She charmed Californian high society (and the gossip columns), but can the wannabe US president sweet-talk the rest of America? Megan Agnew speaks to the friends, colleagues and allies who witnessed her early ascent up close.
Kamala Harris moved quickly. At just 39 years of age she was elected as district attorney of San Francisco – the city’s chief prosecutor; the person who decides whether to charge, who to charge and what the charge should be. In 2010, a mere seven years later, she was elected as California’s attorney general, the “top cop” responsible for overseeing the state’s criminal and civil cases, ensuring the law was enforced in the way she interpreted it.
In the UK the chief prosecutor – a position once held by the prime minister, Keir Starmer – acts for the Crown and remains publicly apolitical. In the United States they are elected by and act “for the people”. They are politicians with a very public profile. In 2016 Harris won the race to represent California in the US Senate. By 2020 she was the first female, first black and first Asian-American vice-president. Next week she will turn 60. Soon she could be the 47th president of the United States – the first woman in the role.
To understand how Harris has travelled so far in politics, we must first understand how she began – by winning the 2003 election to become San Francisco’s DA. She wasn’t from a family with political heft and didn’t have a grand surname in a city where it mattered. She was in many ways an outsider – a former trial lawyer from a middle-class home across the bay in Berkeley.
Last month I travelled throughout the Bay Area, speaking to dozens of people who worked for her and above her, who knew her from fundraisers and parties, who went to her wedding and invited her to their hen dos. What I found was a person whose raw ambition and charisma got her into the most exclusive rooms in the city.
In the 1990s and 2000s she became the ultimate networker. She went to charity events and fashion luncheons, Sunday suppers and gala dinners, and dated the most influential politician in the city, Willie Brown, during his high-profile mayoral run. She schmoozed the old-money dynasties – the Gettys, Buells, Swigs and Pritzkers – who dominated public life and operated from the chintzy mansions in the hills of San Francisco’s northern quarter. These were the Democratic kingmakers. They adored her.
Her brand of liberal politics was easily embraced in California, which has transformed over the past 40 years. This was a state that once spawned Republican leaders – Nixon, Reagan and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was governor from 2003 to 2011. Immigration and emigration changed all that. Less than 25% of California’s electorate are now registered as Republican. Its politics became dominated by two key groups of Democratic voters: new ethnic minority immigrants – Latinos make up almost 40% of the population – and highly educated, well-off liberals.
Harris learnt to appeal to both. She is currently polling at 59% in California – but her popularity there is also one of the biggest threats to her campaign. The state has a reputation for being a wealthy, sun-drenched La-La land that doesn’t reflect or understand much of the rest of America; a place far, far away from the Rust Belt swing states of Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where the election will really be won, decided perhaps by just a few tens of thousands of voters who might have last voted for Trump’s brand of red-blooded, working-man’s Republicanism. Will her charm stretch that far? Can she persuade some-time Republican voters that she is their woman too? Can she replicate what she did in California across America?
East Bay beginnings
Harris was born in 1964 in Oakland, across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco. Whereas the big city’s politics were flashy and highfalutin, the East Bay’s were scrappy and grassroots. Its citizens were poorer, with large black and Hispanic communities living across sprawling former industrial districts. It was the centre of the civil rights movement and the birthplace of the Black Panther Party.
Harris spent her first few years in nearby Berkeley, raised by middle-class academic parents. In 1958 her mother, Dr Shyamala Gopalan, travelled from India to the US and became a noted breast cancer researcher. Her Jamaican-born father, Donald J Harris, now 86, became an economics professor at Stanford in 1972. Harris was wheeled to civil rights marches in her pram and the family’s front door was always open to academics and activists. After her parents divorced in 1971, Kamala and her younger sister, Maya, now 57, were brought up by their mother, who died in 2009.
When Harris was 12 her mother moved the family to Montreal, Canada. There she had a high-school friend who, she found out, was being sexually abused by her stepfather. “A big part of the reason I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her,” Harris later said. She went on to attend Howard University in Washington, one of America’s historically black colleges.
After graduating she studied at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, and during her last summer there won a coveted internship at the district attorney’s office in Alameda, just south of Oakland, to train with a team of prosecutors. It was a noble office, one of the most respected in the country, tackling a heavy caseload of violent crime.
At the end of the summer Harris was offered a job in the DA’s office as a trainee prosecutor – to launch her career in the courtroom all she had to do was pass the bar exam. When she failed she was mortified, but the office kept her on until she succeeded on her second attempt. She started as a deputy district attorney in 1990.
“We did everything together for those years,” says Kenneth Mifsud, 63, who joined in the same intake, working in cubicles on the ninth floor of the René C Davidson Courthouse, an enormous art deco building on Lake Merritt. “Kamala was the youngest, she was three years below, so she was like the little sister.”
The young lawyers cut their teeth on misdemeanour cases – prostitution, driving under the influence, vandalism – scrabbling hard to prove themselves. On Thursday evenings they unwound at an Irish pub in Jack London Square or at Warehouse, a “cop bar”, Mifsud says, “but a fun place to hang out”. Harris would “light up a room”, he adds. “She enjoyed life.”
In front of a jury she was “poised”, recalls Carol Brosnahan, 89, an Alameda Superior Court judge who heard some of Harris’s first misdemeanour cases. “She didn’t come in to fool around – you can’t do that in a court like mine.” The judge was so impressed that she suggested to her husband, James Brosnahan, now 90, a senior trial lawyer at Morrison & Foerster, that his firm should poach Harris. “I never managed it,” he says.
Most trainee attorneys took five years to be assigned felony trials. Harris took three. “She was ahead of schedule,” says Darryl Stallworth, 59, a fellow attorney at the Alameda DA’s office. The work was brutal. A “horrible wave of violence” crashed through Oakland in the 1980s and early 1990s as the crack cocaine epidemic took hold. “We were the soldiers in that office, putting on preliminary hearings back to back – murder cases, rivalry cases, drug cases. It was high volume and it was intense.”
‘First-lady-in-waiting’
In 1994 Harris was still a largely unknown Oakland prosecutor when she started dating Willie Brown, the flamboyant Speaker of the California state assembly, one of the region’s most recognisable politicians and its great powerbroker. He was 60 and married, though separated from his wife. At 29, Harris was the oldest of nearly all his recent girlfriends, according to the rumour mill. “He has given up his ‘girls’,” Herb Caen wrote in his gossip column for the San Francisco Chronicle, “in favour of a woman, Kamala Harris, who is exactly the steadying influence he needs.”
For San Franciscan society watchers it was a titillating, intriguing relationship that propelled Harris to the top table. As Brown campaigned to be the next mayor, Harris accompanied him to his fundraisers, to the San Francisco Symphony’s opening-night gala and to play pool (in front of a TV camera crew) at Tosca Cafe, a sceney dive bar popular with politicians, artists and movie stars. On the night of the mayoral election Harris gave Brown a baseball cap with “Da Mayor” printed on the front in gold. “Mayoral candidate gets a kiss from friend Kamala Harris,” read a picture caption in the Tribune newspaper. “The new first-lady-in-waiting,” Caen declared after Brown won.
Brown, now 90, was a big character, immaculately dressed and bombastic company. After being central to the civil rights movement, he was elected to the assembly in 1964. He was surrounded by the great, the good and the dodgy of California. His fundraisers were stuffed with Hollywood names and, many said, those wanting to make a profit from his policies. As a result, he became associated with misconduct and favouritism, known for hiring his political allies into plum jobs and accused of being too close with local developers. The FBI investigated his tenure at City Hall between 1998 and 2003 on allegations of corruption, though he was never indicted. He has defended his reputation as a wheeler-dealer and said handing out patronages was part of politics.
A sexist interpretation or not, Harris’s relationship with Brown validated her as a person others might want to get to know at parties and elevated her beyond the otherwise civilian, worthy existence of a local prosecutor. San Franciscans squabbled over whether it was true love or a positioning exercise on Harris’s behalf. Either way, Brown operated a powerful political machine and Harris was at the heart of it.
He appointed Harris to the Insurance Appeals Board, which paid US$97,000 a year, and later the California Medical Assistance Commission, which paid $72,000 a year and required her to attend just two board meetings a month. She was known, says a friend, for “bombing around town” in her BMW – said to be a gift from Brown. They broke up before he was sworn in as mayor after spending less than two years together. No one quite knows why – “It’s over,” Brown told the gossip columns forlornly. But they remained close friends, attending weddings as a couple, and – crucially – allies. Brown’s political machine went on to form the skeleton of Harris’s future one.
Empathy and ambition
Back in Alameda, Harris’s colleagues in the DA’s office were used to seeing her in the gossip columns, but in court it was serious work. In 1996, while on the felonies team, Harris successfully prosecuted the first “scalping” case in the court’s history. Frank Vanloock, an unemployed labourer from Fremont, had been drinking and taking methamphetamines with his friend Monica Mayer-Harnisch when he jumped on her back, pulled back her hair and cut off a large swatch of her scalp.
Harris was appointed the prosecuting attorney. “She seemed like she cared about what happened to me,” says Mayer-Harnisch, 64, now 25 years sober and living in a neat cottage in northern California. The difficulty for Harris was proving intent to maim and torture, a more serious crime than battery. Vanloock argued that he had only meant to cut her hair, but Harris called five witnesses who said they had overheard him repeatedly threatening to scalp her. He was sentenced to life in prison for the more serious charge of aggravated mayhem and torture, and served 28 years in jail.
Sitting in the gallery was Nancy O’Malley, the head of the sexual assault unit at the Alameda DA’s office. She was looking for new hires. “That case really solidified my decision,” O’Malley says today. “Kamala really understood that evidence code to be able to build these strong cases. And it was quite remarkable how this young woman was able to testify about her experience. There was something that was comforting about Kamala, but at the same time she was tough as nails when she needed to be. She would shut someone up in the [courtroom] crowd in a way that did not put that person down as much as it did take control.”
O’Malley hired her. “She was very sophisticated in her ambition,” she says. “She had this innate sense of how and where to move to, who to know, meeting people in social circles that could help or did eventually help on her way up the ladder. That’s a unique skill.”
Also on the Alameda sexual assault team was Sharmin Bock, now 62, who became a firm friend of Harris. The pair would sit on the courtroom steps, drinking coffee and talking about the bleakness of their cases. They needed “respite”, bonding over ideas and projects to “make the world better”, says Bock, who lived and socialised in San Francisco. The first initiative they worked on together was with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Harris had joined the board and established a mentoring scheme to bring high-school students into the gallery. She then joined the board of Partners Ending Domestic Abuse, a non-profit founded by Roselyne “Cissie” Swig, of the real-estate family that has roots in the city five generations deep.
“The mid-nineties were pivotal years as the social scene shifted its focus from debutante balls to cultural fundraisers,” says Catherine Bigelow, a society watcher who wrote a diary column for the San Francisco Chronicle. “The traditional social scene had already morphed from lunching society mavens to young ‘doers’, devoted to raising funds and supporting cultural institutions. Kamala was among these dynamic doers.”
Having been introduced to the in-crowd by Willie Brown, Harris was well positioned. There was Billy Getty, grandson of the oil tycoon J Paul Getty, and his wife, Vanessa. Harris attended their wedding; Gavin Newsom, the present governor of California, was the best man. Harris was later made godmother to the Gettys’ youngest child, I am told. There was the Democratic grande dame Susie Tompkins Buell, co-founder of the clothing brands Esprit and The North Face, and her daughter, Summer Tompkins Walker, a bright young thing with a fabulous wardrobe who was a committed philanthropist. There was the socialite Denise Hale, a “pillar of high Wasp society”, according to Vanity Fair, who considered Harris to be one of her “favourite friends”; the Pelosis, including the future House Speaker Nancy and her daughter Nancy Corinne; and Stanlee Gatti, an event planner who was the best-connected man in the city.
“It’s very hard to penetrate and hard to establish yourself in San Francisco if you’re not really on the inside,” Tompkins Walker, 57, tells me. She still lives in the city, running a monogrammed gifts brand alongside renovation and philanthropic projects. She first met Harris through Willie Brown. “Kamala got on the inside because she had friends. She knew how.” However, Tompkins Walker never felt as though Harris was using people or “working the system I don’t like those kinds of people, I can spot them from a mile away. This was an effortless friendship. She was embraced by everybody.”
In the evenings this group of ambitious young change-makers had kitchen dinners at their homes, mainly in the grand Russian Hill and Pacific Heights districts, or went to the Balboa Cafe, opened by Billy Getty and Gavin Newsom, a businessman then whom Willie Brown was soon to appoint to the Parking and Traffic Commission.
Harris was spotted at a rock’n’roll-themed party thrown by Ingrid and Reuben Hills, heirs to a coffee fortune, where she wore “leather and lace” (Nancy Pelosi came in a Rolling Stones T-shirt and George Shultz, the former US secretary of state, a black wig). At a charity “celebrity pool toss”, Harris sat between the author Danielle Steel and the theatre producer Jo Schuman Silver, while Getty and Newsom were pushed into the pool ($8500 each), followed by the socialite Charlotte Mailliard Swig, who went in wearing a bouffant black taffeta Oscar de la Renta gown.
Towards the end of 1997 there were rumours that Harris was looking to make the professional move from Alameda to San Francisco. She went to speak to her DA, Tom Orloff, to tell him she had been offered a job as deputy assistant in the San Francisco office. “Obviously Kamala was ambitious and she saw a brighter future over in San Francisco,” says Orloff, now 81 and retired, “and I think she was right.”
Alameda was considered a “backwater”, says Orloff, its DA’s office a place of stability where people stuck around for decades waiting for the king to die. The San Francisco DA’s office, by contrast, was the power centre, a place of quick-moving, back-stabbing politics. “She was obviously thinking something,” Orloff says.
Harris began work as a prosecutor in San Francisco in February 1998, heading up the career criminal unit. At her first trial (burglary, guilty) her old boyfriend Willie Brown, the mayor, was sitting in the courtroom’s public gallery. He had recommended Harris highly for the job.
Her boss, the DA, was Terence “Kayo” Hallinan, a left-wing former defence attorney who was known for settling disputes with his fists. Rumour had it that Harris saw his position as vulnerable. Hallinan’s chief assistant and campaign manager, Darrell Salomon, was deeply suspicious of Harris, believing she was plotting to usurp his boss in the next DA elections in 2003. “San Francisco is hard-knocks politics,” Harris has said. “People sling mud. They punch the gut.”
Fred Gardner, 82, Hallinan’s press secretary at the time, asked Harris if she would run for DA. She told him no. “Maybe I’m quite naive,” he reflects, “a fool of the left.” Harris was soon leading a revolt of the “Samurai Seven”, a group of deputy DAs. Their coup against Salomon failed and Hallinan kept him on. The office’s chief investigator gave him a bulletproof vest as a gift. Harris resigned in August 2000 to take a job as the head of the children and family’s unit at the city attorney’s office. “I’ve become disillusioned and disappointed with the top leadership,” she said.
Her farewell lunch was at a bayside restaurant, where the crowd grew from eight to 30 people. “It suddenly became the ‘in’ place to be that day,” Gardner says. “Even Kimberly Guilfoyle came at the end.” Guilfoyle, who is now engaged to Donald Trump Jr, briefly worked as a prosecutor in the same office, and was soon to marry Newsom. The two women, Gardner says, had a largely unspoken tension, “both politically, in the office, and in a social way outside the office, in the world they were moving in”.
The city attorney’s office was in City Hall, a monumental building with ornate stucco arches and a grand staircase in a soaring atrium. The CA handles civil cases including the family courts, where Harris was placed, dealing with fostering, adoption, neglect and child abuse. Louise Renne, the city attorney at the time, hired her. “I thought her work as a prosecutor would stand her in good stead for the kind of trauma and neglect you see in the family courts,” says Renne, now 87. “But she can also be tough.”
On Harris’s first day in the adoption court, Renne says she came into the office with her arms full of teddy bears. “She said, ‘Come on, we’re going to hand these out to the children as a remembrance of this day.’ That had never been done before and it struck me – and still does after all these years.”
By November, however, after just three months into the job, Harris took leave to manage the Rev Amos Brown’s re-election campaign for the San Francisco board of supervisors, the city’s governmental body. Brown was a notable Baptist pastor, president of the San Francisco branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a “great friend” of Willie Brown, who had – yet again –recommended Harris. “She was a person who knew how to get things done,” Amos Brown, 83, says. “You were held accountable – she wanted people to deliver.”
To some it was a demonstration that Harris was “a ranking captain in Willie Brown’s army”, says one local politician; a show of her loyalty to him and his trust in her. She was making her way up. Harris returned to her day job after Brown lost the race, though soon rumours swirled about whether she had her eyes on her boss Renne’s job too.
In the rarefied rooms of Pacific Heights, Harris was still sparkling. She threw a baby shower for Vanessa Getty, attended a 60th for Vanessa’s mother (six courses, foie gras, lobster and duck) and briefly dated the talk show host Montel Williams. She was on the board of Women Count, an organisation that aimed to mobilise women to vote. Its logo was designed by Susie Tompkins Buell.
Through Tompkins Buell, Harris met Andrea Dew Steele, 56, a political adviser who was “impressed by her the moment I met her”, she says. “This woman had tremendous competence and poise. She was very commanding, a force of nature with a firmness and steeliness to her.”
Dew Steele took her out to Rose’s Café and over dinner told Harris she should run for the DA’s office. Months later Harris called her back: “I’m ready to run, what do I do?” Dew Steele invited her over to her apartment in Haight-Ashbury. They poured a glass of wine, prepared a plate of cheese and got going. Their first job was to bring together a “kitchen cabinet” who would help create a solid foundation of donors. Harris pulled out her Filofax. “The Bay Area was the ATM of politics,” Dew Steele says. “It’s a machine – you have to play the game and really develop relationships with the right people.” Harris’s contacts book was stuffed full of the city’s biggest names.
She was the underdog in the election race (polling at 6% at first), but positioned herself as the sensible, moderate candidate to Hallinan’s pandemonium, which would veer unpredictably to the left. His relationship with the police was fractious: he had told The New Yorker they were “terrible”. Harris promised to “restore confidence” in the police/prosecutor relationship and to be tough on crime, highlighting Hallinan’s 52% rate of felony conviction rate, compared with 83% across the state.
Behind the scenes Mark Buell, Susie’s husband and a Democratic donor, had agreed to run Harris’s finances, pulling together a “committee of young socialite ladies”, he later told Politico, to cultivate the support of their own financial and political networks. Buell asked Willie Brown how much they needed to win the race. Brown said $1 million – so that’s what they did. The San Francisco elite rallied behind their new star. Billy Joel performed at one of Harris’s fundraisers; Eve Ensler, writer of The Vagina Monologues, at another. There were champagne receptions and events in a barn at the Buells’ ranch in Bolinas beneath an enormous peace sign.
“She was relatively unknown,” says Sharmin Bock, her friend from Alameda. “But San Francisco is very small, very insular. You’re either in or you’re not. We went all hands on deck to help her keep going, but she was exhibit A. She sold herself.” They raised more than $1 million.
Harris “showed up to everything”, says Aaron Peskin, who was on the San Francisco board of supervisors at the time and is now president. “If you’re connected to the Willie Brown machine the floodgates of money are much easier to access she was able to raise the kind of money you need to win.”
The campaign between Hallinan and Harris, former colleagues, was ruthless. He hit her hard with allegations of corruption in City Hall, due to her relationship with Brown and her subsequent selection for his well-paid boards. Though Brown supported her run, Harris distanced herself from him, describing their relationship as an “albatross hanging around my neck”. She told SF Weekly: “His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing.” Brown would not be mentioned in either of her memoirs.
In November 2003 Harris was elected as San Francisco’s DA, defeating Hallinan with 56% of the vote. Her team celebrated at their headquarters in the Bayview, a predominantly black, working-class area miles from the usual political hubs. Two months later she was sworn in wearing a string of pearls – a family heirloom leant to her by the Buells.
This was the culmination of her first political race – a remarkable exercise in personal politics – and the beginning of the epic ones to come after she broke out of the progressive San Francisco bubble.
Written by: Megan Agnew
© The Times of London