The morning after the returns were in, an unshaven, pale Nixon held his famous “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” news conference in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, in Beverly Hills. Nixon’s pout and the fact that a former vice president had been defeated for a mere governorship, even if it was in a state the size of California, took some of the national media limelight off Pat. But he had won, and won convincingly.
Jerry Brown graduated from Berkeley with a bachelor of arts degree in classics in 1961. District Court of Appeals judge Matthew Tobriner, who had convinced Pat Brown to switch from being a Republican to a Democrat nearly thirty years earlier, convinced Pat’s son that he should attend Yale Law. Jerry set off for New Haven.
At the suggestion of his father, Jerry performed legal research in the Yale Law Library for Stephen Reinhardt, a Los Angeles attorney who had recently brought a legal action against Pierre Salinger, formerly President John Kennedy’s and then Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. Salinger, a former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle before he went to Washington, had been appointed to the U.S. Senate to fill the unexpired term of Democrat Engle, who had died of brain cancer. He then filed to run for a full six-year term. Even though Pat Brown had appointed Salinger to the Senate, Brown and Reinhardt opposed Salinger’s candidacy and sought to derail it on the grounds that Salinger was not a legal resident of California. Salinger won the case, even with Jerry doing opposition legal research, defeated Alan Cranston in the Democratic primary, and went on to be defeated in 1964’s general election by former MGM song-and-dance man George Murphy.
During his time at Yale, Jerry formed two other friendships—with former Louisiana seminarian Don Burns, a brilliant student who later became a member of his cabinet, and with also-brilliant Tony Kline, who became Jerry’s legal adviser and a state appeals court judge.
Jerry did not go to Fort Lauderdale to frolic with girls in bikinis during Yale’s spring break. Instead, he went to Mississippi to observe the struggles of those attempting to win civil rights for African Americans. He arrived in Jackson, talked with civil rights organizers, and dropped in unannounced to chat with Ross Barnett, the segregationist governor. Barnett, an unlikely friend of the senior Brown from governors’ conferences, phoned Pat to tell him that Jerry was running around with the wrong sort of people. A few days later, Jerry returned to New Haven. “It got really heavy,” Jerry told his father. “I was really nervous so I got out of there.”19
Jerry graduated from Yale in 1964, returned to California, and clerked for Matthew Tobriner, then a justice of the state Supreme Court who had been appointed to that court in 1962 by Pat. (Jerry breezed into the clerkship after getting his law degree but before passing the bar examination; he was, after all, the son of the governor.) Jerry confidently took the California bar exam, and flunked it. In Jerry’s defense, the three-day California bar examination is generally regarded as one of the most difficult in the nation. Determined to pass the next time around, Brown hunkered down in the 1877-vintage, three-story, white Victorian governor’s mansion in downtown Sacramento and studied. He passed on his second try, after taking a three-month refresher course at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento.
Whether he was influenced by Yale, his rebellion against the severity of Sacred Heart, a resurgence of interest in secular intellectual pursuits, or, as is most likely, a combination of those factors, Jerry Brown after graduating from law school pointed his life in a direction that was new in locale but familiar in background—politics. The idealism remained, but gone was any desire for an official attachment to the Catholic Church. He decided to strike out afresh in a new political arena. He went to work at $640 a month for Tuttle & Taylor, one of the more prestigious law firms in Los Angeles, located in the former 20th Century-Fox studio lot remade into the sleek Century City office area.
Tuttle & Taylor was a firm that emphasized collegiality, relatively low billable hours, schedule flexibility, and high academic achievement among the attorneys it very selectively hired. The combination was ideal for a young man ready to explore options.20 But before taking the Tuttle & Taylor job, the ever-restless, ever-inquiring Jerry Brown embarked on a six-month study tour of Latin America, which saw him stopping in Mexico City, Honduras, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, and Uruguay.
In 1969, not long after beginning the private practice of law at Tuttle & Taylor in vote-rich Los Angeles, former Jesuit seminarian Jerry Brown entered what was to be his lifelong occupation—elective politics.
CHAPTER TWO
Going Statewide
Learning the Ropes and Hunting Headlines
Nothing in life is so rigid that there aren’t developments. That’s true in politics. That’s true in theology. That’s true in personal relations.
Jerry Brown, speech to high school students, 1979
Just as Jerry had begun to settle into life in Los Angeles, his father found himself in the political fight of his life, scrambling to retain his governorship against a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan. The election that followed had repercussions that echoed down the years for Jerry Brown and all California politicians.
From the conventional political standpoint of the mid-1960s, even with its revolution against societal norms, Reagan was regarded by Pat Brown and his inner circle as an impossible candidate; movie stars did not run for office, even in celebrity-struck California. The famous, but probably apocryphal, story has movie mogul Jack Warner reacting when informed that Reagan was running for governor: “No—Jimmy Stewart for governor—Ronald Reagan as ‘best friend.’”
For the most part, elected officials in the state’s highest offices prior to Reagan had been people—almost all of them men—who had devoted their lives to politics. Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, William Knowland, and Pat Brown were experienced, professional, and used to making deals. They sought to win voters by talking about how their policies were good for people and their opponents’ policies were not. They did not rely primarily on personal charm, although it was regarded as an asset. They sought to project themselves as competent and reliable. Warren and Knight worked at having a cordial relationship with the state’s civil servants. Being charming on television was terra incognito.
Reagan upended that world forever, a lesson not lost on Jerry Brown. Reagan proved that a political outsider, one who had never before faced a general electorate and who had a background professional politicians would laugh at, could steamroll an experienced, competent incumbent through his appeal to the media. Dramatically exploiting themes that resonate with voters had long been a standard part of the political armamentarium and still is, but Reagan’s twinkly-eyed ability to connect with voters, especially on television, took the tactic much further. The trick is finding the themes. In California in 1966, the right themes were the perception of misbehaving students at Berkeley and the rioting blacks in Watts.
The late Mario Savio and other young firebrands of the 1964 Free Speech movement at the University of California’s Berkeley campus could not have known it at the time and would probably deny it today, but they and a group of conservative California businessmen formed an unknowing and odd combination that helped open the door for Ronald Reagan to eventually occupy the White House. They unwittingly helped elect him governor, and a California governor is automatically a potential president. Reagan would indeed be elected president in 1980.
The chain of circumstances stretched across many years. For nearly a century, the university had been a beloved California institution, enabling millions of young people from modest circumstances to receive an excellent education and move up the economic and social ladder. UC was, and still is, a major driver of California’s and the nation’s economies. But beginning in 1964, millions of voters discovered to their