San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The unlikely and unconventional Jerry Brown.
California is an American state unlike any other; it boasts the country’s largest population, has the fifthlargest economy in the world and is a furnace of ideas, innovation and activism.
A place owes its identity in part to the leaders who have shaped it, and in his nearly halfcentury of service as fourterm governor (the longestserving governor of the state), attorney general of California and mayor of Oakland, politician Jerry Brown has left his mark.
In “Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown,” veteran journalist Jim Newton provides a thorough and sympathetic take on one of California’s most significant and unconventional politicians.
Brown grew up in a political home; his father Pat (both eschewed their given name Edmund Gerald) served two terms as the governor of California, yet the young Jerry wasn’t keen to follow in his father’s footsteps and had a distaste for “this backslapping world” of politics. Described as a “precociously devout Catholic adolescent,” Brown instead enrolled in the seminary after high school, driving there with two friends, “tossing loose change out the windows in order to arrive penniless.” There he studied, did chores, picked grapes.
It’s an unlikely start for a politician, and yet for one as unorthodox yet principled as Brown was, it makes sense. He ultimately decided not to pursue the priesthood and enrolled at UC Berkeley and then Yale Law School and returned home to start a career in politics.
For a son hesitant to follow in his father’s political footsteps, Brown took to the career with gusto, defining it around budgetary health, criminal justice, immigration rights and labor and environmental protections, among others.
Brown said, “Politics is practical, tactical, transactional, but it is also a framework of ideas …” and his ideas often came from atypical sources for a politician. His reading influenced him more than anything else. He touted E.F. Schumacher’s book “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered,” and the book’s ideas became a guide for Brown’s penchant for limits and preservation of nature.
“Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich may have encouraged Brown’s testy relationship with the higher education system in California, and Michel Foucault perhaps influenced his pardons for prisoners. Brown’s governing style was quixotic yet pragmatic, and his choices often surprised his own party. For example, where Democrats expected him to spend, he scrimped.
While he lived briefly in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon and dated singer Linda Ronstadt, Brown wasn’t drawn to the spotlight but rather to a life of inquiry. Newton writes that the religious studies and reading “helped reinforce his detachment from the currents of the day,” adding that while other people “plotted political strategy and reveled in showing Ronald Reagan the door, Jerry Brown read Wittgenstein and sat quietly in monasteries, rising early, saying little, thinking deeply.”
These qualities are wholly refreshing especially in light of current politics. In his first term in Sacramento, he rejected the governor’s mansion and instead slept on a mattress in a rented apartment.
Brown also mingled with interesting thinkers, including Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, who held the title of special assistant to the governor and brought in a wide array of speakers like Jacques Cousteau and Buckminster Fuller. Brown created an Office of Appropriate Technology, naming as director architect Sim Van der Ryn, whom he had met at the San Francisco Zen Center. Van der Ryn advocated things that we now consider commonplace like smart buildings and droughtresistant planting.
Newton’s biography is also a portrait of a place, and readers who might be turned off by the minutiae of ballot measures and budgets (of which there is enough in this book to satisfy any wonk) will learn about how Brown’s life intersected with significant moments in California’s history, from the Jonestown massacre to the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Ultimately, Newton seems unable to crack Brown’s inner emotional landscape; he remains inscrutable throughout the book, and that opacity limits the intimacy of this biography, though that might be less a fault of the writer than the nature of the subject himself, especially considering Newton’s exclusive access.
While Brown’s inner life remains fairly opaque, we instead infer character through actions. He signed and vetoed more bills than any governor in the history of California. He enacted extensive protections of the state’s coastline, ensured that the California Public Employees’ Retirement System could not invest in any utility that got more than 20% of its electricity from nuclear power and raised the state’s minimum wage.
He created a budget surplus for California. More than half of his appointees were women and roughly 40% were nonwhite. He pardoned 1,736 inmates and commuted the sentences of 284 — more than all his immediate predecessors combined.
Brown’s legacy is a testament to investing in ideas much larger than one’s self and putting stakes in a future where one will not exist. Or as Brown posted to Twitter after his testimony about cap and trade:
“This isn’t about some cockamamie legacy. This isn’t for me, I’m going to be dead. It’s for you & it’s damn real.”
Anisse Gross is a San Francisco writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker online, the New York Times and the Guardian. Email: books@sfchronicle.com