Willie Brown: Style, Power, and a Passion for Politics

In 1992, after returning from a meeting with Brown (formerly Speaker of California's state assembly and now the mayor of San Francisco), presidential candidate Bill Clinton noted that he had met ""the real slick Willie."" Brown is flashy (his suits generally cost $2500 and his cars run to Porsches and Jaguars) and ballsy (he answered charges of corruption by appearing in Godfather III taking campaign contributions from Mafia Don Michael Corleone), but most of all he is a consummate politician. Born in 1934 in Mineola, Tex. Brown came to California in 1951, where he got an education in law at Hastings College of the Law and a political education at local branches of the Young Democrats and the NAACP. In 1964, he was elected to the state assembly--the first African American legislator to represent San Francisco in that body. The next year, he rose to national prominence when friends appended his name to a telegram urging foreign leaders to prevent further escalation of the Vietnam war, making him, according to Richardson, ""something of a founder of the antiwar movement, however accidental his involvement was."" In 1980, he was made Speaker of the Assembly, a position he held until 1995 by juggling campaign contributions, committee assignments, offices, staff, parking spaces and personal favors to keep ""at least forty-one of his eighty members happy at any given time."" This is not a personal biography: Brown's wife and children appear only as counterpoints to his innumerable extramarital affairs. Nor does the author pay much attention to the larger cultural issues.(Richardson says of the Watts riots only, that ""black leaders in California were galvanized by the 1965 Watts riot like no other single event."") What Richardson, a senior writer on the Sacramento Bee, does, and does well, is portray Brown as the archetypal political animal, astute, flexible and extraordinarily lucky. Photos not seen by PW. (Nov.)