The Free Speech movement was not the first demonstration for idealistic causes at the University of California’s Berkeley campus. Demonstrations for one cause or another dated at least back to the 1930s, and the campus was roiled by a 1960 demonstration against the ROTC. In 1949–51, the entire university system was embroiled in controversy over the Board of Regents’ decision to require a loyalty oath. In addition, students in 1960 went across the bay to be part of the San Francisco city hall demonstration against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was holding hearings in the same building. But the Free Speech movement was the seminal student activism event, leading to at least some consequences the demonstrators and their leaders never had in mind.
Reagan and his campaign strategists realized the impact the Free Speech movement was having on a large portion of the California electorate and moved effectively to seize the opportunity presented by offended voters.1 Among those offended was Jerry Brown. When the Free Speech movement erupted at Berkeley, Jerry Brown, by then a Yale Law graduate clerking for state Supreme Court justice Matthew Tobriner, went over to the campus to take a look. He was not impressed by the students’ righteousness, reportedly saying that he didn’t see the point of breaking a law in support of some other grievance.
The campus unrest, combined with the Watts riots of 1965, was fatal for Pat Brown’s reelection hopes. The six days of race riots across eleven square miles of Los Angeles left thirty-four people dead, more than a thousand injured, and a feeling on the part of voters that Brown had not moved effectively to stop the violence. Brown had been on vacation in Greece when Watts began burning, and although he called out the National Guard and flew back to California once he realized the seriousness of the situation, millions of voters thought he was not on the job.
Handsome, stern, and reassuring Ronald Reagan promised to whip the university and its ungrateful students into shape. “Obey the rules or get out,” he declared. Voters eagerly gave him a chance to fulfill his promise. Reagan defeated Brown by nearly one million votes—3,742,913 to Brown’s 2,749,174. Reagan carried fifty-five of California’s fifty-eight counties, with more than 57 percent of the popular vote. Pat carried only 42.3 percent of the popular vote and won in only three counties.
Some political observers have argued that Jerry felt his father lost the election because he wasn’t agile and flexible enough—that he allowed Reagan to paint him as ineffectual in dealing with problems instead of nimbly leaping to the forefront of the attack against unruly students and rioting blacks. In subsequent years, Jerry Brown—the supreme opportunist—has proven himself able to take quick advantage of the tide of public opinion. The most blatant example, discussed in chapter 4, is Jerry’s overnight about-face on Prop 13. He had campaigned against it as governor, but hours after it won overwhelming voter approval, Jerry pronounced himself a “born-again tax cutter.”
With his new job at Tuttle & Taylor, lifelong Northern Californian Jerry Brown immediately wove himself into the fabric of Los Angeles. With the help of his parents, Jerry bought a house in Laurel Canyon with a swimming pool. He started forming acquaintanceships. If he was to launch a political career, Jerry knew he needed a foothold in Los Angeles—some sort of public office that could serve as a launching pad. Pat Brown, ever helpful, called a friend, Los Angeles County supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who promptly arranged to have the newly arrived Jerry appointed to the Los Angeles County Delinquency and Crime Commission. It was a start.
Those expecting a soft approach to crime from the son of the notably liberal governor Brown were in for a surprise. He reportedly told his fellow commission members that his philosophy was that it is better to catch people at the beginning, give them a sentence of a substantial time in prison but not a draconian period, then let them out, and if they fail again, bring them back and keep them longer.
At the same time that the newly arrived Southern Californian was delivering hard-line lectures on juvenile delinquency and feeling bored with routine legal work at Tuttle & Taylor, he took an interest in presidential politics and the Vietnam War. He wrangled an invitation to speak at a California Democratic Council (CDC) meeting in Long Beach and spoke in favor of an immediate cessation of the bombing of North Vietnam, advocating a prompt start of truce talks. That was not what many CDC members wanted to hear. They wanted a call for immediate withdrawal.
But Jerry, while seen as a moderate, was also dovish enough to be selected as the Southern California finance chairman of a CDC “peace slate” favoring the rebellious presidential candidacy of Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy. Pat Brown favored Lyndon Johnson and thought his son’s advocacy of McCarthy was helping to destroy the Democrats’ chances of retaining the White House in 1968. The situation grew more complicated when Robert Kennedy, the senator from New York and brother of the late president, entered the race and Lyndon Johnson declared he would not seek reelection.
The president’s decision to bow out placed McCarthy and Kennedy in head-to-head competition in the California Democratic primary. Jerry worked hard for McCarthy, finding him an agreeable intellectual companion, familiar with Latin and able to discourse on theology, poetry, and politics.
Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles minutes after learning that he had defeated McCarthy in the primary and telling his cheering supporters “On to Chicago!” After Kennedy’s assassination, Jerry and others briefly considered the possibility of resurrecting the McCarthy campaign, but it ultimately failed to gain traction. Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president who had been endorsed by Pat Brown, won the Democratic nomination at a tumultuous convention chiefly remembered afterward for television footage of Chicago police beating antiwar street demonstrators.
Early in 1969, after Humphrey had been defeated by Richard Nixon, Jerry decided to run for the new Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees. It was the next step up. Community colleges—originally “junior colleges” until educators decided “community colleges” sounded more grown-up—had been educating students for forty years when the state Legislature separated the nine-campus system from the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1969. The colleges would now be governed by their own seven-member Board of Trustees. Jerry Brown, working in corporate law at Tuttle & Taylor, saw election to the board as an obvious move in his nascent political career. Service on a school board has long been a traditional way for ambitious Californians to begin careers in elective office, and many Los Angelenos have realized that. There were 133 candidates for the seven trustee positions in the 1969 election.
Many would argue, justifiably, that Jerry breezed into his first elective office because his last name was Brown. His father’s friend Matthew Tobriner was not alone in observing that had Jerry’s last name been Green, he would not have achieved his immediate success. But it is equally true that Jerry worked hard and intelligently. His name and ambition alone would not have been enough to sustain a political career—certainly not one that has carried him to three terms in the governor’s office. They had to be combined with a high intellect, a canny political instinct, and a finely tuned sense of what gains favorable recognition in the media.
But because he was the son of a governor, the unproven Jerry Brown in his first elective venture had the widest name recognition and cruised to victory. He became one of the fourteen finalists selected in a preliminary round of voting and was the top candidate in the runoff, beating second-place Mike Antonovich by sixty-one thousand votes.
There was never any doubt in anyone’s mind that Brown viewed his trusteeship as nothing more than a temporary, entry-level position and that even before his election, he had his sights aimed higher, undoubtedly at statewide elected office. Antonovich, not surprisingly, believes that Brown’s entire service on the board was aimed at creating an effective springboard for higher office. “I don’t think his heart was in serving on a college board,” he told Brown biographer Robert Pack. “I think that was all contrived to project his name in the paper and then to be elected secretary of state.”2
Brown was one of at least three newly elected board members who had their sights set on higher office. Brown, Antonovich himself, and Robert Cline