The real Kamala Harris, according to ex-boyfriend who ‘made her career’
Willie Brown, the wheeler-dealer former mayor of San Francisco, jokes he will take credit if Kamala Harris beats Donald Trump. Others who know her insist linking her success to him is sexist.
For years the rise of Kamala Harris has been overshadowed by claims, dismissed as sexist by her allies, that she owes her career to the California powerbroker she dated during the 1990s.
The Vice-President, critics argue, would still be in local politics were it not for her ex-boyfriend Willie Brown, the charismatic former mayor of San Francisco. When The Times met him at his favourite restaurant, Brown, now 90, dismissed such attacks on the woman who is expected to challenge Donald Trump for the White House in November.
“I don’t think she owes her career to me,” he said from his usual table in the corner of Sam’s Grill, an old-school seafood restaurant in the city’s financial district. But it is unlikely that Brown’s protestations will silence Harris’s critics, who are picking over her history before the election.
Harris was 29, an up-and-coming lawyer, when she caught the eye of Brown, then an influential figure in Californian politics and later the mayor. Their relationship lasted less than two years but Brown, 60 at the time and separated from his wife, used his influence to place Harris on well-paying boards. His largesse has been used to attack her ever since.
“I think talent is what got her where she is,” Brown said, dismissing claims that his former girlfriend relied on her looks to climb the political ladder. “And she has been through the chairs: DA [district attorney], attorney-general, US senator and now vice-president. That’s an indication she had to be talented.”
Harris has been thrust to the top of the Democratic Party’s ticket by the physical decline of President Joe Biden, but Brown appears robust. With a firm handshake and a youthful face, the nonagenarian had no problem being heard over the din of the lunchtime rush.
He remains a beloved figure in San Francisco. Impeccably dressed in a tan, pinstripe suit and pastel-blue shirt, he cut a stylish figure while chatting to the restaurant staff. They still refer to him as “the mayor”, despite him leaving office in 2004.
He cannot remember the first time he met Harris but points out that he has boosted the careers of other California politicians, including Gavin Newsom, the governor, and London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco.
He says he takes a “lot of pride” in watching Harris’s rise and jokes that she has left behind his other young charges. “She is now clearly rated as the most outstanding,” he said. “My friend Newsom is only the governor and she might be the president. And that outranks him.”
If Harris can beat Trump, despite polls suggesting that the 78-year-old convicted felon holds a slender advantage, it will complete an extraordinary journey.
Harris was born in Oakland in 1964 to a Jamaican father and an Indian mother. They were both accomplished academics: Donald Harris was an economist and Shyamala Gopalan, who died in 2009, was a cancer researcher.
Kamala Harris grew up in a pale-yellow two-storey duplex in Berkeley. This week drivers passing the house slowed down to take a closer look at the property.
After earning her law degree in 1989 from the University of California, Hastings, in San Francisco, Harris joined the Alameda county district attorney’s office, where she spent much of the following decade.
It was during this period that she met Brown, then Speaker of the California assembly. Their relationship was the talk of the town and in 1994 Herb Caen, the celebrated San Francisco Chronicle columnist, revealed that she had attended Brown’s 60th birthday party.
Clint Eastwood, another guest, “spilled champagne on the speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris,” Caen wrote, adding that she was, “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”
The relationship was over two years later but the debate about Brown’s influence has rumbled on.
What is not disputed is that Brown gave Harris influential posts on two state regulatory boards. According to Politico, they paid her dollars 400,000 over five years, on top of her salary as a prosecutor. Brown is also said to have given her a BMW.
Brown had his detractors while in office and critics accused him of being too close with developers. An FBI investigation into alleged corruption at San Francisco city hall resulted in few prosecutions and Brown was never indicted. He has defended his reputation as a wheeler-dealer and said handing out patronages was part of politics.
Despite his pride in her achievements, Brown said he had not spoken to Harris “in many years”.
Making an impression with teddy bears
After a decade in Alameda county, Harris joined the San Francisco city attorney’s office. Louise Renne, who led the office, was looking for a new head of the Family and Children’s Services Division when she met Harris in 2000.
She needed someone tough and compassionate, able to deal with fraught family issues. Harris, Renne had heard, was an outstanding lawyer and found her to be “very intelligent and charming”. She offered her the job.
Harris quickly left her mark with a gesture on her first day in charge of hearings in which children would find their adopted families. “Kamala came into my office with her arms full of teddy bears,” Renne recalled.
“She said ‘Come on, Louise, we’re going over for adoption. And we’re going to hand out these teddy bears as remembrances of this day.’”
That incident confirmed to Renne that she had hired the right person. “Kamala really is a family person,” she said. “She was very close to her mother, to her sister and her sister’s family. And of course her husband and her husband’s children.”
During their time together Renne never heard of any complaints about Harris, whose time as vice-president has been marred by high staff turnover and claims of a toxic office.
Of course, Renne knew of Harris’s relationship with Brown. Claims that she owes him her career, however, are sexist and untrue, according to Renne, the first female city attorney in San Francisco. “When women are first in anything, there are always a lot of sexist comments,” she said.
Renne supported Harris’s 2003 run for San Francisco district attorney, when she challenged a powerful incumbent in what proved to be a bitter campaign. It was around this time that she became friends with Amelia Ashley-Ward, publisher of San Francisco’s oldest black newspaper, the Sun-Reporter.
The media proprietor can vividly recall the first time she spotted Harris, who was wearing blue jeans and a white leather motorcycle jacket, her hair flowing, at an event at the city’s Fairmont hotel.
She and Ashley-Ward bonded immediately. “Kamala is smart, she’s brilliant and caring,” she said. “You always had the sense she was meant to do something extraordinary.”
The Sun-Reporter was quick to endorse Harris when she announced her run for attorney-general in 2002. During the campaign Ashley-Ward recalled riding a cable car through the streets of San Francisco, with Harris jumping off and on to greet voters with her “magnetic” personality.
The campaign was tough. In a prefiguring of today’s attacks by the Republicans, Harris’s good looks were used against her, according to Ashley-Ward, adding that women “could be jealous”. In the end Harris won a resounding victory and a foothold in California politics.
Ashley-Ward dismissed the claims that Harris owes her career to Brown as misogynistic. “She has got to where she is because of her brilliance, her tenacity, her determination, her family life, her background, her education,” she said.
“Her heart is in the right place and she wants to make the world better. And Willie Brown has not been with her every step of the way, in every minute of her life.”
Rivals depict Harris as a ruthless careerist, but Ashley-Ward says this is far from the full picture. She knows her as a “sister friend” who calls her on her birthday each year in September.
She weeps while recalling how Harris phoned her in January after the death of her father. “I don’t want you to hurt,” Harris told her.
Such a personal touch has not always been evident, with the vice-president struggling to lift her alarmingly low approval ratings. Her run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019 collapsed as support and money ran out before the first contest in Iowa, leading to bitter recriminations.
“This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organisation treat its staff so poorly,” Kelly Mehlenbacher, the state operations director for Harris’s campaign, wrote in her resignation letter.
“Because we have refused to confront our mistakes, foster an environment of critical thinking and honest feedback, or trust the expertise of talented staff, we find ourselves making the same unforced errors over and over,” she added.
The same shambolic atmosphere followed Harris into her first year as vice-president, leading to numerous leaks bemoaning the “toxic” atmosphere of her office and a high staff turnover.
Harris “refused to do the kind of preparation that you need to do before going public on a hardcore policy matter. And then she became incensed and outraged when things wouldn’t go the way she thought they were supposed to,” one disgruntled employee told Chris Whipple, author of the 2023 book about the Biden administration, The Fight of His Life.
They rejected the frequent rebuttal from the Harris circle that such anonymous complaints were racist or sexist.
“When somebody raises an issue about Kamala, everybody’s like, ‘You don’t want to see black women succeed’. That’s completely backward. Everybody who goes to work for Kamala, by definition, wants to see her succeed. That’s why you take these jobs,” the worker said.
The stream of corrosive leaks about Harris being hard to work for has slowed as she eventually found her feet as vice-president and pivoted away from the task of stemming migration to the fight to restore abortion rights.
However, her staff turnover figures seem unusually high even for the high-pressure environment of the White House.
Some former colleagues argue that politics is a rough business. Brian Brokaw caught his first glimpse of Harris in the mid-2000s when, as the district attorney for San Francisco, she was hosting a fundraiser for a state senator called Barack Obama.
In 2009 Brokaw found himself seated opposite Harris while interviewing to become campaign manager for her California attorney-general bid; an intimidating set up. “I was in the hot seat and I felt like I was in a police interrogation room,” he recalled.
The questions were tough, as was to be expected from a leading prosecutor, but Harris found the time to ask personal questions of him.
“It was a perfect combination of both Kamala the prosecutor and Kamala the person, who wants to know about your family and how they’re doing, and the ages of your kids and all that sort of thing,” Brokaw said. He overcame his nerves and got the job.
Harris, Brokaw said, is hard-working and determined, and expects the same from her staff. “She is dogged, she is scrappy, she is demanding,” Brokaw said. “She expects the best of the people who work for her, and if she doesn’t get it, it’s pretty clear we’ve fallen short of her expectations.”
Brokaw admitted with a chuckle that he was on the receiving end of a dressing down many times during the campaign. One moment stands out: in 2009 he was walking Harris through her schedule for the following day when he attempted a joke.
“And it just wasn’t funny,” he said. “And she said, ‘Don’t do that again’. It was one of those moments that just sticks with you and I didn’t make that mistake again.”
Brokaw stresses, however, that Harris is not dour. She possesses a “biting sense of humour” but it often takes a back seat to her work.
Other staff members also felt her wrath if briefings were inaccurate. “She is somebody who pays incredible attention to detail,” Brokaw said. “In legal filings every detail matters and in a courtroom setting every detail matters. “If one detail is wrong she will probably question the validity of everything. I saw too many examples of a briefing being thrown off because staff didn’t have their act together.”
He added: “She recognises we’re all human and people make mistakes. The important part is not repeating mistakes, and learning from them.”
Brokaw, who worked on primary races, election campaigns and as manager of a super political action committee for Harris’s doomed 2020 presidential bid, argues that high staff turnover in the vice-president’s office cannot always be blamed on the boss. “She is demanding – and guess what? Not everybody is up to snuff,” he said. “And sometimes, if you’re not up to snuff maybe it’s time to find something else.”
Harris showed the aggressiveness that served her well as a prosecutor while grilling Brett Kavanaugh during his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, but as vice-president she has been mocked for “word salads”.
She has gone viral for referencing coconut trees, repeatedly telling audiences they are “unburdened by what has been” and for describing her love of yellow school buses.
Her laugh has also come in for criticism, and Trump has used the insulting nickname “Laughing Kamala”.
The Democrats hope Harris has learnt lessons from her time as vice-president. After Biden’s position became untenable in the wake of the catastrophic televised debate in June, and he dropped out of the race, the party quickly unified behind his No 2.
Harris’s responsibility for the southern border represents what is perhaps her greatest political liability. Biden gave her the thankless task of examining “root causes” of immigration in the spring of 2021, but millions of migrants continued to flow in the US.
She was often referred to as the “border tsar,” a label the Trump campaign is now highlighting in an attempt to associate her with what is considered the top issue before the election.
Polls suggest that Trump has a lead, though Harris will no doubt fancy her chances. “I think she does well in those moments when she’s being counted out,” Brokaw said. “It’s fuel for her.”
Harris will need such resilience if she is to endure what is certain to be a no-holds-barred campaign.
She has not even been confirmed as the nominee but the gloves are off, with prominent conservative commentators accusing her of sleeping her way to the top.
Those jibes appal Harris’s supporters, who condemn them as sexist tropes, but Brown is confident his former protegee is ready to roll with the punches.
If she does manage to defeat Trump, few will be more delighted than “Mr San Francisco”, who, in his tenth decade, has lost none of the humour that made him such an adored public figure.
Asked how proud he would be of President Harris, Brown said with a smile: “I’d take full credit.”
The Times
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