Slick Willie

...In short order, committee chairs were being doled out to members who were proven fundraisers...

...gridlock and irrelevance...

...and the “juice” committees, like Ways and Means, were enlarged in the cause of greater fundraising potential...

...Brown thundered, and for a moment he had become the spokesman for all the forces-blacks, students, women, antiwar activiststhat emerged in the turmoil of that time...

...That he was not universally viewed as a tribune for minorities became clear in his unsuccessful bid for the speakership in 1974, when all but one of the black and Latino assembly members supported his opponent...

...In quick time, Brown had not only become one of San Francisco’s few black attorneys, but a rising star both in the city’s militant NAACP chapter and in the fledgling, left-wing Burton machine...

...Still, he’s been a smash on purely stylistic grounds...

...What Brown didn’t do during the OS, when Jerry Brown was governor and liberal legislation was possible, was produce any notably progressive law, save a statute decriminalizing gay sex...

...he proclaimed early in his race for mayor...

...It’s not the consummation one would necessarily have predicted for the young Willie Brown...

...He recently canceled a homelessness summit his ofice had planned...

...I hope San Francisco takes on my style and my attitude,” he said while campaigning, and the wave of fedora purchases that followed his election suggests this may be the case...

...And early though it may be, Richardson’s thorough and engrossing study is indeed likely to stand as the definitive biography of Brown-as well as an authoritative account of the descent of the California legislature into HAROLD MEYERSON is the executive editor at LA Weekly and a member of the editorial board of Dissent...

...After 1972, that was the Willie Brown who emerged, though for many he remained cloaked in the larger purposes of social movements that he had ceased to represent...

...Brown’s deals were often no less Byzantine or brihant, but their goal was more commonly simply to perpetuate hs hold on power...

...When he finally became Speaker in 1981, having cut a deal with assembly Republicans to let him wield the gavel, the liberal epoch in California was virtually at an end...

...Overall, Speaker Brown was memorable more for his ability to keep the Democrats in power than to produce notable law...

...Brown emerged from the Sacramento cocoon to find that there was no consensus as to what the liberal urban agenda actually was, and he himself had little to suggest...

...In the first term of his speakership, Richardson notes, Brown raised and spent twice what his predecessor had on Democratic assembly campaigns...

...I still have a soul...

...Both were driven men, both were masters of the game, but Burton played the game to ideological ends...

...But tobacco money proved a double-edged sword: In 1994, a lastminute $125,000 check from Phillip Morris to a Republican assembly challenger gave the GOP its first majority in a quarter-century...

...During Brown’s speakership, no American politician received as much money from tobacco as he...

...Brown grew up in the most segregated and Mississippi-like corner of Texas in the 1930s and OS, within a very functional extended family that supported itself at least partly through activities on the far side of legality...

...Brown left the speakership as he had come-securing just enough Republican votes to cling to the post until he was enmeshed in his next activity, running for mayor of San Francisco...

...by Harold Meyerson WHEN THE GALLEYS OF James Richardson’s biography of California’s legendary assembly Speaker arrived in the mail, I mentioned the book to a friend, a longtime . . Y Sacramento staffer and lobbyist...

...The steady stream of girlfriends had begun well before Brown was in the money...

...Phillip Burton...

...Brown presided for a record 14 years as Speaker, twice the tenure of any other, but his reign coincided with the governorships of George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson...

...And it is partly because Brown, in complete contradistinction to Burton, was consumed by the game itself...

...But it falls somewhat short of Jacobs’s effort, and chieflv,,, o ne is forced to conclude, because Brown’s story is ultimately a good deal less compelling than Burton’s...

...Richardson puts the figure at just over $600,000...

...Brown consoled himself by cultivating a lucrative law practice on the side, and reveling in the cars, the I d a n suits, and the overall ambiance of elegance that came with it...

...Shortly after high school, Brown left for San Francisco, where his uncle Itsie-and his uncle Itsie’s casino-had relocated...

...it seemed likely to yield few solutions and much rancor...

...It hasn’t quite worked out that way...

...The bill died in the other house...

...Richardson’s volume comes a year after his colleague John Jacobs’s marvelous biography of Brown’s mentor, California Rep...

...No, since the statute of limitations hasn’t run out,” she replied...

...His legislative victories were largely defensiveminimizing the effects of the governors’ cutbacks on Democratic causes, such as education funding...

...That is partly because Sacramento was more gridlocked during Brown’s tenure than Washington was during Burton’s...

...Since he’s just starting out as San Francisco mayor...

...Give me back my delegation...

...fichardson follows the young attorney as he represents protestors in the courts (a steady source of employment in the Bay Area of the OS), into the state assembly where he rashly challenges Speaker Jesse Unruh, and to his apotheosis: his speech at the 1972 Democratic National Convention on behalf of seating George McGovern’s California delegation, which Brown chaired and which was under challenge from the party’s old guard...

...the pol who set the standard for fundraising, for deal-making, for all the aspects of the politician’s trade that the public has come to loathe...

...Surprisingly, the most absorbing section of Richardson’s work is the first...

...In this new chapter of a long career, Brown is emerging as less a new-age LaGuardia than a latter-day Jimmy Walker, LaGuardia’s playboy predecessor whose affairs, like Brown’s, were endlessly interesting to the local press...

...It is partly because the means Brown used to stay in power made the progressive advances he professed to desire all the harder to attain...

...Which remains the rap on Willie Brown, the fiery ’60s liberal who, to general astonishment, became the ultimate player of inside politics in the nation’s most populous state...

...On balance, though, the East Texas of Brown’s youth was a violent, racist environment...

...His uncles ran a casino and a bootlegliquor operation, and Brown learned early that not even the white man’s law wanted to come down heavy on the community’s chief liquor supplier...

...the Byzantine deals with right-wingers would ultimately result in more welfare coverage, or new black lung legislation, or additional national parks...

...I asked...

...Brown funneled the money into assembly races that he targeted and staffed with his own able apparatchiks...

...It’s not quite the legacy one would have hoped for from the man Richardson calls Phil Burton’s most talented student...

...Brown claimed to view his return to San Francisco as an opportunity to be born again in liberalism...

...As leader of America’s most liberal city, he would have the freedom to pursue a progressive urban vision freed from the threat of Republican vetoes, to become a champion for urban America...

...But there’s another way to read that line-the cry of a legislator who wants his votes back...

...While many liberal-dominated local governments were outlawing smoking in public places, Brown got the assembly to pass a bill pre-empting localities’ power to regulate smoking...

...It’s a little early for the definitive biography of Willie Brown,” she said...