Brown also sees danger in the growing discord between Democrats and Republicans. “The last time we had that, we had the Civil War,” he said. Infuriated by the President, California Democrats—such as Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who is leading the race to replace Brown, and State Senate leader Kevin de León, who is challenging Dianne Feinstein for her seat in the U.S. Senate—have argued that the state is a “sanctuary,” and the antithesis of Trump’s Washington. Brown’s opposition to Trump is somewhat different. On occasion, he drops some “rhetorical bombs,” as he has called them, but he prefers a measured, pragmatic approach. Brown rejects the idea that a state can offer sanctuary from the federal government, and he does not like to talk about “the Resistance,” either.

“What is that?” Brown said. “People are striving to frame their campaigns rhetorically. But I’m not running a campaign. . . . I’ve criticized the President when I thought he was wrong, but my life doesn’t revolve around Donald Trump.”

In late December, I met with Brown at the governor’s mansion, a three-story Victorian residence with a towering windowed cupola. A startling anachronism in downtown Sacramento, the mansion is separated from the street by a low iron fence with a locked gate. When a visitor arrives, a security official emerges from the house with a key.

Brown’s parents, Pat and Bernice Brown, lived in the mansion throughout Pat Brown’s two terms as governor. (In the seventies, Ronald Reagan lived in a house in the suburbs; Nancy Reagan had called the mansion a “firetrap.”) Pat Brown had an expansive, optimistic view of California, and he believed in spending generously: on university campuses, on freeways, and on a vast water project that turned the Central Valley into one of the country’s richest agricultural regions and helped Southern California flourish. In 1966, he ran for a third term but lost to Reagan, in his first run for political office.

When Pat Brown began his governorship, Jerry was twenty and a Jesuit novice, honoring vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. In a photograph taken at his father’s office, he is wearing a priest’s black suit and Roman collar. After several years, Brown left the seminary and went to the University of California at Berkeley and then Yale Law School. In a recent interview with the political analyst David Axelrod, he recalled studying for the bar exam on the third floor of the governor’s mansion and, to escape boredom, making his way down the winding staircase until he could eavesdrop on a political argument between his father and Jesse (Big Daddy) Unruh, the speaker of the Assembly. Jerry was transfixed. He thought, That’s what I want to do.

Brown once said he was both “attracted and repelled” by the political discussions and machinations that took place in his parents’ house. Nathan Gardels, who went to work for Brown in 1976, told me, “That may be true, but he was never indifferent. He can tell you how many votes Pat Brown got in San Luis Obispo County in 1954, in his race for attorney general. It’s the family business, and he knows it thoroughly.” Brown was more resistant to Pat’s penchant for the time-honored campaign tradition of donning festive hats. Tom Quinn, Jerry’s longtime campaign manager, recalled, “He’d go to a Mexican parade and wear a sombrero. Jerry said, ‘No hats!’ He was always rebelling against the old-fashioned kind of politics.”

In 1970, Jerry Brown was elected California’s secretary of state; there was no incumbent in his way. Four years later, Governor Reagan, preparing for a Presidential campaign, announced that he would not seek a third term. Brown, who was thirty-six, decided to enter the Democratic primary; three of his six opponents were leaders of the Party establishment. Quinn said, “Pat Brown took me to breakfast at the Polo Lounge and he told me, ‘You’re going to destroy my son’s career.’ He thought Jerry had no chance.” But Jerry was running against corruption in state government. His inexperience became an advantage; his adversaries belonged to the world he wanted to clean up. “Jerry had an issue, clean government, which seemed kind of bland,” Quinn said. “And then Watergate came along!” He won the primary by almost twenty points.

Brown took office in the midst of a recession. He believed that no public institution should be exempt from budget cuts, including some that his father had helped to build. When University of California officials resisted, he said that they had an “edifice complex.” Gardels recalled that David Saxon, the university’s president from 1975 to 1983, once told him, “Reagan distrusted public institutions. Jerry Brown distrusted all institutions.” Tony Kline, a friend of Brown’s from Yale, who was his legal-affairs secretary in his first two terms, said, “There is an ascetic aspect to him that is very genuine. He was quoting E. F. Schumacher”—the German economist, who had recently published a best-selling treatise on sustainable development—“talking about lowering expectations, driving around in his blue Plymouth. I think his message of ‘Small is beautiful’ did not really resonate in 1975, but it did establish his credibility as a person who has long adhered to the view that there is virtue in sacrifice.”

Brown entered the Democratic Presidential primaries in 1976 and 1980, losing both times to Jimmy Carter. In 1982, near the end of his second term, he ran for the U.S. Senate, against the Republican Pete Wilson, who was then the mayor of San Diego. There was a ballot measure to declare California’s opposition to nuclear weapons, and Brown released a commercial in favor of it, featuring a mushroom cloud and a child telling voters, “I want to go on living.” A former adviser recalled, “I told Jerry, ‘This is stupid!’ He was already seen as kooky.” Wilson beat Brown handily.

In the years after Brown left the governorship, he travelled to Japan, to study Zen Buddhism, and to India, to work with Mother Teresa in caring for the dying. He campaigned for President again in the 1992 election, declaring his righteous opposition to the “unholy alliance of private greed and corrupt politics.” He attacked Bill and Hillary Clinton for conflicts of interest during their time in Arkansas, and said he would not accept contributions of more than a hundred dollars. After losing decisively to Bill Clinton, Brown moved to a converted warehouse building in Oakland, where, for a time, he hosted a radio talk show. In 1998, he ran for mayor of Oakland, on a platform of improving schools, revitalizing the downtown, and reducing the crime rate, and won.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has known Brown and his family since the sixties, told me, “He had that awful moniker, Governor Moonbeam, and I think the difference came when he served as mayor of Oakland, because he saw what it took to make a city run.” He founded two charter schools, including a military academy, and forged strong relationships with law enforcement. In his Oakland office, he displayed a poster with his father’s campaign slogan from a run for San Francisco district attorney, in 1943: “Crack down on crime, pick Brown this time.”

During Brown’s time in Oakland, he cut ties to a longtime political adviser, Jacques Barzaghi. Bald, dressed in black, and speaking in a semi-comical French accent, Barzaghi was given to preposterous utterances. “We are not disorganized,” he said of the highly disorganized 1992 Presidential run. “Our campaign transcends understanding.” In 2001, one of Brown’s staffers filed a sexual-harassment complaint against Barzaghi; the city paid fifty thousand dollars to settle the complaint. Brown finally fired Barzaghi in 2004, after Barzaghi’s wife, his sixth, called the Oakland police, alleging that he had been violent during a domestic dispute. (No charges were filed, and Barzaghi could not be reached for comment.)

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Some of Brown’s friends believe that his relationship with a business executive named Anne Gust steadied him after the Barzaghi era. They started dating in 1990, and married in 2005, a first marriage for both of them. Feinstein, who performed the civil ceremony, said she had been remonstrating with Brown: “If you don’t propose, you’re going to grow old and lonely and sick, and Anne is going to find someone else.” Gust Brown is twenty years younger than Brown, and until they married she was a senior executive at the Gap. The next year, he ran for state attorney general, and Gust Brown ran his campaign; she has been his de-facto campaign manager and closest adviser ever since.