Trailblazer - Chuck McFadden

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election was James Flournoy, an African American attorney in Los Angeles.8 With the backing of the Reagan forces, James Flournoy campaigned against Brown on a theme of toughening laws that governed corporations, declaring that there was some evidence of an underworld influence. He also said he wanted to bridge the “polarization gap” between the races, although it was uncertain how he could do that as secretary of state.

      Sensing the growing voter distrust of politicians and all that went on in Sacramento, Jerry Brown said he would reduce the “hidden influence of lobbyists” in political campaigns by requiring candidates to file more complete reports on their campaign expenditures. He said election laws should be liberalized to allow voters to register as late as two weeks before election day and suggested that television stations be required to donate time to political candidates as a remedy for the vast amounts of campaign money that had to be sought on behalf of political candidates. Brown himself benefited from help given by Pat’s former financial backers, including San Francisco hotel magnate Ben Swig. Swig occasionally locked up potential donors in a hotel ballroom until they unlimbered their checkbooks.

      Brown went on to a victory in the general election with a margin of three hundred thousand votes. He had 50.4 percent of the vote, Flournoy won 45.6 percent, Peace and Freedom candidate Israel Feuer won 1.7 percent, and American independent Thomas M. Goodloe had 2.3 percent.9

      Jerry had achieved a Democratic victory amid a mostly Republican year. Ronald Reagan, whom Jerry regarded as an intellectual lightweight, was reelected governor by a 501,000-vote margin over Jesse Unruh, the longtime speaker of the Assembly nicknamed the “Big Daddy” of California politics.10 Houston Flournoy was elected state controller, Ed Reinecke was elected lieutenant governor, and Ivy Baker Priest was elected treasurer. All were Republicans. It was not, however, a complete Republican sweep. Wilson Riles became California’s first statewide elected African American official, winning the nonpartisan state superintendent of public education post. Riles was a Democrat; Max Rafferty, the incumbent that Superintendent Riles defeated, was a conservative Republican.11 And Democrat John Tunney was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican incumbent George Murphy.

      Reagan, justifiably confident of his own victory, campaigned hard for his old movie-days friend Murphy and was disappointed when Murphy lost. Murphy’s forlorn reelection campaign was handicapped by his undistinguished six years in the Senate plus throat cancer, which forced him to make platform speeches in a throaty whisper.

      On January 4, 1971, Jerry was sworn into office by Earl Warren, with his parents, siblings, staff, and grandmother, Ida Schuckman Brown, looking on proudly. Standing before the 150 people assembled to witness his inauguration, the new secretary of state turned to his mother and thanked her for naming him after his father.

      Early in his tenure as secretary of state, Jerry met Jacques Barzaghi at a party in Los Angeles and shortly afterward appointed him to his staff as a file clerk. That was the title, although Barzaghi was really a staff utility man, friend, political and spiritual adviser, futurist, confidant, decorator, and personal stylist. Barzaghi was an enigma to Brown’s other staffers. However, he was to remain at Brown’s side during the next thirty-plus years, far outlasting other members of the Brown team who eventually went their separate ways.

      Despite being the son of a governor, Jerry Brown had spent little time in the state capital. He was a creature of San Francisco and then Los Angeles, where he had quickly become part of the city. The Sacramento that Jerry Brown confronted upon taking up his new position was, like Jerry, full of contradictions. It had a reputation of being dull. A long-standing quip had one of its residents saying, “Sacramento used to be a little cow town. Now it’s a big cow town.” Nancy Reagan was famously quoted as saying of Sacramento, “Nobody does hair there.”

      Dull or not, Sacramento was the capital city of the nation’s most populous and complex state. And it was sophisticated. But the sophistication was political, much too specialized to be appreciated in the wider world. Lieutenant Governor Ed Reinecke once told me that, counting the 120 legislators, lobbyists, staff members, and reporters, only about 2,000 Californians were daily concerned and knowledgeable about what went on in the Capitol, while the rest of the state knew little about internecine Sacramento political happenings and didn’t much care. Back in the districts, constituents didn’t know much about the realities faced by lawmakers, who sometimes had to make ugly compromises to get desired legislation passed. Lobbyists got it; constituents didn’t.

      The political players—legislators, their staffs, and lobbyists—had their own jargon, their own watering holes, and, in cow town Sacramento, a certain amount of well-hidden contempt for civilians unfamiliar with their tribal rites. In a quote that has been repeated for more than fifty years, Unruh once declared, “If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money, and vote against them, you have no business being here.”

      Unruh’s legendary quote has been accurately interpreted as a commentary on being independent and tough-minded in the face of blandishments by lobbyists, but it also gives insight into the prevailing atmosphere in Sacramento. Republican and Democratic legislators got to know one another at private parties that lobbyists hosted in the Senator Hotel, across the street from the Capitol. In his book A Disorderly House, James Mills, a scholarly legislator who was one of Unruh’s top lieutenants in the Assembly and later became the president pro tempore (leader) of the California Senate, tells of magnificent feasts with distinguished wines topped off by brandy and cigars.12 State senators formed the Derby Club, where lobbyists paid for jolly lunches every Wednesday at Posey’s, a nearby restaurant that posted a black derby hat atop its sign. The California Assembly and Senate were gathering places for 120 extroverts, and because their wives and children were most often at home in the districts, they were on their own.

      While they were guilty of occasional idealism, the eighty members of the Assembly and forty members of the state Senate, along with the constitutional officers who were elected statewide, had for the previous 120 years spent most of their waking hours scheming and posturing to move out of the Triple-A League politics of California’s capital to the Major Leagues, either by getting elected governor—and therefore becoming automatically mentioned as a potential president—or by getting elected or appointed to a suitably prominent position in Washington. There was nonstop plotting, maneuvering, and backstabbing.13 Everyone also wanted to do good, of course—whatever that might be—but most of all, everyone wanted to do well.

      In 1966, four years before Jerry’s arrival in Sacramento, voters approved a measure authored by Mills to create a full-time legislature with an annual salary that went from six thousand dollars to sixteen thousand. The idea was that a more professional, better-paid legislature was appropriate for a complex state that in 1962 had surpassed New York to become the most populous in the nation. For many lawmakers, the higher salary allowed them to live in Sacramento year round, some with their families, and become even more wrapped up in the world of the Capitol.

      Into this long-established cauldron of ambition, warfare, idealism, and sin came thirty-one-year-old Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit novitiate, austere idealist, and opportunistic antipolitician politician. “I would say it was a culture shock,” recalls Doug Faigin, Brown’s press secretary in the secretary of state’s office and later his press secretary as governor. “Reagan and his people would go to the Firehouse, which was about the only really fine restaurant in Sacramento at the time, but we would go to the Virgin Sturgeon. Sometimes Jerry would be there.”14

      It took a year of simmering resentment before the Sacramento political establishment moved to put the brash, self-righteous newcomer with the famous name in his place. In June 1972, legislators did what they usually do when an agency head or elected official displeases them—they cut his or her budget. When he took office, Jerry had established his main base of operation in sleek Century City, not far from his previous perch at Tuttle & Taylor.15 Not only were the offices handsome and modern, but Jerry was driven to them every day in a Cadillac—a far cry from the famous blue Plymouth he later used during his years as governor as an emblem of his frugality. Then the Assembly’s budget committee took away the rent money for the Century City office and cut two positions from his staff, including an “editorial assistant”—a

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