Bernice had first attracted Pat’s eye when she was only thirteen, when they were in the same history class at Lowell High School. Lowell was and is an elite public school that numbers among its graduates actors Bill Bixby and Benjamin Bratt, U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Stephen Breyer, Alexander Calder, the artist who invented the mobile, and actress-singer Carol Channing. Pat had almost immediately tried to get a date with pretty Bernice, but her parents ruled that she was too young to go out with boys. But Pat persisted, and after years of courtship, he and Bernice eloped to Reno, Nevada, on October 30, 1930. They had to elope and marry on the sly because women teachers in 1930 were not allowed to marry. Pat was twenty-five.
In contrast to her ebullient, politicking husband and her non-ebullient, intellectual, politician son, Bernice was ambivalent about politics. In a 1960 news release, the governor’s office said, “Mrs. Brown frankly admits that she never would have chosen a political career for her husband if the choice had been hers to make.” But she “gracefully assumed the role of First Lady. As First Lady, she was a popular speaker, often offering intimate stories of family life in the governor’s mansion.”4
Pat made friends easily, an asset that fueled his political ambitions. Just one year into his law career, in 1928, he ran for the state Assembly as a Republican but lost. At the urging of a friend, labor lawyer and fellow Lowell High alumnus Matthew Tobriner, he switched to the Democratic Party in 1932, and in 1939 he ran for San Francisco district attorney against incumbent Matthew Brady. He lost again. But in 1943, when Jerry was five, indomitable Pat ran again, and this time he won. He would be in public office for the next twenty-three years.
As the district attorney of San Francisco with an eye for higher office, Pat eventually performed what was almost a rite of passage for law enforcement officials of that era, even in wink-at-sin San Francisco. He launched a headline-seeking campaign against vice. He cracked down on bookies and led a raid on San Francisco’s most elegant bordello, run by Sally Stanford. Most political observers at the time credited the antivice campaign, especially the 1949 raid on Ms. Stanford’s popular establishment, as a major factor in Pat’s successful campaign for California attorney general a year later.5
In 1946, as the well-regarded Democratic district attorney of a major California city, the ever-ambitious Pat had thought himself well poised to run for state attorney general. He took on Frederick Howser, a former member of the Assembly who was the district attorney for Los Angeles County. Howser beat him. But four years later, with the Sally Stanford raid under his belt, Pat tried again and beat Republican opponent Ed Shattuck by 225,000 votes. In what would be regarded as freakish today, parts of California were plastered with billboards urging voters to cast ballots for Democrat Brown and the ever-popular Republican governor Earl Warren. The governor had not liked Howser, but he did like the affable Brown and looked favorably on Brown’s use of his name. Brown was the only Democrat to win statewide election in California that year, which saw Earl Warren win a third term as governor. Brown’s son Jerry, in a somewhat parallel triumph, was to be a Democratic victor in a mostly Republican year when he was elected secretary of state twenty years later, in 1970.
Although he was a politician to his core with an eye for the next chance to move up, Pat had a strong sense of right and wrong—most of the time. He opposed the forced relocation of some ninety-three thousand California residents of Japanese descent, including those who were U.S. citizens, during the early days of World War II. It was a courageous stand, especially for a politically ambitious young man. The relocation had been endorsed by Franklin D. Roosevelt and most other army and civilian authorities, and Brown’s opposition stood in marked contrast to the position of his friend Earl Warren, who as governor endorsed the policy. (Warren later said he regretted his role in the relocation.)
Pat Brown was a visionary and an idealist who sought to make California a better place by being a civic booster on a grand scale, building freeways, opening new university campuses—three University of California branches in one year, 1965—and creating an enormous water project. Jerry absorbed his father’s sense of vision but manifested it differently. More reserved, intellectually inclined, and with a strong commitment to personal austerity, he grew up questioning his father’s backslapping ebulliency and unswerving devotion to pouring concrete. Despite his more self-reflective nature, however, Jerry also internalized his father’s ferocious ambition.
Both Pat and Jerry were entranced by the rough-and-tumble game of moving masses of people in a desired direction, and both were prepared to do what was necessary to accomplish political goals. Pat could pull an occasional dirty trick; if Jerry ever did, it escaped public notice.
Jerry’s political heritage was therefore formed as he grew up in a serious, but certainly not gloomy, household where law, politics, religion, and ambition dominated the adult conversation that Jerry eagerly absorbed and would adumbrate his lifelong interests in politics and various intellectual or spiritual pursuits. He was an inquisitive, intelligent child who listened closely to adult dinner-table discussion and asked endless questions. Despite his idealism, he learned early the value of playing on voters’ fears and ignorance, campaign tools used even by candidates such as his father, who told fearful voters he would stand up against eastern hoodlums and communist subversives.
There is little evidence that humor played much of a role in Jerry’s upbringing. While it is true that Pat Brown was an outgoing man who was extremely likable, he was not known as a great teller of jokes, nor was Bernice. Young Brown grew up in an atmosphere emphasizing achievement, substance, and serious concerns. Humor was not a mainstay of life on Magellan Avenue. Politics was.6 “I was attracted and repelled by what I saw of politics in my father’s house. The adventure. The opportunity. The grasping, the artificiality, the obvious manipulation and role-playing, the repetition of emotion without feeling—particularly that—the repetition of emotion. . . . I’ve always felt I could see the limitations because I was brought up in it,” Jerry said years later.7 Jerry also got a close-up look at California politics on the campaign trail, accompanying Pat as a twelve-year-old in 1950 when his father endeavored to show voters up and down the state that a good family man was running for attorney general.
But it wasn’t all politics in the serious Brown home. Spiritual concerns have always been an important part of Jerry’s life. In his first twenty years, they manifested themselves in his intense devotion to the Catholic Church. He attended St. Brendan’s, a Catholic grammar school near his home, then San Francisco’s St. Ignatius High School—now known as St. Ignatius College Preparatory—founded by the Jesuits in 1855. He graduated in the school’s centennial year, 1955.8 He was devoted enough to the Catholic Church to attend services on his seventeenth birthday, causing him to miss a surprise birthday party his friends threw for him.
As he matured and learned more about the world and its inhabitants, however, Brown became less attached to the formal teachings of the church. By the time he was twenty-one, he had left his seminary in a rebellion against the strictures of Jesuit teaching. Brown then began to express his moral convictions in more secular and independent ways, opposing the death penalty, working on behalf of farmworkers, and bringing those who were previously excluded into the mainstream of state government. He discovered that his idealism could be expressed through, of all things, nitty-gritty politics.
Jerry Brown therefore grew to maturity with two concurrent streams of thought running through his young psyche: his love-hate relationship with the facts of life involved in big-city politics, and the pursuit of Catholicism’s lessons. Catholicism and political ambition are a combination that many Irish politicians grew up with, in Boston, New York, and other big cities, but few of them pursued the theological side of the combination with the dogged persistence, moral conviction, and intelligence of Jerry Brown.
Every biography of Jerry Brown that covers his youthful years paints a picture of an essentially serious, highly introspective young person who nonetheless played football with his friends