Jerry Brown | Interview 10 | June 10, 2019

SHAFER: This is June 10, 2019. We're at Mountain House with Governor Jerry Brown, and this is recording session ten. I'm with Martin Meeker and Todd Holmes from The Bancroft Library. I'm Scott Shafer from KQED. And yeah, so just pick up on that if you want to--is there anything about Prop. 13 that you want to add that would--?

BROWN: Well, after the passage of Proposition 13, I invited a number of groups to come, and a number of individuals to come, to Sacramento and discuss the ramifications, the implications of the new law--Proposition 13. And among the people that came were George Shultz and Arthur Laffer--and others. Of course they're working out of the bailout bill, which I think was AB 8. It was worked out by the staff of the Finance Department, which does so many things in the 00:01:00state government. So they worked it out, and that's all within the budgetary documents to see.

SHAFER: What did you feel like you had to--you wanted them to address? What was the fundamental problem?

BROWN: Well, the fundamental problem was that the property tax had been cut by two-thirds, and the property tax funded police, fire, emergency services, schools, among other things. So some source of revenue had to be developed, and that was only the state at that point. The state did have a large surplus, and I certainly couldn't foresee what the succeeding years would be. But as it turned out, we had another recession, and yet the state bailout worked and continues to 00:02:00work. And that was something that I think is of interest--that this is not outside economists. This is the staff of the Department of Finance working to fashion statutory language allocating state revenues that are collected under that law. So what would change was the existing laws that had the local government depending on local property-tax revenue, and we shifted it to state funding. And one of the largest and growing sources over the next several decades was the income tax, and the role of the income tax in financing local government activity.

So from a property tax which remained constant, even growing in recessions, we, 00:03:00being the state, replaced that with state funding which derived from income. And the income tax became increasingly focused on the upper 1 to 2 percent--or more than that, but the bias is toward the richest Californians--and a very small number of them. And that source of revenue changed with the up and down of the stock market, of the economy. And therefore, what was a stable, predictable source of funding called a property tax, which was in the hands of local government elected officials, now was shifted to the legislature. They were facing, for the first time, a two-thirds vote to appropriate the money; and secondly, if the local government wanted to add to that, they were facing an 00:04:00election of two-thirds of the people. Both of those factors were new, and they put in constraints in government.

Now, since Prop. 13, the revenue has certainly dramatically increased. It's gigantic at the state and local level, but I think the critical variable is not so much the source or the amount of money, but its volatility, and there's where we are today. But the important point was that the decisions were made by professional staff, because the detail and the complexity of the revenue statutes were beyond almost all the politicians, and then secondly, what the staff did, ratified by the legislature and myself. But what they did was make the shift from a stable local tax called the property tax, to a very volatile 00:05:00tax called the state income tax.

SHAFER: As you said, there was a surplus at the time, so the state was able to backfill a lot of that money.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: To what extent at the time did you and the legislature feel that that was a sustainable long-term solution?

BROWN: I don't think we think in terms of a long term/sustainable solution. It's not clear that anybody does that. I was always concerned what it would be in a few years. I can't tell you exactly, but I think your question assumes a level of forecasting or future-oriented focus which is generally beyond the capacity of the people who deal with these problems. And not because of their inherent 00:06:00incompetence or limitation, but that's just the nature of what can be known by anybody, much less a collection of government leaders and staff.

HOLMES: Governor, I wanted to get your opinion on that, because in some ways when we look at Prop. 13, there seems to be a conservative paradox, meaning the proponents of Prop. 13 were able to cut taxes, property taxes. Yet at the same time, it also, therefore, made local governments and local communities, therefore, dependent on the state.

BROWN: Yeah.

HOLMES: What was your opinion on that?

BROWN: It didn't seem like the major issue at the time. Yeah, the problem was that there was a property tax--the challenge was that there was a property tax revolt. People were upset. At the same time they voted the cut in services; I 00:07:00think the voters didn't think the cuts would be made, and they turned out to be right. There were obviously some cuts, but by and large, government went on its merry way. And every government, I'd say, almost without exception, is spending a lot more money than it was then. Whether it's more money in inflation-adjusted terms for population, that you'd have to look into.

MEEKER: May I ask a question? So you had mentioned both George Shultz and Arthur Laffer came and consulted with you as this transition was happening. What kinds of ideas were they providing? I mean they're typically associated with a more conservative side of the perspective.

BROWN: Yeah. Well, I invited labor union representatives as well. I don't know that idea is the right word I would use. The government functions in an 00:08:00environment of journalistic scrutiny, and so when you have to propose a solution, you have to build support--and you don't build support by just inviting the legislators down to your office. As governor, you have to create some public activity that is reported on by the newspapers and television and radio, and through that reporting, a certain amount of attention, interest--in the vernacular, buzz--takes place, and that gives salience to the topic.

So in reality, all this is being done in the bowels of the bureaucracy by what I call the gnomes--also, the staff--and they're doing it. But in order to satisfy the newspaper people, who need news, and the legislators who need focusing 00:09:00external sources of information, the method I chose--which was similar to what I used in the farm labor movement--was to bring people into the governor's office, after they leave, to walk outside at the door or the outer office and speak to the press. And that was a way of building attention in radio, news, and television--and newspapers, that then becomes part of the discussion. Because absent the news, the government can't function, because people don't know what to think. They're not going to sit there and delve into the documents.

This staff stuff is pretty turgid, and I would say I myself would not have read the actual laws. The laws are beyond the legislators, the governor, the people. That's kind of a mythology: that there are laws being made by representatives of 00:10:00government. The laws are being made increasingly, at every level, by staff. And the staff are trained professionals, who alone know what they're talking about. For example, if you're talking about that bailout measure, would there be fifty people? Maybe there'd be a hundred, two hundred, three hundred--I don't know. But out of 24 million Californians, you're talking about a tiny, infinitesimal subset of individuals who can apply their mind and intelligence to, first of all, understanding it.

As far as about writing it, you're talking under a dozen, although there will be some legislative lobbyists or staffers in LA and San Francisco, some of the larger places, that will look at this. And then they will instruct their lobbyists, and that will create the atmospherics. So there's a lot of show going 00:11:00on. But in reality, it's a staff function that is looked at by other staffs, in other local government, local governments, and then it shapes into a bill. The bill will have a summary, kind of headnotes that people will look at, and there will be talking points derived, in one form or another. And the talking points will be recited, and the people will take votes, and then it will happen. But I don't want people to think that the legislators and the governor were engaged in some intellectual deliberation, actually going over the provisions. Now, they would talk--I can't remember exactly what, if there were any sticking points or not, but there's where it is.

We had the surplus, which I carefully built up, just like the same surplus I built this last time--relative to the size of budget, $24 million general fund 00:12:00versus $130 million general fund, I think it's comparable. It's about $5 billion. So that was there. Now, some people call that the obscene surplus--Jess Unruh did that, because people don't want government to have extra money that it's not spending, because that's the people's money. They should get it. On the other hand, because of the cyclical nature of our economy and the extreme volatility of our revenue sources, if you don't build up a big surplus, you will create a huge deficit. And the deficit now is much bigger than it was when I was governor the first time. And that deficit will be funded by cutbacks on programs everybody likes, on various borrowing and accounting maneuvers that will tide people over until the recovery kicks in, grows several years, and replenishes 00:13:00the state funding sources--and this goes on over and over again.

And it goes on more now because of the income tax being such a large source of funding for important functions like education, but also funding for local government. That's all part of the existing bailout, things like realignment. Pete Wilson had a realignment. I had a realignment on criminal justice, so it's a constant readjusting of this flow of money from the state, the county, the city, the special districts, the schools, with also adjustments in obligations and responsibilities.

MEEKER: Can you tell me about the transition from main source of income being from property tax, to income tax at a very top level of earners? Are you saying 00:14:00that that basically comes from staff-driven initiatives that are then introduced to legislators? Because it seems to me like a very strongly political decision, but you're talking about it as being a bureaucratic one.

BROWN: Well, first of all, the problem of shifting from property to income was not a problem. It was an opportunity. Either you're going to have police not functioning, schools closing--that's not going to happen, so you have to get state money. The income tax was only a third around that time. Now I think it's about 50 percent. Income tax is about 50 percent, maybe more, and the payers of the income tax, 60 to 70 percent of it, are the top 1 percent. That wasn't true then, but it has evolved. Now, that wasn't a decision anybody made; no one knew 00:15:00that much, not even the experts. I mean somebody talked about that. They warned that the local government lose their capacity. But that's a total non-issue when people are seeing their property tax doubled and tripled--that's what they want an answer to, not the shifting of power, which even today is probably obscure to except for maybe a few thousand very knowledgeable people. So what you said is a total non-issue in terms of what the focus was.

SHAFER: So 1979, you've won reelection by twenty points, and--

BROWN: Twenty? Closer--more than twenty points.

SHAFER: No, I think it was twenty--maybe twenty-one.

BROWN: Yeah, well, it's more than twenty. [laughter] I don't know if it's twenty-one. I think it is.

SHAFER: It was a healthy margin. I think it was 57-36, but anyway--

BROWN: That's twenty-one, in my book.

SHAFER: So Miriam Powell, in her book, writes that you delivered your inaugural 00:16:00address on statewide television sounding more like a Republican candidate than a Democratic governor. What is your response to that characterization?

BROWN: Well, it's the problem of the binary quality of the political mind, the journalistic mind, and our collective thinking. The two items in there--the balanced budget was certainly a big thing, constitutional amendment for a balanced budget. But I was concerned that the inflation would continue, and that government spending keeps rising. And I quoted Keynes about how inflation is like a foreign enemy, but it's undetected until it has totally destroyed the society. I do think that the spending was out of control. I think it's out of 00:17:00control--I think it's excessive. Now, how a big state or a country manages their finances is a complicated and challenging issue to fully grasp. But it strikes me that while the government budget is not like a family budget, nevertheless, you can't keep spending more than you're producing or more than you're taking in.

As a matter of fact, we not only spend more money than the government collects, we also import hundreds of billions of items that we need. I have a little metal basket, a simple little metal basket, and I looked at it and it got here on FedEx, and yeah, it came from China. But I don't know why that couldn't be made in downtown Williams, or maybe even downtown Vacaville. But that, and a million 00:18:00other items, are made more cheaply [in China]. So that elimination of American jobs, and that reliance on foreign countries--and the reliance on financial technology, financial manipulation and creativity--allows us to mask the fact that we're spending. And we assume we need and must spend more than we're willing to pay for, [but] it is not without casualties.

The fact that the middle class was hollowed out, the fact that there's this populism, the fact the rich are getting richer, that the whole society is being shaken--is because the society hasn't learned to live with balance. And I thought that a balanced-budget amendment (and I never said how to craft it) was going to be an exercise that I would engage in, but you have to balance what you 00:19:00spend with what you earn or what you produce. It's the same thing with your body. You've got to balance your calorie intake with your calorie consumption; otherwise you get yourself into a big overweight problem. Well, the society can mask all this. I notice that the Federal Reserve now is talking about lowering interest rates, and just a year ago they were worried about trying to raise them. Well, the proposition that I'm worried about, and it's a conservative idea, fiat money; in France they just made up money, and that ended very unhappily.

For example we, here in California, had more than $50 billion of deferred 00:20:00maintenance in roads and bridges. Okay? So people say, "Well, we can't afford that." But each year it's getting worse. Now, we did get a tax, but the tax--we barely got it. All the Republicans, except one, were against it. And the Republicans said no tax, but then the Democrats have their own issue, where they want to spend more, but they don't want to balance it with the taxes. So this is an American societal--maybe even Western, maybe even an issue of modernity. People want the goodies. They want the healthcare, they want the education, they want their car, they want their gasoline. They want all the goodies, but they're not willing to balance what they are able to produce.

And if I look right here at the Mountain House--I mean [August] Schuckman came 00:21:00here in 1878, and he couldn't live off growing things or sheep. He had to have a hotel called the Mountain House, and it was designated a post office. I'm sure he got some revenue from that. So he needed multiple sources of income to satisfy--but even that was not enough for his eight children. They had to move on. And all but two left the area. But in America, we're not worried about that balance, because we have something called the Federal Reserve. We have something like China and Mexico, and other places, that will work much harder than most Americans want to work, and they'll accept the wage much lower. And because of ships and planes, we can get those foreign workers to do things that we're not willing to do, at prices we're not willing to accept.

So the balanced budget was a simple idea, but for me it embodied the larger and fundamental concept of balance, or in scientific terms, homeostasis; the body 00:22:00can't function if it loses its homeostasis. But the body politic is losing its homeostasis. It's getting more and more off keel. It's like a car, or like an engine in runaway, and it's not stable. And you've got to--and one of the things you have to do to stabilize is make sure that your money out-go is equal to your money in-go, and not just made up with borrowing. And borrowing's fine if you have a source of repayment, but most of our borrowing is just borrowing--invent and make the money, and so far it has worked. [laughing] But we're moving in a direction where I don't think it's working, and I saw that in January of 1979, and I wanted to stop it then. And I didn't stop it then, and it's much, much worse.

In fact, I remember going to James Wright, Speaker of the House of 00:23:00Representatives [1987-1989]. I had a little green book, and it showed the federal government spending. And I opened the book, and I just looked at it, and I said "Gee, just a few years ago the interest on the debt was $20 billion a year. And now, "it wasn't four, five, six, seven years [later], "it's gone to $60 billion!" And I opened to the page and said, "Look at this! It's gone from $20 [billion] to $60 [billion]." He didn't respond too much.

Well, check out the interest on the national debt today. It's in the hundreds of billions, and there's no agreement. "Oh, we're going to put a limit on it"--and they can't. Now, the Republicans say that, but then they spend money on tax cuts; they spend money on military. Then you go over to the Democratic side--"okay, we're not going to let you do that, let us do it for education," for whatever the Democrats want. So you have a collective official agreement to 00:24:00spend and spend, in a way that will undermine, and possibly destroy, the American system of governance. So I didn't understand all that exactly, but I understood a good deal of it.

And that's what I was trying to say in that speech, if you read it. It was about inflation, and I thought this would be a mechanism to start a national debate. Today, we'd call it a national conversation, but we didn't have that term then. I wanted a national debate, and I thought through that we could get the governing institutions, the governing leadership, to confront this problem. And I was not correct: (a) I didn't get elected, but (b) the governing leadership has not met it even now. And if you look to the Democrats or Republicans, they don't have a viable consensus solution [on] how to align our spending with our revenue generation.

SHAFER: But at the time there were fellow Democrats who felt like you were 00:25:00cynically embracing the tax cut.

BROWN: Well, they think balance is a great act of cynicism. Survival is cynicism. It was true. We've got to take care of our constituents, and we're not cynical. All we want you to do is spend--and borrow and spend, and we'll worry about it--I'll be out of office. And all the people that criticized me are gone. Most of them are dead. So they weren't worried about balance. Well, I'm alive, and I'm still worried about it. And it's not getting better, it's getting worse. [laughing] So there.

SHAFER: So those who--at the time, because they're not all dead. I mean Maxine Waters, for example, was in the assembly--

BROWN: Jack Henning is dead. He blew his top--yeah, I still remember that. He said, "It was the worst speech I've heard since Herbert Hoover!"

SHAFER: So here's a quote from Maxine Waters. "The schizophrenic man who is a Democrat today, at his inaugural address he was a Republican. I've been terribly disappointed with the governor, and I was not about to welcome him with open arms."

BROWN: Well, right, because paying your bills with a fully earned revenue stream is unacceptable. It is completely deviant to the cultural norm of modern America. It is, I'm sorry. And I don't care where you look, they're all agreed, no matter if you're a right-winger or a left-winger, there is no constituency for fiscal restraint. I will assert that. There is no constituency for fiscal responsibility. No matter what they say, they don't mean it.

SHAFER: When they said you're abandoning your principles. You're throwing the elderly--

BROWN: No, it is my fundamental principle that has never changed. I think it was my great-grandfather's fundamental principle. And I would say my grandmother, Ida Schuckman--I remember she had a Murphy bed, and I remember going over and having what she called a hamburg, at her little apartment on Seventeenth and 00:27:00Lincoln Way. And when I opened the drawer to get a fork, I noticed the fork was bent. And I thought here's the governor's mother using bent forks. So hmm, that's something. [laughing] But, we live a balanced life.

MEEKER: So you're identifying a fundamental part of the American character, and the reason it's like this is because the United States is unique in that our debt is salable. We can continue to produce debt--

BROWN: So far, till now.

MEEKER: So you're saying that the fiscal system is out of whack, that we don't want to have a clean fiscal house?

BROWN: It's out of whack because we're getting some messages from nature. It's called climate change. It's called species extinction, it's called habitat destruction, it's called rising sea levels--so we're getting plenty of notice 00:28:00that we're living an imbalanced life. And I would have to say, in going back to my great-grandfather over here, there was dozens of families working the land around here and they were growing wheat on homesteads. Right now, the land is only used for cows to eat this imported, exotic grass that we brought from Spain. And you eat these cows--then you bash them over the head and you turn them into hamburger and steak. But it used to be a viable place, with schools and cemeteries and growing families, and it's a shadow of what it once was. That's the imbalanced life. You've can't break the laws of nature, and that's what we are, in effect, doing in so many different ways--today. In America, and in other parts of the world. It's not just the US.

MEEKER: So in terms of financial health, the fiscal system is out of balance, in essence, because the monetary system--we can print as much money as we want to?

BROWN: Well, that's the mechanism. But the reality--we're out of balance. Since 00:29:00the time Homo sapiens emerged until 1860, we never had more than a billion people. Now we've got 7.4 billion, and we're going to have several billion more. And we never had any cars--now we have a billion cars. It is totally unsustainable, either through climate destruction or nuclear destruction, we will come into balance. But the coming into balance will be such an overcorrection, that you won't like it.

SHAFER: Hmm. Interesting. So around this time, 1979--

BROWN: That's a lot more than interesting. It's damn frightening. I wish it would wake people up, but so far it hasn't.

SHAFER: You're warming up for your speech tonight, it sounds like.

BROWN: No, I'm just trying to wake you up, because we're all asleep. We're living in Sleepyville.

SHAFER: You, around this time you were getting--thinking, I assume, about running for president again?

BROWN: Yes, I've always been thinking about running for president. I think about 00:30:00running for governor--also, I do think about a lot of things though, and that's certainly one of them.

SHAFER: But to what extent were you thinking--okay, there's this new sort of tax-revolt mentality. And I'm going to embrace it, and--

BROWN: Trying to work with that--you know, any politician that's successful has to work with the zeitgeist of his time, otherwise you can't even be heard. It's like even today, if you want to be heard, you should respond to a tweet from Trump. Because Trump, by the journalistic agreement, is the defining factor, the pivot for all discussion. It has to be related to Trump, or you can't get covered. And even if you don't mention Trump, they will bring it into the story to make it anti-Trump, so that's part of the zeitgeist. And if you're talking about the tax revolt, when it was the tax revolt, you've got to deal with that, or what you're talking about looks off the point.

SHAFER: So when Democrats said, at the time, you're being cynical, was there some truth to that? Or opportunistic.

BROWN: Wait a minute. Are you saying to deal with the problems that are facing you is an act of cynicism?

SHAFER: No, but you're saying that there was this zeitgeist, and you had to kind of plug into--

BROWN: Well, that is what democracy is about. [laughing] It's about the feelings of people. If you want to say, "I don't care what the people think. I'm going to go do what I want." There are people who know how to do that--Pol Pot was very good at that, so was Joseph Stalin. So was Adolf Hitler, and his henchman Goebbels. They said, "I don't care what the people think. I don't care what the zeitgeist is. I'm doing what I want. Anybody who doesn't like it, I'm going to kill." No. In democracy we are interacting through debate, through argument, and through evidence, hopefully. And if the name of the game is tax revolt, and you want to be a politician--you've got to deal with tax revolt. If you want to go deal with something else, that's another line of business. You can write for an 00:32:00obscure magazine maybe.

SHAFER: Obviously, Jimmy Carter was president.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: And you were thinking about running, challenging him, as was Ted Kennedy. Did you think of--you were going to challenge him from the right?

BROWN: No. No, because I also was for getting rid of nuclear power. This was another thing that was emerging, and I thought nuclear power was deeply flawed. And it was also connected to nuclear proliferation, because in order to build and maintain a nuclear power plant for electricity, you have to develop the skills that can be transferred into making nuclear weapons. And so one implies the other, even though they tried to square that circle and say, "No, we're going to give everyone peaceful nuclear skills, but we're not going to use them for bombs." We find out, with the proliferation now to Pakistan and India and 00:33:00other countries, that didn't work that way.

What I liked about that is what I saw as the connection is fiscal imbalance with environmental imbalance. That it's all part of human beings living within a natural system, and you have to have balance. And so I thought nuclear [energy]--where you boil water by having nuclear fission, and then generating radioactive material for thousands of years--was imbalanced. That's like spending more than you have. You're not living in a world that is sustainable; your part is not proportionate to the way the system works. It's out of balance. So that's where I saw the key to those two.

But it so happens that the zeitgeist--or maybe I'll call it the ethos--made it 00:34:00very difficult to connect those two ideas, because the small mind does a, "Ooh, you don't want to overspend. You're a Republican." "Oh, you don't like nuclear power, well you're a liberal, you're a Democrat," or something. So you put the two together, and that creates a certain cognitive dissonance that I was not able to overcome in the 1980 election.

SHAFER: Hmm. What were, there were--a lot of people, I think, told you that they didn't think it was a good idea for you to run for president.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: How did those conversations go?

BROWN: Do you think I can remember a conversation from 1980? [laughter] That would mean I'm not doing much thinking today, because I'm so buried in my old memories. I must have shoeboxes of notes that I spend my time looking at.

SHAFER: So why did you--why did you ignore all their advice?

BROWN: Because I was very ambitious. You know, they had good advice--I didn't listen to it. By the way, if I'd listened to it, I might not have had the focus 00:35:00and the ambition to get to be governor at the age of thirty-six. So if something gets you in one place, it doesn't necessarily get you in the next place.

SHAFER: So they were right, that it would have been a mistake to--?

BROWN: Yeah, they were right. Well, they were right, first of all, because Kennedy jumped in. And I didn't anticipate that. But then I should have jumped out, and I didn't.

SHAFER: Why?

BROWN: Well, you know, the human mind is not as flexible as we would like. And sometimes you're going down a course, and you get a little notion you better change course, but you still keep going.

SHAFER: So is that pride? Stubbornness?

BROWN: You get your own adjectives. Because you're trying to describe my state of mind in 1980, and you want to come up with an appropriate adjective. Do you think it exists? I doubt it.

SHAFER: [laughing] What adjective would you use?

BROWN: Well, I wouldn't use an adjective. I don't think it's useful. I don't know that it's knowable, because whatever you say, it's so far removed. And the 00:36:00context is--so many factors have changed since the time of the Carter: the 1980 campaign, the primary even before Reagan has emerged, that I think it's very hard to say what I was looking at and what I wasn't.

SHAFER: You say you were very ambitious. Like why did you--?

BROWN: Well, that's just my little adjective. But you had some other adjective that you like better. But I don't know that any of them will illuminate what you're trying to get at. What is the state of mind that was going--what was my state of mind, and what can we learn for history from elucidating that state of mind forty years later? And I don't think (a) I could give you that factual report, and therefore (b) I don't know that you can make anything out of it.

SHAFER: Well, maybe say it a different way. Why did you want to be president so badly?

BROWN: Well, why did you want to do this interview? You do things. This is your job.

SHAFER: But it wasn't your job to run for president.

BROWN: [laughing] You know, I remember talking to Burt Lancaster once. I had him 00:37:00over to my house when I lived on Topanga Beach. "And people come up to me and say, 'How is it to be a movie actor?'" And he said, "How is it to have a head?" [laughter]

MEEKER: Why did Carter deserve a primary challenge for the 1980 election?

BROWN: Well, I don't know if Carter deserved a challenge, but I deserved to be a challenger. I deserved to run, because it's--look at today! You have twenty-one people. When I was running, it was only a couple. It was much more--your question is more appropriate--why are there so many people running today?

MEEKER: No, no. The question is why--?

BROWN: Well, I didn't agree with him on nuclear power. There's a number of [issues]--the MX missile. I said, "Instead of putting the MX missile on railroad cars, we should build a high-speed rail, build a bullet train, and move people around instead of missiles." That was actually part of my speech in 1980.

MEEKER: Some people attribute Carter's decline to the Iranian hostage crisis. Did you have any particular thoughts about that?

BROWN: Yes. I thought it was a mistake to bring the Shah into America to get his hospital care. That was not a smart move, and not in the interest of the American people, in my opinion, driven by, I don't know, some of his friends, David Rockefeller and others, whose names I won't mention. From a strategic point of view, looking toward America's place given our previous overthrow through the CIA and the other forces from Great Britain that helped get rid of the democratically elected government, I think we should have been more cautious. Definitely. I don't think, I know we should have been more cautious, and history proves it.

SHAFER: You said you deserved--

BROWN: I didn't deserve, no, it's not about deserve--just in the sense if you're an American citizen, and you grow up and you want to be president, that's what 00:39:00everybody tells you you can do. But had it been better not to run? Yes, no question. If I had not run, and prepared in a very thoughtful way a subsequent run for the presidency, I might have made it--but I didn't.

SHAFER: So if you had it to do over again, which--perhaps you don't.

BROWN: Well, there's no do-overs. [laughter] You can't do it again. You've got to keep going.

SHAFER: Yeah. So getting back to the legislature. That relationship was deteriorating, and--

BROWN: Well, it had problems from day one, because I ran on political reform. And political reform means that there's a need for reform, and the people who need to be reformed are the legislators who the governor has to work with, so there was tension right from day one. Also, they were struggling in their own way to be legislators, to be legislative leaders, and I went from junior college 00:40:00board to secretary of state to governor, certainly with the help of my father's experience and name and reputation, and that breeds something less than admiration.

SHAFER: So you think there was like resentment, or--

BROWN: I don't like to give all these psychological labels to such a diverse body of political leaders. We're all in the same boat. We see offices; we want to run for them. When we get them, we want to run for the next one. That is the nature of the American system. Now, we like to do good while we're there, or we like to do good at ever higher levels. And that's the way they are; that's the way I am. Why is that? That I leave to you--you UC journalists, you UC-whatever you are, to kind of research all that stuff, but I don't think it's evident.

SHAFER: One of the issues that came up was a resistance, on your part, to increased salary for state workers.

BROWN: Yeah, well I'm trying to live within balance. Increasing these salaries is a good thing, but too many goods is a bad thing. And when you have a constraint, you've got to stop somewhere--and all the cuts are always on good things. If you look at the budget cuts under Schwarzenegger and under myself, you're cutting things, most of which are good. Government only does things because they're in the public interest--or at least people think they are. So when you have to cut what government is spending money on, you're cutting what is in the public interest. That's the nature of the beast, and that's why it's so controversial. But government has to live within its means. It doesn't have an open line into the pocketbooks, the bank accounts, of its citizens. It has to pass laws, and in California you have to get voter approval for taxes, so that's why we have to keep with limits.

And other people say that no, and you don't have--as James Mills told me, the 00:42:00senate leader, lives in San Diego. He's still alive. He said, "I vote for every expenditure, and against every revenue measure," and then he chuckled. He thought that was very humorous, and that's often what a lot of the legislature can do. They can get the credit, as they think of it in their minds, of providing more childcare, more roads, more school money, more healthcare, more everything. And then when it comes down to paying for it, they don't have to worry about it. And then you get a deficit, and you get a new governor, and the governor usually is the one who has to accept it. So the legislature has their role, and the governor has to play the role of a governor. And you know as the 00:43:00machine accelerates, the governor then dampens down the speed, and that's really what governing means. Kubernao. It comes from a Greek word meaning helmsman [kubernetes].

SHAFER: At what point--you were out campaigning, and your field director at the time, LeRoy Chatfield said, "Jerry, this isn't Maryland." In other words, it was tougher going than 1976.

BROWN: Yeah, yeah--I don't remember him saying that, but he well could have. But I also had Marshall Ganz, so we went along, did pretty well, and we started to pick up speed in Maine. So what's your question?

SHAFER: Well, when did you start to feel like maybe you should get out, or maybe things weren't--?

BROWN: Well, I got out [after] Wisconsin, that was a clear defeat. So but if you haven't been defeated yet, why--these people running for office, all twenty-one of them [referencing current pool of Democratic candidates for president.] Couldn't you put the question to them? Why are you doing this? You have no chance. Well, they're going to let the voters tell them that. And that's what I 00:44:00did. Now, is that smart? No. Not clever enough.

SHAFER: What do you mean?

BROWN: What I said speaks for--it's clear. It's crystal clear.

SHAFER: So the Wisconsin, there was that event with--

BROWN: Francis Coppola. Great idea, but it didn't--no, it was a great idea, but the trouble is the chroma key didn't work. The technology--like the 737 Max, maybe like the software that controls our nuclear retaliatory system. They break down. When they break down, you get little disasters.

MEEKER: What was the idea behind the event?

BROWN: Well, the idea is clear.

MEEKER: What was the great idea?

BROWN: Well, if you read the speech, it'll tell you what it is.

MEEKER: Well, I read the speech--I watched it.

BROWN: Well, I think my speech was fine. The problem was what was going on behind me. It would have been pictures of new factories and clean air. So the idea, which was Francis Coppola's, was to create a visualization of what was 00:45:00being talked about, and communicating more effectively with the people of Wisconsin. So it was an idea, but it didn't work. It broke down.

SHAFER: How--how aware were you while you?

BROWN: I wasn't aware of that. I didn't know. I wasn't even sure how much I knew. But you can only remember certain things. I might have known.

SHAFER: As part of the state-of-the-state speech, you were given sort of a frosty reception with very little applause when you came in, I think. It was obviously--the Demo[crats], your own party, was not happy with you. And Agnos brought a black hat, which was--I think a reference to your having said if you vote for this pay increase, you should wear a black hat.

BROWN: Did I say that? Yeah.

SHAFER: Yeah. So like--do you remember that at all?

BROWN: Not particularly. I can remember--but you've got to remember, the legislators, they're working their side of the aisle. So they're telling their constituents we can get you more money, if the government would just let us. Of 00:46:00course in California, that's not true in many cases, because we have a limit on deficit spending. So at some point you hit the wall, and not only do you not have more money, but then you have to start cutting even what you gave them. But then they can always point fingers, and that is the name of the game is to be able to shift responsibility and identify blame. And that's a lot of what politics is.

SHAFER: Was there any alternative plan that they presented?

BROWN: For what?

SHAFER: To deal with Prop. 13 without cutting? Like revenue, more revenue. Did anybody suggest, "Hey, let's raise this tax."

BROWN: No, this was a tax-cutting mood. We were cutting the inventory tax. We cut the estate tax. We reduced the income tax by altering the inflationary feature, by indexing the income tax. A problem that is very much inherent here, 00:47:00and which I didn't grasp the way I do today is that regardless of the spending, we are in a cyclical economy, the market economy. It goes up, and it goes down. When it goes down, if you don't have a surplus--which you rarely have--then you're going to have to cut. So I was always in the position of trying to create enough surplus that we wouldn't have to cut.

Because that has been the history: of governors leaving deficits. But that thing wasn't that obvious. And people don't do the arithmetic, generally. The budget's a large item. Very few people understand it--well, in detail, almost nobody understands it. But the more general-type people, the legislators, the governor, they're just talking in more general terms. So I had a general propensity to try 00:48:00to live within my means. That was the way the world worked! You know, we didn't have credit cards. You had a charge account from your local department store. But the unlimited credit card, the way you have today--the borrowing, we're into much bigger borrowing. And so I was more on that pay-as-you-go kind of view.

But that then ran into--you have to say no. And there is no amount of yeses that will slow down the continuing discovery of new demands. So the escalation--because if you look at the stratification between the lowest income, the next level, if you break it into quartiles, or whatever, quintiles--and then you say, "Okay, the bottom 40 percent, they need help." So until you can pull 00:49:00down the top 20 percent and distribute it to the bottom 40 percent, you're going to need more childcare, more programs, more things. Because people don't have enough money to pay for housing, food--that's why we have food stamps. You have an unlimited perceived, and in some ways real, need to shift money. And we don't shift that much, so it's a little bit more, a little bit more. So that's in California. I don't know about Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi. They're doing this at a much slower level, but that's the way government lurches forward. You know, even in Kansas you have teachers' strikes, because they were underfunding. So you create a big hubbub, and they got taxes.

So we do the same thing in California, but there is always the tension between the legislators that are going to overshoot, at least from my point of view, and 00:50:00the governor, who is going to have to explain when the money's not there. So when they focus, the newspapers, which used to be predominant, when they would report stories, they would report a whole list of legislators--120 legislators, or fifty did this, and seventy did that. Now they say the governor, and one or two legislators. So the legislators basically have a great latitude to spend without consequences, and also the governor can veto. So if the governor doesn't veto, they say it's your fault anyway. So there's an inherent difference between the legislative and the executive branch when it comes to spending. Now sometimes governors want to spend more than legislators. That's true in other states, but in California that's not true.

SHAFER: So you took a very, I think, well-publicized trip to Africa in 1979, 00:51:00with Linda Ronstadt. How did you two meet?

BROWN: I met her at El Adobe restaurant. In fact, she was reaching up from a table to get something off some kind of a platform, that was above the seats. And I saw her in her cute outfit with her jeans, standing there, and I thought, well, that's interesting. So I went and met her.

SHAFER: You just walked up to her and said--?

BROWN: I can't remember. Maybe--she was there. I don't know, I can't tell you exactly how it happened.

SHAFER: I assume you knew like her music and you knew--?

BROWN: I did know her music.

SHAFER: Yeah, yeah. And what do you think was the glue for your relationship?

BROWN: I'm not going to go down that road. Glue. [Shafer laughs] There was definitely attraction.

SHAFER: And how did you feel, or how did you, you know--?

BROWN: How did I feel? That's always a good--

SHAFER: I know, as soon as I said that, I knew you were going to challenge me on that. [laughter]

BROWN: No, I think it's good to have feelings about things, but to try to then put them into words and describe them--that's what novelists do.

SHAFER: There's that iconic photo of the two of you in the plane.

BROWN: The Newsweek photo, yeah.

SHAFER: Yeah, any thoughts about that?

BROWN: No.

SHAFER: No thoughts?

BROWN: I think it speaks for itself.

SHAFER: Why do you think--it seems like there's a tremendous public fascination with that. I think I've mentioned that almost everyone I've told that I'm doing this project said, "Are you going to talk to Linda Ronstadt?" Like--why do you think that--?

BROWN: Well, you know why. It's interesting. She was interesting, I was interesting--the two of us were more interesting. That's all. It's a combination, how you put politics in rock and roll, and that was the mood at the time. That music, which is not the mood today, and it's hard to even imagine today. Today we've come so far in so many different dramatic events. But at the 00:53:00time, it was just--first of all, politics is not that interesting. You know, if you're going to talk about the budget bailout bill or realignment, you're going to have a hard time getting the same clicks as a trip to Africa with Brown and Ronstadt.

SHAFER: And my sense of her--and I don't know her, but what I've read is that she was not--she didn't like the spotlight very much.

BROWN: No, she didn't like the spotlight.

SHAFER: Yeah, so how did you negotiate that? Because obviously wherever you went--and wherever she went--you were attracting all this media. Was that--how did you deal with that?

BROWN: I don't know. We dealt with it. I dealt with it--trying to avoid it when you can.

SHAFER: Yeah, okay. Anything else about that? So Mike Curb became lieutenant 00:54:00governor. Merv Dymally lost. That was the first time in a long time that people had split their tickets between the governor and lieutenant governor. What did you know about Mike Curb when he got elected?

BROWN: Nothing.

SHAFER: Nothing at all?

BROWN: Well, what I read in the campaign. He was in the music business. Linda Ronstadt knew Mike Curb, so I knew a little, but not very much.

SHAFER: And he, obviously, thought that he would take advantage of your being out of the state.

BROWN: Right.

SHAFER: When--did you, like when did you realize that was going to be a problem?

BROWN: Well, when did I, do you mean what date? Was I having breakfast and heard that he--

SHAFER: What was the first thing he did that you remember?

BROWN: I think it was something with the Air Resources Board or regulation, I believe. But I told Mike Curb. "Mike, look, don't try to play governor when you're not governor. It's not going to make you look very good. And in fact, it 00:55:00creates a bad impression generally, for the governor, you, state government. So why don't you figure out something that's within your domain--for example, economic development." Because the lieutenant governor is the head of the Economic Development Commission, and then we could work on projects that would be valuable and would be useful. But he didn't listen to that, because I don't think he trusted me, which goes back to my point that rarely does anybody ask for my advice. [laughter] Even when it's good advice, and that was particularly good advice, because he might have got the nomination. Instead--when was this?

SHAFER: 1979.

BROWN: Yeah, he might have beaten Deukmejian, might have, had he acted in a gubernatorial way. I don't know what he thought. You'd have to go ask him. But there was another path for him. But you know, that's hindsight. There was another path for me, in 1980, so we're not totally clear about what's in our 00:56:00best interests.

SHAFER: What kind of problems did that cause? I mean he was trying--he tried to appoint judges.

BROWN: No, there were no problems. It was just a media story. And the legislators could take advantage of that. Anybody who wanted to hammer me could say there's a problem. Just like there was no problem with me being outside of the state, but you have to have something to hang your hat on. You need an ostensible causative factor--oh, this happened because Brown is outside of the state campaigning. Oh, this happened because Curb is making decisions. In truth, I would say there was zero impact, except the political atmospherics. Which by the way, that's to say, it minimizes political atmospherics quite a bit.

SHAFER: So it was around this time that you got the nickname Governor Moonbeam.

BROWN: Yeah.

SHAFER: And there's different stories about how that came about. Mike Royko at the [Chicago] Sun-Times.

BROWN: Well, Mike Royko is the one who wrote it, so that is the story.

SHAFER: Did he say it originally? Or--because there was another--

BROWN: He did say it. I think he did.

SHAFER: Well, there was another story that Linda Ronstadt was quoted in a Rolling Stone article previously, jokingly, calling you Moonbeam.

BROWN: Yeah, I don't remember that.

SHAFER: Yeah, did you--I know later, much later--like last time, when you're governor the second time, you sort of embraced that whole thing.

BROWN: Yeah. What? You want more feelings. Did I feel bad? Did I feel good? You know--neither one. It just is, it's another one of--this is a business. You get obstacles in your way. It's not trouble free.

MEEKER: Well, if we would ask another politician, they might say okay, "I met 00:58:00with my campaign manager. We decided that we needed to get ahead of this."

BROWN: Yeah, but you have--that's about a textbook view that you have of the way and I don't operate that way. I don't think anybody else does.

HOLMES: Did you like the nickname?

BROWN: No, just not helpful--do you like it? It's not about like and dislike. It's not helpful, right? I mean the idea is to get more votes than your opponent. That's the business. Okay? So that did not help.

SHAFER: Why did it not help? What do you think it--?

BROWN: Why did it not help?

SHAFER: What did it--well. [laughing]

BROWN: Well, would you want to elect--come on, that's not a very intelligent question.

SHAFER: What did it say about you?

BROWN: It said different things to different people, but it was not the gravitas that I would have put out were I to be in charge.

SHAFER: Yeah, did you and Royko ever--I know Royko came to regret it.

BROWN: He wrote another story about it, because he liked my speech in 1980. It was a good speech. In fact, I was going to tweet it out the other day, but then 00:59:00we couldn't find the digital copy. I have many copies myself on hard copy, because I talked about some of the same topics we're still talking about, in 1980.

SHAFER: Another thing that was going on around that time was the oil crisis. You know, Carter, OPEC, and all that.

BROWN: The oil crisis, right. Was that OPEC? OPEC was '73, and there was another one in '79. There were two.

SHAFER: Well, there's--and there was rationing, and every other day I think, even and odd days you could get gas. And you know, offshore oil drilling sort of became an issue.

BROWN: Yeah, well no, it's not an issue in California, because most of the political people were against it, even, I think, Pete Wilson.

SHAFER: Oh, really? I thought--because Reagan, I thought, was sort of thinking about that later when he became president.

BROWN: Yeah, but I'm not sure when he was there. This was the Pasadena Coastal Commission. The Santa Barbara oil spill was not--yeah, offshore oil has been 01:00:00pretty dead as an issue in California, until Trump.

SHAFER: Yeah, did you feel like that was another opportunity to sort of promote environmental causes and remind people--

BROWN: Well, wait a minute, see, you're talking about the issue of the day. Is the issue of the day an issue for that day? It's kind of a tautology, isn't it? This is the problem. It's like rising housing prices, like the crack epidemic. We're in business to deal with people's felt needs and real needs, so if you can't get gas, that's a big, big issue. You've got to deal with it.

SHAFER: Do you remember--how do you remember it being felt in California?

BROWN: The long lines around the gas station--pretty serious. People would get 01:01:00in fistfights, so yeah, that was a big issue.

HOLMES: Well, speaking of the zeitgeist, I mean I know Reagan in the early 1980s was pushing for more drilling. But--

BROWN: Was he pushing for more drilling off of California? I don't know.

HOLMES: Monterey Bay, I know, was one of the places he was looking--

BROWN: That's when James Watt was the secretary of the interior, right? And that became huge. Sierra Club doubled its membership, and it became quite a rallying cry.

HOLMES: Was there any public sentiment that you recall from that time. In the midst of the second oil crisis--so we're talking 1978, '79--was there any kind of public outcry or pressure to increase drilling or self-reliance in oil?

BROWN: I can't remember. I don't think there was any in California. There isn't 01:02:00now. The oil prices went up, but very few people are saying go drill off the coast. I saw that as another example of imbalance. We've created a life that unless, you know, Saudi Arabia and these other oil countries feed our need, then all of a sudden our society starts coming unwound. That's not sustainable, as we now say. But we've handled that. We've had the Iraq War. We have troops in 700 different bases, so we're trying to handle making sure that other people take care of our needs, as opposed to redesigning how we show up in the world in a way that's more sustainable and locally self-sufficient.

MEEKER: You know, this is mainly harkening back to the moonbeam question, and I apologize for that, really what it has to do with is your slogan for 1980, which 01:03:00was, "protect the earth, serve the people--

BROWN: Explore the universe, and serve the people.

MEEKER: So the "explore the universe" part--

BROWN: Tell me, have you ever heard of a better three-point plan for the United States of America, then or now?

MEEKER: I think it's awesome.

BROWN: Even though it is a little general.

MEEKER: Well, let me ask you about that "explore the universe"--

BROWN: I mean you want to protect the Earth. And you'd like to explore the universe, and you'd like to serve the people.

SHAFER: How did you come up with that slogan?

BROWN: How did I come up with it? I had a cup of coffee. And what does that mean, how did I come up with it?

SHAFER: Was it your idea?

BROWN: How did you come up with that question? It's part of the flow here. I thought about it, and I thought how can I state what I think is important? And that's how it came to me.

MEEKER: Can you talk about the "explore the universe," part of it?

BROWN: Sure, that was the space shuttle, that's space exploration. It's Landsat, 01:04:00monitoring natural resources, habitat, soil, forests, forest fires--that's a technology that is, then and now, critical to managing our own earthly environment. But it's also this huge--I mean huge is not even the right word, but you've got trillions of stars, the whole massive expanse. So the human mind, as it explores in research, locally--new diseases, new materials, new energy technologies--also has to explore where we are. I mean right here we're sitting looking at the mountain, at the soil. Scientists have come from the University of California, have drilled holes and put in measurements to tell when the water 01:05:00comes to the trees. They're trying to learn. How do the oak trees survive in a hot summer, in a five-year drought? Where is the water stored, and what is the mechanism? So that's exploring the soil. But then we have to explore the atmosphere. By the way, by exploring the atmosphere we found out about CO2 and heat-trapping gases, and the ozone hole. And the Montreal Protocol, of course that came after my 1980 [run], but there are so many different examples of exploration, and that's what that was.

And protecting was more conservative--that's, we're trying to preserve. I meant the exploration to be the innovative, the change side, whereas the environment is more the continuity. How do we preserve the habitat, preserve clean air, preserve clean water? And then, that's all rather physical. And then the third 01:06:00point was well, the people, and government is a service, and public servants, so then that should be a spirit in which government sees itself.

MEEKER: So the exploration represents a huge outlay of funds, as well as fossil fuels, in order to get those space ships up there.

BROWN: Or other fuels.

MEEKER: So were you ever in a position to need to defend the--fitting of that rubric within the larger rubric around balance?

BROWN: Well, yeah again, the binary mind: it's either this or it's that. It's called the two-value orientation. And I first became very aware of the two-value orientation when I read a book in the seminary by S.I. Hayakawa, called, Language and Truth, I think [Language in Thought and Action]. And he said people 01:07:00like to think it's either this way or that way, but life shows up as multiple values. So the fact that you want to preserve natural habitat, doesn't mean you don't want to understand the heavens, the stars, the way gravity works, the way the earth interacts with other planets, and other things. So all of that fits together. It's the opposite of ignorance. It's seeking truth and knowledge, and uncovering the mysteries of our existence, so the two fit together. In the same way, we're trying to figure out how to protect the environment. We need a lot of science to do that.

HOLMES: Did anybody push back in regard to that platform? And this gets back to what Martin was asking, in regards to balance of--not just environmental balance with exploring space, but budgetary balance, right?

BROWN: Well, they do that now. Trying to do the high-speed rail is beyond 40-45 percent of the people, "What do you mean a high-speed-rail train?" In the same way, "Oh, you want a space shuttle, or a space platform?" So yeah, people would say, "Well, why spend it way out in space? You could spend it all here." That is the thought. We can say that about the university. What are you doing all that research for? I think Reagan once said, "We're not in the business of subsidizing curiosity." And I thought yeah, that's exactly the business the university is in.

SHAFER: To what extent did you feel that the rationale for your candidacy was 01:09:00that Carter was thinking too small?

BROWN: Well, obviously that was the rationale--I said so. He used to allocate the tennis dates in the White House tennis court. I thought that was a little too granular for the presidency.

SHAFER: He was a micromanager?

BROWN: Well, yeah, there was some of that. Well, he was a manager. That's true, he was a manager. He managed submarines.

SHAFER: I'm just curious. You know, in later years, of course, he's become a big advocate for human rights and--

BROWN: Well, he was an advocate of human rights--he's the one who put it on the map when he was president. That's a hallmark of President Carter.

SHAFER: Do you feel like, looking back, that he got kind of a raw deal as president?

BROWN: Well, I don't think of politics as getting a raw deal. There are a lot of deals to be made, and some are better than others.

SHAFER: So the voters got it right, you think?

BROWN: [laughing] No, voters don't necessarily get it right. Did voters get it right with Trump? What is democracy is whatever it produces. That's the theory of democracy, right? That the people vote, and then you get what you get. I think President Carter had some good ideas, but Reagan projected the imagery and the presence that more people were satisfied with. Some people say Hoover got a raw deal, that Roosevelt took a lot of his ideas. So I don't find this raw deal business very illuminating. Because a lot of people get a better deal than they deserve.

Did Reagan get too good a deal? Did the killing of 30,000 people in Nicaragua, 01:11:00under the pressure of the United States' support of the Contras--is that something we ought to really take a little more attention to? Or maybe how the Guatemalan leadership and army massacred a couple hundred thousand people--what about that? And even during the Reagan Administration? Or how about the generals throwing people out of airplanes in Argentina, and taking babies away from women that they tortured, and then giving them to themselves? What about that? We don't hear too much about that. But nevertheless, those are facts. And so some people get a better deal than they deserve, other people get a worse deal than they deserve. [laughing] That's the way our system works.

HOLMES: Governor, you were challenging a sitting president of your own party. What do you recall about the criticism or comments that you received for doing 01:12:00so, particularly from those within party circles?

BROWN: I don't know. I know too much about the party system, and it's a very loose, porous, amalgam of ambitious people, so I can't remember what people said. And first of all, a lot of what people said are put up to saying that by the person you're running against. And that's been, developed into a fine art. It was very primitive in those days.

HOLMES: Do you recall people who were supporting your decision to challenge Carter?

BROWN: There were, there were a lot of people. Not enough, obviously.

SHAFER: Your New York State campaign director at the time was quoted--

BROWN: Who was that?

SHAFER: Sorry.

BROWN: You don't have his name. I like citations.

SHAFER: But he said, "Jerry Brown means sleeping on the floor, Linda Ronstadt, 01:13:00and a trip to Africa--to people in New York State."

BROWN: That was 1980.

SHAFER: '80, yeah. Eighty.

BROWN: Yeah, I don't even remember who that guy--that's why I wanted to get his name. [Thomas Flynn]

SHAFER: Did you find though, and kind of alluded to it a moment ago, but did--?

BROWN: No, see, we didn't get to New York. I mean all it was, was New Hampshire, Maine, and Wisconsin. That was it--over, out.

SHAFER: But I mean did you find that--whether it was because of the moonbeam moniker or whatever--

BROWN: No, it's far less than that. There's less there than meets the eye. The presence in the media was minimal.

SHAFER: Of your campaign?

BROWN: Yeah. And Kennedy--because of the obvious. Kennedy and Carter--that was the story, and my candidacy was marginal. If I had done better, that would have come up. [laughing]

HOLMES: Governor, as you mentioned, Ted Kennedy also threw his hat in the race to challenger Carter. What were your impressions of Ted Kennedy? Had you met him before?

BROWN: Yes, I'd met him before. I thought his speech at the convention was very eloquent, and I marvel at how well he could--it was a written speech, and he read it in a way that I could only hope to. It was quite, quite moving. And the torch--the flame will never die. That was a very powerful line.

SHAFER: Bob Shrum [Kennedy's speech writer.]

BROWN: Bob--yeah, but whatever it was, he sure delivered it--and very few politicians can do that.

HOLMES: How would you compare him to his two brothers, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom you--

BROWN: I never met Robert Kennedy. I think John Kennedy was the one of the three, had a unique, what shall I say? He had a very charismatic aura and 01:15:00presence, that I haven't seen in anybody else since. Maybe for Republicans, Reagan might capture that. But Kennedy was not an actor. He was a guy who was on that PT boat. He wrote about the danger facing Europe, and he had a good sense of humor. Even though he was certainly an ambitious politician, he comported himself in a way that made him stand out and engender a lot of admiration and respect.

I think his finest moment was in the Cuban Missile Crisis, by avoiding the extinction of humanity. You can't get any bigger than that. And he stood up against the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who wanted to 01:16:00bomb the armaments, I don't know what they called them. They weren't exactly missiles, but they were weapons that could reach Florida, and they were already nuclear-armed, which was not known at the time. And had Kennedy followed the unanimous advice of the generals, he would have bombed the Russian soldiers and weapons, and they would have fired then nuclear weapons.

And I know that because I talked to the Russian commander when he came to visit Stanford. I've had dinner with him twice. They would have fired. And if they fired a nuclear weapon at Florida, and killed tens of thousands of people, we would have fired on Russia, and they would have fired on us, and we might have wiped out the human race. That's how close we came. With the unanimous advice of these people here, this forty-five-year-old guy stood up to them. Amazing. So 01:17:00whatever else they say about Kennedy--he certainly had some flaws; he had a lot, like everybody else--but he was pretty amazing, I think. That may be the most amazing moment in American history.

SHAFER: And it seemed like he--not to digress on that--but he learned from the Bay of Pigs, I think, and that was one of the reasons he overruled the generals.

BROWN: That might have been--so lucky for the Bay of Pigs.

SHAFER: Yeah, so I'm wondering what--what lessons did you take from your second presidential run?

BROWN: I don't know that I took lessons--I mean I certainly understood. In the immediate aftermath, I don't know what lesson. Probably didn't have enough organization. I mean the clear lesson, which I didn't take then and I didn't see 01:18:00this clearly, but the fame, the name of the incumbent president, and the name of the Kennedy--it's not just Teddy Kennedy. It's John Kennedy, it's Robert Kennedy, it's their assassination--that's powerful. And when you have these--it's a phenomenon.

And in some ways, that's why I knew, when I went to run for mayor of Oakland--and I'm not comparing myself to Kennedy, but I know that my father and I and my sister have won every election that ever took place in Oakland, at least the statewide election there. So I knew that I was going to be a very overarching presence in that election. A lot of other people who were running didn't get that. Just like I didn't get that once Kennedy was there, it was over. And I didn't have that much money, but even with money [its] very hard to 01:19:00displace a name. I'd say, even to some extent, Meg Whitman found that out. You can spend a lot of money, but the belief that resides in the voters, the pre-existing belief, determines a great deal. And that's why the media types and the campaign types like to think that the campaign consultant, the campaign manager, the campaign strategist are going to alter the reality. But it's all done. You just show up, and it all unfolds. That was like running for mayor in Oakland.

Now, running for president would be, the negative of that. I was showing up as not the winner, and there was not a way to change that. Now if Meg Whitman gave me her $175 million, I don't know that it would have made any difference. 01:20:00Because Kennedy was a person, and that Kennedy impression was built out of the prior two assassinations, and that's a power. And then Carter didn't have that in back of him, but he had the fact that he was president. So deeply embedded in the imagination of people, and in the way the media would communicate things, that there was no room. But I see it a lot clearer today than I saw it in 1980, for sure. [laughing] And a lot of people don't see it now. In fact, I was reading a story in the New York Times about somebody running for president, and they were kind of wondering what is this all about? Well, I know what it's about, because I've done it.

SHAFER: What's that?

BROWN: Well, I said I know what it's about, because people who've run, and they're not smelling the roses, they're not looking out at what's out in front of them. But they seem to do it--so people have not consulted my 1980 campaign. 01:21:00[laughter] They could look at it, and if that were true, most of those people would stop running for president.

SHAFER: You make it sound like it's almost--not quite preordained, but like there's this plan that's going to unfold.

BROWN: The world--well, it's--it is a plan. You see the corn growing there? [Pointing out the window] It wasn't there before. Do you see it?

SHAFER: Yeah.

BROWN: Okay, right there. Three feet, some of it. It wasn't there. So was that preordained? Once I put that seed in the ground, and put water--and the sun shined, there it goes! Okay, so but you can't alter--are you going to say I'm going to make different seeds? Or I'm going to make the water? Or I'm going to make the sun? Or I'm going to make the soil? No. There are certain things that are the factors, if I could use the word in a different sense, the factors of production, the factors of reality--there they are. And you have to get on the side of reality, because reality isn't going to get on your side.

SHAFER: Interesting. I mean--that was sort of a criticism of you, wasn't it? That you were not rooted in reality. You were thinking all these big thoughts.

BROWN: Well, well right, and it proved to be the case. [laughing] I didn't make it.

SHAFER: What impact do you think the 1980 run had on you politically in California?

BROWN: Oh, not good. I won by twenty-one points, and then I was into the low forties or maybe worse than that--I can't remember. Yeah, that was not so good. Not good at all, as a matter of fact.

SHAFER: And like why do you think, I mean what was your sense--

BROWN: Why do I--do you want me to analyze how the system of the flow of information affected people through survey research? I mean I can do that for you, but I don't know what that's going to prove.

SHAFER: But I mean do you think it was like--people sort of getting tired of you, or that people don't like someone who reaches and fails, or what?

BROWN: Well, all of that. And if you got elected to one job, and now you've got 01:23:00to jump to the next one. There's always the problem, they say, "Wait a minute, we like you to do this, not that." And the only way that's overcome is if you're winning, and it's the cause that seems to transcend the office, and those factors weren't present in 1980.

HOLMES: Governor, you ran for president four years earlier, and didn't seem to have that negative impact.

BROWN: Right, I was winning.

HOLMES: Could be.

BROWN: Could be?

HOLMES: Well, you were, but you didn't win the top spot. Do you think as someone who's encroaching eight to twelve years in elected office, that voters, inevitably perhaps, get tired of politicians?

BROWN: Well, they didn't get tired of me this eight years, I don't think. Of course exposure is going to run the risk that people get tired of looking at you. I think I told the story of Aristides the Just. Didn't we go through that 01:24:00once? They ostracized him because at least in the minds of some ladies standing there at the polling place, "We're just tired of hearing the name Aristides the Just." So there's that factor.

But it's also what your exposure is. So if you limit your exposure, and you try to keep it as favorable as possible--and you're lucky and the economy's good--that's a big part. And how the economy goes, shapes a lot of how people think. Because the guy at the top is associated with the general state of wellbeing. So if things are going well, and you modulate your exposure so it's much more positive than negative, you'll have more shelf life, than if you (a) are all over the media, and (b) the economy sinks--as it will. Unless you have 01:25:00the timing, which both Deukmejian and I had, that for the entire eight years the economy was always growing, and that's unusual.

SHAFER: To what extent were you sort of tired of the job by that point?

BROWN: Oh, I was getting a little tired of the job. Yeah, I think I said that publicly.

SHAFER: Just the routine of it, or what was it?

BROWN: No, it wasn't that interesting--well, I don't know. Probably, it was my inability to find the interesting, important things to do. I found that the next time around I had a lot of things to do. You had a deficit, you had screwed-up workers' compensation. I mean all the things we did were needed, and we did them. Now, what was needed in 1982? Well, we were in a recession then. So we 01:26:00weren't going to raise money or raise taxes. So, yeah, I have to go back in time, but I liked it well enough, but it didn't seem to have quite the--I don't say it's the job. It was probably my state of mind at that time. I couldn't perceive the interesting possibilities that were inherent in that particular role at that time.