CALIFORNIA: Just Plain Pat

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California’s Attorney General “Pat” Brown marched across the lobby of San Diego’s U.S. Grant Hotel, his stocky body (5 ft. 10 in., 200 Ibs.) rolling like a sea captain’s, his brown hair carefully slicked with Vaseline Hair Tonic, his ample jowl set with fierce, self-conscious determination. Suddenly he stopped, whirled, brought the men behind him to a skidding halt. “Where is everybody?” cried Pat Brown. “Anybody missing? Are we ready to go?” An aide soothed him: “Don’t worry, Pat. Everybody’s here.” Brown looked carefully around just to make sure. “Well,” he explained, “I want to get out there while people are still going to work.” He spun, led the way out the door, clambered into a Plymouth station wagon. Edmund Gerald Brown, 53, Democratic candidate for Governor of California, odds-on favorite in what may be the most important contest of Election Year 1958, was on his way to a 6:15 a.m. appointment with destiny. He did not intend to be late.

Destiny was waiting last week on the San Diego waterfront, where Pat Brown “officially” opened his campaign against William Fife Knowland, 50, retired as Republican leader of the U.S. Senate to run for Governor in California.

Point of Departure. Arriving on the waterfront, Brown jumped from his car, plunged through the low-hanging fog to the point where hundreds of workmen were converging on the Star & Crescent ferry slip, ready to ride to their Navy shipyard jobs on North Island. “I’m Pat Brown!” cried Candidate Brown, reaching for workmen’s hands as if they were gold nuggets. One, two, three workmen hurried past, heads down, clutching their lunch boxes, leaving Pat’s hand dangling in midair. A ferry attendant came up, told

Brown he was blocking the entrance, ordered him to one side. Brown stepped away, looked suspiciously at several pigeons flapping close overhead, glanced suspiciously at the shoulders of his fresh grey suit. Thirty paces in front, his aides worked at their cheerleading tasks. “Shake hands with Pat Brown,” they shouted, “your candidate for Governor.”

Somehow the incantation began to work. “Hi, Pat,” came a workman’s voice. Hands reached out to grasp Pat’s. “Morning, Patrick,” came a greeting. Then another and another: “Good luck, Pat” and “Give ’em hell, Pat.” Pat Brown grinned happily, pumped hands with a proficiency that would make Estes Kefauver seem like a subway straphanger. “Hey,” he cried to no one in particular. “I feel a speech coming on.” Candidate Brown was in his element, doing what he knows and likes best. He was being just plain Pat, making himself liked—and running well ahead of the opposition.

Point of Agreement. Just six days before, also in San Diego, the opposition candidate, an entirely different sort of man, had opened an entirely different sort of campaign. William Fife Knowland came not to be liked but to demand respect. Outside San Diego’s Russ Auditorium, big, dead-serious Bill Knowland seemed incongruous against the stock California political backdrop—a marimba band, Japanese girls, a flame swallower in vaquero costume. Knowland moved carefully among some 300 people, here pausing for a solemn word, there posing with a tight grin for a photograph, all the while working toward the speaker’s platform. Once he got there, Knowland wasted little time on howdy-dos, plowed straight away into his speech. “I know of no campaign,” rumbled Oakland Tribune Assistant Publisher Knowland, “that may determine the fate of California and the U.S. as much as this one.”

On that single point, just plain Pat and just plain U.S. Senator William Fife Knowland are in complete agreement. California is the second largest (13,600,000, against New York’s 15,800,000) and fastest growing (at a breakneck clip of 500,000 a year since 1950) state in the Union. In its infinite variety, in professionally sophisticated San Francisco and professionally unsophisticated Los Angeles, in the big cotton growers of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys and the lettuce growers of the Salinas Valley, in Okies and Arkies come to suburban prosperity, in oil drillers and gold diggers and pensioners and professors, California provides a political spectrum that can cast its colors nationwide.

At a highly practical level, the Brown-Knowland race can shape California politics for years to come. California’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives now stands at 13 Democrats to 17 Republicans from 30 districts carefully gerrymandered by a state legislature long under G.O.P. control. But after the 1960 census, California will probably rate 37 House seats (v. 40 for New York). If Pat Brown can lead his party to an across-the-board sweep this year and come even close to maintaining his pace while in office, then a Democratic state legislature will control the post-census redistricting in 1961. Already Democratic planners have figured out how to gerrymander for 22 shoo-in Democratic districts against 15 Republican possibles.

Heavy Stakes. More than that, California’s gubernatorial battle probably will exert a profound influence on the presidential election of 1960. Rarely have so many presidential hopefuls had heavy stakes in a state election. Among them:

WILLIAM KNOWLAND himself has aimed at the White House since boyhood, left Washington partly because he thought Sacramento would be a better jumpingoff place for the presidency. A loss to Brown would wreck Knowland’s chances.

VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON is caught between the furiously feuding forces of Bill Knowland and Republican Governor Goodwin J. Knight, the G.O.P. Senate candidate. Unless Nixon can patch things up, a Democratic sweep figures to cost him heavily in prestige and in the benefits of a strong Republican Party in his home state.

MASSACHUSETTS DEMOCRAT JOHN KENNEDY has long counted on the California presidential primary as his best chance to show dramatic vote-getting talents. But a Brown victory would shut Kennedy completely out of California. If Brown wins, he will almost automatically become a favorite son candidate for President—and a genuine hot prospect for the Democratic nomination for Vice President. And although both he and Kennedy are Roman Catholics, that very fact would keep them from ever being on the same ticket.

ADLAI STEVENSON could only benefit by a Brown win. Pat Brown was one of Stevenson’s presidential boosters in 1952, backed him strongly again in 1956. Urged on by powerful Stevenson Democrats in California, Brown would be agreeably inclined toward Stevenson in 1960 and might hope to be Illinoisan Stevenson’s running mate.

Weighty Burden. For a fellow who just wants to be liked, then. Candidate Pat Brown has awesome political responsibilities. In this as in countless other ways, he is an unlikely sort to carry such a burden. California Democrats look to Brown to lead them to their greatest victory in history, yet many of those same Democrats distrust him as an ex-Republican who still rides the coattails of Republican heroes. “I want to make it very clear,” said Brown last week, “that I intend to guide our state government in the great tradition of Earl Warren and Hiram Johnson.”

Similarly, as the son of a professional gambler with a tragic genius for bucking a pair of aces against three deuces, California’s Brown is perhaps the most cautious bet hedger in U.S. politics, rarely moves without holding a Pat hand. Running for one of the nation’s biggest administrative jobs, he is a second-rate administrator with a notorious inability to make decisions. “He has limitless energy in meeting people but not the energy to cope with issues,” says a top California Democrat. Adds a close friend lamely: “While he may be a guy who is not too aggressive administratively, he frankly recognizes deficiencies where they appear. He is honest about them. It’s a real asset.”

Above all eke, behind his hail-fellow heartiness. Pat Brown is a worrier. He worries about his weight. He worries about his clothes, is a meticulous dresser despite a tendency toward garterless socks that droop. He worries about having people disagree with him, follows almost every declarative sentence with a question: “Don’t you think so?” He worries about his hold on the voters. “Frankly,” he confides, “I think I’m closer to the people of California than anyone since Hiram Johnson.” Then he asks: “Don’t you think so?” He worries about being liked, he worries about being disliked, and he worries constantly about being understood. “You know,” says Pat Brown, “in all the things that have been written about me, nobody’s ever captured me. To understand me, you have to understand my life.”

“I Was Miserable.” Edmund Gerald Brown was born April 21, 1905 in San Francisco’s “Western Addition,” then a middle-class section of narrow homes with stained-glass windows and Victorian gingerbread, now part of the city’s expanding Negro community. Pat’s father, Edmund Joseph Brown, was a trim, likable man, given to fancy gold watch chains, aromatic cigars and second-best poker hands.

He prospered briefly with a Fillmore Street nickelodeon, ran shooting galleries, arcades, three-for-a-quarter photo shops. Finally, he bought an interest in a Tenderloin district poker club, bucked his own game and ended on his uppers.

Young Edmund, eldest of four children, picked up pocket money carrying the San Francisco Call and Chronicle, was a better-than-average student, starred in extracurricular activities. “I have always wanted to be a leader,” he recalls. He won first prize in a grade school oratorical contest, ended his speech with the deathless words: “Give me liberty or give me death!” That promptly got him dubbed Patrick Henry Brown—and he has been Pat Brown ever since. But leadership had its problems for cautious Pat Brown. He was easily the best-liked kid at San Francisco’s Lowell High School, served as cheerleader and wanted desperately to be elected president of the student body. “But the captain of the football team was running,” says Brown, “and I was afraid he would beat me.” Pat ran for secretary instead—and won, while the football captain was beaten for president by someone else. “As secretary,” says Brown, “I was miserable. I felt left out of things.”

“Why I Left.” After high school he worked at odd jobs, tended the cigar counter in his father’s poker club, went to night classes at San Francisco Law School and was admitted to the bar in 1927. But his real interest, then and now, was in being liked, in being a leader—and a political career was inevitable. He ran as a Republican for assemblyman in 1928, but the G.O.P. competition was stiff in San Francisco, and Pat lost in the party primary. When he next ran for public office—in New Deal 1939—he was a Democrat. “I’ve never regretted the change,” he tells his friends. “I’m not entirely satisfied with everything, but I have considerable more intellectual solace as a Democrat than I had as a Republican.”

Democrat Brown became a popular luncheon speaker on the subject. “Why I Left the Republican Party,” made hundreds of new friends, joined every organization he could find (including the National Lawyers Guild, which he joined and quit in the 1930s, rejoined and quit again in the 1940s, when he finally discovered that it toed the Communist line. He ran for San Francisco County district attorney in 1939, lost, went out and made more friends, joined more clubs, ran again in 1943—and was elected.

At the time he took office, Pat Brown had never tried a criminal case. But he surrounded himself with promising young trial lawyers, moved hard against gambling and vice interests, wrote a good record.

Straight Ticket. In 1946 California Democrats worked up a “package” slate of left-leaning candidates for state offices, and relatively conservative District Attorney Brown was the candidate for attorney general. “We traveled together and made speeches together.” he recalls. “The Republican newspapers wrapped us up in that package and we couldn’t get out.” Result: a total Democratic loss. Since that day Pat Brown has run alone, lending little or no support to other Democratic nominees—including his current running mate, U.S. Representative Clair Engle, candidate for the Senate against Republican Goodie Knight.

Elected attorney general in 1950, Lawyer Brown was California’s only major Democratic officeholder, plainly his party’s best vote getter. He worked hard at staying that way, traveling constantly around the state, speaking to every group that would listen, shaking every hand within reach. In 1954 he was the obvious Democratic choice for Governor, and party leaders begged him to run. Brown hesitated, pondered, worried over postcard polls showing incumbent Republican Goodie Knight ahead of him. Finally Brown backed out, deciding to run for re-election as attorney general. Rarely referring to his Democratic running mates (part of a deal, snarled his enemies, for the support of the Republican Los Angeles Times’), Pat Brown campaigned on a straight Pat Brown ticket—and won easily while the other Democrats got clobbered.

Brown’s 1954 refusal to run for Governor was attributable to his caution, not his lack of ambition. Early last year Democratic National Committeeman Paul Ziffren and then-State Chairman Roger

Kent began sounding Brown out on his 1958 intentions. They talked to him about running against Bill Knowland for the Senate. Brown gave them no answer. They talked to him about running against Goodie Knight for Governor. Brown gave them no answer. He studied innumerable postcard polls, drove Ziffren and Kent to distraction with his indecision, almost worried himself to death.

Fatal Fracas. Then, incredibly, the Republicans made his decision for him: Bill Knowland announced that he was going to quit the Senate, return to California and run for Governor. That meant fellow Republican Goodie Knight was going to be shoved right out of the Governor’s chair.

Thus began one of the liveliest party brawls in California Republican history. Knight first threatened to fight Knowland to the finish. Then, under relentless pressure from Knowland friends, including the Los Angeles Times’s powerful Publisher Norman Chandler, Knight gave way, announced that he would run for Knowland’s Senate seat. The Knight-Knowland fracas was what Pat Brown had been waiting for; while Bill Knowland and Goodie Knight were exchanging insults, Pat Brown announced his Democratic candidacy for Governor of California.

Throughout the primary campaign, bitter Knight and Knowland forces worked desperately—and successfully—at cutting each other’s Republican throats. Bill Knowland terrified his fellow Republicans by coming out foursquare for a right-to-work law. All other major Republican candidates frantically disavowed the Knowland gambit, and organized labor went out against Knowland as never before. But the most lasting effect of the Republican brawl was that it gave the Democrats the chance to attack a man of straightforward ways and impersonal honesty as a ruthless politician who had brutally shoved Goodie Knight aside to satisfy his own consuming ambitions. And who could better save California from such a tyrant than just plain Pat?

On primary day Californians voted by the millions against the brawling Republicans (TIME, June 16). For the first time in the 45-year history of California’s famed cross-filing primary system, Democrats voted a straight party line, giving handsome pluralities to nearly all Democratic candidates, including Senatorial Candidate Engle. Pat Brown, predictably, led the way, walloping Bill Knowland by an astonishing 662,000 votes.

Changing Currents. With such a plurality, many a candidate would sit back on his fat margin, trusting to God, motherhood and still squabbling Republicans to keep him out of trouble. Brown knew better than anyone that post-primary factors would still be working in his favor, e.g., on the November ballot will be a proposition to take tax exemptions away from Roman Catholic and other privately endowed schools; with a huge Catholic vote expected against that proposition, Catholic Brown can only be a beneficiary.

But for all his foibles, Pat Brown has never yet been one to underrate an opponent or to miss the slightest eddy in the political current. For one thing, Knowland, tied closely to his Senate duties until last month, is now stumping California from border to border and just such stumping won him his senatorial seat over big-name Democrat Will Rogers Jr. in 1946. Knowland lacks Pat Brown’s charm, but he knows what he thinks and says what he knows (TIME, Jan. 14, 1957)—and just such a reputation won him the senatorial nomination on both tickets in 1952. Conceivably, California’s independent-minded voters, after a look at both candidates, might see more virtue in the man who can make up his mind as compared with the fellow who wants to please everybody. Moreover, in the primary Pat Brown had been able to retort to Knowland’s right-to-work labor cry with his own recession-slanted back-to-work demands, California is now moving toward economic resurgence. More than that, Knowland’s labor ideas, plainly stated and clearly understood, seem much more appealing in the light of a potentially dangerous West Coast strike by the corrupt Teamsters Union.

But to overcome his primary setback, Bill Knowland faces a statistically staggering job. To come within 100,000 votes of Brown in November, Knowland must 1) persuade seven of every ten registered Republicans to vote, 2) recapture the 23% of the Republican primary vote he lost to Brown, and 3) increase his 15% slice of the Democratic primary vote to some 25% in November.

Among Friends. That job might seem almost impossible to everyone except dogged Bill Knowland—and worried Pat Brown. Not for one moment since the primary has Brown stopped running. Every day in every way, he keeps plugging. He finds little time to spend with his wife Bernice in their pleasant San Francisco home (the Browns have four children, including a son who is studying for the Jesuit priesthood). Indeed, for the first time since he first ran for assemblyman in San Francisco, Bernice has recently accompanied him on campaign trips.

One recent day Pat Brown started out from Sacramento to a political conference at Henry Kaiser’s Lake Tahoe estate on the California-Nevada line. With him were a TIME correspondent, two aides and Chester Reed, a dedicated retainer who keeps Brown’s scrapbooks and drives his state-owned Cadillac. Candidly, refreshingly. Pat Brown told of his life and times. Then, suddenly, he got excited. “Chester!” he cried. “How fast are we going? Why aren’t we going faster?” Chester patiently pointed out that a truck was dead ahead. “Oh,” said Pat. “Well, pass it when you can.” Calmly, he resumed the telling of his life story. Then: “Chester!” Said Chester: “Yes?” Said Pat: “I think you can pass that truck here.”

That night the group stopped at Cal-Neva, a popular gambling resort on the state line. Brown led the way into a swank hotel casino, then pulled up short. The place was swarming—but, tragically, with outstaters who might not recognize Pat Brown. Pat was baffled. He strode back and forth on the edge of the crowd, jaw tight, brow creased, eyes darting from face to face in search of the familiar. Finally he girded himself, walked up to the registration desk to ask if there were any available rooms. The blunt answer: no. Crushed, Pat walked away while his two aides began telling the clerk who he was. Moments later the hotel manager hurried up, full of apologies. The manager immediately began calling people over to meet “the next Governor of California.” Pat Brown shook hands, slapped backs, made himself liked. So pleased was he that he later plunged on a dice table to the extent of one silver dollar (he lost, betting on eight the hard way).

Pat Brown was happy. He was among friends. He was being liked. He was just plain Pat, running high, wide and handsome ahead of a wounded but still dangerous Bill Knowland.