Pat Brown’s Lasting Legacy

Re “Edmund G. ‘Pat’ Brown, Former Governor, Dies,” Feb. 17-18:

Among all his noteworthy accomplishments in his two terms as governor, Edmund G. Brown Sr. is most revered by me for his sterling commitment to higher education.

In developing and expanding the state college and university system, he enabled those of us who did not come from privileged families to acquire a formal education and thus to contribute more productively in society. And his Republican successors have been trying, ever since, to destroy education for the poor and middle class.

STUART LUBIN

Los Angeles

* Brown, like his contemporary in New York state, the late Nelson A. Rockefeller, was truly one of the more visionary figures of our age. His legacy of accomplishments in so many diverse areas--civil rights, higher education, transportation and water resource management--made California the envy of the nation, and showed what government can do to fulfill its obligations to the people it serves.

After leaving office in 1967, the former governor continued to speak out. His 1989 book, “Public Justice, Private Mercy: a Governor’s Education on Death Row,” in which he passionately articulated his opposition to capital punishment, is one of the best treatises on the subject I’ve read.

Too bad for California, Gov. Pat’s successors have all paled in comparison.

HAROLD N. BASS

Northridge

* Brown’s development of California is evidence that government, even big government, is good and necessary. I am sorrowed by his passing and the passing of an era responsible for our growth and well-being.

MADELINE DeANTONIO

Encino

* The memorials to Brown’s vision are all about us, when we drive from one end of California to another, when we step onto a public university campus, or even when we drink a glass or water or irrigate our plants. For all his admitted shortcomings, Brown’s approach was one of saying “yes.” For him, the glass was never half-empty, but half-full; for him, the possibilities for our state were limited only by the limitations of our imagination and our courage.

Unfortunately, in our own enervated, defeatist age, our courage seems to have failed us. A generation of politicians in Sacramento and throughout California whines and gnashes its collective teeth. For them, the answer is always “no,” the glass is half-empty, and the solution to our problems is not education but incarceration; not unity, but division; not an ever-expanding universe of possibilities, but a grimly static zero-sum game in which classes and ethnic groups, are set against one another, in which discrimination is encouraged and tolerated, and in which the conversation in society focuses not on the California Promise, but on the California Problem.

Perhaps the greatest lesson we could take from the public life of Brown, and the one which would do honor to his great service to this state is this: The limitations of our future are what we make them.

PAUL S. MARCHAND

West Hollywood