Pat Brown’s Death Marks Passing of Era

While President Clinton and his Republican rivals loudly proclaimed the end of big government from the frozen precincts of the East in recent weeks, the life of the man who epitomized ambitious postwar liberalism ended quietly in Southern California.

A wide range of political allies and adversaries said Saturday that the death of former Gov. Edmund G. “Pat” Brown Sr. Friday night marked the passing of an American political era, in both its possibilities and its excesses.

A politician convinced of government’s ability to make life better for its citizens, Brown championed a can-do vision of California that has long since been overwhelmed by recession, overpopulation and increasing divisiveness among its people and its politicians.

The university system that he helped build is racked by budget shortages and racial tension. The freeway and water systems have never matched the growth they knew when he left office in 1966. And, most markedly, the pendulum has swung sharply against his belief in the power of government to solve people’s problems.

Political commentator Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, following the presidential campaign in New Hampshire on Saturday, was struck by the contrasts between that contest and Brown’s legacy.

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“This place today is one million light years away from where California politics and government were back then,” Jeffe said. “Here I am following a group of men, including the incumbent, who are competing against everything that Pat Brown stood for . . . active government, government that could make civic life better for everyone. That is all under deconstruction right now, on all sides of the political spectrum.”

Those who opposed Brown during his career conceded that he built many of the state’s great institutions, but said he failed to pay proper attention to the costs or to understand the dangers of big government.

“He expanded government, the welfare system grew, entitlement programs grew,” said one top Republican strategist, who asked not to be named. “He empowered the government and once it became empowered to do some of the good things, it also became empowered to do some of the bad things.”

The day after Brown’s death, his wife, Bernice, and other family members--including his son and eventual successor in the governor’s chair, Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr.--gathered with friends at the patriarch’s three-bedroom house in Benedict Canyon. He had lived for 30 years in the white brick home, a modest structure compared to many of its hillside neighbors in the affluent enclave above Beverly Hills.

One of Pat Brown’s 10 grandchildren, Kathleen Kelly, came outside the house to speak to a reporter, saying the telephone was buzzing with phone calls from all over the country.

“My grandfather, I think, represented to so many people a compassion and a justice that we are just not seeing in this political era,” Kelly said. “So a lot of people are expressing their sympathy on that level.”

Among the callers were President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

“More than any other individual, he built modern California with its great universities, highways and vital water system,” Clinton said later in a prepared statement. “He loved people and he loved politics. Always positive and optimistic, he believed in the promise and he brought out the best in people because they knew he was committed to their future.”

Gov. Pete Wilson described Brown as “an honest liberal--unlike many today who are at pains to disguise their true beliefs in Republican rhetoric. He was, appropriately in a time of great population growth for California, a builder whose great delights and lasting legacies were the state water project and the expansion of the UC system.”

In a prepared statement issued Saturday, Wilson added that Brown “was a formidable politician in his day. Though I had fundamental disagreements with him on crime and the role of big government, I respected his convictions and achievements.”

Daughter Kathleen Brown--who failed in her bid to unseat Gov. Wilson last year--was returning to Los Angeles from Sun Valley, Idaho. She was to plan funeral arrangements with the family, which one relative said would be likely to include burial at Holy Cross Cemetery in the San Francisco area. The family also expects to have some sort of memorial service in the Los Angeles area, but details were pending.

If Brown helped build many of the state’s enduring public works and institutions, some observers said it was largely because he was lucky enough to preside over post-World War II boom days, when aerospace and other industries were growing and the population increased by one-third.

Brown was governor “during the greatest prosperity in the history of the United States,” and even a Pat Brown would have trouble getting such ambitious things done in today’s shakier economy, said Clark Kerr, University of California president during Brown’s tenure.

“There aren’t the resources there were then. No matter how much you might want to do things now, there aren’t the same possibilities,” Kerr said in a telephone interview from his Placer County vacation home. UC president from 1958 to 1967, Kerr was forced out by Brown’s successor as governor, Ronald Reagan.

But Kerr said the former governor, nonetheless, was perfectly suited to his time.

“It was a period of people being confident that the future was going to be better and they could make it better, which is not the attitude today,” Kerr said Saturday. “And Pat Brown’s attitude and interests fit that very well. He was confident he could make a difference and he did.”

Jaime Regalado, executive director of the Brown Institute of Public Affairs named after the late governor at Cal State L.A., called Brown’s tenure a “nice coincidence of history.”

“There is no question that Gov. Brown was the right person, at the right place, in the right time because of what the 1950s and ‘60s were like,” he said. “I’m talking about the economics of the nation and the state and his great vision for the future.”

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Brown’s passing inspired memories of a period of genteel politics that have also become a memory. In 1954, he won reelection as attorney general while cross-filing and winning the endorsement of both Democrats and Republicans--the last candidate to do so.

He often expressed admiration for his two Republican predecessors, Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight. And Warren, who went on to become Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, returned the favor.

“The governor said, ‘You know Chief [Justice Warren], you were one of the great governors in this state’s history,’ ” recalled Frank Cullen Sr., a longtime Brown aide, who was in the governor’s office for the meeting. “And Warren said, ‘No, you are the best governor this state has had in this century.’ ”

“It was from Democrat to Republican and vice versa. It was just electrifying,” recalled Cullen, adding that such a scene would be unthinkable in today’s bitter political climate.

Members of both parties recall that, well into retirement, Brown had a zest for public life and for people.

The senior Brown made himself available to counsel not only his two children in political life, but a new generation of Democratic politicians, although he was careful never to let differences become public.

Confidantes said that, behind the scenes, he never warmed to his son’s message of an “era of limits” and calls for lower expectations of government. But publicly he was always supportive. “I love him . . . I’m proud of him,” he once told a reporter.

The senior Brown also liked to say that his son and his wife, Bernice, who graduated from U.C. Berkeley at 19, were the true intellects of the family. Pat Brown, who had gone straight from high school to night law school, quipped that he was in no position to challenge them.

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Republican political strategist Arnold Steinberg praised Brown for his support of growth and for his robust political beliefs, but said his governorship paved the way for a series of tax increases and spiraling government growth.

Political scientist Larry Berg argued, however, that it is a mistake to write Brown off as simply the beneficiary of economic boom times, who left other generations to pay the bills.

“The question is, is this really an era of limits or is it a failure of political leadership to allocate resources in different ways?” Berg said. “Ronald Reagan’s goal was always to destroy government. If you spend years brainwashing several generations of people that the fundamental problem in this country is government, then you have the climate we have today.”

Jeffe said that, in some ways, the eventual demise of activist government was inevitable.

“Pat Brown built great institutions and used public funds to build them,” Jeffe said. “Government got bigger. It cost more. And it got more distant from the people it served. Out of that grew the tax revolt and this philosophy, built in part by his son, that less is better.”

Several observers noted the ironic parallels between Brown and his old nemesis, Ronald Reagan, who thrashed Brown in the 1966 gubernatorial race.

Reagan lives in Bel-Air, a short drive from the Brown family home. The former president, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, was recently unable to attend a star-studded 85th birthday party in his honor at Chasen’s restaurant. Brown missed his own 90th birthday celebration last April, sponsored by the Brown Institute at Cal State L.A. Kerr was the keynote speaker that evening.

Kerr worked closely with Brown to build new UC campuses at San Diego, Irvine and Santa Cruz. And the governor, in retirement, called the university system his proudest achievement.

As for subsequent governors, including Pete Wilson, the university was also an arena for intense dissent, a place of great triumphs or failures, depending on the observer’s political stripe.

Brown gained something of a reputation as governor for indecisiveness, in large part because of his handling of the case of Caryl Chessman, a condemned kidnapper-rapist whom he first reprieved from a death sentence and then, less than three months later, had put to death.

But in a lesser-known incident in 1961, a year later, Brown was the picture of defiance in his face-to-face confrontation with a caravan of protesters who came to the Capitol to demand that the governor cancel an appearance by a Communist sympathizer on the UC Berkeley campus.

Brown stared down the minister who led the group, Curtis R. Nims, and insisted that the speaker, Frank Wilkinson, had a right to speak. “As long as I’m governor of this state, the students can invite anyone they please to speak on the Berkeley campus, “ Brown said.

Some hailed Brown as a civil liberties champion. And, although Brown would later support police breakups of sit-ins at Berkeley, his tolerance of free speech was later used by Reagan and others to paint him as too soft on student extremists.

Pat Brown had been keenly interested in his daughter Kathleen’s race for governor last year. But his illness trimmed his former mastery of political details, said granddaughter Kelly. “He used to live, breathe politics and it certainly wasn’t at that level over the past few months,” Kelly said. “I think he was much more interested in seeing his family. That was where his focus was.”

His zest for people and his old flair survived until the end, said friend and confidante Cullen. When the longtime aide visited Brown at his home Thursday, he was fragile and had to be awakened by a nurse. But when he saw Cullen, he fell immediately into character, Cullen said.

“He said, ‘Oh Frank. Great! Let’s have lunch,’ ” Cullen said. “It was tremendous. It was the governor.”

Times staff writers Ken Reich, Bill Stall and George Skelton contributed to this story.

* POLITICAL LEGACY

Brown had an impressive record of accomplishments. A3