Pat Brown: He Had the Principle to Risk His Interest

I rang the bell at 6:15 p.m. just as I had promised. Former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr. opened the door and invited me in.

My evening’s assignment was to drive the governor and his wife, Bernice, from their Benedict Canyon home to the Athenaeum in Pasadena. We’d been invited to a farewell party there for the governor’s onetime press secretary, Jack Burby, who is retiring from his present job as a Times editorial writer.

I was somewhat preoccupied with my driving that night, concerned about my distinguished passengers. But as I listened to the Browns talk, I also thought about how much I admired Pat Brown and how today’s politicians could use the courage he showed in his eight years as governor.

When I was younger and more stupid than I am now, I wrote that Pat Brown had been a good governor, but not a great one. I was wrong. Brown, California’s chief executive from 1959 to 1967, was a great governor, right up there alongside a man he admired, the late Earl Warren.

The Brown Sr. years are best known for a mighty wave of state construction--university campuses, the north-to-south water project, highways. The outpouring of public works provided the water, the speedy transportation and educated citizens that gave California decades of prosperity.

But I also remember another issue that brought him nothing but trouble, one that is relevant to our racially tense Los Angeles of today.

It was 1963. The civil rights movement was beginning to turn to the North. In California, attention centered on persuading the Legislature to approve a law banning discrimination in housing. Men and women--black and white, singing “We Shall Overcome”--settled in around the second-floor rotunda of the Capitol. They promised to remain there until the bill was passed.

They had a long wait. White backlash against civil rights legislation also was moving North. Brown and the late Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh had pushed the housing bill through the liberal Democratic Assembly. But it was failing in the Senate, controlled by more conservative Democrats.

The Capitol turned into a steaming summer circus. The demonstrators’ sit-in became a statewide story, brought into millions of homes by television news, just becoming a force. Brown and other smart Democrats suspected there might be a backlash against their fair housing legislation. Unruh even warned that the Democratic Party was moving ahead of the people.

But although the housing bill looked increasingly like a political loser, Brown persisted, carrying the battle into the Senate, where Unruh had little influence. The bill passed the Senate.

A year later, the backlash crashed around him. The voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure nullifying the housing law.

The anti-fair housing measure carried the state by a much higher margin than the voters gave to President Lyndon B. Johnson in the same election. It was the beginning of the conservative tide that, two years later, elected Ronald Reagan governor and tossed Pat Brown out of office.

What interested me about the way Brown handled this is how he willingly engaged in an act of political self-destruction for principle. He knew that he wanted to leave for the next generation a California of economic opportunity and social justice.

His moves for economic expansion made him a hero to the state’s powers. Conservative Kern County farm barons loved their water from the north. Southland chambers of commerce praised him for the highways, campuses and water plan. But such friends quickly bailed out as Brown was engulfed by the tide of protest against efforts for racial equality.

There’s a lesson in all this for the present governor, Pete Wilson.

He faces social, economic and political problems greater than ever imagined by Pat Brown. In the months ahead, Wilson will have to balance moves to serve economic and human needs. Where Brown’s California was rich, Wilson’s state government is impoverished. Wilson will need Brown’s guts, rare in today’s political generation, his willingness to risk his career.

We didn’t talk about such heavy matters on the drive home. Mrs. Brown told about campaigning for her son, Jerry, in Illinois. She recalled her speeches about the evil influence of money on politics. She said she also got a chance to have dinner with her granddaughter, who lives in Chicago.

I pulled up in front of their house. Back and forth to Pasadena without a crackup. And earlier in the evening, Mrs. Brown had confided to my wife that “Bill was driving perfectly.”

A perfect evening. I escorted them to their door and we said good night.