by Jim Newton
To run for governor was to risk upending that hard-earned balance at home, to take a cut in pay, and to move to Sacramento. All of that argued for skipping the race. Olson, however, was bedeviling him, and Warren’s closest advisers—at least those whom he consulted about politics—wanted him to run. As the state’s most prominent Republican, Warren represented the party’s best chance to recapture the governorship. And still a third option was raised by the war: Having missed combat in World War I, Warren was eager to lend his services to this conflict, and he had kept up his work with the reserves. With the war now on, Warren inquired about rejoining the Army, and about entering the service as a colonel. Nothing came of that, but weeks ticked by, and Warren’s silence only fueled speculation. In late March, he called his staff together to tell them of his plans.
“[W]e sat down,” said Adrian Kragen, a member of the attorney general’s staff. “And he said, ‘I know all these rumors are going around, that I’m going to run for Governor of the State of California. And it’s caused a lot of uncertainty around this office. And I want you to know I’m not going to run.’”14
For the staff, that was a relief. They could go back to work and set politics aside. California’s leading Republicans were not, however, in the mood for that answer. From March 13 to April 9, Warren met five times with Jesse Steinhart and once with Steinhart and William Knowland together.15 Through Knowland, Warren was connected to his past—to Joseph Knowland and the first campaign for district attorney, to the days of anti-Communist prosecutions in Oakland and the punishing campaign to defeat Upton Sinclair. Knowland had his father’s devotion to Earl Warren. By 1942, few men knew Warren better or had better sources among the conservatives who dominated the California Republican Party. Knowland had scouted out Warren’s prospects well in advance, compiling his information into a thoughtful, detailed appraisal in the fall of 1941.16 Now, with the election approaching, Knowland redoubled his campaign to draft Warren, urging him in strong terms to take Olson out. Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron was considering a run, Knowland said, but he would probably lose against the incumbent. Others were similarly positioned. Only Warren, Knowland believed, could win. And so he leaned on Warren’s competitiveness and irritation with Olson and on Olson’s potential vulnerability to a strong challenge.
Steinhart was gentler, his pitch less political and more intended to appeal to Warren’s sense of service. Steinhart was an archetype of a certain breed of public man, as rare then as it is today. He never sought elected office but helped shape a generation of California’s political leadership by pressing others to service. Humble, incisive, gifted in his judgment of people, Steinhart was a successful business lawyer in San Francisco and a longtime admirer and backer of Hiram Johnson. In the 1920s, when Warren started receiving positive coverage for his work as district attorney in Alameda, Steinhart called him up and asked him to lunch. The two enjoyed each other—two such serious, civic men—and over the years since had kept in close touch, with Steinhart providing important support during the attorney general campaign of 1938. Now, Steinhart was among Warren’s most regular appointments. Rarely a week went by that they did not talk, either in person or over the phone. And he brought not just depth but breadth to Warren’s circle of advisers, Steinhart being a relatively rare Jew at Warren’s table. Their families were close, with the Warrens occasionally spending a day at the Steinhart home in Los Altos, south of San Francisco.
On April 3, Warren, Steinhart, and Knowland met together in Steinhart’s office in San Francisco. Knowland made the political case, arguing forcefully that Warren could win and that he owed it to himself and to California to run. “I pointed out to him that he was the one man in my judgment who could defeat Olson,” Knowland said. “I didn’t think there was any doubt that he could be re-elected Attorney General, but he would then be faced with four more years of an Olson administration.”17 Although Steinhart’s advice is unrecorded, his appeal undoubtedly was to Warren’s sense of mission—that their shared commitment to service demanded that he set aside personal considerations and take the office from a governor who was failing at a time of national urgency. They went over the results of a secret poll, commissioned to give Warren a sense of how he might fare in a head-to-head against Olson; the poll had gone into the field in March, so its results were fresh. How encouraging they were is unclear, as the results have not survived, but Knowland was keen to digest the figures and clearly intent on using them to bolster his case for Warren’s candidacy.18 Still, Warren refused to commit.19
And still, his advisers pushed. The following day, the Saturday before Easter, Earl and Nina Warren lunched with Steinhart yet again.20 Nina had her own reservations about a bid. Among them, Earl said later, was the question of how he might do. “[S]he asked if I thought I could win,” he said.21 Although Warren portrayed his conversation with his wife as one-sided—him announcing to her that he had at last made up his mind to run and her acquiescing after a few questions—her presence at the lunch with Steinhart on April 4 suggests otherwise. Nina Warren was not overtly political. But this would not be like 1938, when Warren was an experienced prosecutor seeking what amounted to a step up and into an open seat. To run for governor against an incumbent in the middle of a war would require Warren to campaign in a larger context, to sell his whole person to an immense state and to persuade Democrats to abandon their governor and join him. As Nina Warren surely recognized, that meant that the Warren family could no longer stay out of the campaign. Defeat would involve all of them and might well end her husband’s political career. Victory would change their lives even more deeply. In addition to the required move to Sacramento—hard on five school-age children—a win in November would transform her husband into a national political figure and would bring his family along as well. For Nina Warren, defeat would be bad enough. Victory might be worse.
But whatever concerns Nina Warren had about the move were subordinated to her faith in her husband. And he had reached his wit’s end. “I would not sit on the sidelines for a term as attorney general while we were in the midst of a war that threatened our very national existence,” he declared.22 After talking with him—and presumably hearing Steinhart’s pitch as well—she yielded. “All right,” she told her husband, “if that is the way you feel, you should do it.”23 It fell to Nina to tell the children, which she did without fanfare. One by one, she casually let them know that their father was about to become a candidate for governor.24
Two weeks after having told his staff he was not running for governor, Warren was back. “Contrary to what I told you,” he began, and this must have elicited a chuckle or a gasp, “I have been convinced that the only way that we can save the State of California from the tremendous disaster which the continuance of the Olson administration would bring to the state, is for me to run. I don’t want to run,” Warren added a bit disingenuously, since it was he who felt the frustration of fighting with Olson. “I like this job, but I’m forced, as a citizen of this state, to accept the decision of others that it’s the only way we can defeat Olson, and I’m running.”25 “That was it,” Kragen recalled.
On April 9, 1942, Warren announced his candidacy for governor of California. 26 The times, he said, required “a unity of purpose that rises above every partisan consideration.” While Warren acknowledged his long association with the Republican Party, he said he did not consider that relevant to the issues confronting California or to those he had addressed thus far in his career. California’s issues, Warren said, were those of “the security of the people in their homes, the administration of our schools, business methods in government to prevent overtaxation, civil service to prevent the spoils system, conservation of our resources, both human and natural, to prevent exploitation, the social services to raise living standards, co-operation with the agencies of the Federal government to carry out national policies, and now civilian protection to further the war effort.” None of those, Warren argued, required partisanship, merely leadership.27 O
lson issued no immediate response, but others took quick note. Wasting no time and surprising none of its readers, the Los Angeles Times endorsed Warren on April 11.28
Although newspaper support was assured, Warren did not enter the campaign as a favorite. He had no conventional political machine to press his candidacy. His fundraising apparatus was essentially nonexistent, and his relations with some Republican Party leaders were tenuous. He had sparred with Herbert Hoover, Frank Merriam, and William Randolph Hearst—a Republican former president, a Republican former governor, and a Republican newspaper baron—and all within the last few years. He discouraged his own staff from participating in his campaigns, telling them that the best they could do for him was to produce a record he could run on. Some helped anyway, which Warren allowed without much comment. But that hardly constituted a full-fledged campaign.29 And yet Warren was not without other resources. The anti-Sinclair campaign in 1934 had introduced him to top political operatives, and his own 1938 race had broadened his political appeal and spread his name identification. Warren’s chief task in those early days was to find someone to organize his effort. He turned to the consulting firm of Whitaker and Baxter, the husband-and-wife team who had overseen Sinclair’s demolition.
Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were the best political operation in America, and their talents were particularly well suited to the emerging politics of California—especially the opportunities that its Progressive-era reforms had created for political operatives such as themselves.
Clem, a journalist as a teenager and young adult, came from a left-wing family. His uncle, a Socialist minister, had delivered one of the eulogies at Tom Mooney’s funeral. And Clem himself had once been a friend of Sinclair’s. But Clem Whitaker left journalism for business, and in 1933 founded Campaigns Inc. As a businessman, he moved sharply to the right—that was, after all, where the money was—specializing in campaigns for conservative candidates and causes. Whitaker’s partner, Leone Baxter, had started as his employee and then became his wife. He was intensity and blaze—tall, thin, chain-smoking, fast-talking, demanding. She was curvy and genteel, an attractive redhead with a deceptively soft touch.
What they shared was ruthlessness. Whitaker and Baxter were dedicated to the creation of a new form of politics and devoted to winning for their clients. Long before it became commonplace, they brought all the elements of a campaign into a single operation—they handled media, speechwriting, advertising, public appearances, endorsements. They conducted negative research on opponents, crafted strategy, and recruited volunteers. Cross-filing and the initiative had weakened traditional party leadership in California; Whitaker and Baxter picked up the work that state party organizations did elsewhere. They were a full-service political operation, maybe the first of its kind. In 1942, they put that machinery to work on behalf of Earl Warren.
Four days after Warren announced his candidacy, Clem Whitaker called to gather materials for the campaign. That initial request suggested the dual lines that the campaign was to take: He needed a detailed story of Warren’s life and a “running and complete story of the King, Ramsay, Conner case.”30 Warren’s own story would represent the campaign’s positive element; Olson’s pardons and paroles would form the principal line of attack.
The first stop of the campaign was California’s mining country, the string of mountain towns along the western edge of the Sierra Mountains. Given his birth in Los Angeles, upbringing in Bakersfield, and education in the Bay Area, Warren had strong roots in nearly every part of California. The mining country was an exception, but he worked hard to remedy that. It was there in the California spring that Warren went to work on the electorate. Those towns were verdant at that time of year, the last of the winter snows melting down their flanks in swollen rivers. The air was fresh and cool, the heat of summer still months away. Each little town had its dusty streets and historic markers, placed there by the Native Sons and commemorating their place at California’s birth. They were fierce in their attachment to California, many first settled in the Gold Rush less than a century earlier. They were far away from San Francisco and Los Angeles culturally and politically as well as geographically. In these pioneer towns, there was not much regard for Olson’s vaguely socialistic notions of attacking poverty. Their citizens did not know Warren well at the beginning of 1942, but they were Warren country. As he worked those little hamlets, Warren enjoyed their people, their small-town papers, their cantankerous warmth. They responded in kind.
Traveling through them in 1942, Earl Warren would demonstrate, more than in any campaign before or later, why politics was his calling. His facility for names was astounding. In town after town, he would walk up to a man or woman, stick out his hand, and call the person by name, often asking further about a wife or husband or child. So remarkable was his ability to recall names, faces, and facts that an aide once asked him how he did it. Warren responded that it was all about focus. “I never look at their neckties,” he said.31 But Warren supplemented his natural gift with a typically meticulous system. In his office was a card file listing every person he had ever met, along with a few details about the person’s life—spouses, colleges, favorite sports, and the like. Sweigert and others filled up cards with details about notable friendships or enemies to avoid. Helen MacGregor would add information on influential women. As the campaign developed, the card file formed a stockpile of political information.
On the trail, Warren stormed through California’s sparsely populated interior. Warren, said his driver, “would go into a town, shake hands with half the people, make a talk, shake hands with the other half, then we’d be on our way.”32 No one was better at it. The campaign, in fact, seemed to highlight Warren’s strengths and minimize his weaknesses. His sternness, for instance, was reserved for his staff—and occasionally his children—but not constituents. To them, he conveyed earnest sincerity. Greeting crowds involved just the right amount of connection for Earl Warren. He listened to the problems of others but was under no obligation to reveal any of his own. He sympathized, offered ways to help, and then, with a slap on the back and a firm grip, moved on to the next person. If he overpromised, and he did—Warren’s secretaries complained about men and women showing up at the office to speak with him because he’d casually extended an invitation to do so—well, Mrs. MacGregor was there to sort that out, and she efficiently did so. So persuasive was Warren’s presence, so effective was his measured garrulousness that he invariably seemed taller in memory than in person. Warren was just a shade over six feet tall, but taller men, in their recollections of him, almost always remembered looking up at him.
He was not always an easy man to work for. Speech-writing for Warren, for instance, was a difficult and often unappreciated chore. Typically, Warren would block out a speech, outlining in broad strokes the themes he hoped to express. Then he would turn it over to an aide and ask him to “put it on the typewriter.” With that, Warren would often forget about the speech until the day of its delivery drew near. When the speech finally received his attention, Warren was demanding and particular. He disliked ending a sentence with a preposition, and he insisted on plain, direct language. He could be brusque if the draft came up short. In one particularly bruising episode, Warren dressed down a staff member who had prepared remarks for him on a public works speech. “This thing is no good,” he raged. “I asked you to give me a strong message on public works, and you haven’t done it. A high school sophomore could write a better speech without half-trying. I just don’t understand what’s going on around here.” The sputtering aide tried to reply, as another senior member of the staff asked what they could do to improve the draft. “I don’t want you to do a damned thing,” Warren snapped. “I’ll write my own message. Nobody ever does anything for me around here.”33
Outbursts such as those were not common, but they did occur, and they strained relations between Warren and some of his staff. His loyal core stayed with him through many campaigns and offices, but other turnover on
his staff was high, in part because of the demands he placed on them. He was notoriously stingy with raises. He guarded compliments and rationed praise. “Flattery,” Warren’s press secretary reflected, “was a habit to which Earl Warren was not addicted.”34 One secretary who worked for Earl and Nina for years remembered afterward always having felt appreciated but could not recall a single time that Earl thanked her.35 Still, he inculcated a powerful sense of loyalty among his closest aides. Warren Olney, Helen MacGregor, Bill Sweigert, Oscar Jahnsen, and others would dip in and out of Warren’s life, but they were loyal to the end. Sweigert agreed that Warren was “a hard man to work with.” But he stayed for nearly a decade. Warren, he said, “was always fair.”36
Until 1942, the face that Warren had presented California was in some ways that of a forbidding figure. He ran first for district attorney, then for attorney general, serious jobs for crime fighters. He rarely attempted humor in his public addresses—once, when a secretary taking dictation suggested a joke for a speech, Warren smiled, thought for a moment, and then responded, “I think I’ll leave jokes to the master of ceremonies”37—and his campaigns up to that point had always been built around law enforcement. The result is that many voters undoubtedly had a positive but somewhat narrow view of the man who now asked to be their governor. Whitaker and Baxter saw that Warren’s image needed to be completed—the prosecutor in their client was perfect to point out Olson’s failings, but they needed a candidate that voters could like, not just respect. The two consultants, with their gift for imagery, realized that they needed to show Warren as a father and husband, not just as a prosecutor. His wife was the image of devotion, his children sunny and appealing. Whitaker and Baxter’s task was to overcome the Warrens’ resistance and bring the family into politics.
