Volume 25, Number 14 · September 28, 1978
Jerry for President?
By Marshall Frady
Brown
by Orville Schell
Random House, 307 pp., $10.00
Jerry Brown: The Philosopher-Prince
by Robert Pack
Stein and Day, 293 pp., $10.00
Jerry Brown: The Man on the White Horse
by J.D. Lorenz
Houghton Mifflin, 267 pp., $8.95
Jerry Brown: In a Plain Brown Wrapper
by John C. Bollens, by G. Robert Williams
Palisades, 272 pp., $9.95
Ever since his startling pillage of Jimmy Carter's progress in the last six presidential primaries of 1974, California's bachelor governor Jerry Brown—errant Jesuit seminarian with still a pallor of sanctity about him, in his raven-dark suits, his sharp mouth with a faint down-tug of the haughty and fastidious, political communicant now of Buckminster Fuller and Zen thought—has continued to present one of the most perplexing presidential prospects to impend in the nation's life since, perhaps, Robert Kennedy. For approximately the same reasons, he also strikes many as one of the most disquieting. Nevertheless, with Carter increasingly seeming to be caught in some perverse and unmanageable political undertow, already there is a sense of a vacuum ineluctably forming for 1980, a free magnetic field of possibilities. And Brown, having magically delivered himself not only intact but, if anything, enlarged out of what appeared at first to be a capsizing with Proposition Thirteen, seems more and more a figure moving in a kind of crackling St. Elmo's shimmer of portent.
Review, 11644 words
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