Kathleen Brown: She Too Wants a Chance to Lead

“I am not my father,” Kathleen Brown begins. “And I am not my brother.”

True enough, there are the bloodlines. She is the daughter of former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown and sister of former Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr.

But at age 43, as she starts her run for the office of California treasurer, her first statewide campaign, be careful what you color her.

“I am a different shade of Brown,” she says with cool practice, even before you ask.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, Pat Brown, was the builder-governor of California who made the ground all but shake from the concrete pouring out freeways and buildings--pouring out dreams of bigness and greatness. In the 1970s, Jerry Brown, the conserver-governor, made the Establishment shake in anger from his challenge to freeways and the whole notion of bigness as a path to greatness.

A Blending of Both

Now at the dawn of the 1990s, Kathleen Brown wants her chance at state leadership on the promise to meld into a contemporary political alloy the exuberant growth of her father’s era with the flinty conservancy of her brother’s.

Almost without trying, she has become the talk of Democratic circles. Party regulars who have seen her only once in 15 years swear to the heavens that she is one of their most promising up-and-comers, someone with boundless potential.

“My father didn’t pay heed to the environment. My brother paid attention to the environment but didn’t plan for those who were moving here. I want to do both. It’s really the Yin and Yang of the Democratic Party,” she says.

To witness her in action, Brown was followed from the reeking sewer plant at Playa del Rey, which she supervises in her role as a Los Angeles Public Works commissioner, to bucolic Monterey for a reunion of classmates from her prep school days. Along the way, there were the usual assortment of speeches and fund-raisers that form the foundation of a statewide campaign.

Never has someone brought such a legacy to the task of seeking statewide office.

You can see it in her face. She has her father’s easy smile and her brother’s deep, intense gaze. The sharp Brown nose is unmistakable.

You can see it in the way she moves. She bores into the center of any crowd and plays to the camera with the natural ease of someone who grew up knowing of flashbulbs and fishbowls and glad-handing.

Life in the Mansion

As a child, she painted toenails on the feet of the antique bathtub in the governor’s mansion and listened to the family’s background chatter about fabled friends and foes, men like John F. Kennedy, Adlai E. Stevenson, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan.

“I thought people always had sirens on their cars,” she says with a laugh.

A favorite story is a reminder to herself and her listeners about the anything-can-happen vagaries of politics. The time was 1966 and her father was sitting at a table with his advisers, planning his campaign for a third term. The elder Brown feared he would have to face Republican George Christopher, the mayor of San Francisco.

“They sat there and said if only the Republicans would do them a favor and nominate that actor fellow Ronald Reagan, it would be a pushover,” she recalls, rolling her eyes.

Republicans did, of course. And they dashed Pat Brown’s career, except as patriarch.

Unlike Pat’s son, Jerry, the eccentric whose interests never strayed far from the throb of politics, daughter Kathleen arrives on the ballot from a roundabout path.

She was born on the cusp of social change for women. Some of her college friends headed out for the wonders of careers. Others wanted the satisfaction of being homemakers. Brown chose both lives, one after the other. She changed her name along the way to separate the eras. Old friends from college and her housewife days call her Kathy. Today’s career associates call her Kathleen.

“She always had balance,” explains Sister Carlotta, who oversees the exclusive Santa Catalina Catholic girls prep school in Monterey. Here, Brown was boarded for her final two years of high school. She says it was to shield her from what the family knew would be a bruising 1962 gubernatorial campaign between Pat Brown and Nixon.

You could call hers a balance of the common and uncommon.

Like countless other 40ish mothers of today, Brown was called on to sacrifice for the men in her life. Twice she pulled up stakes and followed husbands from Los Angeles to the East Coast.

Sold Neckties

In 1966 she left Stanford University and went to Massachusetts so her first husband, George Rice, could attend law school. For pin money, she sewed and sold men’s neckties under her own label. She went by the name Kathy Brown Rice.

The two returned to Los Angeles and Brown first plunged into elective politics, winning a seat on the Los Angeles Board of Education in 1975. She was reelected in 1979. And also divorced. The couple had two daughters and a son who now range in age from 23 to 17.

Brown resigned from the school board in 1980 to follow her second husband, television executive Van Gordon Sauter, to New York where he was president of CBS television news. He brought to the marriage two sons, now aged 26 and 29. In New York, Brown went to Fordham University School of Law, interned as a local prosecutor and joined the Manhattan office of the Los Angeles-based law firm of O’Melveny & Myers.

She was older than other junior associates and living in luxury, but colleagues said she carried her own bulging briefcase or “elephant bag” and willingly began down on the bottom rung on the tedium of corporate law working for attorneys who were barely older than her children.

She and Sauter returned to California in 1987. The children all but raised, Brown was bitten anew by the political bug.

Although moving up at O’Melveny, she quit when an associate of Mayor Tom Bradley engineered an appointment to the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

“I call it my three S’s: Sewers, solid waste and streets,” she says.

Politicians with new turf always seem to indulge in the delights of discovery, no matter how plebeian. Brown can recite the gallons of sewage flowing into the Hyperion Treatment Plant (400,000 gallons a day) and tell why residents in El Segundo hate the methane gas associated with the facility (huge ovens that burn it off shake the ground). She visits the Monterey Aquarium and wonders, “Humm, wonder what they do with their sludge?”

She tries out a jingle: “There’s no free lunch and there’s no free flush.”

Some people try to move a conversation away from sewers to almost anything else. What about her two-month specialty diet, for instance. “You can tell people how old I am but not how much I weigh,” she warns. Better you should ask her about the Japanese sewer system. “I was reading. . . .”

Surveying elective opportunities for 1990, Brown quickly settled on the “good fit” of the office of California treasurer, a once sleepy post that the late Treasurer Jesse Unruh expanded into a dynamic center of power in Sacramento.

The treasurer invests the tax revenues, a $17-billion-a-year portfolio. Anyone with such unthinkable sums to manage, in chunks of $50 million to $400 million a day, can be a very powerful person on Wall Street and in the other financial markets and among giant investors around the world. So, Unruh asked, “Why not?”

More, Unruh enlarged the office’s influence on various independent government commissions, those with financial powers. In total, if you add in the treasurer’s vote on state government pension boards, it is an investment empire of $70 billion.

As she campaigns, voters sometimes give her a blank stare when she mentions the office of treasurer. They brighten when they understand, “Oh, you want to be the new Jesse Unruh.”

“It’s my theory and belief that the person who sits in the treasurer’s office needs to be an advocate, needs to understand the diversity of the state, needs to understand its problems,” she says. “I have seen real life, broken sewers and overflowing landfills. That’s the sort of experience someone dealing with these (investment) decisions ought to have. . . . I’m angry about the state of our Golden State.”

Traditional Strategies

Although her record of public service is modest, Brown cheerfully points to calamities that have not occurred on her watch, either while on the school board or the public works board. No education labor strife in Los Angeles, no widespread upheaval over teacher integration, and no emergency ocean dumping of sludge.

So far, she has made one important promise. If elected, she will give preference to California companies when investing tax funds--if all other factors are equal. And she has indicated that she might as treasurer consider a company’s social policies in determining whether it is a good investment. Does a firm have child care? Has it been fined for toxic pollution?

But she pledges that all such considerations will be used only in pursuit of what she calls “traditional investment strategies,” the quest for maximum return at minimum risk.

“You don’t invest for some social policy reason. But I won’t wear blinders. You might look at all kinds of factors in judging a company’s performance over the long term,” Brown says.

Holding the office now is Thomas W. Hayes, appointed by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian to fill the vacancy left by the death of Democrat Unruh. Hayes, former auditor general of the state Legislature, has virtually no campaign experience, and was not even a registered Republican until confirmed to the job by the state Senate.

“He is a caretaker . . . a numbers cruncher,” she says bitingly.

So far, Democratic reviews of Brown are downright enthusiastic. “Jerry with a gyroscope!” concludes one writer. “The best of Pat and Jerry,” says 35-year family friend Joe Cerrell, who makes politics his business. Political columnist David S. Broder called her “in many ways, more of a ‘natural’ politician than her brother, Jerry--’a throwback to the old man,’ some Democrats would say.”

Some professionals wonder whether Kathleen Brown is allowing expectations among would-be supporters to soar too high too early. Can anyone be this promising without having been tested on the anvil of a major campaign?

“If high expectations mean we don’t have to spend 2 million precious dollars in a contested primary it is an acceptable early burden to bear,” replies Steven M. Glazer, the first consultant to be signed up with her campaign.

So far the strategy has been successful. No significant figure has emerged to challenge Brown for the Democratic nomination in the June, 1990, primary. Hayes is likewise alone in the GOP field right now, but a potentially powerful opponent is on the sidelines weighing a challenge, former U.S. Treasurer Bay Buchanan.

No Major Campaigns

None of these would-be treasurers have been through a statewide campaign. Their vulnerabilities and weaknesses are speculative. But for Brown, critics will strike squarely at the source of her strength--her political upbringing and her family name.

“Why in the world would you want a politician to manage your money?” Hayes asks.

And then there is the matter of Brown’s brother.

Jerry’s experimental approach to governing left him a lavish collection of unattended baggage. There were his controversial court appointments, his mishandling of an agricultural pest infestation, his ragtag 1980 run for the presidency, and any number of other deeds entered into the political ledgers as mistakes. His record has once again been thrust into political discourse by his decision to take over the chairmanship of the state Democratic Party.

Sources in a position to know say that the family and certainly its close friends are uneasy about Jerry’s timing. “Some people feel this is Kathy’s turn and Jerry should stand aside and not damage her chances,” said one.

Kathleen denies the steady chatter of rumors that there is family friction.

Nevertheless, she is bracing for a turbulent campaign.

“My friends make me so mad when they say this is going to be a slam-dunk. I know otherwise. It’s going to be rough and nasty.” Already she has memorized Hayes’ declaration to attack politics the way he learned war while serving with the Marines in Vietnam: “Bring superior firepower and take no prisoners.”

Her reaction?

“No comment.”

But then she adds a personal view about politics: “I don’t have to have this, you know. I walked into the sunset before. So what the heck, I could do it again.”