Pat Brown - Governor of California

Governor of California

In 1958, he was the Democratic nominee for Governor of California. He defeated Republican U.S. Senator William F. Knowland by a near 3/5ths supermajority of 59.75% to 40.16%, and an outright majority with over 1 million more votes out of just over 5.25 million. He was re-elected in 1962, defeating former Vice President Richard Nixon by 52% to 47%. He lost the 1966 election to another future Republican President, Ronald Reagan. Following the turbulence of the Watts Riots, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, the Vietnam War Protests, and Death Penalty politics, a law-and-order Reagan dramatically unseated Brown, who had pledged only 2 terms, with 58% to 42%, winning another similarly huge majority as Brown's '58 gubernatorial success over Knowland, with some 990,000 more votes.

Brown's two terms were marked by an enormous water-resources development program. The California Aqueduct built as part of the program now bears his name. He also presided over the enactment of the California Master Plan for Higher Education, fair employment legislation, a state economic development commission, and a consumers' council. He sponsored some forty major proposals, only five of which failed to pass in the Legislature.

On April 14, 1960, Governor Brown signed the Donahoe Higher Education Act, more informally known as the “Master Plan.” This was actually composed of three parts. There was the statutory bill, which set the functions of the various public institutions. Next there was a constitutional amendment creating a Board of Trustees for the state college system. And finally, there were dozens of general agreements never officially sanctioned by law, including admissions guidelines, maintaining a nontuition policy for California residents other than "incidental costs," and beginning a policy of charging tuition for out-of-state students. During Brown’s two terms, enrollment in higher education in California, including junior colleges, approximately doubled. Spending for the University of California system more than doubled, and for the state colleges more than tripled. Four new state colleges were opened, and three new campuses for the UC system were built.

During his two terms in office, Brown commuted 23 death sentences, signing the first commutation on his second day in office. One of his more notable commutations was the death sentence of Erwin "Machine-Gun" Walker, whose execution in the gas chamber for first-degree murder had been postponed some hours before it was to take place because of an attempted suicide. After recovering, Walker's execution was postponed again while he was being restored to mental competency. After Walker was declared sane in 1961, Brown commuted Walker's death sentence to life without the possibility of parole. Walker would later be paroled anyway after the California Supreme Court held that Governor Brown could not legally deny a prisoner the right to parole in a death sentence commutation. Another prisoner whose death sentence was commuted by Brown committed at least one murder after being paroled.

In contrast, Governor Brown allowed 36 executions, including the highly controversial case of Caryl Chessman in 1960 and Elizabeth Duncan - the last female put to death before a national moratorium was instituted. Though he had supported the death penalty while serving as district attorney, as Attorney General, and when first elected Governor, he later became an opponent of its use. While Governor, Brown's attitude towards the death penalty was often ambivalent, if not arbitrary. An ardent supporter of gun control, Brown was more inclined to let convicts go to the gas chamber if they had killed with guns than with a knife or (in one actual case) with a bowling pin. He later admitted that he had denied clemency in one death penalty case principally because the legislator who represented the district in which the murder occurred held a swing vote on farmworker legislation supported by Brown, and who told Brown that his district "would go up in smoke" if the governor commuted the man's sentence.

During the Chessman case Brown proposed that the death penalty be abolished, but the proposal failed. His Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, was a firm death penalty supporter and oversaw the last pre-Furman execution in California in 1967.

Brown was a relatively popular Democrat in what was, at the time, a Republican leaning state. After his re-election victory over Richard Nixon in 1962, he was strongly considered to be Lyndon Johnson's running mate in 1964, a position that eventually went to Hubert Humphrey. However, Brown's popularity began to sag amidst the civil disorders of the Watts Riots and the early anti-Vietnam war demonstrations at U.C. Berkeley. His decision to seek a 3rd term as governor (after promising earlier that he would not do so) also hurt his popularity. His sagging popularity was evidenced by a tough battle in the Democratic primary - normally not a concern for an incumbent. Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty received 38% of the primary vote while Brown barely received 52%, a very low number for an incumbent in a primary election.

The Republicans seized upon Brown's sudden unpopularity by nominating a well known and charismatic political outsider - actor Ronald Reagan. With Richard Nixon and William Knowland working tirelessly behind the scenes and Reagan trumpeting his law and order campaign message, Reagan received almost 2/3 of the primary vote over George Christopher, the moderate Republican former mayor of San Francisco, and went into the general election with a great deal of momentum. At first Brown ran a low key campaign, stating that running the state was his biggest priority. As Reagan's lead in the polls increased, Brown began to panic and made a gaffe when he told a group of school children that an actor, John Wilkes Booth, had killed Abraham Lincoln. The comparison of Reagan to Booth did not go over well and led to a further decline of the Brown campaign. By election day, Reagan was ahead in the polls and favored to win a relatively close election. However, Reagan won in a landslide; his nearly 1 million vote plurality surprised even his staunchest supporters.