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By Root 1578 0

that were being talked about, back when a billion was still real money. Brown’s $750 million lie (and, if Hirschleifer was right, it was considerably more than that) was a $3 billion lie in modern money. And it would set the stage for a monumental predicament, one that the governor’s son, ironically, would be the first to have to face. In order to embark on building the project, the DWR would have to have contracts in hand to sell water. That was the whole idea—demand before supply. Those contracts would ultimately demand that the state deliver 4,230,000 acre-feet of water. But if the initial bond issue failed to deliver the full amount, and the voters subsequently rejected bonds to expand the project, the state would expose itself to a torrent of crippling lawsuits from cities and farmers who had planned their growth and invested their money on the promise of water it could never deliver. The damage claims might cost more than the project itself. Back in 1959, however, all of that still seemed far in the future.

One of the reasons Pat Brown felt confident with his misleading cost estimate had to do with the tidelands oil contract between Long Beach and the state which, as attorney general, he had abrogated in 1954. Long Beach was understandably outraged, and immediately filed suit against the attorney general’s office. To its amazement, the California supreme court sided with the state. It was a remarkable legal opinion. The attorney general had nullified a signed contract to let a city have some revenues, and the court had upheld him even though the state had no demonstrable need for the revenues. It didn’t even have a plan to use them. What kind of court was this?

An answer—a speculative one—popped up in another part of the governor’s long 1981 interview with Malca Chall. Actually, they were discussing something else—Brown’s decision to try to use the old Central Valley Project bonds which the voters had authorized in 1933 to scrape together another $170 million in cash. That, in its own right, was a matter of peculiar legality: using a bond issue passed twenty-seven years earlier—a bond issue that was meant to finance the Central Valley Project—in order to construct an entirely different water project. But, mystifyingly, the California supreme court had okayed that, too. “That was Phil Gibson, the chief justice, with whom I worked very closely,” Brown told his interviewer. Then, according to the transcript, he laughed. “He was a great chief justice and it was great to validate those bonds.... The chief justice worked very, very closely with me in all of those decisions. You see the supreme court didn’t have to take original jurisdiction in those cases. But I would call the chief justice and say, ‘Chief, this is very important. I want you to take it.’ And invariably he did.”

Phil Gibson died before he could be interviewed for this book, and Pat Brown, in a personal interview, hotly denied ever having tried to influence the court’s decisions. But Gibson’s obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle described him as perhaps the most powerful and influential chief justice in the history of the court, and he was, after all, Pat Brown’s bosom friend. All of this leaves at least a suggestion that, in California, where an issue as important as water was concerned, strict legality, separation of powers, honesty, and other niceties of governmental conduct could easily be ground into mush.

In 1959, after intensive lobbying by Pat Brown, the California state legislature agreed to allot the tidelands oil money for the water project—an annual interest-free loan of $25 million, repayable ... whenever. It was an open-ended deal; the Tidelands Oil Fund could keep feeding the project until the oil ran out, which might take a hundred years. Even Brown would admit in yet another startling little confession to Malca Chall that “it was another subsidy to the big farmers.” But it was not just any old subsidy. It was a subsidy that had an architectural elegance, a wonderful symmetry to it. Several of the “big farmers” who would get much