Pat Brown

Pat Brown governed California through the years it became the largest state in the union and built most of the infrastructure it still runs on. He was a San Francisco district attorney and then attorney general before winning the governorship in 1958, and his two terms produced the State Water Project, the freeway system, and the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which sorted the university, state college and community college systems into a single structure and made tuition-free public higher education a functioning reality for a decade. He also presided over a state whose politics were turning against him. He commuted some death sentences and refused others, most famously Caryl Chessman's, which satisfied nobody. When the farmworkers' march reached Sacramento at Easter 1966, Brown - who had courted their support and whose party depended on it - left the capital for the weekend to stay at Frank Sinatra's house in Palm Springs rather than meet ten thousand marchers on the Capitol steps, and Cesar Chavez made sure the absence was noticed. The Watts uprising in 1965 happened while he was in Greece. The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the property-tax revolt gave Ronald Reagan a campaign about disorder, and Brown lost to him in 1966 by roughly a million votes, having dismissed him as an actor. His son Jerry later served four terms as governor himself, and his daughter Kathleen became state treasurer. He had prosecuted organised crime as district attorney and campaigned against capital punishment while presiding over dozens of executions, a contradiction he wrote about at length afterwards. California passed New York to become the most populous state during his second term. He lived long enough to see his daughter run for governor and lose to Pete Wilson in 1994.

• Lived: 1905 CE – 1996 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: politician