Washington Post
March 8 2008
Crossing (Almost) All the Lines
San Francisco’s Willie Brown recalls the joy of politics.
Reviewed by Ron Fimrite
Sunday, March 9, 2008; Page BW05
BASIC BROWN
My Life and Our Times
By Willie Brown
Simon & Schuster. 350 pp. $26
Modesty is not one of the many attributes former San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown ascribes to himself in this engaging autobiography,
written with veteran journalist P.J. Corkery. Describing his humble
beginnings in rural east Texas, Brown writes, "From that limited and
limiting environment, or perhaps because of it, I grew up to be one
of America’s most adept politicians." "I’m unique," he adds, "given
the fact that I’ve had to run and campaign in districts with very
small black electorates." Oh, and by the way, "I give wonderful
fundraisers: no windy speeches, just lots of entertainment."
But as another unassuming sort, the late Dizzy Dean, once said, "It
ain’t braggin’ if you can do it." And Willie Brown, who turns 74 on
March 20, has done it. A liberal Democrat, he represented San
Francisco in the California State Assembly for 31 years and served as
speaker for a record 14 years, the last six months under a Republican
majority. "When the Republicans finally gained control . . . in 1994,
they didn’t elect a Republican to be speaker, they elected me,"
thanks, he might have added, to a typical bit of Willie-ness that
involved successfully wooing a moderate assemblyman who was out of
favor with the Gingrich-style revolutionaries.
Brown’s long run as the first African American speaker of the
California Assembly was predictably controversial. He reorganized his
party’s fundraising procedures, channeling the money into his own
office, from which he distributed it to needy campaigners. It was a
method that attracted the unflagging interest of FBI agents
apparently determined to incarcerate the speaker as an
influence-peddler. Brown gleefully describes an FBI sting that
involved setting up a sham shrimp-processing company eager to pay for
favorable legislation. The only assemblyman caught in that crude trap
was a Republican mole who cooperated, much to his grief, with the
feds.
At the same time, Brown takes pride in a bipartisan record that
includes chummy relationships with Republican governors from Reagan
to Schwarzenegger. The most unlikely of these pairings was with
George Deukmejian, who was in every sense Brown’s polar opposite. "He
was suburban; I was urban. His idea of a good time on a weekend,
someone once said, was cleaning out the garage of his modest home
down in Long Beach. My idea of a good time was a weekend of clubbing
around the nightspots of San Francisco. His clothes were
ready-to-wear; mine, of course, were bespoke." But in the 1980s Brown
needed Deukmejian’s signature on a bill prohibiting the state from
doing business with apartheid South Africa. By appealing to
Deukmejian’s ethnic heritage and pointedly mentioning the historic
persecution of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, he got it — though only
after agonizing weeks of Gourmet Willie dining with the parsimonious
governor on white-bread tuna sandwiches in the capitol cafeteria.
Brown remains an extraordinarily popular figure in the city he has
called home since he arrived as an impoverished but ambitious student
in 1951. Dapper, convivial, witty, he’s one of San Francisco’s most
accessible homegrown celebrities. But he freely admits that when he
resigned from the assembly in 1995 to run for mayor, he "knew next to
nothing about local government." His campaign received an unexpected
and unprecedented boost when his opponent, incumbent Mayor Frank
Jordan, decided to shake up a humdrum image by agreeing to be
interviewed stark naked in the shower by two male disc jockeys. The
event was amply publicized and photographed, effectively ending
Jordan’s time in office. Asked if he would ever do such a thing,
Brown responded that he disliked appearing in "one-button suits."
As mayor, Brown bravely took on a series of historically unsolvable
problems — the homeless, low cost housing, public transportation,
the 49ers’ demand for a new football stadium — with mixed and mostly
inconclusive results. He appointed the city’s first black fire chief
and its first Asian police chief, and he managed to restore, mostly
through his connections in Sacramento and Washington, San Francisco’s
damaged City Hall to its original magnificence.
In many ways, his book reads like a political primer, offering advice
on everything from fashion to fund-raising. Some of that counsel can
scarcely be considered conventional. It is, for example, his
considered opinion that in politics, extra-marital affairs are not
only inevitable but possibly advantageous. "I think the public
relishes the idea of having someone who’s actually alive holding down
public office. If you’re going to have a reputation, have one for
your dashing ways."
Well, that’s all very easy for Brown to say. Last year, he celebrated
his 50th wedding anniversary with a woman he hasn’t lived with for 25
years. In the interim, he has accumulated an impressive succession of
attractive mistresses and fathered a child with one of them. His
ability to hold on to political power while breaking (almost) all the
accepted rules of conduct may be his chief legacy.
True, his roguish ways are reminiscent of such other flashy mayors as
Marion Barry of Washington and Jimmy Walker of New York. Like them,
he makes no pretense of piety. But unlike them, he’s never run afoul
of the law. He has so nimbly crossed racial barriers that he stands
as something of a pioneer, and yet he has demonstrated no particular
desire to be remembered as an African American leader. Indeed, many
of his closest friends are white.
So let’s just say this man is one of a kind, and be done with it. *
Ron Fimrite, a former San Francisco Chronicle columnist, is at work
on a history of football at the University of California, Berkeley.