by Anne Edwards
Decorating no longer held the same charm for her. And although her work on behalf of multiple sclerosis had not slackened, she was now drawn to activities and committeework inside the Republican party. Charles, she mused proudly, “is the kind of husband who pushes me out the door. He likes me to get involved. He urges me on.” A witness adds, “While Charles certainly encouraged her to get involved in politics, international affairs and diplomacy, Shirley was strong-willed enough to want to make it on her own.”
With the Vietnam War accelerating, crude, hard-fisted Lyndon Johnson in the White House and large-scale student violence (which had begun at Berkeley in the summer of 1964) practically in her backyard—Shirley had a wealth of material to draw upon for her speeches. She attacked monolithic government with its “disastrous cycle of tax, spend, inflation and deficit,” and declared that “private will has been eroded and personal initiative derided . . . and much of the rising cost of government [is the result of] back-filling the holes it has dug with public largesse.” Assailing lack of leadership at the executive level, she contended that in Washington “problems aren’t solved; they’re subsidized.” She would use statistics to make her point: Five times as many people were now on welfare as during the Depression; the Vietnam War was more than quadrupling the number of bombs dropped by the Allies in all of World War II, with every enemy killed costing three hundred thousand dollars; major crime had increased 62 percent in six years; riots had accounted for a quarter-billion dollars property damage in 1966; and federal spending had risen 14,000 percent in the last fifty years. Her arguments, delivery and impressive figures bore an amazing likeness to those of Ronald Reagan.
Reagan had run successfully for governor of California in 1966, and Shirley had been a diligent worker in his campaign. (Once, in her childhood, she had remarked, “God is the most important person in the world and the Governor of California is second.”) Out of moral conviction, she had resigned from the San Francisco Film Festival Committee’s 1966 presentations in protest of the entry of the Swedish film Night Games, * which she called “pornography for profit.” Early in 1967, she became a vigorous advocate of charging California students tuition at the state university because she believed “they would appreciate their education more if they paid for it.”
She was a speaker in search of a platform, and when a congressional seat was vacated by the death of Representative J. Arthur Younger of California’s Eleventh District, San Mateo County, of which she was resident, she found it.†
Younger had seen Shirley, a long-standing acquaintance, at the Woodside Country Club on Easter Sunday, March 26, 1967. The elderly conservative was suffering from leukemia, and was aware that he had limited time. During the course of the afternoon, he sought Shirley out for a few private moments of conversation. Shirley later said that Congressman Younger had asked her to run for his seat in the event of his death. On June 21, less than three months afterward, Younger died.
Shirley had been a member of Governor Reagan’s Finance Committee and one of his appointees to the state’s Advisory Hospital Council, a top-level job. The council made recommendations about which communities would receive state hospital funds, and Shirley considered this a toehold into California’s Republican politics. Very soon after Younger’s death, she intimated that she might enter the race for his congressional seat, in a special primary election slated for November 14. She quickly drew back from this idea, and not until August 29, after four local Republican leaders had already declared themselves and obtained pledges of support, did she confirm her candidacy.* From that moment, Shirley’s life and that of her family were overtaken by election fever. Not since seventy-one Texans had ponied up fifty dollars each to file for Lyndon Johnson’s vacant Senate seat in 1961 had American politics seen anything like the congressional contest of California’s Eleventh District. By the close of filing, twelve candidates—seven Democrats and five Republicans—“representing every shade of [the] political spectrum, were in the race.” One Republican candidate, clergyman Gregory K. Sims, revealed a sense of both humor and how the race would be run by arriving for the filing ceremony in a brightly colored hot-air balloon called “Good Ship Gregory ” (he later withdrew from the race). The contest was to be conducted as eleven male candidates against “The Good Ship Lollipop. ” Jest though they might, Shirley’s presence in the race presented an awesome challenge to her opponents.
Still held dear to the hearts of movie-going millions, her ability to fund-raise well established, Shirley, from the start, seemed “the odds-on favorite to become the third former movie star to win high office in California in the last two years.”* A close observer added, “She is also smart as paint, tough-minded and highly professional, with the devilish charm of a cunning Lucifer-child asking to stay up till nine.”
She announced that she would run for Congress at “one of the biggest gatherings of newspaper, radio and TV reporters in the Bay Area since General Douglas MacArthur’s return.” Sixteen television cameras, twenty-five microphones and over fifty reporters from all over the country recorded the announcement made in the meeting room and restaurant of the Villa Chartier Motel. In a smart linen suit worn with striking jade accessories, she stood poised and cool before the battery of newsmen while a barrage of tough questions was shouted at her. When asked if she believed her movie background would give her an unwarranted political edge, she replied, “Not all actors should be in politics and not all haberdashers should be President,” a pointed reference to former Democratic president Harry S Truman. She referred to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society as “a pretty bad movie which has become a great flop,” and blamed Johnson for “a lack of leadership in preventing Negro riots.”†
Discussing the war in Vietnam, she insisted that the United States had to honor its commitment: “We have to keep the Communists of North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam.” She added that she believed the president should rely more on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in conducting the war “and less on Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara . . . It is not progress for the largest, strongest military power in the world to be mired down in an apparently endless war with one of the smallest and weakest countries in the world.” She was not above using her acting technique to make a point when she then glanced over to young Charlie, dressed in his military-school uniform and seated beside his sisters and father, and remarked, “and I am the mother of a 15-year old boy who will soon be eligible for service in Vietnam.”
She appeared unthreatened by her aggressive inquisitors, and her mature beauty should have put an end to the taunts that “little Shirley Temple was running for Congress.” But the nation would not allow her to divest herself of the past.
At the time Shirley started on the campaign trail, Curley McDimple, a theatrical spoof of her most famous roles, opened off-Broadway, and a three-foot poster showing Little Miss Marker garbed in a leather jacket sold in the tens of thousands across the country. A satire of her as a child, performed by Carol Burnett on television, was to become a classic comic sketch. Shirley was in danger of progressing from living legend to high-camp heroine. She had every right to be “half-mad, alcoholic and suicidal with the obsessed, narcissistic arrogance of the once-adored,” but she was doggedly none of these. She had never surrounded herself with sycophants nor lived on memories of times gone by; she had taken her life into her own hands.
Nothing in Shirley’s career had prepared her for the utter ruthlessness of an American political campaign. Her mother, the studio, her financial security and her own celebrity had all shielded her from harsh reality. Even at the time of her unhappy marriage to Agar, her lawyer had gone to her house to ask her husband to leave while Shirley awaited his departure in her parents’ home. The press, always anxious for any story she might give them, was often relentless, but not until she entered politics had the media ever been unkind. Even the controversial Graham Greene article had been directed at the studio’s use of her nubile seductiveness, and not at Shirley herself.
/> That spring, she had discussed with Reagan the possibility of her running, and he had intimated his support. But by the time she had announced her candidacy, he was hard on the campaign trail for the 1968 presidential elections and had left the state and his office almost entirely in the hands of his attorney general. Richard Nixon was revving up his forces to beat Reagan for the Republican nomination. Neither of these men could afford to get involved in a party contest that promised to be controversial, since the San Mateo Republican candidates represented all factions of their party. For Reagan, there was the added danger of associating himself perhaps too closely with his motion-picture past. Congress had convened, and George Murphy was busily occupied in Washington. Even had he been available to extend his help, he might well have been reticent, for Shirley had refused to endorse his candidacy (on grounds that she was not a politician) at the time of his own campaign.
That Shirley had no close friends or advisers with practical political knowledge would seem to have demanded she hire one of the several California public-relations firms that specialized in election campaigns. But by custom, she was against the use of outsiders in all business and career matters. During Shirley’s last years in films, Gertrude had blamed her daughter’s decline in popularity on the theatrical agency that represented her. Retired now with George to Palm Desert, Gertrude could not have helped her daughter in the political arena even if she had been available. Shirley turned to Charles, who, after all, had encouraged her to toss her hat into the ring. The choice was unfortunate. Charles was no more savvy about the chicanery and demands of politics than Shirley was, and no one could quite believe she had been foolish enough to make him her campaign manager.
“Just a few days after Shirley entered the race,” a Woodside lawyer recalled, “I saw Charlie and strongly advised him to get professional help. I even recommended a firm with a solid reputation for this sort of thing. But he was determined to keep the campaign a family matter. I believe he thought it was a better choice for Shirley’s image, that she would have more voter appeal as a woman out there on her own, except for her husband’s support. As I recall, there were no other women running congressional races at that time. At least not in northern California. This could only help her chances. And at the start, she damned well stood a good chance. I know she scared the hell out of the Democrats when she announced.
“The general public has this concept of her drawn from her film and television career. I mean [as a child], she had been a most compassionate and loving figure, much put upon by conservative and reactionary forces. And it had been a few years since they had seen her [on TV as host of The Shirley Temple Theater] as a grown woman. In the intervening years, she had greatly matured. The fairy godmother look had suddenly become a bit jowly. It was going to take some doing to convince the voters that this lady was Shirley Temple, or to prove to them that her lack of experience as a politician in no way diminished her ability to represent them with spirited rightness.
“Well, she marched right into this lion’s den certain that she could tame the opposition and win the hearts of the crowd. But everything she said and did was all wrong. Voters who had been brought up on little Shirley Temple didn’t like to face the fact that she had grown up to become a member of the same reactionary forces she had so valiantly fought [in her movies] as a child. To add to this stumbling block, her credibility was successfully attacked by her opponents—both Republicans and Democrats—in the earliest days of the campaign.”
When Shirley publicly stated that Congressman Younger had asked her to run, Mrs. Younger immediately stepped forward. “If he did encourage her, he did so in jest,” the widow asserted. A former Younger aide was quoted as saying, “She’s trying to get an endorsement out of a dead man.” Then, after Shirley’s vehement declaration that “little Shirley Temple” was not running for anything, she turned around and changed the name on her voter’s registration from Shirley Jane Black to Shirley Temple Black.
Further trouble plagued her when she alleged that former President Eisenhower had said he “was all for Shirley Temple” (a comment made much earlier and in relation to her work on Reagan’s campaign.) Shirley proudly added that his endorsement was “a great honor.” Eisenhower’s aide, Brigadier General Robert L. Schulz, replied to the press that “General Eisenhower has no intention of getting involved in California politics. He is perfectly certain that voters of the 11th District need no outside advice in selecting their candidate for Congress.”
For the primary on November 14, the voters of California’s Eleventh District were to choose one Democrat and one Republican candidate. The runoff between the two party winners was to be held on December 12, and whoever the Republican might be, one thing was certain. He or she had to swing enough registered Democrats to the Republican side to carry the election, for Democrats outnumbered Republicans in this contest by twenty thousand registered voters.* Of the four men in her party that she had to overtake, Paul “Pete” McCloskey was a most formidable opponent.
“Well,” laughed one resident of California’s Eleventh, “here you had Shirley Temple on one hand and Jimmy Stewart on the other. Of course, Pete McCloskey was Irish, and in fact, looked a little like John Kennedy. But he had the kind of dedicated humbleness that the characters Stewart portrayed in pictures had—Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—that sort of thing.”
Pete McCloskey was a self-styled country lawyer with a scholarly bent. His great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant, had landed in San Francisco in 1853. Pete was the first McCloskey born in southern California (in 1927 in San Bernardino). By Depression standards, the McCloskeys were not poor, but they could hardly have been called rich. At age eight, Pete became critically ill with nephritis. His two-year recovery was a drain on the family’s finances, and he felt responsible for their subsequent pinched circumstances.
His illness had set him behind other boys his age both athletically and scholastically. When finally able to return to school, “too awkward to make the [baseball] team,” he persisted at batting practice for hours after classes each day and eventually “wound up as the team’s best hitter.” The same perseverance marked his studies. When war came, he joined the navy’s V-5 Pilot Training Program. To his great disappointment, he was not sent overseas. Upon his discharge, he attended Stanford University on the federal and California G.I. Bill, which instilled in him a sense of obligation to the taxpayers who had made his education possible. He continued on at the Stanford Law School, augmenting his G.I. Bill by working hard at a variety of menial jobs.
About this time, he joined the Marine Reserves and, shortly afterward, he was married. With the advent of the Korean War, he requested and was granted overseas service, much to his pregnant wife’s distress. On February 16, 1951, the day his daughter was born in Palo Alto, Second Lieutenant McCloskey of the 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Division, landed in Korea. Three months later, while commanding a mortar platoon, he was wounded. Nonetheless, “he continued to lead the assault and personally attacked enemy-held bunkers, knocking them out.” For his “daring initiative, aggressive determination and inspiring leadership responsible for the success of the attack,” he was awarded the prestigious Navy Cross (outranked only by the Congressional Medal of Honor). And still he remained at the front. In June, shortly after he recovered from his injury, he led a rifle platoon in support of a tank patrol. Eight of his men fell: “McCloskey put the balance of his platoon under cover then crawled through fire to administer first-aid to the wounded. In the process he was severely injured in the leg, but continued to treat his men.” For this act of bravery, he was awarded a second medal, the Silver Star, and returned to Palo Alto at Christmas a true local hero.
Admitted to the State Bar of California in 1953, he became what he claimed had always been his dream—“a small-town lawyer.” An observer noted, “McCloskey loved the law. He had always nursed defensive feelings on behalf of the underdog and increasingly he sharpened an old and fundamental view of himself as a righter of wron
gs.” To the despair of the partners in his law firm,* he consistently “handled no-fee cases for juveniles, the indigent, and impoverished groups.” His popularity in San Mateo County burgeoned. He became president of the Palo Alto Bar Association and the Stanford Area Youth Club. He was named Young Man of the Year by the Chamber of Commerce in 1961, an honor closely followed by his election as president of the Conference of Barristers of the State Bar of California.
The McCloskeys had been Republicans for generations. Pete was “devoted to the concept of private enterprise and fiscal conservatism. But in terms of humanitarianism and the role of government in society, his brand of Republicanism clearly stemmed from that of the nineteenth-century abolitionists . . . and the Theodore Roosevelt Progressives of 1912. . . . In a very real sense [he] was a manifestation of the progressive liberal Republicanism that [had always been] a part of California’s political heritage.” He had considered contesting the more conservative J. Arthur Younger in the 1966 G.O.P. primary, but was asked by party members not to do so. Instead, he decided to fight Younger in 1968, which meant organizing a campaign in 1967, before anyone knew about Younger’s terminal illness. By the time Shirley declared on August 29, McCloskey’s campaign had been in motion for nearly five months. Large sums of money had been raised in his behalf, and hundreds of persons were already actively involved in his campaign, which was being managed by one of the most experienced men in the business, Sanford Weiner, who had guided the successful election of George Murphy and more than sixty other California campaigns, winning 80 percent of them.
