Slick Willie

A busy Sunday. First, the Dallas Morning News published my review of Willie Brown's new memoir:

BASIC BROWN: My Life and Our Times
By Willie Brown
Simon & Schuster, 332 pp., $26

When you’ve lived in Texas, politics in almost any other state seems tame. That’s true even of California, despite the occasional movie star turned politico. Which may be why the two most colorful politicians in recent California history came from Texas.

The first was Jesse Unruh, a corpulent good ol’ boy known as “Big Daddy,” who ruled the California State Assembly as speaker for eight years in the 1960s, and became a power broker in the national Democratic Party. Unruh grew up in a sharecropper family in the Panhandle town of Swenson and made his way west to Los Angeles as a teenager. A brilliant manipulator of people and money, Unruh is famous for two statements, one of them “Money is the mother’s milk of politics.” The other, quoted here in an expurgated version, is his advice to his fellow legislators: “If you can’t take the lobbyists’ money, eat their food, drink their booze, sleep with their women, and then vote against them, you don’t belong here.”

And then there’s the Machiavelli of Mineola, Willie Lewis Brown Jr., who approvingly quotes both of those statements by Unruh in “Basic Brown,” his engaging and sometimes outrageous memoir. Mr. Brown was born in segregation as well as poverty. His mother, the granddaughter of a slave, worked as a cook for a Dallas family, 80 miles away; she came home to Mineola only on weekends. In 1951, at the age of 17, Mr. Brown went to San Francisco to live with his uncle. Thirteen years later, he was elected to the California State Assembly, where Unruh became one of his acknowledged mentors. Most politicians, Mr. Brown says, “just want to do deals. I learned from Unruh that you could shape the game itself.” He followed in Unruh’s steps and became speaker in 1980, serving in that position until 1995. In 1996 he was elected mayor of San Francisco, and served until 2004.

Mr. Brown, one of the most prominent African-American politicians, tells us proudly, “I have never run for an assembly seat in a district that was more than 15 percent black.” But he is typically shrewd about the role of race in politics, observing that “as a black politician, you’re constantly having to spend energy to integrate yourself into the minds of white power brokers as a real, pure force of politics. You also have to spend as much time reintegrating yourself into the black community.” It’s a dynamic one can readily witness in the campaign of Barack Obama.

“Basic Brown” was compiled by San Francisco newspaper columnist P.J. Corkery from months of Saturday morning breakfast-table conversations. But Mr. Corkery is little more than an amanuensis: The voice here is unmistakably – for anyone who has witnessed him over the years – that of Willie Brown, right down to the references to himself as “Willie Brown,” which he does as frequently as Sen. Robert Dole used to invoke “Bob Dole.”

The epithet for Mr. Brown has always been “flamboyant.” Certainly, few American politicians have ever flaunted it the way he did: the $5,000 Italian suits from high-end clothier Wilkes Bashford, the Porsche that he used to make the 90-mile trip between San Francisco and Sacramento in about an hour (after making sure the Highway Patrol knew his license-plate number), the string of beautiful girlfriends. (He and his wife have been married for 50 years, but separated for 25.)

With visibility comes vulnerability, but “Basic Brown” is all about how his opponents – from the good-government organization Common Cause to the Republicans (and some Democrats) to the FBI – never laid a glove on him. It’s a lively saga with an underpinning of seriousness. For Mr. Brown, who now runs his own institute on politics and public service, essentially a consultancy for politicians, believes in making government work – even if you have to ignore, bend or break a few rules to do so.

Some of the book’s most entertaining anecdotes have to do with his mayoralty, trying to solve the myriad problems of an often fractious city. Those on the right who seem to think that liberals move in totalitarian lockstep apparently don’t know liberal San Francisco, where no cause lacks a constituency and at least two factions that oppose it. Mr. Brown tells how he succeeded in achieving a modicum of consensus, but also why he occasionally failed to solve problems that range from the treatment of the homeless to the demands of the 49ers for a new football stadium.

All politics is local, they say, and some of the political maneuvers in “Basic Brown” may not engage readers outside of California. But the book is full of delights not only for political junkies and policy wonks but also for the general reader. There’s a very funny chapter, for example, on dressing for political success, in which he critiques a few of his fellow politicos, such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein: “While she never looks sloppy, she sometimes looks hit or miss, as if she were caught between seasons.” (You can see here why Mr. Brown was so popular with the gay community: He was fabulous, and he can dish.)

Politicians worry about their legacies, and “Basic Brown” is its author’s attempt to preserve his own. But Willie Brown’s legacy consists not so much in his achievements – which were substantial – as it does of his legend. He succeeded in having it his own way, and becoming what he set out to be: “a real, pure force of politics.”
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Brown's flamboyance is always noted. His shrewd good sense? Not so much. So here's a bit of an interview with Brown by Charlie Rose: