Now the Candid Sell

It is Saturday evening of a hard campaign week, and the candidate is tired. His expressive hands play with thick budgetary studies by the Brookings Institution that lie on the coffee table before him. Scattered at his feet are books that he has had little time for recently: Thomas Merton on Zen, Arnold Toynbee on the future, Idries Shah on Sufi parables. As the twilight fades, the soothing voice of Judy Collins drifts through the room from the hi-fi in the corner: " 'Cause she's touched your perfect body with her mind."

But the candidate is tense. He is not getting his point across to a listener. Finally he interrupts the questions. "Is it a liberal program? Is it a conservative program? It's my program. I'm consistent with myself. I don't have to fit some predetermined mold."

Largely because he has refused to fit someone else's predetermined mold, Edmund G. ("Jerry") Brown Jr., a Democrat who sometimes sounds like a Republican, is the favorite to win the Nov. 5 election and succeed Ronald Reagan as Governor of California. In any circumstances, Brown would be a strikingly unusual candidate, points out TIME Correspondent Richard Duncan. A tense and introverted intellectual, Brown spent four years in a Jesuit seminary ("It concentrates your thinking," he says with a half-smile) and cracks jokes in Latin for his press entourage. He has been a follower of Eugene McCarthy and Cesar Chavez, made money as a corporation lawyer, studied Gandhi and Thomas a Kempis, dated Liv Ullmann and Natalie Wood. He is a public man with private layers that are concealed from even his closest friends.

But for all his contradictions and complexities, what makes Brown such a salable commodity this election year is the fact that he is so well attuned to the politics of 1974--to voters disillusioned and ultimately bored by Watergate, frustrated and angered by inflation, wary of and irritated with most politicians. As Brown freely admits, he would not be running for Governor of the nation's most populous state at the age of 36, after only five years in public life, if his father were not Edmund G.

("Pat") Brown, California's Governor from 1959 to 1966, and the man who seemingly ended Richard Nixon's political career in 1962 by crushing him in a race for the governorship. But Jerry Brown is out from under Pat Brown's considerable shadow now and has established himself as his own man with his own views. That is the bedrock requirement for any candidate in a major election this year. Across the country, Republicans and Democrats alike are struggling to convince jaded voters not simply that they are bright and capable candidates but, perhaps even more important, that they are independent, honest and practical as well.

Possible Debacle. Cursed by the sins of Nixon and Watergate and blamed for inflation, the Republicans, of course, are having the hardest time establishing their credibility. Their party faces a possible debacle at the polls.

Democrats predict that the G.O.P. will lose up to 50 seats in the House, three or four in the Senate, and perhaps half a dozen Governors' mansions (see key races page 30). When the G.O.P. candidates were deciding whether to run last spring, they faced the dismal prospect that Nixon would still be in the White House in November. Many of the strongest Republican politicians decided not to try for higher office--or simply not to run at all. Astonishingly, the Republicans did not even field candidates in 61 of the 435 House races (only one Republican is running unopposed).

Republican moneymen, who gave more than $50 million for the re-election of Nixon in 1972, have zipped up their wallets. Laments one G.O.P. leader in the Midwest: "I've been around since the 1930s, and I don't remember it ever being tougher."

To do what he could, the President last week embarked on a series of campaign appearances that will take him to 18 states. But many Republicans who embraced Ford when he replaced Nixon have kept him at wary arm's length since his controversial pardon and the amnesty decisions. Even California's able Republican gubernatorial candidate, Houston Flournoy, desperate for a way to overtake Brown, was less than happy when he learned that Ford would barnstorm his state. Shrugged Flournoy:

"He's not as valuable as he was before he was tarnished by the pardon."

Ford clearly revealed his own worries about the election when he voiced his concern about the survival of the two-party system. Paradoxically, the G.O.P. was slumping while conservatism was rising. A study conducted for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White Inc. (TIME, Aug. 26) revealed that 28% of Americans regard themselves as conservatives and another 23% as moderates who are leaning toward the right.

At the same time, survey after survey has revealed that Americans are losing faith in politicians and political institutions. A Gallup poll released last week shows that 58% of the electorate have little or no interest in the upcoming election, compared with 51% for the mid-term election hi 1970.

Given this situation, any association with Watergate--however unjustified or farfetched--can be a threat to a Republican candidate who might otherwise be a strong favorite to win.

Walking Tour. In a variety of ways, candidates across the country are trying to establish their independence from party bosses and special interests alike.

Perhaps the most spectacularly successful example of this tactic occurred in New York, where voters rejected the entire statewide slate selected by the Democratic Party and chose one more to their liking. Indeed, politicians are falling all over themselves this autumn to convince voters that they are hardly politicians at all. In Ohio, former Astronaut John Glenn, a Democrat, is emphasizing his independence as he builds up an incredible lead in his senatorial race against Republican Ralph Perk, the mayor of Cleveland, (65%-15%, according to the latest polls).

Never before have so many candidates willingly displayed then-- tax returns or opened up their financial records. In Tennessee, Republican Lamar Alexander, 34, one of the few promising young candidates that the G.O.P. has managed to field this year, is making public every donation, however small, to his campaign for Governor. It some-tunes seems as if the archetypical candidate of campaign '74 is one who stages a 750-mile walking tour across his state, rejects all contributions above $100, rarely lets on whether he is a Democrat or a Republican and approaches everything with deadly earnestness.

With the ground rules changing, election year 1974 has attracted a good many new faces, although not as many as might have been the case had the G.O.P. not been so dispirited over Watergate; in all 435 House races, there are only 50 new Republican faces v. more than 100 among the Democrats. In Colorado, Gary Hart, the Democratic senatorial candidate, is 36, and Richard Lamm, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, is 34. Oklahoma's David Boren, a Democrat running for Governor, is 33. California's Colleen O'Connor, who is giving Republican Congressman Bob Wilson a tough time, is only 28. So is Democrat Harold Ford, a black state representative who is taking on Republican Congressman Dan Kuykendall for a House seat from Tennessee.

More of the new faces are female than ever before. This year at least 45 Republican and Democratic women are running for Congress v. 34 in 1972. Three women have been nominated for Governor, and one is expected to win--Connecticut's tough-minded Democrat Ella T. Grasso.

Probably no candidate has carried the theory that honesty is the best policy --and the best politics--further than Democrat Elaine Noble, 30, who is running for a seat hi the Massachusetts legislature. She is frankly admitting that she is a lesbian. "I thought people in my district might at least respect me for having the guts to stand up and say who I was," says the candidate. The voters seem to be doing just that: Noble is favored to defeat Joseph P. Cimino, an assistant district attorney.

From what many of the candidates have been saying this fall, 1974 marks the beginning of the sobering of America hi terms of what politicians can do to solve stubborn social and economic problems.

Says Les AuCoin, 31, a Democratic congressional candidate from Oregon: "No single member of Congress is being honest if he says he has the answer to inflation." Jerry Brown occasionally goes further. "I take a somewhat jaundiced view," he says, "of the ability of government to perform."

In what may be the most significant trend of the campaign, candidates hi both parties are moving away from doctrinaire and extreme positions and converging on a middle ground. As a sign of the times, Allard Lowenstein, once one of the most unyieldingly liberal of Democrats, has accepted the offer of the determinedly centrist Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson to speak for him hi his congressional race in New York.

Pushing Money. As he campaigns from campuses in Northern California to the urban sprawl of Southern California, Jerry Brown exemplifies a great number of the trends that are so evident hi 1974. He vigorously condemns Republicans and Republicanism, which, he claims, is "a philosophy of favoritism for the few and sacrifice for the many." But Brown is no ideologue, and often he adopts traditional conservative positions.

He deplores "the kind of '60s liberalism that involves pushing money after every problem." In education, he is against permissive systems that "teach kids algebra hi the third grade and remedial reading in the twelfth grade." On law and order: "Let's get back to the old-fashioned idea that an individual is responsible for his actions." On drugs: "If people want to get high, they should turn to meditation."

Despite his frank reservations about the efficacy of government, Brown remains an optimist and a reformer who says of his undoctrinaire political philosophy: "I'm convinced that activism hi government, credible action, is the answer. That doesn't mean liberal activism. It means simply getting done for people what they need to have done.

"I'm not precluding anything and I'm not making promises. I don't think people want promises. I say things like this: I say the state's administration will be unproved. I say special-interest logrolling must be eliminated. I say we must have better education. I have to assume people know I mean it, or they will reject me." With a shrug, Brown continues: "I can only say what I feel and what I think is right. I don't know--is that new politics? It just seems like common sense to me."

Sometimes when Brown is waiting to expound his views before an audience, his hands wring fervidly and sweat glistens on his forehead. Inevitably, questions arise about such an intense, complex and ambitious young man, and pop-psyching Jerry Brown has become a statewide pastime. There are those who see Brown as a humorless, intellectual fanatic who first tried submerging himself in the Roman Catholic Church and then, with equally uncritical fervor, opted for the ego and power trip of politics. Others speculate that his drive is pure Freud, the compulsive, humorless, self-righteous attempt of a quiet young man to surpass the booming, back-slapping old pol who happened to be his father. To his family and friends, Brown is simply a shy, intelligent man with "a missionary spirit."

Pat and Bernice Brown have always been somewhat awed by the single-minded zeal of then-- only son. When the boy was in seventh grade and short for his age, he vigorously argued that he should be given hormone shots so that he would grow tall enough to dance with girls who had already sprouted. (The shots were denied him, but hi time he reached a height of 5' 10^".) Kathy, Jerry Brown's younger sister, watched sympathetically as her brother was raised in the penumbra of his father.

"I think his shyness, given my father's personality, was inevitable," she says. "My father liked to share his family with the body politic. We were always paraded out front." Did her brother resent this? "Well," says Kathy, "he went into a Jesuit seminary for four years."

Brown had wanted to enter straight out of San Francisco's St. Ignatius College Preparatory in 1955, but his mother wanted him to finish college first. Bernice Brown has had a considerable influence on her son. Thoughtful and self-contained, she had the drive to finish college by the age of 18. "Oh, he has my genes," she says with a smile. And Pat Brown readily admits: "Jerry's much more like his mother than me."

After a year at the University of Santa Clara, he entered the Sacred Heart Novitiate at Los Gatos, just south of San Francisco. His high school sweetheart came to see him off, recalls Kathy, "like he was going to war."

During his first two years with the Jesuits, Brown was allowed to talk for only a brief period every day. "It was two years of no contact with the outside world, reading only the Bible and Thomas a Kempis," says Brown. "The mental regimentation was fantastic."

Brown quit the seminary in 1960, six years before he would have been ordained. Why? Brown buttons up. "I'd learned as much as I could," he says simply. "I couldn't get any more out of that removed existence." He remains a practicing Catholic.

Anti-War. Brown dallied with the idea of becoming a psychiatrist, but ended up majoring in Latin and Greek at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1964, he graduated from Yale Law School, and eventually joined the prestigious Los Angeles law firm of Tuttle & Taylor. But there were always some things about law that bothered him. Says Pat Brown: "He isn't comfortable with the fact that much of the law is based on adversary relationships rather than the search for truth."

All along, Brown had been edging closer, step by cautious step, to his rendezvous with politics. He started as a virtual dilettante, making a brief tour of Mississippi in 1962 to learn something about race problems. In 1968, he took part in demonstrations for ending the Viet Nam War, his main cause. In 1969, Brown briefly trudged California's dusty roads with Cesar Chavez, the Mexican-American who was leading his crusade to organize migrant farm workers.

It was also in 1969, whether at the command of his mother's genes, a primordial need to match his father, or a simple, old-fashioned lust for power, that Brown switched from backroom strategy to running his own campaign.

Largely because of his name, he outpolled 132 other candidates and won a seat on the board of trustees of Los Angeles Community College.

More Guts. A year later, Brown found his short cut to the top. Still helped mightily by his name, Brown was elected California's Secretary of State, traditionally a sleepy sinecure for men content to shuffle documents. But Brown, using the latent powers of the office, began acting more and more like the state's Attorney General. He sued three oil companies for making illegal campaign contributions. Today Brown runs against Exxon nearly as vigorously as he does against Richard Nixon; he has accepted no contribution from a major oil company--not that many have been offered. Says Pat Brown proudly: "He had more guts than I did, taking on major oil companies. I just let 'em alone."

Staying constantly in the news, Brown managed--with a flair for opportunism that infuriates his opponents --to hitch a ride on the assorted scandals of the Nixon Administration.

Because he was responsible for the work of the state's notary publics, Brown got involved in the controversy over President Nixon's gift of his vice presidential papers to the National Archives.

Brown's small staff discovered that the deed had been predated and notarized by Nixon's California lawyer, Frank DeMarco. The resulting story put Brown's sternly righteous face on front pages across the country.

But Brown's main political accomplishment while serving as Secretary of State was to create the impression that he was not a politician at all. He got across the message that most legislators were corruptible, if not already corrupt, and he tarred Democrats and Republicans alike.

Such conduct cost Brown what few friends he had in the state capital of Sacramento--where "arrogant kid" was the kindest epithet reserved for him--but he was winning a popular following throughout the state. In January, Brown announced that he would campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor. One opponent, Assembly Speaker Robert Moretti, boasted privately: "I'm going to drive Jerry Brown up the wall."

A veteran of ten years in the assembly, Moretti attacked Brown's lack of experience and ridiculed his coldly cerebral approach to problems. "Whenever I see Jerry, I say to myself, 'The Iceman Cometh,' " Moretti told one college audience.

At one impromptu debate before the press, Moretti cried: "What are you, the only holy man around? What do you have, a little statue of yourself you bow down to every night?" Privately Moretti joked: "If I had one wish, I'd want to meet every Democrat in this state between now and the primary. If I had a second wish, I'd want Jerry Brown to meet them."

One of the main issues in the primary fight turned out to be a bold and sweeping proposal for campaign reform drafted by Brown's office. Among other things, the measure set limits for spending by candidates, required them to disclose their finances and restricted lobbyists to spending $10 or less per month on entertaining any one elected official --"enough for two hamburgers and a Coke," Brown liked to point out.

Moretti and most of California's leading politicians in both parties opposed the plan as unworkable. So did business and labor. "I want labor's support," said Brown, "but they're wrong on this one." In the era of Watergate, Brown's instincts were right. Placed on the primary-day ballot by an initiative movement, the plan was supported by 70% of the voters in June. Brown led the Democratic field with 38% of the vote while Moretti received only 17%, trailing even San Francisco's Mayor Joseph Alioto, who got 19%.

While Brown was making his victory statement on TV and promising to bring a "new spirit" to Sacramento, his performance was being closely appraised by the Republican candidate who had also won that evening, State Controller Houston Flournoy. "What a crock," Flournoy muttered to no one in particular and then went downstairs to make his own TV appearance.

The handsome and hard-working Flournoy, 45, has impressive credentials. A former political-science professor, he has spent 14 years in public life and done a commendable job overseeing the state's finances. With an attractive wife and three children, Flournoy has the traditional advantage of the family man over the young bachelor.

Flournoy also has a solid issue to work with: Reagan is leaving California with a surplus of about $300 million after inheriting a deficit of $350 million --from none other than Pat Brown. But for all that, Flournoy is eleven points behind in the polls. So far he has been unable to find a way of countering Brown's charge that he is the heir of a Republican Party that gave the nation Agnew, Nixon, Watergate and inflation.

Flournoy makes no effort to conceal his contempt for Brown, who has called him "a passive, weak-kneed, sleepy administrator, a private Santa Claus for the special interests of this state." In turn, Flournoy feels that Brown is irresponsible and a hypocrite to boot. But Flournoy, an enervating speaker, has been unable to arouse much feeling either against Brown or for himself. "He has no goosepimple quotient," admits one of Flournoy's friends.

If Flournoy's problem is how to turn people on, Brown's is how to avoid turning them off with his unsmiling, tense approach. But with increasing skill, he can force himself to handshake his way through a crowd with something of the skill of his father. One of his ordeals was watched by TIME'S Duncan, who has closely followed Brown's campaign. Duncan's report: "The press, the welcoming committee is there. Brown looks for a moment, silent, while his fierce brown eyes dart back and forth beneath thick black brows. The lobe-length sideburns are frosted white, the profile is sharp, the nose too prominent, a touch hooked and aggressive. The eyes flash out and grab. It is an angular face, almost always serious. The most intriguing expression is a look of inner bemusement that appears at odd times. You ask: Is he laughing at himself? At me? At all of us?

"But there is no amusement in his eyes now. There is a timid, almost fearful look for a moment. Then he steps forward strongly, the hand goes out, the voice is clear and the gaze friendly. The classics scholar begins dropping his ^s. 'How ya doin'? How you guys doin'? Ya lookin' good.'"

To ease the strain of making himself a public figure, Brown takes refuge whenever he can in the three-bedroom house where he lives alone in the hills above Hollywood. There is abstract art on every wall, a refrigerator full of fruit, soft drinks and beer, and outside, a quiet, leaf-strewn lawn and pool. Brown reads, swims and walks on the beach at Santa Monica. "He gets so 'peopled-out,' " says his sister Kathy, "that just silence is fun for him."

Ego Trip. He dates every now and again (there was a blonde waiting at Burbank airport one day during the campaign), and he once brought Liv Ullmann home for a short evening visit. His father had never heard of her, but his mother had and was amused to note that the Norwegian movie star had brought along her young daughter and a nurse. During his Hollywood phase, Brown went out with Natalie Wood. "We're each on an ego trip," he confided to Kathy at the time.

But now Brown's ego trip is politics, and sometimes, he appears to be feuding as bitterly with his fellow Democrats as with Flournoy. He is running almost entirely on his own; his ticket mates rarely appear on the same platform or billboard. To finance his campaign, he depends upon contributions, almost all of which he raises without the help of his father. Total tab for the primary and main race: $2.5 million. No fewer than four of his aides carefully check every donation to make sure it carries no stain of scandal.

Brown insists that he has no political ambition beyond the statehouse, but if he wins next month, he will be only 40 when his four-year term ends, young enough to start thinking about the White

House. That depends, of course, upon how well he performs as Governor. His fellow Democrats have reservations about his style. "It's so cold," says one. "It makes me wonder how Jerry will react in terms of welfare mothers, of prison reform, of issues when it's not just theories but people that count."

Even proud old Pat Brown, now 69, wonders about his son. "He's got the best brain that anybody ever had up there. Whether the best brain will make the best Governor remains to be seen."

Jerry Brown thinks he can handle the job. "It'll be a learning experience," he jokes. As the campaign has gone on, he has clearly mellowed. Sometimes he even shows flashes of joy in public.

But there remain the moments of intense introspection. "You know," Jerry Brown said recently, "Thomas a Kempis cites Seneca to the effect that every time I leave my cell and go out among men, I come back less a man. Sometimes I feel that way." It was a rare admission for a politician, even in 1974, when candor is in style.

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