When Ronald Reagan succeeded Edmund G. Brown as governor of California in 1967, Brown told him: "There is a passage in War and Peace that every new governor with a big majority should tack on his office wall. In it Count Rostov, after weeks as the toast of elegant farewell parties, gallops off on his first cavalry charge and finds real bullets snapping at his ears. 'Why, they're shooting at me,' he says. 'Me, whom everyone loves!'"