'Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times' by Willie Brown
BOOK REVIEW
One politician's remarkable life.
OSCAR WILDE observed the absurdity of dividing people into good and bad. As he saw it, people were either charming or tedious. By that measure, Willie Lewis Brown Jr. has few contemporary equals. He goes down as one of the most charming, least tedious politicians in modern California history.
This great-grandson of Southern slaves lost but one election, his first. After that, his remarkable life has been a celebration of guile, wit, grace, theatrics and -- yes -- the grandeur of public service. Winning was important. But how the winner conducted himself counted for plenty too. Too bad that Brown's loose-jointed memoir, "Basic Brown," lands on the wrong side of Wilde's maxim. Charming it is not.
Brown was a Democrat on his way up in the state Assembly when I arrived in Sacramento as a cub wire service reporter. He was my kind of politician: bold when others were meek, brash when his colleagues were measured. He was a pugilist, a dandy, a raconteur -- traits that frightened other politicians, but which never seemed to hold Brown back.
Face it, he was interesting in a business that perpetually suffers from aching dullness. He had a grin as big as a hundred-dollar bill and he spent from it freely. His renowned eloquence bestowed consequence on the subjects that mattered to him.
No wonder that his tenure as speaker of the Assembly became a standard for others. No wonder that after he was elected mayor of San Francisco, Newsweek put him on the cover to illustrate an article on the most dynamic mayors in the nation.
I admire Brown because he earned it. He made it look easy, when in fact his life has been in service of his ferocious drive. Once, as a statehousereporter for the Los Angeles Times, I went home to Texas with him for a reunion of his classmates at Mineola Colored High School.
I saw the railroad tracks that cut his hometown in half according to race, and I tried to imagine the beginning for this diminutive black kid from a broken home.
How far he'd traveled. He came of age in the angry era of the 1960s, but anger never got in the way of his determination to live large and for a purpose. If anyone deserved to wear a $6,000 suit, he did. He was the only one at his reunion successful enough to have a white reporter in tow.
The pages of "Basic Brown" convey much of Brown's improbable life story, and no small measure of his contrarian political wisdom. But Brown, I'm afraid, presents himself in this book as a man measurably different and less likable than the one I know in the flesh: a blowhard.
