Basic Brown

My Life and Our Times

Willie L. Brown

• Editorial: Simon & Schuster
• Año: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781416539766
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Biographies politiques

To The Washington Post, he's "The Last Political Showman of the 20th Century." Bill Clinton has called him "the real Slick Willie." Ronald Reagan's secretary of state George Shultz called this famously liberal politician "a man of his word" and endorsed his successful candidacy for mayor of San Francisco. Indeed Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both called upon him for advice and help. He is Willie L. Brown, Jr., and he knows how to get things done in politics, how to work both sides of the aisle to get results. Compared to him, Machiavelli looks meek. And drab. In Basic Brown, this product of rural, segregated Texas and the urban black neighborhoods of San Francisco tells how he rose through the civil rights movement to become the most potent black politician in America through his shrewd understanding and use of political power and political money. He adapts the lessons he has learned so they can be used by anyone -- black, female, male -- intent on acquiring political power. And this master of the political deal demonstrates why deals are not enough, and that political power grows only when public good is being done. Willie Brown shows how some of the most far-reaching and socially advanced legislation in American history -- like gun control, legalized abortion, gay rights, and school funding -- was carried out under his guidance and on his watch, and tells of the ingenuity, the political machinations, and the personal perseverance that were required to enact what now seems to many to be obvious legislation. These are stories of breathtaking, sometimes hilarious ruses and gambits that show that even the most high-minded legislation needs the assistance of the skills of a shark, which is what Willie Brown often sees himself as. Basic Brown is a compendium of insights and stories on the real forces governing power in American political life that will leave you looking at politics anew. It is also the inspiring and funny story of the rise of a gawky teenager in mail-order shoes and trousers who rose to entertain royalty and schoolchildren, superstars and supersize egos, the saintly and the scholarly, while working to transform and open American politics. If you ever wanted to learn how to be slick, a shark, a do-gooder, and a man of your word, Willie L. Brown, Jr., is the storyteller for you.

PART ONE

Willie Brown Talks the Talk

Willie Brown discourses on the political life, how to succeed, and how to handle money and scandal.

CHAPTER ONE

“Willie Brown, Who Are You Kidding?”

ONE FOGGY SAN FRANCISCO Saturday morning not long ago, a dapper, tweedy, old-school fellow—a real East Coast establishment type—came up to me in the Big 4, a clubby restaurant in the Huntington Hotel atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill. The restaurant with its dark green leather banquettes and dim lighting pays homage to the secret dealings of four of the great railroad barons who lived and plotted in San Francisco’s bonanza days back in the 1880s. It still attracts deal making, high society, high-level gossip, and, occasionally, frank talk.

This old Brahmin was new to me. He obviously wasn’t a San Franciscan. At the outset, I wasn’t sure that he was a fan.

“Willie Brown,” he said, wasting no time on preliminaries, “who are you kidding?

“Look at you,” he said, going right into it, “wearing three-thousand-dollar suits, a five-hundred-dollar shirt, a French foulard tie.” I was a little insulted: the Brioni suit I was wearing cost at least six grand. The Wilkes Bashford shirt was about eight hundred dollars, and my Hermès necktie would have exhausted a trust fund baby’s monthly stipend.

And he didn’t mention the beautiful Russian blonde, Sonya Molodetskaya, on my right, which I thought was unchivalrous. But he was making a point and I didn’t take offense. He went on.

“The way you dress, the way you carry on—it’s pure power, wealth, and privilege. And yet at the same time, you do this number about having started out poor, underprivileged. You do this whole ‘I was born in a log cabin’ routine…Complete hypocrisy, Mr. Mayor. I don’t believe there’s a sincere bone in your body.”

He wasn’t being mean. He was merely confused by me. He figured that anyone with polish couldn’t possibly be a brutha, someone from the rough-and-tumble. He figured I was a highborn fella who found it politically convenient to pretend to be from the streets. He supposed I was more likely to be at home in the celebrated woodsy grove of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club on a Saturday rather than in a barbershop in San Francisco’s black ’hood, the Western Addition. If I told him I was from Mineola, he would have thought I was from Mineola, a Long Island suburb, and not from hardscrabble Mineola, Texas, where I was actually born. Mineola, Texas, the humble home of the pinto bean! He figured if I weren’t the product of one of the red-brick Ivies like Harvard or one of the Silicon Ivies like Stanford, then at least I had gone to Howard or Morehouse, not humble San Francisco State College.

I’ll say this for the old boy: he didn’t start to rant and rave that I was corrupt, on the take, for sale to the highest bidder. Maybe he was just being courteous, maybe he didn’t believe the old libel, or maybe he shied away from the theme of corruption because it might strike close to home. I recognized him as the heir to a great American industrial fortune—on the way to building that pile of cash, there had been a lot of chicanery. The man was also a major Republican contributor.

I said to him, “Brother, I’ll let you in on the secret.”

He jolted at being addressed as “brother,” but he liked the idea of being in the know, of learning the secret behind a player. The powerful like being in on the know.

“You’re right,” I said. “I wasn’t born in a log cabin.”

“I knew it,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I was born under a log cabin.”

It’s true. I didn’t just come from poor circumstances, I came from something worse: segregated rural Texas in the Depression. But I rose in the world to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom of the White House and to host the Queen of England in Sacramento and I intend to get back to the Lincoln Bedroom (I’d like to bring a date) by helping the Democrats regain the White House. The old Republican who accosted me in the Big 4 might not be thrilled with the idea, but I can tell you that my mother and grandmother, who raised me and my sisters and brother, certainly would be.

My mother worked “in service,” as they used to say, as a cook in a Dallas home, eighty miles distant. She rarely changed employers and lived in. Her name was Minnie Collins Boyd. Her grandmother had been a slave. Another grandparent had been a runaway slave. We also had Cherokee blood in us. We may not have been a typical family by white standards, but we were a mighty family. And mother was the most important person in my life, even though I saw her only on weekends. We children always called her by her first name, Minnie.

She was always fixed on us, her five children, and made sure we behaved well. We were not allowed to be flakes. She raised well-disciplined, orderly children.

Like so many black families, ours was a kind of matriarchy. The women kept the family operation together, functioning as a survival unit. My father, Willie Lewis Brown, Sr., but known as Lewis Brown, was gone early. He and I never spent even one night together under the same roof.

If ever there were bad feelings between my parents about either of them or what might have happened to their relationship, it was not communicated to me. But it wasn’t until I was in grade school that I learned that I shared my father’s name. I knew, of course, that I was his son. People around Mineola used to point to me and say, “That’s Lewis Brown’s son.” But I was seven or eight before I knew my name was Willie L. Brown Jr. I thought my name was Lawson Brooks Brown. People called me Brookie. To this day contemporaries back in Mineola still call me Brookie. Lawson Brooks was the leader of a roadhouse blues band that was playing in my grandmother’s tavern the night I was born! My mother had wanted to go and hear the band, but instead she went into labor with me. Someone commemorated the event by calling me Brookie.

In later life, when I became an influential California politician and my father was living in Los Angeles, he would sometimes show up at political banquets, announce himself as the father of the speaker of the assembly, and ask the banquet organizers to be seated. They would ask me and I always consented. Sometimes he was seated at the head table. Despite any feelings I had about his absence during my childhood, I never gave way to them and never gave him away. I looked after him financially, and when the time came, buried him with respect and reverence.

Back in Mineola, my grandmother, Anna Collins, also looked after us, making us study and work. Grandmother was quite a character. She took nothing off no one, black or white. My mother, her daughter, believed the best way to handle society’s hypocrisy was to comply assiduously with its often absurd rules and regulations. She believed in working to change them, but meanwhile she wasn’t going to let society have the slightest chance of laying a hand on her. She made a point of meeting with society’s rules. There’d be no opening against her. My grandmother came to a different kind of accommodation with the local establishment. She made arrangements with it. She and my uncles had to. My mother and uncles called grandmother “mot’ dear,” short for “mother dear.” We children did the same.

You see, in our little town, Grandmother and my uncles ran a speakeasy. It was called the Shack, an apt description of the property. Inside you could buy bootleg liquor called “chock” and listen to blues bands that made the circuit through Texas. I’m not the only popular politician to have a bootlegger in the family closet. Old Joe Kennedy moved lots of scotch through Boston, I’m told.

The Shack was never raided, as far as I know, so grandmother’s arrangement with the sheriff must have been an effective one.

The Shack brought in money, but as kids we all had to have jobs. At age ten, I picked beans in the fields—and was glad to have the cash mother let me keep from my pay. With that I was able to buy some little kid toys and even shoes. A few years later, I shined shoes outside a railroad hotel (fishing nickels out of the spittoon by the stand into which white customers gleefully pitched their coins and phlegm). I made six wet dollars a week. Our primary school was terrible: a one-room schoolhouse. But we were lucky to have that and a high school: Mineola Colored High School. I played point guard for the basketball team, but we played on a dirt outdoor court. Indoor courts were for the white schools.

When my sisters and brother took the train to Dallas to see our mother, we did what the conductor told us to do, which was to pull down the shades on the windows in the colored car when passing through the town of Grand Saline. The good white people of Grand Saline didn’t want to have even a glimpse of black people. It was the law of that town that the colored riders on the train had to pull down the shades when passing through.

From that limited and limiting environment, or perhaps because of it, I grew up to become one of America’s most adept politicians. For fifteen years, I was Speaker of the California Assembly and controlled one of the largest and most complex governmental budgets in the globe. I even got Ronald Reagan, the icon of right-wing Republicanism, to sign liberal legislation! Then I served and thrived through two terms—all that the law allows—as mayor of the most politics-ridden city in America, my fabulous San Francisco.

To commentators, I’m something of a conundrum because I’m a black Democrat. I opposed the War in Vietnam in 1962, long before the teach-ins of Vietnam Summer in 1967 turned opposition to the war into an acceptable political stance. I worked for Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 presidential campaign. As a legislator I won, through long, intricate political fights over many years, battles for gay rights, women’s rights, immigrants’ rights, and against guns. I fought at the 1972 Democratic Convention for George McGovern. I chaired Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1988. What makes me a seeming contradiction is that I’ve also been unusually popular with Republicans. They helped make me speaker of the assembly in 1980, and when the Republicans finally gained control of the assembly in 1994, they didn’t elect a Republican to be speaker, they elected me! I’ve been out of public office since I left the mayoralty of San Francisco in 2004, but I’m still very close to Republicans. Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of my best friends. Ronald Reagan and I got along just fine.

People come to me for political and legal advice all the time. That’s how I earn my living these days—as a political consultant and lawyer. I’m very good at both, but something in the way I’ve done things—from working with Republicans while being a liberal—and in my demeanor—I can’t resist a cutting line—makes people wonder, “Willie Brown, are you kidding?”

Sometimes I’ve had to make it very clear that when it comes to maintaining power, I’m not kidding.

CHAPTER TWO

Willie Brown Is NOT Kidding

IN 1988 I HAD been speaker—Ayatollah—of the assembly for eight years. I would go on to serve seven more years as speaker. I would still be speaker today were it not for term limits, a destructive idea introduced by mean-spirited wretches from Southern California who sought to deprive the people of San Francisco of the right to reelect me as their assemblyman. You know, even Ronald Reagan opposed term limits. He and Nancy Reagan wrote a letter that was to have been used in the ballot campaign against term limits. But due to the indolence of Democratic colleagues of mine in the California State Senate, the letter wasn’t mailed out to the voters, and I and scores of other legislators were “termed-out” because the voters never learned of the Reagans’ opposition to the idea.

Back in 1988, however, I was unchallenged as speaker until suddenly a handful of members of the assembly decided it was time for me to go. They became known as the “Gang of Five.” Their story shows that while the use of power can be elegant (at least when Willie Brown is wielding it), politics itself ain’t pretty.

You already know one of the Gang of Five: Gary Condit, who in 2003 lost reelection to his seat in the U.S. Congress after having become involved in the scandal around the disappearance and murder of his congressional intern, Chandra Levy. Condit was not implicated in Ms. Levy’s brutal slaying, but in denying that he had had an intimate relationship with her, he lied to her family, the press, and investigators. That finished his career. Back then, in 1988, he was an assemblyman from the San Joaquin Valley, the massive agricultural heart of California.

With four cohorts in the assembly—Jerry Eaves, Rusty Areias, Chuck Calderon, and Steve Peace—Condit attempted to oust me from the speakership, even though I had been generous to them, appointing them to powerful committee chairmanships and providing them with campaign funds and perks galore. Indeed, I had been training them to one day succeed me in the ranks of the powerful in the assembly. They got pushy, though.

Without revealing their agenda, they asked one day to meet with me. Assembly members always came first with me, so I stopped what I was doing, brought them to my inner office, and served them coffee. They came right to the point.

“We think it’s time,” said Condit, “for you to give us your exit date.” They said, you know, we really love you, you’ve set the record, you’re going to go down in history: you’ve been speaker for seven and half years, longer than anyone else, and you’re the first black speaker, but we want to take over. I was surprised but not fazed.

I said, “You young fellows, you really impress me with your skills and your ability. Each of you is the chair of a major committee, each of you holds an important position, so when people like you say something like this, I have to listen. But, oh boy, this is not something we can decide easily—there are a lot of ramifications. So let me go cancel all my other appointments for this afternoon and we’ll talk about this in depth.” I stepped out of my office.

Whew. Now, a challenge to a speaker’s hold on his chair can never be unexpected. In fact, in California challenges to previous speakers were common. As speaker you’re holding a job that not only has no built-in tenure, but your job security depends on your constantly pleasing a majority of the membership. Politics and ambition being what they are, somebody is always unhappy. Somebody is always thinking of toppling you.

But you don’t expect a coup attempt from your own side, especially from members to whom you had given chances for advancement. What was it my mentor, Machiavelli, said? “Lavish your allies and underlings with honors and opportunities, and they shall not desire to change princes”? Well, Machiavelli never lived with my legislature. My mistake with the Gang of Five now attempting to oust me was to have shown them, by appointing them to leadership posts, that I thought they themselves might one day make fine speakers of the assembly. They showed their gratitude by telling me to quit.

Their demeanor fascinated me. They wanted me to acknowledge publicly that they were my masters and that they had decided to move things around. They behaved as if they were being charitable towards me by allowing me to be awarded with the record of having been the longest-serving speaker in the history of the California Assembly! And by being the first black speaker. One of them said it looked good on my résumé! I was supposed to be impressed that they were concerned about my record and my future career.

I knew, though, that their coup would not succeed. They had only their five votes—with perhaps a few more members lurking in the shadows. I, however, had more backup, including Republicans as well as Democrats. So while the Gang of Five had a handful of the eighty members of the assembly, when you counted up the numbers (as I did a few times every day), I had over forty-one. And that’s all it takes to stay in power. The Gang of Five could not win.

Nonetheless, these five had to be punished for their temerity and ingratitude. So when I left them behind in my office, ostensibly to tell my secre...