Antonovich, a conservative Republican and former public school teacher, later served three terms in the California Assembly before winning election to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.3 Robert Cline, another conservative Republican, was also elected to the Assembly.
During his eighteen months on the board, Brown quickly established a paradoxical reputation that has remained with him throughout his political life: He is a dead-serious fiscal conservative and a social liberal. He voted against an appropriation to provide private offices for the seven trustees; comfortable in his own ability to generate media attention, he opposed hiring media relations people for the district as an unnecessary expense; he was a “no” vote on a sixty-dollar appropriation to allow Antonovich to attend a conference at Stanford University. He was mostly on the losing side in these issues, with Antonovich and Cline voting against Brown and with the majority. But, according to his conviction and his view of political necessity, he carved out a reputation for himself as someone distinctly different from his free-spending father.
On social issues, idealist Brown was a consistent liberal “yes” vote. He favored, for instance, recognizing Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday and opposed a requirement that district employees be fingerprinted.
Brown also came up with some off-the-wall ideas designed to show voters that he was not completely a squishy liberal. Keenly aware of the continuing public antagonism toward angry students, he advocated prohibiting students from transferring into the district if they had been convicted of a campus disruption sometime during the previous three years. In a notion that today sounds silly, he suggested formation of “an airborne campus strike force to curb student violence” that would employ “no-nonsense tactics” against the hated student disrupters. It would have a fleet of jets, and members of the strike force would equipped with crowd-control devices such as tranquilizer guns, wood pellet guns, and water cannons. He also suggested that the state’s nationally admired Master Plan for Higher Education be scrapped in favor of turning two-year junior colleges into four-year institutions. Although helicopters were used by Reagan to quell student disorders at Berkeley, the airborne strike force never flew, and the Master Plan for Higher Education has remained in effect. All of Brown’s suggestions were styled to receive maximum media attention, a practice Jerry was to follow through the coming decades.
The major liberal/conservative dispute during Brown’s time on the board revolved around Deena Metzger, an English teacher. A majority of the board voted to fire her after she read a poem titled “Jehovah’s Child” aloud in class. Cline and Antonovich were among the board majority who regarded the poem as advocating abnormal sex, among other things. Brown voted to retain Metzger but lost. The case became a Los Angeles cause célèbre, winning headlines for Brown as an advocate of freedom of expression.4
Almost simultaneously with his election to the college board, Jerry met Tom Quinn and began a friendship that was to benefit both of them immensely over the coming years. Brown needed favorable notice in the media if he was to advance his political career beyond the board. Few could equal Quinn as a master at creating headlines and using the news media to the advantage of a candidate or cause.
Quinn came by his abilities naturally. He is the son of Joe Quinn, a former executive at United Press International who, with former Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowren, founded City News Service. CNS is a local wire service that for eight decades has provided local news on a fast-breaking basis to media outlets, first in Los Angeles and later to much of Southern California. It features a daily morning “budget” listing of scheduled events such as news conferences, and it is avidly read by city editors and television assignment editors as an important resource in determining how to deploy reporters and camera crews.
Tom Quinn in 1966 had formed Radio News West, an audio version of CNS that feeds audio reports to radio stations. Such a background meant that Tom Quinn, more than most news executives, was from an early age acquainted with the news business—its customs, techniques, problems, people—and what makes a news story.
Brown and Quinn talked about what path might prove most beneficial in advancing Brown’s political ambitions and quickly settled on a target—California secretary of state. To say that the office of California secretary of state was obscure in 1970 is to elevate its profile. Few Californians, even those who worked in state government in Sacramento, had much of an understanding of, or cared to learn, what the secretary of state does. The joke around Sacramento was that the chief duty of the secretary of state is to polish the state seal.
In fact, the secretary of state is a sort of county clerk, except that he or she serves a state rather than a county. The office is responsible for a number of functions, nearly all of them boring. It oversees the state archives; it keeps an official record of all laws passed by the Legislature; it records the sales of farm equipment and the registration of farm names; it registers the names and insignias of fraternal organizations; it registers aircraft brokers and notary publics.
Not only was the office of secretary of state an obscure paper-shuffling backwater in 1970; it was also an oddity. Since 1911, with the exception of two years, 1940–42,5 it had been filled by Frank C. Jordan and then his son, Frank M. Jordan. Both died in office.
It was an office that most aspiring politicians thought little about. Who would want to wind up in such a dead-end job? But as Jerry Brown would many times in the future, he proved himself more intelligent than his fellow politicians and potential rivals. Unlike the hordes of ambitious individuals in Sacramento and elsewhere across California, Tom and Jerry took the trouble to study the duties of the office in some detail. They realized that the secretary of state was, after all, a statewide office, but because it was so lightly regarded by the ambitious, there would be little or no topflight competition. There was no incumbent. And while most of the office’s duties were dull, it had potential: the office interprets and enforces the state’s election laws. What could be a better platform for a clean-government crusader?
Jerry declared his candidacy on March 2, 1970, and zeroed in on the office’s hitherto-unrealized potential for creating headlines. Brown told reporters in a news release that he would “vigorously enforce campaign disclosure laws now on the books. These laws require candidates to report the precise source of all contributions. Yet most reports are so vague they’re actually more funny than informative.” He added, “I will refuse to certify the election of any candidate who fails to fully and honestly report every campaign contribution.”6 Brown and Quinn had seized upon a previously neglected potential headline grabber within the labyrinthine functions of the office of secretary of state. It was a masterly display of finding a political golden needle in a haystack.
The combination of Brown’s name identification, the headlines promising a crackdown on rule-evading politicians, and Californians’ distrust of Sacramento, encouraged by Reagan, combined to give Jerry 70 percent of the vote over two opponents in the Democratic primary. His chief intraparty rival was Hugh Burns, a Fresno Democrat who had been a major power in the California Senate for more than thirty years and, ironically, had been one of Pat Brown’s chief lieutenants in getting Pat’s huge water plan through the Legislature. He had achieved some notoriety through his chairmanship of the state’s Un-American Activities Committee, but by the time he ran against Jerry Brown, Burns, no longer in a Senate leadership position, was very nearly a spent force. His longtime financial backers absented themselves, and Brown spent two dozen campaign dollars for every dollar spent by Burns. Pat also helped, sending his longtime supporters a letter asking them to contribute a hundred dollars toward his son’s campaign. There was also money originally pledged to a 1970 Pat Brown comeback campaign for governor that never happened. Jerry Brown and Pat Brown biographer Roger Rapoport wrote that Pat was dissuaded from making the rematch race against Reagan by Bernice, who told him that two Edmund G. Browns on the ballot was not a good idea.7 Burns afterward found a sinecure through appointment to the Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals