Three Who Missed Their Man

...is impressionistic where one wishes he were analytical...

...In a style reminiscent of a poor TV documentary, he flits from one issue to another, giving no sense of the past beyond his seven-month tenure...

...This leads both of them to endless comparisons of public and private statements and actions that only serve to enhance the aura of mystery surrounding Brown...

...When the state's legislators, irked by Brown's pro-union appointments to the board established by the law, choked off funding, three appointees resigned...

...Brown achieved national importance with his astonishing showing in the Presidential primaries, a performance Pack alone details...

...And the final paradox is that our leading political proponent of a smaller-scale society has sustained his career in a state awash in prosperity and growth...

...So words are very important...

...He represents the possibility of successfully confronting a future in which, many feel, less will be available and more demanded...

...He told Pack: "I view government and leadership as educational, persuasive, communication...

...Reviewed by Steve Lagerfeld Assistant editor, the "PublicInterest" After only four years as governor of California and a short-lived, if spectacular, run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1976, Jerry Brown is the subject of three books published almost simultaneously...

...I'm communicating ideas...

...He does write in Jerry Brown: The Man on the White Horse that he believes the Governor to...

...Jerry Brown: The Philosopher Prince By Robert Pack Stein & Day...

...Lorenz fails to seize the opportunity...

...Curiously, Brown seems to have done relatively little to deserve such popularity...

...The result is a superficial book, as much an autobiography as a biography: Lorenz relates how his efforts to address the unemployment problem ran counter to Brown's seeming obsession with symbols and abstractions and ultimately cost him his job...

...It is simply too early to say how his ideas will work out or even what they really mean...

...It is also the least difficult...

...252 pp...

...The attention has less to do with his White House potentialities, though, than with his enigmatic personality...

...It is clear, in fact, that Brown thinks his vision is the most important thing he has to offer...

...His personal life, for instance, seems somehow to combine austerity and a "California lifestyle...

...An image is in reality a thesis presented to the public...

...In another case where he appeared to take a political risk, by vetoing a death penalty bill, they point out that he made no effort to prevent the legislature's override, thereby avoiding the penalties of his position...

...One comes away from these three books realizing that Jerry Brown remains an enigma...

...He helped formulate the difficult law by means of personal diplomacy, and guided it through the legislature virtually unchanged...

...He has rolled up a budget surplus of about $5 billion, yet most of that is a windfall, the consequence of taxpayers being pushed into higher income tax brackets by inflation...

...Of the six primaries he entered, he won five, beating Carter, and finished third as a write-in candidate in Oregon, where he still managed to collect almost a quarter of the ballots cast...

...But by the end of June the Los Angeles Times reported he was solidly out front again...

...After the initiative failed, Brown appointed three moderates to the inactive board and funding was restored...

...to accept it, with all its accompanying hoopla, as the basis for study is to concede too much ground at the outset...

...be "the representative American figure of the 1970s...

...Language is very important---We're not manufacturing durable goods here...

...J.D...

...Critics, including Lorenz and Schell, say Brown exerts himself only when there is political benefit to be derived, such as association with the farm workers issue...

...Nonetheless, Brown has plausible, often fascinating explanations for everything he does, and they are part of the much talked about "vision" that, in addition to being important to his image, is too consistent and too clearly a guide in his daily life to be mere sham...

...The authors of these books thus had the opportunity to explore that phenomenon and their principal subject in greater depth than the media have, and to explain his success in a way that would reveal something about the confused state of American politics...

...Remarkably, Orville Schell's Brown exhibits precisely the same qualities...

...Brown may have done more thinking than most of our political figures, but he has put more of his ideas into words than into action...

...He then campaigned for a more ambitious proposition placed on the ballot by the UFW...

...politically, he is able to hold out the promise of both slower economic growth and increased well-being...

...In part, this falls within the tradition of appearing to be all things to all people, but a number of the paradoxes Brown embodies also are quite real and reflect the public's latent anxieties...

...He presents a balanced account that contains a wealth of information about the Governor's past, his political career and his appeal...

...One of the obligations of political biography, particularly in the case of "media politicians" like California's Governor, is not to puncture images but to avoid them altogether...

...Although Schell has done a little more homework, like Lorenz he neglects to even mention how well Brown actually did in the Presidential primaries, deeming it sufficient to offer a few supposedly illustrative vignettes from the campaign trail...

...and deals almost exclusively with Brown as a personality...

...But Lorenz, who was Brown's employment director for seven months before being fired, is more interested in venting the fury of the scorned than in serious observation...

...Happily, Robert Pack avoids this mistake in Jerry Brown: The Philosopher Prince...

...That's what I'm getting paid for----" The communication of ideas is certainly an important aspect of government...

...He has pushed only three major pieces of legislation: the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, a measure to protect the coastline and a new school financing law...

...But perhaps the best evidence that Brown is more concerned with symbols than substance is the way he takes pains to identify himself with "victimless causes" that arouse no real opposition and where there is small chance of having an impact on the outcome —like the save-the-whales movement and space exploration...

...Brown was responsible for passage of the agricultural statute guaranteeing farm workers a secret ballot to determine whether they wanted union representation and, if so, to decide between the competing Teamsters and United Farm Workers (UFW...

...Opinion polls within California have consistently yielded approval ratings of around 80 per cent—until the one conducted at the time of the vote on Proposition 13, showing him trailing this year's Republican gubernatorial challenger by four percentage points...

...The net effect of such surface treatment is to enable Brown to control the terms of discussion: The public has been persuaded that his relationship with singer Linda Ronstadt or his interest in Zen are more important than how he has governed California, and the two authors, along with most of the press, have fallen into the trap, attempting to deflate that image by pointing out its contradictions...