Harris’s Early Career: Prosecutor by Day, Boldface Name by Night
As Kamala Harris toiled as a junior prosecutor in Alameda County, Calif., she developed important connections among San Francisco’s financial and social elite.
In August 1996, a jury in an Oakland, Calif., courtroom convicted a man of slicing off a portion of his girlfriend’s scalp. The prosecutor was Kamala Harris, and the gruesome case was one of the few that made news early in her career.
“It was a vicious crime,” Ms. Harris told The Oakland Tribune. She was in her seventh year as a rank-and-file prosecutor in Alameda County, doing battle with suspected drug lords and murderers in Oakland, which was still contending with the crack epidemic.
Weeks later, Ms. Harris was back in the news, this time across the bay in San Francisco as a boldface name in the society pages, among the young and fashionable who had gathered for a martini party at a Polo Ralph Lauren store ahead of the Fall Antiques Show. It was hosted by a group of art lovers who called themselves the Young Collectors, raising money for underserved children while collecting “antiques, art, knowledge — and parties,” Pat Steger, The San Francisco Chronicle’s society editor and columnist, wrote.
During these formative years, when Ms. Harris was in her 20s and 30s, her life ran along two tracks that proved pivotal to her political ascendancy. By day, she developed the courtroom skills that have shaped her methodical approach as a candidate. By night, she moved through San Francisco high society, nurturing the financial and political connections that became instrumental in her national rise.
Ms. Harris, who grew up in a modest neighborhood in Berkeley, Calif., with a single mother, showed a talent for forging relationships with some of California’s most influential elites while she was still a young prosecutor.
She dated Willie Brown, one of the most powerful legislators in state history who became mayor of San Francisco. She cultivated relationships with Susie Tompkins Buell, the founder of two iconic clothing brands, and Laurene Powell Jobs, a businesswoman who was married to Steve Jobs, the entrepreneur who made Apple a tech powerhouse.
“The ability to have people want to open up to you is not that different in a courtroom than it is in a cocktail party,” said Teresa Drenick, who worked with Ms. Harris as a prosecutor in the 1990s.
The Gritty Streets of 1990s Oakland
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office was for decades known as a place for ambitious lawyers to cut their teeth. When Ms. Harris arrived, Oakland was struggling at the tail end of the crack epidemic, and the war on drugs was in full force and homicides were at near record levels.
“When I was coming out of law school and you wanted to be a D.A., you wanted to be either in Alameda County or Manhattan,” Ms. Drenick said. “Those were the golden rings of D.A. offices at the time.”
A few years before Ms. Harris joined the office, Felix Mitchell, an infamous drug lord in Oakland whose career was an inspiration for the movie “New Jack City,” had been arrested by the F.B.I. and later stabbed to death in prison. That led to a leadership vacuum on the streets, as new drug bosses violently competed for territory.
“The Oakland that me and Kamala came into was an Oakland where his top lieutenants and new players in the game were recarving up Oakland,” said Terry Wiley, a former prosecutor who joined the Alameda office the same year as Ms. Harris.Centrist Democrats, including President Bill Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr., who was a powerful senator of Delaware at the time, advanced tough-on-crime policies that flooded cities with police officers and that used incarceration to fight drug use. Black communities were devastated by the harsh sentences that were imposed on crack cocaine but that weren’t applied to the powdered version of the drug favored by wealthier white people.
Ms. Harris traveled down the path of a new prosecutor — first misdemeanors, then felony preliminary hearings, then felony trials.
She lived in Oakland, where the housing was still affordable, scooping up a one-bedroom condo near Lake Merritt for $116,000. She drove a Toyota Corolla and wore skirt suits in the time before pants were considered acceptable for women lawyers.
Her days, she recalled in her memoir, regularly included poring over autopsy photos with the coroner and trying to get survivors of rape to talk while they recovered at the county hospital.
