California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown

11. “By God, I Can Beat That Son of a Bitch”

229 11 “BYGOD,ICANBEAT THATSONOFABITCH” INSEPTEMBER1961PATBROWN hunkered down in front of a television set to watch an announcement he did not wish to hear. Richard Nixon, the former vice president of the United States and a man who had come within a hairbreadth of winning the Oval Office, was standing before dozens of reporters and cameramen in the Statler Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles. The state government in Sacramento, Nixon declared, was “a mess.” California’s government was too big, its crime rate too high, its economy too sluggish. As for the “amiable but bungling man who presently is governor,” he was incapable of finding the solutions. So Richard Nixon would take the job. He would run for governor of California in 1962. Republicans, Nixon vowed, would “beat Pat Brown to a pulp.”1 The would-be pulp watched with dread. Brown’s first term had featured an ironic combination of policy successes and political setbacks. His achievements—the water project, the new college campuses, the tax increase that helped to pay for it all—were more deeply appreciated with the passing of time. The failures, by contrast, were immediately obvious. His debacles in dealing with the death penalty and national politics had left many Californians believing their governor a weak and vacillating figure, the amiable bungler described by Nixon. Nearly a third of voters thought Brown was doing a poor job. Even among those who approved of his work, more than half were unable to cite anything specific as a major accomplishment.2 230 BUILDING Polls suggested Brown would lose to Nixon badly, and that was not the worst news. At least Nixon was a national figure. The governor’s numbers were little better against far weaker opponents. He trailed former Gov. Goodwin Knight, who was contemplating a comeback. He was tied with San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, a local figure. Most ignominious of all, the governor polled only five points better than William Knowland, the man he routed so easily in 1958. Knowland was out of politics, yet one in five Californians said they did not know how they would mark a ballot in a potential Knowland-Brown race. The cold fact was that with less than fourteen months to election day, the governor was the most unpopular major politician in California.3 Brown’s self-confidence was a fragile thing in the best of times, and as he watched Nixon’s announcement, his courage gave way completely. Frightened that he might be on the losing end of a rout, Brown called key Democrats and told them to find someone else to carry the party’s banner against Nixon. Brown had spent his life in the pursuit of political office. Now, cowed by bad circumstances and a bold opponent, he was ready to quit.4 ——— In many ways Nixon cut a daunting figure. Born and raised in Whittier, east of Los Angeles, he had been elected to Congress at thirty-three, to the Senate at thirty-seven, to the vice presidency at thirty-nine, an age when Brown was still in his first year as San Francisco district attorney. Politically, he was said to be brilliant, knowledgeable, strategic—and ruthless. Many people in California politics hated Nixon, especially his fellow Republicans, but nobody thought him a boob. Brown first met him in 1950, on a hot day in Bakersfield when both were campaigning, Nixon for the U.S. Senate and Brown for attorney general of California.5 From the beginning, Brown got glimpses of Nixon as a schemer. Later in the same campaign, both men found themselves in Sacramento at the same time. They met at the Senator Hotel, and Nixon proposed a pact. If Brown avoided an endorsement of Helen Gahagan Douglas, the actress and congresswoman who was Nixon’s opponent for the Senate, Nixon would refuse to endorse Brown’s Republican opponent in the attorney general’s race. Brown was already keeping his distance from Douglas, who was well to his left politically, but he found Nixon’s proposal slick. He offered a characteristically noncommittal answer, and the two men went their separate ways.6 “BYGOD,ICANBEATTHATSONOFABITCH” 231 Two years later, Brown watched on television as Nixon, accused of having a slush fund, gave his famous Checkers speech, invoking the family dog as emblem of his honesty and preserving his place on the Republican ticket. Brown was not convinced. He found...