by Jim Newton
Space undoubtedly dictated many of the cuts—newsprint, always at a premium, was especially scarce in those war years—and some of Warren’s language had been offered and reported during the campaign. But the cumulative effect of the Times’s published transcript was to make Warren appear more conservative than his own words. When some would later complain that he had changed as governor, had abandoned his early friends, they would in part be right; Warren did learn and grow in his ten years and nine months as governor of California. But they also would misunderstand his transformations because their sense of Warren was based on the view of him allowed by his allies in the Republican press.
For now, however, Warren’s challenge was to govern. In the months after his election but before his inauguration, Warren began the methodical business of building his staff. Helen MacGregor was one of the first. Warren had appreciated her signature calm and professionalism during his district attorney years and had kept her with him through the attorney generalship. After winning the governor’s race, Warren received a letter from a woman seeking a job; MacGregor read it first, as she did most of his mail. The woman, a politically active Republican, asked for a job as his staff secretary and suggested that he should consider her because it was important to have a woman on his senior staff. As she and Warren were driving to Sacramento one day and going over business in the car, MacGregor passed that message along without comment. Warren took it in and said he agreed with the writer. “But I’m not going to appoint her,” he said to MacGregor. “I’m going to appoint you.”5
As he moved to fill his other ranks, Warren shrugged off demands from Republican supporters that they be rewarded for their political loyalty. Sweigert, a Democrat, came with Warren as his executive secretary, and a few other Democrats were selected for top positions. Warren later would insist that he never asked about a job candidate’s political makeup, an exaggeration but only a slight one. In fact, a few of the memos composed by Sweigert and MacGregor noted a potential nominee’s politics—considering a candidate for the post of director of natural resources, Sweigert described him as “Republican, geologist, sportsman, fine citizen”—but politics never dominated Warren’s considerations. Indeed, his refusal to give more weight to political allegiance annoyed many of his Republican backers.
“[A]fter I was elected,” Warren recalled, “many of my supporters said, ‘We have had enough of this nonpartisan foolishness. Now we will get down to business.’ ” 6
They underestimated Warren’s commitment to his word. One of the first to discover that was Murray Chotiner, a lawyer and political operative who had supported Warren but was soon to become chiefly associated with a new star in California’s political constellation, the up-and-coming Richard Nixon. After Warren was elected, Chotiner complained on behalf of himself and other Southern California Republicans. “Chotiner,” Sweigert said, “is concerned over failure to give hearing to some who were active in campaign.”7 Sweigert said Chotiner specifically cited Raymond Haight, who had steered Warren’s Southern California effort, but also asked for personal consideration. “Murray Chotiner wants some prestige,” Sweigert wrote to Warren, “and expected Professional and Vocational Standards.” So sure was Chotiner of his pending appointment that he pushed Sweigert to act quickly “in order that he may arrange his professional affairs concerning his law practice.” Warren ignored him.
At home, the new governor moved with his family to the ramshackle governor’s mansion, and faced a problem his constituents could appreciate: The house was a mess. Warren’s predecessors had been older men, none with young children, and had neglected to care for the house. After Olson’s wife had died inside, he had abandoned it altogether. Rooms were boarded up inside the stately Victorian. Floors were ridden with termites, drapes with moths. The front steps were worn and dilapidated. The third floor had been shut off entirely, and had become a home to bats. When Nina Warren first laid eyes on the mansion, she burst into tears.8 California’s legislature, however, was not prepared to house the state’s new governor and his photogenic family in a hovel, so a modest appropriation for renovation was approved, and Warren asked ever-faithful Oscar Jahnsen to supervise the project. For months, laborers crawled over the house, and Nina Warren shuttled back and forth from Oakland, consulting decorators, supervising the work.9 The first floor was public space—greeting and dining areas. The second floor was reserved for bedrooms, while the third, formerly a ballroom, was converted into an office for the governor. It perched more than fifty steps above the ground, with views to Sacramento’s intersecting rivers.
Nina worked on a budget, but she was resourceful. A California store, W. & J. Sloane, had a set of oversized Oriental rugs that it could not sell in the middle of the Depression. It offered to donate them to the mansion rather than let them sit out the years in storage. Nina and Oscar Jahnsen picked out four they liked—glowing red for the parlor, blue in the living room, garnet in the music room, and a fourth, its color now forgotten, for the dining room.10 The rugs brought color back to the mansion. To appoint it, Nina picked out department-store imitations of Victorian furniture and inexpensive pieces. When two visitors admired antique portraits of what they assumed to be Warren ancestors in one of the downstairs living areas, Nina laughed and confessed, “I bought them at Gump’s last month.”11
Finally, as the school year neared summer break, the renovation was complete. The Warren children finished up their studies in Oakland, then joined their father in Sacramento, seventy miles to the northwest. The Sacramento telephone book listed California’s new governor with conspicuous lack of pretense. “Earl Warren, 1526 H Street,” the notation read, alongside the listed phone number, there for anyone to call. And inside the newly refurbished rooms, Earl and Nina Warren set out on the next phase of their family’s life.
First was the business of installing the children. Room assignments followed an unmistakable theme: Girls got big ones, boys little ones. Earl Jr. was given a corner, overlooking the carriage house, quiet for the studious young boy to tend to his work; inside, Earl Jr. set his mind on his studies and his passion for taxidermy. Outside, he took over a nearby lot and converted it into a victory garden, to the delight of many Californians and his own oldest brother, Jim, who designed the family Christmas card that year around the theme of the garden. Bobby’s quarters were spare as well, built over the covered driveway along the home’s western edge. (Although small, Bobby’s room later was distinguished by a snarling boar’s head, the prize of a hunting trip in 1947 during which he, the youngest member of the party, shot and killed the wild animal and was allowed its head as a trophy.)12 Virginia, by contrast, drew a front room with a fireplace. Dorothy secured a quiet space in the back of the house; it was decorated with busy wallpaper that she never liked and chose instead to cover with Hollywood movie stills and posters. And Honey Bear took the second floor’s most opulent room, one with its own shower, quarters that later generations of first ladies would occupy. Her father, ever doting, allowed it with a private chuckle.
The move was hard on the children at first, particularly the younger ones. Bobby moped through his early days at school. Honey Bear was even more morose. 13 At the end of each school day, she would return home, pull out sad records, and play them on the family phonograph. Through the warm fall of Sacramento, she whiled away afternoons to the mournful voice of Lena Horne. One day, her father returned home early to find her that way. His heart, always tender for his youngest daughter, broke at the sight of her. In his youth, Earl Warren had been comforted by his loyal donkey, Jack. Now, seeing his daughter in distress, Warren lit upon a solution: Honey Bear got a pony, a pinto she named Peanuts. From that day onward until a tragic morning in 1950, Honey Bear spent part of almost every day on the back of a horse.14 She and Bobby shared the pony, and Honey Bear’s horseback riding became one of the emblems of the Warren family legend, one more aspect of the big, handsome, healthy family.15
The Warren children were neither shy nor pretentious. Whe
n they worried about what other children would think of them being chauffeured in an official state car, Bobby persuaded the driver, Pat Patterson, to pull over a block or so away. Out of view of their classmates, the children would tumble out, each one hustling to his or her own campus—elementary school for the little ones, high school for Virginia, with the rest following. Being the governor’s children made them objects of attention, naturally, but they bore the attention well. Earl Jr. drank beer with other boys on the levees outside Sacramento, and though the thought of getting caught and turning up in a newspaper story crossed his mind, it didn’t keep him at home.16 All the children experimented with smoking, climbing up to the top of the mansion to sneak cigarettes. Their parents did not do much to catch them. Sometimes the children could smell the smoke on one another, nervously tittering at dinner, convinced that they would be caught. Earl and Nina either silently tolerated the habit or preferred not to notice.17
Mischief notwithstanding, the Warren children mostly asserted themselves in the ways that parents would hope. “I remember how the governor used to kiss Bobby goodbye every morning,” Pat Patterson recalled for Warren biographer John Weaver. “Then as he got older, Bobby began to get embarrassed. He’d duck away. The governor got the point. I’ll never forget the first time he stuck out his hand to Bobby instead of kissing him.”18
For all its obligations, the governorship in some ways actually reunited Warren with his family. Where his job as attorney general had forced him to miss many a dinner at home, now he was just blocks from work and able to join his family more often in the evenings. Dinner was the highlight of the Warren family day, as Nina and Earl Warren took their places at opposite ends of the rectangular dining room table and the five children occupied the flanks. Conversation was lively, though never rowdy. At the table, Earl Warren led the conversation as he always had, asking questions and drawing his children into gentle debates.
After dinner, Warren usually enjoyed a few quiet moments, often in the company of Honey Bear. He sipped tea while she peeled grapes for him. Sitting at her father’s elbow, she entertained him with news of her day, while he listened quietly, interjecting with a question or praise.19
Mornings were, as they had to be in a home with five school-age children, more frenetic. The children pounded down the stairs to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where they wolfed down breakfast before heading for school. For a few minutes there would be quiet, and then the governor would dress. Nina Warren took care to pick his suits out for him, and she left them painstakingly arranged. Each shirt hung in the closet, pressed without starch, cufflinks already in the cuffs. Jackets had pens in the breast pockets. Earl Warren, almost as if a fireman, merely slipped on his uniform and was ready for work.20 He then headed for the capitol, taking in the ten blocks in his big, assertive strides. Crossing over onto the capitol grounds at K Street, Warren jaywalked across the middle of the block. He often paused to chat with a gardener or pedestrian or to have his shoes shined at Fourteenth and J. Warren was too hearty to dislike, too open to suspect, and yet too serious and driven to be taken lightly.
His serious professionalism made him a quick hit with a tough audience, the Sacramento press corps. Those reporters were not easily impressed; having seen enough graft, greed, and cynicism in elected officials, they were wary of those who pretended otherwise. And yet Warren, from his very first days in office, struck them as different. An early, minor controversy helped set that tone. Soon after Warren took office, Oscar Jahnsen was inspecting the governor’s suite and noticed some suspicious wiring. He traced it back through the walls and discovered a room upstairs in the capitol where the wires connected to recording equipment. He suspected that meant the governor’s suite had been bugged, but Jahnsen could not find the microphones. After a flurry of activity, a source in Southern California tipped off the speaker of the Assembly that the microphones could be found in a janitor’s closet. The speaker, Charles Lyon, called Helen MacGregor, who invited him over to investigate. Before opening up the closet, the two rounded up three newspaper reporters so they could witness the hunt. When the door to closet #7 was opened, the sleuths uncovered cleaning supplies, some vases, and in a wooden box, five telephone sets. Their cords were cut, and when one of the newspapermen unscrewed the bottom, they found the insides hollowed out and replaced with a microphone.21 Olson explained away the embarrassing discovery. The devices, he said, were merely installed to record the debates of the legislature (why the microphones needed to be hidden in hollowed-out phones was never entirely explained). But what may have left the most lasting impression was that the press was invited along on the search.
“Warren’s relationship with the press was not close,” recalled one reporter, William Allen. “It was professional. We were invited once a year to the mansion for a very nice event, but most of the contact was formal.”22 Though he rarely granted exclusive interviews—Warren’s press aides worried about alienating newspapers—he held press conferences regularly, alternating between mornings and afternoons so both cycles of papers would get their firsts, and spoke at such length that they sometimes ended without questions, Warren having answered everything the reporters could think to ask. He could be stiff around reporters, but they did not feel deceived, and his honesty charmed them. Morrie Landsberg, bureau chief of the Associated Press and dean of the Sacramento press corps, admired him, as did the leading reporters and editors at the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times. Warren sought out each—trips to Los Angeles generally included a personal meeting with Kyle Palmer, not to mention social visits with the Chandlers.23 And Warren occasionally asked Walter Jones at the Sacramento Bee for advice on judicial nominees or people under consideration for important state jobs.24
Toward the end of each year, the press corps would gather over drinks and informally designate its man of the year. Skeptical by nature and training of elected officials, the press invariably gave the honor to a man outside the elected circle. That continued under Warren—a press favorite was Warren’s finance chief, James Dean. But Warren occasionally came in second, a high mark indeed for a man in a position reporters yearned to disparage.25 “[T]he working press in Sacramento,” Warren wrote, on reflection, “treated me with what I considered to be kindness and generosity throughout my years there.”26
After the liberal message of his inaugural, Warren tacked back to the center, at least symbolically. On January 5, one day after proclaiming his commitment to “the common man,” Warren fired Carey McWilliams from his post as the head of the state’s Division of Immigration and Housing. The job, Warren remarked, had “grown out of all proportion” and had encroached on areas best left to local government.27 There was no question of McWilliams’s staying. Gubernatorial cabinets leave along with governors. Still, Warren dropped McWilliams with particular gusto, and Warren’s friends approved. McWilliams, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, was “known as a left winger,” and even the increasingly big tent that Warren was erecting to house his personal philosophy had no room in those days for a liberal of McWilliams’s convictions.
Warren came to office as California moved decisively to the war footing that upended the state—and did so in curiously symmetrical fashion. Having been born in the Gold Rush and shaped by that mass migration of young men who came to work the fields and streams of the Sierras, California was born again in a second cascade of young men, this time stopping over along its coast before embarking on their voyage into the War of the Pacific. The military’s wartime embrace of California began in 1942 with the establishment of the Desert Training Center east of Los Angeles. There, a California native, General George Patton, began drilling in desert conditions resembling those he would soon discover in North Africa.28 San Diego already was dominated by the Navy; now, with the Pacific fleet’s Pearl Harbor in tatters, that city teemed with the arrival and departure of sailors. The federal government seized 122,000 acres north of San Diego to establish Camp Pendleton, where divisions of Marines trained befor
e shipping out. Still farther up the coast, San Francisco’s Presidio was the Army’s Western headquarters, nestled among the eucalyptus trees with an inspiring view of the recently completed Golden Gate Bridge, whose span was joined in 1937, a year after the Bay Bridge linked San Francisco to Oakland. On the other side of the Golden Gate, forty miles up one of the slivering tributaries of San Francisco Bay, Camp Stoneman welcomed 30,000 men every month. They rushed through final paperwork, received last-minute instructions and equipment, and shipped out. By the time the war was over, more than a million men had spent an average of one to two weeks at the camp; for many, those would be their final footsteps on American soil.29
Among those who volunteered for service in those tumultuous days was Warren’s oldest boy, Jim. He had broken his arm as a youngster, and it had been set poorly. When a military recruiting officer, thinking of doing the governor a favor, used that as an excuse to block Jim’s enlistment as a paratrooper, Warren was furious. “How dare one man interfere with another man’s life like that,” he thundered. Jim kept at it, was accepted, and shipped out to the Pacific Theater.30
Defense industries clustered around military bases, and they too churned into high gear. The economy, so encumbered by poverty during Lorena Hickok’s tour, now burst with activity. All California factories combined produced $2.8 billion worth of goods in 1939. By 1944, that number had nearly quadrupled, to $10.14 billion.31 In 1939, California employed 400,000 people in manufacturing. By 1943, it had increased to more than 1 million, and many of the new workers were women, often embarking on their first jobs.32 Company after company expanded to meet the demand for material. In 1937, Lockheed built 37 airplanes; by the time the war ended, it had built 18,000.33 The Kaiser shipyards north of San Francisco pushed out new vessels with extraordinary, sometimes alarming, speed. More than a quarter million workers built aircraft in California during the war, joining hundreds of thousands more in other defense-related industries. Wages soared, unemployment evaporated. California, in just a matter of months, had become a land of wealth, flush with its second Gold Rush.
