Trailblazer - Chuck McFadden

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adding that we are collaborators in creation. But the authorities in Rome distrusted Teilhard de Chardin and did not want young would-be priests exposed to what they thought could lead to an undermining of Catholic doctrine.

      On one of the monthly visits of his parents, Jerry unburdened himself, declaring, “I sit here in poverty, but it isn’t real poverty. I don’t buy anything. I don’t own anything, but I don’t have to worry about it either. The mystical Three Degrees of Humility elude me, too.15 And chastity seems like just another form of detachment and separation. What’s the point of being here?”16

      Jerry decided to leave Sacred Heart. He went through the necessary paperwork, giving up his Jesuit connection and its pathway to priesthood, and was placed in El Retiro, a sort of Jesuit halfway house where young men who wished to leave the seminary stayed briefly. He then hitched a ride home to Magellan Avenue with Mark McGuiness, a friend from Jerry’s boyhood in San Francisco. At the end of his three and a half years at Sacred Heart, Jerry Brown emerged with two concurrent drivers in his life: first, the Jesuit-influenced approach to political and personal challenge, emphasizing intellectual rigor and personal austerity, and second, his previously developed idealism and desire to make the world a better place, even if that eventually involved doing the unconventional, as well as the assiduous study of what political ploy works best to influence voters.

      James Straukamp, a former priest who was a teacher at St. Ignatius when Jerry was a student there, told Brown biographer Robert Pack that among Jesuits “there is a process, an attitude, an underlying approach to problem solving and people relationships that remains. Your will and mind are in control all the time, and therefore there is a danger of being too heady and not having enough heart. Oh, you’re going to feel emotion, but I think that there is a mechanism that controls the external expression.”17

      During his time of isolation, introspection, self-denial, and inward-looking intellectual exercise at Sacred Heart, Jerry had become the son of the governor, although it had made little difference in his daily life. Pat’s campaign for governor came as he was nearing the conclusion of his second term as a popular attorney general, well poised to become the Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Then, on top of that, he was handed an opportunity politicians can only dream about. It came as a result of one of the most infamous instances of political bullying in California history.

      The incumbent governor was Goodwin Knight, an affable, outgoing Republican who enjoyed his job. He had been lieutenant governor under Earl Warren and found himself in the governor’s office in 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower rewarded Warren’s support by appointing him chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Knight was elected governor on his own in 1954.

      Knight’s happy life as governor came to an end in 1958 because of the ambitions of U.S. senator William Knowland, who was also an assistant publisher of the newspaper the Oakland Tribune, owned by his father. Knowland was the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate and one of the most powerful, best-known, and bullheaded politicians in the country. He harbored presidential ambitions and thought his chances would improve if he were the sitting governor of a large state such as California rather than one of many in the Senate.18 Knight stood in Knowland’s way. Knight enjoyed his job and wanted to keep on being governor. But Knowland, aided by Richard Nixon and even President Eisenhower, convinced (some would say muscled) Knight to run for Knowland’s Senate seat instead of another term as governor.

      Pat took advantage of this gift from the political gods in the 1958 campaign, hammering at Knowland’s stance on right-to-work, the big switch, and the disarray in Republican ranks caused by Knowland’s ambition. And he won the governorship easily, beating tone-deaf Knowland by more than a million votes. The jovial Knight lost his senatorial campaign by 10 percentage points to Clair Engle, a Democratic congressman from Red Bluff, a small agricultural community in the northern Sacramento Valley. Knowland committed suicide in 1974.

      Immediately after Jerry Brown left Sacred Heart, he enrolled at the University of California’s Berkeley campus as a second-semester junior majoring in the classics. He stayed at International House, on the campus, which was open to both American and foreign students. Two fellow lodgers were Rose Bird, whom Jerry would appoint as chief justice of the California Supreme Court, and Ken Reich, who later covered Brown as an able political reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Frank Damrell, who had left the seminary as well, also enrolled at Berkeley.

      The big, bustling, sophisticated Berkeley campus, with students discovering 1960s folk music that spoke to social injustice, was a different universe from the quiet, austere Sacred Heart, but Brown retained his idealism. In coffeehouses near the campus, students talked about racial integration in the South, capital punishment, conditions for farmworkers, the merits of the Kingston Trio, and the morality of the atomic bomb. It was, again, a place where Jerry found satisfying intellectual discourse, but this time it was free and far-ranging, in contrast to that at Sacred Heart.

      He became interested in the plight of California farm laborers and sought to improve conditions in California’s fields, working with members of the Berkeley campus’s Agricultural Organizing Committee and the Catholic Worker Movement. Jerry and a friend, Carl Werthman, volunteered to help take students to work in the fields on weekends to help pick strawberries near Stockton so that they would form an up-close idea of what farm labor was like. He spent additional time researching farm labor law. That interest was made concrete in 1975, when Brown, as governor, created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.

      However, what may have been Jerry’s most direct demonstration of continued idealism, an issue that brought him into direct and heartfelt conflict with his father, was the case of Caryl Chessman. Chessman was a career criminal with a long record who was on parole when he was arrested near Los Angeles on suspicion that he was the notorious “Red Light Bandit” who used a red light on a car spotlight to deceive young couples into believing that a policeman was behind them. When they got out of their car, the bandit would rob them and rape the women. Chessman was convicted of seventeen assorted counts of robbery, kidnapping, and rape in July 1948 and sentenced to death. He repeatedly appealed his sentence over the twelve years he spent on San Quentin’s death row and won worldwide fame from his cell as an author. Chessman sold the rights to his autobiography, Cell 2455, Death Row, to Columbia Pictures.

      By early 1960, however, Chessman was reaching the end of his appeals. Pat Brown, an opponent of the death penalty, was his last chance. Chessman had not been accused of murdering anyone, but under California’s “Little Lindberg” law, kidnapping with intent to inflict harm was a capital case. Forcing victims to move even a few feet constituted kidnapping under the law. Since Chessman was a man who hadn’t killed anyone but still faced the death penalty, his case became a worldwide cause célèbre. Brown was deluged with appeals for clemency from, among many others, Billy Graham, Marlon Brando, William Buckley, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

      For Berkeley undergraduate Jerry Brown, Chessman’s was a clear-cut moral case. He hadn’t committed murder. The death penalty was a leftover from the Dark Ages. California was better than that. Jerry repeatedly appealed to his father to follow his conscience and grant clemency. Pat, pulled between his personal beliefs, the impassioned appeals of his son, and the demands of the law, listened, argued, and wavered. In the forlorn hope that the California Legislature would somehow act on his plea to abolish the death penalty or at least place a moratorium on it and erase his agonizing dilemma, he granted a sixty-day stay of execution in February 1960, hours before Chessman was due to enter the gas chamber. The stay ran out in April, the death penalty remained in effect, Pat Brown refused executive clemency, and after a few unsuccessful last-ditch appeals, Chessman was executed on May 2, 1960.

      Jerry’s opposition to the death penalty did not waver. In April 1967, seven years after Chessman’s execution, Jerry was among those outside the gates of San Quentin Prison when Aaron Mitchell, screaming, “I am Jesus Christ!” was executed for killing a Sacramento policeman during a 1963 robbery. A year earlier, toward the end of his term, Pat Brown again had refused to grant executive clemency. In 2011, as governor, Jerry Brown halted construction of a new, state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar gas chamber at San Quentin. He cited budgetary concerns.

      Although the Chessman case had harmed

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