Willie: The Man, the Myth and the Era, The Speakership Battles

Willie – The Man, the Myth and the Era

The Speakership Battles

By

Marcus McGee

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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Willie – The Man, The Myth and the Era

The Speakership Battles

Copyright © 1995, 2011 by Marcus McGee

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ISBN 978-1-4524-3929-7

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Willie – The Man, the Myth and the Era

THE 1974 SPEAKERSHIP BATTLE

The black boy can’t count.¹

Bob Moretti [after Willie Brown’s defeat in 1974]

For all its drama, the 1974 contest for Assembly speakership was quite possibly at one time the best and worst episode in the political life of Willie Brown. It was a painful loss, but because of it, he learned the importance of numbers.

He was also made to finely-tune the art of deal-making and to understand the consequences of failure. Where some would have accepted the resulting punishments as political death, Willie Brown endured, learned and put himself in place for yet another opportunity, years later.

As the curtain opened for Act I of the two-part drama [see Chapter 21 for Act II], he was young, and to many, brash—not at all the smooth, polished operator many came to perceive him to be in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet he was the brilliant chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, distinguishing himself as an astute legislator with great energy, knowledge and a quick wit. The speakership was a natural end.

When exactly he first seriously entertained the desire to become Assembly speaker is difficult to ascertain, but I did come across two stories having similar elements. The first was told to me by former legislator Mike Cullen, who was Willie Brown’s assembly seat-mate for years.

In an interview, Mr. Cullen related to me that in 1968, as Mr. Brown was deeply enthralled telling one of his famous stories to assemblypersons Knox and Crown, that erstwhile session assembly Speaker Jesse Unruh approached and interrupted, saying, Willie Brown, it’s a good thing you aren’t white, because if you were, you’d be Speaker!

Mr. Cullen recalled that he saw the desire in Willie Brown’s eyes at that very moment, relating, I wouldn’t be surprised if at that very moment Willie Brown said, Well, by God, Why not?!"² While the verbiage doesn’t exactly sound like something Willie would say, I’m certain Mr. Cullen summed up the spirit of the moment. The other story is recalled by writer Rian Malan in the April 1982 issue of California magazine:

Toward the end of the sixties, Brown delivered a particularly brilliant speech on the floor, and afterward Speaker Unruh drew him aside. It’s a good thing you aren’t white, Unruh rumbled benignly. Why’s that? Brown asked. Because if you were, Unruh said, you’d own the place.

Both stories suggest that circa 1968, four years after Willie Brown was elected to the California State legislature, Speaker Unruh recognized that he had the ability and the disposition to be assembly speaker. Such a compliment from a man as stalwart and respected as Jesse Unruh undoubtedly stirred the thirty-four year-old Willie Brown to aspire for the speakership, if he was not already coveting it.

Mr. Unruh, though, was destined to leave the legislature for the inevitable shootout between him and Ronald Reagan, California’s Governor, in the 1970 state gubernatorial election. The assembly itself, however, after the 1968 presidential election [the narrow victory by Richard Nixon over Hubert Humphrey], became a Republican majority, and the speakership fell to former minority leader, Robert Monagan. Speaker Monagan, with a 41 to 39 Republican advantage in the assembly, was not destined to remain long, so Willie Brown and others were ready when, in 1970, the Democrats regained the advantage with a 43-37 margin.

His first public attempt for the speakership was in 1971, but he lost to Bob Moretti. Some say he failed because, lacking the finesse that later became his trademark, he tried to strong-arm members into voting for him. Speaker Moretti did, however, appoint Mr. Brown as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, a committee assigned to handle fiscal concerns, and among those, the State Budget.

Like his Democratic predecessor, though, Mr. Moretti forsook his speakership to run for Governor in 1974. If there was a provision in the assembly for passing the scepter of speakership, it would have passed from Bob Moretti to Willie Brown.

To this end, Speaker Moretti recommended Willie Brown for the job, and Willie Brown initially seemed to be a shoe-in for the position, but as assembly politics go, he would not simply assume the speakership unchallenged. Thus the struggle for leadership began.

THE PLAYERS

The challenger turned out to be another San Francisco Democrat, Leo McCarthy, who had in his political experience learned to be a more efficient operator than Willie Brown. Nowhere was this more obvious than it was in the attitudes of the two aspirants in the year leading up to the Democratic Caucus vote.

Where Willie Brown exuded confidence and levity, Leo McCarthy worked silently behind the scenes, eroding Mr. Brown’s position, playing on concerns members had about him, while constructing a coalition of his own. Where Willie Brown seemed to take the votes of the Black Caucus and Latino Caucus for granted, Leo McCarthy, a conservative Democrat, was meeting with them on a weekly basis to make deals that would secure votes. In the end it proved to be simple math, and Willie Brown lost by four votes in the Democratic Caucus.

In picking off members’ votes, Leo McCarthy employed a strategy that played on the ambition, concerns, prejudices, jealousies, and outside loyalties of the legislative membership. Emphasizing the difference between himself and Willie, he told reporters,

I don’t feel I have to be center stage in everything that goes on in the capitol.³

Recalling the almost militant positions Willie Brown had taken during the sixties, some conservative members were worried that, as Speaker, Mr. Brown would take up some of these extremely-left causes at the expense of issues relating to their constituencies.

Others members were concerned that, because of his law practice, he might be spread too thin, that his law concerns might be in conflict with the duty he would have as Speaker, a duty to members. Still others were apprehensive about what they perceived as Willie Brown’s self-absorbed nature: the flamboyance, the clothes, the cars and the glamorous image. And finally, there was just outright prejudice.

The members involved might scoff at hearing it, but there were some who, as liberal as they claimed to be, were just not ready to vote a black man into the Assembly’s top position. Speaker Unruh understood the Assembly’s membership, and he was clearly alluding to members’ racial prejudices and discomfort when he suggested that Willie Brown would be much more successful as a white man.

These are the concerns and prejudices several former members suggested Leo McCarthy played on in order to get the required number of votes that made him Assembly Speaker. When the votes were tallied in the Democratic Caucus, Leo McCarthy counted four more votes than Willie Brown and went before the Assembly on June 27, 1974 with full Democratic Caucus support.

Within the Democratic Caucus, a body of 51 members, there were three voting blocs that figured prominently in the contest between Willie Brown and Leo McCarthy. The first of these was the Black Caucus, with six members: Bill Greene (D-Los Angeles), John J. Miller (D-Oakland), Leon Ralph (D-Los Angeles), Frank Holoman (D-Los Angeles), Julian Dixon (D-Los Angeles), and Willie L. Brown, Jr. (D-San Francisco). According to Lou Cannon of the Washington Post :

Brown sought the Assembly speakership in 1974 and lost, in part because he would not promise a key committee chairmanship to a black legislator whom he considered poorly qualified. Brown’s opponent [McCarthy] made the promise and won.⁴

When, in late December, Leo McCarthy announced committee chairmanships and assignments, John Miller was named Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Bill Greene was named Chairman of the Labor Relations Committee, Julian Dixon became Chairman of the Public Employees and Retirement Committee, and Leon Ralph was chosen to head the Rules Committee. Frank Holoman had been a part of the speakership vote in June; he had been Brown’s sole supporter in the Black Caucus, but he retired before committees were assigned, and his successor, freshman assemblyman Curtis Tucker (D-Los Angeles) became Vice Chairman of the Elections and Reapportionment Committee.

Given the spirit of the rivalry between the two aspirants and Leo McCarthy’s speakership philosophy, it is not surprising that ten year incumbent Willie Brown was relieved of his chairmanship of the powerful Ways and Means Committee and assigned menial seats on three large committees [Human Resources (nine members), Transportation (fifteen members), and Urban Development and Housing (thirteen members)].

But who was this black legislator, at odds with Willie Brown with reference to a key committee chairmanship that Leo McCarthy awarded? Of the Chairmanships dispensed to Black Caucus members, the Judiciary Chairmanship and the Rules Chairmanship were the most key, so it might be supposed that the black legislator was either John Miller or Leon Ralph. Because the Caucus keeps no public record of individual votes, it had been impossible to substantiate who in the Caucus initially supported and who opposed Willie Brown, but there are many in Sacramento who vividly and specifically remember the dynamics of the time.

In interviews conducted with individuals associated with the 1974 speakership contest, it was generally suggested that this black legislator was John Miller, though he did not stand alone against Mr. Brown. During an interview, Alice Huffman, director of the California Teachers’ Association and President of Bay-PAC [Black Political Action Committee], recalled a conversation she had with Bill Green in 1975 after he had become a state senator.

At a reception for Governor Jerry Brown’s black appointees, she asked the senator why he and the other blacks in the assembly hadn’t supported Willie Brown. In Ms. Huffman words:

He unloaded on me. He had me in the corner for one hour telling me all the reasons why, but he was very, very defensive.⁵

Yet the actual, behind-the-scenes developments suggested far more encompassing dealings involving regional and personal loyalties. According to education lobbyist John Mockler, a former state senator, a former Willie Brown staffer, and a friend to Mr. Brown since 1959,

The speakership fight got involved with gubernatorial politics, it got involved with black, north/south power politics. Remember Merv Dymally was running for lieutenant governor—Merv got involved in this negative thing against Willie—he was worried about too many blacks having power. You know that old game—one’s enough... So Merv weighed in to cut a deal with Leo on money.⁶

If indeed Mervyn Dymally saw a Willie Brown speakership as a threat to his position as the preeminent black in the state, he sought to derail the astute assemblyman’s bid in a place where he could yield his greatest influence, in the black caucus. His instrument, or agent within that group was a man who hated Willie Brown—John