California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

9. Cigar Smoke

AFTERCHESSMAN,BROWNNEEDED, for once, to escape his beloved state. Public events, normally a source of great joy, had become nightmares. Crowds hooted at the mention of his name. “I was really blasted and booed from one end to the other,” he remembered. “The Walls of Jericho fell down on me.”1 Fortunately, he had a trip planned. Two weeks after the execution, in the middle of May 1960, he traveled to Bainbridge Island, near Seattle in Puget Sound, for a conference of western governors. Combining people and politics, such trips were usually a balm for Brown, but at this one he found himself in a partisan exchange with Gov. Mark Hatfield of Oregon. Gary Francis Powers , the pilot of a U-2 spy plane, had just been shot down and captured by the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower initially denied the existence of espionage flights, then admitted it, and the resulting furor derailed a Paris summit meeting scheduled between Eisenhower and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Brown told reporters that the incident had damaged Eisenhower and that spillover from the affair would hurt Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee. The GOP might abandon Nixon in favor of New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Brown insisted. Hatfield, who had been elected the same year as Brown and would go on to a long career in the U.S. Senate, disagreed. The Soviets knew Nixon would be a tough-minded president, Hatfield said, and that fact would only strengthen his campaign.2 180 9 CIGARSMOKE The importance of the mini-debate was not in the details, but the topic. It was a presidential election year, and as Brown and Hatfield demonstrated, the political crowd was focused on the events of the nation and the world. The governor of California was no exception; he was involved. For a year, as he soared through the early days of his administration and struggled through the morass of the Chessman case, Brown had been eyeing a bigger venue. Like California governors before and after, Pat Brown was suffering from presidential fever. ——— It had taken little time for the disease to incubate. At the beginning of 1959, after his election as governor but before his inauguration, Brown wrote to Adlai Stevenson to say that he enjoyed their recent meeting. It was a meaningless letter of courtesy, but Brown added a handwritten postscript that revealed his thoughts: “How do you deny you are running for president and make it seem true?”3 The night of the inaugural Brown joked publicly about getting to the White House, and the idea never completely left his mind. Barely two months later, in March, Brown spoke at the Gridiron Club banquet, an annual spoof of Washington officialdom organized by the capital ’s press corps. Hoping to use the affair as something of a coming-out party for his national ambitions, Brown and his staff spent hours crafting his talk. Brown thought he held his own against House Republican leader Charles Halleck, the GOP speaker, and toward the beginning he threw in a witty line that went over well. “I will use this very important forum to declare ,” he said, “courageously and unequivocally, I am not a candidate for president in 1960. Now that I am back in the thick of the race . . . ”4 Before leaving town, Brown telephoned Drew Pearson, a fixture in the political gossip of the day. It was too early for definite moves toward the presidency, Brown said, but he made no bones that he was hoping. “I’m going to be as good a governor of California as I can,” Pearson remembered him saying, “and then see what happens.” Pearson thought his old friend might have a chance. “It could be,” he noted in his diary, “that the two nominees will be from opposite ends of the country—Rockefeller of New York and Brown of California.”5 If there was any prospect of winning the nomination, more than a year of maneuver lay ahead, and after he returned from the East, Brown got a memo from Dutton laying out a strategy. For now, Brown would run for president only in his own state, entering the California primary as a “favorite son.” CIGARSMOKE 181 182 BUILDING Favorite sons still mattered because national political conventions still mattered. Only sixteen states held presidential primaries, and together they offered only a fraction of...