One Party Town (1962)
On San Francisco, political families, and not sticking to sports.
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I.
You might say this whole thing began with Richard Nixon and a California ski resort. In 1960, the same year Nixon narrowly lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy, a fledgling resort in Tahoe known as Squaw Valley hosted the Winter Olympics. Those Olympics would prove influential and prophetic in a number of ways, but they also foreshadowed the power dynamics that would come to define California itself over the next sixty years.
Bear with me for a moment, because we’re about to get really granular: In the wake of those Olympics, a concessions contract for that ski resort was awarded to a man named William Newsom, who happened to be a longtime friend of (and donor to) the Democratic governor of California, a man named Pat Brown. And Nixon—who channeled his insatiable political ambitions into a run for governor of California in 1962—used this as an avenue to attack Brown for his nepotism. Brown insisted he knew nothing about the awarding of the concessions contract; Newsom insisted he’d made absolutely no money on the contract.
The story largely fell flat. Nixon wound up losing that election, prematurely signing on to his own political demise. One year later, in 1963, San Francisco—after over three decades of Republican governance—voted a Democrat for mayor. Later on—after Ronald Reagan oversaw the last true era of Republican governance in California—Pat Brown’s son Jerry would also serve two terms as the Democratic governor. Even later, William Newsom’s grandson, Gavin, would also become governor in a state that is now bluer than ever. It was the beginning of a fascinating interplay of four powerful families who would come to define the city and the state’s politics for three generations, as outlined by CalMatter’s veteran reporter and columnist Dan Walters:
II.
As Walters would tell us, his only objective in writing that article and publishing that chart was to lay out the varied connections between those families. But in this political environment, people saw in it what they wanted to see, including a number of far-right conspiracy theorists, who attempted to co-opt this chart as incontrovertible proof of California’s inherent liberal corruption.
The year after Walters’ story ran, I got a call from an independent producer in Los Angeles named Ryland Aldrich. We knew there was story here, but the story wasn’t about some hacky Q-Anon level conspiracy, and it wasn’t about Richard Nixon and a largely meaningless concessions contract. For a while, we thought it was a sports story, about the 1960 Winter Olympics and their impact, which was why Ryland had contacted me in the first place.
But we couldn’t get those bigger ideas out of our heads. It took us a long time—and the addition of a second producer, Steve Petchenik—to figure out what the narrative actually was, but the idea was right there in Nixon’s attempt to build a conspiracy out of the San Francisco-born friendship of Pat Brown and William Newsom (who would, ironically enough, later engage in one of the most egregious conspiracies in American history).
The story, we realized, was in San Francisco itself.
What we uncovered was not some sinister plot. It was not a function of left versus right at all; it was a function of power. But it did raise real questions about how those power dynamics affected (and still affect) the people of San Francisco. It raised questions about the influence of a political machine birthed by perhaps the savviest politician in California history, a San Franciscan named Willie Brown—who helped jump-start the career of a prodigiously talented young attorney named Kamala Harris, who herself was incredibly skilled at navigating San Francisco’s complex and often insular social circles. And it raised questions about what happens when one political party essentially operates in a vacuum for decades without any outside opposition, regardless of whether that party happens to be red or blue.
Above all else, it was a story that raised larger questions about what we wanted and expected from democracy itself.
III.
Here is the point where you ask yourself, Why in the hell would a longtime sportswriter want to delve into politics? And the answer is that I didn’t plan to. But the problem was that no one seemed to be writing the story we wanted to tell about the city that I’d come to love—a story that examined the big picture over the course of the past 40 or 50 years. (San Francisco’s political reputation had become so pervasive that it had arguably even begun to affect sports in the city.)
I’d like to think that the three of us had very little of an agenda at all, because we came from this story out of left field. We had our own political viewpoints, but this story wasn’t really about those; it was, again, more about power than politics. We worked on it for several years without any guarantee that it would see the light of day until a major podcast company made an offer for it; I’d never narrated much of anything before, let alone a podcast. We made very little money for our work, but we didn’t care, because we knew we were onto something. And I’m proud of what we produced. I don’t think we have all the answers—I don’t think we ever expected to have all the answers—but I’d like to think we ask a lot of the right questions, like whether machine politics and consolidated power is an inevitable byproduct of democracy, or if there’s a better and more equitable way forward.
Here’s the link to the first episode of One Party Town, which is available for free on Wondery. If you want to binge the other four before the election, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial of Wondery Plus. Thanks for giving this quirky little project a shot.
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