Sam Brown might be the Daddy in some kid’s game of play-house. His face is soft, cute: immature: waiting perhaps for a momentous endocrine change. The mustache, I think, could have been spirit-gummed on. At 33 his adulthood will seem borrowed from a grown-up’s closet. This is that Brown, remember, who organized Students for McCarthy, who invented the Vietnam Moratorium, who is now—turn left often enough and you’ll end up following yourself—is now State Treasurer, elected State Treasurer, of Colorado. He orders Campari to moralize against my straight bourbon and takes a Sam Brown belt from it. He’s apologetic, sweaty: been sprinting to keep this appointment. New York bankers, not freshmen and sophomores, have held him up. Sam ducks out of his conservative suit jacket and arranges it, each shoulder just right, on the chair back. No more funky jeans for Sam Brown. As he will say, “Why offend people with style when you can offend them with substance?”
A bit self-important, that: drawn from some state treasury of useful maxims. It has the macho-pompous ring that went with people who called Vietnam just plain Nam: politics is the art of the passable and so forth. But Brown has sung it, solo on occasion, before. Back in ‘69 he could sense that Middle America had been snubbed, gratuitously, by style. One year later, at age 27, he did a brilliant piece for The Washington Monthly, maybe the most incisive, certainly the most precocious, appreciation of antiwar tactics and neuroses then written. “In any case, I find political violence wrong in principle, and antiwar violence is also strategic nonsense, creating even more needless enemies than flag-burning…. Middle Americans who favor an early end to the war hold the political balance…. Jerry Rubin may have to be excluded from a platform to keep John Lindsay, because, coldly, John Lindsay is far more politically valuable.” This might have been effective strategy, but Brown knew that there was a crack in its engine block. “This is particularly difficult for young people, who dislike the notion of effectiveness because it represents to them the very craving for success that alienates them from America…” Form will follow functioning: so does a paycheck, mortgages, boredom.
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