The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics

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Copyright © 2000 by Matthew Dallek

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ISBN-10: 0-7432-1374-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-1374-5

To my parents, Robert and Geraldine

and

to my sister, Rebecca

Introduction

The Critical Years

RONALD REAGAN redefined politics like no one since Franklin Roosevelt. His impact is so encompassing, so lasting, that pundits have even coined a phrase for it: the Reagan revolution. There is widespread agreement on the meaning of that revolution: Reagan convinced us that government was not the solution, it was the problem. Taxes were too high, social programs were counterproductive, regulations were stifling entrepreneurial energy, and the United States was failing to prosecute the cold war in a vigorous manner. Two issues lay at the heart of the revolution: economics and foreign policy. It began in 1980. It continues to this day.

In truth the Reagan revolution began in 1966, and it was not primarily about economics or foreign policy. Reagan’s stunning, out-of-nowhere victory in the California governor’s race against two-term incumbent and Democratic giant Pat Brown marked the arrival of the Right in postwar American politics. Reagan’s leadership of that movement is perhaps his most enduring legacy. It is also a story that has never been properly told.

In the mid-1960s revolution was in the air. Leaders of the New Left spoke of revolt against the Establishment; leaders of the Far Right echoed them in talk of toppling the liberal order. Media images were filled with violence: frightened National Guardsmen brandished fixed bayonets in Watts, where burned-out buildings lay in ruin; angry activists marched on military bases; protests erupted against segregated hotels and businesses; students turned out by the thousands to fight for free speech on campus; anticommunist leaders held rallies and workshops to teach people how to defend their homes and schools against the red menace. This was a time of stark contrasts, nowhere more so than in California. The much-discussed New Left activists of the ’60s were offset by an equally impassioned group on the other side. For every organizer from Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) there was a John Birch activist; for every civil rights marcher there was an anticommunist rally-goer; for every antiwar protester there were several more who sympathized with American aims in Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan’s race against Pat Brown—the real Reagan revolution—began as a debate about retaking control of a society in chaos. What Ronald Reagan stood for above all was law and order.

Reagan and Brown clashed on every issue, major and minor, of the day. Understanding the collapse of the liberal order and the rise of the conservative movement requires understanding how Reagan and Brown, during the several years leading up to 1966, came to embrace such bitterly opposed visions of government and society.

Reagan was a card-carrying conservative, Brown a proud liberal. For Reagan, opposing communism was paramount. For Brown, anti-communism was but one issue in foreign affairs and a nonissue at home. Reagan saw the welfare-state policies of recent decades as a slippery slope toward socialism. Brown viewed governmental programs as the best way to achieve a great society. Reagan denounced moral decline on campus; Brown thanked God for the spectacle of students protesting. Brown seized an opportunity to lead the civil rights movement into the new frontier of fair housing; Reagan believed that even the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional. Faced with urban riots, Brown looked to government to help eradicate poverty; Reagan vowed zero tolerance for criminals.

Prior to 1966, Reagan’s views on all of these questions were considered extreme, not least by Brown and his followers. In 1962, Reagan was indeed part of a marginal movement; in 1964, Barry Goldwater led the movement in a national election, but suffered a stinging defeat. Reagan could not possibly have beaten Brown prior to 1966; only civil rights, Berkeley, Watts, and Vietnam made it possible. It was Reagan’s promise to arrest moral decline that won him a million-vote victory over the popular incumbent, who had beaten Richard Nixon in 1962 and seemed destined to usher in California’s progressive future.

Tomes have been written about Reagan, chronicling the dominant events of his life and career. They detail his early years in Illinois, exploits as an athlete, rise to fame in radio and film, and of course his two terms in the White House. Former aides have produced a stream of memoirs, and biographers have examined the main features of his presidency, from his victory over Jimmy Carter to his supply-side economic program to his role in Iran-Contra. Yet even the biographers rarely spend more than one or two chapters discussing his rise as a politician in the early and mid-1960s. Reagan’s official biographer, Edmund Morris, passes over the 1966 election in a few short pages, his narrator explaining that he was not in California at the time.

Politics is about ideas, but it is also about the people who champion those ideas. How Ronald Reagan and Pat Brown came to embody two utterly contrasting sets of ideas is a fascinating story of two men who mirrored each other in many ways. Each came from a troubled home with a father who struggled with alcoholism. Each had his own conversion, Brown from Republican to New Deal Democrat, Reagan from New Deal Democrat to anticommunist Republican. Each became a pioneer in his political party: Brown was only the second Democrat to win statewide office in California in the twentieth century, and he was the leading voice of liberalism in the state. Reagan made the conservative movement legitimate for the first time, both in California and later in the nation.

In 1966 these two titans faced off in a battle of worldviews. Law and order was the hinge on which an era turned, yet the particular strategies involved were crucial. For the first time, the conservative movement was able to distance itself from the anticommunist fringe. For the first time, the conservatives learned how to push the right buttons on key issues, from race and riots to war and crime. Reagan successfully linked the liberal social programs of the ’60s with disorder in the streets, and offered an alternative vision of what government should and should not do. The Reagan revolution would prove so lasting because the formulas developed in the heat of the moment—pro–social order, pro–individual liberty, anti–government meddling—had a lasting appeal. Americans, like most people, crave peace and prosperity. The Reagan revolution has come to be associated with the free market. Yet at its origins, and perhaps still today, it is equally about social order.

ONE

THE GIANT KILLER

The election reaffirms our conviction that the people of California are resolved to move forward with courage and confidence. Offered reaction by the radical right, the voters emphatically declined. Offered government by retreat, the people preferred progress. Clearly then, our duty is to bring to California the forward force of responsible liberalism.

–PAT BROWN, Inaugural Address, 1959

MOST AMERICANSKNOW that at one point in his life Ronald Reagan was a staunch Democratic supporter of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Most do not know that Pat Brown started life as a Republican. One irony of their confrontation is that both men wound up standing for ideas that they once eschewed. Reagan would change his politics during the early years of the cold war, at a time of terrible anticommunist tension. Brown would change his at a similar moment of national peril, during the Depression and New Deal—a decade before Reagan’s political crucible.

In 1934 the Great Depression cut a wide swath of misery through California, and San Francisco lay squarely in its path. A rough-and-tumble blue-collar town teeming with burly shipyard workers, tattooed stevedores, and seedy waterfront pubs, San Francisco was a city on the verge of revolt. Approximately 50,000 working-class Irish immigrants resided in uneasy proximity to growing numbers of Italian, German, and Chinese immigrants, a poor and increasingly desperate population living in tightly packed boardinghouses and makeshift apartment buildings. In the late spring, as labor unrest swept the United States, thousands of disgruntled longshoremen went on strike, shutting down the city’s ports and fueling talk of a general walkout. Newspapers blared headlines about an impending urban implosion while printing pictures of helmeted soldiers with gas masks covering their faces standing in battle formation ready to cut a bloody path through anyone foolish enough to defy this and other heavily-armed outfits.¹

From the twelfth floor of the Russ Office Building on Montgomery Street in downtown San Francisco, a young lawyer named Edmund Gerald Pat Brown thought hard about the deteriorating economic situation. It was not something he did of necessity. A successful attorney with a firm footing in the city’s legal community, Brown had a growing family, a sound professional career ahead of him, and strong ties to the Republican political machine in San Francisco. Most of his friends and family were members of the Republican party, and Brown had throughout his adult life subscribed to the Republican belief that the American economic system was the best in the world. Those who failed to succeed in it were corrupt, lazy, or both.

But as the Depression crept its way across California, it also began to whittle away at Brown’s long-standing assumptions about the political parties and the ideologies that undergirded them. The labor struggles and street demonstrations and social discord concerned Brown. Sympathetic to those who had been hardest hit by the economic slump, worried about violence in the streets, Brown had been seriously reconsidering his Republican party affiliation since 1931. That year, Matthew Tobriner, a fiery young labor lawyer working down the hall, decided to abandon Herbert Hoover and the big business Republicans and embrace the party of Franklin Roosevelt. Tobriner had lost faith in the ability of Hoover to deal with the economy, and, eager to convince his less prescient friends of the error of their ways, he began telling Brown to open his eyes. The Republicans, Tobriner chided, represented the nation’s business tycoons and corporate behemoths, and its vaunted standard-bearers—Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover—had failed to stem the misery. They had done nothing to help American farmers whose fields lay barren through no fault of their own; had done nothing for the small entrepreneurs and manual laborers who played by the rules but ended up barely making ends meet. Franklin Roosevelt and the Democratic party were stepping into the political breach, taking responsibility for the American masses, doing for the man on the street what the uncaring and callous GOP would not.

Brown spent a good deal of time thinking about Tobriner’s arguments, and he allowed that some of those arguments made sense. But Brown was torn: He recalled his own personal success, and reasoned that if he could make his way out of poverty and build a successful law practice, anyone could. Tobriner kept urging Brown to sever his ties to the Republican party, and for the next two years the men engaged in heated debates. One time Tobriner reached into his back pocket and pulled out a copy of The New Republic and asked his friend to read it. Brown returned to his office and did so, but he remained unconvinced. The Republicans, he thought after putting down the liberal rag, would return to power as soon as the American economy rebounded.

Yet the American economy did not recover, and Tobriner continued in his hard-charging ways: He railed against tycoons and even began quoting the liberal newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann on the crumbling of the old order. The only real question among intelligent people, Tobriner quoted Lippmann as saying, is how business methods are to be altered, not whether they are to be altered. For no one unafflicted with invincible ignorance desires to preserve our economic system in its existing form. In 1934 Brown finally concluded that Lippmann and Tobriner were right: The Republicans represented the wealthy few; Democrats stood for the average working man. One morning that year, with farm prices at record lows and 20 million Americans out of work, Brown walked into the men’s room on the twelfth floor of the Russ Office Building and told Tobriner that he had decided to become a Democrat. Tobriner responded with a whoop and a shout.²

Brown’s switch was not unusual. Like many young men of his generation, Brown had decided that the GOP program, as he said years later, amounted to a set of outmoded economic notions and an appeal for human selfishness. Brown also had come to admire Franklin Roosevelt, the new president whose fireside radio chats and promises of federally funded relief and recovery encouraged millions of Americans in these years. But Brown had another reason for bolting the Republicans—he wanted a career in politics. Although he had never held elected office, by 1934 Brown had his sights firmly set high. He realized, as had so many aspiring politicians in this era, that a shift in the American political order was underway, that the New Deal offered a popular political program that might help a budding politician such as Brown realize his ambitions. To be sure, Roosevelt’s reform agenda dovetailed nicely with Brown’s burgeoning activist leanings; it also offered him a way to get ahead in the one field that by the mid-1930s really mattered to him.³

BROWN’S BELIEFS and aspirations, the ones that would convince him to become a Democrat and make him one of the leading liberal politicians of the 1960s, sprang from a variety of eclectic and unlikely sources: the seedy card parlors and gambling dens south of San Francisco’s Market Street; the Catholic church that his parents shunned; the literary lectures, fiery political rallies, and subdued libraries to which his mother dragged him; and the crush of economic hard times. Brown’s political and moral tenets evolved slowly, imperceptibly at times, forged in family crises and world events. They also had deep roots in the immigrant West. Brown’s mother Ida Shuckman was a first generation German Protestant who arrived in San Francisco in 1896, while his father, Edmund Joseph Brown, was a burly Irish-Catholic blade. The young couple shared an immigrant background but precious little else. He was an entrepreneur on the rise and a handsome charmer with a gift for blarney; she, a self-taught matron with an insatiable appetite for knowledge. Edmund enjoyed whiskey and craps; Ida loved books and lectures. He was fleshy, with wide and searching eyes and a fading shock of sandy-brown hair; she, rail thin, her neck so lithe it made her look like an eighteenth-century aristocrat. He cut deals and ran scams; she studied the Bible and attended lectures about deep and serious subjects.

They produced four children. The first, Edmund Gerald, arrived on April 21, 1905, a pudgy baby with big brown eyes who in his early years inherited his mother’s passion for ideas, literature, and politics. Ida herself was an unusual woman for her time: Exceptionally bright and keenly interested in the larger world of political affairs, she had learned to read by the age of three, could quote from the classics by five, and was an ardent admirer of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson. She tried to inculcate her first child with a similar knowledge and interest in the outside world. When Brown was a child, Ida often dragged him and his brother Harold to packed political rallies and highbrow lectures by Mark Twain or other turn-of-the-century literary lions. She took Pat to see Governor Hiram Johnson speak at Dreamland Auditorium as he stumped for a United States Senate seat. She brought him to polling booths on election day, where the future governor would watch in awe as local officials tallied election returns. She encouraged him to campaign on behalf of a neighborhood grocery man running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and she also, according to some rumors that would later take hold, brought her eldest to radical labor parades sponsored by the International Workers of the World—the Wobblies.⁴

Brown’s father, Edmund Joseph, also shaped his son’s view of the world, but in a much different way. A boisterous charmer and enterprising businessman, Edmund Senior passed on to Brown his considerable gift for gab and instilled in his namesake a strong desire to live clean, work hard, and avoid a life of poverty. In the years before Brown’s birth, Edmund was an ambitious youth who after holding a series of low-paying, back-breaking jobs (horsecar conductor, laundry wagon driver) decided that the best way to get ahead in turn-of-the-century San Francisco was to start his own business. Hungry for his own slice of the bustling local economy, as a young man Edmund rented a cigar shop on Market Street and then used the profits from that store to acquire a handful of risky enterprises. In short order, Edmund purchased a photography studio, a penny arcade, a Market Street movie theater, and a novelty store where tourists could shop for trinkets. In the late 1900s, in the wake of the great earthquake of 1906, Edmund’s businesses turned a substantial profit: American sailors on weekend shore leave began flocking to his photography studio, where they would have their pictures taken; tourists descended in droves on his trinkets shop, and local residents went in large numbers to the theater to catch the latest film. By 1910 Edmund had become a well-known fixture in the city’s downtown, sporting derby hats and tailored suits while standing outside his business establishments and wooing customers into the store. Edmund earned enough money to purchase a three-flat house in the city’s Western Addition, a new middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. But Edmund’s good fortune and business success would prove short-lived. A heavy drinker and chronic gambler, Edmund spent many of his evenings holed up in one of the city’s backroom gambling parlors, where he would sip bourbon, shoot craps, and play five-card draw (stud was illegal) against the hard-drinking, gamble-happy men who frequented such places. In 1912, a new theater outfitted with a brass band opened across the street from Edmund’s, luring away his customers, forcing him to close shop. He made the mistake of trying to recoup his mounting losses by making a series of bets with bookies around town, and soon found himself plunged deeper into debt and mired in poverty. The family nest egg gone, in 1912 Edmund decided to put his two boys, ages 7 and 5, to work.⁵

From the first, Pat proved himself a hard worker and able breadwinner with a knack for deal making, corner cutting, and sales. He began his working life as a newspaper boy who trudged through the streets of San Francisco on Sunday mornings yelling Chronicle! Examiner! Later he worked as an usher at the Edison Theater, sold sodas at the fights, snapped pictures of tourists and sailors at his father’s photography studio, attended to customers in his father’s novelty store, and peddled holiday cards at Christmas time. Pat was a deft salesman and enterprising young businessman who sometimes hiked soda prices arbitrarily, concocted elaborate ruses to sell more Christmas cards, and raked in hundreds of dollars while gambling against boys his own age. Early on, Brown was determined to avoid his father’s fate. Although he at first enjoyed hustling and swindling others out of their money, Brown developed an aversion toward the gaming life, with its floating craps games, swindlers, and loan sharks. Brown sometimes worked in his father’s store while his father gathered with friends around a big table upstairs and gambled. Brown hated to see his father lose money and believed that Edmund’s fast lifestyle and loose morals had contributed to the family’s financial woes.⁶

Eager for a different existence, Brown plunged into his school work. A solid student, Brown above all was a rambunctious and popular youth with a flair for extracurricular activities and student politics. In elementary school he became a star soccer player, and after giving a rousing four-minute speech in the seventh grade in support of World War I liberty bonds in which he quoted the Revolutionary War hero, Patrick Henry (Give me liberty or give me death, Brown shouted to classmates), he earned the nickname that would remain with him throughout his life. Brown cut an awkward figure in high school, weighing only ninety-five pounds; a spindly prepubescent who blossomed late, but what he lacked in size he made up for in enthusiasm. Spirited and active in many of the school’s extracurricular activities, Brown beat out an opponent for yell leader, starred on the hundred-pound basketball team, served as president of the camera and rowing clubs and the debating society, and helped organize the Nocturnes, a half-Jewish, half-Gentile fraternity known for its religious tolerance, private clubroom (well-furnished but no food), and raucous parties. Donning snappy, white flannel trousers and red jerseys with white megaphones emblazoned across the chest, Brown prided himself on being the most innovative and best-dressed cheerleader, and he enjoyed showering his team with confetti and balloons and whooping and yelling during sporting contests.⁷

After graduating from high school, when his family was unable to afford college, Pat accepted a job as a doorman at his father’s cigar store. His duties included minding the shop and regulating the flow of traffic into his father’s nightly game of five-card draw; for his hard work Brown received a hefty salary of $150 a month. He further boosted his income by running his own dice game at the front of the cigar store (often netting $200 a month in winnings). Quickly souring on the worlds of business and gambling and, eager to find work that would challenge his intellect and engage his ebullient personality, Brown decided to enroll in law school.⁸

The San Francisco College of Law was not the University of California at Berkeley, where many of Brown’s fraternity friends had enrolled, but to Brown it represented a means to a better life, and he was determined to make the most of it. Working days, attending classes at night, and operating on the vague assumption that as a lawyer he would be able to make a good living and help out others, Brown worked grueling fifteen-hour days, a schedule that would become a hallmark of his later political career. A photograph from these years shows Brown sitting at a lawyer’s table in the middle of what appears to be moot court, fast asleep, his head slumped over his briefcase, law tomes piled high in front of him. But Brown enjoyed the law and relished the furious pace. He became a top student in his class during his third year of law school, and after graduating he found a job working as an assistant to Milton Schmitt, a well-known blind attorney in the city who immediately took Brown under his wing. On cable cars that clacked their way over the hills of San Francisco, Brown skimmed his law books while Schmitt droned on about pending cases; during trial Brown helped his boss select juries and often read from court cases to bolster Schmitt’s arguments.

Brown passed the bar in 1927, and after Schmitt was committed to a mental institution (he had begun comparing himself to Jesus Christ and babbling about making Brown a millionaire), Brown inherited his boss’s practice and quickly established himself as a formidable lawyer in his own right. He was a jack-of-all-trades litigator who handled personal injury cases to divorces to bankruptcy cases (a lucrative area of the law during the Depression) to pro bono criminal defense work. In 1929 he eloped (to save money, according to his wife) with his high school sweetheart Bernice Layne, the daughter of San Francisco Police Captain Arthur Layne. Children soon followed, and it seemed that Brown, although not yet twenty-five, had achieved the prize that had eluded his parents: a stable home and work life.⁹

But he wanted more. While he took a measure of satisfaction from helping clients and trying cases, Brown believed that there was only one career that would satisfy both his ambitions for fame and his yearning to perform good works. In high school Brown had run for class secretary and won, but he did not enjoy sitting in the back of the auditorium and being a note-taker, and he vowed that in the future he would seek out bigger offices that befit his talents. When he reached law school, Brown used to fantasize about being elected district attorney of San Francisco, assuring himself that someday he would be the chief law enforcement man in his city. Thus it was not entirely unexpected when Brown ran for the California State Assembly as a Calvin Coolidge Republican in 1928.¹⁰

Brown did not give much thought to the campaign or to the consequences of running for office, nor did he spend a great deal of time contemplating his party ties or political credos. Brown was a Republican, period. The party of Coolidge and Hoover dominated the machine politics of San Francisco, and virtually everyone Brown knew, from his father to his friends, belonged to and voted for the GOP. The party maintained such a viselike grip on local affairs, in fact, that a young man with political aspirations would have had to have been either dense or unusually brazen to side with the Democrats in the 1920s. Brown was neither; intensely driven, eager for the spotlight, and interested in public service, yes, but holding few firm political convictions. He considered politics a sport—a contest of men and wills in which what mattered was winning elections. When he did, on rare occasions, think about the beliefs and ideologies that undergirded the two major American parties, the GOP with its free market ideas made the most sense.

His campaign for a state assembly seat was doomed from the start. With only $500 to spend, and with Tom Finn, the Republican boss of San Francisco, backing Brown’s opponent, the result was embarrassing. Brown received only 500 votes.

He would not run for political office again for eleven years, but politics would remain for the rest of his life near the surface of his thoughts and perhaps his one great passion in life. He began spending almost all of his free time frequenting local civic clubs and societies, cultivating potential political contacts, and attending campaign rallies and other political events. After switching to the Democrats in 1934, he won a seat on the San Francisco Democratic Central Committee and stuffed envelopes and gave speeches in support of Upton Sinclair, a utopian socialist and muckraking novelist who was running for governor that year on a promise to End Poverty in California. Walloped at the polls, Sinclair imparted to Brown a simple lesson about American politics: One could not rail against the system and hope to win.¹¹

From his first days as a Democrat, Brown blended the politics of urban reform with an intense interest in campaigns and political strategizing. Pragmatic, cautious, and attuned to the mood of voters and constituents, he believed strongly that men in public life possessed terrific power to accomplish good deeds and improve the lives of the people they served. Brown considered public service a noble endeavor, a wonderful way to spend one’s life, and while he enjoyed the more grubby aspects of American politics—giving speeches, attending rallies, shaking hands, accosting voters on street corners—he believed above all that public officials either perpetuated the status quo and enriched and served themselves and their cronies, or performed good works, enacted needed reform measures, and left a lasting mark for the better on their communities and their cities. This was a stark approach to politics and governing, but Brown had good cause for embracing such a diametric view of the political process.

San Francisco in the 1930s was a city awash in corruption: illegal gambling parlors dotted the downtown district, small-time thieves committed robberies at will, corrupt policemen accepted bribes and kickbacks from criminal defense attorneys, and abortion mills and whorehouses abounded. Run for the most part by old-time machine politicians and a district attorney who turned a blind eye to crime, the city did little to improve itself. Brown believed that a program of municipal reform was just what was needed and his own personal ticket to a career in politics.

In the aftermath of the Sinclair campaign Brown plunged with verve into the politics of municipal reform. With the help of old friends and like-minded reformers, he created the New Guard, a nonpartisan organization committed to bring[ing] about honesty and effectiveness in local government. Bylaws, however, prevented the New Guard from endorsing candidates for public office, and the organization proved impotent and soon disbanded. In 1935, after reading a series of articles about a group in Seattle called the New Order of Cincinnatus, Brown wrote a letter to Ralph Potts, the group’s leader, in which he asked for permission to organize a Cincinnatus branch in San Francisco. Under Brown’s leadership, the group blossomed quickly. Armed with scores of brash young men eager to extirpate corruption from the urban scene, the Order demanded that candidates file a statement of their assets and then place that statement in a safety deposit box. It also mounted a formidable campaign against incumbents on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, holding press conferences, endorsing a rival slate of candidates, and adopting the campaign slogan Skip the First Five, a reference to the supervisors in office. The campaign succeeded in ousting four of the board’s five incumbents. The organization was exactly what Brown had been looking for, a lively fighting group composed of idealistic men committed to stamping out vice. Flush with his first real taste of political success, convinced that urban reform was a winning program that would prove popular with voters, Brown decided in early 1939 to challenge Matthew Brady, the long-time district attorney of San Francisco.¹²

Brown had been trying for some time to win a political appointment with either the mayor’s office or the state administration in Sacramento. But his requests had been repeatedly rebuffed and he quickly concluded that if he wanted a career in politics he would have to strike out on his own. The district attorney’s office seemed the perfect place for him to begin: Brady was a plodding attorney notorious for his do-nothing approach to police graft and lackadaisical attitudes toward law enforcement in general. Although Brown had never held elected office, and he realized his chances against the long-time incumbent were slim, Brown believed that Brady made a choice political target. Brown entered the campaign with great ardor; ringing doorbells and campaigning nonstop, he stumped everywhere in the city. He promised to transform San Francisco into a respectable city free of crime and criminals. Brown was easily beaten, but he made a respectable showing in a race he knew would be a trial run.¹³

Brown yearned for another shot at Brady, and almost immediately after the votes had been tallied from the 1939 campaign he began laying the groundwork for another race. Brown did not abandon his law practice, but he was growing bored with it. As the American nation found itself embroiled in World War II, Brown stayed home but felt guilty about doing so while men were fighting and dying overseas. Convinced that it was his duty to serve the public in some capacity, Brown also believed that he had a religious obligation to perform good works and lift up his fellow men.

In 1938 Brown had become a devout Catholic; his immersion in the church would shape for years to come his approach to politics and governing. In his younger years Brown had shown little feeling toward organized religion; his father was a Catholic, his mother a Protestant, and his parents feuded constantly about the role of religion in their household. Edmund wanted his boys to attend Mass on Sundays and Catholic schools during the week; Ida, however, felt a large dose of contempt toward the Catholic priests with their strict sermonizing, and she refused to send her children to parochial school. The battles grew rancorous and eventually contributed to Edmund and Ida’s divorce. Brown reacted with bitter feelings toward organized churchgoing of all kinds. But in 1938 he experienced a kind of religious awakening. That year a fellow Democrat invited him to a religious retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains. His curiosity piqued, Brown agreed to spend a weekend listening to the Catholic priests and reacquainting himself with his father’s religion. Expecting to hear priests pontificating about purgatory and everlasting damnation, Brown, much to his surprise, found the sermons moving orations about the power of God’s love. Brown listened intently as the priests argued that no matter how much material success a person acquired, there was always something more in life for which to strive: joining with God after death. Unexpectedly enthralled, he began to read Walter Lippmann on humanism and Carl Adam on Catholicism. He organized a bible study class for friends, and slowly his agnosticism gave way to a deeply felt devotion to God, Catholicism, and a commitment to carrying out God’s work on earth.¹⁴

That work, for Brown, would continue to be found in politics. For the second race against Brady, Brown secured endorsements from two of San Francisco’s most powerful dailies. The campaign would prove one of the most bruising of Brown’s life. Reluctant to be tarred as a three-time loser, Brown launched a hard-hitting, exceedingly effective assault: When Brady accused the underworld of bankrolling Brown’s campaign, Brown argued that his opponent was an incompetent law enforcement officer and a stupid man who himself had close ties to the bookies and abortionists in the city. Brown told voters that Brady had failed to stop the illegal card games and stamp out the city’s lucrative gambling parlors, and he also blasted him for being a lazy lawyer who refused to do anything about police graft. Brady was an artful dodger, Brown complained, a do-nothing D.A. Campaigning eighteen hours a day, shaking hands with slaughterhouse workers, stumping at the produce and flower markets, giving speeches virtually every night, Brown worked himself to exhaustion. But he was armed with scores of supporters, a catchy rallying cry (Crack down on crime, elect Brown this time), and a compelling welter of negative information about his foe. On election day he finally achieved a victory.¹⁵

The district attorney’s office that Brown inherited was a shambles, with few typewriters; part-time employees who wrote legal briefs and other court documents out by long hand; desk drawers bulging with paperwork; an oversized antique canvas-covered ledger as the docket for upcoming cases; and deputy district attorneys who often ran their own practices on the side. The city’s entire legal system, in fact, resembled nothing so much as a bad joke: During trial, prisoners often found themselves locked in cage-like structures more appropriate for animals in a zoo. Brady’s deputies had often personally handled bail money. Police and not attorneys often decided which charges to bring against criminals, and the city’s more wily defense attorneys often kept their clients from jail with police payoffs and other well-placed bribes. Thomas Lynch, who would become Brown’s top assistant in the office, had a simple description of the district attorney’s office under Brady: the most colossal disaster I’ve run into.¹⁶

Taking District Attorney Earl Warren in Oakland as his model, Brown embraced a slew of reforms. To be sure, he was not a radical eager to uproot the entire legal system in the city, and he