The enfant terrible
Even as a young member of the St. Ignatius College Preparatory debate team in San Francisco in the 1950s, Edmund G. Brown Jr. knew the power of a good political idea — and his own legacy.
Coleman, now associate pastor of St. Ignatius Church in the city, recalls that his fellow debate team member would tap family know-how to prepare for the stage.
“He would ask his father for a quote in the morning,” Coleman said, and when the time came for the powerful rhetorical punch, young Jerry Brown could lead with, “As Attorney General ‘Pat’ Brown has said ...”
Although he grew up in “a very ambitious, politically oriented household,” said McFadden, Brown initially rebelled against the vocation that would take his father to the governor’s mansion in 1959.
Instead, he headed to the Jesuit novitiate and what Coleman called “a very cloistered experience.”
That time spent “picking grapes, sweeping floors,” in prayer and mediation, remains “a source of reflection for me about where we are — in the world, in America, in California, in the modern age,” Brown said Friday, sitting in an Oakland coffee shop without entourage.
The spiritual existence is a contrast, he said, to “this world of utility, maximization, spreadsheets, return on investment, inputs and outputs.”
Declaring that he wanted to become a psychiatrist, Brown gave up the collar in 1960, calling it “coming off the mountain to the world below.”
Instead of going into psychiatry, however, Brown studied at UC Berkeley and Yale Law School, then found politics. He remembers the exact moment of the epiphany — in the winter of 1964, while studying for the bar exam at the governor’s mansion in Sacramento.
“I spent a lot of time up there on the third floor ... and I would listen to meetings that my father had,” Brown said. That night 50 years ago, he overheard Pat Brown and then-Assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh “talking about who’s going to run for governor.”
“And just listening to it, my heart started pounding, I was so excited,” he said. “And I said, ‘Wow. This is what I want.’ ”
Brown plotted his ascent. In 1969, he won election to the Los Angeles Community College governing board, but says, “I had already decided I was running for governor.”
The next year, he ran for secretary of state and won. It had always been a backwater post, but when Brown took over, he helped craft a law that fundamentally changed California politics — the Political Reform Act of 1974, which restricted campaign contributions, set new ethics rules and clamped down on gift-giving by lobbyists. Some still haven’t forgiven him. “Jerry Brown ruined collegiality in Sacramento and changed it to gridlock — and he admits it,” said William Bagley, a Marin County Republican legislator from 1960 to 1974. Brown ended bipartisan socializing, Bagley said, and “changed the social complexion in Sacramento by passing a bill that wasn’t necessary.”
Political socializing, however, wasn’t high on Brown’s agenda.