Jerry Brown, former California governor: America then and now

James Naughtie (0:00)

Hello, this is the BBC Special Correspondent James Naughtie, and this is The Interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC, people shaping our world from all over the world.

Jerry Brown (0:17)

I want to get freedom. I like that freedom.

James Naughtie (0:20)

A gender equal world would be a better world for men too. We need this as fire. We need healing. We need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do.

Jerry Brown (0:30)

This is a war. The first thing that we want is the war to end.

James Naughtie (0:36)

For this interview, I met Jerry Brown, former governor of California, and we spoke at his home in the hills northeast of San Francisco.

Born in 1938, Brown's first taste of politics was in 1958, when his father, a lawyer, was elected as the first Democratic governor of California. Less than two decades later, Brown followed in his father's footsteps, when he was elected as California's governor himself in 1974, succeeding the future Republican president, Ronald Reagan. It was the first of two eight-year periods as governor, with a gap of nearly three decades between them, in a long political career that made him one of the Democratic party's best known national figures. He oversaw the world's fifth largest economy for sixteen years, ran three times for his party's nomination for president, and over the course of his public life, he knew every president from John F. Kennedy to Donald Trump. Now retired, he lives on a piece of land where his ancestors settled in the middle of the 19th century. You're going to hear about his deep connection to the state of California, his reflections on how his era in politics compares with today's world, and how spirituality has helped to guide him in his personal and political life.

Jerry Brown (1:57)

In the Jesuit Seminary, we were told tantum quantum. That's in Latin, so much, how much. So much is needed, that's how much you get, that's how much you take. No more, no less.

In Buddhism, the vow is delusions are endless. I vow to cut them down. So we say that every day.

James Naughtie (2:22)

Welcome to The Interview from the BBC World Service with Jerry Brown.

Jerry Brown (2:28)

This land was where my grandmother grew up, and when she read me Bible stories as a very young child, she also said the mountain house. The mountain house was a wonderful place, special.

And based on that memory, many, many years later, I got myself control of this land, and I built a house here. And from a place that had been totally abandoned, except for cows, for over 50 years, I now dwell here. I don't garage here, I dwell here, because I live in the memory and the places where my forebears lived so many years ago.

James Naughtie (3:10)

And they came here in the 1850s. California was the place to go, and it really was the idea of opportunity that became embedded in the whole spirit of the place, didn't it?

Jerry Brown (3:20)

Well, it was the place to go, and people with the gold rush came from all over. A lot of Germans came. Foreigners, we talk now about some of the immigrants, but people were all immigrants at that point. And California has always been an exceptional place. It's been a magnet drawing people from Europe and from China and the rest of America. But once you're here, you don't really think about that. We're here, so I don't think about these mass migrations.

James Naughtie (3:50)

And you know the state, as well as anybody on this earth. Your father was governor. He preceded Ronald Reagan as governor. You succeeded Ronald Reagan as governor. You were the bookends for Reagan.

How do you look back on that period?

Jerry Brown (4:05)

More optimistic, less polarized, more full of hope, simpler, exciting, a politics that was not as high tech, as professionalized, as manipulated. Well, politics is always manipulative, but it was a good era. But I would say the emergence of Reagan was very shocking, and certainly shocking to my father that an actor who never spent a day in government could somehow take the reins of California. So I guess in that sense, things were as shocking as they are today.

James Naughtie (4:43)

You say it was a hopeful time. It was certainly a tumultuous time. San Francisco itself was the heart of a kind of intercultural movement in the late 60s, became the city of peace and love and so on. The country was riven by Vietnam.

You were a young man. It was a very divided country. I'm interested that you still look back on it as a time of hope.