Man of Tomorrow the Relentless Life of Jerry Brown by Jim Newton

• Jurisdiction: California,United States
• Publication year: 2021
• Citation: Vol. 34 No. 1
• Author: Reviewed by Marc Alexander

Man of Tomorrow The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown By Jim Newton

Reviewed by Marc Alexander

Marc Alexander is a mediator and Of Counsel with AlvaradoSmith APC. He publishes the blog California Mediation and Arbitration, and he co-contributes to the blog California Attorney's fees. malexander@alvaradosmith.com

The title of journalist Jim Newton's fine new biography, Man of Tomorrow, scarcely mentioned in the book, cannot capture Jerry Brown in his fullness. As Newton himself points out, Brown's thinking was strongly influenced by a rigorous Jesuit education, and Brown "walked in the paths of tradition." He strongly believed in limits to the role of government (and to government spending). Brown told William F. Buckley on Firing Line, "Freedom is totally impossible without limits, without structure." While Brown did not believe government was the solution to every problem, he believed government could play a positive role and make the lives of Californians better. Accepting the limits of government and accepting the active and positive role government can play may make Brown seem a man of contradictions in our politically polarized time. In fact, Brown's ability to integrate both ideas enabled him to govern our unruly state with increasing success as he matured politically.

At times, Brown seems less a man of tomorrow than a man out of synch. About Brown in 1967, Newton writes: "Too young, too skeptical, too liberal to join up with Reagan's team, too old, too straight and too Catholic to enjoy the counterculture, he was outside the poles staked out.... "

Brown has been called a visionary, yet he rejects the label, preferring "Catholic skeptic enthusiast ... and a romantic." Yet "romantic" is a word pointing in many directions, towards tomorrow, towards the past, towards chivalry, towards utopia, and in the waspish words of the smart aleck journalist Mike Royko, towards moonbeams. All this is to say that no substantive label can begin to do justice to Brown.

The book's subtitle, "The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown," is more illuminating, because the adjective "relentless" points towards a surging and churning process, towards Brown's ambition, his striving, his inquiring mind, his occasionally contrarian and harsh streak, and his sense of obligation and commitment. An editor might have suggested another subtitle, "The Questing Life of Jerry Brown."

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The relentlessness of Brown's quest for public office is recounted in detail by Newton: trustee to the Los...