California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

Epilogue

BERNICEBROWNOUTLIVEDHERHUSBAND by six years. Her health declined until she was blind and bedridden, yet she upheld the tradition of a nightly cocktail and complained when her attendants watered down the drink. She died in 2002, at ninety-three. The political dynasty that she and Pat created had faded by then. Always looking toward the future, the West is inhospitable territory to ambitions based on a link with the past. After losing her race for governor, Kathleen Brown abandoned politics and settled into a career in high finance. Two of Pat’s nephews held local offices, but neither moved on to statewide prominence . Although there were occasional rumors that at least one of the grandchildren might join the game, nothing came of it. Only in Jerry Brown did the family business truly live on, and even there the path was rocky. As he left the governor’s office, he lost a bid for the U.S. Senate and then went overseas to work with Mother Teresa in India and study Zen Buddhism in Japan. He returned to California to begin a series of extraordinary personal reinventions, by turns giving play to competing traits in his complicated personality. For a time he sought a conventional role, becoming chairman of the state Democratic Party. But he grew disgruntled with that and sought the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination as an insurgent who complained about corporate influence and raised money through a toll-free telephone line. Later he abandoned the Demo381 EPILOGUE cratic Party altogether and hosted a left-wing radio talk show. In 1998 he won election as mayor of his adopted hometown of Oakland, where he cozied up to real estate developers and ordered the police to get tough with criminals. Publicly, he did not talk often about his father, but occasionally observers could catch a glimpse of his private feelings. When he was inaugurated as mayor, he held a meditation session at the former warehouse he had converted into a communal living space for himself and his most loyal aides. In one corner he had built an altar, a table decorated with things dear to him. One was a picture of his father.1 ——— Pat Brown was by then an icon of California politics, but his reputation had not always enjoyed so happy a status. In the years just after he was thrown from office, Brown’s style seemed increasingly anachronistic. Campaigning became less personal, the pitch for votes inexorably tipping more toward the wholesale than the retail. Television seized preeminence, and the handshaking that Brown so adored receded to a matter of little concern. In many respects Brown was the last of his breed, a fact made plain by his final defeat . Contemporaries, Brown and Reagan both spent the 1920s and 1930s learning how to communicate, but in vastly different ways. Brown trooped to meetings of the Kiwanis or the Knights of Columbus, booming out a politico’s oration audible to the man in the back row. Reagan honed a different skill, talking to microphones and cameras to win over radio listeners , movie audiences, and television viewers. Brown’s skill was once the more valuable political talent, but by 1966 a new day had dawned. Politics never reverted to the style Brown loved. In substance too voters rejected much that had been dear to Brown’s heart. Californians became ambivalent about their state’s enormous growth. The newcomers who had once signaled the state’s importance seemed merely to bedevil everyday life. Freeways that had been the epitome of modern efficiency became bottlenecks choked with traffic. Suburban tract homes once hailed as offering the good life to the working class were attacked as ugly sprawl. Dams once celebrated as admirable controls on the brute force of nature were said to be environmental disasters. The antigovernment rhetoric with which Reagan attacked Brown became the animating force of American politics. The evils of taxation—an argument that Brown found unappealing—took hold as the central focus of the Republican Party, which dominated both the presidency and the Cal382 EPILOGUE ifornia governorship for much of Brown’s retirement. Led by Reagan, voters rejected Brown’s steadfast belief that government was part of the solution to society’s woes. By 1982 the Democratic candidate for governor, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, declared that he was “running to bring state government under control,” an echo more of Reagan than of Brown.2 But...