe as fiscal limitation, other people interpreted it as environmental limitation. But in a time of excess--in that period, I think people were ready for some limitation.

SHAFER: Do you think like, in some ways, do you think your message resonated, in particular, because--the country was probably exhausted in some ways: Watergate--

MEEKER: Vietnam.

SHAFER: The war, of course. The resignation, assassination attempts twice--we'll talk about that another time.

BROWN: It's hard to remember. You know, you should consult the record, to the extent there is a record. It's hard to say. You know, you get up there and give speeches. I gave a lot of speeches in Maryland. I gave a lot in Rhode Island. I 01:10:00gave some in New Jersey, some in Oregon. They were generally pretty well received. But they were in '92, for that matter. So I ran a fairly decent campaign.

SHAFER: Yeah. When you came back here, or to Sacramento, do you feel that--I mean I know you don't like that word--was there a price to pay for your having been gone and being in the spotlight?

BROWN: Wasn't, not immediately--no, not really. I don't think there was--maybe there was longer term. No. And it might have set in motion that I went off running for president, and maybe that says, well, when we see problems in state government, maybe that combined creates disaffection. That's quite possible.

SHAFER: And how so?

BROWN: Well, how so? Just the way I described it.

SHAFER: Like a sense that you're--didn't have your eye on Sacramento?

BROWN: Well, that could be, but I'm interpreting it. I was still pretty popular at the end of the summer. But you know, these things, they go in--you know, if you don't do anything, that's a problem. And if you do do something exciting, then you do another thing that's exciting--at some point that is a problem. So I would say that the campaign--it didn't take that many days, it was over pretty--I think it worked okay. Now, when you're winning, it works pretty good. Then when it's not going anywhere. Then people say, "What the hell are you doing this for?" I can't tell you what the opinion is--I'm not polling each week, and you can say well, here's what we think.

SHAFER: But you did win the California primary, so obviously, it was resonating here.

BROWN: It was resonating. I'm doing fine in June. Now when we had that ballot measure, I campaigned for that through television. That didn't go anywhere, and Tunney lost. Now, what was that all about? That was '68. Tunney lost that time, didn't win it.

HOLMES: He did--in '76, and he blamed it on Prop. 14.

BROWN: Oh, with the farm work--well, that's why I tried to get Chávez to get off. It was not helpful. I don't know how much that did, but they did have the idea of these farm workers jumping over the fence into your back yard, and they were darker-looking people, so that scared people--kind of like an early Pete Wilson ad, and it was damn effective. And we know what happened in [Proposition] 187, and that was what more than a decade, a decade--or two decades later. So, and that was an effect of that, and Tunney got caught in it. And that's because 01:13:00Chávez wanted what Chávez wanted. That's not what Tunney needed, or what I needed--and they didn't need it anyway. So it was not helpful for him. It did not help him, but that's what he wanted, and so it was kind of hard to buck him.

SHAFER: He--he went with you, I think, to the convention that year?

BROWN: No, he was there. He went there. He seconded my nomination, so I thought that was pretty good.

SHAFER: Do you remember how many delegates you had? I don't know if we have that written down here, let's see.

BROWN: It's somewhere. Not that many. I mean you'd have to know how many delegates were there?

SHAFER: I think--you needed 1,400 maybe, for the nomination?

BROWN: Yeah, I think we only had 285, something like that.

SHAFER: Yeah, did you feel when you went to convention that there was something you wanted to accomplish?

BROWN: Well, how do you end it? It's hard to unwind those things. That's the problem. But no, we went to the convention, it wasn't--yeah, well, that's a good 01:14:00question. How to be relevant at the convention in which you have no chance. And you have to endorse Carter, so that was, you know, it's a--but they always have primary candidates. They usually pull together, so usually it works out. But it's hard to remember all that stuff, you know?

SHAFER: Yeah.

HOLMES: How did you feel?

BROWN: I wasn't in the convention, because I just went that last time and announced the vote.

HOLMES: How did you feel about having to, or choosing to endorse Carter?

BROWN: Well, you know, I'm not going to endorse Ford, so that made sense. You know, you want to get back on the program. It was enough--that game was over. That horse had run. [laughing]

SHAFER: Was there any interest in--on your part, or did anyone around you suggest that maybe you'd be a good VP?

BROWN: No, I wasn't looking for VP under Carter.

SHAFER: Because--?

BROWN: Or anybody. Why? Well, it's kind of a derivative function. Governor is a good job, it's a big job--a lot of stuff going on, a lot of things. Vice president, what do you do? It's just completely different. We crafted, in just our energy and appliance standards, that was pretty--and our 55 percent solar tax credit--those still resonate.

SHAFER: You can do more.

BROWN: Cogeneration, you can--well, it was a sufficient province. That's all. I guess some people wanted to do that. But cabinet officials obviously is a funny business. You know, or even now when I see these people, they come out and--well, "what are you doing really?" Give talks or? The way I approach 01:16:00government, really getting in and working stuff out. You know, like some of these criminal justice reforms. You really think through a measure and get it in the legislature, and against the odds you get it passed. Where can you do that?

SHAFER: Yeah, do you remember having any, you know, any thoughts about--I mean Reagan gave Ford a real run for his money. Did that--you know, inspire you?

BROWN: Yeah, that did. Yeah, well of course--of course you always think that yeah, there's something that can be done later, sure.

SHAFER: What do you mean, done later?

BROWN: What do you mean later? Well, yeah. You know about the elections--they happen every four years, right? [laughter] So it's not like the end. It's just the end of chapter one. Then there's chapter two, so--

MEEKER: How did you decide to build or maintain a relationship with Carter when he becomes president?

BROWN: I went out and stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom. That was a good start. And we talked. But these guys have a hard time, I think. When you run against them, you exchange words, so that leaves a certain residue probably.

MEEKER: Right, so in debates or on the campaign trail you're--

BROWN: We didn't debate--I don't think we debated Carter.

MEEKER: You didn't?

SHAFER: No.

MEEKER: No, okay. But on the campaign trail you're saying certain things about Carter's record to put yours in front. So what is that relationship like then, afterwards?

BROWN: It's not a relationship, it's a competition.

MEEKER: Okay. And did it remain a competition for the next four years?

BROWN: Like a relationship sounds like, "let's have a relationship." That isn't the way it works.

MEEKER: Or--or like colleagues or friends?

BROWN: Well, California's way is a lot different. Even Obama, they've got people in Washington and New York, and they're all interacting there. We're five hours away here, so we're a little bit off to the side--and maybe I was off to the side because of the way I did things.

SHAFER: Hmm. When you came--you wound down the presidential campaign, you come 01:18:00back to Sacramento. And Bill Lockyer is quoted in one of the clips saying, "The honeymoon is over for Brown and the Democrats." He criticized you for your unorthodox style of governing, said it was hard to get things done, felt you were lecturing sometimes too much.

BROWN: Yeah. Well, hard to get things done is true. Because if I want to do something--if I wanted not to get what they wanted to get done, then it was harder for them to get it done. So that was a perfect description of the problem--from his point of view. But they got done whatever they got done. They're totally in charge of their house. They do things. The governor doesn't have--I mean on the gas tax bill, and cap and trade, we had a lot to do with it. But for most of these bills, they're doing what they want to do. And that was certainly true when I was governor the first time.

So there was nothing that didn't--and when they say that, that's a meme--not a 01:19:00meme, that's just a way of talking. If you want to get in the news, you can't criticize the local city council. You criticize the governor, because you've got to attack up. You can't attack down. Because of running, that opens up that avenue, that makes it plausible, and people will write about it. And people will do it because--I don't know why they do that. Lockyer or--because they have their own, their own needs, their own relationships. They have a whole world that I know more about now than I knew then. Lockyer is from Hayward, and there's a whole group of people in Oakland and Berkeley, and that whole world, and Lockyer was part of that. But they have [Nicholas C.] Petris, these different people. So he might have had something he wanted. I can't tell you what it was, but nothing strikes me.

Because they can talk to--Gray Davis was there. What do you need that you're not getting? Nobody ever says, "Well, we need the governor to help us with this vote." Or maybe the parks--are we saying the parks didn't open up in time, or the income tax reforms didn't go out? Or what are you talking about? It's part of the drama, where the legislature--I get attacked. So they did that--look at Gray Davis. Didn't they attack him? And of course they grumble, the Republicans grumbled about Arnold. That's part of what the legislature does. They're trying to strive for recognition, but I don't want to recount the legislative game.

But there it was. But there was always a little tension, because they're running. They've got to raise their money--they raise their money from people who want things. And they try to keep it a little bit unclear, because you've 01:21:00got to keep it unclear, otherwise, if you do something for money, you're already committing a crime. So it's all kind of obfuscation, to some degree. And my effort to say let's make this clear: where's the money coming from? When's it coming in? Let's keep a current record--that crowded their style. It crowds any style.

That is the American way of politicking in a mass market. If you have 10 million voters, you can't shake their hand--not even close. You've got to send a message. So if you're in the legislature, you've got to send mail. It's all mail--and a few other little things. And statewide, it's all television. Now it's more social media. But that all costs money--and how do you get the money? It's far more than you--how do you get it? You get it from raising it from people who are interested. So they kept it, so we didn't quite know what that was all about. We didn't make a big deal out of it.

Then with Watergate, and then during secretary of state I made--because I noticed, because it was the secretary of state's job to follow all these things, and they're all vague. So why have it? And we had a purity of election law. When you have the purity of election law--things were a lot different in the 1880s, I presume--but it's still the same game. Government allocates the goods, and so who gets what when? And there's a lot of competition for that. Lowering taxes, funding schools, are broad things. But then you have more narrow things: how many racing dates for Los Alamitos--or whatever the hell the case may be. So that means people are lobbying you.

So I guess that's all by way of saying there was nothing that running for president made difficult. But I think it gave a chance for them to express 01:23:00irritation, and they didn't need to avoid that. And maybe they felt when you say that, then you had to pay a little more attention to them. It's a way of getting attention, and so if they have a bill, you've got to be a little nicer to them, because you don't want them to be more mad at you. So I can't tell you why he does all that.

Lockyer, in later years, was pretty friendly with me. But all these older guys were, like Nick Petris--a lot of them didn't like, a lot of it--it came on the money thing. They had programs; they wanted that money. And I was concerned that we're going to create a deficit, and I did want to avoid that. That was the clash. And as long as you keep spending--but you can't keep spending. This is the problem.

And Arnold found that--both Davis and Arnold were at the top of their game--and crash. Okay? So we're at the top now. In fact, this is an economy that never, 01:24:00never goes south. But it always has; it always will. So, it's very hard to manage. You have all this money, and the whole thing of politics is showing need. So there's all these needs. Well, and then you have all this money, and you're not going to take care of the needs? [laughing] It doesn't even feel right, unless you're a conservative Republican. So that's why to hold it off is difficult.

SHAFER: People want to spend it.

BROWN: They want to--yeah, but they don't want to spend the money, they want to do good. They want the classroom to be better, they want the mental hospitals--well, now we shut them all down. But yeah, they've always got an idea. And there are ideas, but they're virtually unlimited. You can almost reinvent the whole landscape of California, but of course you can't, because you 01:25:00have a limited amount of money.

And the trouble with a limited amount of money--it's not fixed. [tapping on table] It's changing all the time. It's either going up, or it's going down. And the fact that it went up, doesn't mean it's not going to go down. And the fact that it goes down, doesn't mean it will go up again. So here you are trying to save money, and then all of a sudden the money goes up! Or here the money goes up, and then--it's very hard to manage, because it's a zigzag, and people are very present-focused on their needs, and the whole system runs on manifesting your needs. You get up here and say, "Look. Look at what I need." [claps hands] And so that, and there are real needs. And what is a real need to you, is not a real need to the other guy. I mean California, there's a lot of money, and there's a lot of lobbying, and there's a lot of knowledge. So it's a heavy--it's intense. I think other states must be simpler.

SHAFER: Yeah, a lot smaller.

BROWN: Or maybe I think they are, but maybe they--what do I know?

SHAFER: All right. We're going to leave it there for today, I think.

BROWN: Yeah. Okay, good. All right.