PART IV—
MR. SPEAKER:
1980–1995

Chapter Twenty—
Drawing Lines

One day they'd show you the map and you know you'd been screwed.
Robert Naylor
Republican Assembly leader, 1981–1984

They were snookered.
Maxine Waters
Assemblywoman, 1976–1990

Five days into the new year of 1982, California's legislators returned to their newly renovated capitol for the first time in six years. Settling into their desks in the cavernous Assembly chambers, lawmakers were elated at what they found: mahogany desks, immense green draperies, crystal chandeliers, and majestic nineteenth-century landscapes everywhere. Befitting the occasion, they held a forty-five-minute dedication ceremony in which they pledged they would act as dignified as their restored surroundings. The first Assembly session under the restored copper-sheathed dome was opened with a prayer to seek "goodness, truth and beauty, and not re-election."^[1]

The Speaker of the Assembly that morning was Willie Brown. Visibly moved by his new surroundings, Brown noted that a "Negro chain gang" had removed stumps from the grounds in 1862 to make way for the new Capitol. "In 1980, you elected what at one time was a Negro as Speaker of the California Legislature," he told his colleagues. He invited them into his new office, filled with Victorian antiques and oil paintings. No Speaker before him had ever been surrounded by such opulence. Only a few veterans remembered that he had paid a political price years earlier in pushing the unpopular Capitol restoration bill onto Governor Reagan's desk for his signature. The

renovated Capitol reflected Willie Brown's impeccable taste for art and antiques. Everything was done with his eye for excellence, and nothing was done cheaply. Now everyone was beaming broadly.

Brown had been Speaker for one year, and many considered that a major accomplishment. When he became Speaker, few believed he would last long enough to open the restored Capitol. Fewer still believed he could do much more than preside over the floor sessions. Wielding power effectively seemed out of his reach. But Brown did more than survive. He discovered opportunities where few believed they could be found, and he cleverly exploited each one. By the end of his first two-year term as Speaker of the Assembly, Willie Brown was solidly entrenched. But he never held the job as firmly as Jesse Unruh. Brown always needed to look over his shoulder, and his energies were significantly devoted to keeping his job. Paradoxically, he held it longer than anyone else.

The Republicans made a deal with Willie Brown in December 1980 to share his power as Speaker, and they expected big payoffs. Not just cynics believed Brown would be little more than a puppet of the Republicans. Conventional wisdom held that a coalition speakership could not work and that Willie Brown could not survive long under such an unstable arrangement. "The betting action in the Capitol is on how long Willie Brown will keep his job as Assembly Speaker," wrote Martin Smith, political editor of McClatchy newspapers, based at The Sacramento Bee . "There is considerable body of opinion that his tenure will be remarkable for its brevity."^[2]

Smith was not alone in December 1980 in his prognostication. Brown's deal was improbable; no one had ever become Speaker quite the way he did. A coalition speakership was a setup for failure; indeed, Brown's successor, Republican Doris Allen, tried the same thing with Democrats fifteen years later and was recalled by voters in her home district of Orange County. By failing so ignominiously, she proved the point.

Brown's first steps as Speaker were rough. Within a week of his election as Speaker he ran into a buzz saw by trying to keep not one but two seats on the prestigious University of California Board of Regents. Governor Jerry Brown had appointed Willie Brown to a twelve-year seat on the twenty-six-member governing board in September 1980. When he became Speaker, Brown was entitled to an ex officio seat on the board, and he audaciously asserted he would keep both seats.^[3] Newspaper editorialists were soon beating their drums about his arrogance in trying to keep both seats. Brown had not even sought the first seat and in fact had been urging the governor to appoint his old patron, black newspaper publisher Carlton Goodlett, to the board. But Goodlett's newspaper had offended some of Jerry Brown's Jewish supporters

with articles they considered anti-Semitic.^[4] The governor was left offending someone no matter what he did. His solution was to appoint Willie Brown and keep both black and Jewish supporters happy. Once he had the seat, Brown saw no reason to give up the one with the longest term. But his position was both politically and legally untenable, and in the face of criticism he backed down, resigning the seat given to him by the governor.

"I've been doing a considerable amount of apologizing," he later confided. "And I don't do that well."^[5]

Brown looked vulnerable like no other Speaker before him. If his misstep over the Board of Regents seat was any indication, Brown looked as if he could bring himself down with little outside help. In any case, the opposition party that had put him there could pull him out any time it wished. The Republicans would rely on Brown's downfall to catapult themselves into the majority they were sure was inevitable. In the afterglow of Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980, the Republicans predicted they would take over in two years or four at the latest. Willie Brown was nothing more than a caretaker for the real power brokers of Sacramento. And with Willie Brown, a flamboyant black liberal from San Francisco, as such a visible target in Assembly district elections, the Republicans believed they could hasten the day of their majority. The Republicans found considerable affirmation for their beliefs. Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters, who had been hired away from the conservative but financially sinking Sacramento Union , repeatedly predicted an impending Republican majority throughout the 1980s, and then when it did not materialize, he continued his prognostication into the 1990s.

Political analysts at the time also believed that the Republicans were the big winners on policy issues with Brown as Speaker. Brown gave six committee chairmanships and nineteen vice chairmanships to the Republicans. In keeping with his agreement with Carol Hallett and the Republicans, he put forward new Assembly rules that gave away one of the Speaker's biggest weapons—the power to assign legislation to committees. The new rules put that authority in the hands of the Rules Committee. The Assembly ratified the new rules with three dissenting votes. Howard Berman, one of the three, called the new policy "unwise."^[6]

Brown further alienated environmentalists and allies of the United Farm Workers union when he agreed with Hallett to route pesticide regulation bills to committees friendly to the agriculture industry.^[7] The matter was of no small importance to Hallett, whose husband, James, was president of the Western Agricultural Chemical Association. Brown's agreement with Hallett gravely alarmed Cesar Chavez and the UFW, confirming Chavez's view that Berman should have been Speaker and that Assemblyman Art Torres was a traitor to the cause.^[8] Although the UFW eventually patched things up with Brown, it would never again enjoy the clout it had once held in the Assembly under Leo McCarthy or would have enjoyed with Berman.

The predictions of Brown's quick decline were, in hindsight, breathtakingly wrong. As it turned out, Willie Brown became the longest-reigning Assembly Speaker in California history, flourishing through the terms of four U.S. presidents, three governors, and six Republican Assembly leaders.^[9] Other politicians came and went, but Willie Brown endured. He became the most dominant politician in California in the latter part of the twentieth century. The more Republicans vilified him, the stronger he got. Brown ended up serving twice as long as Jesse Unruh. In truth, the Republicans underestimated the man they made Speaker. No matter what it looked like on paper, he could outmaneuver his opponents under practically any set of rules. As long as he was Speaker, as long as he could find forty-one votes, he could do anything he wanted. He called it the "Rule of Forty-One," and it was the only rule that really counted.

Brown proved that a skilled black politician could triumph not just in black politics but on a playing field dominated by white politicians, many of them hostile to his race and his generally liberal cause. He did so by being smarter and working harder than his opponents and, most critically, finding fissures to split them apart and keep them preoccupied with their own squabbles.

What those who depended on Brown's downfall did not clearly foresee were the opportunities that steadied Brown's hand. The gambler in him turned out to be more clever—and luckier—than the Republicans and pundits ever imagined. If Brown was ever worried that his speakership would be short, he never let it show. "It's not a honeymoon here—it's a permanent love affair," he boasted three months into his reign. "I expect to keep this job forever."^[10]

Like other states in 1981, California went through its once-a-decade reapportionment of congressional and legislative districts. Brown used the occasion to shore up support among Democrats with a redistricting plan masterminded by his political mentor, Congressman Phillip Burton. It was Burton's last gift to his protégé.

As the Legislature moved into the reapportionment battle, Carol Hallett stepped aside as Republican leader so that she could run for lieutenant governor to replace her friend Mike Curb, who was mounting a run for governor. Hallett was replaced by her second in command, Robert Naylor, an affable Republican elected from a suburban district on the southern base of the San Francisco peninsula.

As it emerged, the redistricting plan gave Democrats a lopsided advantage in California's congressional delegation and in the state Legislature. The congressional redistricting plan was crucial for Brown because it provided an honorable way for his strongest Democratic rivals to leave the Assembly for seats in Congress in the 1982 elections. Among those who availed themselves of the Burton-sent escape hatch to Congress were Howard Berman, who was another Burton protégé, and Brown's chief rivals, Mel Levine and Rick Lehman. Burton wanted them in Washington anyway, where he was getting

ready for another run at House leadership. Other Democratic Assembly rivals, like Wadie Deddeh of San Diego, got safe seats in the state Senate. The Republicans never quite understood how rewarding Brown's Democratic rivals helped solidify his power by removing them as threats. Rewarding enemies was not a part of their political value system, then or later.

The Republicans not only underestimated Brown but also misjudged how quickly the Democrats could come together after the bloodletting of the speakership fight. The Democrats privately swore they would never repeat the carnage of their political civil war. The memory of the 1980 leadership battle was so traumatic for Democrats that they remained loath for more than a decade to engage in another one. Berman was in no mood to challenge Brown again. The fact that it was Brown who beat him let him save face. At least Leo McCarthy had not beaten him. "I never had a bit of hostility to Willie from this," said Berman. "You know, when you live by the sword, you die by it. So, unlike Leo, where there was a deeper hostility because we had been so close, with Willie it was, 'Hey Willie, gee, nice move'"^[11]

Brown was smart enough to make a deal with Berman and his allies on the issue that mattered most to them—reapportionment. Phillip Burton and Berman's brother, Michael, were given a free hand over the congressional redistricting, maximizing Democratic gains and giving Berman and his friends their path out of Sacramento. "Within four months after Willie beat me, he made a deal with us on the reapportionment process which the Republicans spent the next ten years litigating," said Berman with glee.^[12] The Republicans believed that Brown was cowed by Phillip Burton and Berman, but in fact those two gave him the gift that solidified his speakership: his enemies were promoted via redistricting to the state Senate and the U.S. Congress. The state Democratic Party was unified, and Brown could function as a Democratic Speaker and break with the Republicans who put him there.

Willie Brown needed no convincing while Phillip Burton cajoled and pushed his Democratic colleagues in Congress into accepting strangely drawn districts that maximized Democratic gains and concentrated Republicans into the fewest possible districts. He carried the plan, and all the intricate demographic data supporting it, around in his head and on reams of yellow work sheets. The plan was technically brilliant; no districts differed by more than 223 people. But it also was a crazy quilt of lines patching together district pieces, with thin corridors across bays and mountain ranges. Burton weakened some incumbents, including himself, to shore up other Democrats, including his brother John. He called his work on his brother's district "my contribution to modern art." Naylor, on the other hand, called the whole thing a "diabolical masterpiece."^[13]

By law the Legislature was required to approve Burton's elaborate plan. In return the state legislators wanted a congressional bill exempting their per diem living allowance of $75 a day from federal income taxes. Burton got Congressman Robert Matsui, who sat on the House Ways and Means Committee,

to insert an amendment into a bill, and the tax loophole for legislators quietly became law as part of President Reagan's 1981 tax bill.^[14]

While Republicans fumed and stewed, Brown had his own problems within the Democratic caucus. For starters, it looked as if the Berman supporters were getting all the plums and all the Brown supporters were getting their districts hacked to pieces. Brown kept his distance from his disgruntled Democratic colleagues by handing over the Assembly's redistricting to Richard Alatorre, appointing him chairman of the Elections and Reapportionment Committee. Brown then stood back and played the peacemaker.

Alatorre was an up-from-the streets legislator from East Los Angeles. He had built his own political machine in the barrio, and he could be gruff, hard-edged, and mean when necessary. He was also exceedingly sharp. The Republicans, however, did not take him seriously and believed that his appointment was Brown's gesture to Latinos. One joke making the rounds in Republican circles was that Alatorre would draw district lines with spray paint.^[15] The Republicans severely underestimated the new chairman.

Alatorre hired Bruce Cain, a talented political scientist from the California Institute of Technology who was proficient with computers. Joining him was Bill Cavala, a Berkeley political scientist associated with Howard Berman and his political consultant brother Michael, and Assemblyman Bill Lockyer's college roommate (Lockyer had voted against Brown, and he was another to be rewarded with a Senate seat).^[16] Alatorre's staff attempted to maximize the number of Democratic Assembly seats while pushing Republicans into smaller districts with larger numbers of Republicans. The strategy meant that Democrats would have several marginal districts where incumbents would face tough election campaigns, while most Republicans would have safe districts. However, to come up with concentrated Republican districts, the plan called for putting several Republican districts into single districts, essentially collapsing Republican districts. If those Republicans wanted to stay in the Assembly, they would have to run against other Republican incumbents.

The strategy sounded great to Democrats until Cain started peeling off safe Democratic neighborhoods from incumbents and putting them in new districts. Suddenly some incumbents who had not faced a serious election challenger in years found themselves in marginally safe Democratic districts. The new lines ran counter to the natural instinct of incumbents, for whom no district was safe enough. As Alatorre began carving up San Jose to create a new Hispanic seat, for example, he pitted John Vasconcellos against Dominic Cortese. Both Democrats embraced the concept of new Hispanic seats, but neither could understand why he should give up territory to create one.^[17]

Brown went to meetings with Alatorre and his aides, but he did not stay long. "He'd get the picture and then he'd walk out," said Cain. "He wasn't really interested in the details. He figured between Richard Alatorre and Bill Cavala, he had people who enjoyed it, were interested in the details of it, plus it was painful, and he just didn't want anything to do with it."^[18] And by

staying out of the detail work, Brown could plausibly deny knowledge when an incumbent came to him screaming. More than a few gruff incumbents never saw through Brown's ploy.

Democrats sometimes found that their new district did not include their own home. As Democratic Assembly members arrived in Alatorre's office to learn what their new districts looked like, many were stunned. A few were furious. Assemblyman Leroy Greene briefly surveyed the map, said there was "nothing to say," and got up to leave. Although Greene had lost only one percentage point in Democratic registration, he was unyielding and voted against the plan.^[19] Greene did not bother to run for reelection to the Assembly, but fortuitously won a state Senate seat in 1982.

Brown wanted to avoid embarrassing lawsuits from organizations representing racial and ethnic groups. Latino leaders in particular were suspicious that their people would be shortchanged by the remap, as they had in every other remap since California had become part of the United States. Los Angeles County was 27 percent Hispanic, and Latino leaders called for one more predominantly Latino Assembly seat.^[20] Brown met with members of the Californios for Fair Representation, an organization of lawyers and civil rights leaders determined to increase the number of legislative seats held by Hispanics. Brown offered to collapse seats held by incumbents who were not part of the leadership coalition that brought him to power.

But carving out a new Hispanic seat in Los Angeles proved difficult because it could strip territory from black incumbents and alienate Berman's liberal allies. Alatorre began looking for territory elsewhere in the state to patch together. Alatorre managed to create sixteen new districts with a minimum Hispanic population of 30 percent, up from the previous ten districts. He did it by pushing incumbents into unfamiliar territory, making the jigsaw fit. One Los Angeles district that included rural areas of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties was nicknamed the "condor seat" because it included a mating reservation for the endangered bird.^[21] To consolidate Hispanic areas in central California, Alatorre collapsed Carol Hallett's area into a single concentrated Republican district by combining the southern parts of Santa Clara County with the Salinas Valley. The new district became known as the "John Steinbeck" seat. Although it could have been safer for Hallett, she was infuriated to lose one hundred thousand constituents and some of her biggest donors in the Salinas Valley.

The Republicans remained miffed, but there was little they could do if enough Democratic incumbents voted for the plan. Not all Democrats went along. Some, like San Diego Assemblyman Wadie Deddeh, flat out refused to vote for the remap although he was leaving the Assembly anyway. But the bulk of the Democrats were pushed, prodded, and cajoled into accepting new districts despite their displeasure.

Willie Brown's thespian skills proved crucial in convincing enough of his colleagues, and those skills were never more needed than with the explosive

Louis Papan, who represented a suburban district just south of San Francisco.^[22] Part of Papan's old district was given to another legislator, and aides forgot (or were afraid) to tell him about it until the day of the vote on the entire reapportionment plan. While the reapportionment bill was being debated, Papan discovered the change and summoned Cain to the back of the Assembly chambers. Demanding an explanation, Papan grew angrier by the second. Cain began worrying about his personal safety just as Brown arrived.

Brown listened to Papan's rant. Then he asked Cain what his own Democratic registration would be under the plan, pretending not to know.

Cain told the Speaker he had lost five percentage points of Democrats.

"You mean, you bastard, that you dropped my registration?" Brown scolded.

Brown asked how much of Papan's Democratic registration had slipped. Catching on to Brown's theatrics, Cain replied that Papan's Democratic registration had actually gone up by three points. Papan calmed down, and he walked away with the Speaker commiserating over the raw deals wrought by lowly assistants like Bruce Cain. Papan voted for the bill and Cain breathed a sigh of relief.

Whatever discomfort Brown gave his Democratic friends was nothing compared with what he did to Republicans. When Naylor finally got to see the maps, he discovered to his horror that Republican incumbents would have to run against other Republican incumbents to stay in the Assembly.

"One day they'd show you the map and you know you'd been screwed," Naylor remembered. "It didn't include seats for all members. The only incumbents it caused to run against each other were Republicans. Three pairs of Republicans! And we were just absolutely livid. We knew we had been double-crossed."^[23]

The Republicans declared war on Brown, and their anger never subsided. "On reapportionment," said Patrick Nolan, who would soon succeed Naylor as Republican leader, "my recollection is the only deal with Willie, other than giving us the ability to analyze votes, was that we would be treated fairly. No specifics. And that's where he let us down because we weren't treated fairly."^[24] But it was too late for the Republicans to depose Brown. By now his hold on the speakership was solid enough in his own party to survive the withdrawal of Republican support. For all practical purposes, the bipartisan coalition speakership was dead. "That reapportionment deal poisoned the well," said Naylor. "Just that one act dramatically altered the civility of the Assembly and the ability of parties to work together—no question about it."^[25]

For as long as Willie Brown was Speaker, the Republicans never got over feeling betrayed. By voting for the black liberal Democrat from San Francisco for Speaker, many had taken a huge risk in their suburban white Republican districts. As they saw it, he should have at least rewarded them with a "fair" reapportionment. "We wanted to have a chance at a majority, a fighting

chance," said Nolan. "Therefore we needed more competitive districts, not slam-dunk districts. The Democrats never understood that."^[26]

But Brown understood all too well that competitive districts could give Republicans an edge and topple him as Speaker. The Republicans were, in fact, hugely naive in thinking Brown would permit a reapportionment plan awarding them control of the Legislature. Brown had no choice but to tilt toward his own party if he was to have any chance of long-term survival. To deliver even the possibility of a majority to the opposition party was suicidal. "You can imagine the Republicans asking for the status quo plus one maybe, or two," Cain observed. "But it's another thing to say to a Democratic legislator, 'Give us a Republican majority, and oh yes, and we'll keep you as Speaker.' Do you think a street-wise black guy who has fought his way up from poverty in Texas is going buy that one? I think Willie works from the premise that people will be good to him as long as they have an interest in being good to him. And that's a very solid basis for relationships in politics."^[27]

Brown delivered to the letter on his promises to Republicans. He gave them computers and statisticians to work out their own redistricting plan. That did not mean he had to listen to what they came up with. The Republicans hired the Rose Institute in Claremont to give them a state-of-the-art redistricting plan. But Republicans found that sharing resources did not mean much when Democrats held the majority vote on all the committees in the Assembly. Democrats were not about to share power in the committees.

Nor did Republicans do themselves any favors by unveiling a redistricting plan that eliminated Brown's San Francisco district by dividing it up into other districts. When he saw that wrinkle, Brown quipped that he was "negotiating with the Israeli air force about visiting Claremont" to wipe out the Rose Institute.^[28] In any case the Republican reapportionment plan was dead on arrival in the Legislature with or without a visit from the Israeli air force. "They were snookered. They were outdone, and I don't think they knew what happened to them," observed Maxine Waters, who was one of Brown's closest lieutenants in the Assembly.^[29]

Brown did one other thing to strengthen his hold on power for the future. He took out a political insurance policy with a handful of Republicans by quietly helping them get safe, or safer, districts. He went out of his way to make sure they knew he was responsible for helping.^[30] Brown's tactic quietly split the opposition party because the Republicans had sworn an oath to stick together during reapportionment and not cut individual deals. He showed up in the districts of Republicans to make appearances for them. When Democrats whined, he reminded them he was "Speaker of all the Assembly."

Writer Dan Blackburn observed in California Journal that "by promising almost everything to almost everyone, Brown bought precious time to practice his magic."^[31] Throughout his speakership Brown could seemingly

pull a Republican vote out of his hat when he needed it, and the origin of those votes can be found in the 1981 reapportionment and the favors he did for Republicans back in their home districts.

As the redistricting legislation reached its climax, Brown delivered a plan to remove his strongest Democratic rivals from the Assembly and solidify his hold on power for the next decade and beyond. The plan included shifting Leo McCarthy's district eastward to include part of Sacramento.^[32] The new district was tailored for Brown's ex-aide, Phillip Isenberg, who was winding up his term as mayor of Sacramento. McCarthy planned to leave the Assembly anyway, but his political fate was up in the air; he dearly wanted to run for the U.S. Senate in 1982, but Jerry Brown also wanted the Democratic Senate nomination. Willie Brown helped persuade McCarthy to run for lieutenant governor instead.

Brown also had his hands full with the state Senate, where the Democrats elected a new leader, David Roberti of Los Angeles. The new president pro tempore was no pushover, and he declared that he would be more sharply partisan in protecting the Democratic majority in the state Senate. Roberti said that Brown's plan conflicted with his own designs, and he called a press conference to announce that "the Senate is alive and well" and "reapportionment will not be accomplished in the first person singular by any legislator."^[33] Brown and Roberti worked out their differences, but their relationship would remain prickly for the next fifteen years.

When the plan was finally rammed through the Assembly, at 1:20 A.M. on the last night of the session for the year, the Democrats were elated and united behind their new leader. "You are the best Speaker I never voted for, and I want to tell you I'm happy to be a part of your leadership," Berman proclaimed that night.^[34]

But Naylor glowered: "We have a kind of betrayal."

And Brown gloated: "The Speaker in California is the closest thing you will ever know in the world to the Ayatollah."^[35]

Paradoxically, Brown's prominence as the most powerful African American politician in California, and quite possibly in the nation, forced him to scale back his activities in national black political circles. Shortly after becoming Speaker, Brown and Julian Bond planned another summit of black political leaders to map strategy for dealing with the Reagan White House.^[36] But as Brown's energies were increasingly consumed with keeping power in the California Assembly, the role he played in national black political circles became more sporadic. He needed to focus on keeping at least forty-one of his eighty members happy at any given time, and that meant he was less inclined to play the role of a vocal black politician embracing traditional black positions that might alienate some of his Assembly members. The most volatile of those

issues was court-ordered school integration, which, as Brown saw it, was a no-win issue for blacks and Democrats.

Traditional black political organizations felt increasingly alienated from the new Speaker. Symptomatic was his relationship with the NAACP and its western regional director, Virna Canson. Unknown to Brown, Mervyn Dymally, now in Congress and back in his feuding mode, added fuel to the conflict between Brown and Canson. Dymally mailed Canson a February 1981 Washington Post column by David Broder that quoted Brown declaring that black leaders were hurting black candidates by defending busing. Broder observed that Brown was "still groping for the levers of leadership" by selling a "cynical view of the realities of political influence."^[37] But Brown believed his view was not cynical at all. He was a realist, and he was going his own way on the volatile issue.

The breaking point for Brown and the NAACP came a month later when Brown made a speech to life members of the NAACP in the Bay Area. He again cautioned against turning busing into a live-or-die issue. Canson grew increasingly furious as she listened. She then wrote Brown a lengthy letter. She told him that the members had been insulted by his remarks, and she compared his position to that of state Senator Alan Robbins, a foe of school integration who at that moment was under indictment for having had sex with an underage girl. Canson concluded by telling Brown:

If there is some temporary mental state which you find yourself in which causes you to believe that you can accommodate the racists and escape their seeing you as Black, I trust that conditions will soon end and reality will once again be a part of your state of mind.

We are going to fight for school integration, including busing for as long as it takes. We do not ask that you take a leadership role. We do implore you to "shut up." Don't make our burden harder. . . .

P.S. Don't force me to go public.

Brown's reply to Canson was as short as it was unflinchingly characteristic of his temperament:

Your non-public letter to me and many other people is neither respectful of my free speech rights nor accurate. You have done yourself serious damage and demeaned the NAACP in the process.

Virna please "go public," repeating all over the world exactly what you said in your letter and I'm sure it will not be long before you realize how wrong you really are.

Sincerely, Willie L. Brown, Jr.^[38]

Canson, who was closer to Dymally than Brown to begin with, said she patched things up "little by little" with Brown over the years.^[39] But she and the NAACP never had the access to the Speaker's office that other organizations and groups developed over the next decade. Whatever chance

the NAACP had of entering Brown's inner circle was squandered when Canson took Dymally's bait and wrote her angry letter.

Brown's break with the NAACP was symbolic of a larger break from his early black political roots. Brown had nearly completed his public transition to becoming the ultimate pragmatic politician. That journey was never easy. There were reminders, some not so subtle, that no matter how much power he attained, or how rich he got, Willie Brown was a black man in a white country. One such reminder came when he led his colleagues on a trip to Washington, D.C., for the first time as California Assembly Speaker.^[40] Brown paid most of the airfares out of his own campaign funds to protect his members from being accused of taking a junket at the taxpayers' expense. When they arrived at the White House, the white assemblymen were routinely ushered inside. But Brown was stopped at the door. He could not prove he was Speaker Brown, and the White House police would not budge. Finally, an embarrassed Ed Rollins, who was by now working for the Reagan White House as political director, came out and vouched for the man he had helped make Speaker.

Earlier in his career Brown would have called a press conference to complain about the snub at the White House gate. But he did not. He told a few Sacramento Capitol reporters, but he kept it jocular. Now that he was the Speaker of the Assembly, he was dependent on white legislators and their white voters to stay in power. For public consumption, he deliberately submerged his earlier black militancy. That did not mean he was abandoning black politics.

Brown quietly consolidated his position as the most powerful black politician in California. One of his vehicles was the Black American Political Association of California (BAPAC), the successor to the Watts-riot-era Negro Political Action Association of California (NPAAC), founded by Augustus Hawkins. Brown put Alice Huffman, a former legislative aide of Maxine Waters, in charge of BAPAC. Huffman was also the chief lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, one of Brown's most crucial campaign contributors. There was grumbling in the ranks at the CTA that Huffman's loyalties were divided, but it suited Brown's purposes perfectly to tie the two organizations together. "If you put CTA and BAPAC together, that organization has really empowered black people," Huffman observed in an interview in her Sacramento office, a block from the Capitol. "When you talk about Willie and Alice, you have to put that BAPAC piece in there. That's the brother-sister piece that everybody up here doesn't see, but it's very real. In fact, I know Willie more through BAPAC than I know Willie through public education."^[41]

Brown got the CTA's money, and he used BAPAC to enhance his clout and promote a new crop of black political leaders throughout the 1980s. Black leaders who owed their political careers to Willie Brown included Maxine Waters, who eventually went to Congress; Elihu Harris, who chaired the Assembly Judiciary Committee before his election as mayor of Oakland;

Gwen Moore, who chaired the Utilities and Commerce Committee; and Marguerite Archie-Hudson, who chaired the Higher Education Committee. Brown also used his growing clout as Speaker to diminish black rivals, particularly Mervyn Dymally.

As Brown's power grew, a younger generation of blacks chafed at their inability to get ahead in politics. Brown was so large and powerful that there was little room for anyone else to move up in black politics. Compounding the problem, most black legislators and city council members represented uncompetitive districts with large black voter registrations, and it was almost impossible for younger blacks to dislodge them. Willie Brown, as leader of the Assembly, perpetuated the system. A few black leaders began worrying that once Brown and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley ceded the stage, there would be no black leaders of stature around to take their places. Brown, however, was not particularly sympathetic.

Journalist Herbert A. Sample, a member of that younger generation of African Americans, once asked Brown about such sentiments. "First and foremost," Brown replied, "I'd welcome young blacks to do anything. This generation has not shown a great propensity to be heavily involved. With all of the skills, with all of the ability, with all of the resources available to them, they have got to pick up the mantle of leadership and move it to the next level. This business of spending all of their time buying BMWs and Porsches and Mercedes and houses and joining black ski clubs and all of that kind of stuff, doing the yuppie type activities, is a terrible waste."^[42]

Brown discovered first-hand that the job of Speaker included taking unending flak from all directions. While he fought with the NAACP on one front, he was accused on another of "racism" for championing black political rights by saying he would protect black districts during reapportionment.^[43] His remarks were nothing more than a restatement of the federal Voting Rights Act, which required protection for the political districts of blacks and other minorities. But some believed he was showing favoritism to blacks.

Brown's loyalties to the black caucus occasionally got him in trouble with the rest of the Democratic Assembly caucus. With the 1981 reapportionment looming, Brown remarked that Latinos did not vote and that he would not create a second Latino congressional seat "at the expense of black folk." Speaking at a luncheon of the Black Journalists' Association of Southern California, Brown also said that he would share power with other Democrats and "remain partisan forever and ever and ever." Brown further compounded his difficulties by saying that Dymally and Julian Dixon would be safe enough in Congress during reapportionment, but that Ron Dellums from Berkeley would have "veto power" over the lines of his congressional district.^[44] Brown's rivals threw his luncheon remarks back in his face for more than a year.

As it turned out, Dixon, Dymally, and Dellums would all be safe enough. But only one person had power over the congressional lines, and that was Phillip Burton. His first priority was stretching the number of Democratic

seats to the maximum possible. Next was protecting his younger brother's San Francisco district. He even peeled off some of his own safe areas to give to John.

"Should I try to hurt my brother? My brother is Willie Brown's closest personal friend and I got him into politics. I suspect there are few people in the world Richard Alatorre would hold in higher esteem than my brother," Phillip told reporters when pressed about his maneuverings. "If anyone suggests a plan that Willie Brown and Richard Alatorre thought was unfair to my brother, the thing would hit the dust before anybody could do anything."^[45]

Phillip Burton said he was just taking care of all his friends in Northern California. "I don't anticipate any incumbents in the North being discumbooberated."

What about Southern California?

"How do I know?" he lied.

In fact, Phillip Burton was collapsing several Republican districts and carving up Anthony Beilenson's safely Democratic Beverly Hills district to make room for Berman and Mel Levine in Washington.^[46] Beilenson tried to block the plan through David Roberti in the state Senate.

But the plan was hard for Roberti to oppose; it gave the Democrats lopsided control over the Legislature and the congressional delegation. The congressional delegation went from twenty-three Democrats and twenty-two Republicans to a lopsided 28-17 majority for the Democrats. All of the Republicans' Rose Institute plans went for naught. "I gave them what we agreed," said Brown. "I handed them the money [for reapportionment] . . . and I let Phil Burton rip their hearts out in Congress. We didn't have a deal on that."^[47] In the Assembly, the Democrats ended up with forty-eight seats, and a solid majority that lasted the rest of the decade and well into the next. For the Democrats the remap fit together perfectly. Despite the grumbling over its individual parts, the Democrats rammed it through both houses on September 15, 1981, and sent it to Jerry Brown for his signature.

The Republicans began a petition drive to overturn the Democrats' redistricting at the ballot box, and gathered nearly a half-million signatures. The Democrats sued to stop the ballot measure and won a partially favorable decision from the California Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Rose Bird. The court ruled that the 1981 redistricting was valid for the 1982 election regardless of whether the voters approved a Republican-backed initiative to overturn the new districts in June 1982. The decision reeked of partisanship, and conservative Republicans vowed to get even with Bird by removing her from the bench.

Voters approved the June 1982 ballot measure and so required the Legislature to come up with a new plan. Not wanting to take chances with what the Democratic-controlled Legislature would devise, the Republicans qualified another ballot measure, Proposition 14, for November 1982 that

would have given redistricting to a bipartisan commission. The Republicans raised $305,718 to get the measure on the ballot, but they put up only $88,260 to try to get it passed.^[48] With the Republicans failing to adequately bankroll the measure, it lost. However, the ballot proposal unleashed a barrage of Republican-sponsored ballot initiatives on reapportionment.

Under Chief Justice Rose Bird's rulings, all the Legislature needed to do to get court approval was change Burton's redistricting plan around the edges. The new plan, like the old, met the requirements of the federal Voting Rights Act by giving racial minorities distinct districts. The few significant changes were wrought by Maxine Waters, whom Brown had made the new Elections and Reapportionment Committee chairwoman following the elections. Waters proved formidable, and even Phillip Burton backed down and acceded to her demands for changes to some congressional lines.^[49] The new plan was again approved by the Legislature and sent to Governor Brown. He signed the bill on January 2, 1983, one of his last acts in office. The gerrymander was in place, and the Democrats' grip on the Legislature would go unchallenged for the next decade. The stage was set for a new crop of Democratic legislators to join Willie Brown in Sacramento.

Nearly lost in the midst of the reapportionment struggle was John Burton. He hated Washington, his second marriage was over, and he had developed a cocaine addiction.^[50] His behavior was erratic in public and worse in private. He missed nearly 40 percent of the votes in the House. He forgot to show up at the House subcommittee he chaired, gave ranting speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives, and got into roaring arguments with his older brother. Compounding everything, Phillip constantly treated his younger brother as if John could not function politically without him, and he belittled his accomplishments. The two brothers could not connect.

Phillip tried using Congressman George Miller in Washington and Willie Brown in California as go-betweens. "I became a peacemaker between John and Phil," remembered Brown. "There were bitter disputes between the two. And I would make connection. But 'til Phil's death, I still enjoyed a very close, warm working relationship with Phil. I spent probably as much time as anybody with Phil every time he came to California. Every time he came home I would eat one meal with Phil."^[51]

When reporters heard the rumors of John Burton's drug use and confronted him, he said he had "piles." Finally, friends took John Burton to Bethesda Naval Hospital and saved his life. Two days before the March filing deadline, John Burton announced he was retiring from Congress. He told waiting reporters at San Francisco Airport that he "just wanted to come home."^[52] Notes in Phillip Burton's files indicate that Willie Brown talked with John Burton before he made his decision.^[53] Phillip Burton, however, did not know his younger brother was quitting until George Miller told him.

The Willie Brown style took Sacramento and San Francisco by storm. Stories about his expensive clothes, beautiful women, and slick cars were legion. He turned heads one day by showing up for work driving a Rolls Royce. He had borrowed it from a law client. He said it was too big and a bit of a clunker. He bought $1,500-to-$2,500 tailored Italian suits from his haberdasher friend, Wilkes Bashford, and said his body would "reject a Plymouth"—a jab at the car Jerry Brown used in lieu of a state limousine. Brown threw out his Brioni suits once a year, giving them to a charity thrift shop. Owning a pre-worn Willie Brown suit was very chic in San Francisco. Willie Brown was possibly the only politician in America featured in GQ magazine, and possibly the only one whose closet was ever the subject of a photo spread.^[54] His fashion tips were constantly turning up in magazines and newspapers. And he once explained why he was chronically late to meetings: "If I'm scheduled to meet you at 8, and I'm 10 minutes late, it's because I'm in the third outfit."^[55]

He drove new Porsches and Jaguars and a rare V-12 Mercedes, price tag $125,000. He dated movie stars, and he attended parties with his wife on one arm and a girlfriend on the other. Above all, he loved to be noticed. On his wall in his law office was a poster quoting himself: "The only thing worse than being misquoted is not being talked about at all."

It was only half in jest that lobbyists complained that the Legislature did not settle down to legislating until after Willie Brown attended the Academy Awards.

At home he enjoyed tinkering with stereo systems, building ever more elaborate sound systems. He delighted in seeing the first run of a movie before anyone else. One weekend in the mid-1990s in San Francisco he saw Red Rock West and loved it so much that he told his friends in Sacramento that they had to see it. When he discovered it was not playing in Sacramento, he borrowed the film from the San Francisco theater where he saw it, and then rented the Crest Theater, two blocks from the state Capitol, for a private showing for two hundred of his friends.

Brown flaunted his lavish lifestyle. Brown's parties were bigger than life. In March 1982 Brown staged "Oh, What A Night!," a political fund-raiser like no one had ever experienced before.^[56] The bash set a new standard for excess. Held at the San Francisco Hilton Hotel, mounds of food and drink were piled high on tables, each with a distinctive theme. In one corner was "Japantown," while in another was the "Coit Tower Bar." In the farthest corner from the door was "Willie's Soul Food." The guests were dazzled by nonstop entertainers including Melba Moore, the Dick Conte Trio, and the Emmitt Powell Gospel Elites. With Willie Brown, fund-raisers were no longer a dreary chore but a hot ticket. Even

his Republican opponents came to his "events." He threw another lavish party just for his favorite women, filling a banquet hall and giving each a present. He went to the Academy Awards each year. All but the starchiest were dazzled by the new Speaker and delighted in his company even as they castigated him in public.

Soon the rest of Sacramento came to be amazed with the Willie Brown style. His staff and colleagues threw him a party for his forty-eighth birthday.^[57] Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz gave him a black silk jacket from the Palomino club in Hollywood. The jacket was embroidered: "The Speak-ah." Jerry Brown came and gave Willie seven silk hankies from Wilkes Bashford's store in San Francisco. Willie Brown got laughs when he stuffed the hankies into seven different pockets.

His flamboyance did not escape notice from the eastern media. The CBS weekly program 60 Minutes profiled Brown for a segment in 1984 shortly before the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. "For those who never heard of Willie Brown," reporter Harry Reasoner began, "he's probably the most influential black politician holding elective office in the country."^[58] Reasoner observed that Brown's power was second only to that of the governor, but "when it comes to using that power with style, there are those who say Willie Brown is second to none."

Brown gave a dazzling television performance in his interview with Reasoner. "You really have to have more than just a good heart," Brown told him. "You also have to have some style. You're competing with Frank Sinatra. You're competing with Richard Pryor. You're competing with some real heavyweights, both in and outside of the field of politics. California is a media state. California is an image state. California is where it happens. You really—you really have to project something."

He loved being Speaker, and he loved showing off, particularly to other politicians. Sometimes they got the last laugh. Soon after Brown was elected Speaker, Congressman Julian Dixon came to pay a courtesy call. He and Brown whisked down an elevator located two paces from the Speaker's office to the Capitol garage below, where a driver with limousine was waiting. Brown ushered Dixon inside the car with a flourish. "He had not only a telephone, he had a Highway Patrol direct line and all of this stuff," Dixon remembered.^[59] Brown ordered the driver to take them to the Firehouse for lunch. But the motor would not start. "He was fit to be tied. I thought it was funny," Dixon said.

Brown's political footwork was not always dazzling either. The state budget negotiations in 1982, the last with Jerry Brown, did not go well.^[60] The problem was not with the governor, who barely cared as he was busily running for the U.S. Senate, but with David Roberti, the other Democrat in Sacramento who considered himself at least the equal of Willie Brown. Setting a pattern for the years ahead, the Roberti-led Senate grew tired of endless

haggling over the budget and left town before the final $25.2 billion plan was approved. During a three-day showdown with Roberti, Brown tried to get the Senate to go along with using $235 million in reserves for education. Roberti held firm, and the budget plan was approved without the extra money for schools.

Brown was so furious at being beaten on the budget by the Senate that he threatened retaliation against all Senate bills in the Assembly. Roberti managed to smooth things over with Brown, but it was the last time for a long while that the Senate would call the shots on the state budget. From then on, Brown was the one using strong-arm tactics to force the Senate to go along with his budget. However, there was little time for rehashing the budget battle. He had to gear up for the 1982 election, his first as a legislative leader. The outcome would determine whether he would remain as Speaker.

That election turned out to be the most important of the decade, setting in place the leaders and electoral trends that would dominate California politics until the mid-1990s. It brought the political demise of Jerry Brown, who was beaten for a U.S. Senate seat by San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson. It also saw the election of Republican George Deukmejian as governor. Although he was less than charismatic, Deukmejian proved to be a solidly enduring figure through the rest of the decade. The election was not all bad for Democrats. Leo McCarthy was elected lieutenant governor, beating Republican Carol Hallett, who left politics for good. The voters also reelected Democrats Jesse Unruh as treasurer and March Fong Eu as secretary of state, and they elected a new state attorney general, Democrat John Van de Kamp.

Willie Brown rose to his task of protecting the Democratic Assembly majority, but he did little to help the Democratic nominee for governor, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a mild-mannered black politician and ex-UCLA track star. Bradley had been a participant in the 1966 Bakersfield summit of black political leaders, and a member of Willie Brown's 1972 convention delegation pledged to George McGovern. Bradley narrowly lost to Deukmejian, and a low turnout by black voters contributed to his loss. Some statewide Democrats later condemned Willie Brown for not doing enough to help Bradley.

However, Brown was preoccupied with protecting his Democratic majority in the Assembly, and just as critically, proving that he was capable of running a complex election machine. He needed both to win the election for his Assembly members and to show that he was the crucial cog in the machine. Brown was confronted by some powerfully ugly moments during the 1982 election. Republicans tried to use him as a scapegoat, and they made thinly disguised references to the color of his skin in doing so. Slick brochures mailed to voters smeared Democratic Assembly candidates for their association with Brown. Photographs of Brown in the brochures showed him with a dark Afro haircut, although he had been bald for a decade, and with a sneer that made him look one step

removed from Huey Newton and the Black Panthers.^[61] The text usually painted Brown as the "boss" of Democrats, and Democratic candidates as his foolish tools. Ethics aside, the tactic was of questionable value. Sacramento Bee political columnist Martin Smith revealed that "some hardheaded Republican campaign strategists don't think it swung many voters over to the GOP's side."^[62] Nonetheless, Republican strategists repeated the tactic over and over, election after election, as the decade wore on.

To counteract the Republican onslaught, Brown raised $2.2 million in 1982 for Democratic Assembly candidates.^[63] He showed himself a formidable fund-raiser in his first campaign as Speaker, raising more than twice what Leo McCarthy had raised in the tumultuous 1980 Assembly campaigns, and McCarthy's war chest in 1980 was twice the previous record for Assembly Speakers. Brown got the money from the one place he could get it—corporations and trade associations seeking to influence legislation. Roughly 60 percent of Brown's campaign funds in 1982 came from businesses and political action committees in Sacramento, while only eleven cents out of every campaign dollar came from an individual donor. Brown was building the speakership into Willie Inc.^[64]

Predictably, the Republican smears infuriated Brown. "They sent out a sheet with blood flowing off and they still sent them out with my picture on them," he declared.^[65] When the Legislature returned to Sacramento for its 1983–84 session, he dumped Republicans from their committee chairmanships. If there was any doubt left in anyone's mind, the deal that had made him Speaker was now officially dead.

The Democrats also maintained their majority hold on the congressional delegation and the Legislature. Burton's and Alatorre's reapportionment plans worked. The Democrats won forty-eight seats in the Assembly, and the class of 1982 became the backbone of the house leadership well into the 1990s. The new Democratic members included Lloyd Connelly, Johan Klehs, Tom Hayden, Rusty Areias, Gary Condit, Bruce Bronzan, Jack O'Connell, Phillip Isenberg, Burt Margolin, Charles Calderon, Lucky Killea, and Steve Peace. All were chairing committees before long. The Republicans elected that year were also notable, such as Doris Allen, who went on to succeed Brown as Speaker in 1995. Other Republicans in the class were Bill Jones, who was elected secretary of state twelve years later, and Frank Hill, who also left office in 1994 sentenced to a federal prison for bribery.

Willie Brown emerged from the 1982 election with his power solidified and with a firm hold on the job he had coveted for so long. Although few yet realized it, he was rapidly becoming the most powerful Democrat in California. And over the next eight years he would have a most improbable partner with whom to share power.

Chapter Twenty-One—
Deukmejian

I recognized early on the highest priority issue for Willie Brown was that he remain Speaker. He would be willing to negotiate and try to resolve differences, provided he not lose the confidence of his caucus, and remain as Speaker.
George Deukmejian
Governor of California,1983–1991

George Deukmejian, the new Republican governor, did not get off to an auspicious start with Willie Brown and his Democratic colleagues in the Capitol. Soon after he took office in January 1983, they sold the governor's mansion out from under him. The eleven-thousand-square-foot, eight-bedroom Spanish-style house in Carmichael was commissioned by Governor Reagan because Nancy Reagan detested the Victorian mansion in downtown Sacramento that had been the traditional residence of California governors for generations. Jerry Brown, who grew up in the old house, called the new mansion a "Taj Mahal" and refused to live in it.^[1] Deukmejian had no such compunctions, but he never got the chance to move into the new mansion. The place was sold, and Deukmejian lived in a high-rise condominium at 500 N Street, five blocks from the Capitol, until rich friends bought him a townhouse in the suburbs.

Deukmejian never quite got over his irritation at being locked out of the governor's mansion. But in January 1983 Deukmejian had bigger worries than where he lived. Jerry Brown had left a $1.5 billion deficit in the $27 billion state budget, handing his successor a fiscal crisis of unprecedented proportions.^[2] The surpluses of the 1970s were gone, and a recession in

the early 1980s had cut deeply into state revenues. The state stood on the verge of bankruptcy, unable to pay employees and creditors or to distribute money to schools, local governments, and the poor.

Over the course of the next six months, Deukmejian found his way out of the fiscal quagmire by forging a pragmatic alliance with Willie Brown. The crisis forced the two politicians to cooperate; their alliance was to last most of the next eight years. Their uneasy partnership brought tangible, though limited, results for both. To be sure, the 1980s were marked in large measure by political gridlock in Sacramento, mirroring a similar situation in Washington, D.C., with the Democrats controlling the legislative branch and the Republicans controlling the executive branch. California's biggest needs went largely unmet, both in Washington and in Sacramento. The quality of elementary through high school education in California declined precipitously as reading scores for fourth-graders sank to the lowest in the nation by the mid-1990s. An influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, strained an already overtaxed welfare system, and the state's once-proud transportation and water systems decayed badly, falling behind the pace of population and urban growth. Nonetheless, whatever progress was forged during the era came from the unlikely partnership between the very conservative governor and the very liberal Assembly Speaker. That they accomplished as much as they did was, in retrospect, remarkable.

By the standards of a later day, the 1983 budget deficit was not huge; closing a billion-dollar gap became weary routine in the Legislature in the 1990s. But in the early 1980s, after years of budget surpluses under Jerry Brown, the billion-dollar-plus deficit was incomprehensible to the state's political leaders. The budget mess forced the first policy crisis for both the new governor and the still relatively new Assembly Speaker. It took time for them to discover the threads that bound their political fate together.

Deukmejian came into office more attuned to legislators and their egos than any of his modern predecessors or his successor, Pete Wilson, who had been a legislator only briefly. He was one of them. But, on the surface at least, Deukmejian and Brown had little in common. Deukmejian was the antithesis of the Sacramento politician, the exact opposite of Willie Brown. Deukmejian's idea of a great weekend was to clean out the garage in his Long Beach home. He could not name the hottest four-star restaurant, and his clothes were strictly off the rack. He drove a station wagon, and unlike Jerry Brown's trademark Plymouth, it really was all he could afford. While his colleagues boozed and whored their way through legislative sessions, Deukmejian went home to his wife, Gloria, and their three children. The only weakness he would admit to was for Jamoca almond fudge ice cream.

Courken George Deukmejian . His wife and childhood friends called him "Corky," but campaign managers insisted his nickname was "Duke."^[3] They were so concerned that voters could not pronounce his surname that they purchased billboard space to spell it phonetically: "Duke-may-gin." Reporters constantly misspelled it, particularly those from the East Coast. His rhetorical skills were so leaden that he took speech lessons, which improved him from frightfully awful to merely bad. But those who underestimated George Deukmejian's political skill, and his shear tenacity, vastly miscalculated.

In 1955, fresh out of law school, Deukmejian tried his hand as a corporate lawyer for Texaco, and then he became a Los Angeles County deputy counsel. After a brief stint in private law practice, Deukmejian won a seat in the Assembly in 1962. He was not much of a standout in the Assembly, and his voting record reflected his white suburban constituents. He voted against Byron Rumford's landmark open-housing law, which prohibited discrimination against blacks. Deukmejian stepped up to a Senate seat in 1966 during the first election for a full-time Legislature. He eventually rose to Republican floor leader in the collegial Senate, and he unsuccessfully led the fight against Willie Brown's bill legalizing homosexuality.

There was really only one issue that interested Deukmejian—fighting crime. He made the death penalty into a personal crusade, making speeches laced with phrases about "punks and hoodlums."^[4] Deukmejian authored the state's 1977 law restoring the death penalty and the "use a gun, go to prison" sentencing law, successes that a year later catapulted him into the job of California attorney general, the most visible statewide office besides governor.

Deukmejian appeared content to run for reelection as attorney general in 1982. But influential Republicans were uneasy with the likely Republican nominee for governor, Mike Curb. Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a mild-mannered, moderate Democrat, was strongly popular in the polls and stood a good chance of being elected the first black governor of California, especially if his opponent was Curb. Deukmejian got into the race late as an underdog. Although Curb was backed by many of Ronald Reagan's key supporters, Deukmejian proved an energetic campaigner and beat him in the June 1982 gubernatorial primary. Deukmejian was again rated as the underdog in the general election against Bradley. Indeed, exit polls on election day showed Bradley the winner, Deukmejian the loser. But a strong absentee vote against a handgun control measure propelled Deukmejian to victory over Bradley. Deukmejian was elected the thirty-fifth governor of California by a margin of six-tenths of 1 percent.

By the time he became governor, Deukmejian's ideas on crime were mainstream. His enthusiasm was for building prisons, appointing tough judges, and lengthening prison sentences. However, he was out of his depth on fiscal issues and had only a superficial understanding of the state budget. Deukmejian's approach to the budget was simple—he pledged not to

raise general taxes. Once in office, Deukmejian's tax pledge proved exceedingly hard to keep, especially with all the new prisons he wanted to build. The Democrats pushed hard for a tax increase to offset revenue losses for welfare and education programs, but were held back by the constitutionally required approval of two-thirds of both the Assembly and the Senate. The Democrats simply did not have fifty-four votes in the Assembly or twenty-seven votes in the Senate for a tax increase. By the same token, Deukmejian did not have the two-thirds vote needed to balance the budget only with cuts.

At first Deukmejian and Brown hurled insults at each other in public. "The relationship started out rocky in the sense that Governor Deukmejian and Willie Brown had a fundamentally different agenda," recalled Steve Merksamer, Deukmejian's politically astute chief of staff. But Deukmejian and Merksamer also grasped that if they were going to get anything done, they needed to understand what made Brown tick. "I personally spent a lot of time trying to figure out Willie Brown because I believed early on that Willie is certainly the key to the Assembly, and certainly to some extent, the key to the Legislature," said Merksamer.^[5]

The governor and his staff secretly sought the advice of two men who knew better than anyone else the political perils Brown faced: Jesse Unruh and Robert Moretti, the former Assembly Speakers.^[6] Few in the Capitol were aware of the extent to which Deukmejian and his aides relied upon Unruh and Moretti, or just how much time Unruh and Moretti spent helping the Republican administration figure out the Democratic Assembly Speaker. Their groundwork, although frequently frustrating, paid off and proved crucial to Deukmejian's successes as governor. Unruh and Moretti tutored the governor and his men about the pressures and conflicts facing Brown as he continued to solidify his hold on the Speakership.

Unruh was in his element helping Deukmejian. Unruh thrived as a power broker in Sacramento. As state treasurer, he transformed the sleepy outpost in state government into an empire with tentacles in every corner of state finance. Unruh built his power by setting up dozens of boards and commissions with oversight over state and local bonding and finance authorities, and then he mined the boards for patronage jobs he could dispense or give away as state treasurer. Unruh especially enjoyed working the Legislature, and he was frequently seen hovering in the Assembly chambers buttonholing a legislator for a vote on yet another bill creating yet another new state board or commission with himself as the chairman. As a former Assembly member, Unruh had the full privileges of the Assembly. As a friend of Willie Brown, he had full access to the Speaker's office. And helping Deukmejian with his problems paid off with signatures on bills creating new boards and commissions for Unruh to chair.

Merksamer spent hours talking with Unruh about Willie Brown, and he got an education from a master.

"Lookit, the guy is like an onion," Unruh told Merksamer. "And you peel off a layer, and there's another layer, and you peel off that layer and you find another layer. And you can keep peeling off layer after layer after layer, and you're still going to find layer after layer after layer. You're never going to get to the core, you'll never get to the bottom of it, so don't even try because I'm his best friend and I can't."^[7]

That did not mean, however, that Brown was impossible for Deukmejian.

"Recognize that you can deal with Willie Brown," Unruh told Merksamer. "He's an easy guy to deal with if you're willing to play by certain rules. He likes to share in the credit, and to the extent that he can get all the credit, it helps. He's not ideologically driven. He is result driven, and he likes to be in play. He likes to be the key player. If you're willing to permit him to be the key player, and share in some of the credit that goes with that, all kinds of good things can happen."^[8]

Meanwhile Deukmejian asked Moretti to serve as a go-between with Brown. "He did undertake to establish a bridge between us to bring us together on the issues," Deukmejian recalled.^[9] Deukmejian was more comfortable dealing with Moretti than with Unruh. Moretti had been a peer in the Assembly, but Unruh had been Speaker. Unruh was now a state office-holder representing the opposing party, and that made direct communication more awkward. But Moretti was a private citizen, and Deukmejian found him easy to work with. Moretti found ways to connect the Democratic Speaker with the Republican governor, and few inside the Capitol knew about it. Conversely, Moretti and Unruh both could also explain Deukmejian's problems to Willie Brown. The two were among only a handful Brown would listen to as an equal.

Deukmejian learned that the key to Willie Brown was in protecting his position as Assembly Speaker. As long as Deukmejian did nothing to endanger Brown's standing with the Democratic caucus, all things were possible. "I recognized early on the highest priority issue for Willie Brown was that he remain Speaker," Deukmejian observed. "He would be willing to negotiate and try to resolve differences, provided he not lose the confidence of his caucus, and remain as Speaker. We always tried to work with him so we would not jeopardize his position in his caucus."^[10]

For Brown, getting along with Deukmejian was not always easy. His Democratic colleagues disliked Deukmejian, both politically and personally, and that constrained Brown's room to negotiate. Brown personally found Deukmejian rigid, overly formal, and not particularly personable. Negotiating with Deukmejian was frustrating; he was slow to commit and was suspicious that Brown might be getting an advantage. As frustrations among rank-and-file Democrats mounted, Brown lashed out in public at the governor: "My guess is if Deukmejian's son was to get married tomorrow, there probably wouldn't be three members with whom he served that he would invite to

the wedding, or that would attend if they were invited."^[11] Brown's jab was below the belt, but it was also preposterous on its face. Deukmejian indeed hosted parties for legislators, and most came, including Willie Brown. The comment was meant to placate the Deukmejian-haters in the Democratic caucus.

Like Ronald Reagan a decade earlier, Deukmejian learned to ignore Brown's posturing in public. "Very often, in his rhetoric, he gets carried away with himself as he hears himself speaking," Deukmejian said. "I found that, unlike his public comment, Willie was very practical in his approach. He was not an ideologue."^[12]

Within four months of taking office, Deukmejian formed a durable working relationship with Brown. It started with the budget crisis. "After the skirmishing, the Speaker was very helpful in resolving the situation," Deukmejian remembered.^[13] They began meeting for lunch once a week, an appointment they kept up for the next eight years. Brown usually came alone, while Deukmejian had Merksamer at his side, or in the second term, Michael Frost, who replaced Merksamer as chief of staff.

During the winter of 1983, budget negotiations went on around the clock while state finances remained frozen. The government of California ran out of money and started printing registered warrants—IOUs. Of all the political leaders, Brown was the only expert in how the state budget worked. Brown's years as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee gave him a huge advantage over David Roberti, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and the Republican leaders in either house. "It was essentially a two-way conversation between Deukmejian and Brown, with comments from all the rest of us," said Merksamer. "The leadership did not come from the Senate, who were essentially nonparticipants. The leadership came from Deukmejian and Willie."^[14]

Deukmejian and Brown came up with a novel solution to the budget crisis.^[15] First, they agreed to $638 million in immediate budget reductions. There was really only about $100 million in real cuts; the rest came from raids on special funds and delays in construction and maintenance projects. Second, they agreed to an automatic 1-cent sales tax increase that would be triggered on October 1, 1983, if revenues fell below projections. Both leaders got bragging rights, and both shared in the political risk. Brown could tell Democrats that a tax increase was in place if it was needed to protect schools and welfare. Deukmejian could keep his no-tax promise by working to keep the budget under control for the rest of the year and prevent the sales tax from automatically going up. The Senate Democrats went along grudgingly. In its cleverness, the plan had Willie Brown's fingerprints all over it. It balanced the state budget, and it gave all but the most stubborn—or ideologically correct—an opportunity to save face. "It would not have been

put together but for the active involvement and leadership of the Speaker," Merksamer recalled a decade later.^[16]

The biggest obstacle to passage was the Assembly Republican caucus and the 1978 class of hard-right conservatives.^[17] They considered the cuts as phony, which they were, and the sales tax trigger as a remote-control tax increase, which it was. Furious at what they viewed as a sellout by Deukmejian, the conservatives dug in their heels.

"This is the Duke's program," Brown implored his colleagues, squarely aiming to embarrass Republicans for not supporting their governor. "Give the Duke a vote."^[18]

Finally, under pressure from banks and the governor of their own party, enough Republicans caved in to enact the fiscal rescue plan. On February 16 the Senate voted first, approving the plan by a 33-6 vote. Two hours later the Assembly voted 60-17, sending the bill to Deukmejian's desk.

Within two months the governor and the Legislature were plunged into a new budget crisis over the 1983–84 fiscal year plan. The timing could not have been personally worse for Brown. That April Phillip Burton died of a ruptured artery in his abdomen, his years of chain-smoking, heavy drinking, and compulsive work catching up to him.^[19] He had just come off the toughest reelection campaign of his career, and he was preparing to run for Speaker of the House of Representatives either by challenging Majority Leader Jim Wright in 1984 or by running for the job in 1986 when Thomas "Tip" O'Neill planned to retire. The combination of Phillip Burton as Speaker in Washington and Willie Brown as Speaker in Sacramento would have greatly magnified the power of their San Francisco organization and made them the most powerful Democrats in the nation. But it was not to be.

A few days after Burton's death, on a stage near San Francisco Bay, Willie Brown gave a eulogy for his most important political mentor. Sitting to Brown's right that day was House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who brought with him 117 members of Congress, and San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein.^[20] Nearby was an even earlier mentor, the Reverend Hamilton Boswell from Jones Methodist Church. Then Brown returned to business.

The new fiscal crisis was an emotional roller coaster for Brown. He was in a terrible mood that spring, and it showed. One week into the newest round of budget negotiations, Brown declared "It's awful. It's the worst experience I've ever had."^[21] It was not, of course, the worst experience of his life, but he seemed to be struggling to come to grips with the death of Phillip Burton.

Deukmejian and Brown remained at loggerheads, $1 billion apart in balancing the budget. Deukmejian wanted to cut schools and welfare programs and impose a first-ever $50 per semester fee on community college students. The governor's proposals were unacceptable to Democrats. "We've got to play hardball," Brown declared, aware that some of his colleagues believed

he had been too conciliatory towards Deukmejian during the earlier fiscal negotiations. Deukmejian proposed a spending cap of $22 billion for the fiscal year, which Brown labeled as "impossible" to live with because "there just isn't sufficient number of victims to allow that luxury."^[22]

The June 15 deadline for passing the budget came and went. The stalemate dragged on through most of July, setting an ignominious record for legislative inaction. During the impasse, Brown and Deukmejian stopped talking directly to each other; the lunches were put on hold. Then the budget impasse got tied to reapportionment politics. Brown and the Democrats swore they would not vote for a budget until Deukmejian agreed to prohibit a special election on a Republican reapportionment proposition.^[23] As all sides hardened, the state stopped paying its bills, paychecks stopped, and the state government of California ground to a virtual halt.

To outsiders it looked like a clash of two over-sized egos. But the posturing gave Brown's Democratic colleagues what they wanted most of all—cover. They could go back to their districts and blame Brown for the mess-up in Sacramento, and then go back to Sacramento and hold out for concessions from Deukmejian. Playing flak-catcher to protect his members was not an easy role to play. Despite all his years in public life, he remained remarkably thin-skinned. But Brown played the role to the hilt. It was part of the job of being Speaker.

The $26 billion budget was finally approved and signed on July 21, 1983, ending the longest budget crisis in the state's history up to that time.^[24] In political terms, everyone won something and lost something. Instead of cuts, the state's 1.6 million welfare recipients got a 4 percent raise. Deukmejian dropped his proposed college fee and left in place the stand-by tax trigger approved earlier in the year. The governor got to cut more than $400 million out of the budget, and the Democrats quietly dropped their demand that Deukmejian scuttle the special election on reapportionment. On the day he signed the budget bill, Deukmejian boasted that it was balanced without raising taxes. He acted like a winner, while the Democrats acted like losers, grousing about the cuts. However, with the exception of comparatively mild cuts to schools, traditional Democratic programs, including welfare and regulatory agencies, remained intact.

By fall Deukmejian had lucked out. Revenues rebounded, and the sales tax trigger was never pulled. By the end of the fiscal year, Deukmejian sat atop an amazing $1.2 billion surplus. By his second term Deukmejian was mailing rebates to taxpayers. For most of his two terms, Deukmejian kept a $1 billion–plus surplus in the state treasury and could brag that the state went from "IOU to A-OK."^[25] The fact was that the Reagan military defense buildup did more to catapult the California economy out of the doldrums in the 1980s than anything done by the state government in Sacramento. By the end of the decade, California was receiving $51 billion a year in Department

of Defense appropriations—21 percent of domestic military expenditures—despite having 12 percent of the nation's population.^[26]

The partnership of Deukmejian and Brown, born in the 1983 fiscal crisis, gradually expanded to include other policy areas. "In the course of that first year, a bond developed so that we were able to deal with the Speaker on a wide variety of issues," Merksamer observed. "If you look back on those years, you'll see that the governor got a lot of his legislative program through, and got most of it through the Assembly."^[27]

To be sure, Willie Brown was never going to embrace Deukmejian's conservative agenda, especially his stance for tougher criminal laws and more prison building. Deukmejian and Brown frequently sparred in public over everything from welfare to taxes to schools. And there were times when Deukmejian's frustrations exploded: "They opposed us from the minute right after I got into office," he said shortly before leaving office, alluding back to the vote to sell the governor's mansion. "We were constantly confronted with that kind of strong, hostile opposition."^[28]

But as much as Brown disliked Deukmejian's agenda, Brown did not stand in the way of most of it, particularly crime bills. In a favorite Brown phrase, he did not "orchestrate the house" against Deukmejian's key crime bills. The voters favored tougher laws, even if Brown did not, and Brown needed to let his Democratic members vote for them. Hidden in the political heat and smoke of the 1980s was a simple fact: Deukmejian accomplished much of his conservative agenda in his first term, and he could not have done so without help from the liberal Democratic Assembly Speaker. Deukmejian built more prisons in eight years than California had built in the previous one hundred years. He toughened sentencing laws and doubled the number of convicted felons behind bars. He kept his pledge to hold the line on income taxes, although other taxes gradually crept upward. Funds for schools doubled under his care, although not nearly enough to keep pace with the needs of the state's children. The state's colleges and universities flourished after eight years of miserly stewardship under Jerry Brown. Deukmejian could rightfully claim to stand next to Pat Brown as one of the two governors who most advanced California's nationally recognized higher education system.

Outwardly, Deukmejian's relations with legislators and other politicians were poor. As governor he vetoed more than four thousand bills and axed more than $7 billion in proposed state spending. Democrat John Vasconcellos spoke for many at the end of Deukmejian's eight years when he said the governor was "bad history." Legislators considered the governor "miserly" and called him "the Iron Duke," and they resented his aloofness. He fought endlessly with Bill Honig, who was elected as the state's superintendent of public instruction the same year Deukmejian was elected governor. Deukmejian's relations were coolly correct with the Democratic lieutenant governor, Leo McCarthy, and the Democratic attorney general, John Van de Kamp.

Even the most starchy Republicans found Deukmejian almost impossible at times. "He remains a sphinx, patiently waiting in the corner office to see what develops in the legislative branch," said Assemblyman Tom McClintock, a miserly Republican himself. "We will occasionally receive a cryptic indication of how he might be leaning, in the vaguest of terms. We get a hint here and a scrap there and try to interpret what they mean."^[29] Deukmejian kept a strict calendar and never pulled out a bottle of booze from his desk drawer for legislators after hours. He preferred to work through legislative leaders, Willie Brown in particular, and then go home for the day. And that perfectly suited Brown's quest for power.

Although Honig was difficult, the state Senate's Democratic leader, David Roberti, was far trickier for Deukmejian. Unlike Honig, Roberti had a vote, and he had a majority of the Senate behind him. Roberti was prickly to work with, and he was endlessly jealous of Willie Brown's star status. Deukmejian and Roberti never could connect, and their relationship grew worse and worse. Roberti was more inclined to stand on principle than Brown, and that made him much tougher in cutting deals. Deukmejian usually managed to find the votes he needed in the Assembly and then used the Assembly votes to pressure the recalcitrant senators.

One of the biggest fights of the decade was over Deukmejian's proposal to build a state prison near downtown Los Angeles on the edge of the Latino neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. Roberti furiously put roadblocks in the way, arguing that East Los Angeles had for too long been the dumping ground for all the state's ills. Roberti insisted that to make things fair, the prison should be built in the Republican suburbs.

Willie Brown, however, used all his powers as Speaker to advance Deukmejian's prison proposal. Brown changed the makeup of the Assembly Public Safety Committee for a single day to provide Deukmejian with a pivotal vote to advance the Los Angeles prison bill.^[30] To get the prison bill to the Assembly floor, Brown appointed to the committee Assemblyman Richard Polanco, who was formerly an aide to Richard Alatorre and had just won a special election. Once Polanco voted for the prison, Brown then pulled him off the committee. The move earned Polanco intense flak for years after from his East Los Angeles constituents. Roberti was forced to cave in, and Deukmejian got authority to build one more of his cherished prisons.

"The Republicans have tried to sort of demonize [Brown] for political purposes—and he's pretty easy to demonize," Merksamer said. "But the fact of the matter is the real Willie Brown is fundamentally different. The fact of the matter is he is not, despite the conventional wisdom, a knee-jerk liberal on all the knee-jerk type of liberal issues. I found him in my experience to be a very centrist, pragmatic Democrat."^[31]

There was one political battle, however in which Brown gave no quarter to Deukmejian and got none in return, and that was over reapportionment. The fight sizzled throughout the 1980s, with the Republicans never conceding

that the 1982 lines were final. The Republicans put a succession of proposals on the ballot for voter approval to overturn the Democratic gerrymander. The initiatives were successively more expensive for both sides to fight. By the spring of 1983, Roberti and the Senate were weary of the fight and were inclined to compromise with Deukmejian by approving a plan to have an independent commission draw the district lines in California.^[32] But Brown refused even to negotiate on the issue, perceiving that to lose power over district lines was to lose the speakership itself.^[33]

The Republican pushing hardest of all was Don Sebastiani, a small but fiery assemblyman from the Sonoma wine-growing region and heir to the winery bearing his name. In temperament and bearing Sebastiani was the perfect counterpart to the Democrats' Maxine Waters. Sebastiani qualified his own set of district lines for the ballot, and Deukmejian set a special election for December 1983—an eventuality dreaded by Democrats during the previous summer's budget negotiations. However, to the glee of Democrats, California Chief Justice Rose Bird and the state Supreme Court scuttled the special election.

Stymied by the Bird court, and frustrated with what they viewed as Brown's double-cross on sharing power, the Republicans took to the ballot box with a proposal to trim the power of the Speaker. Proposition 24 was unprecedented in its scope. The Republicans, in effect, were asking the voters to intervene in an internal legislative power struggle by rewriting the Legislature's rules to favor the minority party. The measure was officially sponsored by Paul Gann, the coauthor of Proposition 13. But unlike his tax-cutting initiative, which grew from a groundswell of taxpayers' dissatisfaction, Proposition 24 was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Assembly Republican caucus. Brown tried to forestall the measure by negotiating new rules with Naylor, but the negotiations were fruitless.^[34] Proposition 24 was placed on the June 1984 ballot.

The 1980s were marked like no other decade before by an unending stream of propositions, as politicians took their power struggles out of the Legislature and onto the ballot. The initiative soon became the weapon of choice not just for politicians but also for lawyers, doctors, insurance companies, teachers, environmentalists, lottery ticket makers, sport fishermen, and others dissatisfied for one reason or another with the Legislature. By the end of the decade, forty-six proposals had been qualified for the ballot, twice the number of the previous decade.^[35] Fewer than half were approved by the voters. The cost of fighting such battles was astronomical—more than $300 million flowed into the proposition campaigns during the decade. The money spent on lobbying the public on ballot initiatives exceeded that on lobbying the Legislature.

A month before the June 1984 balloting, Brown toughened his leadership team, turning it sharply partisan. He removed Assemblyman Richard Robinson as the Democratic caucus chairman, relieving him of direct management over the Democratic election machinery. Robinson, the only Democrat representing an Orange County district, was seen as an accommodater with

Republicans and too nice for the fight. Brown needed a war consigliere, and he turned to Maxine Waters.^[36] She was the toughest-talking take-no-prisoners Democrat in the Legislature, and she was unfailingly loyal to Willie Brown. She remained as Brown's caucus chair until her election to Congress in 1990.

To the horror of Brown and the Democrats, the voters approved Proposition 24 in June 1984. The measure required the Speaker to hand over power to the Rules Committee, imposed other rules favorable to the Republicans, and forced an immediate $37 million cut to the Legislature's $120 million operating budget.^[37] Proposition 24 forced immediate layoffs among the legislative staff, and Brown was hit hardest of all. The mandatory cuts were aimed directly at his staff, which, with a budget of $1.16 million, was the largest in the Legislature.^[38] Confronting Gann at a forum in San Francisco soon after the election, Brown lost his temper. "No one heard from Gann about the power of the Speakership when whites held the post," Brown charged. "Not until 'Double-O Soul' became Speaker did you see Gann."

But the state Supreme Court again rescued the Democrats and nullified Proposition 24, holding that the voters could not write the rules for the Legislature. Brown hailed "Sister Rose and the Supremes" for the decision. However, the power plays via initiative did not slow. Deukmejian backed a new reapportionment proposal, and it was qualified for the November 1984 ballot as Proposition 39. This time Deukmejian poured his own campaign money into the effort, dumping $1.2 million from his reelection funds into the Proposition 39 campaign, including $400,000 during the final week before the election.^[39] Deukmejian's proposal would have taken the authority for redistricting away from the Legislature and created a commission made up of retired state appellate court judges to draw congressional and legislative district lines. The Democrats were divided on Deukmejian's proposal. They were tired of fighting one ballot proposition after another. Deukmejian's idea sounded fair, and some privately believed it would depoliticize reapportionment once and for all.

Willie Brown took his Democratic Assembly colleagues to Yosemite in September to talk about it.^[40] Surrounded by Half Dome, El Capitan, and the rustic elegance of the Ahwahnee Hotel, the Democrats wore blue jeans and boots, went on hikes, played tennis, and talked. Brown convinced them to fight Deukmejian's proposal, and they hatched an inventive campaign to defeat it.

Bankrolled by Brown's campaign fund, the Democrats broadcast a series of television commercials in which actor Jack Lemmon earnestly told viewers that Proposition 39's reapportionment plan would give politicians too much power. The pitch turned the Republicans' rationale for Proposition 39 completely on its head. The Democrats' argument was this: because the proposed commission was composed of retired judges, and the Republican governor appointed judges, the Republican governor would control reapportionment.

In the closing days of the 1984 campaign, Brown made several critical moves to defeat Proposition 39 and help his Democratic friends running for the Assembly. He raised $1.44 million in campaign funds and distributed them to his candidates with the best chance of winning.^[41] Brown mobilized the Black American Political Association of California, the organization he helped found, to work actively for the defeat of Proposition 39 in the black community. Brown took one other key step: he convinced Walter Mondale to continue campaigning in California, although his presidential campaign had no chance of success in Reagan's home state. Mondale's campaigning kept the Democratic turnout high enough to defeat Proposition 39 and elect enough of Brown's friends to keep the Legislature and congressional delegation in Democratic hands. Few at the time understood why Mondale stumped so hard in California for a doomed cause. But Mondale's campaigning helped forestall Reagan's landslide from doing much to help Republicans in California. Mondale's help was in sharp contrast to that of President Carter in 1980, whose early concession speech before the polls closed in California contributed to the loss of four congressional seats for the Democrats in the state.

Deukmejian and the Republicans spent more than Brown and the Democrats—$4.7 million to $3.8 million—on the ballot campaign.^[42] But the Republican campaign was ponderous and was no match for Brown's deftness. Deukmejian's ballot proposal was defeated by a healthy margin: 45 percent to 55 percent. "In strictly California terms," wrote Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters following the election, "Tuesday's big winner was Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, the state's most powerful Democratic politician, and the big loser was Republican Gov. Deukmejian."^[43]

Brown was exultant over the election results, and he got carried away with himself. During a speech at the San Francisco Press Club, Brown described his commercials opposing Proposition 39 as "the most extensive collection of con jobs I've ever seen."^[44] Other Democrats flinched when they heard about Brown's line. "Apparently the Speaker was in his show-off mood," Howard Berman said, trying to shrug it off. Republicans tried to take advantage of Brown's flippancy as if that could reverse the election results. "Willie Brown, by his own admission, conned the people of California," Sebastiani declared.

Back in the Capitol, Brown's patience with Republican leader Robert Naylor was at a low ebb. The 1984 Assembly races were just as nasty as those two years earlier, with Republicans again trying to make Brown the issue with racially tinged ads and mailers. Brown was already nursing a grudge because at the start of the 1982 session the Republicans did not vote for him for Speaker by acclamation, a sign of respect since they did not have enough votes to elect one of their own as Speaker. Naylor tried to explain that it was only a "gentlemanly partisan division" to protect his most conservative members from taking flak in their districts for voting for a Democrat. But Naylor's political fate was sealed.

"I thought of every way possible to apologize," Naylor explained. "It truly was not intended as a hostile act. If anything I really wanted to get past the reapportionment bitterness and come up with some kind of a working relationship, but boy, I sure got off on the wrong foot."^[45] Naylor stayed on the wrong foot by sending his staff to check Brown's expense accounts at the state controller's office and then calling a press conference to complain about a $2,800 car phone Brown had purchased at the taxpayers' expense.^[46] In Brown's view it was petty for Naylor to claim that the Speaker of the Assembly did not deserve a car phone, and it was bad form to rummage through the expense accounts of another member.

Personalities aside, Brown needed a measure of procedural peace in the Assembly so that the Democrats and Republicans could battle over public policy without constantly bickering over the rules. Brown got the accommodation he needed with a new Republican leader, Patrick Nolan of Glendale. In the view of Nolan's enemies, he got the job thanks to Willie Brown. The claim is overstated, but not completely off the mark. Brown certainly helped Nolan by undercutting Naylor at every turn and making him look weak. Once Nolan replaced Naylor, Brown helped Nolan solidify his power in the Republican caucus. Nolan, in turn, helped shore up Brown's power as Speaker.

Nolan was one of the Proposition 13 Babies who came to Sacramento in 1978. Nolan had led the ultraconservative Young Americans for Freedom chapter at USC. A big, jovial man, Nolan was exceedingly serious about his politics, and he was determined to win a majority for the Republicans at the ballot box. As far as Nolan was concerned, cheap shots against Brown and squabbling over rules were not the way to get there. Winning at the ballot box was the only guarantee of success, and that called for making election campaigns the top priority of the Assembly Republican caucus. Nolan and his allies viewed Naylor as drifting in his leadership, giving no firm political direction when dealing with Brown or Deukmejian. "It was awful," said Nolan. "Willie did not respect Bob Naylor. Willie is a harsh judge of people and he saw Naylor as being weak."^[47]

One day while Naylor was downstairs in Deukmejian's office involved in budget negotiations, Nolan rounded up the votes needed to depose Naylor as Republican leader. When Naylor returned to the Republican caucus meeting room, he was presented with a letter signed by seventeen Republicans supporting Nolan as their new leader. Naylor was devastated, and he pleaded with his colleagues not to humiliate him. Several asked to have their names removed from the letter, and Nolan's coup temporarily collapsed. Naylor continued to operate as Republican leader, but in the worst possible political position. Brown gave him no say in Republican appointments to committees or in the running of the Assembly. Inevitably, Nolan deposed Naylor as Republican leader after the 1984 election.

Nolan and Brown reached a mutually beneficial accommodation on how the Assembly should operate. "My agreement with Willie was that we would fight over substance, not over procedure," said Nolan. "There were tremendous fights, but it was always over the substance. We would work out ground rules for debates on tough issues. We would agree two speakers 'for' a bill, and two speakers 'against.'"^[48]

Nolan showed Brown the respect he craved. Nolan arranged for Brown to be reelected Speaker by acclamation. In return Brown showed Nolan respect. "He agreed to give me the deference that he gave to Carol Hallett on appointment of committee members," said Nolan. Brown did not always go along with Nolan's recommendations, but he listened and he protected Nolan's backside. Republicans began chairing committees again.

However, Brown and Nolan were ideological opposites, and their accommodation did not promise to produce much consensus on issues. The political middle ground steadily shrank throughout the 1980s as each side aggressively pursued its own agendas and fought the other to a standstill. The 1981–82 reapportionment produced more moderate Democrats, like Richard Katz of Los Angeles and Steve Clute of Riverside, who had to accommodate conservative voters in districts that were barely winnable for Democrats. But the reapportionment also produced more ideologically driven conservative Republicans, who because they represented safe districts could take virtually any position they wished with little worry about their reelection prospects. Orange County Republican Gil Ferguson, elected in 1984, went on crusades to oust Tom Hayden from the Assembly and opposed every effort to make amends for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II on the grounds that Pearl Harbor veterans would be "outraged." He paid scant attention to the issues of his district. The Assembly's chemistry was increasingly volatile.

Brown and Nolan each searched for the levers to force the other into concessions, each linking passage of one unrelated issue with another unrelated issue. The end result was legislative gridlock, with dozens of major bills and hundreds of minor bills stalled somewhere in the legislative pipeline. It usually took until the last night of the legislative session to unravel the political knots as each side tried to bluff the other. Breakdown was inevitable, and it occurred on the last day of the session in September 1985.

The issue that sparked the meltdown was, on its face, not partisan. But it strained the Deukmejian-Brown partnership almost to the breaking point. The state's toxic waste cleanup program was fraught with bureaucratic bumbling, and the federal Environmental Protection Agency threatened to take it over if it was not fixed. Deukmejian tried to reorganize the hodgepodge of state agencies responsible for the program by executive order, but he was rebuffed by the Legislature. Then Deukmejian hired a retired Republican state senator, Gordon Cologne, to work it out. Cologne and Democratic

Assemblywoman Sally Tanner labored for weeks over a torturously technical bill and brought it to the Assembly floor on Friday, September 13, 1985, the last day of session for the year.^[49]

Just as Tanner's AB 650 was about to come up for a vote at 5:30 P.M., Louis Papan stormed into the Assembly chambers and exploded that Tanner's bill should be put on hold until Deukmejian and the Republicans agreed to support his bill to give a cost-of-living raise for blind, elderly, and disabled Medi-Cal recipients. Papan proceeded to destroy the work of fellow Democrat Sally Tanner. Papan was having a terrible day. Four of his appropriations bills had gone down to defeat because the Republicans would not give him a two-thirds majority. He now insisted that the Republicans were a "bunch of crazies" and could only redeem themselves by voting for his Medi-Cal bill. Faced with bullying tactics, the Republicans refused. Papan's issue was completely unrelated to toxic waste, but now the two bills were linked. Brown went along with the tactic, and the two bills languished for hours. Democrats and Republicans held lengthy closed-door caucuses into the night. "We're waiting for someone to blink," said Assemblyman Byron Sher. But no one blinked. The Assembly finally went home at 5:30 A.M. on Saturday morning, having failed to vote on either Tanner's or Papan's bill. Dozens of other unrelated bills also fell aside without being taken up for a vote. "One piece fell out and everything started crumbling. I don't recall since then a session quite like that with interlocked bills," Merksamer observed.^[50]

Deukmejian was furious the next day. "He was pretty pissed off, and I'm sure he was angry at the Speaker," Merksamer remembered. Deukmejian held a rare Saturday-afternoon press conference accusing Brown of being "totally irresponsible and arrogant" by reneging on a deal to give him the toxic waste reorganization bill. "This kind of political extortion has to come to an end," Deukmejian declared. However, the governor never got the bill, and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley made toxic waste cleanup one of the cornerstones of his ill-fated rematch with Deukmejian in the 1986 elections.

On the surface, the scuttling of Deukmejian's agency reorganization bill looked like an election-year gift from Willie Brown to Tom Bradley, with Papan providing the cover. But Brown was not close to Bradley, and the whole episode was far too messy to do the Democrats much good. Nor did Merksamer believe that Brown was helping Bradley by stalling the bill. "Now maybe it's true, but I don't believe it because I don't see why," said Merksamer. "I didn't think it was that big a deal. It wasn't like it was a huge philosophical issue."^[51]

Puzzled, Merksamer later asked Brown for an explanation. "He lost control of his caucus," Merksamer said. "Willie went in there arguing in favor of the governor, and Lou Papan went ballistic, as he is capable of doing." Liberals in the caucus bucked Brown and got away with it. The episode showed that Brown's power was not ironclad, and he began to feel the need

for shoring up his left wing. But in so doing, Brown set the stage for the most serious challenge yet to his power.

More broadly, such failures to reach a legislative consensus fed a public perception that the Legislature and the governor were incapable of managing the public's business. To an extent, the perception was accurate, and as the 1980s ground on, reaching a political consensus in Sacramento became increasingly dicey. Even so, Brown and Deukmejian were able to forge policy on a limited number of fronts. Deukmejian, who was not interested in much outside of crime and holding down taxes, was open to suggestion from Brown on a variety of issues.

Brown helped convince Deukmejian to sign a raft of environmental protection laws, including AB 2595, opposed by Assembly Republicans, to expand the authority of local air districts clamping down on smog emissions. The measure, which required a phased-out reduction of air pollutants by the twenty-first century, was certainly one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation passed during the Deukmejian years. The Republican governor also signed Democratic bills—AB 357 and SB 292—to ban the sale of automatic weapons in California over the strenuous opposition of the National Rifle Association.^[52] Deukmejian signed a bill by Brown that required drivers to wear seatbelts. And he let Democrats craft the first major welfare revision since Reagan had been governor.

When University of California researchers complained they were starved for funds to investigate a mysterious disease killing gays, Brown slipped $2.9 million into an appropriations bill for their labs in 1983. The bill was sped to Deukmejian's desk and signed, the first state funds approved for battling AIDS.^[53] Throughout the 1980s Brown was instrumental in getting Deukmejian to approve increasingly larger appropriations for AIDS research. But Brown was unable to convince Deukmejian to sign a bill guaranteeing homosexuals equal rights.

The partnership with George Deukmejian yielded one enormous, personally gratifying payoff for Willie Brown: after years of opposition, Deukmejian agreed to support withdrawing California's $11.4 billion pension fund portfolio from investments in companies conducting business in racially divided South Africa.^[54] Getting Deukmejian to that position took Deukmejian's entire first term, and ranked as one of Brown's chief accomplishments as Assembly Speaker.

At first, Deukmejian was flatly against the South Africa boycott. When Maxine Waters succeeded in putting a South Africa boycott bill on Deukmejian's desk in 1985, he vetoed it.

After the veto, the battleground over investments in South Africa switched to the University of California, which had $2.4 billion of its $6.4 billion portfolio invested in companies with ties to South Africa. The stodgy Board of Regents, led by UC President David Gardner, was reluctant to withdraw the investments, fearful it would endanger the university's financial health. The board and Gardner came under intense pressure from legislators and protesters. Then Willie Brown entered the fray. When the university's imperious president came to testify at a May 1985 legislative hearing, he was interrogated by the Assembly Speaker for nearly an hour.^[55]

"Now, Dr. Gardner," Brown began, "we are very concerned by the university's attitude. Specifically, I want one scintilla of evidence that the atrocities of the South African regime present a problem to you personally, not as president of the University, but as a human being."

Gardner replied that, as a Mormon, he was familiar with discrimination. He told how his grandfather was driven to Utah by religious bigots. But Gardner maintained that the university could not take moral stands.

"I abhor oppression," said Gardner, "but I don't choose to advertise it."

Brown found the answer unsatisfactory.

"You can end discrimination against you by changing your religion. Blacks in South Africa cannot," Brown shot back. "Willie Brown cannot change his skin as he could his religion. There are no Utahs for Bishop Tutu."

Brown also went to work convincing Deukmejian that it was morally imperative for California to keep its money from supporting apartheid. Brown appealed to Deukmejian's Armenian heritage and the oppression suffered by his relatives at the hands of Turks. Brown used one more argument: it was good politics. The city of Los Angeles had enacted a South Africa investment boycott ordinance, and Mayor Bradley was preparing to bludgeon Deukmejian with it in their 1986 rematch. Brown told Deukmejian that he did not have to take the chance.

Finally Deukmejian became a convert. He began throwing his weight behind the push to pull the University of California's investments out of South Africa. The governor even offered to lobby Congress and President Reagan, who had vetoed a boycott bill.^[54] The showdown came at a Regents meeting at UC Santa Cruz in July 1986. Faced with a united front from Deukmejian and Brown, the board voted to become the first major institutional investor in California to join the South African boycott.

Taking advantage of the political momentum, a new bill was prepared to pull the state's huge pension fund from South Africa.^[57] With Maxine Waters still as the official author, the bill reached the Assembly floor in August 1986. As television cameras lined both walls of the chamber, Assembly members sat in unaccustomed silence and listened to the debate. The usual joking and jibing were put aside. Every member seemed to sense it was a rare moment. The debate over AB 134 surged for three hours, and the speeches were passionate on both sides.

Willie Brown spoke last, and as he raised the microphone at his desk signaling he was ready to speak, sergeants-at-arms scurried to close the doors. They need not have bothered; the chamber fell silent and no one moved. Brown gave one of the most emotional speeches of his career, and as his voice rose, he stood on his toes. He finished with a tribute to George Deukmejian:

"It takes a big man to recognize that circumstances and information should now dictate a different decision."

The bill was approved 50-26, with four Republicans joining all but one of the Democrats.

A month later, as a tribute to the Speaker of the California Assembly, Governor Deukmejian signed the South Africa bill in the city of San Francisco. As Waters and Brown looked on, Deukmejian condemned South Africa for its "racism and brutal oppression." Then he put his pen to the bill. Those close to Deukmejian later said he never would have signed a South Africa boycott bill but for Brown's intervention.

Four years later, as apartheid was crumbling in South Africa, newly freed black leader Nelson Mandela visited the San Francisco Bay Area.^[58] Speaking to fifty-eight thousand people in the Oakland Coliseum, Mandela paid a special tribute to those who had put pressure on the white government of his nation. He said the investment boycott was a vital weapon helping to bring down the system of racial oppression in his country. "We also salute the state of California for having such a powerful principled stance," he declared.

Willie Brown stood nearby that evening and smiled.

Chapter Twenty-Two—
Willie Brown Inc.

In many ways, the Speaker of the Assembly, in pure politics, may have more power than the Governor. . . . Willie has an awful lot of power, and none of the headaches of being governor.
Ed Meese
Chief of Staff to Governor Ronald Reagan, 1967–1975

He would stay in that job for the rest of his life if he could. He would give up making the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars, he could get out in the private sector to stay in that job. He loves that job. He loves being the center of attention.
Steve Merksamer
Chief of Staff to Governor George
Deukmejian, 1982–1986

No one could top Willie Brown for sheer extravagance.

In July 1984 Brown threw the most lavish bash in the history of national political conventions.^[1] The Democrats came to San Francisco to nominate former vice president Walter Mondale for president, but Brown made sure that he was the most memorable event of an otherwise dreary presidential campaign. Brown's party was again called "Oh, What A Night!" after the bash he threw in his first term as Speaker. This time, however, no hotel ballroom was big enough. Brown rented the expansive Pier 45, just west of Fisherman's Wharf on the waterfront, and he sent ten thousand personal invitations.

Willie Brown's party was a huge logistical undertaking. Brown chartered seventy-four buses to shuttle delegates, reporters, and other politicos back

and forth between the George Moscone Convention Center and Pier 45. When his guests stepped off the bus and onto the pier, they found a miniature redwood forest, scale replicas of the city's greatest landmarks, the Golden Gate Bridge and Coit Tower, and all the beer, wine, and liquor they could consume. The party throbbed to music on six elaborate stages, featuring the likes of the legendary Jefferson Starship and Tower of Power rock bands, produced by San Francisco rock promoter Bill Graham. The invitations were so hot that not even former president Jimmy Carter could get enough tickets. The former president asked for one hundred and got only ten.

"It's unbelievable. It's out of hand," Brown gleefully exclaimed. "Everybody in the world is trying to get into this event."^[2] The pier was so crammed with people that firefighters, fearful of calamity, stood by with fire extinguishers. The out-of-town guests and media were flabbergasted at Willie Brown's extravagance.

The party cost $250,000 to stage, but not a cent came out of Brown's pocket. Brown raised the money from corporations, trade groups, and others with business in the Legislature. The food and booze also came free of charge: California wineries delivered a truckload crammed with one hundred cases of wine. San Francisco's best eateries, the finest on earth, provided delicacies to match. "I am hell-bent on enjoying every minute of my life," Brown proclaimed in an interview with GQ magazine. "So I do not mistreat myself. I make very few sacrifices. I live my dreams."^[3]

Not everyone was impressed with Brown's stupendous excess. David Roberti peevishly stayed away, giving his ticket to a Burbank city council-woman. The prickly Senate leader was in a snit over Brown listing himself on the invitation as "Speaker of the Legislature." Roberti fulminated that the Legislature had two houses and Brown was Speaker of only one. "You should bill yourself accordingly," Roberti huffed in a letter to the Speaker.

Roberti was technically correct; Brown was the leader of only one house of one branch of state government. But nobody that night cared about Roberti's civics lesson, much less his pride. In the world of politics, there really was only one Speaker of the Legislature, and that was Willie Brown. He was the most powerful politician in the Capitol, and arguably in the entire state. Willie Brown was more than that; he was the P.T. Barnum of California politics, the best show in a state that relentlessly produced bland, blow-dried political leaders.

Brown's flamboyance, however, hid another reality. The bashes were one more method for Brown to spin his web of power, tying other politicians, interests groups, campaign donors, and power brokers to himself. Lobbyists, corporate executives, and union officials paid for everything so that they could don a tuxedo or a formal gown and rub elbows with Brown and his friends. Brown was allegedly "treating" them to his party, and everyone played along with the facade. The end result was the same. Those who wrote

checks expected, and got, the attention of the Speaker and a place at the negotiating table when the party was over. Brown got their money and used it to fuel an election machine that kept his friends and allies elected to the Assembly. His friends, in turn, kept him elected Speaker.

The whole edifice was based on a simple principle: keeping Assembly members happy. As long as Brown could keep forty-one members happy, he could remain Speaker. As long as he was Speaker, the checks kept coming, and Assembly members remained happy.

"Don't ever misread me—ever," Brown once said in the middle of a challenge to his leadership. "I always have forty-one votes. Always."^[4] Few understood or appreciated how accurate he was.

Keeping the members happy only started with getting them reelected. Like a small-town preacher, Brown called it "tending to the flock."^[5] His was a small congregation of eighty, and he knew everything about each member. He knew their strengths and weaknesses, who was energetic, who was lazy. He knew their appetites for work and play, food and sex; he was their father confessor, their uncle or brother, and the ultimate fixer of any problem. He would go to extraordinary lengths to tend to their individual needs. Artie Samish, the boss-lobbyist of an earlier generation, had once boasted, "I am the governor of the Legislature."^[6] Brown could fairly make the same boast as long as he had forty-one members on his side—any forty-one. Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters, one of Brown's harshest critics, accurately observed: "Brown functioned like a Chicago ward heeler, dispensing favors to his flock and making it clear that his continuance as Speaker and his party's control of the Assembly were his two highest priorities."^[7] Assemblyman Tom Hannigan of Fairfield, who served as Brown's Democratic majority leader, put it more succinctly: "If he could please your self-interest, he controlled your broader conduct."^[8]

But there was another side to Brown as well. He could, and would, punish his enemies ruthlessly. As Brown's power grew, Terry Francois, his former law partner and mentor from the old days, noted in awe: "He engenders fear like you wouldn't believe. I have just become enthralled at the way he wields power. I don't know a politician in San Francisco that dares take him on."^[9]

Willie Brown had an arsenal of political weapons at his disposal, and the longer he stayed Speaker, the bigger the arsenal got. The weapons started with the formal rules of the house. Brown presided over the twice-weekly sessions of the full Assembly, and his parliamentary rulings were absolute law. By comparison, the state Senate was run by a five-member Rules Committee, which diffused the power of the Senate's leader, Roberti, the president pro tempore. Brown could directly manage the flow of legislation, frustrate opponents, and help his friends.

"The speakership would be powerful even if Willie didn't hold it," observed Jim Brulte, the last Assembly Republican leader to serve concurrently with Speaker Brown. "But you couple the structural power of the speakership with someone who is as bright as Willie Brown and you have a powerful institution."^[10]

The art was in knowing when to do what. Theoretically, the eighty members of the Assembly were answerable only to the voters of the districts they represented. But to be effective as legislators, Assembly members were very much dependent on the Speaker. "When I first got the job (of majority leader), I thought it was important to spend a lot of time with members," said Tom Hannigan. "I finally realized that the real heat center was the Speaker. And there's nothing you can do to change that. If members really want something, they know where to go."^[11]

Every Assembly staff member was ultimately hired or fired by the Speaker. To the consternation of Republicans, Brown even reached down into their staffs and exerted his authority over hiring and firing.^[12] Every square inch of Capitol office space, every desk, every telephone and fax machine, every district office was assigned by the Speaker. Offices, cars, secretaries, and legislative aides were all dispensed by the Speaker for everyone, Republican and Democrat alike. And what the Speaker gave, the Speaker could take away—and give back again. "You ought to understand the environment in which you are operating," said Brulte. "And I've read the rules of the Legislature. And the rules say that he gets to do just about what he wants. Now whether I think it is right or not is academic."

That was no accident. Brown wrote the rules, and as long as he had forty-one votes, he could make the rules stick. That meant the first choice for everything went to Democrats.

"I think Willie Brown has been Speaker for thirteen years because he works overtime figuring out how to retain loyalty from Democratic members," observed Democrat Patrick Johnston, who served for a decade in the Assembly representing a Central Valley district. "Some of that is committee assignments, some of that is staff, some of that is office space, some of that is where you park your car, some of that is the more personal things he does for members. He's found doctors for some, lawyers for others. He's done lots of things for members. I mean, he's a 'Members' Speaker.'"^[13]

Brown kept his members happy by serving as a lightning rod for thunderbolts from opponents and pundits, a role often lost on governors and the public. He absorbed blame for them. During a record-breaking stalemate in 1992 over the state budget, Brown endured a daily drubbing from Republican Governor Pete Wilson and newspaper editorial writers. Little appreciated at the time was that Brown was giving his colleagues—from both political parties—cover until a budget compromise could be forged. "If you can shield them from the political attacks, you should do it," he explained.^[14] Brown

was the ultimate winner, particularly in 1992 when Wilson's poll ratings took a dive and Brown picked up one Democratic seat in the November election.

The Speaker did favors, big and small, for his members and their families regardless of their party affiliation. Brown found ingenious ways to become the dispenser of favors. When Assembly members began demanding tickets to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Peter Ueberroth, the chief organizer, was distressed over what to do. He called Brown, who told him to ignore the demands.^[15] The tickets could go through the Speaker's office, and both Brown and Ueberroth were happy.

"In my job as Speaker I'm like the chief administrative officer of the Legislature," Brown once explained. "And in that capacity I do things to make this body function."^[16]

That was an understatement. Brown lined up defense attorneys for Assembly members under federal investigation. Phillip Ryan, who shared a law office in San Francisco with Brown, was tapped to represent Democratic Assemblywoman Gwen Moore during a federal grand jury investigation into bribery. Moore was cleared, although one of her aides, Tyronne Netters, was later indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison. When Democratic Assemblyman Frank Vicencia ran into trouble with the Fair Political Practices Commission, staffer Bill Cavala was dispatched to talk it over with the agency.

Brown also built up a reservoir of goodwill among a handful of Republicans. When the daughter of Republican Assemblywoman Cathie Wright, who later became state senator, received one too many traffic tickets in 1988, Brown arranged for a defense attorney to represent her and telephoned Municipal Court Judge Herbert Curtis III fifteen minutes before he was scheduled to take the bench in the case. Brown asked for leniency and the judge put Wright's daughter on probation. The frustrated prosecutors charged that Brown had acted unprofessionally, and they issued a ninety-seven-page report backing up their allegation that Brown's telephone call was "legally improper." But the State Bar declined to discipline Brown.^[17]

The criticism was worth the pain for Brown. By having a group of Republicans more loyal to him than to their party leaders, Brown had accurate intelligence on the workings of the opposition and assurance that the Republicans could not overthrow him. "I think we have a man who is really brilliant in the use and exercise of power," Brulte remarked. "Particularly at times where his caucus is not totally united, he has a vested interest to see to it that our caucus is not totally united."^[18]

Each election year, the Republicans focused their campaigns on smearing Democrats for their association with Willie Brown. But in Sacramento the Republicans for the most part put on a different face when they were around Brown. "I've been so vilified over the years by Republicans, but only for reelection purposes, not because they really dislike me," he explained in a 1994 interview. "It's hard to find a Republican in our house who really genuinely

dislikes me. It's hard to find one who legitimately would want anybody else as Speaker if they couldn't have a Republican."^[19]

Brown's main act was his election machine. That he had an election machine was not unusual. Other Assembly Speakers before Brown were adept at raising campaign funds. Jesse Unruh raised plenty of cash and ran his machine with a collegial group of legislative colleagues nicknamed "Unruh's Praetorian Guard." Unruh coined the adage "Money is the mother's milk of politics," and he dispensed money to keep his friends happy. But no Speaker before Brown so completely centralized the campaign apparatus or made it so completely the focus of one man's ambition. Brown had followers, but never a "Praetorian Guard" of cronies like Unruh's.

Brown co-opted the Unruh-vintage Capitol lunch clubs. The clubs were dying anyway because new laws had made it impractical for a lobbyist to buy lunch for a legislator. Brown helped give the clubs a shove into oblivion by turning his old Mice Milk lunch club into an official Assembly Democratic caucus luncheon held on Tuesdays.^[20] Attendance was mandatory. Each Assembly member kicked in $100 from campaign funds every few months for the caucus lunch fund. Using campaign funds was an indirect method to get the lobbyists to pay for lunch with the added benefit of lobbyists not coming to lunch. The lunches provided a private sounding board for the Democrats to talk about legislation and politics and knit themselves together as a caucus. Brown usually sat in the back and listened, offering an observation when needed. Mostly the lunches gave him a barometer for gauging the political temperature of his Democratic colleagues from week to week.

Brown rarely held to a regular schedule, and those with appointments often waited for hours before getting in. Assembly members always had first crack at his time, with or without an appointment. "Every member knows they have unlimited access," he said. "So you never see a member's name on my (scheduling) card, yet I see approximately thirty members every day, so my schedule means almost fucking nothing."^[21]

There was really nothing secret to any of Brown's methods. He required Democratic Assembly members with relatively safe seats to regularly ante into his election fund, usually in a minimum denomination of $10,000. Those he appointed to chair committees garnered contributions from the industries over which they had legislative jurisdiction and then turned over a portion of those contributions to Brown's campaign fund.^[22] Sometimes they were asked to directly give to candidates of Brown's choosing. New West magazine once published an unflattering cover piece about him entitled "The King of Juice" because of such "juice committees."

Those who did not milk their committees adequately were removed as chairmen. He also expanded the size of the two most lucrative committees—Ways and Means, and Finance and Insurance—so that more Democrats would be in a position to soak up campaign contributions.^[23] Finance and Insurance grew to nineteen members, and Ways and Means grew to twenty-three, fully

one-fourth of the membership of the house. The perception steadily grew in the 1980s that Willie Brown had posted a "For Sale" sign on the Capitol dome.

"His legacy is the refinement of the Jess Unruh speakership so that it is the person who has the money who controls the house," said Ruth Holton, the executive director of California Common Cause, a liberal organization that was a continual thorn in Brown's side. "He's the chief fund-raiser, he's the one who has set fund-raising standards which are now higher than ever before. And now anyone who wants to be Speaker has to prove their adeptness at raising money. That now is the main job of the Speaker."^[24]

Brown tried to deflect the criticism of his fund-raising practices, but with little success. He held an unusual "Committee of the Whole" hearing of the entire Assembly on campaign finance reforms, and in it he acknowledged that the perception of influence peddling was justified. The problem was that his words were louder than his actions. Republican Assemblyman Ross Johnson quipped, "This committee of the whole is a lot like Al Capone hosting a temperance rally."^[25]

Johnson was among the few Republicans who saw the potential of campaign finance reform as a weapon against the Democrats.^[26] For the most part, however, the Republicans sought to emulate Brown rather than change the system that kept him in power. Republican efforts at raising money reached an extreme under Assembly Republican leader Patrick Nolan, who built an organization mirroring Brown's. Nolan even assigned Capitol staff as liaisons to specific industries. Nolan was tripped up by his organization, and it eventually led to his indictment and guilty plea to avoid a trial on federal corruption charges, for which he served a prison sentence.

By the mid-1980s Brown was running multiple campaign committees, each with its own funds. Brown hewed to the law by filing regular public disclosure forms about the donors. But the money flowed back and forth between the funds so freely that it was nearly impossible for opponents or the press to follow exactly what he was doing. He was also careful that no contribution could be legally construed as bribery. His associates said he was so exceedingly careful in conversations with lobbyists that the subject of campaign donations never came up.^[27] "You never raise money, or have conversations about raising money in the Capitol," said Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg. John Mockler, an old Brown staffer turned lobbyist, once remarked, "I've seen him in rooms where people even hint in a conversation about an issue and a fund-raiser. He stops immediately and sends them out of the room."

He found a way to make fun of those who branded him corrupt, and it was vintage Willie Brown. His friend, movie director Francis Ford Coppola, gave him a walk-on role in The Godfather Part III . Brown appeared for a few seconds in the opening scenes of the gangster movie shaking hands with Mafia don Michael Corleone, thanking him for his campaign contributions and asking for more money for judicial candidates. As soon as Brown finished

his lines, he stepped to the side and beamed broadly. On the day the scene was shot, Brown told movie-makers that he did not need any help from the wardrobe department; his own expensive Italian-cut suit was more than adequate for the scene. When the movie was released, and Brown was on the Big Screen, it struck many inside the Capitol that only Willie Brown would have had the audacity to mock his critics by playing a crooked politician in a movie—and only Willie Brown could have gotten away with it.

In real life Brown dispensed campaign funds to Democratic incumbents in the most need and to challengers with the best chance of bumping off a Republican. He also kept an eye out for newcomers who could win an open seat for the Democrats. In the 1986 campaigns, for example, Brown interviewed each potential Democratic candidate and then gave the nod to sixteen of them.^[28] Brown's chief of staff, Richie Ross, went off the state payroll to oversee the campaigns. The work was lucrative for Ross; he operated three campaign service firms that netted $1.02 million in business for Assembly candidates that year.

Brown's regard for the intelligence of voters was not particularly high. "To win [elections] in this country these days," Brown once said, "you've got to campaign down to a thirteen-year-old's level of mental development."^[29]

He tried repeatedly to shake the perception that money ruled everything. After the 1986 elections he called for finance reforms. Greeting his colleagues back in Sacramento at the start of the new session, he said, "The process of special interest groups providing money for political campaigns, regardless of who the special interest group happens to be, had gotten beyond the limits of anyone being able to successfully and accurately say they don't have too much influence."^[30] But Brown never followed through with any viable campaign finance reform proposal, and business went on as usual.

The campaign contribution arms race steadily escalated. For instance, in the 1992 elections, winning Assembly candidates received an average of $434,000; Brown raked in $5.3 million to support his candidates that year. The Republican Assembly leader, Bill Jones, was no match, raising a relatively paltry $1.2 million in the same period.^[31]

Willie Brown found novel ways to raise money. Brown paid Marlene Bane, the wife of Democratic Assemblyman Tom Bane, $75,000 a year out of campaign funds for staging fund-raising dinners for him in Southern California.^[32] Brown also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars a year at his own yearly birthday party in San Francisco. Lobbyists and their clients paid dearly, but at least they enjoyed the evening when first-class entertainers like Ray Charles, Lou Rawls, and the Temptations entertained for them.

The parties reached a frenzy toward the end of every two-year legislative session just as hundreds of bills hung in the balance. In the month of August 1990, for instance, legislators scheduled 112 breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and cocktail parties.^[33] It would have cost a lobbyist $51,200 for a ticket to all of them.

Brown also funneled money to the California Democratic Party, which spent it on voter registration drives in targeted legislative districts. He gave $1.18 million to the party in the 1992 elections.^[34] In effect, Brown was a major benefactor for the party and the party was an arm of his machine. In fact, without a Democratic governor, Willie Brown was the real leader of the party; he was the glue that held it together to keep at least one branch of the state government in Democratic hands. Brown helped the state party raise money in other ways as well. Jerry Brown reemerged in California politics by getting himself elected state Democratic Party chairman in 1990. The former crusader for campaign finance reform hosted a breakfast for lobbyists during the last week of the legislative session in 1990, charging them $2,500 each for orange juice and rolls. To make sure the lobbyists showed up, Willie Brown stood at the door shaking hands. "I'm the hook," he proclaimed.^[35]

The fund-raising excesses in Sacramento did not escape the notice of federal authorities. Republican leader Patrick Nolan himself secretly asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 1985 to look into Brown's fund-raising activities.^[36] Nolan told agents that Brown used a system of "bag bills" in the Assembly designed to "milk lobbyists" for campaign contributions. He could not prove it, but he suggested that agents go undercover and try to trick Brown and his associates into asking for bribes. Nolan indirectly unleashed a lengthy investigation that ultimately hooked himself.

The FBI began secretly investigating influence peddling in 1985, setting up an undercover sting by peddling a bill to see if legislators would demand bribes for its passage. The FBI drafted a bill that would have given a state subsidy to a sham shrimp processing company in West Sacramento. The FBI even went as far as making the sham firm eligible for state financing for minority-owned businesses. The investigation had all the earmarks of targeting Willie Brown, although federal authorities would never say whether he was their ultimate objective. Undercover agents posing as southern businessmen began spreading campaign money around the Capitol, including $4,000 to buy tickets to one of Brown's bashes.^[37] The undercover agents tried slipping cash to a Brown aide, who gave it back. Before they were done, federal agents had passed out at least $85,000 in the Capitol.^[38] A handful of legislators were caught on hidden videocameras taking or asking for bribes in restaurants or in a hotel room across the street from the Capitol. Many in the Capitol later remarked that the FBI never had a chance of trapping Willie Brown; he never would have been so stupid as to walk across the street to an unfamiliar hotel room to pick up a check.

In August 1988 the FBI blew the cover on its undercover operation with a spectacular raid on the state Capitol. Combing through legislative offices until dawn, agents removed boxloads of records. In the years ahead an assortment of lobbyists, legislative staff members, senators, and Assembly members were indicted, convicted, and sentenced to prison, including Nolan. But no Democratic Assembly member was ever charged, much less convicted.

After the FBI sting surfaced, many in the Capitol were convinced that Brown was the original target of the FBI, including Brown.^[39] The investigation moved close to Brown with the indictment of Mark Nathanson, a slick Beverly Hills real estate broker. Nathanson had raised campaign funds for Brown, and Brown had appointed him in 1986 to a seat on the powerful state Coastal Commission. Nathanson ended up admitting he had solicited $975,000 in bribes while on the twelve-member Coastal Commission, and he agreed to help federal investigators.^[40] Prosecution sources said that the FBI was hopeful that Nathanson would provide evidence against Willie Brown, but Nathanson gave them nothing useful.^[41] Nathanson was sentenced in August 1993 to four years and nine months in federal prison.

Brown's connections to a huge trash-hauling firm in Northern California were also probed by federal authorities. NorCal Solid Waste Systems was a Brown law client, paying him more than $70,000 in a five-year period and donating $124,000 in campaign contributions to Brown and other legislators.^[42] The company held waste-hauling contracts in dozens of cities, including San Francisco. Brown sponsored AB 1853, the Tire Recycling Act of 1989, which provided grants and subsidies for recycling, and it sailed easily through the Legislature to the governor's desk. NorCal, meanwhile, was expanding its recycling operations.^[43] Federal agents subpoenaed records from Brown, and a grand jury began investigating and taking testimony from lobbyists. But nothing ever came of the investigation. All told, federal investigators spent nearly a decade circling around Willie Brown. When they reeled in Nolan instead, Brown was not inclined to gloat: "It's been very painful for me [to watch] elected officials go down in flames of impropriety and corruption," he said.^[44]

But the perception still lingered that Brown and his organization had dodged a bullet. While his activities may not have been illegal, they were still ethically questionable. He was the largest recipient of tobacco industry donations of any public official in the nation—a total of $600,492 of such donations flowed his way while he was Assembly Speaker—and he championed that industry's cause in the Legislature.^[45]

Until the voters outlawed the practice, he was, year after year, the largest recipient of honoraria for making speeches to interest groups. One such speech was to a gathering of tobacco executives in New York in 1990, in which he offered them off-the-cuff advice on how to neutralize local antismoking ordinances by sponsoring a bill in the California Legislature.^[46] By the end of the 1980s Brown was being roundly condemned for it by health groups and campaign reform organizations. In 1993 the Assembly passed AB 996, a tobacco industry–sponsored bill that would have preempted local antismoking ordinances. The measure was killed in the Senate. The issue came back to haunt Brown in 1995 when he ran for mayor of San Francisco and his opponents lambasted him for his tobacco contributions.

To Brown, the origin of campaign money was unimportant. Brown took money not just from the tobacco industry but also from trial lawyers, teachers, bankers, public employee unions, trade groups, and anyone else who wanted to give it to him. He considered accepting the contributions as one more service for his members; he provided them with political cover by putting the funds in his own campaign committee and then passing it along to their campaign funds.

"The Speaker's job is to seal and shield the membership," Brown explained. In his view he would have been dishonest to choose between the donors. "I take it all. I don't have a choice," he said. "If you can shield them from the political attacks as the result of it, you should do it. And you cannot anticipate the one day in your life you might be running for something where this might be problem."^[47]

His candidates needed all the campaign money they could get. In his view the only thing offsetting the natural advantage Republicans held with big-business donors was the power of the Speakership. "There's no way any Democrat can get $125,000 from any tobacco industry," Brown said. "I raised a shitload of money. I average four to five million dollars a year. I average seven or eight million dollars in an election fight." Most of the tobacco money, in fact, was funneled into fighting Republican-backed ballot initiatives that threatened the power of all Democrats in the Legislature. Brown said he and Roberti divided up the special interest groups: "I drew the tobacco industry to go raise the goddamned money, and I did my job on behalf of the Senate and the Assembly."

There was more to Brown's power than just collecting money. As he grew more powerful, Brown delegated authority to those he trusted. Soon after Phillip Isenberg, his former assistant, joined the Assembly, he was put in charge of the day-to-day management of the Assembly Democratic campaign apparatus. But Brown kept tabs on everything; there was no detail too minuscule for his attention. "Long before the battle, Willie will nickel and dime you to death on campaign stuff. He's awful, he just drives you nuts," said Isenberg. "But when the battle is really on, there is nobody better. He understands risk-taking, he listens to people, and he makes the decision. Once he is in a fight, he sticks in there forever. He's terrific, just terrific. He doesn't underestimate his opponents, but he doesn't overestimate them, either. Most of us tend to overestimate our opponents and underestimate ourselves."^[48]

Willie Inc. drew on top-flight pollsters, graphic artists, direct mail experts, and campaign managers. He looked for economies of scale by hiring the same graphic artists, pollsters, and the like to do several Assembly campaigns at once. Brown was choosy about whom he hired to do campaign work, and he kept tight control over which consultants worked for Democratic Assembly candidates. He tended to pick campaign consultants with experience working

in the Assembly. More than a few political consultants were resentful over being locked out of such lucrative work. In the mid-1980's Brown relied heavily on Art Agnos's brilliant former aide, Richie Ross, to run many of the Assembly campaigns. Ross became one of the most skillful political consultants in California.

The line between public service and campaign work was blurry in Brown's operation. Brown built a huge staff operation at taxpayers' expense. In 1970, when Moretti was Speaker, the Assembly's budget was less than $3 million; by 1995 it stood at $74 million. Included was a huge bill for the Speaker's Office of Majority Services to help Democratic Assembly members with constituent services, newsletters, public forums, press relations, and other services only one step removed from actual campaigning. Brown centralized constituent services for Assembly members through Majority Services. Brown did not want to leave the vital work to chance, knowing some of his Democratic colleagues were lazy or preoccupied with legislation and fund-raising. Majority Services also operated a state-of-the-art television studio—nicknamed "WBTV" for "Willie Brown Television"—packaging video-feeds featuring Assembly Democrats for local television stations.^[49]

During election years many of Majority Services' employees routinely left the state payroll to join the campaigns of Democratic Assembly candidates. The practice was increasingly common for Democratic and Republican staff members in both houses, but nowhere was it more prevalent than in Willie Brown's operation. A sampling of campaign records from the 1986 legislative races showed that seventy-one Democratic Assembly staff members were paid a total of $603,788 by Brown's campaign funds for work in legislative races, far more than for any other legislative leader in either house.^[50]

When election time rolled around, staff members in Majority Services were the first to jump off the state payroll, move to Bakersfield or Rialto or Riverside, and organize precinct and voter registration operations. The office had a succession of politically able directors, including William Cavala, Richie Ross, and finally Gale Kaufman, a veteran political consultant with political experience in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. "We do a lot of work that we know that the district offices should be able to do but don't have time to do. And we try to keep a good relationship with their offices," she explained.^[51] The state of California paid her $129,000 a year for working four days a week for the Assembly. The fifth day of every week she devoted to her political consulting firm, primarily serving Democratic Assembly candidates.

Brown built a formidably able staff.^[52] William Hauck, who had once worked for Moretti, was Brown's chief of staff for a time. Hauck became something of the David Gergen of Sacramento, crossing party lines to work for Republican Governor Pete Wilson in the 1990s. Brown kept several of his old aides from his Ways and Means Committee days close at hand, and they formed the nucleus of his operation. Steve Thompson, who had presided over health and welfare issues at Ways and Means for Chairman Brown, became

Speaker Brown's chief of staff. Another holdover from the old days was Robert Connelly, who managed the budget, physical space, cars, personnel, and all the other assorted tools legislators needed to do their jobs in the Capitol. Dotson Wilson, who had been Brown's aide when he chaired the legislative black caucus, became the chief clerk of the Assembly and its top parliamentarian.

Brown brought in other friends and mentors from the old days. The Reverend Hamilton Boswell, who had made Willie Brown his youth director in 1951 and had run Brown's first unsuccessful Assembly campaign in 1962, was appointed chaplain of the Assembly. Boswell had retired to Richmond, but at the behest of the Speaker he made the trip twice a week to Sacramento to open Assembly sessions with a prayer. Boswell finally retired as chaplain shortly before Brown stepped down as Speaker in 1995.

Richie Ross served for a time as chief of staff before Brown settled on the even-tempered Michael Galizio, who was comfortable with both the political and the policy assignments that came with it. "Politics are a necessary part of what we all do here," said Galizio. "I think it's important to separate politics from campaigns because there's a significant difference. Campaigns are the things you do on your own time, separate and distinct from the political discussions that affect policy."^[53]

Working for Brown was something like working for the family concern. Galizio's wife, Barbara Metzger, was Brown's press secretary. Even after she became a partner in a public relations firm, she continued to offer media advice to Brown and remained an influential member of his inner circle. Brown also hired Gina Moscone, widow of the slain San Francisco mayor, as an Assembly senior assistant, paying her $53,600 a year.^[54] Members of Brown's family were also on the campaign payrolls. Brown's son, Michael, worked for his father's campaign committees and produced his father's lavish parties. Brown also put a girlfriend, Wendy Linka, on the campaign payroll, paying her $40,000 in 1986 for fund-raising work.^[55] Linka's sister was also on the campaign payroll.

"The only people you can really trust on your campaign committee are your relatives," Brown remarked. "The guys who get in trouble in their campaigns and come to the attention of the Fair Political Practices Commission are people who just have employees."^[56]

Many of his closest aides in the Assembly had been with him so long that they may as well have been his relatives. The highest-paid Assembly staff member was Connelly, a former Ways and Means Committee staffer. Officially Connelly was the executive officer of the Assembly Rules Committee, paid $119,000 a year.^[57] In reality he was Brown's dispenser of favors and punishment to Assembly members. Connelly did Brown's bidding on office space, staff payrolls, and parking spots. Every telephone, every computer terminal, every box of paper clips had to be ordered through him. Connelly knew every square inch of the Capitol—every closet, every telephone jack,

every bookshelf. On more than one occasion Connelly accompanied Brown with a tape measure to check an Assembly member's office. Walls were soon moved, expanding or shrinking a member's space. "Interior decorating has long been one of Speaker Brown's less appreciated skills," noted William Cavala, who worked in Majority Services for years and at one time was its director.^[58]

Steve Thompson was eventually put in charge of the Assembly Office of Research, ostensibly a nonpartisan policy office for legislators. Thompson soon earned a reputation for devising creative policy solutions that also passed Brown's political muster. Thompson's work finding solutions to one state fiscal crisis after another proved essential to Brown's success in the 1990s. Even after Thompson left to become executive director of the California Medical Association, he remained a crucially important member of Brown's inner circle. Another former Ways and Means aide, John Mockler, became a lobbyist for schools but remained Brown's chief adviser on education.

Working for Brown was never easy. He told a press secretary, "We don't have time for normal bodily functions around here." He could be uncommonly harsh and demanding on staff members, and even worse on those he did not believe were measuring up. He could also be permissive and allow some staff members incredibly wide latitude to speak for him.^[59]

Brown's huge apparatus extended into every crevice of the Legislature and beyond into state government. He had dozens of appointees on state boards and commissions, some of them well paid. Each time a new board was created, the Speaker made certain he had at least one appointment.

In the closing days of the Deukmejian administration, environmentalists backed a bill to create a new state agency to manage the state's solid waste disposal regulation. Brown and Deukmejian got together, and by the time they were done, the state's new garbage management board had five seats paying $95,000 a year each.^[60] Deukmejian appointed his outgoing chief of staff, Michael Frost, and his finance director, Jesse Huff, to the new board. Brown also got an appointment and gave it to Kathy Neal, the wife of Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris, an old friend and former Assembly member.

Brown's web of friends and allies grew larger and larger the longer he stayed Speaker. In the closing days of Brown's tenure as Speaker, Sacramento Bee political columnist John Jacobs dubbed it "Willie Inc."^[61]

"Beyond this small army of publicly paid employees," Jacobs observed, "are even larger networks of lobbyists, consultants, former employees, elected officials and former elected officials, friends, law partners and former partners, girlfriends and former girlfriends, appointees to scores of state boards and commissions and others whose relationship with the speaker stretch back over 31 years."

Brown kept grounded with Democratic core constituencies through his members, his staff, and his friends. He relied heavily on Maxine Waters, who served as Assembly Democratic caucus chair from 1984 until her election

to Congress in 1990. Many found her difficult and quick-tempered, and they nicknamed her "Mad Max," but her importance to Brown was unquestioned. "I was the gatekeeper and the protector of resources and possibilities and opportunities for the constituencies that we all cared about," she recalled. Brown appointed her to serve on the budget conference committee each year, and she served as his eyes and ears. "To know what was going on, and to know how to identify some things, is exactly what Willie needed," she said. "So while he may have had to be in the room with bankers and the insurance guys and the trial lawyers and all of that, he had somebody in the room with the poor people and with women and with children and that kind of stuff."^[62]

Brown had no single "gatekeeper." He had many eyes and ears throughout California. He maintained a state office in Los Angeles—four hundred miles from his San Francisco district—with state-paid aides keeping contact with the varied communities of Southern California. Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, considered in the 1990s as the most powerful Hispanic politician in California, was among several politicians who began as Brown aides in his Los Angeles office collecting political intelligence.

"We were gathering a lot of that information so that the Speaker would be able to, you know, enjoy the support of every ethnic group," Molina said. "His goal was very clear: he intended to be Speaker for life. He wanted to make sure that his members that elected him were very happy."^[63]

Molina was hired on the recommendation of Assemblyman Richard Alatorre, who left the Assembly for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council. Others in Brown's Los Angeles office over the years besides Molina included Marguerite Archie-Hudson, who eventually replaced Waters in the Assembly, and Linda Unruh, daughter of Jesse Unruh. "I think we all recognized very clearly that we're all political," said Molina. "All of us who were in that office were very political. And believe me, I had the same goals as the Speaker did."^[64]

After Molina became an Assembly member, her relationship with Brown became strained. She received Brown's favors, but she was extremely ambitious and not easily manipulated. "There are so many incidents," she explained. "The kind of payback that he expects. You know, how he moves around in different groups. And then the demands that he makes and wants back. He buys everybody in, and that makes him powerful."^[65]

Brown had no rival for authority over the internal workings of the Assembly. He created committees and appointed the members. If it suited his purpose, he expanded or shrank a committee or replaced its members to obtain a desired vote on legislation. Giving Governor Deukmejian the vote he needed to get his Los Angeles prison bill was among the more public examples. There were dozens of other examples that went unnoticed by the public.

Nor did Brown stand in the way of politically popular bills even when he believed them unwise. The most noted example was the "three strikes,

you're out" prison sentencing bills in 1994. Four versions moved through the Legislature before one reached the governor's desk. The legislation required life prison terms for three-time felons regardless of how trivial the offenses. Brown considered the bills simplistic in their approach to justice and fiscally irresponsible because they would result in a massive expansion of the prison population. In Brown's view the prison budget would soar at the expense of schools and higher education. But after the kidnap and murder of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas from a slumber party in her suburban Petaluma home, the public overwhelmingly supported "three strikes." Brown recognized that his Democratic colleagues needed to be on record voting for such a bill, so he got out of the way and let the bills come to the Assembly floor despite his opposition.

"An overwhelming majority of the public is in a mind to put people away forever for jaywalking, period," he declared in January 1994 as the issue caught fire. "And I think that's the mentality and the thing that's going to prevail, so I am not going to attempt to be the person that fashions rationality out of this. That's not my role."^[66]

As on many issues, Brown's position came down to a cold political analysis about what was best for a majority of his members rather than his personal ideology. What was best for them was ultimately best for him. "The power of the Speakership is holding onto forty-one people," he explained to reporters. The issue that day was "three strikes," but it could have been any issue during the tenure of Brown's Speakership. "I think there is a perception by many members that this crime thing could be the difference between their continuing for the next two years until term limits gets them or to an earlier exit."^[67]

The final version of the three-strikes bill was overwhelmingly approved by both houses and signed into law.

Brown used his legislative prowess to protect his members. "He doesn't try to jam us on anything that's not good for our district," said Democrat Delaine Eastin, who served four terms in the Assembly before her election as state superintendent of public instruction. "A lot of people see him as more of an arm twister than he is. He's a lot more of a team captain than he is an autocrat. Willie is the guy you can disagree with and walk away with your head."^[68]

Isenberg viewed his old boss as the ultimate pragmatic politician. "He is smarter than anyone else around," said Isenberg. "At a distance all you see is Willie: the hard edges, the sharpness, and a San Francisco legislator who's got to be a lunatic. Right? Well, you get up anywhere close to him, and you understand here is a very sophisticated elected official who understands government, understands the processes, is prepared to compromise and negotiate—and to do so directly, clearly, and specifically."^[69]

The ultimate example was the extent to which Brown went to protect Norman Waters, a plodding Democrat who represented a conservative district

in the Sierra foothills. Brown tried to shore up Waters by appointing him chairman of the Assembly Agriculture Committee, a plum assignment for his farming district. But Waters could not present a bill without a crib sheet. He let lobbyists make the presentations for him and answer questions. When Waters proved unable to block farmworker protection legislation, Brown squashed it for him on the floor of the Assembly.^[70] But Waters was undone by his own stupidity, making a speech about his opponent: "He talks about family values. He talks about praying and going to church and all this B.S."^[71] The speech was taped and used in television commercials against Waters, and he was defeated by Republican David Knowles, a Christian-right activist.

By the mid-1980s influential Democrats in the Assembly began to believe that Brown had compromised too much for the sake of staying Speaker. "One of the things that people really respected about Willie Brown was that he was someone who absolutely believed in certain things and was going to fight to the end to get them done," Molina reflected. "I think that as he became Speaker, he just had to compromise so much more, because there were so many points of view. He had to buy a little bit from each one. He had to keep everybody happy."^[72]

Brown found it increasingly difficult to juggle the competing, and sometimes irreconcilable, political and economic differences represented in the Democratic Assembly caucus. In 1987 the liberals formed a new dining club and began meeting for dinner at the Firehouse restaurant to talk about issues and strategy. The members of the new club were some of the most liberal legislators in the Capital, including Tom Hayden of Santa Monica, the former student radical, and Tom Bates, who represented Berkeley, the leftist-most district in the state. Both represented communities so left-wing that they were often dubbed "The People's Republic of Santa Monica" and "The People's Republic of Berkeley."

"We invited Willie because we did not want Willie to view this as some kind of threat to him," said Assemblyman Tom Hannigan. "Willie came to the dinner."^[73] The group soon dubbed itself the "Grizzlies" and began to push Brown and the Democratic caucus leftward. In so doing, the liberals set in motion a new civil war in the Democratic caucus, soon to be made worse by Brown's overreaction. However, it was not the liberals Brown punished, but the moderates who resisted the Grizzlies. Brown's instincts as the "Members' Speaker" began to fail him in the fall of 1987, and it nearly brought him down.

Chapter Twenty-Three—
The Gang of Five

Talking to the present leadership about institutional changes is like talking to a Latin American plantation owner about agrarian reform.
Rusty Areias
Democratic Assemblyman, 1982-1994

I can't worry too terribly much about how doing my job as the insider's head guy looks to the rest of the world.
Willie Brown
March 1988

In the mid-1980s five Democratic assemblymen dined together almost every evening at Paragary's Bar & Oven, a trendy California-cuisine eatery ten blocks from the Capitol, and each night they talked of how they were fed up with Willie Brown and his liberal leanings. Brown had been pushed increasingly leftward by the Grizzlies faction in the Democratic caucus. The five dinner companions were increasingly steering their own independent course, and not just on policy but on basic power divisions in the Assembly. From their dinner conversations sprang the most serious challenge to Brown's power, one that would bring him perilously close to losing the speakership. The political explosion that racked the Assembly from the autumn of 1987 until the following autumn ultimately forced Brown back to the political middle. He emerged from the challenge battered and scarred but with a new sense that he had to do something beyond just holding the speakership.

Mostly in their thirties, the five rebellious Democrats were moderate in their outlook, products of the 1981 reapportionment.^[1] They were also ambitious and taken with their own intelligence. The five—Rusty Areias,

Steve Peace, Gary Condit, Jerry Eaves, and Charles Calderon—represented marginal districts for Democrats. Areias and Condit represented primarily rural districts, Calderon and Eaves had suburbs east of Los Angeles, and Peace had an amalgam of San Diego suburbs and the rural Imperial Valley. All five districts were laced with voters that East Coast pundits called "Reagan Democrats."

By necessity the five compiled moderate voting records. They voted for every tough criminal law that crossed their desks, and they were wary of expensive welfare programs. Paradoxically, they were the political beneficiaries of Brown's success at gerrymandering districts and winning elections. But they were also the most vulnerable to attack for their association with Brown. A well-financed Republican just might oust them in an election if they were not careful.

The five were alarmed at the influence the liberal Grizzlies were having on Willie Brown. The Grizzlies were pulling the Assembly Democratic caucus leftward, and the trend seemed confirmed when Brown installed Grizzly leaders Tom Hannigan as Democratic Majority Leader and Tom Hayden, the husband of Jane Fonda, as chairman of the Labor Committee. The Assembly's most liberal members—Maxine Waters, Phillip Isenberg, Mike Roos—had Brown's ear more than anyone else.

"Willie was powerless to affect the direction of the caucus because he was being pulled to the Left, and his natural leanings are to the Left anyway," said Calderon. "We started to compete with that perspective."^[2]

Calderon and the others cemented their alliance on a vacation they took together in Mexico in 1987. Following their vacation, they began dining together every evening at Paragary's, and they talked about what they could do to reverse the leftward shift. "We talked about everything that happened during the day," said Calderon. "We considered options and alternatives; we considered different types of strategies to accomplish different goals." The five were sometimes joined in their nightly forays by a sixth, Jim Costa, a savvy Democrat from Fresno who was noted mostly for pushing bills to repeal local rent control ordinances and for getting arrested on the last night of the 1986 legislative session for soliciting an undercover policewoman for prostitution.^[3]

Eventually Costa dropped out of the group, and those who remained became known as the "Gang of Five."^[4] They called themselves the "Five Amigos," which they took from the Three Amigos comedy film starring Steve Martin. But the Maoist-sounding "Gang of Five" stuck in public. Maoists they were not.

The Gang of Five held seats, given to them by Willie Brown, on some of the most choice committees in the Assembly.^[5] Condit was chairman of the Governmental Organization Committee, the oddly named panel with jurisdiction over gambling and liquor legislation. Areias chaired the committee presiding over consumer protection legislation. Calderon, Peace,

and Eaves held seats both on Finance and Insurance and on Ways and Means. Calderon also sat on the Revenue and Taxation committee. In short, all five were on "juice committees."

The Gang of Five began leveraging their positions by joining Republicans on legislation opposed by other Democrats. The Assembly stood at forty-four Democrats and thirty-six Republicans. By adding their five votes to those of the Republicans, the Gang of Five could control a majority of forty-one votes on select issues. The most critical issue was their embrace of proposals for no-fault auto insurance in California.^[6] Their position put them on the side of insurance companies and directly counter to one of Brown's largest campaign benefactors, the California Trial Lawyers Association, which had pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into Democratic Assembly campaigns over the decade.

Maxine Waters was particularly incensed with the Gang of Five when her bill to repeal state antitrust prohibitions on insurance companies went down to defeat at their hands. Furious, she mounted a campaign in the media to prod Calderon, Eaves, and Peace into voting for her bill in the Ways and Means Committee, but they torpedoed her bill instead. In Calderon's view, Waters was "cheap shotting" them in the press. "Maxine went ballistic," said Calderon.^[7] She preposterously accused them of hiring a private investigator to dig up dirt on her. Without fully realizing what she had done, Maxine Waters had fired the first shots in a new civil war in the Democratic caucus.

Brown's inner circle believed the Gang of Five was freelancing for campaign contributions and endangering a united Democratic campaign to protect the party's majority in the 1988 elections. It did not take long before Waters, Michael Roos, and Phillip Isenberg were urging Brown to do something about it. "The boys are coming off the reservation," Isenberg told Brown at the time. He later said in an interview, "It was not an ideological attack. They wanted to play like Willie. They wanted to be the powers that be."^[8]

Waters demanded that Brown punish the five. Roos joined in, and Brown finally began summoning each of the Gang of Five to his office for what became known as the "woodshed talks."

"I've got a problem," Brown told Calderon, "because up here perception of power is reality, and right now people don't perceive that I am in control of this house."

"Well, do you believe that?" Calderon replied.

"No."

"Then what are you worried about?"

The conversation went downhill. Brown threatened to strip Calderon of committee assignments, staff, and office space. The two were interrupted when Calderon got word his wife was in labor, and he departed with nothing settled. Brown followed through on his threat against Calderon, sacking him in February 1988 from his juiciest assignment on the Revenue and Taxation Committee.^[9] Besides being angry over losing the assignment, Calderon felt

particularly slighted because Brown had not tried to resume a dialogue that had been interrupted by a child's birth. The Gang of Five began calling Brown a dictator and other insulting names.

Publicly, Brown at first tried to downplay the seriousness of the threat posed by the Gang of Five. "I am the insider's head guy," he said. "I can't worry too terribly much about how doing my job as the insider's head guy looks to the rest of the world unless I am interested in some object other than being the insider's head guy."^[10]

But by minimizing the threat of the Gang of Five, he only further infuriated them. "I should have told you those bastards were trying to take the Speakership," Brown later admitted to reporters. "I should have said these individuals have met and conspired."^[11]

Each of the rebels was stripped of committee assignments and staff. By March 1988 they were left with no committee assignments whatsoever.

The deaths of Jesse Unruh and Bob Moretti also were key elements in the Gang of Five revolt. The profound effect of the absence of the two on Willie Brown was not appreciated then or later. The two former Democratic Assembly Speakers had played quiet but pivotal roles in helping Brown become Speaker in 1980. Afterward they continued to help him maintain bridges to Republicans. Even more important, Unruh and Moretti were among the few people, perhaps the only people, who could tell Brown to be conciliatory. Among the few who appreciated their roles, and wished they were around to play them, was Republican Assembly leader Patrick Nolan. "You need somebody that you both trust sometimes to get you back talking when you are both angry or hurt about a situation—and Moretti and Unruh served those purposes," Nolan reflected. "Bob Moretti and Jess Unruh went out of their way."^[12]

Moretti died of a heart attack while playing tennis in May 1984. Moretti's death was so devastating to Brown that he had to be helped from the pulpit after giving a eulogy. Many in the Capitol believed that Willie Brown was far more wounded by Moretti's death than by George Moscone's or Phillip Burton's. "With Moretti's death we were down to only Jess," Nolan said.

Jesse Unruh died in the summer of 1987 after a long battle with cancer. In the year or so before his death, as Unruh grew sicker, Brown avoided him, finding his advice wearisome. Unruh never quite accepted that Brown was now a formidable power in his own right and had accomplished things that Unruh had never accomplished as Assembly Speaker. With Unruh's passing, there was no one left who could even attempt to talk to Brown as a peer.

Unruh's funeral brought a gathering of all of California's political mandarins. Brown and Frank Mankiewicz gave eulogies and then sat together. A few days earlier Mankiewicz had asked Brown's advice on who to hire as a lobbyist for one of his public relations clients.^[13] At the funeral, just as Leon Ralph, a black former Assembly member who had left the Legislature to become a

minister, began to give a sermon, Brown turned to Mankiewicz and offered his opinion about who to hire.

"Willie," Mankiewicz replied in shock, "I don't think we should be talking about a lobbying matter up here on the podium at a funeral."

Brown looked up and said, "Jess would have wanted it that way. What better time? It's private."

Mankiewicz had to agree.

Brown's snub of Ralph was obvious to those who noticed and understood it. Ralph had cast a pivotal vote against Brown in the 1974 Speaker battle despite being his roommate.

The Gang of Five felt unfairly persecuted for playing the same game as Brown and his friends. All of Brown's fury fell upon them. Many others in the Capitol also thought Brown punished the Gang of Five too harshly. Brown's overreaction was his biggest lapse in keeping the members happy, and there was no one left who could tell him so. Instead, Brown listened to those who told him to wage war on the Gang of Five. "In retrospect, I might have overstepped it a bit," Isenberg later acknowledged.^[14]

Perhaps naively, the Gang of Five expected Brown to find a way out for all of them. But when he responded by stripping them of committee assignments, firing their staffs, and reassigning them to closet-size offices, they had an odd discovery of liberation. They still held their Assembly seats, and unfettered by Brown's largesse they could move freely against him.

They responded with a flurry of parliamentary motions on the Assembly floor to pull bills from committees and force votes by the full house. Each time, Brown responded by firing one more staffer or removing one of them to a still smaller office. They responded with new diversions so that mostly Republican-backed legislation was all that was coming up for a vote. Brown began stalling major Democratic legislation to avoid embarrassment. "It takes forty-one votes to do that and I don't want to demonstrate too often that I don't have it," Brown acknowledged.^[15]

Finally, the Gang of Five reached the point of advancing a proposal to strip the Speaker of his power under new house rules.^[16]

"We're really not interested in a road back," declared Condit.^[17]

"We're as tight as we can get," said Eaves. "There's nothing he can do to split us up."

The Gang of Five, however, was desperate to become the Gang of Six, or Gang of Seven. They hoped to turn Costa to their side, but he backed away. The Gang of Five courted potential recruits nightly at Paragary's. A steady stream of state cars containing legislators pulled up to the restaurant.^[18] Their best hope seemed to be another moderate Central Valley Democrat, perhaps Patrick Johnston. "They were out hustling to get recruits. And I was one that they made a run at," said Johnston.^[19]

Brown had reason to worry about Johnston. The Stockton lawmaker chaired the Assembly Finance and Insurance Committee, and he had quietly

gone against Brown on no-fault insurance. Johnston was more a policy wonk than a savvy politician, and he meant no slight to Brown. But Johnston's move toward the insurance companies encouraged the Gang of Five. Johnston was not interested in joining the rebels; it was not in his constitution. But Brown could not be sure. How he tested Johnston was Willie Brown at his most creative.

A month after sacking the Gang of Five from their committee assignments, Brown bumped into Johnston in a Capitol hallway after a committee hearing. Brown made it look casual, but there was nothing casual about it.

"Can you come with me? I want you to go to a meeting with me," Brown asked.

Johnston was puzzled. "Where are we going?" he asked as the two headed down a Capitol stairwell.

"Oh, we're going to drop by and see a couple of guys in the Gang of Five. They want to talk about getting together and resolving issues and stuff like that. And I'd like to have somebody else with me. And if you don't mind, would you come along?"

Johnston agreed, not yet understanding Brown's ploy. The two sped off from the Capitol toward the northern suburbs of Sacramento.

Brown had previously told the Gang of Five that he wanted to discreetly discuss a rapprochement. They agreed to meet with him at Eaves's apartment in a development called the "Swallow's Nest" along the Garden Highway, which wends along the Sacramento River.

When Johnston walked into the room, it was soon clear that Brown was not interested in reconciliation. Johnston then realized he had been set up: Brown wanted to show the Gang of Five that the member they hoped to pick off—Pat Johnston—was with him, not them. That was the illusion. Pat Johnston was left with no choice but to make it a fact by committing to Willie Brown on the spot. "It was Willie's own way of locking down my commitment to the caucus, and demonstrating it to the Gang of Five in his presence," said Johnston. "I don't think the meeting had anything to do with me somehow being likely to convince the Gang of Five to put down their swords."

The rebels were not stupid; they got the message, and they felt further insulted by Brown. "As I drove away with Willie, the Gang of Five members were furious with me," said Johnston.^[20]

"He didn't trust Pat," Calderon later reflected. "He thought Pat was going to try to make a move on him, too. And he didn't want Pat Johnston ever getting together with us, so he wanted us to believe that Pat was his right-hand man."^[21] Brown had used illusion and sleight of hand, and the ploy worked.

Brown won the round, but he also gave the rebels further reason to get even and escalate the fight. The Legislature again seemed to be consumed by a leadership struggle at the expense of public policy. Brown fought the

Gang of Five to a standstill, he unable to intimidate them and they unable to remove him from his office or strip him of power with new rules. As the fight wore on, the Gang of Five honed their sound-bite skills. The media lavished attention on them, finding the Gang of Five good copy. "Talking to the present leadership about institutional changes is like talking to a Latin American plantation owner about agrarian reform," Areias proclaimed.^[22]

On a personal level, Willie Brown was deeply wounded. Brown considered all five to be friends, particularly Areias, who was the playboy heir to his family's dairy business. Brown and Areias shared mutual passions for fine clothing, beautiful women, and sports cars. The hurt showed and Brown wore it on his sleeve. Brown once paused in the middle of the battle to note that he had helped Areias pick out his neckties. "It really hurts," Brown lamented.

"I helped him pick out his ties," Areias echoed. "I'm feeling hurt, too."

As the realization sunk in that they were not going to back off, Brown fulminated daily at the Gang of Five: "They're just the most outrageous collection of ungrateful people I've ever met," he fumed at a press conference.^[23]

Most Democrats stood back and shook their heads. The fight looked increasingly like a melodrama about favored sons scorned by their father. "These were the closest people to Willie Brown almost in the entire Legislature," observed Democratic Assemblyman Bruce Bronzan. "Not only were they with him during the day, they ran with him at night."

For all of Brown's flamboyance and nightlife gallivanting, many in the Capitol saw him as essentially a lonely man. He was estranged from his wife; he had a steady succession of girlfriends, but he rarely let any get too close. Most of his friends seemed to want something from him, so Brown found ways to hide from them. Throughout his speakership, Brown often spent entire Sundays alone in movie theaters watching one film after another.

The Republican leader, Patrick Nolan, once invited Brown to a small dinner party celebrating Nolan's marriage engagement. For entertainment Nolan invited an Irish psychic to "read" the minds of his guests. "When she got to Willie, she was very perceptive," Nolan recalled. "She said he used people, used women, hid behind masks; he didn't have many friends; that he used people, that he took from people."^[24]

Brown made a few jokes, trying to deflect her observations. But she persisted, and he became noticeably uncomfortable. "Finally, he told her to stop discussing him," Nolan said. "Out of politeness she moved on to someone else. He left abruptly soon after. The psychic had obviously hit close to home, and it was equally obvious that Willie preferred hiding behind a mask."

Hurt feelings and broken friendships began to overwhelm the Assembly's fragile chemistry, overtaking the political and policy differences that had sparked the rebellion. Brown was also acutely aware that he was in a battle with an inexperienced army and with relatively few veterans of earlier leadership wars at his side. "Willie was not enthralled with the fight. But he

got into it." said Isenberg. "He gave a cautionary talk to the caucus that it would be long and bloody. If they didn't know it, he did because he had been in it before."^[25]

Brown lacked for level-headed, experienced political advisers. His staff wanted to aggressively get even with the turncoats, as did his Assembly allies. He soon got more help of sorts. John Burton was elected to the Assembly in an April 1988 special election to fill the vacancy created when Art Agnos was elected mayor of San Francisco. Burton had dried out, had kicked his cocaine addiction, and was ready to return to politics in the arena he preferred—the state Assembly. But Burton had been away for a long time; he did not know the current legislators. And his cantankerous, overbearing personality was of little help in smoothing the waters in the Democratic caucus. And though Willie Brown had his best friend back at his side, he still had no one to tell him when to cool off, least of all John Burton.

Calderon and Brown ran into each other one night at Eilish's, a bar popular with legislators three blocks from the Capitol.^[26] The usually noisy crowd at the Irish bar grew hushed as they listened to Brown and Calderon scream at each other.

"You are being petty, you are being chickenshit, you ought to act like a leader and not a dealer!" Calderon yelled.

"That's right! That's right! I am chickenshit!" Brown yelled back. "In fact, I lay awake nights thinking of any way that I can screw you guys, and if you have any ideas you should let me know."

Brown gave the Gang of Five no way out but war. "He didn't leave any face-saving room," Calderon later reflected. "He didn't leave us with anything, not even our dignity, and he had taken everything away with no road back."^[27]

Gary Condit soon began talking with Republican Assemblyman Frank Hill, a close lieutenant to Republican leader Nolan, about making a deal to depose Brown as Speaker. The talks were difficult, and Nolan was suspicious from the start of the Gang of Five. Nolan wanted to become Speaker with a Republican majority, not with Democratic votes. But many in the Assembly, including the Gang of Five, believed that Nolan had a deal with Brown to protect Brown from a challenge.

Over the years Nolan has strenuously denied he had any such deal.^[28] He has insisted that his agreement with Brown extended only to the smooth functioning of the Assembly. Nolan explained he was reluctant to make a deal with the five insurgent Democrats because he did not trust them, and subsequent events confirmed his suspicions. "They're like a bunch of skunks spraying in every direction," he said of them. "The problem is, they're getting me wet, too."^[29] Nolan had other reasons to be wary. He suspected that four or five Republicans could not be counted on to be loyal to him in a pinch because they were personally close to Brown. He was right.

However, most of the Republicans began to grow restive that Nolan was not taking advantage of the insurgency. "It's a farce," said Republican Assemblyman David Kelley from Hemet when asked about Nolan's passivity.^[30] Finally Republican Trice Harvey from Bakersfield brought the issue to a head on May 5, 1988, making a formal motion on the Assembly floor to topple Brown as Speaker.^[31] His motion was turned aside with another motion to directly elect Nolan as Speaker, which the Gang of Five was not ready to support. Nolan would not support Harvey's motion to remove Brown without knowing who his replacement would be, so he supported the motion to elect himself even though he knew it would fail.

There was more to the confused maneuvers than met the eye. The ruse was designed to protect Brown: there were not enough votes to elect Nolan, but there might have been enough votes to remove Brown. The Republicans secretly supporting Brown were provided cover by voting for Nolan. The motion to elect Nolan won thirty-six votes, and the challenge was turned aside for the moment. At best, Brown had won a draw, not a victory, and the insurgency continued. Afterward, Brown was uncharacteristically subdued. "It's intact," he said of his position. "When you get forty-one votes, take my name off the door."

Meanwhile, Brown was trying to play on the national stage that year, but he was hobbled by the Gang of Five rebellion. Maxine Waters convinced Brown to help Jesse Jackson with his 1988 presidential campaign. Jackson's first presidential campaign four years earlier had been highly symbolic but hopelessly unprofessional. Brown and other black elected leaders had kept their distance. Waters, an unabashed Jackson fan, believed that Willie Brown could provide him with the kind of insider's savvy he was sorely lacking, particularly with potential campaign contributors. "Not only must we all be involved," Waters said, "we must own this campaign. This campaign needs a Willie Brown. While Jesse is a wonderful candidate, he doesn't have the experience of party negotiations and convention negotiations, and so needs a Willie Brown to take an active role."^[32]

Brown began offering Jackson private advice, and he was named Jackson's national campaign chairman.^[33] But Brown and Jackson did not get along particularly well, and Brown was frustrated by the well-meaning amateurs around Jackson. Making matters worse, Brown was distracted by the rebellion in the Democratic Assembly ranks. He found that his freedom of movement in presidential politics was far more constrained as Speaker Brown than it had been as Assemblyman Brown.

Brown could not play an unfettered role in the Jackson campaign so long as he needed to keep looking over his shoulder at the Gang of Five. Others in California were soon trying to fill Brown's vacuum in the Jackson campaign. Brown's old rival in black politics, Mervyn Dymally, began playing a more prominent role in the Jackson campaign. Brown needed to smash

the Gang of Five rebellion fast, but he ended up making it worse. Brown went on the offensive by trying to oust Jerry Eaves from the Assembly in the June Democratic primary. Brown fielded a candidate, Joe Baca, in the primary against Eaves, trying to unelect one of those he had helped elect. The Gang of Five raised money and walked precincts in trailer parks and housing tracts for Eaves.

Eaves won renomination, and Brown's move against him in the primary succeeded only in further cementing the Gang of Five together. With the primary out of the way, the five rebels signaled to the Republican leadership that they were now ready to make a deal to elect Nolan as Speaker.^[34] The Republicans held thirty-six votes, and combined with the Gang of Five, they theoretically held a forty-one-vote majority. Willie Brown's downfall and Pat Nolan's ascendance were sealed.

Or so it seemed. Years later, Calderon revealed in an interview for this book that the Gang of Five was planning to double-cross Nolan. The play would have been simple: "We had decided that we would put all but one vote up for Pat Nolan," Calderon explained. With the vote tied at forty votes for Brown and forty for Nolan, the Gang of Five planned to march into the Democratic caucus and tell their colleagues they had to elect "a new Democrat, any Democrat" as Speaker. "If they resisted we would elect Nolan Speaker," said Calderon.^[35]

The plan might have worked but for the untimely death of one of the Republicans, Richard Longshore of Santa Ana, whose longtime chain-smoking sent him to his grave the day after the June 7 primary. Longshore succumbed to pneumonia and the Gang of Five was short by one vote. "When we showed up to session shortly after the election, Willie was beaming and quite excited to inform us that Dick Longshore had passed," Calderon recalled.^[36] The Republicans were left with thirty-five votes in the Assembly, not enough to topple Brown even with the Gang of Five.

However, the threat may not have been as serious as it appeared to most of the denizens of the Capitol, whose eyes were glued to every twist and turn. Even without Longshore's death, Brown had secret cards to play. Unknown to the Gang of Five, Brown still had a group of Republicans supporting him. Brown likely would have stayed Speaker even had Longshore lived because those Republicans would have abstained or voted for a third candidate, thus denying Nolan the forty-one votes he needed. In the weeks and months ahead Brown adeptly used his Republican votes to finally snuff out the rebellion.

Nolan was about to exit from the game. The Republican leader was caught up in the FBI's widening investigation of Capitol corruption after he accepted $10,000 in campaign contributions from undercover agents posing as businessmen pushing sham legislation.^[37] In August 1988 Nolan's Capitol office was raided by FBI agents armed with search warrants, and his position as Republican Assembly leader became increasingly untenable. When

Republicans lost three seats in the November election, Nolan stepped aside as leader, passing the baton to his close friend, Ross Johnson of Fullerton, one of the Republicans who was pivotal in the 1980 deal that made Brown Assembly Speaker.

Brown picked up three seats, giving the Democrats a forty-six-vote majority, which seemed to give Brown a one-vote cushion even if the Gang of Five voted with the Republicans. When the November election was behind him, Brown was anxious to finally put the rebellion behind him as well. But the cushion was not large enough to end the rebellion decisively. Brown began hunting for votes: his endless favors for members of both parties had given him a reserve. It was time again to play his Republican cards.

On the day he was officially elected Republican leader, Ross Johnson came to pay a courtesy call on the Speaker. But Johnson was forced to wait in Brown's outer office. As the afternoon wore on Johnson fumed and fussed. By the time he was ushered into Brown's private office, Johnson was ready to explode. Then he got bigger shock: sitting with Brown were Republican Assembly members Sunny Mojonnier and Jerry Felando, who both had voted for Johnson as Republican leader only hours earlier. The message was abundantly clear. Brown had learned Unruh's lesson of always having a Republican or two in his pocket when he needed them most. Now he needed them.

"To me, that was an almost unbearable insult," said Johnson. "With Felando and Mojonnier sitting on the couch, he says, 'Well I'd be very interested in any recommendations that you'd care to make with respect to committees. Of course, you understand, that some members—Jerry and Sunny and Stan Statham [Republican from Redding]—they're separate and apart from that, you know."^[38]

Johnson was furious: "I left determined to take him out." As soon as he returned to his office, Johnson placed a call to Calderon and told him he was ready to make a deal to make Calderon, or any other member of the Gang of Five, the Speaker.

Shortly before the November election, one of Brown's oldest, most loyal friends, Curtis Tucker of Inglewood, died, and that gave Johnson a slim opening through which to crown Calderon. With Tucker's death, Brown held a one-vote margin.^[39] Another Democrat, Lloyd Connelly, was out of the country trekking in Nepal, and it looked as if he would miss the vote. Johnson planned a frontal assault on Brown. He figured he could at least get a 40-40 tie. Although there would not be enough votes to elect Calderon or a Republican, there would not be enough votes to elect Brown as Speaker, either. There was no subtlety in his plan, and no fallback position. Despite having seen Mojonnier and Felando lounging with Brown, Johnson assumed that all his Republicans would vote with him.

Brown anticipated Johnson's move, getting a legal opinion from legislative counsel Bion Gregory that with Tucker's vacancy, only forty votes would be

necessary to elect the Speaker. Lloyd Connelly would not need to interrupt his vacation.

When the votes were cast, three Republicans—Mojonnier, Statham, and Felando—defected from their party, coming up with an ingenious but transparent ploy. Making speeches dripping with sarcasm about Ross Johnson's leadership, they voted for Johnson, not Calderon, as Speaker. They could not be punished for that even though they were not following the Republican playbook. The move denied Calderon enough votes to topple Brown. Abstaining was Republican Assemblywoman Cathie Wright, whose traffic scofflaw daughter had been helped by Brown. She explained she could not vote for Calderon because she had growers in her Ventura County district who perceived, rightly or wrongly, that Calderon was close to Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union.^[40] He was not that close to Chavez, but it was another way of saying she could not vote for a Mexican American. Calderon got thirty-four votes and Brown got forty, the bare minimum for reelection. The war was over, and both sides were exhausted and sick of the fight.

"After the vote I walked up to Willie and I congratulated him," said Calderon. "He was a little taken back by that." A few hours later, Brown invited Calderon into his office.

"I want to tell you I thought that was a class act thing that you did coming up and shaking my hand," said Brown.

"It was your win, you deserved to win, it's your day," Calderon replied.

"I want to stop all of this, this is nonsense," Brown implored. "It's not going to do anyone any good. We're not being productive on the floor, I want it to end. You're a warrior, but you're an unhappy warrior and I want to know what I can do to change that, because the next fight that comes along I want Calderon working for me."^[41]

Brown then said he would find a chairmanship for Calderon, and he soon delivered. Before the end of the session, all the rebels were rehabilitated to one extent or another. Areias and Peace were again cavorting with Willie Brown and chairing important committees. When U.S. Representative Tony Coehlo, the House Democratic whip, suddenly resigned from Congress, Condit won a special election to succeed him. Calderon was elected to the state Senate.

The biggest losers in the Gang of Five rebellion were not the rebel Democrats but the Republicans. Brown shored up his support in his own caucus at their expense. Johnson hung on as Republican leader for a time while his colleagues increasingly grumbled about his ponderous leadership. He was ousted as leader in July 1991, the last straw coming after the Assembly Republicans had failed to block $7 billion of tax increases proposed by Governor Pete Wilson to balance the budget. The Assembly Republican caucus was left more fractured than ever by the Gang of Five episode, and some overly suspicious Republicans believed that the whole thing was an elaborate Willie Brown scheme to divide and confuse them.

Johnson had tried but failed in a power game against a master, and he bitterly concluded that the game was essentially pointless. He said it was something like a popular novelty toy: "You push the little red button, and the top of the cube would open up and a little plastic hand would come out and curve around and push the button, the effect of which was to withdraw the hand and close the lid," Johnson observed. "That's been the California State Assembly pretty much during Willie Brown's term as Speaker. He has exercised power for the exercise of power. You exercise power, you raise money, and the result of that is you are able to continue to exercise power."^[42]

But in the view of Willie Brown, he had a new lease on his speakership, and he resolved to do something with it. "Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen," he declared on the day he was reelected Speaker, "look out—I'm back."^[43]

Chapter Twenty-Four—
The Ends of Power

I'm the ultimate negotiator, period.
Willie Brown
May 24, 1994

Frank Fat's is the smallest building on its block. The garish pink Chinese restaurant is sandwiched between a parking garage and an old brick office building a short walk from the California State Capitol. Up the street is the stately Sutter Club, long a bastion for the powerful. Down the street are rows of glass-and-steel office towers housing lawyers and lobbyists. Those who regularly drink and dine at the place refer to it simply as Fat's.

Inside, behind Fat's heavy oak door, is a long, narrow bar. Fat's was remodeled in the mid-1980s to give it a fashionably slick art deco look. Most of the tables are in the rear, but off to one corner is a booth with a brass plaque memorializing it as the favorite table of James "Judge" Garibaldi, who until his death in 1993 was the king of Sacramento lobbyists. He represented a most lucrative set of clients: the liquor and horse racing industries.^[1] The best dish in the house is not Chinese, but a New York steak smothered in onions. The powerful do not come to Fat's for the food. They come for each other.

Not long ago, on any given night when the Legislature was in session, a blue Cadillac, its motor idling, was usually parked in front of Fat's. Sitting inside the car, monitoring a radio and a telephone, a state driver would be waiting for Willie Brown, the Speaker of the California State Assembly. It was on one such sultry night, September 10, 1987, that nine representatives for four economic mortal enemies assembled in the private dining room upstairs at Frank Fat's.^[2] All of them were experienced political insiders and were well paid for their connections.

Those sitting around the table that night included the preeminent lobbyist of his day, Clay Jackson, a gruff, six-foot seven-inch three-hundred-pound cigar-smoking fixer for the insurance companies who eventually would go to prison on a federal corruption conviction; Don Green, a lobbyist for the California Trial Lawyers Association, the trade organization representing litigation attorneys; Jay Michael, a lobbyist for the California Medical Association, the avowed enemy of the trial lawyers; Kirk West, the powerful president of the California Chamber of Commerce; and Gene Livingston, chairman of the Association for California Tort Reform, a front group for a variety of industries.

Also sitting at the table were several former Capitol figures who had crossed the street to use their power for private clients: Steve Merksamer, former chief of staff to Governor Deukmejian, who was now representing manufacturers; Merksamer's law partner, Robert Naylor, the former Assembly Republican leader; and Kathleen Snodgrass, former chief counsel to Speaker Brown, who was now working for the trial lawyers.

The four economic powerhouses broadly represented at the table that night—insurance companies, trial lawyers, doctors, and manufacturers—were also among the biggest campaign contributors to state legislators in California. Each had spent years fighting expensive battles against each other in the Legislature and at the ballot box, with little to show for it but ever increasing campaign contributions to candidates and initiative campaigns. That their representatives were having dinner together was a momentous event in California.

As plates of chicken wings and pea pods were shuttled to the tables, the representatives of the warring industries scribbled on legal pads, trying to work out a political truce. They were joined by Democratic state Senator Bill Lockyer and eventually by Willie Brown. The night wore on, and Brown shuttled between the tables, talking with each participant, probing for trouble spots. The talks nearly broke down when the trial lawyers balked over a detail. "Are you going to trust me?" Brown bullied them. "Are you going to let me deal for you?"^[3] Brown closed the deal.

A few hours later the group slipped out of Frank Fat's with a cloth napkin upon which was scrawled in ink the outline of a political peace pact. Each side agreed to observe a five-year cessation of hostilities in return for supporting compromises representing the most sweeping changes in California's civil liability laws in decades.

The "napkin deal," as it came to be called, was the final touch in complex negotiations painstakingly conducted over a series of days at Fat's restaurant and in Willie Brown's private cloakroom in the Capitol. The napkin itself was penned by Senator Lockyer, a major mediator in the talks. His involvement marked his ascendance as a power player in the Capitol. The napkin was scribbled with legislative shorthand like "non-touchable

w/o mutual consent," "meet & confer, neg in good faith," and "DMZ" for demilitarized zone.^[4]

Legislation was prepared in less than forty-eight hours and brought to the Assembly and Senate for immediate votes on the last night of the legislative session for the year. Brown allowed quick "informational" committee hearings but no chance for changes by anyone who was not in the room that night at Frank Fat's. The legislation included a drastic restriction in product liability laws offset by fee increases for lawyers prosecuting medical malpractice cases. Doctors got promises that protections already in place against lawsuits would not be touched. Insurance companies won a reprieve from threatened regulations gaining momentum in the Legislature and won restrictions on when outside lawyers could be hired by policyholders in lawsuits. Most controversial of all, civil immunity was granted to manufacturers of products considered "inherently unsafe," such as tobacco.^[5]

Alarmed consumer groups fought for time that night, pleading with weary legislators who were aching for their yearly adjournment. Democratic Assemblywoman Jackie Speier asked in futility why the Assembly could not hold the legislation over for a more careful look when it returned a few months later in January. Speier had been elected the year before, overcoming Brown's opposition to her candidacy in a Democratic primary. Eight years earlier, as Congressman Leo Ryan's assistant, she had nearly died of wounds inflicted by the same Peoples Temple gunmen who murdered her boss on a South American airstrip. Speier was a rarity in the Legislature: a free agent elected without help from any political boss. Her questioning of Willie Brown that night displayed her independence. He took it as a challenge.

"I have the votes on the floor tonight," Brown replied.^[6]

Democratic Assemblyman Byron Sher, a Grizzly who was also a Stanford University Law School professor, came to his feet asking for a recess so that the Democrats could at least discuss the deal among themselves in a caucus before voting.

"There will be no more caucuses tonight, Mr. Sher!" Brown growled from his Speaker's rostrum. With that, the legislation was jammed through with a lopsided vote and signed a few days later by Republican Governor George Deukmejian.

For critics of the Legislature, the napkin deal came to symbolize how narrow economic interests dominated lawmaking in California in the mid-1980s to the exclusion of public participation. "The process stinks," complained a bitter Harry Snyder, regional director for the Consumers Union. "It is outrageous to take all these special interests, find them a room in the Capitol, then say the public is not allowed."^[7]

But for Willie Brown it was one of his proudest accomplishments, and he called it the high point of the session. He had brought peace, if only for a time, to the seemingly insoluble battle over liability laws. And writing a

new law on a napkin in an upstairs room at Frank Fat's appealed to his sense of showmanship. So proud were Brown and Lockyer that they reproduced the napkin on a large poster, titled "Tort-Mania 1987," and signed it at the bottom and gave copies to their friends. One of the posters was hung above the pay phone at Frank Fat's restaurant.

In fact there was really nothing unusual about the napkin deal other than the theatrical touch of writing it on a napkin (which was Lockyer's idea). The evolution of the complicated pact followed a pattern recurring throughout Willie Brown's career that displayed both his genius as a politician and the limitations of his genius.

Long identified as the protector of trial lawyers—being one himself—Brown was in the unique position of being able to force his allies into swallowing unpalatable concessions to prevent a fate far worse. On the offensive, doctors and insurance companies were threatening a raft of ballot initiatives to trim liability laws to their own advantage unless the Legislature acted on the issue. As the negotiations proceeded, insurance companies ran full-page ads in The Sacramento Bee and posted signature gatherers for ballot initiatives in strategic locations near the Capitol so that legislators would notice.

In a series of speeches and interviews in 1986, Brown signaled his willingness to entertain changes in California's tort system. At the time, the doctors and insurance companies were promoting Proposition 51, an ultimately successful ballot measure to limit civil damages. Brown and the trial lawyers vehemently opposed it.

But Brown also kept his lines of communication open. Significantly, Brown made a speech to the California Medical Association on April 2, 1986. His words foreshadowed the napkin deal. "Let me assure you I don't want to be identified as a knee-jerk trial lawyer obstructionist," he said. "You've been unsuccessful in the legislative process and I am partly, I suspect, responsible for that. You have an absolute right to pursue [Proposition 51] in that fashion. Once that's over, though, I hope you will come back into the arena with me, with the insurance companies, with the trial lawyers, with cities and counties, and sit around and beat ourselves to death with all of our respective interests on the table."^[8]

Many of the details of the napkin deal were quietly mediated by Lockyer, who had begun his career in San Francisco working in Phillip Burton's political organization.^[9] He had become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he, too, was close to the trial lawyers. "The public is better served when these groups are trying to mend rather than tear the fabric of society," Lockyer explained at the time.^[10]

Brown entered the negotiations when the issues became sticky, haranguing the lobbyists when necessary or shutting them away together in his ornate cloakroom just off the Assembly floor. This time the issue was liability laws, but Brown's modus operandi was the same whether it was for negotiations over the state budget, tax laws, the workers compensation system, or education reform. He had used the same method in his earlier career as a civil rights lawyer mediating the sit-in at the Sheraton-Palace Hotel.

Typically, Brown shuttled between warring parties, relaying ideas and proposals but also mastering the details himself and searching for the weaknesses that could provide him with leverage over each participant. In the end, Brown made everyone believe they faced destruction in the Legislature or at the ballot box unless they knuckled under to compromises. "He tells everybody that," said John Mockler, a former Brown aide turned education lobbyist. "You never know, right?"^[11]

Brown was a master at retail politics, picking off one vote and one issue at a time. "There are very few people who are going to be able to outdo [me]," Brown boasted.^[12] "I'm always interested in negotiating with anybody. You know that. I'm the ultimate negotiator, period ."

But his was a genius that worked best within a narrow set of players; he defined the public interest as the sum total of the interests of all the players sitting around the negotiating table. "I would hope," he once remarked, "I could develop a close relationship with every voter, every potential voter, every pool of voters in the state of California, whether they be [the California Teachers Association] or the Broadcasters Association or the reporters or the lawyers, doctors, or the truckers, or whatever group of people are out there."^[13] To Brown, the voters were an amalgam of interest groups that could be pulled, pushed, cajoled, prodded, and won over. To the extent that was true, Brown succeeded. To the extent that voters were something more, he failed.

Brown was not a good wholesale politician; he was weakest at articulating a broad vision to a wide audience. In the television age he was an anachronism. He was a master at the techniques of television and computers to get his candidates elected, but he did poorly on television himself. His was the world of old-fashioned backroom politics. For him democracy worked with compromises carefully built one on top of another. But to those left out, the napkin deal had an undemocratic, almost sinister feel. "The Legislature gave away its authority over laws to some special interest groups," complained Snyder for the Consumers Union.^[14]

And in fact the narrowness of the participation in the napkin deal brought a narrow result. Consumer groups vowed to get even, and they did so with the successful passage a year later of Proposition 103, a tangled web of regulations and mandatory rate rollbacks imposed on insurance companies that was far more drastic than anything under consideration in the Legislature at the time of the napkin deal.

Brown's strength was also his weakness. His focus was almost entirely on the inner workings of the Legislature; consolidating power and mastering the intricacies of that narrow world became his all-consuming pursuit. He resisted any and all campaign reforms designed to break his grip on campaign contributions. His repeated torpedoing of reasonable measures resulted in 1990 in the overwhelming success of Proposition 140, an extreme measure that imposed term limits on all state officeholders and contributed to his ultimate fall as Speaker five years later. Term limits, many believed, were directly aimed at removing Brown from power.

Brown's mediation over liability laws came just as the Gang of Five rebellion was building steam. One of reasons he reacted so vengefully was that he viewed them as interfering with his negotiations over tort reform. Brown had been criticized repeatedly for not producing any legislation of any note while Speaker, and now he had a chance. The rebellion seemed to confirm his worst fear, namely, that once he would try to exert leadership on a knotty policy issue, he would end by alienating a major segment of his caucus.

The Gang of Five rebellion, however, also proved what he could get away with. In the years ahead Brown became more emboldened to take policy positions, to use his power for something besides just keeping power. After the Gang of Five battle, Brown steered back to the middle. When Pete Wilson became governor, the two found numerous openings to help each other, particularly with business-oriented legislation. The business break bills reached a fever pitch in 1994, with Brown backing AB 1313, a measure to grant the Taco Bell fast-food chain a tax break. Brown's work on the bill alarmed liberals, but in Brown's view he was taking a traditional liberal position by using government to create jobs.

Brown branched out of the Legislature and used his talents to mediate between teachers and the Los Angeles Unified School District in 1993. With teachers threatening to strike, Brown cajoled both sides, and once an agreement was reached, he coaxed them into lowering their weapons. Brown talked frequently with Helen Bernstein, the explosive head of the teachers union, whenever she felt slighted or betrayed by some detail, and he talked with representatives of the school district when they believed Bernstein was reneging. "It's every week. Every goddamned week," Brown exclaimed after interruption by a phone call from Bernstein. "That is the worst run operation I have ever seen. The world has got no clue. Got no clue."^[15]

The agreement prevented what could have been a calamitous strike for Los Angeles that would have turned 641,000 children and teenagers onto the streets with nothing to do. However, the agreement came under attack within hours because parents, rank-and-file teachers, and administrators had been left out.^[16]

Brown forced the teachers union to accept a 10 percent pay cut. He pulled other state leaders, especially state Democratic Controller Gray Davis, into

the talks and found an additional $36 million for the financially strapped district to finance the agreement and help it fill a $400 million deficit in its $3.9 billion budget.^[17] He succeeded where Republican Governor Pete Wilson stood no chance of success. The key for Brown was his relationship with the teachers union, and that relationship was built on a foundation of campaign money.

Throughout Willie Brown's tenure as Speaker the perception reigned that those invited to the negotiating table were those who provided the most money for his election coffers. It was a perception Brown tried to shake but never very convincingly. "The person who comes to my attention gets the attention," he said in an interview with California Journal . "And one of the ways in which I know you is that I know if you have given a contribution some place and I send you a thank you note. I also know you if you come and ask for an appointment to see me and tell me your troubles. And I respond."^[18]

By the mid-1980s his work in the Legislature and his work in the private world began to blur. Even as he wielded power as Assembly Speaker, he maintained his San Francisco law practice. Brown's ethics were repeatedly called into question throughout his years as Speaker, and he was investigated by the State Bar of California, the Fair Political Practices Commission, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sacramento-based reporters steadily wrote stories highlighting his private deals and the connections to his public office. Sacramento Bee pundit Dan Walters, whose column was syndicated in many California newspapers, was the most unrelenting, and the enmity between the two grew.

Journalists also highlighted Brown's representation of the Southern Pacific Development Company and its Mission Bay development plan on the San Francisco waterfront. In the late 1980s Brown served as Southern Pacific's lawyer while the development company was lobbying in Sacramento on twenty-nine separate pieces of legislation. The company paid Brown's law firm $58,000 in 1987 alone, but Brown denied there were any trade-offs.^[19] Eventually Southern Pacific split up, and Brown remained lawyer for the development firm under its new rubric as Catellus Incorporated.

It looked all too obvious that wealthy developers were hiring him not for his legal expertise but for his political connections. The clearest example came when he represented Underwater World, a $1.3 million aquarium on Pier 39 proposed by a New Zealand firm that had successfully built a similar tourist center in Auckland. Brown was paid more than $10,000 in 1988 by Underwater World developers as they worked their way through City Hall getting permits. When the nonprofit Stienhart Aquarium and the California Academy of Sciences objected to the commercial project, Brown neutralized the opposition by sponsoring AB 1580 to get the nonprofits a $2 million subsidy for their own development plans. Complaints were lodged with the state bar association against Brown, but the bar concluded there was no conflict of interest.

"I did not know of any business my clients had before the Legislature," Brown testily replied when pressed by reporters. "When I do, I disqualify myself. There is no way to ask everybody."^[20]

The Underwater World developers' political connections went beyond just Willie Brown. One of the investors, Fort Worth billionaire Robert Bass, and his brothers were clients of the San Francisco investment firm owned by Richard Blum, the husband of Mayor Feinstein. Feinstein endorsed the project in 1987, and her support helped speed the project on its way.^[21] Although they were conservative Republicans, the Bass brothers gave to Feinstein's 1990 Democratic gubernatorial campaign.

Despite his years in the public eye, Brown was remarkably thin-skinned about journalistic scrutiny, lashing out at reporters as "scumbags" and even calling a few "racists" for questioning his business deals. In his view the press had turned a blind eye to white politicians amassing wealth on the side but were now questioning him for doing the same thing. Brown failed to appreciate that a new generation of journalists had arrived in Sacramento; they had never known Jesse Unruh or any of the white politicians who had grown rich while holding public office. The new reporters considered themselves equal-opportunity muckrakers, and Brown's position at the pinnacle of power made him the most inviting target.

Brown finally blew up at the Capitol press corps. He tried to circumvent the resident reporters by contracting with a cable television company in 1991 to start live broadcasts of Assembly sessions. Brown then removed newspaper reporters and commercial television news crews from the floor of the Assembly. For decades the press had worked at desks, assigned by seniority, along the aisles on the floor of the Assembly. Reporters could come and go as they pleased with almost full privileges of the floor. Brown, simmering over reporters digging into his private business deals, ordered the desks removed, and he consigned the reporters to the back of the Assembly in a gallery reserved for staff and visitors. Reporters still had more access to the floor than their counterparts covering Congress, but the insult was clear.

The press corps and Brown faced off at a press conference in February 1991. Everyone acted ugly. Brown said he was clearing his house of "clutter," especially "despicable" underdressed reporters and photographers.

"You are in the back where you belong," Brown declared.^[22]

The reporters lashed back that with their salaries, they could not afford to buy Brioni suits.

The feud simmered, and in April it blew up again. Reporters had redoubled their digging into Brown's private law practice.

"The process of inspecting Willie Brown defies description," Brown complained at a press conference that soon spun out of control. "That is absolute bullshit."^[23]

Reporters pressed him about a stock option he held in a medical supply company, and Brown lashed back: "You spend full-time trying to denigrate

Mrs. [Minnie] Boyd's oldest son," he declared. "Most of you have a level of racism that is so subtle that visits itself every day of my life upon me and other black Americans."

Reporters questioned him about what he meant, only further infuriating him.

"It's tough being black, mister," he snarled at a reporter for the Los Angeles Times .

Asked if he would have escaped scrutiny if he had not been black, Brown replied, "Maybe the title of Speaker prompts it. But in part you and I know it has something to do with the color of my skin and the success which I allegedly enjoy."

Brown might have saved himself much grief if he had hired a strong press secretary and had listened to him or her. But Brown went through a succession of press secretaries, burning them out. It was widely acknowledged in the Capitol that one of the worst staff jobs in the building was serving as Willie Brown's press secretary. Only toward the end of his speakership was a tacit détente reached with the press corps, and only then did the job of Brown's press secretary become bearable.

Brown generally had an easier time with San Francisco Bay Area newspapers, even getting paid for promotional advertisements for the San Francisco Chronicle . The one exception in his hometown was the weekly Bay Guardian , which consistently ran hard-hitting and original pieces about his private business practices and his public duties.^[24]

Brown came under heavy scrutiny in the press for his campaign fund-raising practices. The numbers spoke for themselves. As the tort wars raged during the first six years he was Speaker, Brown received a total of $215,056 in campaign contributions from the California Trial Lawyers Association.^[25] In addition, the trial lawyers organization gave a total of $652,032 to Brown's Democratic Assembly colleagues while giving only $84,050 to Republicans during the same period. The trial lawyers enjoyed a special relationship with Brown, and he repeatedly protected them from the more drastic proposals floating in the Legislature to trim liability laws. The lawyers, however, were victims of their own success, and they came under attack at the ballot box because of initiatives sponsored by their economic rivals. "They've been so selfish in expanding liability, expanding damages and making a profit from the misfortune of others, that they're going to lose all that they've jealously protected," predicted Assembly Republican leader Patrick Nolan in 1986.^[26]

Sensing that Nolan was right, Brown moved to force the lawyers into accepting the concessions in the napkin deal. At the same time Brown defended his relationship with the lawyers: "If the doctors who contribute to me almost as handsomely as the trial lawyers, and if they have an issue that's without merit, their contributions would have no effect on how I vote or may not vote. . . . I don't think any contributor anticipates having any influence.

I think what most contributors would anticipate is having a fair hearing and having access in helping to elect people who exhibit those qualities."^[27]

Asked at the time if he excluded from participation those who gave nothing, like consumer groups, Brown defensively replied, "We don't expect anybody to give money to be heard. You may."

Many of those close to Brown said he was well aware of who was donating and who was not. John Mockler, who had met Brown during the Auto Row protests in San Francisco, said Brown was "very cognizant of money." But, Mockler insisted, "Willie Brown can't be bought because everybody's in there. He's not 'if you give me money, I'll do something.'"^[28]

There was a degree of cynicism in Brown's contribution-gathering. He took from one and all—tobacco companies, teachers, lawyers, health care organizations, bankers, oil companies, trash haulers—anyone who paid. For the most part, who they were and what they stood for never seemed to matter. "Whether you're on the side of Citibank or the Bank of America on interstate banking—who cares?" said Mockler, reflecting the view that permeated Brown's political operation. "It's a bunch of fat white guys spending a lot of money wrestling with each other where nobody ever wins or loses. A lot of issues in the Legislature that the public and press think are 'corrupt' are really simply economic interests fighting for advantage with each other. The results don't matter one way or another."^[29] The lobbyists and their clients, of course, took another view.

In Mockler's view Brown did his finest work when money, politics, and his deepest held beliefs converged. A few issues did matter to Brown, and among the few was education. Brown was the chief political protector of the California Teachers Association, the largest labor union in the state, with 250,000 members. In turn the CTA showered Brown and his allies with millions of dollars in campaign contributions and consistently provided him with armies of precinct workers during elections.

But Brown's relations with the teachers had not always been so strong. Pivotal to that relationship was the CTA's 1984 hiring of Alice Huffman as the union's political director. The CTA made a shrewd choice: Huffman was a former legislative aide to Maxine Waters and doubled as president of the Black American Political Association of California, an organization founded by Willie Brown in 1979.

Within three months of her appointment, Brown called her to ask for a meeting at a private office to talk about an upcoming political fund-raiser.^[30] When she arrived, other lobbyists were awaiting their turn. When she was finally ushered inside, Brown got to the point.

"I need $25,000 from CTA and I want it by a certain time. Can you help me?"

"Well," she replied, "I'm kind of new but I'll call over and see what I can do."

When Huffman called her bosses at CTA headquarters in Burlingame, she got a quick response. "We can get the money, but it has conditions," she was told.

The condition was simple: Brown had to come and pick up a check for $25,000 himself. Huffman then relayed the request to someone on Brown's staff, who balked.

Two days before his fund-raiser, Brown called Huffman:

"Alice Huffman, where's the money I asked you for?"

"You didn't get my message?"

"What's the message?" Brown replied.

"That you pick it up. I think I've called your office ten times and I've been told you can't come," she told him.

"What!?"

Brown immediately told her he would pick up the check at CTA head-quarters. And he gave her a piece of advice: "Don't ever take a 'No' from me unless you are talking to me personally."

Brown's relationship with CTA was solidified in the 1986 elections. Over-whelmed with requests for campaign contributions form state lawmakers, Huffman turned to Democratic Assemblyman Richard Floyd, a blunt-speaking Democrat who was tight with labor unions.

"You really want to do something smart?" Floyd told her. "Then go and talk to Willie about it. And let Willie direct you. Empower Willie."

She arranged a meeting with Brown, who jumped at the chance to channel the CTA's campaign contributions.

"He said, 'I'll educate you.' And he did. He got his staff and he told me about all the races and which ones he thought he could win and where they were putting their resources and where they weren't putting them. This was highly confidential stuff," Huffman recalled. The CTA became an integral part of Brown's election machine. As it would turn out, the CTA's relationship with Willie Brown became crucial when a new governor came to town.

Pete Wilson and Willie Brown never much cared for each other. Their antagonism went back to when they were colleagues in the Assembly twenty years earlier. Both had reasons for distrusting the other.

Brown had helped San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein in her race for governor in 1990 against Wilson, and indeed went far above and beyond the call of partisanship. Brown helped convince her to stay in the race when she was close to dropping out in the Democratic primary, and he then provided her with squads of his top staff to brief her on California issues.^[31] She won the Democratic primary and came close to beating Wilson in the general election.

Brown's motives in helping Feinstein were more than just fealty to an old political friend from San Francisco. Brown was tired of hearing that he had squandered his powerful position on nothing. He wanted solid legislative accomplishments of his own, and as he saw it, his best chance at moving his own agenda was in having a Democratic governor. The 1990 election was possibly his last opportunity to become a policy Speaker like Jesse Unruh or Leo McCarthy.

"I tried everything I could to get Dianne Feinstein elected governor," Brown explained a few years later. "Can you imagine going all of these years living under Republican governors? Just think of how many friends I'd have currently as judges in this state. Just think of how many people who would have performed the regulatory functions that they perform. The power of Willie Brown is really rooted ultimately in his associates—his extended family—and a Democratic governor would afford me the opportunity to do what fourteen years of holding this job should have [afforded]. I should be able to die and go to my grave with folks still holding office somewhere with whom I have a chit. That's not the case. I want a Democratic governor desperately."^[32]

Not only did Feinstein lose, but the voters approved Proposition 140, imposing term limits on legislators and statewide elected officials. The measure was aimed directly at doing what Republicans had failed to do: end Willie Brown's speakership. The new reality hit legislators like a slap on the face that November. All sitting Assembly members would have to leave office no later than 1996. Most unforgivable for Willie Brown, Pete Wilson had endorsed Proposition 140.

And now Wilson was coming to Willie Brown's town. Wilson had hardly set foot in Sacramento since leaving in 1971 to become mayor of San Diego and then to enter the U.S. Senate in 1982. The chemistry between the two was not promising.

Wilson and Brown could hardly have been more unalike if they had been born on different planets. Wilson was reared in Illinois, and knew only comfort his entire life. His father was a successful advertising executive who dabbled in local politics. Wilson had the finest education money could buy: Yale University and then the prestigious Boalt Hall law school at the University of California, Berkeley, institutions that in his day were closed to Willie Brown.

Wilson had none of the flamboyance of Willie Brown, nor the genteelness of George Deukmejian. Wilson's idea of a good time was singing show tunes around the piano with friends, sipping single-malt Scotch, smoking a good cigar, and telling dialect jokes. Wilson did not care for the rough-and-tumble of legislative politics, with all its oily deals and boozy personalities. He preferred sterile position papers, and he calculated everything in terms of how it would advance his own career.

After a stint in the Marine Corps, Wilson got his start in politics as an eager young advance man for Richard Nixon, carrying his bags and opening car doors for him. Wilson considered the brooding Nixon his political mentor, and he and Bob Dole were the only two politicians giving eulogies at Nixon's graveside. Wilson then came under the wing of Herb Klein, Nixon's communications director, who, when not serving Nixon, ran the conservative Copley Newspapers in San Diego. Klein convinced Wilson to set up base in San Diego, and groomed him for political office. Wilson was elected to the Assembly, and then mayor of San Diego. Wilson ran for governor in 1978 but fared poorly. He wanted to run for governor again, but party leaders convinced him to run for the U.S. Senate in 1982, and he won, beating Jerry Brown for the job.

But Wilson was a lackluster senator. He was junior to Democrat Alan Cranston, and he was in the minority party. Nor was Wilson much of a legislator by temperament; he preferred the role of the executive. To a constituent complaining about one of his votes he wrote, "To hell with you."^[33] As a campaigner, however, Wilson was formidable. He kept the same team with him for most of his career, and they were intensely loyal in return. Bob White, his chief of staff, remained a bachelor, devoting his life to Wilson's career. Otto Bos, a former newspaper reporter, shaped Wilson's image, giving him a human dimension that hid his jagged edges. Self-effacing, Bos joked that he told his children bedtime stories about Pete Wilson. The third leg of Wilson's team was George Gorton, his master campaign strategist who stuck with him through every election. When Leo McCarthy challenged him in 1988 for the U.S. Senate, Wilson and his team blew McCarthy off the political map.

Wilson's chief strength was in striking a pragmatic political course in keeping with the tradition of his mentor, Nixon. Wilson was hawkish on foreign policy and tenacious in bringing defense contracts to California, although he did not need much help with Ronald Reagan in the White House. On domestic policy, Wilson mirrored his state: he voted for environmental protection bills opposed by most Republicans and was pro-choice on abortion.^[34]

Two years after Wilson had won reelection to the Senate, Governor Deukmejian announced he would retire and not seek a third term. Party leaders turned to Wilson and asked him to leave his Senate seat and run for governor. Their reasons were simple: they wanted to prevent another Phil Burton–style Democratic gerrymander in the 1991 reapportionment. The key was in holding the governor's veto pen over whatever remap bill was engineered by Willie Brown and the Democratic-controlled Legislature. Right-wing Republicans were aghast at making Wilson governor, but pragmatic party leaders understood that the only way to keep the governor's office out of the hands of the Democrats was with a moderate.

Wilson, who had barely caught his breath from his 1988 campaign, again stumped the state furiously, capitalizing on the popularity of Proposition 140, the term limit initiative, and narrowly beat Feinstein to become governor.

During his inaugural celebrations in January 1991, Wilson tried to extend an olive branch to legislators. He hosted a dinner for them and brought with him songwriter–political satirist Mark Russell for entertainment.^[35] The Sacramento politicians roared their approval at being lampooned by the national punster. "I've been on a tour of state legislatures," Russell equipped from his piano. "Mostly they are a bunch of fat white guys pretending to hurt each other." Willie Brown laughed loudest of all. He sat with the new governor at the head table. As the evening wore on, each offered toasts to the success of the other. The evening was a smashing hit.

But the first private meetings between the new governor and the veteran Assembly Speaker were rocky. Brown tried to signal cooperation by telling the governor, "I won't orchestrate against you," on one of Wilson's first policy initiatives, SB 92. The bill established a $700,000 fund for welfare case management, allowing the state to claim federal matching funds of $13 million.^[36] But Wilson was wary of Brown and other legislative leaders. He was used to dominating the San Diego city council and expected legislators to show him the same deference the council members did. Wilson also had major trouble within his own party, and he was soon frustrated by Ross Johnson, the blustering Assembly Republican leader. Johnson opposed nearly everything Wilson put on the table that did not cut government and taxes. Senate Democratic President Pro Tem David Roberti was not much easier during meetings in the governor's office. Roberti was testy about his position and was always looking over his shoulder at Willie Brown. The only legislator for whom Wilson had any affinity was Ken Maddy, the wealthy Senate Republican leader who was married to Norma Foster, owner of the San Joaquin Valley chicken empire bearing her name.

Wilson was preachy in meetings with Brown and other legislative leaders. "We need to get serious and the conference [committee] is not serious," he hectored at the start of the May 14, 1991 meeting.^[37] In the view of the legislators, Wilson had an infuriating tendency to bring up new issues just as a deal seemed imminent. During budget negotiations in 1991, Wilson agreed to $7.7 billion in tax increases in his first budget.^[38] His agreement on taxes came relatively easily. But then at the behest of Kirk West and William Campbell, the powerful heads of two business trade associations, Wilson demanded last-minute changes in the workers compensation system as his price for signing the budget bill. The 1991 budget was held up for sixteen days into the new fiscal year until Brown and Roberti agreed to minor concessions, and Wilson backed away from a major revision of workers compensation.

Wilson was never comfortable sharing the stage with Brown, and he did not seem to understand Deukmejian's principle of sharing equal credit with the Assembly Speaker. Brown felt snubbed, and he repaid the insult tenfold:

he once hovered in a Capitol hallway chatting with a young blond woman within view of reporters and the governor's press aides although he was late for a meeting with the governor. The news of his socializing duly got back to the governor.

As Wilson took office, he was confronted with a huge budget deficit. The California economy had taken a sharp downturn, and revenues were plummeting through the floor. Deukmejian had tried to get legislators to agree to massive budget cuts before he left office, but he would not agree to their demands for tax increases. As a candidate Wilson avoided committing himself to a no-tax pledge, and legislators correctly surmised they could make a better deal with him than with Deukmejian, and one that would avoid the most drastic cuts to schools and welfare programs.

Despite the personality differences, Wilson and legislative leaders agreed to roughly equal parts cuts and tax increases in the 1991–92 budget. The $7.7 billion tax hikes were the largest in state history, and Wilson had a tough time winning enough Republican votes to get the two-thirds majority necessary for passage. Brown and Roberti delivered nearly all of their Democratic members. The fifty-fourth vote in the Assembly came from Republican Paul Horcher after a phone call from Wilson. Horcher saved Wilson's first budget, but he was repaid with hostility from his fellow Assembly Republicans.

The problem was that the $7.7 billion in tax increases did not balance the budget. The recession was the worst in sixty years, and the California economy went into free fall. The federal spending for military bases and in the defense industry that had fueled the California economy throughout the Reagan years was shrinking. California had had more than its share of such federal largesse, and the recession that came after was deeper in the state than in the rest of the country. As legislators and the governor began their annual budget negotiations in 1992, they faced a mind-boggling $10.7 billion hole in the $57 billion state budget.^[39] A major part of the problem was in the basic structure of the budget itself.

Most of California's budget was locked before lawmakers and the governor ever got a crack at allocating it.^[40] Half of the budget automatically went to schools because of Proposition 98, a ballot measure approved by voters and backed by the California Teachers Association to give schools (and teachers) a minimal level of financial support. Health and welfare accounted for another one-third of the budget, and that spending was also automatic, driven by caseloads and entitlements. Without changes in law, legislators and the governor had little real discretion in making cuts. Wilson pointed out that he could fire every state employee and it still would not come close to filling the state's budget hole. He proposed cutting $2.6 billion from schools.^[41] Wilson said he would "break arms if it's necessary" to get his budget.^[42]

The California Teachers Association's cultivation of Willie Brown soon bore its richest fruit. The teachers were alarmed at Wilson's proposed cuts,

and Huffman asked Brown to block them. Not even Huffman realized how far Brown and the Assembly Democrats were willing to go to stymie Wilson's plan. Although the Senate voted for the cuts, the Brown-led Assembly refused to pass Wilson's proposed budget. The constitutional deadline for passing a budget came and went, and still the Assembly would not vote. The new fiscal year began on July 1, and still the Assembly would not vote.

"I think there was a belief that they could somehow get past public education, and, particularly, Willie Brown," the Speaker once told reporters who gathered outside the governor's office every day waiting for his arrival. "What I've got to avoid in this thing is becoming Pete Wilson's Willie Horton. I'm not going to let it be Wilson versus Brown. That's where he would like to get it."^[43]

Brown's comments notwithstanding, the battle was soon reduced to Wilson versus Brown. Both men took it there.

Through the heat of a scorching summer, the Assembly sat doing nothing, and Brown and Wilson faced off with ever angrier insults. California was technically bankrupt, unable to pay its bills, and the stalemate ranked as the longest and worst fiscal crisis of any state in American history. Wilson prognosticated that the Democrats would oust Brown as Speaker because they would become fed up with the impasse.

"People who have preached my demise have more bleached bones occupying cemeteries," Brown replied.^[44]

Both Brown and Wilson missed their respective party national conventions that summer. For Wilson it was bigger loss. As the governor of California, Wilson could have been a major player in Houston. As it was, the Republican convention took on a harsh, right-wing tone. Moderate voices such as Wilson's were missing. As for Willie Brown, his son, Michael, played host for him at a New York party—again called "Oh, What A Night!" It marked his son's debut in a new role in Brown's political life.

As Wilson continued to lambaste Brown, he only solidified the Democratic caucus. Wilson became the common enemy. "He's nuts," pronounced Assemblyman Steve Peace, one of the Gang of Five now firmly back in the fold with Brown.^[45]

Wilson began to lose the war for public opinion. He stumbled badly with a proposal to cut the budget by making a generation of five-year-olds wait a year before starting kindergarten. The teachers union moved quickly to capitalize on the coldness of his idea by organizing a group of five-year-olds to show up at Wilson's Capitol office and protest, posing of course for television and newspaper cameras. Wilson quickly dropped the proposal, but the damage from such a half-baked idea cast him permanently as the Uncle Scrooge of California.

Finally, sixty-four days into the impasse, Wilson gave up and dropped his proposed school cuts. For Brown's supporters it was his finest moment as

Speaker. "People understood what we were fighting about," said Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz of Los Angeles.^[46]

Wilson, however, continued to assert that the Democrats would oust Brown as Speaker following the November election, thus proving his position on the budget had been right all along. "I didn't know the governor had a vote in that," said Katz. "I don't see Pete Wilson dumping Willie Brown. Pete may want to believe all his problems are wrapped up in Willie being Speaker, but I think Pete's problems go a lot deeper than who is Speaker."

Vindication for Brown and his caucus on the budget impasse came in November 1992 when the Democrats increased their majority by one seat to forty-seven in the eighty-member Assembly. Wilson's approval ratings in the polls plummeted to the lowest ever recorded for a California governor. Wilson had badly misread the resolve of the Assembly and personalized it into an argument with Willie Brown. He failed to understand that Brown gave his Democratic members, and even some Republicans, cover from the political heat until a compromise could be arranged that protected schools from deep cuts. Once the compromise was in place, Brown cajoled his colleagues and produced the required fifty-four votes—a two-thirds majority—to adopt the budget.

"I spent more time explaining Wilson to my caucus and keeping them from going off the deep end," Brown explained shortly after the fight was over. "My members wanted me full-time to destroy him. They wanted me to attack him. They wanted me to draw the line. They wanted me to tell him where he could get off. And I wouldn't do it."^[47]

Brown played a complicated, multilevel role during the budget stalemate. It was exactly the same role he played when as a lawyer he negotiated a settlement with civil rights demonstrators and the Sheraton-Palace Hotel in 1964, and later when he negotiated between Governor Ronald Reagan and Senator Randolph Collier on perks and parks in the state budget in the 1970s. During the 1992 budget stalemate Brown let his Democratic colleagues vent their anger but he kept their wilder ideas in check. At the same time he impressed upon the Republican governor that he could not win on a number of issues, especially cutting the school budget.

"People want to point to a Wilson-Brown engagement. It wasn't," said Peace. "The Speaker ultimately had to prevail on members to vote contrary to what they really wanted to do to get the fifty-four votes out. Part of what leadership is all about is having some sense about when to negotiate and when to hold fast. He ultimately made those calls."^[48]

But by gambling everything on protecting the schools from deep cuts, Brown took a huge risk that summer. He could not foresee that he would maintain his majority in November, or even that his Democrats would hold fast long enough to break Wilson. Was it just the teachers, their money, and partisan politics that motivated Brown to block Wilson's proposed education

cuts? Those closest to Brown, including Alice Huffman and John Mockler, believed there was something more at work: a convergence of politics and Brown's inner convictions. It is doubtful that Brown would have blocked passage of the state budget for as long as he did, with all the enormous political risks, for other political patrons no matter how well staked financially they were with him. "His instinct is with education as the only positive salvation," said Mockler, who advised Brown throughout the crisis on education issues. "I think that both politics and instinct meet there."^[49]

To Alice Huffman, Brown was motivated as much in the summer of 1992 by his bitter remembrance of "the gap that he had in his background" in a small, rural, racially segregated school in Mineola, Texas. His bleak school had no indoor plumbing, the books were discards from the white high school, and the children were frequently forced to miss school to pick cotton. "Most African Americans should be strong advocates for public education. The one way we can help our community is by helping schools," Huffman reflected.^[50]

Brown's legislative record as Speaker was, on its face, skimpy. He did not carry many bills of his own; there were so few that it was always noticed and was always embarrassing when one of his bills was defeated regardless of how minor the issue. When he pushed through a 1985 bill requiring motorists to wear seatbelts, he boasted that it was his greatest legislative accomplishment. Brown's claim was hardly the stuff of history books.

Brown suffered by his propensity to live in the present and scheme for the future. He was curiously unable to engage in much critical introspection. No matter how many times he was asked about his legacy, or his chief accomplishment, he could not come up with much of an answer, or even a canned answer.

He did, in fact, have a legacy. For nearly fifteen years Brown was the central figure blocking Republican efforts to repeal core Democratic programs. The Republicans in the Assembly despised him for it, considering him the major impediment to their conservative agenda of downsizing government and imposing up-by-the-bootstraps economics. They were right; he was their major impediment, and he was proud of it. When he finally departed Sacramento in 1996, Republican bills began winning speedy passage in the Assembly.

Willie Brown's chief policy accomplishment as Assembly Speaker was in saving education from worse damage than it might otherwise have suffered at the hands of Republican governors. He could not boast, like Jesse Unruh, that he had built a state, but he could boast that he had saved the schools from being even worse than they were. Brown protected his core constituencies—poor people and teachers—and in the schools the interests

of both constituencies converged. But while he kept education and welfare money flowing, he did nothing to shake up systems that were gradually crumbling and badly in need of reform.

For better or worse, Brown also protected the welfare system from radical cuts and overhauls. He allowed a modest workfare bill, GAIN, to win passage under Deukmejian. Both Deukmejian and Wilson proposed drastic cuts in welfare payments to single mothers and their children and in Medical benefits to the aged. The trims came, but they were always smaller than proposed by the Republican governors, and always because of Willie Brown.^[51]

He also worked on behalf of his black constituency. He was an ardent defender of affirmative action, and he pushed bills through to Deukmejian's desk giving minorities and women a percentage of all state contracts. He helped Republican Patrick Nolan win passage of enterprise zone bills giving preferential tax treatment to businesses in slums. The enterprise zone bills represented a convergence of liberal and conservative ideology, but they also attracted the attention of the FBI. It was one such bill, drafted for a dummy company, that was used as bait in the federal investigation of corruption in the Capitol.

Brown's best work was in negotiating legislative deals for others. His agenda was generally clear: expand liberal Democratic programs where he could, and soften the blows when a program seemed headed for certain extinction at the hands of moderates and conservatives. In a few cases the results were beneficial to all.

Sometimes Brown switched sides. After years of blocking any changes in the workers compensation system, which rewarded corrupt doctors and lawyers and cheated employers and injured workers out of benefits, Brown rammed through a series of reforms to Wilson's desk. Brown did so by running over some of his top campaign contributors, particularly lawyers. The bills bore the names of legislators other than Brown. He worked best when others could share in the credit, a lesson he learned from Jesse Unruh. Someone else's name was usually on the bills.

"I'm seldom, if ever, asked about what they should or should not do. I'm usually asked about how should they do it," he explained once. "Maybe I say 'yes' to my membership too often."^[52]

Brown was sometimes his own worst enemy, and not just for saying yes to his members. He looked sleazy, for example, when he sponsored a bill in 1990 to delay for two years imposition of a recycling fee on glass container manufacturers.^[53] Brown carried the measure, AB 4298, at the behest of the Glass Packaging Institute of Washington, D.C., which had given $8,000 to Brown's campaign funds. Brown's bill ran headlong into another measure, AB 1490, authored by Assemblyman Byron Sher, who was Brown's chairman of the Assembly Natural Resources Committee and was the Assembly's leading environmentalist. Sher's bill would have closed a loophole in the recycling law

and imposed the fees on the glass industry. The bills arrived the same day in the Senate Appropriations Committee, resulting in an embarrassing display of differences between Brown and a key member of his caucus. Sher wisely avoided a public confrontation, and Brown dropped his bill.

Even if Brown was not a convinced environmentalist, one of his most lasting legacies was in protecting the environment. During the 1980s the California Legislature approved the most far-reaching environmental legislation in the nation. The state adopted a Clean Air Act that was far more stringent than the federal law.^[50] The 1988 California law required phasing out smog-causing automobile emissions early in the twenty-first century and gave strong enforcement authority to local air districts. Nolan hated the bill and opposed it at every turn, but Deukmejian signed it. Legislation cleaning up rivers and underground water supplies also won passage. The most important environmental bills for two decades were signed by governors Deukmejian and Wilson and were authored by Democratic legislators Byron Sher of Palo Alto and Burt Margolin of Los Angeles. There could be little doubt who made such successes possible: Willie Brown. In the end, it was his role as the "Members' Speaker" that set him apart from his predecessors.

"I would like to be remembered for two or three things," he told an interviewer from California Journal in 1986, at the height of his power. "One, I'd like to be remembered as one of the best and most effective persons to ever hold this position. I'd like to be remembered by every member who served with me, both in my capacity as a member of the Assembly and as their Speaker. I'd like to frankly be thought of positively by all of those guys and women. I'd want them forever to have me as a friend. And then, finally, I'd really like to have the columnist at the end write that I somehow brought dignity to the job. That's what the headstone should say."^[51]

Chapter Twenty-Five—
Hometown Son

Willie Brown is like a cat. Ever notice a cat? They never jump any higher than they can reach.
Willie L. Brown Jr.
Speaker of the California State Assembly
1981–1995

With his tuxedo glistening in the blazing spotlight, Willie Brown bounced onto a stage in April 1993 in the ornate ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel, the grandiose citadel of San Francisco's old-money establishment.^[1] It was his fifty-ninth birthday party, and he was enjoying every minute of it. The budget stalemate was behind him, he was still the Speaker of the Assembly, and he still had a touch for the spectacle unmatched by anyone in American politics. He was also in need of campaign funds. His guests paid $10,000 a table to be there with him. California's most powerful politician began introducing his after-dinner entertainment, and his guests definitely would not be disappointed. On Brown's cue Ray Charles took the stage, backed by the Oakland Symphony Orchestra.

Sitting at table 55 that evening was the mayor of San Francisco, Frank Jordan. Nearby, Brown's nightlife buddy, Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist, celebrated his seventy-seventh birthday over a cake given to him moments earlier by Brown. At another table John Burton cracked jokes as Brown introduced him as "my oldest friend." Mounting a run for governor, state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi worked his way from table to table shaking hands. "All right, John, that's enough," a slightly peeved Brown ordered. Finally, the crowd settled back as Ray Charles sang "America the Beautiful."

Willie Brown was at his pinnacle that night, arguably the most powerful politician in California, and he was enjoying every minute of it. He had no rival in the Legislature, and he had bested the Republican governor during the protracted budget fight the previous summer. In fact, Pete Wilson had never been more unpopular in his entire career and Brown enjoyed the afterglow that came with the victory. Still, he and Pete Wilson were chastened by that experience, and Brown was not inclined to gloat. The two needed to make peace, each for his own reasons.

Wilson's reelection chances appeared doomed, and he needed a few solid legislative achievements if he were to have any hope of reelection. None were possible without help from Willie Brown. Old Sacramento hands, including Steve Merksamer, began privately counseling Wilson on how to make peace with Brown. It was really no more difficult for Wilson than for earlier governors. Wilson needed to share credit with Brown and show him respect. "I think that one of the major mistakes of the Wilson administration for the first years of their term was to basically go to war with Willie," said Merksamer. "I think it severely hurt Governor Wilson's legislative program and hurt his ability to govern for the first few years."^[2]

Brown also had his motivations for making peace with Wilson. The stalemate had been a huge political gamble, and Brown was loath to repeat it. Besides, the budget stalemate had been a giant distraction for Brown. He could play only a peripheral role in presidential politics in 1992. Watching from the sidelines, Brown initially predicted Bill Clinton was going nowhere. But when Brown met the governor of Arkansas, the two hit it off splendidly. Clinton had several Californians serving as key members of his campaign, including Mickey Kantor, a well-connected lawyer from Los Angeles, and Dee Dee Myers, the young former press secretary to Dianne Feinstein. One of Brown's key allies, Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz, was helping Clinton round up support in Hollywood. Clinton's groundwork paid off when Brown agreed to introduce him at a May 1992 fund-raiser in San Francisco at the St. Francis Hotel. That evening Clinton quipped that he had "met the real Slick Willie." The line brought down the house, and no one appreciated it more than Willie Brown.

Once Clinton was in the White House, he and Brown continued to build a warm relationship.^[3] Brown's chief of staff, Michael Galizio, was in almost daily contact with the White House on California issues. As far as the Clinton White House was concerned, Willie Brown was the de facto governor of California. When Brown took his annual trip to Washington, D.C., in March 1993, he was greeted like a visiting head of state.^[4] Clinton continued to tease Brown about not supporting him early enough in 1992. When he saw Brown in the Oval Office, the president quipped, "By the way, Will, have you endorsed me yet?"^[5]

Although the President of the United States paid Willie Brown the utmost respect and attention, by 1993 and 1994 it was becoming clear that Brown's days as California Assembly Speaker were drawing to a close. Efforts by Democrats had failed to overturn term limits in the courts, and Brown was suddenly facing the prospect of his tenure in the Assembly ending in 1996 at the latest. Term limits would finally achieve what no governor and no Republican Assembly leader could do—removing Willie Brown from Sacramento. Brown wanted to end with a flourish, and he also wanted to show that he was more of a state leader than Wilson.

Brown ushered in 1993 by staging an elaborate "economic summit" at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Sitting at a console, Brown acted as moderator for three days of monotonous lectures by economists, business owners, and the public on the state of the California economy. The summit was fashioned after an earlier made-for-television event hosted by Clinton, but the Los Angeles version had all the Willie Brown trappings. Brown surrounded himself in the darkened auditorium with big television screens, and his staff escorted reporters in and out as if it were a United Nations summit of world leaders. Governor Wilson did himself a favor by showing up and taking the event seriously. The legislation that came out of the summit included Wilson's proposals to revamp the cumbersome workers compensation system by limiting stress claims and making it tougher for injured employees to prove that their job led to their injury.^[6] Brown personally authored AB 1300 to crack down on worker compensation fraud.

Wilson followed with a "crime summit," and Brown followed that with an "education summit." The former enemies seemed to be finally working hand in glove. Brown and Wilson began appearing together in front of business groups giving pep talks on the California economy. The insults of the previous summer were put aside. Brown and Wilson continued to cooperate on business legislation and a host of other issues into 1994. Most stunning of all, Brown began to publicly criticize state treasurer Kathleen Brown, who was maneuvering to become Wilson's Democratic reelection opponent.

Kathleen Brown's pedigree was impeccable. She was a member of the closest thing California had to a political family dynasty as the daughter of former Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown and the sister of former Governor Jerry Brown. But Kathleen Brown was short on much political experience of her own. Before her election as state treasurer, her only previous electoral experience had been in serving on the Los Angeles Unified School District board. She resigned to follow her husband to New York, but they divorced. She remarried and went to law school there before returning to Los Angeles

for a job at O'Melveny and Myers, a politically well-connected law firm whose partners included Warren Christopher, Clinton's secretary of state.

Kathleen Brown soon bored of practicing law, and she ran for state treasurer in 1990. Unruh had built the office from a sleepy post in state government to a powerful position with influence not just in government but also on Wall Street. When Unruh died in 1987, Governor Deukmejian nominated Long Beach Congressman Dan Lungren as his replacement. But Lungren was rejected by the state Senate because it was thought he wanted the job as a springboard for higher office. He was replaced by Thomas Hayes, a talented but politically inexperienced bureaucrat who had been the state's auditor general. Hayes was acceptable to the Legislature, for he held no threat of running for higher office. He turned out to be a plodding campaigner, and no match for Kathleen Brown and the aura of her family in the 1990 election.

Willie Brown, however, considered Kathleen Brown a lightweight. She had not earned her office but had relied on her family name and connections. She had not even finished a single term as treasurer before she was off running for governor. As a campaigner, kathleen Brown was lackluster. As an officeholder, she seemed out of her depth; she did not appreciate the potential power of her job. She spouted platitudes about balancing the budget rather than taking part in meaningful negotiations. She got off on tangents, talking about the state's bonded indebtedness. She seemed all gimmick; flow charts interested her more than the nitty-gritty of deals. In short, Kathleen Brown was not a player; she was no Jesse Unruh. Willie Brown just could not take her seriously.

As Kathleen Brown began her campaign against Wilson, Willie Brown started to criticize her. "She's got to humanize herself," Brown told reporters one day on the Assembly floor, "because everything she says is me-too-ish."^[7] Willie Brown also predicted in February that Wilson would win reelection even though his poll ratings were low. "He has to play it the way he's playing it and that's not making any mistakes," he said.

His remarks went off like a bomb in the Kathleen Brown campaign. Within a week she went to Willie Brown's office, handed him a slip of paper with her phone number, and asked him to call her with any further advice.^[8] But throughout the campaign Willie Brown continued to throw barbs at her. He was further disgusted when she hired as her chief political consultant Clint Reilly of San Francisco, whom Brown detested. Reilly had once urged Feinstein to condemn Willie Brown's ethics during her 1990 gubernatorial campaign.^[9] But Feinstein refused, and after many other disagreements, Reilly quit Feinstein's campaign. Willie Brown liked Reilly no better now that he was working for Kathleen Brown.^[10]

In the view of some in the Capitol, Willie Brown was attacking Kathleen Brown because he could not stand the prospect of a Democrat becoming

governor and upstaging him in his own party. But he had worked hard for Feinstein in 1990; he very much wanted a Democrat to help him build a legacy of achievements rather than one of just stymieing Republican governors. But Willie Brown just could not generate any enthusiasm for Kathleen Brown.

Willie Brown had nowhere to go in the 1994 gubernatorial election. He could not abide Kathleen Brown's Democratic primary opponents, John Garamendi and Tom Hayden. In truth, Willie Brown believed he was better than all three Democrats and the sitting Republican governor. Alice Huffman began floating Willie Brown's name as a potential nominee for governor. But few in the Capitol took it seriously, mostly because he did not take it seriously. He was left standing on the sidelines sniping at the gubernatorial candidates.

Kathleen Brown struggled throughout her campaign, the ground gradually slipping out from under her. She began her campaign comfortably ahead of Wilson in the polls. But he ruthlessly exploited fears over crime and immigration, driving wedges between her and the voters. She was against the death penalty; he supported it. He favored a "three strikes, you're out" mandatory life sentencing law for career felons; she sounded wishy-washy. Most critically, Wilson supported Proposition 187, a ballot measure to cut off welfare and educational services to illegal immigrants. Wilson practiced the politics of resentment, and he struck a chord in the white suburbs.

As her campaign sank, Kathleen Brown tried to cultivate Willie Brown as well as she could, but as often as not she found herself on the defensive. "I have a very good working relationship with the Speaker," she said, not very convincingly.^[11]

Willie Brown finally muzzled himself about Kathleen Brown, but not for long. A few months later he arrived one day for lunch at Biba, a first-class Italian restaurant in Sacramento, and Kathleen Brown was eating lunch at a nearby table. Willie Brown ignored her and joined his own guests. When Kathleen approached his table, he stood and the two exchanged greetings and a hug. Then Willie Brown sat back down, muttering to his luncheon companions, "She hasn't changed. She seems just as insincere."^[12]

Throughout 1994 the biggest guessing game in the Capitol was what Brown would do next. He flirted for a time with running for state Democratic Party chairman, but the job was ill suited for him. Party activists were much too insistent on ideological purity, and the party chairman had little real power.

Brown's associates said his greatest ambition was to be elected a United States senator. But two Democrats, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, won both of California's seats in the 1992 election that also brought Clinton into the White House. Boxer won a full six-year term, filling the seat vacated by retiring Democratic Senator Alan Cranston. Feinstein won the remaining two years of the term vacated by Pete Wilson when he was elected governor. She would need to stand for election again in 1994.

Brown's friends said he was both pleased and downhearted because of their election.^[13] He had two Democratic friends from the Bay Area in the Senate, and that was good. But it also confirmed his opinion that California would never elect a black man to a major statewide office. He believed he was more qualified than either Boxer or Feinstein, but he also realized there was no chance that California would ever elect him to the Senate. In any case, with two Democrats holding the Senate seats, what he thought did not matter; it was out of the question for Brown to run against either.

The Sacramento Bee' s Rick Kushman that year wrote a lengthy two-part article headlined, "What Does Willie Brown Want?"^[14] But there was no answer, not yet. "One thing I've never done, I've never planned my next move my whole life," he told Kushman. "I went to law school by accident, I got elected by accident, I went to the particular college I went by accident. The one time I planned to be the Speaker, I failed. I got the speakership by circumstances far beyond my control. In many cases, I've maintained it in circumstances beyond my control."

Brown tried his hand as a television talk show host on KCRA, then an NBC affiliate in Sacramento. He came to the studio every morning for the Willie Brown Show , while his state driver waited outside. The show sank under weak ratings. The program was neither fish nor fowl: not quite serious enough to be a McNeil-Lehrer News Hour , but too political and issue oriented for the flash and trash of morning entertainment TV. His showmanship did not translate well to the small screen.

Brown turned sixty years old in March 1994, and his friends threw a series of lavish birthday parties for him, concluding with an elegant dinner hosted by U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein. Brown's health was still excellent; he was thin, he drank only an occasional glass of wine, and he could still outpace people half his age. His one major problem was his eyesight; a hereditary disease was gradually whittling away at it. Brown's eyes had difficulty adjusting between light and dark, and it made reading difficult for him.^[15] His secretaries typed memos to him using huge type; it became known around his office as "Speaker Type." He usually wore dark rose-colored glasses in the office to ease the strain on his eyes. When Brown presided over Assembly sessions, he needed at least two sergeants-at-arms, one standing at each side, to point out to him who was seeking recognition. Brown still drove his fast cars, but his night driving was curtailed and a state driver increasingly drove him places. His prognosis was not good; his older sister, Lovia, was already blind from the same disease.

While Willie Brown pondered his political future, 1994 began shaping up as one of the worst in the century for the Democrats. Newt Gingrich and his conservative "Contract with America" propelled the Republicans toward control of both houses of Congress. In California a previously obscure millionaire turned congressman, Michael Huffington, sank $29 million of his

own money into a campaign to try to win Feinstein's Senate seat. Flooding the airwaves with attack ads against her, Huffington nearly defeated Feinstein.

Brown and his staff believed they were in relatively good shape in Assembly races leading into the final weeks of the election campaign. But complicating all the calculations were two ballot propositions: The "three strikes, you're out" sentencing law was on the ballot although it had already been enacted into law. The second, Proposition 187, which proposed to cut off state money to illegal immigrants, was catching steam as the cornerstone to Wilson's reelection drive. Both measures had a visceral appeal, and both promised to bring out white reactionaries, conservatives, and older voters. Compounding Brown's problems further, Brown needed to defend thirteen open Democratic seats, with fully eleven of them highly competitive. Asked how big a problem he had, Brown replied, "Major. Major—major, major, major."^[16]

A week before the election Kathleen Brown seemed obviously doomed, having squandered her huge lead and falling far behind Wilson in the polls. Willie Inc. went into full throttle to save the Democratic majority in the Assembly. On the Friday before the election, Brown's pollsters believed he would lose three seats but still preserve a 44-36 majority. Polling data remained unchanged going into the final weekend before the election.

But four days before the election, the Republicans mobilized a huge telephone bank to contact voters. Brown's polling data went crazy on the weekend before the November election.^[17] Suddenly Democrats all over the state were in trouble. Willie Brown's vaunted election machine tried to do what it had always done, fielding hundreds of legislative staffers into the precincts to get out the vote.

Brown was up against not only a national tide but also the most talented and disciplined Republican leader he had yet faced. Jim Brulte was only in his second term, but he was already a seasoned political veteran when his Republican colleagues promoted him to Assembly Republican leader in 1992. He had worked in his first campaign when he was ten years old. As an adult he had gone to work for U.S. Senator S.I. Hayakawa and was then an advance man for George Bush. Brulte returned to his roots in the Ontario Valley suburbs, east of Los Angeles, to serve as chief of staff to Assemblyman Charles Bader, and eventually succeeded him in the seat. Brulte stood an imposing six feet, four inches in height and weighed 240 pounds. He was single, and his entire life was politics. He directed the Republican effort brilliantly by putting his resources where they could do the most good and ruthlessly avoiding races that were not winnable.

On election day Brown remained in Sacramento, at the center of his election operation. That had always been his practice, but this time his presence took on new meaning. He passed the evening in his corner office in the state Capitol, surrounded by antiques and old oil paintings, talking on the telephone with all his Assembly members scattered throughout the

state. It was the logical place for him to be. It was almost as if each election just might be the last for Brown and he needed to savor the grandeur of his office until the last. In politics, no one is ever sure. Meanwhile, Democrats assembled in the ornate ballroom at the Fairmont Hotel to await the election returns that they believed would keep them in power. But it was not going to be like every election night; things went radically wrong.

That night Assemblywoman Jackie Speier stood in the Fairmont ballroom as the increasingly grim election results rolled over the Democrats. She repeatedly talked with Brown over a small, handheld cellular phone. "We aren't seeing the kind of turmoil we're seeing in the rest of the country," she said optimistically, flipping the phone closed after yet another conversation with Brown.^[18]

But the Democrats lost eight Assembly seats, some lost by margins of only a few hundred votes in Democratic districts. The Republicans won a majority of forty-one seats to the Democrats' thirty-nine. For the first time in a quarter-century, the Republicans were poised to take over the Assembly and elect their own Speaker. "Talk about being dealt a bad hand—the Lord had it in for Willie Brown," said Brown soon after the election.^[19]

On the day following the November election, as the Republicans ordered champagne and planned their victory party, the Democrats met privately. Brown offered to resign. There was talk of electing Phillip Isenberg as Speaker, but he told his colleagues that he was not who they needed. If they were going to war, they needed a wartime Speaker. And, Isenberg told them, there was no one better at political trench warfare than Willie Brown. The caucus then turned again to Brown, who told them, "I don't believe in terrorism but I'm very good at it."^[20]

That afternoon, reporters jammed into the Speaker's small cloakroom for a late-afternoon press conference.^[21] One door in the room opened directly onto the Assembly floor, and the door opposite opened into the Speaker's private office. The room was the same used by lobbyists during the "napkin deal" and in countless other legislative agreements over the years. The reporters who could not fit at the huge table in the center of the room leaned against the antiques and lined the walls. It was raining outside, and many inside the room were wet; the room began to feel like a steam sauna. Nearly everyone inside believed they were about to witness the final act in Willie Brown's remarkable legislative career: his resignation as Speaker. Even his staff looked forlorn, as if waiting for the final curtain.

They were wrong.

Characteristically late to his own show, Brown strode into the room shortly after 4 P.M. He was in a fighting mood. No, he would not resign. The game was far from over. He declared that he would "continue to operate the house" until someone else got forty-one votes to be elected Speaker. He conceded that he did not have forty-one votes at that moment, but, reports to the contrary, "I don't think anybody else has forty-one votes." The reporters

left amazed, wondering what Brown knew that they did not. In fact, the posturing was in a vacuum. Neither side was sure of the outcome because absentee ballots remained to be counted in a handful of close Assembly elections.

Republican leader Jim Brulte believed that Brown was bluffing. As absentee ballots were finally counted, the Republicans emerged with a clear forty-one-vote majority. Brulte then held a press conference boasting that he would be the next Speaker. "I look forward, when all the votes are counted, to leading a 41- or 42-member-strong Republican majority," he declared.^[22] The Republicans began arguing over how to divide up the spoils of their victory. Hard-right conservatives, including Larry Bowler, a former Sacramento County sheriff's deputy, and Curt Pringle, an Orange County ideologue, advocated a "scorched earth" policy against Democrats; after so many years of humiliation at the hands of Willie Brown, they wanted not just to rule but to deliver retribution.

The Republican leaders, however, soon demonstrated that they did not know how to count to forty-one.

As Brulte continued to predict his ascension to Speaker, Brown assured his members that the Republican leader was "puffing."^[23] An audacious plan began to evolve to deny the Republicans the speakership for the remainder of the two-year session. The Democratic strategy involved a series of tactical retreats. No political inch would be conceded until the last minute. In Brown's view, the mere fact that the Republicans held a paper majority of forty-one did not mean the Democrats should give up or make it easier for them to seize power. Brown resolved to hold the speakership for as long as possible and, when that was no longer tenable, to find a friendly Republican who could hold it for him. It was an anybody-but-Brulte strategy. Brulte was by far the smartest, most talented Republican in the house, the first to end Brown's majority. Keeping the tools of power away from him was of overriding importance to Brown and the Democrats. Brulte's campaign skills were so formidable that the Democrats feared that with one more term he could consolidate his Republican majority for the remainder of the decade. He could damage Democrats severely if he became Speaker. "He would have made it impossible for Democrats," said Brown, paying Brulte the ultimate compliment by working so hard to keep him from becoming Speaker.^[24] The Democrats resolved to keep the job out of his hands and give it to a weak Republican.

As long as the rules gave the Democrats rough equality with the Republican majority, the Republicans could never get control of the house. The brazen strategy was fraught with risk because it could fail spectacularly. But in Brown's view the gamble was worth taking. The overarching goal was to keep the Republicans off balance until 1996, when the Democrats could attempt to retake the majority. Underlying the politics was a policy goal: the Democrats wanted to keep the hard-right conservatives from dismantling the health, welfare, environmental, and labor protection laws that the Democrats had been building up for more than two decades. The new Republicans were

decidedly anti-abortion rights and antiwelfare and had a long list of laws they wanted to repeal starting with the California Environmental Quality Act, the cornerstone of the environmental movement in California. Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" was not going to extend into California if Willie Brown's Democrats could help it.

"Incidentally, I think that's best for the institution, too," Brown explained in the midst of the battle. "I think if the state Assembly gets the kook title attached to it, it wouldn't be good, certainly after [my] fifteen years. Have you seen some of the crap they introduced?"^[25]

The Assembly chambers were jammed to overflowing on December 5, 1994. Folding chairs were brought onto the floor, and every gallery seat in the back and in the balconies was filled. It was a special day, the start of a new session; the day when new and old members were sworn into office. In keeping with tradition, the Assembly members brought their families; the proud wives, husbands, parents, partners, and children sat on the Assembly floor with the members and shared in the moment. But there was something about this particular day that was larger than life. The speakership of Willie Brown was about to come to an end after fourteen years of continuous rule, and the new majority was about to take over. The vote would be short and painless, Brulte's press secretary, Phillip Perry, predicted, and the Republicans would then immediately retire to a champagne celebration in the rotunda of the Capitol.

The corks stayed in the bottles that day.

For the previous month Brown and Brulte had been talking almost nonstop to Assembly members. Some of the Democrats were wavering, particularly Dominic Cortese of San Jose. Brown felt especially frustrated because all the new Republicans were under instructions not to talk with him. But Brown still had his reservoir of favors with veteran Republicans. Moments before the vote, Brown told Cortese he wanted to show him something. Brown and Cortese slipped into one of the offices near the Assembly floor. When Cortese came in, he found Republican Paul Horcher, who told him he would vote for Brown.^[26] Seeing Horcher was enough for Cortese to stick with the rest of the Democrats.

Horcher had been the odd man out in the Republican caucus for the past four years. He had given Pete Wilson the critical fifty-fourth vote to raise taxes in the 1991-92 budget, and he had been treated ever since like an outcast. Brown, however, had given him the vice chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee as a reward. Brulte had wanted to give the coveted slot to Stockton Assemblyman Dean Andal, who was possibly the stingiest man in the Republican caucus. When Brulte insisted Horcher move aside

for Andal, Horcher refused, and Brown said that in any case he would never give the vice chair to any Republican who refused to vote for the budget. Horcher then suffered slights large and small from the Republican caucus. The Republican leaders made him the pariah of the caucus. But on that cold morning in December 1994, Horcher was about to exact his revenge. He told Cortese he was about to bolt the Republican party and vote for Willie Brown.

When the roll call for Speaker got under way, and the members began casting oral votes, Horcher quietly slipped into the chambers. When it was his turn, he slammed his fist on his desk and shouted "Brown!"

Republicans were in shock. They sat at their desks with their families, unsure what to do next. Many of the new Republicans did not realize what had happened, and confused murmuring filled the room.

Willie Brown sat beaming at his Assembly desk with his son, Michael, at his side. A picture of father and son was published on the front page of the Los Angeles Times the next day.^[27]

With the Assembly deadlocked at 40-40, the Republicans could not elect Brulte as Speaker. No one, in fact, was Speaker at that moment. The Democrats had one more trick to preserve Brown's speakership. Republican Assemblyman Richard Mountjoy had been reelected to his Assembly seat but also elected to the Senate in a concurrent special election in November. Mountjoy refused to vacate his Assembly seat until after the Speaker election. He was determined to hang around long enough to vote for a Republican Speaker. The Democrats challenged his claim to hold two legislative seats at the same time. If Mountjoy could be disqualified from voting in the Assembly, then Brown would have a 40-39 majority. Then, using as precedent the 1988 legislative counsel opinion that enabled him to be reelected Speaker after the death of Curtis Tucker, Brown intended to have himself elected Speaker with forty votes. The maneuver would not have been pretty; it was legislative politics at its rawest. But it would have been over quickly, and the bad press and editorials that would surely have followed would have blown over within a week or two.

The plan almost succeeded. Under the rules, the Assembly clerk presided on the day of the Speaker election. Chief Clerk Dotson Wilson had once worked for Willie Brown; his rulings should have been a sure bet for the Democrats. But, amazingly, Dotson Wilson ruled against the Democratic challenge to Mountjoy. Under intense pressure, the befuddled clerk threw the question up for a vote of the full house. Brown could not get forty-one votes to sustain his position, and the Assembly remained deadlocked. Despite that setback, the Democrats were elated at the draw. On a day when hundreds of congressional staffers in Washington were getting their walking papers, Brown had protected Democratic staff in Sacramento and remained in control of the Assembly. At the very least, the Republicans would have to share power with them despite the election results. "If [Richard] Gephardt had done for the Democrats in Washington what Willie Brown is doing for

the Democrats here, they'd be naming buildings after him," said Democratic Assemblyman Richard Katz, one of Brown's top lieutenants.^[28]

That night a dejected Brulte returned to his office trailed by a handful of reporters.^[29] Brulte invited them inside, and there they found Senate Republican leader Ken Maddy sitting in a chair watching the U.S. House of Representatives on C-SPAN. "Five for five," Maddy declared, explaining how the new Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had just won his fifth rule change that day. Gingrich was rolling up votes by the minute while his counterparts in Sacramento looked on with envy, having been bested by Willie Brown that day.

Within hours Horcher announced he had left the Republican Party and was now an independent. The Republicans were hugely embarrassed by the turn of events, and they vowed to get even with Horcher. What had been a majority of forty-one after the November election had turned into a debacle for Republicans; they began eating their own by mounting a recall against Horcher. Brown accused the Republicans of letting their "Gingrich envy" get the best of them.

However, Willie Brown still had not won. The refusal of Chief Clerk Dotson Wilson to allow the Democrats to oust Republican Richard Mountjoy meant that the speakership fight would drag on for months. There would be no quick, clean solution. Brown was indeed furious at Dotson Wilson, who had been almost a son to him.^[30] Wilson had been Brown's aide since the 1970s, and Brown had been particularly proud to make him the first black chief clerk in Assembly history. Exhausted by his ordeal on December 5, Wilson was hospitalized the next day. Under the rules, the senior Assembly member presided in the absence of the clerk, and the senior member was Willie Brown.

With Brown presiding on December 6, the Republicans refused to return to the Assembly floor. Afraid that Brown had still more parliamentary tricks, and conceding that he was smarter than they, the Republicans fled the Capitol to deny a quorum on the floor. They holed up across the street at the Hyatt for several days in a spectacle that highlighted their impotence. Brown toyed with asking the highway patrol to arrest them and bring them to the Capitol, but he rejected the idea as too melodramatic. "I know I got 'em. They're just scrambling," he said.^[31]

The Republicans could not stay away from the Capitol for long without looking more foolish than they already did, nor could Democrats hold the house with a 40-40 tie forever. Brown continued to search for Republicans who would cooperate with the Democrats. The odds of finding one or two were on his side, and that was all he needed. "In this business you can't start out with the idea that your goal is going to be realized. You've got to have multiple choices. And if this doesn't work, and this one doesn't, one of your goals will work," said Brown.^[32] He kept his options open, he looked

for openings. He was even willing to give up the speakership as long as the Democrats kept effective control of the house.

The Republicans, however, were intent on owning the title "Speaker." They accused Brown of trying to keep the job out of vanity, failing to appreciate that his underlying goal was to deny them the power to pass laws and control the machinery of the Assembly. Brulte continued to hunt for Democrats, but the Republican accusations only made it harder. "He doesn't understand that no Democrat will leave Willie Brown, not for anything," said Brown. "Why would any Democrat leave Willie Brown? I've never offended any of them. I've defended them full-time. I've always been willing to make the personal sacrifice. So no Democrat is gonna leave Willie Brown no matter what their personal views are. If I say it's a bad idea, it's a bad idea."^[33] As the fight wore on, Brown repeatedly demonstrated he was telling the truth.

Republican Assemblyman Bernie Richter, a former Democrat representing Chico, came close to making a deal with the Democrats to elect himself Speaker. Brown even convinced the black caucus to support him, although Richter was a strong supporter of proposals to repeal affirmative action. But Richter declared that he would not consummate the deal without support from at least one other Republican. Two appeared to be in Richter's corner, but they peeled off at the last minute.^[34] The move to elect Richter fizzled.

Finally, on January 23, the Republicans returned to the floor, and Brown presided as the senior member and quickly recognized a motion to oust Mountjoy from the Assembly. Under the rules, Mountjoy could not vote on his own qualifications, so the motion to oust him passed 40-39. Minutes later, Brown was reelected Speaker, 40-39.

Brulte accused Brown of using "brutal and corrupt" procedural moves. Other Republicans, part of the far-right contingent in his caucus that counseled war and tolerated no contact with Willie Brown whatsoever, went further. Republican Larry Bowler, an ex-cop who still packed a gun even in the Capitol, called it the "Willie Brown junta" and accused him of turning California's government into a Third World country. "It's an illegal seizure of power," Bowler declared, itching to march down the hall and arrest Willie Brown. "The man is an enemy. He's evil and he's dangerous."^[35] Bowler was so paranoid about Brown that he confessed to snipping the wires from microphones in the Assembly Rules Committee room where Republicans routinely met; he said he feared Brown was bugging the room.

Brulte's fatal flaw was in counting on every Republican to vote for him. He had no margin for a single member bolting the caucus. He had taken Horcher for granted. Brulte made other mistakes as well. By prohibiting his new members from talking with Brown, he kept them in line but foreclosed the possibility of a deal. He let the most strident members of his caucus, like Bowler, set the tone; Brulte was unwilling to jettison them to attract wavering Democrats. The Republicans ended up talking only with themselves, and so

they were oblivious to the reality that they did not have enough votes to elect Brulte Speaker.

By contrast, Brown encouraged his Democrats to talk with Brulte, advising them to press him for clear details on the shape of a possible deal. Brown trusted that his Democrats would not like what they heard. Furthermore, every offer Brulte made to a Democrat immediately got back to Brown, and so Brown had better intelligence than his Republican rival. Brulte believed he was negotiating in secret, that the Democrats would surely never tell the Speaker that they had talked with him. But the Democrats compared notes and found contradictions. Jackie Speier, for example, talked with Brulte, and she then reported back to Brown that she was not satisfied with what she heard. Brulte told Brown that some of the Democrats were talking with him, hinting that he had them in the bag. Brown did not let on that he already knew who was talking to Brulte, giving Brulte a false sense of confidence.

For the time being, Willie Brown remained Speaker and in control of the Assembly. But with the Assembly evenly split, reality dictated some kind of a power sharing arrangement. Brown announced he would split the committee chairmanships between the two parties, and he soon did so. He gave Brulte a new office directly upstairs from his own, once occupied by Michael Galizio, Brown's chief of staff. Following the election, it had been remodeled with $100,000 worth of antiques and oil paintings, and it was designated for the minority leader. Brown had figured he might have to occupy it himself. But Brown was still Speaker and Brulte was still minority leader. To Brulte's embarrassment, however, when he moved into the remodeled office a front-page story in The Sacramento Bee made him look, perhaps unfairly, like a grubby, perk-addicted politician.

The Republicans mounted their recall of Horcher, and counted the days until they could oust Brown in June. They continued to boast of how much punishment they would mete out to Democrats once they seized control. But they had no alternative plans. Meanwhile, little got done in the Assembly. The sessions were usually short and dominated by bickering and petty parliamentary squabbles. "Let's get on to the business of the day, which I believe is eating lunch," John Burton proclaimed one day during a particularly useless floor session.^[36]

Republicans succeeded in recalling Horcher in June, and again predicted they would have forty-one votes to elect Brulte as Speaker. Again, the Democrats had a backup plan: a Republican willing to be elected Speaker with their help. Their candidate was Assemblywoman Doris Allen of Orange County, who was by then the senior Republican in her caucus but was treated as if she were a newcomer. By anointing her as his successor, Brown again proved himself the master gambler in the Capitol.

Doris Allen was not easy to get along with. She wore her grudges on her sleeve and had a long memory for every slight. Her Republican colleagues did

not consider her very bright, and they were condescending toward her. She was incensed at Republican leaders for not backing her in a special election for a state Senate seat; they instead supported Ross Johnson. Brown appointed her chairwoman of the Assembly Health Committee, but Republican leaders put roadblocks in the paths of twenty-one of her health care bills and tried routing them to the Assembly Insurance Committee, chaired by Republican Assemblyman David Knowles.^[37]

In early May Allen announced she would not support Brulte for Speaker. Soon after, she announced she would stand for Speaker. Allen made a deal with the Democrats in return for their votes giving them control over half of the Assembly budget and preserving the balance of power on committees. The time had come for the Democrats to move to their next defensive line. Willie Brown announced he would step aside as Speaker as soon as someone got forty votes. The Republicans should have seen it for the clear signal that it was, but they did not understand that Willie Brown had again got the better of them by finding a friendly replacement.

Allen was elected Speaker on June 5, 1995, with the votes of thirty-nine Democrats. The only Republican vote she got was her own. The Willie Brown speakership was officially over, but it did not seem that way. He got a new title, "Speaker Emeritus," and was still clearly calling the shots in the Assembly. By stepping aside as Speaker and letting Allen take over, he prevented the Republican caucus from naming its own Speaker and writing its own rules. In effect, Willie Brown was still controlling the shots.

"Isn't that incredible?" Brown quipped after the vote. "And it's not affirmative action, not affirmative action at all. No assistance, no preference. The old white boys got taken fair and square."^[38]

The day after Allen became Speaker, Brown was asked what would happen if the Republicans refused to recognize Allen and mounted a recall against her as they had against Horcher. "It would be the best thing they could do for me, personally, and the best thing they could do for Democrats generally. It would keep the Republican caucus unstable and in disarray," he said.^[39]

That is precisely what the Republicans proceeded to do. They accused Allen of being Brown's puppet and immediately mounted a recall against her.

To become Speaker, Allen had agreed to a new set of rules under which she shared power with Brown, including control over the all-important Rules Committee. She moved into Brown's old office, but he got the ornate office directly upstairs in the same corner of the Capitol, and Brulte was kicked out. Adding to the insult, Allen assigned Brulte to Horcher's old office.^[40]

More importantly, under the new arrangement Brown controlled the Democratic caucus budget while Allen controlled the Republican budget. That meant that Brulte controlled nothing. He had been better off with Brown as Speaker; Allen immediately began firing Brulte's staff. Brulte, who was planning to run for the state Senate in 1996 anyway, eventually resigned as Republican leader, and was replaced by Orange County Assemblyman

Curt Pringle, a sharp-tongued, highly partisan Republican. Pringle was the chief advocate of following a "scorched earth" policy against Democrats if his party ever got power. The Democrats had succeeded in one of their goals: they had removed the threat of Brulte ever becoming Assembly Speaker.

But few in the Capitol took Allen seriously. The Republicans treated her with open contempt, and even Brown had a tough time concealing how much he was manipulating her. A display of that occurred when Allen's mother had a stroke in July. She rushed to her mother's bedside instead of attending her first meeting as a member of the University of California Board of Regents. She therefore missed an enormously controversial vote to abolish racial- and gender-based affirmative action programs in hiring and admissions. When Brown, standing in a hallway during the marathon meeting, was asked how he had arranged Allen's absence, he could not resist quipping, "I've got to make that stroke last another six hours."^[41] Brown's jesting was in poor taste, but it also illustrated clearly who was really controlling the Assembly.

Allen's tenure as Assembly Speaker was as short as it was stormy. Two days before the end of the session in September, she lashed out at her Republican detractors, accusing them of having "short penises." She staged a press conference to advance her own ideas on how to bail out bankrupt Orange County, her home turf, but she showed scant knowledge of the issue and gave a pitiful performance. Finally Allen resigned as Speaker, and she was still recalled by the voters in her district. She was replaced as Speaker by the only Republican who had come to her side, Brian Setencich of Fresno, who had been in office for less than a year. The election of her successor was a replay of her election as Speaker, with Willie Brown calling the shots. Setencich, thirty-three years old, was elected with Democratic votes; the only Republican votes for him were his own and Allen's. Setencich, a former professional basketball player, was so unassuming and mild-mannered that he was called "the Forest Gump of the Central Valley." He seemed immune from a Republican recall.^[42] He represented a district with a Democratic registration edge; if the Republicans tried to recall him, they would likely end up having him replaced with a Democrat.

Willie Brown and his Democratic caucus had succeeded for a solid year at keeping the Republican leaders from controlling the Assembly. His experience and intelligence overwhelmed his Republican opponents in 1995, keeping them constantly off guard and in chaos. But Brown was also looking for a way to exit from the Assembly while keeping his power intact.

For the previous two or three years he had, in fact, been contemplating what to do next. The one thing he appeared not to be considering was retirement. Maxine Waters had urged him to leave the Assembly and set up a foundation. She said he could become a "West Coast Jesse Jackson."^[43] The problem with that idea was that there was no inherent political power in running a foundation, and there was no reason why the media should pay him any attention if he did. Jesse Jackson had his National Rainbow Coalition

and a nonvoting U.S. Senate seat; he had the attention of the media largely because he had run for president. Willie Brown had real political power to protect. He had long since crossed the line to pragmaticism, and in the view of African American intellectual Cornel West, it would have been almost impossible for Brown to recross the line to become a "prophetic leader."^[44] Brown was not Jesse Jackson. Brown was used to pulling the levers of government; his power was not anchored on oratorical skill and the ability to mobilize masses of people. Brown had built a career extending well beyond a black constituency and into the halls of authority dominated by whites.

"He's unable to really throw the stones from the outside in the same way that some exemplary prophetic leaders have," West observed during a visit to Sacramento, where he grew up, even as Brown contemplated his dilemma. "That's true for any protest candidates or prophetic figures from the outside moving to the inside."

Although Brown could not become a Jesse Jackson, that did not mean he could not play in national politics. He just had to play it differently than Jackson. Brown chose a conventional route with his own unconventional twists. Brown always threw spectacular parties at Democratic presidential nominating conventions. He networked incessantly with the rich and powerful. Many of the Californians closest to President Clinton, like Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and trade representative Mickey Kantor, were Willie Brown's friends long before they met Bill Clinton. Brown's network extended everywhere in politics. He was a major fund raiser not just for California Democrats but also for Jackson and New York Governor Mario Cuomo. Brown did his best to raise money in 1993 for the ill-fated reelection campaign of New York Mayor David Dinkins. He was on a first-name basis with Texas Governor Ann Richards. Brown made his annual trips to Washington, D.C., where he was received with limousines and congressional receptions. But all his flourish and frenzy in those circles led Brown's career nowhere.

Alice Huffman's solution for Brown—running for governor in 1994—was perhaps the most enticing for him. He authorized her to form an exploratory committee, and she printed a few hundred campaign buttons. The idea that he might run for governor won worldwide attention, but it was quickly dismissed as improbable. The conservative British magazine The Economist dedicated one of its "Lexington" columns to Brown in 1993, lauding him for his skill at wielding power but puncturing his prospects for statewide office:

And there is the rub. The gubernatorial trial balloon may well fall back in the Speaker's face because, quite simply, there is not enough air in it. That leaves Mr. Brown, like many an ageing master-courtier before him, still stuck without a strategy for a graceful exit; and, more important, without the legacy that his long period in power deserves.^[45]

Brown's frustration was really an old one in his career. He had always been a realist, and he learned his lessons from predecessors who had tried and

miserably failed in their stabs at running for governor. If Brown harbored ambitions of running for statewide, or even national office, he suppressed them during his tenure as Speaker. The example of Jesse Unruh humiliating himself at the hands of Ronald Reagan in 1970 was still too recent. Assembly Speakers did not fare well in statewide elections. Bob Moretti's run for governor in 1974 was a spectacular flop. Leo McCarthy broke the mold, but not really. McCarthy was elected to the virtually meaningless position of lieutenant governor, but went no further in politics after that. His two attempts at the U.S. Senate failed badly. The skills that it took to be Assembly Speaker were not the skills for a successful statewide campaign in California, with its heavy emphasis on media image and unthreatening blandness. To serve as Assembly Speaker required taking the heat for deals with unsavory lobbyists and boorish legislators.

Then there was the problem of being black. California was changing, but in 1994 African Americans still composed less than 8 percent of the population, and roughly 6 percent of the voters.^[46] Blacks had great success in winning city council, legislative, and congressional seats, but had met with only limited success in statewide elections. Mervyn Dymally served a single term as lieutenant governor but was brought down by a neophyte, Mike Curb. Most heart-wrenching of all, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who remained popular in his own city until his last term, twice failed to be elected governor. Bradley had come painfully close in 1982 against George Deukmejian, but he was blown out in a landslide in a rematch four years later. If the bland, operaloving Bradley could not win the governorship, what chance did the flamboyant, controversial Assembly Speaker stand? And if running for statewide office was foreclosed, running for national office was out of the question.

Brown once made a timeless reflection about himself in the mid-1980s that still applied to his quandary of the mid-1990s: "Willie Brown is like a cat. Ever notice a cat? They never jump any higher than they can reach. You've never seen a cat fall off or try to jump up on a table and not make it. You've never seen it grab a curtain and not be able to climb. I know my limits. I know my liabilities electorally speaking, and I live within those limits. My ego is satisfied and I'm comfortable. I don't need to prove I'm the baddest dude on the block by going out and seeking every elected office."^[47]

As it became clear that he could not remain as Speaker much longer, Brown settled on running for mayor of San Francisco. Brown had once taught the incumbent mayor, Frank Jordan, his favorite bar game, "liar's dice." The stakes then were a glass of wine. Now Brown decided to bet against Jordan for bigger stakes: the city. Jordan, the former police chief under Feinstein, was vulnerable. His poll ratings were low, and he was seen as something of a hapless bumbler. Brown had flirted with the idea of running for mayor years earlier, but had discarded it after the assassination of George Moscone.

At first the job did not appeal to him. His brother, James Walton, the assistant city manager of Tacoma, explained to him the realities of running

a city and it held no allure for Willie Brown. "Street lights, dog-doo and parking meters are not my cup of tea," he remarked in the fall of 1994 with a cute comment that came back to haunt him a year later.^[48]

His buddy, Herb Caen, reported in June 1995, that Brown had a tough time making up his mind. Caen rarely gave a whole column to a single subject, but now he devoted an entire one to Willie Brown.^[49] Caen said that Brown was initially put off by the job. Friends, like Rudy Nothenberg, had told him that the city was a disaster and could not be governed. But Brown was now serious about the job and had made up his mind "finally and irrevocably" to run. Caen devoted much of the column to what amounted to a lengthy endorsement of his friend, but he did not explain what changed Brown's mind.

By May 1995 the idea of becoming mayor appealed to Brown on several levels. For one, he could win. It would keep him in politics, providing him with the stage he craved. In his view there was a huge need in the 1990s for a spokesman for urban America. No sitting mayor, much less a black mayor, was performing such a duty.

On a deeper level, becoming mayor could prove something about his years as Speaker of the California Assembly. It could show that he had executive ability, that he stood for something besides raising campaign money and seeking longevity in power. "I would tell you this," he explained over lunch on the June day after stepping down as Speaker. "The mayorship is going to give me an opportunity to vindicate every doubt that's ever been associated with my skills and my ability, whether on the ethical side, or whether on the substantive side, or whether on the management side. I'm going to do it with a vengeance."^[50]

Brown opened his campaign for mayor on June 3, 1995, with an elaborately staged rally at Peace Plaza in the Japan Trade Center in the heart of San Francisco. With the United States and San Francisco flags as his backdrop, surrounded by dozens of his friends, Brown declared his candidacy. Those standing on the stage with him were part of his history: John Burton, Art Torres, and the Reverend Cecil Williams, who led his Glide Memorial Church choir in gospel songs.

"Willie Brown is coming home! Willie Brown is coming home to San Francisco!" Williams proclaimed.

Brown told the gathering that he wanted to be mayor to prove that he was not just a wheeling-dealing politician from Sacramento, but was still true to the ideals that had propelled him into politics in the first place. "I still have a soul," he declared. His speech was heavily laced with his own personal history. He spoke about his arrival in San Francisco in 1951 and what the city looked like then. "It had a magic about it," he said.

Brown recalled for the crowd that the site where he declared his candidacy for mayor was where he had kicked off his Assembly campaign in 1964. But few there realized that the place had a far deeper significance for Willie

Brown. That morning, under a stunning blue sky, 750 people gathered where his uncle Itsie Collins's gambling casino had once stood a half-century earlier, before it was paved over for a shopping mall. They stood on the very spot where Willie Brown found refuge from the segregation of his youth.

In the summer of 1993—forty-two years after boarding a train westward—Willie Brown returned to Texas for a reunion of Mineola Colored High School graduates.^[51] He had not been back for a decade, and then only for a brief visit. But his sisters in Texas persuaded him to return for the reunion. They wanted to show him things had changed.

Quite unexpectedly, it became an extraordinary day of healing for Willie Brown and his hometown. To his astonishment, when Brown arrived in Mineola he was greeted by the mayor, the city council, the chamber of commerce, a judge, a Texas state legislator, and about one hundred townsfolk. They gave him a key to the city, the first given to anyone, and surrounded him asking for his autograph.

Mineola had changed since Brown left in 1951. The town was trying to reinvent itself—and its past—as a tourist center with Victorian-style bed-and-breakfasts. The fact that Brown—an African American man—was honored at all was evidence of the change. Newcomers little aware of Mineola's legacy of segregation were anxious to acknowledge Brown when they heard he would be visiting. Honoring Brown became a hot political issue in Mineola, pitting newcomers against old-timers. The event's symbolic importance to the small town was enormous, and his visit was the main topic of coffee shop conversation for weeks. The newcomers won, and the city council declared it "Willie Brown Day."

"Oh Lord," Brown declared when he stepped out of a car and saw the throng awaiting him.

"Mr. Speaker," said Sam Curry, a local radio station owner who played master of ceremonies, "Mineola welcomes you back home."

Visibly moved, Brown told the gathering, "We were separate and distinct when we lived here. Thank you for letting this Mineola feel so good."

The site of the ceremony was outside the Beckham Hotel, the place where a murder so long ago had helped spur Willie Brown on his journey to California. When Brown was young, blacks could enter only through the kitchen door. But the Beckham had new owners, and they hosted a reception for Brown and his family following the ceremony. "I ain't never been in the Beckham Hotel," Brown declared as he and his half-brother, James, took delight in walking through the front door.

Racial integration did not come to Mineola schools until long after Willie Brown left, nor did it come easily. Mineola at first resisted and then tried

half-measures. In 1966 the Mineola school district proposed sending eighty black students to a previously all-white school while a new school was being built to serve whites and blacks.^[52] The one thing the school district was not about to do was send white students to the black school, a tacit acknowledgment of the wretchedness of the black school. The school district also refused to send white teachers to the black school. Federal civil rights enforcers, however, threatened to cut off federal funds to the school district unless it fully integrated. Mineola enlisted the help of U.S. Senator John Tower of Texas, who wrote furious letters to his fellow Texan, President Lyndon Johnson, pleading with him to stop federal civil rights enforcers. But Johnson did not intervene, the district had no choice, and the original Mineola Colored High School was torn down in 1966. The scrubby woods of East Texas began reclaiming the school yard at the colored school.

The trains that had once brought Minnie Collins from Dallas every week had made their last stop in Mineola years ago. Local boosters had been trying to get Amtrak to stop in Mineola in the hope that it would help tourism. But with no political clout, Mineola found that its pleas fell on deaf ears. The boosters pressed Willie Brown that day about Amtrak, and in his enthusiasm Brown promised he would lobby whoever needed to be lobbied. Brown promised his hometown he would get it an Amtrak stop, and scarcely a person there that day did not believe him.

That afternoon, after the reception at the Beckham Hotel, blacks and whites joined each other to honor one of their own at a barbecue on the site of the old Mineola Colored High School, on the black side of town. Tom Beesley, the white editor and general manager of the Mineola Monitor , stood among them enjoying the barbecued ribs and reflected that the events of that day were far more important than simply honoring one man. The day represented the first time the white power structure had honored any African American man. On another level, it marked the first time in a long time that whites and blacks had worked together on a common project. "The barrier was lowered here today," said Beesley. "The neatest thing that happened here today is people were saying 'We.'"

Willie Brown enjoyed every minute of it. He posed for pictures with the "I.E. Boys"—Cookie, Bootie, and Jackie. Everyone that day called him "Brookie" and wanted to shake his hand or squeeze his arm. The old pea-packing plant even had a sign up welcoming him home. That evening Brown donned a sharp suit and gave an after-dinner speech to what seemed like half the town jammed into Mineola's conference center. Then he returned to California, back to a state that did not quite love him, but an adopted home that remained fascinated by him, and back to a life story very much unfinished. But in Mineola on that muggy Texas night, Willie Brown was, at last, the hometown son who had made good.