Pat Brown Set the Standard for Governor

Pat Brown was the first governor I ever covered and the best. Let’s get that personal bias out of the way right at the top.

Truth be told, this view does not exactly put me in a class by myself. There are countless Republicans--not just Democrats--for whom the title Governor, in the most positive sense, is synonymous with the name Pat Brown. Graded on accomplishments over the last 40-plus years, Brown had no peer.

“At the risk of insulting every other governor I know, from the standpoint of planning for growth in this state, he was the best governor of the 20th century,” former GOP Assemblyman Bill Bagley of San Rafael said after Brown’s death Friday at age 90. “I was, of course, the loyal opposition at the time and we used to accuse him of being a profligate spender. But we’re living today off his capital investment.”

Not to belittle Ronald Reagan, but his achievements as governor were mainly attitudinal; he inspired a future tax revolt. Brown’s achievements were material; he built the water, highway and education facilities necessary for a rapidly growing state. Reagan communicated, Brown created.

Only one other governor of this century was in Brown’s class and that was his hero and duck hunting buddy, Earl Warren, the original master builder.

Warren was a much more gifted politician, an immensely popular fellow whom Californians ranked in a super class with FDR and Joe Louis. Brown was affable but awkward, an easy target for the critics and cartoonists who tagged him with the image of “bumbler.”

“I still have those old cartoons; I love ‘em,” Brown told me in an 85th birthday interview. Then he let loose with his patented, baritone guffaw.

“Pat was fun,” Gov. Pete Wilson recalled. “He enjoyed a laugh, even at his own expense.”

Self-depreciating humor was one of the things I liked most about the man. “The voters failed to appreciate my greatness,” he would say of his shellacking by Reagan in 1966. Grin, guffaw.

Brown’s cheeks might turn pink with embarrassment, but he invariably found amusement in recalling his most famous gaffe--the time on the North Coast when he was touring a catastrophic flood and proclaimed to reporters: “This is the worst disaster since I was elected governor.”

“I could never keep my mouth shut,” Brown candidly told a small group of politicians and reporters he once invited to a birthday party at the old Governor’s Mansion. One veteran legislator asked him to compare today’s journalists with those of his era. Implicit in the question was that reporter-politician relationships then were more civilized and constructive.

“It was the same,” Brown replied without hesitation. “There always has been an adversarial relationship. There has to be. They have to do that.”

Brown never seemed to mind reporters. Despite all the negative stories--and references to “a tower of jelly”--I never heard him blame the news media for his unfavorable image. In fact, each year he would permit a handful of Capitol reporters who covered outdoor issues to accompany him on a wilderness pack trip.

On one such trip into the northern Sierra, I found myself--a twerp reporter in his 20s--sitting alone with the middle-aged governor at a camp table. We got into a debate over a particular capital punishment case--me, a supporter of the death penalty, and the governor, who had risked his career opposing it.

This time, however, I was advocating clemency for a poor black man who had accidentally killed an off-duty cop as they wrestled for a gun during a botched bar holdup. Brown would have none of it. Any cop killer, he insisted, should be executed.

It showed me that Brown was anything but a knee-jerk liberal. And this “tower of jelly” was a man who took one case at a time, one issue at a time, and was not afraid to be deliberative and flexible.

*

A myth has enveloped around Brown’s legacy--a boilerplate paragraph that begins, “He was a great builder, but . . . “

” . . . But remember the era. Post-war boom. Loads of money . . . Couldn’t happen today.”

To the contrary, it would not have happened then--in the early ‘60s--without Pat Brown. That water plan wasn’t new. The new thing was a governor’s will to fight for it, at a huge cost in political capital.

And it might happen today, with Pat Brown-type political courage and leadership. This is the real missing factor.

Brown was a third generation Californian whose main ambition was not higher office, but to be a great governor for his native state. He succeeded.

While voters may not have appreciated his greatness 30 years ago, millions probably do today. And historians certainly will tomorrow.