Mar. 9, 2010
Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters has been covering California politics since 1975. No one writing about our beloved state government has more experience or authority.
But Walters did a curious thing in his March 3 column, titled “Brown’s back – with his baggage.” After spending the entire column talking about Attorney General/gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown’s politics, personas and past tenure as California governor, he drops in this sentence near the end: “And then there’s the Brown family’s semi-secret financial ties to the military dictatorship of Indonesia, a book-length saga unto itself.”
Say what? Now I may still be relatively new to Sacramento, but others in the office who’ve been up here a few years were shaking their heads after reading that little line. Not really having a clue what Walters was talking about, I started digging though old newspaper articles for some kind of explanation. Though I didn’t find much, what I did locate made me reassess everything I knew about Jerry Brown and his father, the late Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown.
Much of what’s currently available about Brown and Indonesia comes from Walter’s reporting decades ago, though it’s clear the issue was hot in the late 1970s. A great source is this Walters story that ran in the Oct. 17, 1990 Lodi News-Sentinel, and forms much of the background for my own knowledge of the tale.
