18 I knocked my opponent to the canvas in a 3 round boxing match at Senior Fight Night.
19 My favorite cereal is Flax Plus Multibran.
20 My first car was a 1941 green Plymouth. My most famous car was a 1974 blue Plymouth.
21 I own a colt 38, given to me by my father.
22 I went to Bangladesh as a CARE ambassador.
23 I hiked to the top of half dome. My first trip to Yosemite was when I was 4.
24 The first time I became Governor, I followed an Actor (Ronald Reagan).
25 My maternal grandfather was a San Francisco Police Captain. My paternal grandfather ran a poker club in the Tenderloin.
In this biography of one of the most idiosyncratic politicians in California history, I will explore the unique persona that is Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., son of California political royalty who forged his own unique political style against the tumultuous backdrop of a huge, balkanized state that goes its own, sometimes errant, way, shoved to and fro by complex currents. Plumbing his visionary impulses as well as his grandiose ambitions, my aim is to portray Jerry Brown through the lens of paradox: the intellectual who has thrown himself into a mean public arena, an idealist who has been willing to negotiate with all comers, a spiritual soul who has triumphed as a backroom politician.
Only in California could someone of such unusual traits emerge. This state on the edge of the continent has been a haven for outcasts for more than 150 years. The gold-seeking forty-niners, as adventurous and peculiar a bunch as one could imagine, were unhampered by the traditions and strictures of their old homes. Class and family background would no longer confine ambition. What a man—men were the only ones who counted—could accomplish in the here and now was what was important. The state was populated by family black sheep, adventurers, and hustlers from its beginning, but later waves of immigrants brought their skills, muscles, and hopes, increasing diversity in an already diverse population. By the twenty-first century, Californians had established the most diverse society on the planet, at one time or another home to Marilyn Monroe and Herbert Hoover, Steve Jobs and John Muir. The University of California claims fifty-six Nobel Prize winners; the state was also headquarters of the Flat Earth Society. Just south of Yreka, in the shadow of Mount Shasta, a sign promoting the State of Jefferson is painted on the roof of a large barn, one of the few remnants of a 1941 movement to create a new state from twelve of the northernmost California counties and seven southern Oregon counties. At the same time, several hundred miles to the south, a motorist in central Los Angeles can drive for block after block and see pink, turquoise, and red neon signs advertising various businesses—all in Korean.
At home and on the campaign trail with his father at a very young age, Jerry Brown absorbed California in all its grandeur and excitement. And while Pat Brown was an honest and effective public servant, his son quickly learned that politicians and the public live in two parallel universes: the things politicians talk about among themselves are a far cry from their utterances to the public. If a candidate or cause is to be successful, matters have to be presented in a particular way to voters, who are more worried about whether the refrigerator will hold up for another year than they are about whether state law should permit podiatrists to treat ankles.
“Except for brief interludes, the political history of the state has not been politically inspiring,” historian Henry Cleland once observed.3 Cleland’s observation is debatable. It is lamentably true that California’s political history has been marred by repeated outbursts of hysterical anti-immigrant agitation—particularly against Asians and later against Hispanics and “Okies”—but it is also true that while Californians were mining gold, developing the movies, and farming the Central Valley, they were concurrently creating a system of government that was intended to emphasize openness, honesty, and responsiveness to the electorate, virtues that Brown has touted consistently throughout his political career. Reform-minded progressives in the early years of the twentieth century gave California the initiative, the recall, cross-filing, and the referendum. These were designed to give the people a direct voice in how their state is governed, taking power away from what had become a corrupt, unresponsive, and lobbyist-riddled state Legislature. Historians point out, accurately, that the idealism only came in reaction to the power of the railroads and other big interests that had a stranglehold on the Legislature, but the outburst of idealism nonetheless did occur. No one at the time knew that the initiative process would become a fearsome tool of special interests that a hundred years later would reduce the Legislature to increasing irrelevance.
Jerry Brown’s California is an abstraction, of course. His life has been shaped by an enormous and diverse place of 156,803 square miles and thirty area codes created by imaginary lines that emerged from war and were then embedded in law and treaty. But the state is more than that. It is a place that for more than 150 years has held forth a promise of life with a difference—warmer, sunnier, easier, a state where, if dreams don’t always come true, they can come closer to realization than they can anywhere else. California promoters from Mark Twain to Southern California real estate hustlers have painted the state as a burgeoning, swaggering, wide-open place for anyone with talent who wants to break the mold, whether in business, science, show business—or politics. Because that fantastical picture grew from the real nature of California, Jerry Brown’s ambition and idealism had great freedom and were even encouraged to develop. Brown has always been his own man, of course, but he could envision a political career for a person such as himself more easily in California, because in that freewheeling state it has been more acceptable for a political hopeful to be a little bit of an odd duck, wandering across the landscape of ideas and finding new intellectual playthings. In no other state would Jerry Brown have been as likely to achieve great success as a politician while talking openly of Zen, Mother Teresa, Catholicism, and the virtues of austerity. The tolerant, free-and-easy ethos of his home state has allowed Brown to blaze a trail of innovation in his appointments, his priorities, and his lifestyle. In California, he was a radio talk-show host long before this role became fashionable for politicians or even before talk radio became a national phenomenon. Jerry Brown lived in an ad hoc commune in Oakland, California, worked with Mother Teresa among the dying in Calcutta, studied Zen in Japan—and then, back in California, ran successfully for a third term as governor. Surfers and scientists, entrepreneurs and farmworkers, originators of social trends and the butt of mockery by some for “have a nice day” and alfalfa-sprout entrées, Californians developed as a separate breed, eager to move forward into whatever lay ahead. And so did their governor.
But paradoxically Jerry Brown has met political success in his freewheeling native state by consistently telling Californians what most state politicians would never tell them—that there are limitations on government’s ability to make things better. Austerity had worked politically for him thirty-seven years earlier, when he proclaimed that Californians were in an “era of limits.” Considering the difficulties the state faced in January 2011, limits would probably be front and center again as he began his third administration.
Jerry Brown’s father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, who was also an idealist, didn’t much believe in limitations. He was the perfect man to govern the rapidly growing California of the 1950s and ’60s—eager to build more educational institutions, more freeways, and more water projects. Pat’s philosophy meshed perfectly with his exuberant California. Jerry Brown has shared Pat’s ambition but in many respects has been his exact opposite. Jerry has preached frugality, limits, and realistic views of what can be accomplished, yet at the same time has practiced his own brand of push-the-envelope idealism, appointing unprecedented numbers of women and ethnic minorities to high positions. In the post-Pat ’70s, Jerry’s particular alchemy created a political persona that sold well among Californians, who were recovering from a twenty-year building binge and beginning to worry about higher and higher taxes.
Jerry Brown’s idealism has been shaped and enhanced by a powerful California institution—the Catholic Church, whose ranks include roughly one in four Californians.4 From the fourth grade through his twenty-first year, the serious-minded and idealistic Brown was educated in Jesuit institutions. The cumulative effect of those many years was that he took the teachings of the Jesuits to heart more than did most of his peers. He took