An Agenda of Unfulfilled Plans : Pat Brown at 80: Political Passions Still Run High

He’s the kind of politician who means it when he shakes your hand.

He reigned during the grand government boom days of the 1960s--a builder of freeways, universities and the immense north-to-south California Water Project, from which two-thirds of the state drinks.

On Sunday, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., former governor and father of a former governor, turned 80 years old.

Brown is the embodiment of that ebullient style of politics which, for more than half a century, has taken him plunging into crowds, slapping backs, kissing babies and always, always looking for ways to put government to use.

“You can contrast my father with (Ronald) Reagan,” said son Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr. “Reagan sees government as the obstacle. My father sees government as the instrument.”

Whether you’re driving the Santa Monica Freeway, turning on the water faucet or enrolling your kids in the University of California, the wonders Pat Brown shaped from concrete are inescapable. Less tangible, but equally important to Brown, are the social initiatives he undertook, including the first-in-the-nation Medicaid, called MediCal here, health care program for the needy elderly.

“We were builders,” he told an interviewer some years back. “We built roads and brought water to the valleys and to the Southland and spent billions. But we had to because the state was growing and we had to be ready.”

Public birthday celebrations took place last week in San Francisco, where the elder Brown was born, and then again Sunday in Los Angeles at the Beverly Hilton, where Brown was surprised as the dinner provided the extras for the filming of the CBS soap opera “Capitol.”

The politically oriented daytime soap opera used the occasion of Brown’s birthday to provide background for an episode in which one of the main characters, a congressman, stands in for the President at a major dinner.

“I haven’t had my picture taken this much since I was elected governor,” said the elder Brown, mingling with both his friends of two generations of politics and the actors of the network serial.

The two celebrations were designed to raise about $100,000 for the Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Institute of Government Affairs, a nonprofit organization that keeps the former governor active in public policy debate. For even at 80, Pat Brown still has an agenda of unfulfilled plans.

A Democrat, Brown was governor of California from Jan. 5, 1959, to Jan. 4, 1967.

It was a time not only of governmental activism, but of memorable political match-ups. Brown found himself facing--with mixed results--two Republicans who went on to become among the most commanding Presidents of their time, Richard M. Nixon (whom Brown beat for governor in 1962) and Reagan (who beat Brown in 1966).

Previously, Brown had served as state attorney general and as district attorney of San Francisco. His first campaign for public office goes back to 1928, when he ran for the state Assembly and lost.

Along the way, this offspring of pioneer Irish and German stock made himself a prominent millionaire lawyer.

Ever so lightly rumpled, he still marches into his corner suite in the Beverly Hills offices of Ball, Hunt, Hart, Brown & Baerwitz five days a week with the energy of a recent law school graduate trying to meet a too-big mortgage.

Friends said that a couple of years ago they feared Brown was slowing down. The cause turned out to be cataracts. And when they were removed, the former governor’s vitality returned, as did his ho-hum golf game and his daily swim. During his days in Sacramento, Brown’s passion for swimming was widely known because he arose each morning in the governor’s mansion and scurried across the street to a hotel pool.

Brown’s great-grandfather crossed the United States by covered wagon in the gold rush year of 1850. The family is proud to still have the great-grandfather’s letter describing these travels and the anxiety of preparing to “run into hostiles,” as Indians were known. Both of Brown’s parents were California natives.

“Few people know that we’re a pioneer family,” said Brown Jr., himself a California governor from 1975 to 1983.

No one denies the hard work that brought the elder Brown success. But the lesson, as he looks back, is that “you got to have good luck too. I had a lot of luck.”

Like the time at age 22, just out of law school, when he unexpectedly inherited from his former boss an established and thriving law practice. “I only shaved three times a week, and here I was with my own practice,” he said, as if still amazed.

Then, just as he became a bankruptcy specialist, the Great Depression drove thousands out of business, providing Brown with plenty of work.

And then there was the time, after leaving office, that counselor Brown was fired from representing the Indonesian oil company. Nixon had just been elected President and the Indonesians didn’t want a lawyer who was a political enemy of the White House, Brown recalled.

But, he continued, the Indonesian government felt bad, and gave him a consolation--a franchise to import 20,000 barrels a day of Indonesian oil to the U.S. market. This contributed substantially to the Brown family fortune over the years until Brown closed down the business a couple of years ago.

Last month, Brown and wife Bernice donated $1 million to UC Berkeley. It was not, the former governor said, his last million.

The high point in his career, as he looks back, was the long and difficult battle during his governorship for the California Water Project and its 444-mile Edmund G. Brown Sr. Aqueduct that transports water from the snowmelt of the northern mountain counties to the arid megalopolis and farms of the south.

Then as now, water development regionally divided California, north against south. And Brown mustered only the narrowest of victories both in the Legislature and in the 1960 statewide election to approve bond financing for construction.

He also is proud of the legacy of expanding the number of campuses of the University of California by 50%, from six to nine, and of his Master Plan for Higher Education, which brought order and direction to the state’s system of colleges and universities. A generation after its adoption, the plan remains the guiding force behind higher education today.

The Department of Transportation reported that 11 Southland freeways were opened during Brown’s Administration, including the Santa Monica, the Pomona and Garden Grove freeways.

Low Point

The low point of his public life still haunts Brown.

This was his decision in February, 1960, to grant a 60-day death sentence reprieve for rapist Caryl Chessman, the so-called red-light bandit of Los Angeles in the 1940s who became a celebrated author in prison.

The delay was one of many preceding Chessman’s execution in May, 1960. But it gave the fed-up public a target for its anger, casting Brown as indecisive.

The governor, the man who loves crowds, was brokenhearted to find himself booed wherever he went, including the Squaw Valley Winter Olympics in 1960, the opening of San Francisco’s Candlestick Park and at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

“It damn near killed me,” Brown recalled. “. . . At Candlestick, Nixon was there and they cheered Nixon and booed me. At the Winter Olympics, it was the final (game) and I was with my wife and little daughter. The boos would have knocked you down. I really wanted to quit.

“My wife prevailed on me or I would have quit,” he continued.

Although Brown acknowledges that times have changed, he still rails against the skepticism about government that is expressed by some of today’s successful politicians.

“It’s a shame that a rich state like this isn’t investing in the future,” Brown said. “We need to prepare; the state has to invest. And the governor has to tell the people that.

“I think (Republican Gov. George) Deukmejian is playing it too safe.”

Brown does more than just complain. His government institute organizes occasional symposiums on problems or ideas that strike his fancy.

Right now, he is hoping to bring together state leaders for a conference on minority youth unemployment in August, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Watts riots. Brown said he wants to build support for diverting some proceeds from the forthcoming state lottery to an urban jobs program, along the lines of the rural California Conservation Corps that was a pet project of his son’s Administration.

‘It’s a Choice’

“It’s a choice. We can pay to help them now, or pay for more penitentiaries for them later,” the elder Brown said.

Son Jerry Brown, who used to urge constituents to lower their expectations, says he doubts if his father’s buoyant belief in government will be popular again soon. “In the post-Vietnam era it will be hard to recapture his kind of faith in the political system.”

It used to be that the younger Brown went out of his way, sometimes awkwardly so, to distance himself from his father. These days, they seem to have reached an accommodation.

At a political reception the other night, for instance, they happened by chance to find themselves standing next to one another.

Like the two Los Angeles lawyers they are, they were overheard greeting each other by making a date for lunch--just two fellows with a common name and a family passion for politics.