• April 05, 1976
• Vol. 5
• No. 13

Victorious Hearst Prosecutor Jim Browning Proves That Relentless 'Plodding' Works

By Nancy Faber

For James L. Browning Jr., the federal prosecutor who played tortoise to defense attorney F. Lee Bailey's hare, victory in the Patricia Hearst case brought sweet vindication. All through the eight-week trial, courtroom sophisticates winked condescendingly as Browning bumbled toward expected defeat—muddling through stacks of photographs, hefting huge cardboard diagrams onto a shaky easel, forgetting his place in the cross-examination. But, in the end, his meticulous accumulation of facts brought a surprisingly swift guilty verdict. "I didn't try the case to the press," Browning explains. "I tried it to the jury."

While Bailey romanced the media and enjoyed 90-minute lunches, Browning gave only two press conferences, and munched sandwiches in his office while he pored over evidence. So immersed did the 43-year-old prosecutor become that he neglected to vacuum his bachelor condominium for nine weeks, to retrieve his car, abandoned when the battery went dead, or to replace the suit he blotched with a felt-tipped pen early in the trial.

Such single-mindedness is typical of Browning. A graduate of the University of California's Hastings Law School, the lanky Globe, Ariz. native spent eight years working his way up through the San Mateo County district attorney's office. Distressed by what he considered federal laxness toward civil disobedience, and encouraged by his politically conservative mother, Browning applied for the U.S. attorney's post. He was appointed by President Nixon in 1969, but the Hearst case was his first full trial. "The only other case I started to try," he laughs, "the defendant had the gall to plead guilty."

Browning had to work harder this time. "Three days into any trial," he says, "you feel as if someone kicked you in the small of the back." As the proceedings dragged on, he eased the tension with an occasional glass of beer or wine. "But I couldn't trust myself with my favorite drink, a martini." Only after the verdict did the divorced Browning have time for tennis with his children, Evelyn, 14, and James III, 13.

Other fruits of victory included congratulations from his boss, U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi, a telegram from his old high school classmates in Reedley, Calif., and an invitation to speak at the Harvard Law School. It was exciting stuff for a man who knows he is called "a plodder" and doesn't mind. "It's not as handsome a term as 'flamboyant,' which is what everyone called Bailey," says Browning. "But the prosecutor has the burden of proof. The defense attorney can pull things. We have to keep on plodding."