Jerry Brown | Interview 9 | May 7, 2019

MEEKER: This is Martin Meeker with Scott Shafer and Todd Holmes, interviewing Governor Jerry Brown. This is interview session number nine, and today is May 7, 2019.

SHAFER: So Governor, we want to talk to you about property taxes. 1977 begins, and you've got your state-of-the-state address, and your focus on property tax has a problem. So that issue was percolating, and people were aware that it was an issue. Describe what the issue was in your mind. What did you see?

BROWN: The property taxes started going up. I think principally because the assessments started going up, so it started slowly. It seemed to be a local government problem, but then in certain areas like Santa Barbara people were hit harder and the protests got louder. I started doing something about it at the end of '76, came up with a circuit-breaker plan that would reduce property 00:01:00taxes, but do it in relationship to the income of the homeowner. That was the idea, and the legislature was not in a big hurry. And so when I proposed some ideas, then they were the ones that developed the bills. And I kept saying to my finance department, "No, we've got to come up with a bill," and they waited for the revenue and taxation committee in the legislature. And so that took a while, and it became a very laborious process. They wanted to add on rent subsidies and higher payments for general relief for welfare recipients, and things like that. So anyway, to make a long story short, the bill finally got out of the assembly, 00:02:00then it got over to the senate. It took on more and more baggage, and so by the time of the last day, I believe, of the session, it failed. It took a two-thirds vote and couldn't get it.

SHAFER: How did you push?

BROWN: Well, pushed--what does hard mean? I mean if you're lifting a weight, I understand that 150 pounds is harder than 120 pounds. But when you're talking about the legislature, you're talking about Democrats, Republicans, liberals, moderates, conservatives, so there's a built-in resistance to any kind of tax, and there wasn't enough desire at that point. And so it died, and, well, at that time I certainly didn't know a way to get a property tax. And each time the senate would add something, and then the assembly--I think they even added an increased tax of capital gains. So you've got more than just pure property-tax 00:03:00relief, and so they had to do it again. But by the end of the year/the beginning of the new year, the Jarvis initiative had qualified. And so that gave more momentum, and we did get a two-thirds vote for--oh, it turned out to be Proposition 8, but it was not enough relative to what [Howard] Jarvis was offering.

SHAFER: So now we're in 1978. What was in the version that didn't get--it failed at the ballot box, but how was it different from Prop. 13?

BROWN: Well, it had a lot more stuff. Prop. 13 was just roll back property taxes on all ownerships: commercial, agricultural, industrial, apartment owners, and home owners. And limit future taxes, after rolling them back to what they were, I think, in '76, that you could only have an annual increase of 2 percent unless 00:04:00the property exchanged--was sold. So that was more far reaching. Ours was limited to home owners.

SHAFER: And it had some renter relief too.

BROWN: And a little bit of renter relief, I think.

SHAFER: In 1977, you knew that property tax was going to be an issue, because you had it in your state-of-the-state address.

BROWN: Well, no, I wouldn't say that. It wasn't that big an issue, I don't think. It grew. So--the question is when was it obvious? When was it red hot? Later.

SHAFER: When?

BROWN: Well, I can't tell you when. You'd have to go look in the newspapers, read it.

SHAFER: But like was there, you know, nowadays, when people are out collecting signatures--

BROWN: Originally there was no notice of Jarvis at that time, in '77. It wasn't until he emerged.

SHAFER: And was it when they filed to collect the--?

BROWN: Well, first of all, the assessors were assessing homes at a higher rate, 00:05:00in various counties at various times, and that then created the fear that there was going to be a property tax increase, which there was in various places. So the property taxes were dramatically going up in various places, so the more that happened, the more the issue became salient. Originally, in 1975, nobody was talking about it. I mean some people were, but it was pretty marginal. And then somewhere in '77/early '78, it became much harder. And then in the campaign, with Jarvis debating people--as he called them, "bum of the day," on Channel 7 in Los Angeles, that got to be a big issue. And the turnout in the primary was very high; I believe one of the highest ever. I think it's the highest that is, before or since, and it was decisively passed. And most of the politicians, even Republicans, had opposed it, because they couldn't imagine how 00:06:00you could live with a two-thirds cut in the property tax. And of course we did, because the inflation also affected the income tax, and so there was a lot of money. But we were able to bail it out. But it did mean that we started to rely on the income tax more than property tax.

SHAFER: And it was a temporary bailout too, I mean, right?

BROWN: It was a temporary bailout. But it wasn't temporary, because we started providing money for the schools and the counties, and that was adjusted over the decades. So it was permanent, although it changed.

HOLMES: You say it wasn't completely on your radar when you came into office, but wasn't there a Proposition 1 that Ronald Reagan was grappling with? I think it even supported--

BROWN: That was to limit government spending.

HOLMES: There was also another--at least initiative or discussions of 00:07:00initiatives dealing with property tax during this.

BROWN: There were a number of measures, and Jarvis himself had an earlier measure that he couldn't get qualified. And then he did, and that often happens. Something doesn't work one time, but they come back two or three times and they get it. So, yeah, it takes on a momentum. We have the so-called car tax. That started in 1935, and then all of a sudden, during the time of Wilson and Gray Davis, had become unacceptable all of a sudden. So these moods out there in the electorate, and they're driven by changes, the taxes were doubling. They were going up in some places, and people just said no. But the state had no control over that. That was the local assessor, the local school board, the local city council, the local board of supervisors. So it seemed like it wasn't a state 00:08:00issue, until it became that.

SHAFER: It was happening, in some ways, locally, because it was the local assessors. It was happening at the local/the county level. To a--do you think to a certain extent Sacramento was sort of either insulated from it--and by Sacramento I mean the legislature and yourself--unless you had constituents who were complaining about it?

BROWN: Well, that's always the case. If nobody's complaining, then there's no issue, no one does anything. So I mean people don't reach out and invent something out of nothing. It also was less of a problem. In 1969, the average price, I believe, if I recall right, the median-priced home in LA was $69,000. Okay, that started to rise in the early/middle seventies, and the taxes also rose. But people living in their house didn't feel they were richer. Their home 00:09:00was just given another number. You know, instead of $100,000, it was now $300,000. But then the taxes are going to affect them. And they, without doing anything, they saw an increased tax bill. And that was not something Sacramento/the state government was thinking of--this is your local people. But because they made it into an initiative, that gave it a statewide character, and so it couldn't be ignored.

SHAFER: Did you feel that--I mean as I remember it, and I was not living here at the time, but it was framed as something to help seniors, because they were living on a fixed income. Obviously, that was one--

BROWN: Well, that was one thing.

SHAFER: Yeah, there was much more to it than that.

BROWN: Well, everybody who paid property taxes. And then you had the apartment owners, and you had others that would benefit from it. Look, the taxes passed--went up too quickly, and people revolted through the initiative. It's that simple. Had the taxes been slower, it might have not happened or would have happened much later.

SHAFER: Looking back, do you think there is something, like in '77, that might 00:10:00have been done to--?

BROWN: And maybe '76, maybe. But that wasn't a problem then. The legislature doesn't want to act unless there's pressure. We presented the legislature, last year--2018, a measure to change inverse condemnation. But the insurance companies didn't want that, and the consumer lawyers, the trial lawyers, didn't want that. So the legislature doesn't want to get involved with bailing out, as they called it, the electric utilities. So now the governor creates a commission, and they come in with the idea to change inverse condemnation, which I proposed--but at the time people didn't want to touch it. Now, whether they will or not, I don't know, but it's illustrative of the fact the legislature doesn't move unless somebody puts a fire at their feet. And the people are property owners, teachers, unions, doctors, hospitals. So whenever any ox gets 00:11:00gored, they organize with more intensity. And they get news stories, and then something becomes a problem that wasn't a problem before--and now is a problem--and now they get to act. It's a relatively passive instrument, the legislative body.

SHAFER: So you obviously opposed Prop. 13. To what extent did you see it as, you know, your ox being gored?

BROWN: Well, it was the local government, but it had nothing to do with the state.

SHAFER: Did you see it as a--this, the movement, I mean by the time the primary happens, it was like a tax revolt, right? They were on a--

BROWN: Yeah. Well, then it became more general, but in the beginning it was local government. That's why I said it was the local government--I'm not going to get involved in that. That's a no-win situation. But I did see it as an anti-government move. I even thought about supporting Prop. 13, but all of my 00:12:00constituents were against it pretty strongly.

SHAFER: Why did you think about supporting it?

BROWN: Well, it was a very popular revolt against this behemoth called government. The trouble is, it seemed way overreaching, and in many respects it was, because it put the state in the business of funding, through the income tax, a lot of local services. And that becomes a big problem. It becomes a problem because the costs are driven locally, but the funding has to come statewide. So the state has to pay the bill, but it can't control the bill. Yeah.

SHAFER: To what extent--when did you realize, you and your team, that it was going to pass?

BROWN: I would imagine a month before the election--something. I can't tell. It could be three weeks, it could be six weeks. I mean that's--

SHAFER: I know that you cleared, at one point in late May, you cleared all your appointments to focus on it.

BROWN: Right. But I mean that's just an empirical question. What day did the polls say what that came to my attention? So I don't think that's a very interesting question.

SHAFER: But clearly by the end of May--

BROWN: Well, by May it was pretty clear that it was going to pass.

HOLMES: Did you give it much credence when it first--even when it qualified for the ballot did you think, did you think this--?

BROWN: I didn't think that much about it, I don't think.

HOLMES: Did you think it was going to pass?

BROWN: We had enough problems at the state level. We were trying to fund the Serrano v. Priest decision to have to equalize school districts. That cost a billion-plus, so we didn't have the money for that. So how in the hell are we going to come up with a bill of $6-7 billion, is what they were talking about. So that seemed unthinkable at the time--unthinkable. But it became doable because of the incredible growth and inflation, so a dollar was not a dollar. 00:14:00They got cheaper, and we got more of them. I mean the income tax was rising 18 percent.

SHAFER: And inflation was really high too, I think.

BROWN: The personal income rather, the measure. Yeah, it got to be what--10 percent?

SHAFER: Or more, yeah.

BROWN: Okay, then the income tax collects a lot of that, so that gave us money. But then the income tax is very volatile, which everyone talks about. So there are times when income tax collections drop. Today, the stock market's going down. If it continues to go down, there will be losses of state revenue. Property tax rarely went down. Until the 2008 recession, it didn't go down since the Depression. What I mean by that, it's a stable source of revenue that's there to pay your schools, police, fire--and what have you. And now, if you take that away and you say we're going to get it out of capital gains--and right now, 00:15:0047 percent of the income tax, which is approximately half of state spending--that comes from 1 percent of the people. I think it's five thousand people pay almost half the income tax. What if those five thousand leave? So it's very unstable--and yet any other tax will be opposed.

SHAFER: Was the portion of it that included property tax, do you think that was--?

BROWN: What do you mean the portion that included it?

SHAFER: Of Prop. 13. It covers--commercial property, and now there's talk about--and there has been for years, of splitting that off. So I'm just wondering, what was your take? Do you think that that was--I mean it wasn't the focus of the campaign at all.

BROWN: What? No.

SHAFER: That it was going to help commercial property owners.

BROWN: Right. Jarvis worked for the apartment owners. That was their intent, obviously. But it was the homeowner too. He was a homeowner. He lived on 00:16:00Crescent Heights in a very modest house, so he could identify with those people. And Jarvis, by the way, worked for [Senator Reed] Smoot, I think, in Utah, who was the author of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. So he has an interesting background.

HOLMES: Governor, so this passes and qualifies for the ballot, and it's gaining steam. How much does this begin to factor into your own campaign for reelection, which is also happening that same year?

BROWN: What does factor in mean?

HOLMES: How much did you begin to think about, in your running for reelection, to have to address Prop. 13?

BROWN: It's hard to remember.

SHAFER: Do you mean the primary?

BROWN: The primary was--I was attacking it.

HOLMES: [laughing] So, you're getting ready and you are running for reelection.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: Prop. 13, you realize--

BROWN: Are you talking about the primary? After June or before June?

HOLMES: Yes, yes.

BROWN: Yeah, well that's a disjointed question. You can't answer it that way.

SHAFER: Before or after the primary?

BROWN: You have to pick.

HOLMES: You mean that--okay, yes, before the primary.

BROWN: You see, people don't think. Well, they just blather. That's very interesting.

HOLMES: [laughing] Well, I'm an academic. As you say, we blather quite a bit--as do politicians. So you say by May that you realized that it was going to pass?

BROWN: Right.

HOLMES: And then what was your strategy going forward into the reelection, because you had a--?

BROWN: Oh, you mean after--after it won?

HOLMES: Yes.

BROWN: Oh, to make it work. Just to implement it. It's now the law.

SHAFER: Well, and to survive--and for your own political survival too, I think.

BROWN: Well, yeah, we got it. Now you've got to make it work. It's the law. 00:18:00People adopted it overwhelmingly. So that was the strategy. I brought Arthur Laffer up, I brought [George P.] Schultz. We had meetings, yeah, with all these people--how do you implement it? And so we bring these people, you create a certain amount of atmospheric, and roll up our sleeves and implement it. Of course the people who are implementing it are the gnomes in the Department of Finance, and they're figuring out things, and what they figure out becomes the solution. But again, that solution is done by experts.

MEEKER: You brought Laffer up, who's known as the architect of supply-side economics.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

MEEKER: What was your interaction with him? How did you--?

BROWN: He was there, he's very voluble and expressive, and he was always very excited about Prop. 13 and gave me a lot of credit for making it work.

MEEKER: What did he contribute in terms of helping you implement it in that 00:19:00critical period of time between the primary election and the general election in November?

BROWN: Well, everybody contributed to the atmospherics, and then we passed the bailout AB 8 or 9, or some damn thing, and that became the bailout, and at least for the moment things were taken care of. I mean, that's the way it works. First of all, if you just went to your gnomes and said, "Come up with a response," you would never see them. So you have to make visible this arcane process deep within the bowels of the Department of Finance. You do that by bringing in visitors. They come in, you talk to the press--this is what we talked about--and there's a certain amount of back and forth, and tension. And then presto, we get the bill. The legislature votes on it, then we have it, I sign it, we have a 00:20:00press conference--[clap]. Done, move on to the next thing. So what do they contribute? They're part of the public discussion--that's all.

SHAFER: The attorney general was on vacation in Hawaii when it passed. And so--and as you say, your team took advantage of that.

BROWN: My team--Tom Quinn. It was his idea.

SHAFER: So tell me how he did that. What happened?

BROWN: We did some ukulele music, and I did a few radio ads. And that was the main thing.

SHAFER: But it indicated, I think--it certainly got everyone's attention. It focused everyone, because you did that pretty--

BROWN: We think it did. But we don't know. Unless you're surveying on a regular basis, you don't know what, does what, how. But it didn't hurt. Yeah, we all 00:21:00thought that was clever. But the main point is I was an incumbent, and every incumbent has always won reelection in California for a second term--with one exception, Culbert Olson, when he was beaten by Warren--and he was a very unpopular guy. So reelection has proved, for very clear reasons, you dominate the media. The number-one problem was this Prop. 13, and as governor, I get to deal with it. And by signing the bill--we had Prop. 13, so we got the benefit of that, but I signed the bill. So at least for the short term, we took care of all the problems. What's not to like about that? Okay, now you're a candidate--you're out there as attorney general, you have nothing to do with that. We had some press conference with Edward Teller about forty nuclear power plants. Well, that wasn't germane to what was there. So a lot of that's the 00:22:00incumbent factor, and then we did our work appropriately, and it was successful.

SHAFER: Looking at the clips from the Times, there was one note of a labor leader, who was unnamed in the clip, but he said, "It seems like Jerry Brown was with us opposing Prop. 13, and then he switched sides to become the general of the supporters."

BROWN: Yeah, right. Well, that's one of the themes. [laughing] But I never could quite follow that. It's the law. Now, no one seriously said you should subvert the law--what does that mean? I mean, that's an impeachable offense. So what do they mean? Implement it, but put on sackcloth and ashes, and say, "Oh, this hurts me more than it hurts you?" Well, that's stupid. I had to do it; I did it! So the war was over. We lost, and it's never nice to lose. You've got to move on 00:23:00to the next fight.

MEEKER: What about a lawsuit?

BROWN: Based on what? It's a constitutional amendment. A very fundamental document of California, called the California Constitution is amended. It has, in it, Prop. 13 now. That was it! As they say, get a life, and move on to the next thing.

HOLMES: Did you also, in its wake after it passed, didn't you try to fashion yourself as a born-again tax cutter?

BROWN: Well, first of all, I was opposed to taxes when I ran for governor. And that did embody the way I felt. The trouble is it went too far. So it's an idea, but it's an idea I thought was completely impractical. And in many ways, it was counterproductive. But I can tell you that if we didn't have Prop. 13, we would have had something else. Property taxes would not have doubled, and tripled, and 00:24:00quadrupled--and nothing would have happened. Not when you have an initiative, and you could just roll it back. So it was inevitable, we probably should have seen, and the only answer to stop [Prop.] 13--I've thought about this--would be to have my own counter-initiative ready, early in 1977. Well, (a) I didn't have the funds, and (b) I wasn't geared up for initiatives like I became later in my second round as governor, where actually, I participated in six initiative campaigns. And won all six, by the way, which had never happened in the history of California. In fact, it's so obscure that you probably didn't know about that. And Schwarzenegger lost four--five initiatives. I won six, and you didn't even know it, so that shows you the thin quality of the California historical consciousness. [laughter]

HOLMES: Oh, please.

BROWN: [laughing] Well, it's true.

SHAFER: Pushing back, you think of yourself as someone who looks into the future.

BROWN: Yeah, sometimes. We didn't see 13, because it wasn't a problem yet, until the people started reacting. Yeah, now, and who's supposed to tell me that? The Department of Finance dealt with the state budget. This was off budget. It's another item. And it became a state budget when, all of a sudden, the local property tax was reduced by two-thirds. We just couldn't sit there and say okay, police and fire and schools: close. We had to do something. And then it became a state budget problem. But the state Finance Department was not in the habit of looking at local property taxes and local assessments and local programs. Well, we got in that business, and the state is now in that business because of 00:26:00various formulas whereby the state provides funding at the local level. That's why the budget--they say it's $200 billion all in, but the general fund's only $130 [billion], and the rest of that are built-in local spending programs that have made up for the lack of property taxes, at least in part.

SHAFER: So I want to read a quote from a legislator at the time, Art Agnos, who represented San Francisco.

BROWN: Yes.

SHAFER: And he says, referring to you, [reading] "His behavior, in the post-Prop. 13 political arena has been shameless. It's one thing to accept defeat graciously, but another to politically prostitute yourself and those who have caused so much damage to the constituency, which has been so loyal to your political career--black, Chicanos, the handicapped, and the poor."

BROWN: Yeah. Well, he's representing his district. That's spoken like a fellow from San Francisco would. [laughing] That's pure political rhetoric.

SHAFER: So there's no truth to--and he wasn't the only one who said--

BROWN: I don't follow that at all. I mean, that's kind of like academic. Let's have a debate about Prop. 13 for the next five years.

SHAFER: That sounds like something you'd relish.

BROWN: No, you have to govern. People are saying, you know, govern, be serious, stick to the job. Do your knitting. I did, but I did it in a way that I won by twenty-one points. And where is Art Agnos now, by the way? Well, he ran for mayor--one term, so maybe you have to look a little broader if you want to stay for a second term, which I did.

SHAFER: Well, I have Maxine Waters too, if you want to--[laughing]

BROWN: Oh, Maxine Waters. They all do it, but that was the left. But that's easy for them to say, because they had Prop. 13 already. Now they have it, their constituents are quieted down. Now they can start beating the drums for all the 00:28:00programs they want, and then more spending. But they're not beating the drums for increasing the income tax. No one there talked about--oh, we lost $6 billion; now let's go find it in state taxes. They don't talk about it that way. That's part of the idea. As this one fellow, James [R.] Mills, who's still alive, San Diego, he had a kind of a funny sense of humor. He said, "You know--" and he was exaggerating, but he said it nevertheless, he said, "I vote for every spending measure, but against every tax measure," and he chuckled. Like that's your problem, Governor.

So I don't even say that all of them think it through. A lot of them don't do the arithmetic. It's the emotion, the noise, the thematics of a given issue. So 13 threatens all these public services. Art Agnos was a social worker, so all he 00:29:00stands for is funded, in many cases, by the property tax. Now it goes away, and I'm exuberantly making that work. He interpreted that, in some way, as attacking, or aggressively inconsistent with his particular social-welfare sensibility. But we're talking about the state, we still have the state issues. He's there--did he propose anything as a legislator that would do something to get whatever he's worried about? He didn't like the rhetorical positioning. Well, that's fine, if he wants to be a campaign consultant. But that's, I would just say physician, cure thyself, is the way I would say it to that.

And by the way, I would acknowledge that maybe I was a little too exuberant in my implementation rhetoric. Because the legislature voted for it. I would bet Art Agnos voted for that, and so did Maxine Waters. They probably voted for it, right? So they had no complaint on the substance. But also, you have to tend to your constituents. How do you tend to your constituents? You don't give them food baskets, like maybe Mayor Daley did. No, you give them rhetorical packages, and that's exactly what they were doing.

SHAFER: Did--at some point, in--after the primary and before the November election, Howard Jarvis cut an ad. Was that something--

BROWN: Yeah, I think we asked him to. Yeah, I knew Howard Jarvis.

SHAFER: Was that a coup? Because he didn't exactly endorse you. He did one for 00:31:00your opponent as well.

BROWN: Well, yeah--well, it was good. What are you asking me? It speaks for itself.

SHAFER: I mean--were there high fives? [laughing] Maybe they didn't high five back then.

BROWN: Well, we don't do that. That was a good, we try to do all that you do. That's all it is. It's a business. You've got to do what you need to do and that was perfectly consistent with law and morality. It didn't cost anything.

SHAFER: When you say, "maybe my rhetoric was a little too exuberant,"--

BROWN: Well, because then, then one of the ads of [Evelle] Younger was a washing machine--wishy-washy, wishy-washy. So I think that stuck over time, but it only stuck maybe because I didn't have new wars to fight. And in politics, you've got to be battling something. Reagan was battling Communism, the evil empire, the welfare queens, the people who are going to do bad things to the American way of life. So he was always a crusader on behalf of the people. You need an 00:32:00adversary. If you want to be a protagonist, you must have an antagonist. And so I became the antagonist for some of the liberals, but also for the media. And then I was running for president, so these are all rhetorical opportunities. They don't amount to anything in the real world. I mean it is the real world of rhetoric, but it's not the world of substance. So it isn't as though some critic was saying, "Well, you should have created this program." If they thought that, they would have introduced a bill, and then we could have talked about that. It fighting, but when I ran for--as I said, most of those people all supported me.

SHAFER: Yeah, when Prop. 13 passed, it created a kind of crisis in Sacramento.

BROWN: Right, well we thought it did. But the truth is we had a lot of money--we 00:33:00had a big surplus!

SHAFER: Two-and-a-half billion, I think.

BROWN: Yeah, it was bigger than that, because we'd already reserved a billion and a half for property tax relief, so that was another--that wasn't there, so you add that to the $2.5 [billion], now you've got four. And because of continuing inflation, it got to be five. It's like the budget now, they say--oh, it's January? All of a sudden we realize we've got even more money. When California's going up, it really goes up; and when it goes down, it really goes down. That's why it's hard to manage, and that's why you always need money. And so that's why it's very difficult. I call it riding the tiger.

SHAFER: I wonder if--you know, you were saying earlier that sometimes being governor wasn't that exciting.

BROWN: Yes.

SHAFER: You know, and I'm wondering if this passage of Prop. 13 created sort of a reason for you to get--?

BROWN: Well, it was a little more exciting for a while, but things get not 00:34:00exciting pretty quickly. And once it's done, it's done--and you've got to go on to new things. Well, then what was it? That was '78. Then we had '79. I'd have to go look and see what we did in '79.

SHAFER: Anything else about Prop. 13, guys?

BROWN: There's a lot of talk about 13, all you can say about 13, I don't know--like everything else, this takes four historians working ten years to figure anything out. But I would say, without doing that, that the property taxes in California--well, number one, we never experienced this kind of inflation. This is what did in Jimmy Carter, and that was the malaise speech, so called. And then Reagan, with [Paul A.] Volcker, put us through the wringer, 00:35:00squeezed out the inflation, and then we went on. But while you're undergoing it--very hard to deal with it. And so the property tax revolt, or concern, was embedded in that larger inflation that also got Reagan elected.

But going back--and if you just leave out the inflation factor, the assessors were able to, with greater discretion--I was going to compare it to the indeterminate sentencing, but in some way, it allowed them a lot of discretion--and it was a scandal. And up to this point, assessors would keep the homeowner taxes down. And then when there was a shortfall, because the city council or the school district needed more money, they could assess the properties according to their judgment. But because they started playing 00:36:00favorites, and because of favors given--they low-balled the assessments for some business--they reformed it, and they wanted to make it determinate, fixed. So it became 25 percent of assessed value, for all property, no matter what.

Once you did that, and the homeowners' taxes started going up in ways that the industrial properties didn't--local government was powerless. Before, they could have sheltered that by shifting more of the money, like a split roll, but they had a de facto split roll, because they didn't have to be as uniform in the application of the property tax. So by making it rigid, you took away the temptation and the opportunity for corruption, but you also made inevitable the 00:37:00tax revolt. Just like when we took away the discretion of the parole board, I guess we made inevitable the legislative reaction of unending escalation of more punishment and more time in prison.

So, but it goes to the idea that we can't trust officials. And how do we know we can't trust them? Because regularly, there is a certain amount of corruption. It might be a small amount, but once you have the corruption, the press--and maybe some others--demand action. And what is the action? It's to take away the capacity for the corruption. What does that mean? That means take away discretion. That means limit the leadership and the decision-making ability of the leader. And so what that does is it makes a reaction less vigorous/less 00:38:00creative, because they've said, abstractly, this is the rule, without ever knowing about the tax revolt, or without ever knowing about the demands for more and more sentencing. They didn't know that.

That's why I always, I have to look at--oh, this is a reform. To what end? And what are the consequences? And it's very hard to see more than six months, let alone six years or twenty or thirty years in advance. Now, with a perspective of that, I can see that. And I've looked back on these things, and I can see that we do need leaders that have discretion. But on the other hand, under the rule of law, we want rules. But leaders act by making decisions, and they don't go to some kind of machine that says just push the number, and the decision comes out. They think it through with all of the informality and intuition and experience 00:39:00they have. But that is something that the political system recoils against, and that's why--whether it's the War Powers Act--we don't want the president to decide. And we don't like the idea of the president, one guy--Trump, tomorrow, could say, "I'm pressing the button," and he could end human civilization in a day. "Boy, we're got to have some rules on that, but we don't." We probably will get them one of these days. But on lesser matters, I think it's very important to give more running room for the people who have the decision. Because a business does that. Government's getting more rigid; business is getting more flexible.

SHAFER: It seems like partly what you're saying too is that there's sort of this law of unintended consequences.

BROWN: Yeah, well, we--no, all the time.

MEEKER: Do you have any thoughts you'd like to share on the current efforts to modify or overturn Prop. 13?

BROWN: Just that I think that there's no support for that. There might be 00:40:00support for some kind of split roll, but that becomes its own problem. I mean there will certainly be a battle, except the people who would have to pay it will spend tens of millions to fight that.

MEEKER: What do you mean by split roll?

BROWN: Oh, that means that property can be appraised--could be given a different value for agriculture, apartments, home owners, utilities, industrial, operate cement factories. They can treat it differently. And the whole idea of the reform is to treat it all the same.

SHAFER: Yeah, and I think the ballot--the ballot measure would remove commercial property from the protections of Prop. 13.

BROWN: Right. Well, some of them just annually appraise it--there's different variations. But they say once you go down that road, you're going to get variations, and pretty soon your uniform property tax will be a Swiss cheese of 00:41:00exceptions. That's the way it is in other states. So that's the argument against it. I mean there is an argument for it. You have to find taxes, and there are still people who want to give tax breaks, and so then--nobody really wants taxes, except the liberals want to tax the rich. But the rich can move, so this is a problem. There's inherent limit, particularly with the initiative in California on how much you can push the electorate.

SHAFER: Yeah, so just following through--in 1978 you're on the ballot in November. You're running against the attorney general, Evelle Younger. And did you feel at any point that, you know, your reelection was threatened?

BROWN: No, no. Not after a month or so, after we got Prop. 13 taken care of. But it's not about my feelings, by the way. People take surveys. You can read them, 00:42:00Younger can read them, and you just see what it is. And if you have any political judgment, you sense that. And then you validate it with the surveys that the papers put out all the time.

HOLMES: By embracing Prop. 13 after it passed--

BROWN: Well, I don't know if I embraced it--we do take an oath, "I swear to uphold the Constitution." And that includes all the laws.

HOLMES: By not critiquing it?

BROWN: Well, that's a funny kind of embrace. I embrace you because I don't attack you. I wouldn't call that an embrace. I'd call that the absence of a continuing attack.

HOLMES: So the absence of critique on your end also seemed to take the wind out of your opponent's sails.

BROWN: Maybe--well, we're not going to relitigate an issue in the primary. No, the newsmen, the arbiters of our destiny--ha, ha--they're already tired. They move on to something else. So there's nothing you can do. And a lot of things in 00:43:00campaigns, they're determined by events. There is a lot of focus on campaign consultants and campaigning, and in many ways it's already done. It's the event, or it's how the candidate strikes the electorate, or what the positioning of the candidate is for the issues that become salient. Because issues have different values/different weight at different times. But you, as a candidate, are just who you are and what you've done. And so you only have certain maneuverability. And I think Younger was caught--I think it was close, polls would say it was close on primary night. But by the general election, it wasn't close at all, and that's because the function of government is to solve problems. This was 00:44:00already, by all-media focus, a big problem, and by all-media focus it was done. What else is there to do? Game over.

SHAFER: So you won by 1.3 million votes.

BROWN: Twenty-one percent, I think--something like that.

SHAFER: It was a landslide, I guess, by any measure.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Which was obviously a much bigger margin than you were originally elected by in 1974.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And it was also bigger than the margin, I think, that Reagan had against your father in 1996.

BROWN: Might have been. He had about 19 percent, maybe 18/19.

SHAFER: Yeah. Is that--like what did you think was the mandate from the election for you?

BROWN: Uh--zero. In other words, I don't believe in mandates. It's what's happening today. Don't tell me what happened a month ago--what's going on today? And then what are the consequences of the battles today? So yeah, you can't take your mandate. That's a total construct with no basis--I mean there's some basis. If you're very popular and you ran on something, you can keep that momentum going, but there's no particular mandate there.

Well, there was still the mood of anti taxation, and we changed the income tax and a few other things like that. We had some tax reductions further, keeping in the spirit. So that's not entirely true. I think we indexed the income tax. I think it was the people that did away with the inheritance tax, and we also did away with the inventory tax, or reduced it. So those were things. And that was kind of the spirit of the tax revolt. But then the tax revolt--it wins, and you can't live on yesterday's issue. That's like fighting the last war. It doesn't work that way. It's the moment--what's hot now. What's going on? 9/11 happens, people react. Before 9/11, that was one thing. So then he reacted, and Mission 00:46:00Accomplished, so that worked very well.

SHAFER: Until it wasn't.

BROWN: Until it didn't work. Well, it didn't work well for Iraq; it didn't work well for the future.

SHAFER: To what extent did you feel like the results, which was a comfortable reelection, fuel your ambition for running for president?

BROWN: Well, I thought that gave me a certain momentum, but that's not true. It doesn't give any momentum at all. Those people in New Hampshire didn't know about that.

SHAFER: But in your mind it did?

BROWN: Well, I can't tell you--but I mean it certainly didn't dissuade me, because I've already done it once before. And, what works in a campaign? You know, that's a good question. That's why, I think, later on--how did [Michael] 00:47:00Dukakis do well? He was from Massachusetts, so he could win that primary. So you have to be relevant to the Eastern Seaboard. So that's why the comfortable win--I suppose you could, if I'd been more clever, I could have used that and worked the media, and had my agents talk to all these reporters and others, and say, "Look at this, this guy Brown. He's a--." We didn't; we didn't do that, so that was, if there were any errors, it was the lack of national operation that could have sold all that. So it might have been sold, but of itself, it didn't go anywhere.

SHAFER: No. Why wasn't there more of a national, organized national effort?

BROWN: Probably because I had a campaign, then it was over. I didn't really run with professionals, so we didn't have an apparatus. Once I won, it was over. 00:48:00Maybe I underestimated what it takes for a national campaign.

SHAFER: We talked to your sister a couple of weeks ago, and she told us that if you'd been married to Anne at that time you would have been president.

BROWN: Yeah. Well, I probably wouldn't have run. [laughter] Yeah, there's a lot of pathways to being president, or to being governor, and you can't tell.

SHAFER: But I guess her point was that--I think--that she would have provided some structure and some of those--the apparatus that you didn't have.

BROWN: If she was interested in it, which I doubt. Yeah, we might have--might have, if yeah, if I'd spent time flying off to Washington and not going to the Zen Center, and not talking to Gregory Bateson or Stewart Brand, but going around Washington and New York and hobnob with various people of power and 00:49:00money. Yeah, it probably would have been better, might have been more credible, to be part of the process. I think that's true. I wouldn't know what I know today.

MEEKER: You mentioned in the '76 campaign that one of the issues that seemed to resonate with potential voters in Maryland were composting toilets. [laughing]

BROWN: Yeah. Not composting--low flush.

MEEKER: Low-flush toilets.

BROWN: Because I signed that bill. So that was the thing. Again, when you're governor, you can do things.

MEEKER: Well, you had a lot of forward-looking ideas, some of which folks in the East Coast liked to call flaky.

BROWN: They didn't call it flaky at the time. They didn't call them flaky in Maryland.

MEEKER: This is going back, but there was the Rolling Stone article from 1976, that I think used that word, so--

BROWN: Maybe.

MEEKER: And it was pretty snarky.

BROWN: Who wrote that one?

MEEKER: I think that was Joe Klein.

BROWN: Yeah--I don't remember. Well, that's the East Coast. And there was, from that point of view, an institutional familiarity. You know, there's big labor--there's Meany. They called him Meany--they didn't use his first name. You know, there's the Jewish community, there's the New York Times, there's various people. So if you want to be their leader, you've got to be around and familiarize yourself. So I didn't do enough of that. So I enjoyed the outsider, but the outsider wasn't enough. Now, Reagan was an outsider, but he was an insider, because he had the money behind him, and he had the conservative movement, such as it was, whereas I didn't have some liberal movement. First of all, it didn't have the same power as the conservative movement, so there was no liberal movement. And it's much more fragmented, and that's what makes the 00:51:00Democratic constituency very hard to negotiate.

MEEKER: Well, so in '76 you had these outsider ideas, but then in 1980 you are identified, you know, with the tax revolt. Was that an idea that you felt you could use?

BROWN: I thought it would work, but the tax/balanced budget/anti-taxes--that doesn't fly with Democrats. Democrats want more spending. They don't want more taxes, but they want to hear about programs. Or, well, it's not clear what they want. Every election's different. And even the [Ted] Kennedy/Carter--what was it all about? I guess it was Carter's incumbency beat back Kennedy, and Kennedy didn't have enough of an issue. They asked him, "Why are you running?" But he had a hard time telling. That's because when these people run, they run because they want to run--and that's the truth, no matter what anybody tells you, as far as I know. Now, they may have a thought in their head that they're running to 00:52:00give back, or they're running to save the republic--or maybe that's what Washington did, but I wouldn't ascribe that to lesser politicians. But you do need an issue, and the incumbent--I can't remember what Kennedy, how Carter pulled that off--yeah, there wasn't a lot of issue there. I mean you can blame Carter, but it was easier for a Republican to attack, as it turned out, with Reagan. So the fact that Carter was weak was true, but it didn't make any difference for a Democratic attack. It really said you're weak, and that's why we're going to have a Republican. That's just the way it is.

HOLMES: Governor in running for reelection in 1978, the tax revolt aside, did you notice a change in the California electorate? I mean you had now been in 00:53:00public service and elective office for eight years.

BROWN: In '80?

HOLMES: No, in '78, when running for reelection.

BROWN: Yeah, four years, yeah.

HOLMES: Well, and then counting--if we counted secretary of state.

BROWN: So yeah, what?

HOLMES: Did you have differences in alliances, or different segments of the electorate, that you had to think about in running for elective office?

BROWN: Well, it's different. 1978, what is it, 1978, you've got Carter, you have--that's our world. And in 1970, you had Nixon as president, and Reagan as governor, and what are people talking about?

MEEKER: In 1978 you have the Briggs Initiative, which was a kind of a big deal.

BROWN: Uh--but that was the primary, wasn't it? I don't recall that in the campaign.

MEEKER: No, the Briggs Initiative was in November.

SHAFER: November, yeah.

HOLMES: Proposition 6.

BROWN: Well, I think both Younger and I opposed it.

SHAFER: Oh, really?

BROWN: So, but that made it a non-issue.

MEEKER: Reagan came out in opposition to it as well.

BROWN: At the end, at the end. He put out a one-word statement that was very vague.

SHAFER: And I seem to remember a video of you and Jimmy Carter. He was campaigning in California.

BROWN: Oh, I told him to attack it. Was that about the Briggs Initiative?

SHAFER: Yeah.

BROWN: Could be.

SHAFER: Yeah, what do you, how it--what's the story?

BROWN: No, I just was telling him, "Just mention this." I think--yeah, and somebody said well, you ought to--I think someone might have told me. I think someone did tell me. I don't think I thought of that spontaneously.

SHAFER: And it looked like, on the video, you just kind of whispered it in his ear, and he said it as an afterthought, yeah.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

MEEKER: Did Carter even know what it was? [laughing]

BROWN: I'm not sure. He probably did. He knew a lot. Carter was a campaign junkie, as it were. Even though he was kind of a reformer.

HOLMES: In your opposition--I remember in our earlier sessions you--Randy 00:55:00Collier, the Silver Fox from Siskiyou County gave you the advice of--

BROWN: But that had nothing to do with the Briggs Initiative.

HOLMES: No, but the job at the campaign, you know, is not to do things that lose you votes, meaning--

BROWN: Well, no--but everybody says that. That's like two plus two equals four.

HOLMES: [laughing] Okay.

BROWN: That's fundamental to any politician.

HOLMES: But in regards to staking a public position on too many things--

BROWN: Well, right.

HOLMES: What made you want to take a public position on the Briggs Initiative?

BROWN: Well, that was the liberal side of the equation. This is the vast majority of people that I knew, this was overreach--and it was unprecedented. You're going to go look into teachers' backgrounds and tell them who can teach and who can't? It became an unliberal thing. And then there's Briggs. John Briggs was not a favorite in the legislature. He did a death penalty initiative 00:56:00too, so he was a wild man. So it was not a responsible--it wasn't the serious elders of the community saying we need to protect our children by this initiative. It was John Briggs, a clearly right-wing politician looking to make a move, and so, therefore, it became obvious to oppose that on many grounds.

SHAFER: I was going to say when that was defeated there was a sense of jubilation, you know, in the gay community.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

SHAFER: For sure. And a sense that maybe the gay community was beginning to flex its political muscles.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah.

SHAFER: Did you see it that way? That there was a constituency that you know, like--

BROWN: No, I saw the fact that we had a political debate on something related to gay rights. That made it a political issue, and it, in effect, took it out of the shadows and put it into ordinary public discourse, so that was the big 00:57:00thing. It domesticated the issue, as it were, and made it less exotic. And that's the important milestone. Here we had another issue--are you a yes?/are you a no? Whereas before that, the whole topic was fraught with concerns, and something very unusual, not mainstream. So that's what it did. It went from the margin to the mainstream.

SHAFER: Yeah, or it began to, anyway.

BROWN: Well, no--on that issue it became mainstream, with Reagan and the newspaper editorials. People writing about it--writing about teachers, gay teachers, voting yes, or voting no. So that was quite an educational exercise, if you think of the initiatives. They can have that value. And that had value for gay rights, unlike the nuclear freeze initiative. That also passed--well, 00:58:00one was defeated, one was passed, but I don't think that provided any educational--it didn't go anywhere after that, so I just contrast those two things. An initiative can be the beginning of a much larger political understanding, or it can be a dead end. I think the nuclear freeze was somewhat of a dead-end quality because there were not enough people behind it.

MEEKER: Well, did it raise the--did it raise the issue for gay rights, for you?

BROWN: Well, it raised the issue. No, it took the issue from the margins and made it a more ordinary, garden-variety topic, so it did that.

HOLMES: And for you as governor, did that make gay rights an issue that in the future that you would address?

BROWN: Yeah, because you would talk about it, easier to talk about it. I did 00:59:00talk about it in my inauguration in 1979. But in 1975 I didn't talk about it, but it was a different ball game, different issue.

MEEKER: You know, in 1978 it wasn't really clear which way the political winds were blowing on this issue. I mean, you look at Anita Bryant and her success in Florida.

BROWN: Right.

MEEKER: And was there serious concern in the liberal political scene about this becoming an issue that could be used against Democrats?

BROWN: I'm not sure. I'm sure in conservative counties Republican politicians were thinking about it, and Democrats were thinking about it as well in the same way. I'm sure people in Fresno were thinking about it differently than San Francisco or Los Angeles.

SHAFER: It's interesting that something was put on the ballot to hurt gay people ended up helping them politically.

BROWN: Well, because it hadn't even been debated before. It wasn't talked about. Now it's just another thing. Do you remember the proposition?

MEEKER: Prop. 6.

BROWN: So it was Prop. 6. So you've got Prop. 1, Prop. 5, Prop. 6, so now it is what I call a more garden-variety issue, and that helped that issue.

SHAFER: So later that year, Harvey Milk and George Moscone were assassinated. Jonestown happened a couple of weeks before that.

BROWN: Was that before that?

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah, first it was Jonestown.

MEEKER: They all happened after the election.

BROWN: That was '78?

HOLMES: So it's all November of '78.

SHAFER: Yeah, it was mid-November, Jonestown, and then November 27, I think, was the assassinations. Do you remember where you were when that happened? How you heard about it?

BROWN: Which one?

SHAFER: Moscone.

BROWN: They happened on different days.

SHAFER: Well, Moscone/Milk.

BROWN: I was in Sacramento.

SHAFER: And Moscone, of course, had been a state senator. And I don't know what your relationship was like with him.

BROWN: I knew him. Well, my brother-in-law knew him, because he went to St. 01:01:00Ignatius, and he played basketball. But I didn't know him that well.

SHAFER: Yeah, well, when you--like do you remember how you heard about it?

BROWN: Yeah, I think I was having breakfast with Linda Ronstadt in Sacramento, and the state police came by and said, "We've had an attack in city hall," so we've got to be here to--I don't know what they--we left, and--

SHAFER: How did you--do you remember how you reacted?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: Finish your breakfast?

BROWN: I don't remember that. I remember I was with Linda Ronstadt. I do remember that. I think I remember that, but I'd have to go ask. I mean, you know, our memory plays tricks with us. I think that's the case.

HOLMES: Did you ever meet Harvey Milk?

BROWN: No, no. I didn't go to San Francisco that much. I lived in LA, so I went from LA to Sacramento, and San Francisco was a political event. Sometimes I went 01:02:00to the Green Gulch.

SHAFER: In Marin.

BROWN: But I didn't get into the political process of San Francisco very much. Well, I didn't get into the process of LA, Tom Bradley, either. I don't think I ever went to city hall. I mean when my--the day I was inaugurated. The same thing like the lieutenant governor, you don't talk to the lieutenant governor that much. You know, the governor has plenty to do, and it's a nice full sandbox of activities--and that was enough.

HOLMES: The 1960s had its share of political assassinations.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: The 1970s also proved just as violent. What was your read--

BROWN: What happened in the seventies?

HOLMES: Well, we have these assassinations--the Zebra killings, the Zodiac killer as well, all of which happened in California. What was your--?

BROWN: They were before, right?

HOLMES: Mm-hmm. That's correct. Did you--

BROWN: SLA--yeah.

HOLMES: Did you think much about the escalating political violence that you saw during that time?

BROWN: Well, that was a little more when I was secretary of state, I think. They blew up a computer in Fresno--so it was going on for--I think, when was the SLA? That was--

MEEKER: Seventy-four. SLA was Patty Hearst.

BROWN: And the Zebra killings--that was San Francisco, wasn't it?

SHAFER: That was earlier, yeah. Art Agnos was shot, actually, by the--

BROWN: The Zodiac? Yeah, that was in San Francisco. Well, I lived in LA or Sacramento, went to the state--

HOLMES: Well, I mean, I guess maybe another way to put it--

BROWN: I didn't know Art Agnos--and wasn't, what's his name--Leo McCarthy. 01:04:00Wasn't he shot too?

MEEKER: At Jonestown--oh, Leo Ryan.

BROWN: No, Jonestown was someone else.

HOLMES: I guess it's just to say that if we look back at, say, Earl Warren's time in office; your father's time in office, political assassinations, or this type of political violence, was not really part of the stable environment.

BROWN: Right.

HOLMES: But in the 1960s and 1970s it was. Did you think about, you know, this escalating violence that you saw?

BROWN: Well, I think the greater shock was the assassination of Kennedy. That was a big shock, because it had never happened in my lifetime before. And then Bobby Kennedy, certainly. That was during the McCarthy-Kennedy campaign in California, so I remember that. But I don't know what to say about these events. You know, they happen--synagogue, Florida, the bar, the schools--and you know, what--I mean they're definitely--they are symptomatic of something in our 01:05:00society that is not good. But as you see, around the world, you see these assassins--these suicide attacks. So yeah, there is something--a loosening about the fabric of society. Now, it's a little different. I mean Harvey Milk, that guy Dan White, he went a little crazy, I guess. People do strange things, like that thing in the Simi Valley. It happens, so I'm not sure what you're looking for. I mean actually, if you ask me, I fear more a nuclear blunder and a hundred million people get killed than--okay, these things seem to be more random. You 01:06:00know, things go on in people's heads. We have all these people running around, so stuff happens.

SHAFER: Well, and there were two of those incidents in--going back to 1975, one of them with President Ford in Sacramento.

BROWN: Right--right, when I was there. Squeaky--Fromme. Well, you know, what--he walked across, they said he was shot--or they shot him, but everything carried on, and we went on our business. It didn't really ripple the waters that much.

SHAFER: Didn't you have a meeting with him after that?

BROWN: Yeah, I think we did.

SHAFER: He came into the office or the governor's mansion?

BROWN: He was pretty calm.

SHAFER: He was pretty calm?

BROWN: I think so. I have a picture with him. My nieces have a picture with him, so I know some have it. Well, maybe I'm a little abstract, but I find the threat of a big blunder more real to me than some immediate killing. I mean that's 01:07:00happening every day. We have two thousand killings, so divide 365, what's that? 6 a day? There's six homicides a day, not counting--we're not counting suicides. So people are dying, people are being killed, and under terrible circumstances. But I'm more focused on these large historical--since I can't do anything about that. And you know, they did it. What could you do? No one could do anything about it. I mean what could you do about Dan White?

SHAFER: Well, they did some things. I mean--they put metal detectors at city hall. They--

BROWN: Oh right, so you do all that. But I'm saying prevent that one, because you're asking react to that. But react with what kind of emotional activity or investment?

MEEKER: Well, what about discourse? You know, when I interviewed Willie Brown, he talked about the Milk/Moscone assassinations. Granted, it was in his own back yard of San Francisco, but how these really had a psychological impact on him where he describes--one, giving up the idea of running for mayor in San Francisco until much later.

BROWN: Oh, he did.

MEEKER: Yeah.

BROWN: Well, it didn't affect Feinstein that way.

MEEKER: Right.

BROWN: In fact, she did a commercial on it, so she went with it, as it were, right? That's the big commercial--the grabber. Isn't that--was that, is that the one they call the grabber? Where they show the news footage of Moscone, and then she takes over and is speaking as president of the board of supervisors. So it became a political advertisement.

SHAFER: It served her well, yeah.

BROWN: So I'm not quite sure--see, these politicians are a strange breed, so don't try to apply your normal human sensibilities to the political animal. They react differently. [laughing]

And I say--I am more worried about the destruction of climate change, at the mass migrations because of the lack of food production, and then mass migrations going to America and the rest of Europe--what we're seeing already in Europe, and what that's going to do to democratic governance, what it's going to do to just completely upend our world. Plus, while we're waiting, as the various countries--particularly Russia and the United States build new exotic nuclear weapons and speak ill of each other and conjure up all sorts of bad things about the other, we're raising the probability that we're going to have a big blowout. 01:10:00And we're not talking about one person or ten people--we're talking millions of people, quite frankly. Something can be done about that, and I'm doing something about that.

But I am more impressed with these large cataclysmic events: World War I, World War II, the extinction of the Indians. Things that happened maybe in this neighborhood. When I think about these mountains and kind of--Californians going around shooting men, women, and children for--you know, hating the Indians. What I was reading in that book, An American Genocide: [The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873], about Indians--what are they? "Insects in human form," and one of them called them that--it sounded very much like the Nazis. So those big threats that are very much present in human history are not absent today, from the point of view of threats. And if you live in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan, they're happening to you right now. So the 01:11:00question is, is that local activity, of which we're so involved in as Americans, or the American government, is that going to spread through this escalation of all this anti-China, anti-Russia, anti-Iran, anti-this, anti-that? And that same thing's going on over there--anti-America.

So what one can do is try to deal with that, and I am actively engaged in both those issues. So maybe that's more abstract, but to me it's very real, because (a) it's very serious, hasn't happened yet, so we might be able to do something about it--I might be able to. So that's why I'm directing my energy, very much so--and so that's the way I respond to that immediate--and a lot of these, this 01:12:00business of public grief. And I know that's a role, and some politicians take to it. You know, they go to fires like fireflies. They want to put on their flak jacket. And other people want to go to tragic events and grieve. I even heard someone say, "Well, that politician, he's one of the best grievers there are." [laughter] Okay. Well, that doesn't sound very nice. It sounds a little cynical, but there's an aspect of that. And so I would like to--I mean that is a role the president, the governor or mayor, you have to play your part there.

But I think it's more important to try to see big issues and deal with them. For example, maybe like the Oroville Dam. If the Oroville Dam broke, you know, hundreds of thousands of people could die, so let's make sure we've got that dam 01:13:00fixed. Or preventing a nuclear accident with Russia or all the other things that could go wrong. And now the threats are getting greater and greater, so it's not about looking backwards or how things--things were comparatively manageable, in all the instances you mentioned. But now with the development of bioterrorism, CRISPR, where the terrorists are going to be able to make various germs that can be airborne, and then you have AI and 3-D printing. If you want to think about it, there's a lot to be worried about, and I would rather think about those things than each little event that shows up.

MEEKER: So I do want to turn our attention back a little bit to what was going on in the mid to late 1970s, and one of the ways in which people grouped these 01:14:00different things together, these tragedies was a symptom of the excesses of the sixties and seventies.

BROWN: Yeah.

MEEKER: And maybe the one that is most prominent in that is Jonestown, where you have a charismatic leader, vaguely on the left, exploiting ideas around racial equality, and then ultimately engaged in murder and mass suicide.

BROWN: Yeah, that was really unusual.

MEEKER: With charismatic leaders, with ideas that were on the edge, did Jonestown give you pause to think about all that had transpired in terms of new thinking and new ideas over the last twenty years?

BROWN: Well, Jonestown is very evident that a charismatic leader can be 01:15:00extremely destructive. Yeah, that really was quite an event, because of the magnitude of it. And it does show you that you have to be very careful about people who--these authoritarian leaders. And there were complaints about Jonestown--what's his name?

MEEKER: Jim Jones.

SHAFER: Jim Jones.

BROWN: Jim Jones, yeah, Jim Jones. Yeah, I'd heard some complaints about him.

SHAFER: He was very politically connected.

BROWN: In San Francisco, again.

SHAFER: Right, with George Moscone and Harvey Milk.

BROWN: Well, because they were there, and, like Delancey Street, he would deliver bodies. So from a local point of view, that was something. But that was his--when I was secretary of state the people from Round Valley would write letters and say, "Pastor Jones has asked us to write to you and commend what a 01:16:00good job you're doing as secretary of state." I must have gotten twenty-five/fifty letters about that. And I said, "Who the hell is this guy Jones?" And then later on, I heard about it. But again, it's happening in San Francisco. I'm either in LA or in Sacramento, so I didn't go down for their elections or local elections. But, you know, these people were desperate, and that's demagoguery. That's what happens. Look at Hitler. In some ways, look at what Trump's doing. So people like to follow these characters. Look at the ISIS people. So yeah, that is quite a danger--mob psychology, mass hysteria. These are real things, and so they could happen again.

SHAFER: Governor, a couple of times today you've mentioned Linda Ronstadt.

BROWN: Yeah. Well, you mentioned it because that's where I was.

SHAFER: Yeah, but I have to tell you whenever I've told somebody we're working 01:17:00on this project, almost everyone says, "Are you going to ask him about Linda Ronstadt."

BROWN: Yeah, well, yeah--well, you have. [Shafer laughs]

SHAFER: So how did you meet and--?

BROWN: I met her at the El Adobe restaurant one night.

SHAFER: In LA.

BROWN: When I was--I guess I was secretary of state then. Yeah. Then I got to know her better after I'd become governor. So went out for several years, and so that was, that was a very--that was a significant chapter in my life.

SHAFER: What was significant about it?

BROWN: [laughing] Well, the fact that it happened.

SHAFER: A lot of things happen. They're not all significant. [laughing]

BROWN: Well, no, not that many. I don't have too many relationships that lasted that long. In fact, very few, so that was unusual. And she was a dynamic 01:18:00personality, a lot of fun to be with, and that was a whole world--of music, rock and roll, all those--I met Keith of the Rolling Stones. I met different people.

SHAFER: Keith Richards?

BROWN: Yeah, no, I think I met the other guy, Ronnie Wood. I think his wife was having a baby--out there at Peter Asher's house, so I met some of those people. So I was peripherally connected with some of the different people.

SHAFER: I mean that was a window into a very cool culture.

BROWN: It was cool, but it--yeah. It is, but you know, so is politics, so is being governor. [laughing] So, you know, everything is just different human experiences.

SHAFER: Can--can you say like what was it about--as you say, you haven't had a lot of long-term relationships with women. That was a significant one. You know, what was--what made it work for the two of you?

BROWN: What always makes it work is there's an attraction, and also--it's exciting, it's fun, it's not boring. There's vitality there. That it's not the mundane, which is not something that I'm drawn to--the non-mundane, that is.

SHAFER: And did you have--do you have a favorite Ronstadt song?

BROWN: Uh--a favorite? Well, I like "Desperado" myself. In fact, we were just listening the other day, and a lot of people sing that song. She has a lot of songs. I liked a lot of her songs. I remarked there are all these great songs. People don't play them that much. That keeps changing. It's like the politics. It just--it burns out fast. But I think those songs have still lasted.

SHAFER: You went to--Kenya, I think it was with her in 1979. There's that sort of iconic picture of the two of you on the airplane.

BROWN: In the Newsweek, yeah.

SHAFER: Yeah. You know--how did she react to the kind of--attention?

BROWN: She didn't like the attention. She was attention averse. Although now she's going around with her book and talking a little bit, but she didn't like publicity; she didn't like the press.

SHAFER: Yeah. And for you was it like--it gave you--you, and your persona, kind of a glamour, added to it. Was that something you were happy about? Or what--

BROWN: Well, the reason I went there was Huey Johnson said the United Nations Environmental Program was in Nairobi, "So you ought to go over there to look at desertification." So I said I'm going to go over there. Well, then I said wait a minute--should I bring her? Well, you know--not clear that was a smart move, but 01:21:00I said okay, I think I will--and I did.

SHAFER: But it became--I mean your relationship became--do you think it was bigger, in the public imagination, than it deserved?

BROWN: Well, it was and it isn't. You know in politics, people don't vote for your relationships. They vote for where you are positioned in their political concerns. They may talk about the partners and the spouses, but at the end of the day, they voted Reagan for Reagan, not for Nancy. And they voted Bill for Bill, not for Hillary. And the same with all these other people--even Roosevelt. Eleanor was probably the most significant first lady there ever was, but they--it's still Roosevelt, I think. And the same thing with Obama. So yeah, these things feed the narrative, but they don't change the trajectory of the narrative, in my opinion.

MEEKER: Did you guys have conversations about how--how to best manage the press and how to best manage the attention that was going to come to you?

BROWN: No. That's a little too--that's more conscious than I think we were.

SHAFER: She did a fundraiser for you--at least one, maybe more.

BROWN: When?

SHAFER: In 1980, I think.

BROWN: Yeah, with the Eagles? Yeah, we did a couple of those.

SHAFER: Yeah, how did that go?

BROWN: The Rolling Thunder Revue, I think. I can't remember which one it was. We did it in San Diego--Jackson Browne, I think. I still see Jackson Browne. He came by to the Capitol.

SHAFER: Hmm. Is he living in LA still?

BROWN: Uh, yes, he has a place--yeah. Anti-nuclear, that was a little bit of the theme there. The anti-nuclear--well, I guess that was more with Jackson Browne.

SHAFER: Yeah, well--and some of that was post-Three Mile Island too, I think, which was eighty--no?

BROWN: Mmm, no, it was pre--

SHAFER: Was it?

BROWN: Yeah, I think so.

SHAFER: Yeah. What was--what was the, what were the Eagles concerts like for you? Or did you say I've seen it--

BROWN: Well, they were all very exciting. The thing I noticed, about concerts, everybody was happy. They were all total unanimity. In politics, at best, it's fifty-fifty, so I appreciated entertainers or leaders or religious personalities. They could have the entire auditorium, as it were, in unison. [laughing] Whereas in politics, very divisive.

SHAFER: So that kind of glow maybe helped you a little bit?

BROWN: No, but I appreciated it, and can't transfer it. But I remember being at a meeting in Santa Monica at the Miramar Hotel, and it was a Democratic meeting, and there's a lot of grumpiness at Democratic Party--particularly the party apparatus--they get grumpy. And I remember walking down the hall, and there were all these people. They were dressed much nicer than the Democrats--I mean not 01:24:00lavishly, but just very nice, appropriately dressed for--it was the morning. And they all looked so happy. And I said, "What the hell is this?" Well, it was some religious gathering. I don't know--Jehovah['s] Witnesses--or something. But they all looked so happy. And then I walked down--and then I go back to these wrangly--so anyway, I have a certain desire for a more harmonious existence, as opposed to the acrimonious and the bitterness that often attends to political activity.

SHAFER: Hmm, that's interesting to hear you say that. Because you've obviously been in politics your whole--you grew up with politics, you were in politics. You didn't have to go into politics.

BROWN: Yeah. I didn't have to. But I don't have to go to the party meetings either. [laughter] But my rallies were all obviously very exciting.

MEEKER: Was Linda Ronstadt interested in politics? In your ideas?

BROWN: Some. In some. I don't know--she was very focused on music. And I was 01:25:00very impressed with how serious you have to be. I mean--it's work. So I wouldn't say--she is very interested, even today. In fact, I'd say she's more interested, in some ways. Not just in politics, but literature, history.

SHAFER: So you're still in touch with her?

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: Yeah. Anything else, guys?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: That's a good place to--

BROWN: That's it?

SHAFER: Good place to stop?

BROWN: All right!