Trailblazer. Chuck McFadden

where they get their campaign money, and they don’t like it,” he said.¹⁶

      But Willie Brown, the San Francisco assemblyman who headed the budget committee—and who was later to become mayor of San Francisco while Jerry was mayor of Oakland, across San Francisco Bay—said the secretary of state’s office was merely being made to comply with the restrictions placed on other offices. And anyway, there were vacant offices in state buildings. The state did not need to shell out fourteen hundred dollars a month for Brown’s Century City offices, Willie Brown pointed out. The irony of protesting the cutting of a public relations position from his office only a few years after he had voted against hiring media relations people for the college district was lost on Jerry, at least publicly.

      “Some of the leadership in the legislature doesn’t want the public to know where their campaign money comes from,” Brown said. Asked by Willis which legislators were attempting to cloud campaign cash reporting, Brown replied, “I would single out the speaker and his lieutenants. They don’t want this done.”¹⁷

      More was involved than mere displeasure or a simple budget cut. Willie Brown was a top lieutenant to Bob Moretti, the speaker of the Assembly who was eyeing a 1974 run for governor, as was Jerry Brown. Even as early as 1972, it appeared they would probably be opponents in the 1974 Democratic primary. The budget cut was a shot across the bow, letting Jerry know that he would not always have clear sailing if he persisted in crusading against lawmakers to gain traction for a run at the governorship. Brown himself said the Democratic primary was too far away to be “a main issue” in the dispute.

      Willis’s story drew headlines across California—the then-named Long Beach Independent, Press-Telegram proclaimed, “Brown Says Top Solons Trying to Cripple Him.” It was just the kind of idealist-against-the-entrenched-establishment headline that Jerry sought.

      Jerry’s indignation was part of a consistent program. No one in the ranks of Capitol reporters, legislators, staff members, or lobbyists doubted that ambitious Jerry Brown was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and become governor. His challenge was to find a way to turn a moribund office into a dynamic center of political reform and let California voters know about the good work that was being done.

      To do that, Jerry and Tom Quinn had to raise Jerry’s visibility as an active, corruption-fighting political comer whom voters would be well advised to promote to a higher position in the next statewide election. To do that, they had to create headlines. And to do that, they had to find ways of entrancing the California news media, most particularly the approximately seventy men and women who made up what was usually called the Capitol Press Corps. The Sacramento Capitol reporters were not the only media people Jerry dealt with—he spent much of his time in Los Angeles, running the office with a telephone from poolside—but they were the single most important cluster of reporters in California on political subjects.

      In 1970, every large- and medium-sized daily in California had at least one reporter in Sacramento. The Capitol bureau was considered a plum assignment. There were full-time television crews from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento as well as radio reporters from all-news radio stations. The four largest bureaus were those of the Los Angeles Times, the Sacramento Bee, United Press International, and The Associated Press. Competition was intense, especially between the two major wire services, UPI and The AP.

      For the seven reporters in the AP bureau, the height of success in daily reporting (along with beating UPI on a breaking story) was to get a story on the “A” wire—the national wire that was put together by the general desk in New York and carried the top stories of the day around the world. Even better was to get a story on the A wire “budget”—the listing of the dozen or so top stories of that day’s news cycle. A story that went national on the A wire was a career booster. Because there were then both afternoon and morning dailies, there were two A wire budgets in each twenty-four-hour news cycle. There were also two California-only budgets a day for the top state stories selected by The AP’s hub bureau in Los Angeles.¹⁸

      Jerry and his staff were well aware of the people and pressures that made up the Capitol Press Corps. They correctly surmised that the best angle of attack for them was the “clean up politics” theme, which would work particularly well against the backdrop of a famous and popular governor who spent much of his time attacking state government and the politicians in the Legislature. Adopting this theme was an ideal melding of Brown’s inherent idealism and his calculating political instinct. But there was an attendant challenge: Reagan’s antipolitician attitude was helpful as a sort of reinforcing backdrop, but would the “clean up politics” message that had carried Brown to victory in the election continue to win headlines when Reagan, embarking on his second term and with great ambition of his own, was still sucking all the oxygen out of the room in terms of major state and national coverage? What would be the follow-through?

      Brown and Quinn felt they had to jump at every opportunity. They were not always certain when real opportunity presented itself, so they just kept jumping. Brown’s office thus began issuing what became a torrent of news releases. Many of them had only a tenuous connection to the work of the secretary of state’s office, but most of them managed to be of interest to reporters, even while they chuckled at their typewriters. Through his numerous news releases, Brown in effect became a commentator on the passing scene. He praised César Chávez for his work on behalf of farm laborers; he called for a “massive national debate” that would end with the impeachment of President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew;¹⁹ he announced support for a bill that would allow women to use “Ms.” before their names when registering to vote. (“Miss,” “Mrs.,” and nothing were also acceptable.)