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TE ARCHIVES

STATE GOVERNMENT
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

iV WITH
J. ANTHONY KLINE

OFFICE OF

MARCH FONG EU

SECRETARY OF STATE

University of California • Berkeley

CALIFORNIA

STUE AICIIVFS

California State Archives
State Government Oral History Program

Oral History Interview

with

HON. J. ANTHONY KLINE
Legal Affairs Secretary, 1975-1980

October 29, November 26, 1990

April 16, 1991
San Francisco, California

By Germaine LaBerge
Regional Oral History Office
University of California, Berkeley

RESTRICTIONS ON THIS INTERVIEW

None.

LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. No
part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written
permission of the California State Archivist or Regional Oral History Office,
University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to:

California State Archives
1020 O Street, Room 130
Sacramento, CA 95814

Regional Oral History Office
486 Library

University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720

The request should include identification of the specific passages and
identification of the user.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

J. Anthony Kline, Oral History Interview, Conducted 1990, 1991 by
Germaine LaBerge, Regional Oral History Office, University of California
at Berkeley, for the California State Archives State Government Oral
History Program.

March Fong Eu
Secretary of State

California State Archives
1020 O Street, Room 130
Sacramento, CA 95814

Information
Research Room
Exhibit Hall
Legislative Bill Service
(prior years)

(916) 445-4293
(916) 445-4293
(916) 445-4293
(916) 445-2832

PREFACE

On September 25, 1985, Governor George Deukmejian signed into law A.B. 2104
(Chapter 965 of the Statutes of 1985). This legislation established, under the
administration of the California State Archives, a State Government Oral History
Program "to provide through the use of oral history a continuing documentation of
state policy development as reflected in California's legislative and executive
history."

The following interview is one of a series of oral histories undertaken for
inclusion in the state program. These interviews offer insights into the actual
workings of both the legislative and executive processes and policy mechanisms.
They also offer an increased understanding of the men and women who create
legislation and implement state policy. Further, they provide an overview of issue
development in California state government and of how both the legislative and
executive branches of government deal with issues and problems facing the state.

Interviewees are chosen primarily on the basis of their contributions to and
influence on the policy process of the state of California. They include members
of the legislative and executive branches of the state government as well as
legislative staff, advocates, members of the media, and other people who played
significant roles in specific issue areas of major and continuing importance to
California.

By authorizing the California State Archives to work cooperatively with oral
history units at California colleges and universities to conduct interviews, this
program is structured to take advantage of the resources and expertise in oral
history available through California's several institutionally based programs.

Participating as cooperating institutions in the State Government Oral History
Program are:

Oral History Program

History Department

California State University, Fullerton

Oral History Program
Center for California Studies
California State University, Sacramento

Oral History Program
Claremont Graduate School

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley

Oral History Program

University of California, Los Angeles

The establishment of the California State Archives State Government Oral
History Program marks one of the most significant commitments made by any
state toward the preservation and documentation of its governmental history. It
supplements the often fragmentary historical written record by adding an
organized primary source, enriching the historical information available on given
topics and allowing for more thorough historical analysis. As such, the program,
through the preservation and publication of interviews such as the one which
follows, will be of lasting value to current and future generations of scholars,
citizens, and leaders.

John F. Burns
State Archivist

July 27, 1988

This interview is printed on acid-free paper.

Participating as cooperating institutions in the State Government Oral History
Program are:

Oral History Program

History Department

California State University, Fullerton

Oral History Program
Center for California Studies
California State University, Sacramento

Oral History Program
Claremont Graduate School

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley

Oral History Program

University of California, Los Angeles

John F. Burns
State Archivist

July 27, 1988

This interview is printed on acid-free paper.

J. ANTHONY KLINE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTERVIEW HISTORY i

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY iii

SESSION 1, October 29, 1990

[Tape 1, Side A] 1

Childhood and early education-College, graduate school, and law
school-Law clerk to Justice Raymond Peters-Wall Street lawyer-Legal
services programs-Public Advocates-Appointments secretary for Jerry
Brown during transition, 1974- Jerry Brown's trust and friendship-Legal
affairs secretary, 1975-1980

[Tape 1, Side B] 15

Political demands on elected officials-Gathering information before
inauguration, 1974-Early "players"-Duties of legal affairs
secretary-Extradition and clemency issues-Prison reform-Uniform
Determinate Sentencing Act of 1976-Jerry Brown, a centrist on criminal
justice issues.

SESSION 2, November 26, 1990

[Tape 2, Side A] 30

The press-Judicial appointments and diversifying the courts-Court
reform-Mandatory pre-trail arbitration-Bail reform-The power of bail
bondsmen.

[Tape 2, Side B not recorded]

[Tape 3, Side A] 44

Jerry Brown and the legislature-Brown's unconventionality-Cosmic view
in problem solving: the medfly and fluoridation-Cabinet meetings.

SESSION 3, April 16, 1991

[Tape 4, Side A] 52

Bail reform, 1989-Workers' Compensation System-Power of the Third
House-Agricultural Labor Relations Act, 1975-Water issues: 160-acre
limit-Experience on the bench.

[Tape 4, Side B] 64

San Francisco Superior Court, 1980-1 982 -Views on the legal profession
and legal process-Rose Bird as chief justice-Success of Jerry Brown as
governor.

[Tape 5, Side A] 76

Diversity in state government.

INTERVIEW HISTORY

Interviewer/Editor

Germaine LaBerge

Editor, University of California at Berkeley State Archives

State Government Oral History Program
Member, State Bar of California (inactive status)
B.A. Manhattanville College, Purchase, New York (History)
M.A. Marygrove College, Detroit, Michigan (Education)

Interview Time and Place

October 29, 1990

Judge Kline's chambers, San Francisco, California
Session of one hour

November 26, 1990

Judge Kline's chambers, San Francisco, California
Session of one and one-half hours

April 16, 1991

Judge Kline's chambers, San Francisco, California
Session of one and one-half hours

Editing

The interviewer/editor checked the verbatim manuscript of the interview
against the original tape recordings; edited for punctuation, paragraphing, and
spelling; verified proper names and prepared footnotes. Insertions by the editor
are bracketed.

Judge Kline reviewed the transcript and approved it with minor
corrections.

The interviewer/editor prepared the introductory materials.
Papers

Judge Kline's publications are listed following the interview.

Tapes and Interview Records

The original tape recordings of the interviews are in The Bancroft Library,
University of California at Berkeley. Records relating to the interview are at the
Regional Oral History Office. Master tapes are deposited in the California State
Archives.

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

J. Anthony Kline was born August 17, 1938, in New York City. He
graduated from Johns Hopkins University with honors in 1960. He pursued
graduate studies at Cornell University as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, receiving
his M.A. in 1962. At Yale University he received the Gherini and Sutherland
Cup prizes and earned his law degree in 1965.

After graduation from law school Justice Kline served as law clerk to
Justice Raymond E. Peters of the California Supreme Court. Thereafter he was
for four years an attorney in New York with the Wall Street firm of Davis Polk
and Wardwell. In 1971, after returning to California, he was one of the
founders of Public Advocates, Inc., the first non-profit public interest law firm
in the west. He was Managing Attorney of Public Advocates when, in January
1975, he was appointed Legal Affairs Secretary to Governor Edmund G. Brown,
Jr.

As Legal Affairs Secretary Justice Kline served on the Governor's cabinet
for six years, until he was appointed to the San Francisco Superior Court in
September of 1980. He was appointed a Presiding Justice of the Court of
Appeal in December 1982.

At the present time Justice Kline is Chairman of the Board of Directors of
the San Francisco Conservation Corps, a member of the Board of Directors of
Youth Service America, the American Jewish Congress (Northern California
division), the San Francisco Private Industry Council, and President of the
Youth Guidance Center Improvement Committee. He is also a member of the
California Judges Association, the Institute of Judicial Administration and the
World Affairs Council.

Justice Kline has published the following articles:

Kline, An Examination of the Competence of National Courts to
Prescribe and Apply International Law: The Sabbatino~"
Case Revisited, i Univ. of San Francisco Law Review 49
(1966).

Kline, Displacement of the Poor from Housing by the

Federal-Aid Highway Program: Remedies Under the
Highway Relocation Assistance Act of 1968, 4
Clearinghouse Review 408 (1970) .

Kline Sc LeGates,

Citizen Participation in the Model Cities Program:
Toward a Theory of Collective Bargaining for the T
1 Black Law Journal 44 (Spring 19/1) .

Kline Sc Sitkin,

Financing the Private Practice of Public Interest Law,
13 Arizona Law Review 823 (1972).

Kline, Law Reform and the Courts: More Power to the People or
to the Profession?, 53 California State Bar Journal 14
(Jan. /Feb. 1978).

Kline, Merit Selection: The Pursuit of an Illusion, 55
California State Bar Journal 421 (1980) .

Kline, Curbing California's Legal Appetite, Sunday Los Angeles
Times, Opinion Section, page 1 (Feb. 12, 1978).

Kline, The Media and the Courts, Los Angeles Daily Journal,
90th Anniversary Issue (Sept. 11, 1978).

Kline, Is Time Running Out on the Legal Profession? , ABA Bar
Leader (Nov. /Dec. 1978).

See also:, Hufstedler, Kline, Zolin et al., (symposium),

Our Congested Courts, 1 Los Angeles Lawyer 14 (April
1978) .

[Session 1, October 29, 1990]

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

LABERGE: Why don't you tell me a little bit about your childhood: where
you were born, your schooling, your parents?

KLINE: I was born in 1938 in New York City. My parents were

themselves the children of European immigrants-Russian and
Hungarian Jews. I grew up in a small town on the south shore
of Long Island, Cedarhurst, went to Lawrence High School,
graduated from high school in 1956. The town I grew up in was
kind of a bucolic suburb of New York City, close by the beaches.
[Interruption]

LABERGE: You were talking about the bucolic suburb of New York City.

KLINE: Yes, just a, you know, a suburb in the fifties after the war. It

was a very pleasant childhood. I was kind of an obstreperous
kid. I was bright, but I was a disciplinary problem in grammar
school and in high school, had difficulty getting into college,
spent a year at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.
Then I transferred to Johns Hopkins University, and at
Johns Hopkins I had a kind of an intellectual awakening. I then
became something of an overachiever. I majored in philosophy at
Johns Hopkins, graduated with honors, then went to Cornell
University on an Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, got a master's degree
in public administration in 1962 and decided at that point that I
was better cut out for a career in the law. Then I went to Yale

Law School, from which I graduated in 1965.

LABERGE: Is that where you met [Governor Edmund G., Jr.] Jerry Brown, at
Yale?

KLINE: Yes. Jerry Brown was in the class of '64. I was in the class

behind him. We lived in adjoining quarters at the law school and
first became friendly there. Til get back to that later.

When I graduated from Yale, I came to California to serve
as a law clerk to a California supreme court justice, Raymond E.
Peters. I served as his law clerk for that one year, 1965-66. In
September of '66 I went to Los Angeles to head up Young
Democrats for Brown. That was in the gubernatorial campaign of
1966. [Governor Edmund G., Sr.] Pat Brown was running
against [actor] Ronald Reagan. After that election I returned to
New York City and worked in a large Wall Street law firm, Davis
Polk & Wardwell. I stayed at Davis Polk for about four years,
much longer, really, than I ever intended to stay. In 1970 I came
back to Berkeley, and became a legal services lawyer.

I was the chief of litigation of the National Housing and
Economic Development Law Project, which was part of the Earl
Warren Legal Center at Boalt Hall [School of Law]. This was a
so-called "back-up center" that was taking on test cases on behalf
of the clients of neighborhood legal services programs. My
specialty was lawsuits challenging the destruction of low-income
housing by urban renewal projects or federally-financed highway
projects.

LABERGE: Did that include the Hayward freeway?

KLINE: Yes, as a matter of fact.

UBERGE: I read something about that, but I'm fuzzy on it.

KLINE: There were federal statutes that protected low-income people

from displacement as the result of a federally-financed
construction project. Those statutes have been on the books for
many, many years, but were ignored because the beneficiaries of
the statutes were, by definition, poor people who didn't know
they had legal rights, had no access to lawyers and were
unaccustomed to asserting their rights. One of the things the
Legal Services Program did was to suddenly provide lawyers who
told the beneficiaries of these statutes, of what their rights were,
and asserted them on their behalf.

One of the reasons I was so successful in these lawsuits--in
one period of about eighteen months I successfully enjoined well
over a billion dollars' worth of freeways in six or seven states-
was not because I was a brilliant lawyer but because state
highway departments had grown so accustomed to ignoring the
law that they were very easy to beat. In any event, our purpose
in these lawsuits was not so much to stop the freeway or stop
the urban renewal project as it was to vindicate the housing
rights of people who'd been displaced. I guess the biggest single
suit that I won at that time was a lawsuit enjoining the Yerba
Buena Urban Renewal Project here in San Francisco; that's a
lawsuit that went on for seven or eight years.

In any case, partly because of my success in court, and
maybe for some other reasons, in 1971 the Ford Foundation
awarded me and two other legal services lawyers, [Robert] Bob
Gnaizda and [Sidney] Sid Wolinsky, about a $3 million grant

over a period of years to start the first public interest law firm in
the West. Actually, it was only the second in the country. It was
called Public Advocates, and Public Advocates is still around and
still quite successful.

From 1971 to 1975, I was the managing partner of Public
Advocates, which had about eight lawyers. We were based in the
Tenderloin section of San Francisco, and we represented most
every minority organization or women's organization in California.
The National Organization for Women, the NAACP [National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People], the Mexican-
American Political Association, the League of United Latin-
American Citizens, the Native American Association, on and on
and on. We were really, I think, an extraordinarily successful law
firm, and it was a lot of fun. Keep in mind this was in the early
seventies when the courts were still seen as an important place in
which to obtain social change. Some people don't think they're
nearly as effective a forum for that today as they were then. But
we were young; we were having a lot of fun, and we were
committed to change. Frankly, I can't imagine that lawyers with
the interests we had could have found more rewarding and more
enjoyable work. So that was a wonderful time.

Because Public Advocates was a 501 (C) (3) nonprofit
corporation, we were not allowed to get involved in conventional
political activities or any political activities. Frankly, we were not
very politically oriented in the conventional sense of party politics
or election politics. So I was never involved during the whole
entire time I was with Public Advocates, that five-year period, in

any sort of politics, even though Jerry Brown at that time had
been elected to the L.A. [Los Angeles] Community College Board
and then had been elected secretary of state and thereafter ran
for governor. I was never involved in any of his political
campaigns, nor was I ever later. When I served in the governor's
office, I was not active in his purely political efforts-campaigns
for president or governor, things of that sort. I was never really
involved in that. I didn't see myself, and I don't think anybody
else saw me, as having any great skills on that front.

L\BERGE: Or possibly interest?

KLINE: Not really. Yes, that's right. I had no real interest in raising

money, and I had no particular interest in developing a political
campaign. My interests were much more issue-oriented and
confined, if not to the executive branch, to the development of
policy.

In any case, in 1974, Jerry Brown was elected. I believe I
was the first person he appointed. I was appointments secretary
during the transition; that is, the period after his election in
November and before his inauguration in January. During that
period the two chief people in the transition were myself and
[Executive Assistant] Gray Davis. So that my first responsibility,
really, was to learn what the appointment responsibilities of the
California governor were, chiefly from the Reagan people who
were still in office. We had a pretty smooth transition. Gray and
I went to Sacramento on several occasions and interviewed
[Executive Assistant Edwin] Ed Meese, who set up interviews
with every member of the governor's cabinet. They gave us

briefing books and quite a bit of helpful information.

Although the governor didn't appoint anybody to a state
position during his transition, it was during that time that we
began to gather the information that resulted in his later
appointments. At that time we were not interested in judicial
appointments. We were talking only about appointments to the
governor's cabinet and department heads.

LABERGE: Before you go on, could you say something about your transition
from working for a Wall Street firm to doing public interest law?
How that came about, or what influenced you?

KLINE: I guess the real question is not why I went into public interest

law or legal services; the real question is why did I go to Wall
Street? There's a picture [motioning] of the Wall Street law firm
on the wall, on the top, and there's Public Advocates on the
lower right. And there's Jerry Brown's office right in the middle.

When I went to New York in 1966, the myth still prevailed
that Wall Street was the big league for lawyers. I was a
bachelor; I wanted to live in New York City with a little money
in my pocket, and test myself in that world. I never had any
long-term interest in staying on Wall Street.

Keep in mind that I went to graduate school and law school
in the sixties. The country was going through great social
change. Many of us saw the law as a way to effectuate
progressive social change as the federal courts had, for example,
in Brown v. Board of Education.1 We were inspired by the

1. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

UBERGE:

KLINE:

possibilities the legal process presented. We saw the law and
change through the law as the great victory of our society, the
victory of reason. The idea it was possible to achieve long
overdue changes in society, to make rights more widely available,
to eliminate invidious forms of discrimination, racial and
economic, and so forth, was heady stuff.

That was a long time ago, and the older one gets, the more
one begins to wonder whether that idealism-whether that
optimism about the use of the courts to effectuate social change-
was as realistic or ever as wise as it then seemed. My present
view, which I won't belabor, is that change that's achieved
through the political system may be more enduring and more
legitimate in the eyes of many people than change that is
imposed by the courts. I see the courts much more as a last
resort today than I did at that time. I think it's important to get
people involved much more directly in vindicating their own
interests and their own rights rather than have lawyers doing it
for them in the abstract way that lawyers do.

In any case, going to Berkeley and entering the Legal
Services Program was much more consistent with my past than
Wall Street.

Was there someone who taught you, who influenced you in any
way toward that bent? Or was it just the period of the sixties
and how you grew up?

I'm not sure I can answer that question. My parents were not
very ideological or politically-oriented people. Harold Lasswell

UBERGE:

KLINE:

wrote a book called Psvchopathology and Politics1 that suggests
that the position an individual occupies in the political or
ideological spectrum is more a function of Freudian sorts of
considerations-such as toilet training-than most people realize.
In any event, I don't know what the answer to your question is.
I know that I always identified more with outsiders or with the
underdog-this may have something to do with being Jewish-than
I do with the established authorities. Though there were many
professors at Yale who influenced me along these lines, as did
Justice Peters, who was the most progressive supreme court judge
of his era, there was no single person I would identify as a
mentor.

I think I also should mention that when I left Wall Street, I
became a Reginald Heber Smith fellow. That was a fellowship
that no longer exists that was designed to bring practicing
lawyers into the Legal Services Program. It provided a stipend
for me that supported me in the early months in the Legal
Services Program. They sent me to school, to ...
... to Boalt? [Hall, University of California at Berkeley, Law
School]

No, it wasn't to Boalt. This course was run at Haverford College
in Pennsylvania outside Philadelphia. It was a course designed to
introduce young lawyers to the sorts of legal issues that were of
interest to poor people, and the different sorts of skills you
needed in dealing with clients who were low income or members

1. Harold D. Lasswell, Psvchopathologv and Politics, a new edition with
afterthoughts by the author (New York: Viking Press, 1960).

of racial minorities, which was a little bit different than the kind
of skills you'd use if you're dealing with a business client.

LABERGE: They're doing something like that at Boalt now. There's a group
of students who go around in vans, and will stop at People's Park
or wherever there are homeless, and they give legal advice,
anyway. But they'd had some kind of training to help those
folks.

KLINE: I'm not familiar with it.

LABERGE: Let's see. Where have we gotten to? We had gotten to why you
had come from Wall Street to Berkeley and Public Advocates.

KLINE: One other thing I ought to mention here is that it was during my

first year in California, when I was clerking on the supreme court,
that Jerry Brown and I became close Mends. Although we were
friends at Yale, we really built our friendship in Berkeley. We
were living together while we were both clerking on the supreme
court. He was clerking for [Associate] Justice [Mathew O.]
Tobriner and I was clerking, as I said, for Justice Peters. But we
lived together in Berkeley near the corner of Walnut and Cedar,
on the ground floor of a beautiful old Victorian-that regrettably
has since been demolished--for about ninety dollars a month. As
you can imagine, Berkeley was a pretty exciting place to be in
1965. That was a very, very interesting time.

LABERGE: So you did that for just one year?

KLINE: Yes. Those judicial clerkships ordinarily are for just one year.

LABERGE: But that was right during the Free Speech Movement.

KLINE: Just after, right. Jerry did his, I think, for about a year and a

half. He started, as I said, earlier. He graduated from Yale a

year before me, but he stayed over for about a half a year or

more, and it was during that time that we roomed together.
LABERGE: You had kept up contact some way so that you ended up being

roommates.

KLINE: Oh, yes, we'd kept up contact, that's right.

LABERGE: So then from there, did you go back to Haverford and do the ...
KLINE: No, no. When I left Berkeley the first time, I went to New York

and practiced in Wall Street for about three years. It was then,

after a brief stint at Haverford, that I returned to Berkeley.

When I returned, it was 1970. By then I was married.
LABERGE: How did you keep up your contact with Jerry Brown between

then, for instance, and 74 when he was elected governor?
KLINE: You mean during the early seventies?

LABERGE: Yes.

KLINE: Oh, if he was traveling, he'd stay with me in Berkeley and, on

one occasion, in New York. If I was in Los Angeles, I'd stay with
him. I talked to him on the phone. That was not a period in
which I saw him very often, because he was then working at a
law firm in Los Angeles, at Tuttle & Taylor. Although we
maintained a friendship, it was not as close during that time as it
had earlier been.

LABERGE: But he obviously admired you very much. Most of the articles
I've read have said that you were his most trusted advisor, and
you were the first person he appointed.

KLINE: Well, I think the reasons may have been because I had not been

involved in any political campaigns, I didn't have a political
agenda, and he knew who I was as well as anybody really could,

at least in a sense that would matter to a governor. I think he
felt comfortable with me. We shared a lot of experiences
together. And I think it's very common for people in that kind of
an executive position-governor, president, or mayor. You're
comfortable in having people around you whose motives you
don't question, whose aspirations are not in conflict with your
own, who you can rely on to be honest with you. Examples of
this abound, so I don't think there was anything unique to my
relationship with Jerry Brown. I just happened to be somebody
that had known him for more than a decade by the time he got
to be elected governor.
[Interruption]

I'm not sure what more I can say about why Jerry Brown
felt so comfortable with me. I guess it would be more
appropriate for Jerry Brown to speak to that subject. I will just
say this: I always felt comfortable with him, quite frankly, and
again, this is something I'll doubtless say more about later.

I think I had the best job in the Brown administration,
largely because Jerry Brown gave me so much room, and also
because the job that I had was essentially ill defined, which
permitted me to define it. I was the legal affairs secretary,
although I was the appointments secretary during the transition
period. The day he was inaugurated I was sworn in as his legal
affairs secretary. I am sure I played a very different role as Jerry
Brown's legal affairs secretary than any previous legal affairs
secretary or subsequent legal affairs secretary has played with
respect to his or her governor.

LABERGE:

KLINE:

You indicated some curiosity as to what I was doing in Pat
Brown's campaign in 1966. That's a good question. I'm not sure
I remember, frankly, except that Fd gotten to know Pat Brown
through Jerry. I guess Jerry was involved in that campaign. I
knew some other people on the campaign: Fred Dutton, who was
the fellow who ran the campaign at that time. The campaign
needed somebody to head up the Young Democrats for Brown,
and I was available in September, early September, until the
election in November was over. I moved down to Los Angeles. I
lived with Jerry during that period on Ocean Avenue in Santa
Monica. That was really my first political experience, that
gubernatorial campaign. But it was very brief; I only did it for
two or three months.

That may be the only political campaign I've ever worked
on in my life. Well, I worked briefly on the campaign of
Harrison Goldin for controller of the city of New York. "Jay"
Goldin, as he was known, shared an office with me at Davis Polk,
and so I got to know him, but that was also a very brief political
venture. I really can't say that I have been a particularly
politically involved person, at least in a sense of campaigns and
election politics.

What prompted you to take on the role as. ... For instance, to
start with appointments secretary for Jerry Brown?
Jerry Brown talked me into it. I didn't have any interest in it,
frankly. I went down to Los Angeles the night of the election,
the night he was elected, and stayed at his house in Laurel
Canyon. I don't remember how the idea came up. I know that I

didn't bring it up, but I can't recall exactly. He persuaded me
that he wanted somebody who, as I said earlier, didn't have any
agendas, didn't have any particular people that he wanted to pack
his administration with, who had some organizational skills.

What we were really doing during that period was
processing information. He was not yet governor, so he couldn't
appoint anybody. We were essentially receiving mail from people
who were applying for jobs in the new administration, seeking
out names of people who might be worth talking to, talking to
labor leaders, for example, or business leaders, and other
representatives of various sectors in the community that had been
active in his election and who expected that their representatives
would have a place in the Democratic administration.

LABERGE: Even after, when you were legal affairs secretary, there was one
little line in one of the Gal Journals [California Journal! about
how you didn't plan to be there forever.

KLINE: No, I didn't plan to be there nearly as long as I stayed, frankly.

Td planned to be there very, very, briefly. I went there partly
because Jerry wanted me to, partly because it started to get
interesting. One of the things that happened during that
transition period is that I was beginning to get an education in
state government. Most of my work as a lawyer, both on Wall
Street and as a public interest lawyer, did not relate to state
government or the legislative process. I didn't know a lot and I
was beginning to get educated during that transition period.

The prospect of being right there in the governor's office in
the biggest state in the United States, if you had any interest in

public policy as I did, was an opportunity you couldn't refuse. So
I don't want to give the impression Jerry Brown had to twist my
arm. By this time I was starting to get interested.

LABERGE: Prison reform would be a good thing for us to talk about, too, at
a later date, possibly.

KLINE: OK.

LABERGE: Because I think you have views very similar to Jerry Brown's.
That's probably another reason he picked you.

KLINE: Well, no, I don't think that's true.

LABERGE: NO?

KLINE: No. In many ways we do have similar values, but our views or

our assessments of the best way to vindicate those values or
whether government has the responsibility to do it were very
often very different. I would wager that most of the time I spent
dealing with Jerry Brown on government business was time spent
arguing with him. There were areas in which our views were
somewhat different.

LABERGE: Maybe we can get into that, too, and you can give me examples
of that.

KLINE: I'll be happy to get into that in more detail, but in general,

looking back on it now, I see that a lot of the areas in which we
differed were areas in which he understood much, much better
than I the limits of the power of an elected official with a broad
constituency. I was much more oblivious than he was to the
legitimate political demands of diverse constituencies that
constrain the room a governor has within which to act. A
governor or a president is not free to do everything he wants to

do. I think many of the things that the governors, presidents,
mayors, and even legislators do are dictated much more by their
perception of the political parameters . . .

[End Tape 1, Side A]

[Begin Tape 1, Side B]

KLINE: I don't say this in any pejorative sense. I think that that's just

inherent in political office. You have to be attentive to the
demands of your constituents, and often, there are going to be
competing political considerations that are very hard to resolve.
In any event, speaking at the most general level right now, Jerry
Brown was naturally much more attentive to those sorts of
constraints than I was. I think he was much more realistic. I
think I became, by force of necessity, much more aware of those
things the more time I spent in government.

LABERGE: When you first started, how many appointments did you have to
make?

KLINE: Gosh, you know, I don't know exactly, except it was just a

colossal number. It's amazing how big a state this is and the
extraordinary power a governor has to appoint people to office.
Just to give you some sense of it, with respect to judgeships,
California has the biggest judiciary in the world. There is no
country that has as many judges as the state of California. At the
time Jerry Brown was governor, California had three times as
many judges as there were federal judges in the entire United
States. We had more judges in Los Angeles County than there
were in England, if you exclude stipendiary magistrates. No chief
executive in the world appoints as many judges as the California

UBERGE:

KLINE:

governor. And this is true in other areas in the executive branch
as well. The number of boards, commissions, departments, and
advisory groups the governor appoints to just boggle the mind.

Now, as I say, I only was involved in that during the period
of the transition. During the time that I was legal affairs
secretary, the only appointments that I was involved with were
judicial appointments. I think I'm probably the only legal affairs
secretary in California history that was chiefly responsible for his
governor's judicial appointments. Ordinarily it is the governor's
appointments secretary, not his legal affairs secretary, who is
responsible for recommending judges as well as all other
appointments. When Jerry Brown was governor, at least during
the time I was with him, his appointments secretary was Carlotta
Mellon, and you might want to talk to her. I think Carlotta
probably wasn't pleased at the interest I took in the governor's
judicial appointments, but we worked it out in any event; that
was the only area of gubernatorial appointments that she did not
work in.

So in that transition period you helped him with just the basic
cabinet appointments and . . .

Yes. During that transition period, the appointments that we
were concerned about were primarily cabinet secretaries and
department heads, and a few other positions such as the chairmen
of certain boards and commissions-I think the Adult Authority,
which at the time was the chief parole board. There may have
been a few other commissions, like the State Water Resources
Control Board that had a lot to do with water policy. But

primarily it was cabinet secretaries and department heads.

L\BERGE: Were there any people that you kept on from the previous
administration, or is it customary to appoint all new people?

KLINE: It's customary to appoint all new people, but there were some

people that Jerry Brown did keep on, who in fact he elevated. As
a matter of fact, one of the most remarkable appointments that
Jerry Brown made was the appointment of Roy Bell as his
director of Finance. Roy Bell was really the chief civil servant in
the Department of Finance under the previous four or five
governors. He was a career civil servant, and I think people in
Sacramento, the cognoscenti in any case, were stunned that Jerry
Brown would appoint a nonpolitical person out of the civil
service, a person who was very, very highly regarded. There was
almost no criticism of that appointment; in fact, I think he was
universally lauded for appointing Roy Bell his director of Finance.
There may have been a few others, but by and large the
appointments that Jerry Brown made, like the appointments of
any new governor, were new people.

LABERGE: How did you go about choosing people? Did you have certain
standards?

KLINE: Well, I didn't choose the people. In fact, people were not actually

appointed until after he was elected. All I was doing during the
transition was gathering information that would be refined and
presented to the governor after his inauguration.

I do remember interviewing some people who were seeking
appointments then early on. [William] Bill Press, who originally
was interested in becoming secretary of resources, was later

appointed the head of the Office of Planning and Research, I
believe. Louise Renne, who's now the city attorney of San
Francisco, was at the time a deputy attorney general who was
interested also, because of her work in the environmental area, in
being secretary of resources, and there were a number of others,
including the person who eventually got the job, Claire Dedrick.

But what Jerry Brown was doing during that period was
essentially defining the sorts of people he wanted to bring in. He
made it very clear, for example, that he wanted minorities and
women in visible, powerful positions in his administration, and he
was the first governor of this state or any large state, I think, to
do that on a massive scale. So we were seeking out people from
minority communities as well as women. And a lot of my time
was spent meeting with Hispanic groups or representatives of the
black community or the Asian community, or with women's
groups, and finding out from them who the people were that
ought to be considered.

By the way, I wasn't doing this by myself. There were
people from various minority communities and women who were
also involved at the time of the transition, on the governor's
transition staff. Herman Sillas, who later became director of the
Department of Motor Vehicles, is now a lawyer in Los Angeles,
was one of the senior people on the staff at that time. Carlotta
Mellon Tve already mentioned. Percy Pinkney, who later became
[assistant to the governor for] community relations in the
governor's office, who's very active in discussions with the black
community. There were others.

LABERGE: How about [Secretary of Agriculture and Services Agency] Rose
Bird?

KLINE: Rose Bird had been more active in Jerry Brown's campaign than I

had. I didn't know Rose Bird prior to the election. I met her in
Los Angeles when she also worked on the transition team. We
divided the state government up into the various departments and
commissions that were under the authority of the six or seven
cabinet secretaries, and I think she was in that group that was
working with the departments that were in the agricultural and
services agencies, as it was then called, and I think that may be
one of the reasons she ended up as secretary of agriculture and
services.

L\BERGE: Let's go on to legal affairs secretary. Can you kind of outline for
me the scope of your duties?

KLINE: Well, as I said earlier, it was pretty ill defined. . . . What legal

affairs secretaries in California had done in the past, and what I
think [Governor] George Deukmejian's legal affairs secretary does,
is limited to dealing with extradition and clemency; serving as a
liaison with the attorney general's office; being a liaison between
the governor and certain criminal justice agencies, the
Coordinating Council on Criminal Justice, for example. The
.Office of Emergency Services was another example, and there
may be some others. And also advising the governor on legal
questions that would arise from time to time. If the governor
was sued personally, or if the governor wanted the attorney
general to take a particular position in a particular lawsuit, it was
the legal affairs secretary that would communicate his wishes.

I did all of those things. In other words, I did perform the
conventional role of a legal affairs secretary, but my work went, I
think, far beyond just that. In fact, I would say that the
conventional work of a legal affairs secretary probably comprised
no more than 10 or 15 percent of my time. I always had a
deputy that was chiefly responsible for extradition and clemency.
Incidentally, the state of California does more extraditing in and
out than any nation in the world, by far, so it's a major job.
There were lawyers in the Department of Justice that were

assigned full time to work with us on this. The deputy in the

^
governor's office who reported to me and was chiefly

responsible-somebody you might want to talk to, actually--is
Allen Sumner. Allen is now a special assistant to the attorney
general in Sacramento.

Fortunately, Jerry Brown never had to decide whether to
give clemency to a person who had received the death penalty.
Had that happened, that would have changed our job
dramatically. But during the eight years he was governor that
never became an issue. Occasionally there'd be an extradition or
a clemency question that I'd have to get directly involved in. I
guess one of the best known was the request to extradite Dennis
Banks to South Dakota. Jerry Brown made the unusual decision
to deny extradition, which outraged the then-attorney general of
South Dakota, who later became governor. His name was
Janklow, William Janklow, who built a whole political career
around his desire to get Dennis Banks back into South Dakota.

In any event, as I say, most of my work was in other areas.

LABERGE: How involved in that were you, in the Dennis Banks case?

KLINE: Oh, I was very involved in the Dennis Banks case. I spent a lot

of time talking to people in South Dakota. I believe we held
some hearings in the governor's office on that question. Received
a lot of correspondence on it, spent a lot of rime talking to Jerry
Brown about it.

In the end, Jerry Brown believed Dennis Banks's life would
be in danger if he sent him back to South Dakota. It was a
tough call. Reasonable minds could differ about it. He offered to
have Banks confined here in California, but South Dakota
authorities rejected that. After Jerry Brown left office, Dennis
Banks went to New York, and I think [Governor] Mario Cuomo
essentially continued the policy of Jerry Brown. Eventually
Dennis Banks returned voluntarily to South Dakota, and I don't
know how that was resolved.

A clemency case I recall quite well, involved a man named
Luigi Aranda. Aranda had been convicted of murder in San
Francisco, and newly discovered evidence was presented that
persuaded the district attorney of San Francisco, who at the time
was [Joseph, Jr.] Joe Freitas, and also the two homicide
detectives who were involved in the case, that Aranda was
innocent. There were some others, like the deputy district
attorney who actually prosecuted Aranda, who disagreed, who
thought Aranda was guilty. This is a complicated case; I won't
bore you with the details. The point is that we conducted several
hearings in the governor's office trying to figure out what the
truth was.

The governor decided to commute Aranda's sentence. He
was persuaded, as I was, that although Aranda was not a very
wholesome fellow--I think he was a Hell's Angel-it was
impossible to believe he committed the murder because of the
new evidence that pointed to somebody else. The governor didn't
grant a pardon. What he did was to commute Aranda's sentence
to the time he had served in prison. Clemency hearings of this
sort, which are judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings, are unusual.

L\BERGE: Could you say something about the governor's views on prisoners
and whether prison rehabilitates people, or how he felt about
prison reform?

KLINE: This was an area in which Jerry Brown and I didn't always see

eye-to-eye. Jerry Brown did not want to spend his political
capital on issues of this sort. I think in part, he took a rather
moral position regarding an individual's responsibility for his acts.
He granted much less in the way of clemency than Ronald
Reagan and his father had. He was aware that a number of
people that his father had pardoned subsequently committed the
same crime, to his father's great embarrassment. Also, Jerry
Brown did not place a lot of faith in the ability of prison to
rehabilitate people. On the other hand, I think he did believe
that whether it rehabilitated them or not, they were largely
deserving of punishment.

I suppose the first big piece of legislation that I worked on-
maybe this is a subject that we should talk about; I haven't
identified it earlier, it just occurred to me-was the [Uniform]

Determinate Sentencing Act of 1976.1 California in 1917 adopted
the Indeterminate Sentence Act.2 It was one of the first states to
do that. In other words, when a person was convicted of most
felonies, he would get a term of, say, five to life, or ten to life, or
five to fifteen, and the actual sentence would be determined by
the Adult Authority, on the basis of parole hearings conducted in
one of the state prisons.

There was a general feeling in the mid-seventies--and it was
bipartisan, it was not just among Democrats-that the
indeterminate sentence system had to go. I think that the main
reason for that were the disparities in sentencing: two people
convicted of the same crime on the same date could spend wildly
disparate amounts of time in state prison and there had to be
greater uniformity. In fact, the name of the statute was
the Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act of 1976. It was
designed to achieve greater uniformity in sentencing.

The Republican candidate for governor, [Controller]
Houston Fluornoy, was also in support of determinate sentencing,
changing the system, as was Jerry Brown. But it was one thing
to say you were in support of determinate sentencing, as most
people of both parties were at that time, and quite another to
come up with a bill satisfactory to everybody. I believe that the
result of the Determinate Sentencing Act that Jerry Brown signed
into law was to lengthen prison terms. I don't think there's any

1. S.B.42, 1976 Reg. Sess., Cal. Stat., ch. 1139 (1976).

2. S.B. 112, 42nd Leg. Sess., Cal. Stat., ch. 527 (1917).

doubt that it has had that effect over time.

In 1976 the goal was simply to take the median terms for
most offenses and make it the midterm penalty. But once you
took the power to set sentences away from the Adult Authority
and placed it in the legislature, you were giving the legislature
the ability to lengthen sentences. You also gave it the ability to
shorten sentences, but it's politically unrealistic to think they
would ever do that, and to my knowledge they have not.

The real opposition to the Determinate Sentencing Act came
from the far left and the far right. The far left did not want to
put the sentence-setting power in the legislative branch, because
then the sentence would just get longer. People on the right
were opposed because they thought existing median terms were
too short.

In any event, people in the senate from both parties did
support the bill. In fact, it had a Republican author, [Senator]
John Nejedly, a former district attorney. But that was my
baptism in the state legislature. It was in the lobbying of the
Determinate Sentencing Act that I got my first experience of the
legislative process.

To return to your question, I had not spent a lot of time
talking to Jerry Brown about criminal justice issues. I myself, by
the way, did not have a great background in the criminal justice
area. I have had considerable experience with the criminal law as
a trial and appellate judge, but at the time I was in the
governor's office, I had very, very little background. But the
people who we were working with from law enforcement and

elsewhere provided me an interesting introduction.

The California District Attorneys' Association during the
early years was led by Lowell Jensen, who was then the district
attorney of Alameda County, John Van de Kamp, the district
attorney of Los Angeles at the time, and [Edwin] Ed Miller, the
district attorney of San Diego. They were a pretty responsible
group of people. They weren't law and order maniacs, and I
think Jerry Brown basically followed their advice most of the
time.
[Interruption]

LABERGE: You were talking about the district attorneys' association, that
they were a responsible group.

KLINE: Yes. And the governor spent a fair amount of time with many of

those people. In any event, I guess to sum it up, Jerry Brown
was not a bleeding heart liberal. I know there were a lot of
people who think that he must have been or were sure that he
was, but let me assure you-and I was there--that when it came
to sentencing issues, Jerry Brown was not a liberal. I don't want
to say he was the opposite either; I think he was a pretty
pragmatic centrist on these issues, and I would be very surprised
if the district attorneys and others in law enforcement who
worked with him at that time would give you a different view.
You see, there were some inconsistencies in Jerry Brown,
and I think that people found it difficult to believe that a
Democratic governor as young as he was, who was as liberal as
he was in certain other areas, wouldn't be liberal in this area.
But he wasn't. I mean, he denied a lot of clemency requests that

UBERGE:

KLINE:

I would have granted; he took conservative positions on criminal
justice bills, on amendments to the Determinate Sentencing Act in
particular, which was a very important bill, and other criminal
justice bills. He signed a lot of bills later on after the
Determinate Sentencing Act was enacted, lengthening sentences
against the advice of public defenders and others.

So on the criminal justice side, Jerry Brown was a pretty
tough-minded governor. [Perhaps the only important criminal
justice issues on which Jerry Brown sided with the liberals were
the death penalty and reform of the bail system. The death
penalty was such a visible issue, however, that it obscured his
moderate to conservative position on most other law enforcement
issues.]*

You were talking about your baptism with the legislature; could
you say more about that? How did you get involved in that bill?
Did you help write it, or did . . . ?

No, I was not involved in the writing of it. The two legislators
who I think were the most involved in it were John Nejedly, who
was the chief author, a Republican, former D.A., and Howard
Way, who was at that time a Republican state senator from the
Central Valley, from around Visalia. A rather conservative state
senator on most issues, but in this area, actually, a real
progressive. In the criminal justice area his views were to the
left of Jerry Brown's, which is an anomaly, because Howard Way
had a reputation as a conservative, and Jerry Brown had a

* Judge Kline added the preceding bracketed material during his review of
the draft transcript.

reputation as a liberal.

KLINE: Howard Way later became the head of the correctional

agencies in the Brown administration. He was the first
Republican. . . . Well, one of the few Republicans high up in the
Brown administration. This came years later. There were a lot
of conflicts between Howard Way and Jerry Brown. I was
responsible for bringing Howard Way into the administration. I
think Jerry Brown was stunned at my suggestion of him, but the
more he thought about it, the more he met with Way, the more
impressed he was with him. He was a very impressive man,
Howard Way. Still alive, lives in Sacramento. I'd say he was one
of the most impressive members of the legislature at that time.
He had been a president of the senate when the Republicans
controlled the senate for a brief time. He was a man of great
stature. He was kind of a Hollywood version of what a state
senator should look like. Very impressive; he had white hair and
a great stentorian way of talking. But a wonderful human being,
really.

The person most involved in the actual drafting of the
determinate sentencing bill, was Michael Salerno, who is now in
the Legislative Counsers office in Sacramento. At the time, he
was on Senator Nejedly's staff. But there was a lot of pulling
and tugging on that bill, so my role really was to try and align
the governor's views with those of the legislature or to find out
where the governor was with respect to changes that various
legislators wanted. You know, there's that old cliche about
legislation and sausages, that if you saw how sausages were

made, you wouldn't want to eat it. I'm not sure I share that
negative sense of the legislative process, but there are moments
on a bill like that, in which I did get a little disillusioned.

It was a real eye-opener to see how power was exercised. I
don't mean to suggest anything was improper. This was not a
bill that involved money. There were no special interests tossing
thousands of dollars around. And in any case, in the seventies
even the special interests were a lot more restrained than I think
they have since become.

L\BERGE: Was that unusual for you to get so involved in a bill introduced
by Republicans?

KLINE: No, the fact that it was introduced by a Republican was really

irrelevant. This was not a Republican bill. It was not a
Republican issue. It was a bipartisan issue. I got involved in it
because there was no other person within the administration that
had jurisdiction in the criminal justice area, and the governor
wanted somebody in his own office on top of it.

LABERGE: Could you say more about how the power was exercised? Did
you mean in the legislature?

KLINE: Yes. I don't mean there's anything nefarious or even complicated

about all this. I mean, what it basically boiled down to was that
there were some legislators-George Deukmejian, who was then a
state senator, he's a perfect example-who wanted longer prison
terms. That's what the real debate was over.

The position of a lot of liberal Democrats was look, what's
important is that people go to prison, and they go to prison
quickly; that the evidence is that the length of term doesn't really

make much difference, it just provides a greater sense of
hopelessness on their part and it's more expensive to the state
and it takes up room that we don't have. On the other end,
there were Republicans who took a very, very different view, as
you can imagine, of the sentencing authority. It was essentially
trying to resolve those two conflicts and to stick to our basic
goal.

Our goal was to say, look, we don't want to change the
length of sentences. All we want to do is take the existing
medians and make them the norm. We didn't want to go to the
left and we didn't want to go to the right; we just wanted to
change the sentencing process but not necessarily change the
average length of sentences. But in the debate it was hard to
persuade people that that was what was happening. People who
didn't like what our position was would characterize it very
differently than we did. So there was a lot of talking to the
press.

That was another thing that I learned to do. In the past
nobody had paid a great deal of attention to whatever I said. All
of a sudden people were paying a great deal of attention to it,
and so [I took a lot more care in instances of representing the
governor's views or those of his administration.]
[End Tape 1, Side B]

[Session 2: November 26, 1990]

[Begin Tape 2, Side A]

LABERGE: Last time when we finished, one of your last statements was

about the press and that you had to be careful. All of a sudden,
people . . .

KLINE: . . . were paying attention to what I said.

LABERGE: . . . were paying attention to what you said, and that you were
taking more care about what you said and giving the
administration's views. Could you say more about the press-both
your relationship with it, Jerry Brown's relationship with the
press, and the power of the press?

KLINE: I didn't have a lot of contact with the press. Certainly not nearly

as much as the governor did. I think he was much, much more
open with the press than most governors are. Certainly much
more free and easy with them than his predecessor or his
successor. I'm not sure he profited from that. I think one of the
lessons of Ronald Reagan's presidency was that it's a lot easier to
manipulate the press and keep them at bay. It's one of the great
mysteries to me that Reagan received such light treatment by the
press, considering how distant he kept them.

Jerry Brown liked reporters; he knew a lot of reporters; he
was confident in his relations with them. He didn't rely on
counselors like Ed Meese and others nearly as much. So he gave
them a lot more access, I believe, than governors of this state

UBERGE:
KLINE:

ordinarily do. I don't believe, however, that the press
reciprocated that with particularly easy treatment. In fact, I think
that because the press feels a need to engage a governor in
somewhat of an adversary way, he probably fared much more
poorly than he might have if he had been a little more distant.

The press-and this isn't simply with respect to Jerry
Brown-has an extraordinary ability to create the image of a
political figure like a governor. This is particularly true in
California, a state of nearly 30 million people that primarily relies
on the media for its impressions of political figures.

Jerry Brown probably did better with the broadcast media
than the print media, because he had a superior ability to
communicate with people directly. He did it in a different way
than Ronald Reagan, who was a much more avuncular person.
Without the interference of an intermediary, like a newspaper
reporter, Jerry Brown was able to communicate quite effectively,
and I think one reason for the political successes that he had was
his ability to effectively use television.

[Looking at list] You want me to move to some of the
issues that youVe . . .

Sure. If there's one in particular you'd like to ...
Let me just go down them. You've provided a pretty good list of
some of the issues that I dealt with.

Let me take judicial appointments first of all. As we earlier
discussed, I was not Jerry Brown's appointments secretary,
although in the legal community people think I was because I
was involved in judicial appointments. I was the person primarily

involved in judicial appointments. Now, most governors don't
give that responsibility to their legal affairs secretary. The
appointments secretary is involved in all appointments, judicial
and nonjudicial. That wasn't true under Brown. The
appointments secretary for most of his tenure, a woman named
Carlotta Mellon, advised the governor on all of his appointments
except those to the bench.

LABERGE: Even to boards? Commissions?

KLINE: To everything. Boards, commissions, executive branch, the whole

kit and caboodle, excluding only judges.

Pat Brown used to have this saying that every time he
appointed a judge, he produced one ingrate and made ten
enemies. There's some truth to that. When I first went up to
Sacramento, I thought that being involved in judicial
appointments would be a very fulfilling thing. I was quickly
disabused of that. California is so large a state and the governor
appoints so many judges that it's impossible for him to know any
significant number of those he puts on the bench. We're the
most litigious society in the world here in California, and
therefore we have required creation of the largest judicial system
in the world, so the governor appoints a lot of judges.

Jerry Brown's greatest achievement in this area, in my view
and I think in the view of many people, is that he brought on to
the bench men and women from areas of the community-the
legal community and the greater community-that had in the past
been excluded. He changed expectations about what governors
would do when it came to judicial appointments. It was not

KLINE: nearly as easy, in the early seventies or in the mid-seventies when

he became governor, to appoint minorities and women as it now
is, because there are so many more minorities and women in the
legal profession who are constitutionally eligible. To be
appointed to the municipal court, a lawyer must have been in
practice for five years, and to all other courts a minimum of ten
years. There weren't that many minorities and women that were
eligible at the time he was governor, relative to the numbers that
are presently eligible.

In any event, Jerry Brown searched out minorities and
women to appoint, and I don't believe that by and large he
compromised the quality of the bench in doing so. While it's
true, as I just said, that there were not as many minorities and
women in the seventies as there are now in the nineties, still in
many parts of the state-Alameda County, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, San Diego--at least in the large metropolitan areas there
were enough minorities and women so that it was not difficult to
find well-qualified people. I don't believe that Jerry Brown
compromised quality.

What he accomplished by appointing significant numbers of
minorities and women to the bench was to increase respect for
judicial institutions amongst the large numbers of people of color
in this state, and the majority of Californians who are women,
who rarely, if ever, previously saw members of their own
communities sitting in judgment over them. When a governor
appoints a Chinese person to the bench, he immediately creates a
visible community leader in the Chinese community, and that's

LABERGE:

KLINE:

LABERGE:

KLINE:

true in every other minority community, and it's also true when
you're appointing women.

In any event, of all the things Jerry Brown did in the eight
years that he was governor that I was involved in, the one that
makes me proudest is my involvement in judicial appointments. I
won't say that Jerry Brown did not appoint some people that he
probably should not have. There's no governor of this state that
can say that he didn't make some mistakes. You just appoint too
many not to make mistakes. But by and large, I think Jerry
Brown greatly strengthened the quality of the bench in this state.

I think it's unfortunate that Jerry Brown's contribution in
this area is going to be inordinately affected by a person's point
of view about [Chief Justice] Rose Bird. Jerry Brown appointed
close to a thousand people to the bench. I don't think he ought
to be judged on those appointments simply on one or two or
three appointments, as important as those appointments were.
The day-to-day work of the courts is really performed at the trial
level, and that's where his appointments really made an impact.

I guess that this is an appropriate time to talk about court
reform.

Before we go into that-maybe it's connected-how involved were
you, for instance when you say Jerry Brown's accomplishments,
weren't you a good part of that?
Yes, but I didn't appoint anybody. I advised him.
But you sort of came up with the pool?

Yes, I was his eyes and ears. He did rely on me heavily. But it's
not as though I invented the idea of appointing minorities and

women. This was high on Jerry Brown's agenda, and he was the
governor, and he made the appointment.

LABERGE: For instance, how would you go about finding a group to present
to him as possible judges?

KLINE: The group is to some extent self-selecting. Ordinarily the

universe from which appointments are selected are those who
apply, and there was rarely a shortage of that. In the beginning
it wasn't as clear that Jerry Brown was as keen on finding
minorities and women as it later became. I remember one of the
first vacancies we had to fill was on the superior court in
Riverside County. Most of the information that you had to rely
on came from others in the community where the vacancy
existed.

I remember talking to a lawyer about a particular Hispanic
candidate. He gave a glowing assessment of this individual, just
glowing. The candidate had graduated high in his class in the
University of California at Berkeley as well as its law school, I
believe. He was bilingual, had done a lot of pro bono work, was
highly respected by his peers and so on and so forth. And then
at the end of his description he said, "It's too bad that he can't be
appointed."

I asked, "Why can't he be appointed?" He said, "Because he
doesn't have the support of the local bar association. He hasn't
been active in bar activities, so he can't be made a judge." I said,
"Wait a minute. I'm calling from the governor's office. It's the
governor who appoints, not the bar association." This person
said, 'Yes, but, you know, when the bar association doesn't

support somebody, it just doesn't happen."

Nobody in California would have said that to me six months
later. That view of how an individual got appointed to the
bench-which was a view that was the product of eight years of
Ronald Reagan and perhaps eight years of Pat Brown before
that-was not a view that existed after Jerry Brown. Expectations
about what George Deukmejian and now [Governor] Pete Wilson
would or should do in this regard are to a considerable extent the
result of what Jerry Brown did. I don't think any future governor
of California will be able to ignore the need to reflect on the
bench the cultural, ethnic, racial diversity of this state and the
need to also appoint women.

L\BERGE: I read just a little story about how when Jerry Brown first

became governor, there were maybe fifty-three vacancies, and you
were trying to get him to appoint people but it took some time
because he had to study the issue.

KLINE: Jerry Brown once told me that when you seize the flag, the game

is over. He did not like to make appointments. Because once
you made the appointment, you lost the opportunity to consider
the alternatives. Although he had a goal, in connection with
judicial appointments-the one I described earlier-he was not a
person whose chief occupation as governor was filling the vacant
positions in the executive branch or on the bench. It was
difficult, frankly, particularly in the beginning, to get him to see
the need out there in the state to have these vacancies filled.

There was the problem of court congestion. I was certainly
hearing a lot about it from judges and lawyers and others. I

certainly agreed that this was a responsibility the governor had to
discharge. It was a little difficult to get Jerry Brown to focus on
this. I have a feeling, incidentally, that this is true of a lot of
governors. I don't think he's the only one. George Deukmejian
has not proceeded with alacrity in filling vacancies either.

LABERGE: Now do you want to go into court reform before I interrupt you
again?

KLINE: Well, let me just say this. That I don't think any modern

governor has been as committed to court reform as Jerry Brown.
This was also an area in which I was his chief advisor, in which I
had a greater responsibility than perhaps anybody short of the
governor.

One of the reasons he was concerned about court reform
was his feeling that we couldn't continue to solve the problems of
court congestion simply by creating more judgeships, which was
the conventional approach, as it still is today. It now takes five
years to get a case to trial in Los Angeles, or close to five years.
The conventional answer to this problem that's being
communicated to Governor Deukmejian and will be communicated
to Governor Wilson is just create more judgeships.

There are I believe considerably more than three hundred
superior court judges in Los Angeles County today. There are a
lot of states that don't have anywhere near three hundred judges.
Jerry Brown's feeling was that there was an analogy between
judges and freeways. If you build more freeways, people are
going to use them and create more congestion and foul the air
more, and that if you really want to solve the problems of

transportation, it isn't going to be done with freeways. It's going
to be done with public transportation or changing people's
lifestyles in various ways.

Similarly, he felt that the problem of court congestion was
to a considerable extent the result of the difficulties and expense
in using the judicial system. There were many sorts of disputes
that could be better resolved outside the courts. By "better
resolved" I mean more expeditiously resolved, and resolved less
expensively. There were a whole variety of ideas that he had. I
don't think it was his feeling that there was any one reform that
would make a significant dent in court backlogs. He felt--and I
think most people who paid attention to this problem agree-that
there has to be a whole array of reforms.

But one of the things that we discovered in this area is that
while a lot of people give lip service to the need to reform the
courts, enacting the actual reforms can be extraordinarily difficult.
Nobody objects to seeing somebody else's ox gored, but when
their own is threatened or perceived to be threatened, they get
very upset. Let me give you some examples.

The United States is one of the few places in the world
where a robed magistrate has to decide whether someone made
an illegal left turn. Most traffic violations in other countries are
resolved before an administrative hearing officer, not a judge.
Here in California, in many municipal courts, 20, 30 percent of
the work of a judge are petty traffic violations.

Well, Brown proposed that the traffic be taken out of the
municipal courts and heard by independent hearing examiners.

There were a few states that had experimented with this: I
believe Rhode Island, New York, Virginia. I think others.
Perhaps Oregon. Well, the California Trial Lawyers Association
opposed this very vigorously, not because the California Trial
Lawyers Association or its members represent people in traffic
cases; they don't. But they were afraid that if you could take
traffic out of the court and it worked, that you might take some
other things out of the court in which they do have an economic
interest.

One of the problems in enacting court reform was the
extraordinary number of lawyers in California, many of whom are
underemployed, if not unemployed. So that certain associations
of lawyers. . . . I'm not referring to the [California] State Bar
[Association], incidentally, but there were other groups of lawyers
that represented special interests: the California Trial Lawyers
Association that represents plaintiffs lawyers and personal injury
cases, the California Applicants Attorneys Association that
represents lawyers that do workers' compensation work and so
forth-there are other examples. They opposed reforms they
perceived might diminish the need for their services. I've given
you the example of traffic.

Another example was mandatory pre-trial arbitration. This
is an idea that had been advanced for years. The idea is that in
certain cases, where the damages sought were under $15,000 or
$25,000-in other words, relatively small civil cases-the litigants
should be required to submit to pre-trial arbitration. You needn't
accept the arbitrator's award, but if you reject it and go to trial

LABERGE:

KLINE:

LABERGE:

KLINE:

and don't get more than you were offered by the arbitrator, you
have to pay your adversary's attorney's fees. This is a modest
proposal. But it was strongly opposed by the Trial Lawyers
Association, whose fear was that if it would work for cases under
$15,000, then they might make it work for cases under $50,000.
If a significant number of cases settled at this early stage, less
business for lawyers might result.

Well, mandatory pre-trial arbitration was a bill1 that the
governor did successfully get enacted; it's been an enormous
success in California. Although the threshold level when Jerry
Brown signed the bill was $15,000, that system has worked so
well that it's now been raised to $25,000. This is an area in
which California is in the forefront.
Do you know what year that was, by any chance?
Gee, I don't. I would guess it was around 1978. Seventy-seven
or 78 is what . . .
I can check it.

What about the independent hearing examiners? Did that
ever . . .

We got that adopted as an experimental pilot program, I think in
certain counties. Sacramento County was one of them. The
hearings were held in the Department of Motor Vehicles. But the
opposition there came not only from trial lawyers, but it came
from the California Highway Patrol. They didn't think that the
tickets they wrote would be given the respect they were due

1. S.B. 275, 1979-80 Reg. Sess., Cal. Stat., Ch. 46 (1979).

unless a judge presided over the proceeding rather than a hearing
officer. We thought that was kind of silly, but the highway
patrol is not an insignificant lobbying group.

I guess that one of the big points that came out of this is
that there were a number of, I think, useful reforms that were
enacted while Brown was governor. I don't think that his
successes in this area were nearly as many as he proposed or
would have liked. But this is an area in which the economic--or
the perceived economic-interest of lawyers often transcended
perceptions about the need for reform on other grounds. And if
you didn't have support within the legal community, it's very hard
to find it elsewhere. So there is a limit to what a governor can
do.

The next issue here, [looking at list] moving kind of
quickly, is bail reform. This was Assembly Bill 2 in 1979.1 This
was one of the few bills that were co-authored by the speaker,
who was then [Assemblyman] Leo McCarthy, and the majority
leader in the assembly, who was then [Assemblyman] Howard
Berman. This was a reform that the governor addressed in his
State of the State message, I believe in 1978. What we were
trying to do in this area was for California to adopt the Federal
Bail Reform Act.2

Now, the way bail works in California and in most other
states-one of the few exceptions is Kentucky-but in most states,

1. A.B. 2, 1979-80 Reg. Sess., Cal. Stat., Ch. 873.

2. Bail Reform Act of 1966, 80 Stat. 216 et seq.

if you're arrested and bail is set at, say, $1,000, if you have the
$1,000 then you put up $1,000 and you're released. If you don't
have $1,000, you have to go to a bail bondsman. The bail
bondsman puts up $1,000, and his fee is 10 percent, or in this
case, $100. If your bail is later exonerated, if the complaint is
dismissed or you're found guilty or you're acquitted or whatever
happens, bail is terminated, you never get back that $100. In
other words, bail essentially constitutes a tax on being arrested.

There are many, many people in jail, pre-trial, only because
they lack the funds to pay the bail bondsman his 10 percent. In
other words, two people arrested on the same day for the same
crime-one is rich and the other is poor-the person who either
has the $1,000 or who can pay the bail bondsman his 10 percent
doesn't spend a day in jail prior to trial. But the poor
person~and most people who are arrested for crime are
poor-doesn't have that luxury. So there's clearly, it seemed to
us, unequal treatment. An awful lot has been written in this
area, incidentally.

The federal bail reform system, the system we were trying
to adopt, was simply one in which the defendant had the option
of depositing his 10 percent directly with the court rather than
with the bail bondsman. And if he appeared—in other words, if
he showed up in court on the appointed day-the money was
returned to him. Now, this was only for certain nonviolent
crimes, and there were some exceptions to this.

The opposition to this reform came almost entirely from bail
bondsmen. The bail bondsmen fought this bill harder than I

think Fve ever seen any group resist proposed legislation in the
six years I was up there. Between 1959 and 1979, during that
twenty-year period, some of the most powerful members of the
legislature introduced bail reform legislation along the lines Fve
just described. They were Democrats and Republicans.
[Assemblyman William] Bill Bagley was one of the Republicans
that was prominent in this area. [Senator] George Moscone was
another example. There were many. These bills never got out of
their first committee. The people who killed these bills were not,
as you might expect, conservative Republicans. Instead, it was
liberal Democrats. More particularly, assemblymen or senators
from heavy minority districts. Bail bondsmen are an extremely
astute group of people. Their lobbyists are usually very effective,
and they are only concerned with one issue: killing bail reform.

And the way they do it is this. In certain assembly districts,
where the assemblymen or candidates for office don't have access
to wealthy constituents, they rely on bail bondsmen. Bail
bondsmen were notoriously generous political contributors. The
public officials with whom they are most generous are the ones
who win in these areas, who tend to be Democrats. There are
many black and Hispanic legislators, for example, who rely very,
very heavily on bail bondsmen. Some of the biggest bail
bondsmen in California are themselves black and Hispanic.
They're entrepreneurs. In fact, I think at the time, that the most
prominent bail bondsman in the state was a black Republican in
Los Angeles named Celes King. He'd once run against [Lieutenant
Governor Mervyn] Merv Dymally for office. Very savvy guy. A

nice guy, actually.

In any event, it was very, very difficult for us to get this
bill because of the strong opposition of precisely those legislators
you would expect to support this bill, because the people who
were languishing in jail simply because of their inability to come
up with bail were themselves primarily black and Hispanic. We
finally did get a bill; however, it took two years. It got a lot of
Republican support, actually. Some of the key people on this bill
were [Senator James] Jim Nielsen, who's now the Republican
minority leader in the senate, and [Assemblyman Eugene] Gene
Chappie, a very conservative Republican who served in Congress
later on.

The condition for enactment of the bill-the bail bondsmen
were pretty effective on this, I have to concede-was that the bill
would self-destruct in five years unless it were extended. Well,
after five years-that was Jerry Brown's last year in office--they
were counting on the fact that the next governor would not be as
interested in bail reform as Jerry Brown, and they were right.

[End Tape 2, Side A]

[Tape 2, Side B not recorded]1

[Begin Tape 3, Side A]

KLINE: Jerry Brown's relationships with the legislature were not as good

as they might have been. I think he has to take some
responsibility for that.

In some ways this was just the result of his personality. He

1. Due to technical problems this section of the tape did not record. The
material contained in Tape 2, Side B was re-recorded on April 16, 1991.

was much more spontaneous than most in high office. He was
willing to take chances. He was willing to float ideas. He was
willing to consider possibilities that a committee might have
found a lot of reasons to quickly reject. I think Jerry Brown was
much more tuned in to changes happening in the world-his idea
of limits, for example-than most other people. And I think he
had a great ability to articulate some of his thoughts in a way
that people could understand. But one of the risks that he ran,
and one of the prices that he paid, was that he would be seen as
"flaky."

It was interesting; the person who first coined the word
"Governor Moonbeam" was a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.
[Michael] Mike Royko. About a year or two after Royko coined
this phrase, which others picked up, he wrote a column in which
he apologized for giving Brown this unfortunate moniker.
Because the more he learned about Brown, the more refreshing
he found him.

Jerry Brown was unconventional, and his unconventionality
did him in to some extent. But there was virtue in this
unconventionality. Jerry Brown was a member of the elite who
had a strong anti-elitist strain. Thus he thought it was useful to
appoint people to consumer boards who did not come from the
regulated industry.

Perhaps I should explain. California has scores and scores
of boards and commissions that regulate various professions,
ranging from the board of governors of the state bar that
regulates the legal profession, to the Board of Medical Quality

LABERGE:

KLINE:

Assurance that imposes discipline on doctors, to the Board of
Behavioral Sciences that licenses psychologists and marriage and
family counselors, to the Cosmetology Board that licenses
beauticians and so forth. Brown supported legislation to put
"public" members on these boards. He thought it was a mistake
for members of the regulated profession to control the regulatory
function. He was a real consumer activist in that regard.

But then when he appointed nurses to the Board of Medical
Quality Assurance which regulated doctors--who had a very
different idea of the role of nurses in society and in the medical
hierarchy-well, doctors took enormous offense. Similarly, when
he appointed public members to the Board of Governors of the
state bar, a lot of lawyers saw this as anti-lawyer, despite the fact
in that case that the author of the legislation, a lawyer member
of the assembly, didn't consult the governor when he introduced
the bill.1
Who was that?

That was [Assemblyman] Howard Berman. Jerry Brown signed
the bill, but Jerry Brown didn't come up with the idea. But in
any event, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the view that the
public and nonprofessionals could usefully be involved in the
work of regulating trades and businesses and professions in
California.

As I have said, that annoyed a lot of people who belonged
to those businesses and trades and professions who didn't want

1. A.B. 590, 1974-75 Reg. Sess., Cal. Stat., ch. 874 (1975).

LABERGE:

KLINE:

outsiders involved. So they developed strong antipathy, some of
them, to Jerry Brown, because they thought he opposed their
interests. He was really advancing his conception of the public
interest. Jerry Brown took, I think, a much more transcendent
view of the role of an elected official than most people were
accustomed to.

He was for supporting scientific efforts like NASA [National
Aeronautics and Space Administration], the space exploration,
even though he understood that that would reduce the amount of
funds available for domestic spending. Because he had a concept
of what man's nature required, that the quest for new frontiers
was imperative, that man could not rest on the limits of his
present knowledge, he supported space exploration and new
technologies. Some people saw that as "flakiness." But I think
he was a very serious person, and I think he had a large vision,
and I think he did have a much more salutary impact on this
state than many people yet realize. People are now coming
around to some of his views.

Another example of this is that Jerry Brown took a lot of
heat for his reluctance to approve the use of malathion to kill the
Mediterranean fruit fly. I don't know if you recall, but one of the
things that was used against Jerry Brown in his run for the
senate was this medfly problem.
I forgot until you mentioned that.

This was a big thing. Basically, what Jerry Brown was saying
was, "Look, the consequences of malathion on the thousands upon
thousands of people that would be affected in densely-populated

urban areas, ought to be a graver concern of government than
the alternatives that would flow from not spraying, but using
other types of efforts to contain this fruit fly." Well, we now
know that the use of malathion, which was used earlier this year
in Southern California-Pasadena and lots of other parts of Los
Angeles-was finally stopped because of the growing concern of
the dangers that Jerry Brown appreciated. Jerry Brown
understood the dangers in the quick fix.

Maybe the best example I can give you of that is to tell you
a story that exemplifies his inquiring mind and the way it
sometimes got him into trouble. While Reagan was governor,
many believed California ought to authorize or subsidize the use
of fluoride in local water supplies. As you may know, there were
people, certain conservative groups, who saw this as part of some
conspiracy to advance a Communist agenda. I never quite
understood what it was all about, but I do know that this anti-
fluoridation effort was motivated by people with very conservative
political views. For that reason, I think, during the eight years
that Reagan was governor, he took no interest in efforts to
expand the use of fluoride.

When Jerry Brown got elected, there was joy among those
pro-fluoridation people. I remember walking into the governor's
office one day when he was meeting with a large group of people
who were there to persuade him to support the use of
fluoridation. He listened to them for a while, and then he said
something like this. He said, "Wait a minute. The problem you
want to address is that our kids have rotten teeth. The reason

UBERGE:
KLINE:

that they have rotten teeth is they eat Hostess Twinkles and drink
Coca-Cola. But instead of changing the eating habits of our
children, you want to put a chemical in the water."

The people in the room suddenly began to think either that
they were being mocked or that the governor was challenging
their most fundamental assumption. What Jerry Brown was
saying was, "Look, maybe the best way to solve this human
problem is with a human solution. You shouldn't look to science
and technology to solve problems that can be solved in much less
expensive and much less potentially dangerous ways without the
use of chemicals, without a quick fix. Kids shouldn't be eating
Twinkies and they shouldn't be drinking Coca-Cola, and we
shouldn't be avoiding that source, which is the source of the
problem."

Now, in a way, he was having fun. I don't think he was
opposed to fluoridation, but the shock in the eyes of those true
believers for fluoridation was so palpable that it was easy for me
to see, how this sort of badinage was going to get him into real
trouble. And indeed it did in years to come. His willingness to
consider new or different ideas upset a lot of people who had a
lot invested in their particular solution to what they regarded as
their problem.

It's 5:20 now. Shall we consider something else, or . . .?
I'm not sure there's much more I can tell you. Is there anything
else you think I should address?
Can you say a few words about the cabinet meetings?
The cabinet meetings occurred with some frequency in the

beginning. Towards the end of the Brown administration there
rarely were cabinet meetings. When Jerry Brown got elected
governor in November, Gray Davis and I went up to Sacramento
to visit with Ed Meese as part of a transition scheme. Meese
showed Gray and I how the Reagan administration was
organized. The cabinet meetings occurred regularly; then there
were sub-cabinet meetings and so on and so forth. He [Meese]
had a lot of boxes and a lot of lines of authority. It was
extremely rigorous. I mean, the meeting would start at eight
o'clock and it would end at eight-thirty and if it was in the
middle of a sentence, that was too bad.

Well, nothing could have been further from that than the
Brown administration. Jerry Brown, as I said earlier, was not a
great lover of meetings. Secondly, he was not a person who
would follow somebody else's agenda very easily. These cabinet
meetings usually ended up focusing more on what was on Jerry
Brown's mind than what was on the mind of the cabinet
secretaries. This is not necessarily to Jerry Brown's credit,
certainly. I think a lot of cabinet secretaries realized that if they
were going to have useful communications with the governor, it
was going to have to be one on one. I think most of the
governor's important communications with his cabinet secretaries
and his department heads was face to face or conversations one
on one or telephone conversations. The cabinet meetings were
not, in the Brown administration, a forum for cabinet secretaries
to bring to the governor their policy problems.

You see, the organization of a governor's office necessarily

reflects the personality of the governor. Jerry Brown was not as
strictly disciplined an administrator as most other governors
certainly are. He was also very, very difficult to control for his
executive secretary, Gray Davis, who was trying to put order on a
very ebullient, imaginative, creative person who liked to spend
time thinking and talking about what interested him rather than
what interested other people.

Brown was also aware of the way governors, including his
father, were controlled by their advisors. I recall him pointing
out to me once how much Reagan's system insured the ability of
those around him to control him. Reagan was presented, when
he was governor, with decision memos. A decision memo
outlined the facts, described the options, and then asked the
governor for a choice. Well, if you control the facts and you
define the options, then you basically control the decision. I
don't think Jerry Brown was about to permit that to happen to
him. He was not going to permit an Ed Meese or a [Assistant to
the Governor and Director of Administration Michael] Mike
Deaver to define the possibilities.

[End Tape 3, Side A]

[Tape 3, Side B not recorded]

[Session 3, April 16, 1991]

[Begin Tape 4, Side A]

KLINE: I think we were talking about the Bail Reform Bill, which was

A.B. 2.1 I believe the year was 1979; I'm not sure. You wanted
to know how the governor was able to get this reform enacted
because the opposition, which I think we've already discussed,
was so effective. The bail bondsmen were a powerful lobby. For
each of the twenty years between 1959 and 1979 they had
succeeded in killing that bill, usually in committee before it ever
reached the floor. It was usually liberal Democratic assemblymen
and senators from low-income districts (who relied heavily on bail
bondsmen contributions) who defeated the bill, even though
ironically, it was their constituents who would have benefited the
most from the reform that was being killed.

But the answer to the question of how we got this through
is in many ways a measure of the strength of the opposition. It
was actively supported by the governor, who raised the issue in
his State of the State message that year, and was co-authored by
the speaker of the assembly, then [Speaker] Leo McCarthy, and
the majority leader of the assembly, [Assemblyman] Howard
Berman, who clearly were the two most powerful and most
effective assemblymen in California at that time. I don't even

1. A.B. 2, 1979-80 Reg. Sess., Cal. Stat., ch. 873 (1979).

think they would have been able to enact this measure had it not
been for some of the excesses of the bail bondsmen.

Ironically, the key legislators who put the bill out in the
assembly and later in the senate were rather conservative
Republicans. In the assembly, the key people were [Assemblyman
Eugene] Gene Chappie, who later went on to Congress, who was
from Placer County; and [Assemblyman] Jim Ellis, who later went
on to the state senate and who was from San Diego.

In the senate, the key person who at the eleventh hour-it
was close to midnight on the last day of the session, I remember
it well-who changed his vote in favor of this bill was [Senator
James] Jim Nielsen, a Republican from Napa County, from an
agricultural area. I think that certainly in the case of Nielsen,
and perhaps in the case of Chappie and Ellis, they were offended
at the enormous amount of money and pressure that the bail
bondsmen were exerting. For example, bail bondsmen "loaned"--!
put the word "loaned" in quotes here-about a quarter of a million
dollars to [Senator] John Briggs, a senator from Orange County.
I'm sure that it was probably conditioned on his strong opposition
to this particular bill. I think the overtness of that financial
inducement offended not just Nielsen but many others, and I
think that was a key element.

But I don't want to underestimate the influence of Howard
Berman and Leo McCarthy, particularly Berman, who really was
an enormously skillful legislator. He's now a member of Congress
from Los Angeles and is an influential member of that body as
well. His ability to steer this measure through was critical, and

he did it through a bipartisan vote of people who were persuaded
that it would save the counties money, that it was consistent with
the presumption of innocence, and that it only related to
nonviolent offenders.

LABERGE: Do you want to go on to workers' compensation?

KLINE: Yes. The California workers' compensation system, though it's a

little-known fact, is the largest workers' compensation system in
the world. It's much bigger than the federal system. When Jerry
Brown was governor, there were then, I believe $17 billion
passing-maybe it was $7 billion, but I believe it was $17 billion-
passing through that system, because there were so many workers
covered. But despite the size of the program, both in terms of
the amount of money involved and the size of the bureaucracy,
the sad fact was that California workers were compensated less
than workers in thirty-two other states. The reason for this was
that doctors and lawyers were taking out of this system what
many believed to be an unconscionable amount.

Now, the doctors and the lawyers have very, very effective
lobbies, and although they ordinarily are at cross-purposes in the
legislature, their interests are not conflicting when it comes to
any reform of the workers' compensation system that would
diminish the economic advantage to those two professions.

In any case, there is no meaningful reform of workers'
compensation, in my view, or of which fm aware, that does not
to some extent limit the amount spent on medical reports and
lawyers' fees. The reform that Brown supported in 1980--it was

Senate Bill 3 75 l --was supported by a coalition of labor unions,
insurance companies, large employers-the California
Manufacturers Association, for example. Now, that's an unusual
coalition. Ordinarily you don't find organized labor on the same
side as insurance companies and large corporations, but you did
on this bill. And yet that coalition, which has some powerful
forces within it, was unable to overcome the enormous resistance
of lawyers and doctors, particularly lawyers.

The lawyers' group that lobbies on the issue of workers'
compensation is known as the California Applicants Attorneys
Association. Most people in California have no idea what an
applicant's attorney is, but there's nobody in the state legislature
who has any doubt. They are very well known and they are very
well financed and they are very professionally represented by
lobbyists in the assembly and in the senate. What they succeeded
in doing was bottling that bill up in a committee to whose
members they make sizable political contributions.

But our real goal was not to hurt doctors and lawyers.
That was not our purpose at all. Our purpose was simply to
benefit injured workers without increasing still further the large
premiums that California employers have to pay. The manner in
which workers' compensation premiums-costs of supporting the
system-diminished California's competitive effectiveness in terms
of our national economy, is not as widely known as it should be.
The problem in workers' compensation is not only that injured

1. S.B. 375, 1979-80 Reg. Sess. (1980).

workers are inadequately compensated, but that corporations are
so heavily burdened by insurance premiums. So there is both a
traditional Democratic and traditional Republican community of
interests here, working people and large businesses, and yet those
two unusual partners were unable to overcome the resistance of
lawyers and doctors.

LABERGE: How were you even able to get that coalition together to begin
with-the labor unions and the corporations?

KLINE: I don't think I can give Jerry Brown or his administration all the

credit for that. They perceived their own self-interest correctly.
It's no secret, really, that the costs of this system are inordinately
the result of medical and legal costs that can be reduced without
prejudicing the rights of workers and without relieving the
corporations of burdens that they should bear. So it didn't
require that much of the governor, but the governor did support
it. I think that to his credit, he was willing to take on doctors
and lawyers. I think this is another bill that helped to create the
idea-the false idea, in my view-that Jerry Brown was anti-lawyer
or anti-doctor or anti-professional, or maybe anti-elitist. But he
was not unwilling to challenge vested interests, in this case
doctors and lawyers, if he felt that it made sense, that it was a
useful social policy, and that it was feasible.

LABERGE: Could you say more about lobbyists in general and the power of
lobbyists in our government?

KLINE: Sure. I don't know that I have any special wisdom on this. I

think that the power that lobbyists have today. ... I haven't
been in Sacramento since 1980, more than a decade. My sense is

that lobbyists have more power today than they did when I was
there, but I was impressed when I arrived in Sacramento in 1975,
with their extraordinary clout.

Lobbyists have the power they do usually because of the
money that their clients spend. The costs of running for office
have become so great in this state because candidates must rely
on the broadcast media to get their message across and this costs
a lot of money. Many elected officials are not fond of the well-
heeled special interests, but nonetheless realize they are their
principal source of large contributions. My own sense is that
some form of campaign reform is essential to reduce the
inordinate power of these groups.

Now, I don't want to paint with too broad a brush here,
and I don't want to suggest that lobbyists don't contribute
anything positive, because many of them do. And indeed, there
are many areas in which lobbyists are influential for reasons
other than money. I mean, for example, in the criminal justice
area, certain lobbyists are influential in that area because of their
political power. For example, the California District Attorneys
Association exerts, I think, considerable influence for that reason.
But there are other lobbyists who exert influence because of their
expertise. There are members of legislative committees who feel
that police officers and district attorneys and public defenders and
representatives of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] do
have a level of expertise regarding the areas in which they
legislate that ought to be used, and I think rightly so.

So I don't want to leave you with the idea that lobbyists

are invariably a pernicious force. I think those lobbyists that
represent largely monied interests can and often do have an
inordinate amount of influence, which is exerted privately rather
than in any public form, and I don't think that that is healthy in
our society.

LABERGE: Do you think that will increase with the proposition that passed
of limiting the legislators' terms?

KLINE: No. That's Prop. 140.1 I think Prop. 140 is an illusion. I think

it's emotionally satisfying for people to think that by limiting
terms they are somehow going to ensure that better people
represent them who are less in the thrall of lobbyists. I think
there's no reason to believe that. I think if anything, Prop. 140 is
going to increase, not diminish, the power of lobbyists, because
few legislators will be in the legislature long enough to develop
the expertise that is necessary in many instances to thwart the
improper or excessive influence of powerful special interests. I
think that many members of the assembly and senate who know
their tenure is limited are going to be looking for positions in the
private sector that lobbyists can help them secure. Also, by
forcing a reduction in legislative staff, members of the legislature
will have less access to independent experts than they did
previously, and will also for this reason be more dependent upon
lobbyists. So I don't think Prop. 140 is a step forward in
California.

LABERGE: Anything more on the legislature, your view of how Jerry Brown

1. Proposition 140 (November 1990).

worked with the legislature or your workings with it?
KLINE: I don't believe that Jerry Brown was as effective with the

legislative body as I think he should have been. He had never
been a legislator, unlike the present governor [Pete Wilson] and
George Deukmejian before him. He also lacked the personality to
get along comfortably with a lot of legislators or those legislators
whose views he didn't respect or whose motives he questioned.
He operated more in his head than in his heart sometimes, and
he was a bit more impatient with the legislature than I think he
should have been, and I also think he was unduly confident in his
ability to lead through exhortation.

Now, this is not to say that he didn't have some great
successes. The greatest one, I think, was the creation of the
Agricultural Labor Relations Board,1 which was very difficult to
do. He had many others. The creation of the California
Conservation Corps is another enduring legacy that he must be
given virtually all the credit for. The Coastal Act2 and many
other environmental measures are also to his credit. So, while he
did have his successes, I think he might have had more if he had
had legislative experience.

On the other hand, I must say this. I do think, frankly,
that he was more effective than George Deukmejian, even though
George Deukmejian did have legislative experience. I don't think

1. Created by S.B. 1, Agricultural Labor Relations Act, 1975 Third Ex.
Sess., Gal. Stat., ch. 1 (1975).

2. Nejedly-Hart State, Urban, and Coastal Bond Act, 1975-76 Reg. Sess.,
Cal. Stat., ch. 259 (1976).

Jerry Brown was as distant a personality as Deukmejian, or
Reagan, for that matter. At that time, he was not as avuncular
and personable as many powerful legislators undoubtedly would
have liked. I don't think he had the ability to go along with
legislative agendas that he didn't share.

LABERGE: What about the Agricultural Labor Relations Bill, what was your
involvement in that?

KLINE: I didn't have much involvement in that. I was around for that,

but I was not directly involved in that.

LABERGE: Could you say something about the way he got support for that?

KLINE: Yes, he developed a level of excitement. He met, he had intense

late-night meetings with powerful agricultural interests like
[Robert] Bob Gallo, I remember in particular, and as well with
Cesar Chavez. He developed a working relationship with the key
players on the farmworkers' side and in the agricultural
community, and he then involved the legislative leadership in the
discussions that he was having. I think the level of excitement
that he generated was key.

Keep in mind this was early in his first term. He was a
new governor; didn't get elected overwhelmingly, but he did early
on have very, very strong support through the polls that I think
rendered him a formidable leader from the legislative point of
view at that time. It was something; he created the impression
that it was going to happen, and you were either going to get on
the train or you were going to be left behind. And if you got on
the train, you have an ability to fashion the measure that
resulted. That's, I think, what really contributed to that success.

LABERGE: How about addressing water issues during his governorship,

particularly the 160-acre limit?

KLINE: I'm not sure that Jerry Brown will go down in history as having

had an enormous effect on the solution to the water problems of
this state, but apart from his father, I don't think any other
governor in this century is going to go down having such a
success either. Water is the most intractable of the important
issues confronting this state and the most difficult to resolve.

There was a period in there, in the mid- to late seventies,
when we also had a drought, and sometimes a drought does
create, as we're now learning, the sort of crisis that will enable
people to perceive possibilities that their minds would otherwise
be closed to. But that drought was not long enough, and Jerry
Brown's levers of influence were not powerful enough to effect
any great change.

Now, what was happening between 1978 and 1980 on the
federal level was an attempt by the [President Jimmy] Carter
administration to reconsider the provision of the Reclamation
Act,1 which was enacted early in the twentieth century, that
imposed this 160-acre limitation. Essentially, what the
Reclamation Act said was that in order to qualify for the very
heavy federal subsidy on water in the Central Valley, people who
received water from the federal water project were limited to
family farmers, those who farmed 160 acres or less.

The 160-acre limitation was never seriously enforced in

1. Reclamation Act of 1902, 32 Stat. 388 (1902).

California, if anywhere else in the West. The value of the federal
water subsidy to California agriculture cannot be underestimated.
It is in the many, many billions of dollars. If the farmers were
required to pay the full cost of the water they received from the
federal system, then California farmers since the fifties would
have paid many, many billions of dollars more than in fact they
have.

Many feel that nonenforcement of the 160-acre limitation
has many adverse consequences for our society. First and
perhaps most obviously is that it is not being used to advance the
interests of small farmers, but is instead advancing the interests
of large corporate farmers who are least in need of this sort of
subsidy, so that there is a misuse or perversion of the subsidy.

But there are many other adverse consequences: cheap
water has financed the development of marginal land that
probably should not have been put into production. It also
encouraged the use of mechanization and pesticides and so forth
because the size of the farms that are flourishing as a result of
this subsidy were thought to require the heavy use of chemicals.

In any event, Brown was asked by the Carter administration
to get involved in this reconsideration. I was his appointee to
something called the San Luis Project, which was chaired by the
solicitor of the Department of the Interior [Leo Krulitz] . The
Secretary of the Interior at that time was Cecil Andrus, who had
previously been the governor of Idaho and is today, I believe,
now again the governor of that state.

There were a lot of recommendations proposed by this

LABERGE:

KLINE:

LABERGE:

project, but, in the final analysis, the agricultural interests of the
country, and particularly the agricultural interests of the Central
Valley of California, bottled up those reforms in committee and
not much came out of it.

It may be that that's going to change now. Because of the
present drought, there's much less willingness in California to
indulge the special rights of farmers with respect to water
allocations. And secondly, [Representative] George Miller, a
congressman from Contra Costa County, is about to become the
chairman of the House Interior Committee because Representative
Morris Udall has indicated he's going to retire at the end of this
term. George Miller has always been one of the great critics of
those provisions in the Reclamation Act that have been used by
farmers to keep a subsidy that people doubt they were ever
intended to receive. It will be interesting to see what happens.

I can't say, though, that the Brown administration was a
major player on this. This is really a federal issue, and California
has very little to say about the allocation of federal water, even
within our own state. We have some controls over it, but it's not
the sort of issue that a governor can easily influence. Any
governor.

Could we talk about either your appointment to the bench and
your experience on the bench, or your assessment of Jerry
Brown's whole governorship-its success or how you would judge
success for a governor?

Well, let me start off with going on the bench, because . . .
OK, because then we could wrap it up with . . .

KLINE: Yes. I probably should have gone on the bench sooner than I

did. I didn't really come to Sacramento with a political
background, as I'm sure I've indicated at the outset of this
interview. My background was really legal. The six years I spent
in Sacramento gave me an extraordinary education. I think I
learned a lot about California, about politics, about people, about
myself.

It was interesting also because my relationship with the
governor gave me a lot more freedom than others in his
administration had. I didn't have a department that I had to
administer. I didn't have to worry about a budget for an agency.
I was in the governor's office. I was right at the nerve center of
the administration. I had the freedom to get involved in
legislative issues or legal issues or other substantive issues or the
appointment process, and it was such an interesting experience
that I think I may have stayed on longer than I should have.

In any event, I think my career probably prepared me more
for the role of an appellate judge than it did any other single
thing. Because-my poverty law and public interest practice and
my practice in Wall Street had been almost entirely federal
courts-I thought that appointment to the San Francisco Superior
Court would teach me something . . .

[End Tape 4, Side A]

[Begin Tape 4, Side B]

LABERGE: OK, you were talking about becoming a superior court judge.

KLINE: Right. I'm not sure that I realized it at the time, but I now feel

that the San Francisco Superior Court is one of the most

interesting trial courts in America. Now, I know that's an
extravagant statement, but I think I can support it. Basically,
there are three reasons.

First, it is in a city that generates interesting cases. San
Francisco is a commercial center, it's a culturally diverse place,
and it is the sort of city that, as I say, develops interesting types
of cases: civil cases, constitutional cases, criminal cases, and so
forth.

The second reason is that the city has a history of a very
talented trial bar. It's a lot easier and more interesting to be a
judge if the lawyers practicing before you are able than if they
are not. Now, I am sure that there are probably more great
lawyers in Los Angeles than there are in San Francisco, simply
because of the different sizes of the two cities, but I do believe
that the lawyers who practice in court in San Francisco are
probably unexcelled, that they probably are an abler group than
the thousands who appear in the trial courts of other larger cities
in California. I'm not sure why that is, but it's easy to show that
San Francisco has produced an inordinate number of the great
trial lawyers of this state and nation. So the quality of the
lawyers is the second reason.

The third reason, though, I think is the most important.
That is because San Francisco is the smallest of the metropolitan
counties, and it is the size of the county that determines the size
of the bench. When I was on the superior court there were only
twenty-seven superior court judges here. There were more than
forty in Santa Clara County and Alameda County. At that time

LABERGE:

KLINE:

LABERGE:

KLINE:

LABERGE:

there were about three or four hundred superior court judges in
Los Angeles and fifty or sixty in Orange County and San Diego
County.

Now, a small superior court in a big city is an anomaly.
What it means for a judge is that you can easily obtain an
extraordinary amount of diverse legal experience. The day that I
got sworn in to the superior court, the presiding judge asked me
a question that I would never have been asked had I been
appointed in any other large metropolitan court in the state, and
the question is, "What would you like to do?" My answer was,
"Everything." In about three years on the trial court, I did
succeed in that goal; I sat on everything that a superior court
judge presides over. I sat in the probate court, I sat in the
criminal courts, I sat in the juvenile courts, I presided over the
mental health calendar, I tried the biggest divorce in the modern
history of the city.
Which one was that?

That was the Montandan-Willsey divorce case. I sat in scores of
very interesting, complex civil cases. In short, I learned a lot.

It's also a very collegial court, always has been, or at least
in the years that I've been familiar with it. I made a lot of good
friends, I learned a lot, and in some ways I'm sorry that events
didn't make it wise for me to stay longer than I was able to.
Who are some of the lawyers that you think are the best, or isn't
that fair for you to say?
The best that I know?
The best that have, for instance, tried cases before you?

KLINE: Well, on the criminal side, I'd say [Alfred G.] Al Chiantelli. He's

now a judge. [Douglas] Doug Munson. He's also now a judge.
Hugh Levine. He's now a criminal defense lawyer; at the time,
he was a district attorney. George Walker. He's still one of the
outstanding criminal defense lawyers in San Francisco. [James
A.] Jim Lassart, [Stuart] Stu Kinder.

On the civil side, there were so many. Gosh, I don't know
where to begin. [William] Bill O'Brien, [Ronald] Ron Rouda,
Jerry Falk, LeRoy Hersh, Charles Morgan, [David] Dave Phillips.
[Interruption]

LABERGE: It's kind of funny because before, we had talked about how

people thought you were antilawyer also, and the state bar wrote
an article about you, blasting your statements about . . .

KLINE: No, I was the one who wrote the article, and they censured me

as a result of the article. I wrote an article in the State Bar
Journal1 I think it was in 1978, asserting in effect that lawyers
were really part of the problem, not part of the solution, that
lawyers were more frequently opposing needed reform than
supporting them. I'm talking about court reforms. As a result,
the president of the state bar at the time-he was an Orange
County lawyer, a nice fellow named [ ] Gar Shallenberger-held
a press conference and bitterly attacked me as being antilawyer.
I've always thought of myself as being prolawyer. It may
be that I hold lawyers to a higher standard than I do other

1. J. Anthony Kline, "Law Reform and the Courts: More Power to the
People or to the Profession?" 53 California State Bar Association Journal 14
(Jan./Feb. 1978).

professional groups, but I think that's justified, given the role of
lawyers, who stand between the people and the constitution, and
who have more to do with the enforcement of the law and the
quality of justice than any other group in our society. I don't
think it's unreasonable to hold them to a high standard.

But I've never had a bad feeling about lawyers or the legal
profession. I've been frankly rather amazed that Jerry Brown and
I were seen as antilawyer or antijudge or anticourt. We were
both law clerks in the supreme court, as I think I've mentioned,
and both practiced law. My life has been committed to the law.
I love it; I can't imagine doing anything else. Most of my friends
are lawyers.

Yes, I have been critical of the legal profession from time to
time, but I think that treating me as antilawyer is very, very
unfair. I think if you want to get a comment of a person who
knows me quite well and who was involved with the state bar
when they did attack me was Charles Clifford. He's a partner at
Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe here in San Francisco. He
was on the board of governors of the state bar at the time I was
censured, and he became the president of the state bar the next
year. He knows me, I think, well enough. I'd be very, very
surprised if Charlie thinks today that I'm antilawyer or that I
really ever was. I think Charlie was more embarrassed for the
bar than he was for me.

I should also say, and I don't say this happily, that being
attacked by lawyers, is like being on Richard Nixon's enemies list.
The mail that I received at the time that the bar attacked me,

which was reported in the press and on television, was
embarrassing, I must say.

LABERGE: Has your experience on the bench changed your view of court
review, of the need for it or of what kind of court reform we
need?

KLINE: My ten years on the bench has given me a pretty highly

developed sense of the limits of the law to solve human problems.
The older I get, the more experienced I get, the more aware I
think I become of the limits of the legal process. I think it's
healthy that we're now trying to find alternatives to litigation. I
think that this whole movement towards alternative dispute
resolution is very salutary. I don't think that there is a legal
answer to every human problem, but we live in a society in
which the law is so glorified, where the notion of having one's
day in court is thought to be desirable, which is not true in any
other society in the world, has created the idea that the courts
have the ability to right every wrong. They don't.

On the other hand, I don't want to be misunderstood about
this, because I believe that our legal institutions, particularly the
courts, are more responsible than any other single factor for the
quality of justice in this country, which is unexcelled in the
world. I guess that that may sound like a contradiction, the fact
that on the one hand I have a more constrained view of what it's
possible for the courts to do, and yet still believe that the courts
have done more here than they have done anywhere. I don't
think that's really a contradiction, because if we are going to
preserve the effectiveness of our courts, we cannot have

unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve.

In any event, I have enormously enjoyed being a judge.
There are very few people in our society who can say, as a judge
can, that he is accountable only to the truth as he sees it. I'm
sure I could earn a lot more money in private practice, but I can't
imagine leaving this job for that reason. I know an awful lot of
lawyers who earn four and five times as much as I do, who
would leave their job for mine in a minute. The psychic rewards
of being a judge are considerable. There are very few issues in
our society that don't come into the courts, there are very few
issues that we don't see. The diversity of issues is a very
rewarding thing professionally.

LABERGE: Did Jerry Brown appoint you to the court of appeal? I'm looking
at the. ... He must have. Yes.

KLINE: Yes, he appointed me to the superior court in 1980, and at the

end of 1982 he elevated me to my present position as presiding
justice of the court of appeal.

LABERGE: Do you want to comment on the appointment of Rose Bird as
chief justice? That's something we haven't touched on, but I
don't know if you want to.
[Interruption]

What was your involvement and your reflection on the
appointment of Rose Bird as chief justice of the supreme court?

KLINE: I did not conceive of that idea, although many people think I did.

LABERGE: That sets the record straight.

KLINE: Yes. In fact, I was somewhat opposed to her appointment as

chief justice, although I was supportive of her appointment to the

supreme court. It was Jerry Brown who initiated the idea of
appointing Rose chief justice. But I worked strongly to see that
she would be confirmed, and was glad that she was.

The misgivings I had and that many others in the Brown
administration had--or maybe not many, but certainly several
other members of the cabinet-was that as talented and as able as
Rose Bird was, she was not temperamentally suited to be the
presiding justice of a collegial body. There was a stiff-necked
aspect to Rose. She could be a bit self-righteous and was
sometimes unduly suspicious of the motives of others. She
tended to see people as either for her or against her, and I think
that she felt that many more people were against her than really
were, but over time her suspicions did generate animosities and
thus became in some sense a self-fulfilling prophecy. Rose didn't
have the ability to exert leadership over institutions consisting of
people who could not be fired and who were very jealous of their
own prerogatives as constitutional officers.

I guess that in retrospect, the appointment of Rose Bird as
chief justice was probably the biggest mistake that Jerry Brown
made as governor. I think the reason he did it was first, he
believed that she was extremely intelligent, and she was. I think
he also believed that she was highly principled, and she was.
And finally, and not least of all, I think he believed that her
appointment would shake up the judiciary, which he felt needed
to be shaken up. He was much more right about that than I
think he ever understood, and I think that therein lay the
problem.

The problem was not that Rose was not a member of an
old-boy network. The problem was that Rose lacked the ability
to persuade the members of her own branch of government and
the public at large that she did not have an ideological agenda
that she was determined to impose on society. In fact, I think
she created the opposite impression. But in any event, I think
that Jerry Brown wanted to appoint a strong woman to an
institution that had been a bastion of men from the beginning as
a symbol that he was bent on opening up that institution to the
diversity-the ethnic, racial diversity-of this state, and I think that
was a good impulse.

LABERGE: Were you surprised when both she and [Justice] Cruz Reynoso
and [Justice] Joseph Grodin were voted out?

KLINE: No, I wasn't surprised by then. I was a little surprised that

Grodin and Reynoso were defeated, but I wasn't shocked by it. I
think that by that time the antipathy to Rose had grown so
widespread and she had demonstrated such an inability to alter
the negative views of her and the court that it was a foregone
conclusion.

I think the real issue that did her in was the death penalty.
There was then overwhelming support for the death penalty.
Most people believed she simply would not tolerate its
application. She had never voted to affirm a judgment in any
one of the scores of death penalty cases that were presented to
her in the, I believe it was eight years, that she was on the
supreme court. In the final analysis, for most people it became a
referendum on the death penalty, the result of which was a

foregone conclusion.

It may be that Rose would have been unable to avoid that
result even if she had been more skilled and less suspicious and
more personable. I don't think we'll ever know the answer to
that.

LABERGE: Would you like to sum up Jerry Brown's success as a governor?

KLINE: Tm not sure that the time is right to totally sum up Jerry Brown's

success as a governor. Or, not whether the time is right but,
whether I'm the right person to do that. I do believe that Jerry
Brown was a good governor, and I believe, I think, that history
will reflect more favorably on him than some people today
believe. He was much more open-minded, much more inquisitive
than elected officials ordinarily are. I think he was much more
willing to listen to people whose background was different than
his own than most people are. And I think he had a greater
ability to stimulate people than most elected officials have.

One of the things that plagued him was that this open-
mindedness and inquisitiveness also had some adverse
consequences. Many people don't want leaders who are
inquisitive or who are willing to entertain alternatives to
conventional approaches. It's a little unsettling to them. I'll give
you a specific example.

During the eight years that Ronald Reagan was governor,
the people in the state who wanted support for fluoridating water
got nowhere in Sacramento. For some reason I've never fully
understood, conservatives in America believe that fluoridation is a
collectivist Communist plot, so Reagan and his people never had

any interest in efforts to fluoridate water.

Well, after the election of Brown, supporters of flouridation
felt that the answer to their prayers had arrived, and a meeting
was convened in the governor's office so he could learn who
these people were, what their ideas were, what it is they wanted
to accomplish, and what specific measures they wanted him to
support.

At some point in the meeting, the governor interrupted, and
in effect what he said was this: "Wait a minute. The problem is
that our kids have rotten teeth. The reason they have rotten
teeth is that they eat Hostess Twinkies and drink Coca-Cola. But
instead of changing the eating habits of our youth, you want to
put a chemical in the water." Well, a lot of jaws dropped in that
room.

Actually, Jerry Brown was to some extent just being playful.
I don't think he was opposed to fluoridation, and I think that he
did end up giving them the support that they wanted. But his
challenge to the conventional wisdom that they had committed
themselves to was very, very unsettling. That was indicative to
me of a problem that Jerry Brown was going to have and indeed
did have with many other constituencies and in many other
connections in the years to come.

Jerry Brown is seen as being an anti-elitist by many groups.
This is partly the result of the fact that he enjoyed appointing
public members who were not experts to boards and commissions
that regulated certain trades and professions. For example, he
put nonlawyers on the board of governors of the state bar, and

UBERGE:

KLINE:

UBERGE:

KLINE:

he outraged doctors when he appointed nurses to the Board of
Medical Quality Assurance. Things of this sort were not
calculated to endear him to many powerful groups in the state.
In the final analysis, I think he was undone by what some people
came to describe as a "flaky" quality.

However, he was intellectually the most substantive
governor this state has had as long as I've been here. I think he
was also much more willing than some governors and other
elected officials have been to tackle issues, even if he felt he was
not advancing a popular view. For example, it was not easy for
him to veto the death penalty at a time when he knew it had
overwhelming support. There were other examples.

I also found that he was a lot of fun to work with. He had
a great sense of humor. I don't think he took himself too
seriously or as seriously as a lot of people in that position did.
He could take criticism very easily. He didn't take criticism
personally. And I think he had a highly developed sense that it's
a brief interlude on this lugubrious planet and you ought to
accomplish as much as you can in the brief time allotted.
Do you want to end there, or are there other issues you'd like to
comment on?

No. I can't think of anything. [Looks through papers]
There are some things we haven't talked about.
Yes. You did ask me once what a typical day in the governor's
office was like. My answer is that there was no such thing as a
typical day. Unlike Ronald Reagan, who came in at nine and left
at five, Jerry Brown was a bit more erratic. He was really a

night person. Sometimes he wouldn't come into the office until
ten or eleven, but when he was in Sacramento he rarely left the
office before midnight and was often there much later than that.
He was a much more spontaneous person who was much more
difficult for his staff to control than I think some governors are.

LABERGE: Including you?

KLINE: Oh, yes, including me. I don't think Jerry Brown was ever in the

thrall of his staff to the extent that I know Ronald Reagan was.
Many of the secretaries and others that were in the governor's
office when Jerry Brown was there had been there under Ronald
Reagan and [Governor] Pat Brown, and a few even earlier than
that- [Governor Goodwin] Goodie Knight-so you couldn't help if
you were there but hear from them what these other governors
were like. And I know Pat Brown quite well and I know what
dealing with him is like.

Jerry was much, much more spontaneous, was not as linear
in his thinking. One of the problems that he had was that he
was not as good at consulting others before he took a position as
most leaders of the legislature have to be. He would call up Leo
McCarthy or [Senator James] Jim Mills, who were then speaker
of the assembly and president pro tern of the senate, with an idea
in the middle of the night and say, "Let's just do it ..."

[End Tape 4, Side B]

[Begin Tape 5, Side A]

KLINE: You couldn't do anything of any significance without building a

consensus among the leadership in your party and the chairmen
of your committees. I'm not sure Jerry Brown always fully

LABERGE:

KLINE:

appreciated that. Once he became persuaded that a particular
course of action should be taken, he got very frustrated by having
to go through a long, deliberative process.

But although he was headstrong, he was, as I think I've
already indicated, much more creative and much more
imaginative than most political figures. That's what got him in
trouble. That's what created this notion that he was
unconventional or flaky, but I think that . . .
[Interruption]

. . . Before that, I was saying that while he was headstrong and
sometimes got easily frustrated, he was also an extraordinarily
creative and imaginative leader. My point is that in a state like
this, at this point in history when change is coming so quickly to
this state, that you do need the kind of creative thinking at the
upper reaches of government that Jerry Brown had. Some of the
things that Jerry Brown said are easy to ridicule, but my sense is
that in the long view of history he will be seen as a much more
productive thinker, compassionate leader, and effective governor,
than some people today realize. We'll see.
Shall we end?

Yes. Well, there is one. ... I don't know if I mentioned it
earlier, but one point I want to emphasize is the type of people
Jerry Brown brought into state government. This is an area in
which Jerry Brown has changed the California reality, and I think
in a positive way. It was not so easy in 1975 and '76 and '77 to
appoint minorities and women to powerful positions that had
never seen a minority or a woman in the history of the state. I'm

LABERGE:

KLINE:

not just talking about the supreme court, I'm talking about the
Energy Commission and the Public Utilities Commission. I'm
talking about the trial courts. I'm talking about a whole array of
regulatory bodies that affect water and power and that make a
real difference in the day-to-day life of California. He was
accused by many people of appointing women and minorities
simply to curry favor with these constituencies, and that in doing
so he was compromising quality, the implication being that if you
were going to appoint minorities and women, then you were not
going to appoint people who were qualified.

This is, of course, racist and sexist, but in the mid-seventies
that was the prevailing view of many, many people in powerful
positions and many people in general. He just defied that, and I
think he's just changed the way that people think. I don't know
if I said it earlier on this tape, but I remember in 1975, his first
judicial appointment was to the superior court in Riverside
County.

You have given that story.

Did I talk about that? Right. Well, I'll just use that as an
example. I won't repeat it. But what the thinking was then,
that's not the thinking today. So George Deukmejian, Pete
Wilson, and future governors, whether they like it or not, or
whether they realize it or not, even, are going to be measured to
a considerable extent by the standard that Jerry Brown set. I
don't think any chief executive of any country, let alone any of
the states, has appointed as many women and people of color to
important positions as Jerry Brown did in the eight years that he

was governor.

LABERGE: I would say you had quite a bit to do with it, don't you think?

KLINE: Well, yes, I did have a lot to do with it, but I don't want to

create the impression that I had to twist Jerry Brown's arm.
Jerry Brown and I really were on the same wavelength on this.
My view is that government is not legitimate if it isn't seen by
the mass of people as reflecting its own values and own life
experience.

As applied to the courts, for example, Jerry Brown's attempt
to bring the complexion and sex and ethnic makeup of the
judiciary more into line with that of the people of this state
strengthened respect for judicial institutions, didn't weaken it. I
think it's completely untrue to suggest that the women and
minorities that he was appointing were less able than the white
males that he appointed. Some of the greatest judges he
appointed were people of color. One that comes immediately to
mind is Bernard Jefferson, one of the greatest judges in the
history of California. There are many, many others. So I think
that that is a legacy also that Jerry Brown will be credited for in
the final analysis.

LABERGE: Thank you very much for your time.

[End Tape 5, Side A]

[Tape 5, Side B not recorded]

BERKELEY LIBRA

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Full text of "Oral history interview with J. Anthony Kline : oral history transcript / [1991"

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