Justice for All

by Jim Newton

  Knowland and Warren, friends in California and later in Washington, would govern side by side for decades, allies for most of that time, estranged nearer the end, when mental instability caught up with Knowland. Both died in 1974, Warren of age, Knowland of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  Through the end of the war and the peace that followed, Warren continued to push his health care proposal, dogged effort in a losing cause. He amended his legislation to cover merely hospital costs, then tinkered with it in other ways intended to mollify the medical community. Each time, the CMA successfully opposed him, and their campaign against Warren turned from disagreement to bitter animus. Warren reciprocated. He forever believed that Whitaker and the association had, out of misguided self-interest and misfocused politics, undermined California’s best hope to lead the nation in protecting its residents from illness. “[O]ur state,” he wrote in his memoirs, “would have reaped great benefits from it.”39

  If Warren’s critics outmaneuvered him in the health insurance debate, however, their victory was largely Pyrrhic, at least in political terms. Warren’s fight on behalf of the legislation put him at odds with conservative Republicans for most of 1945 and 1946. The result was that when it came time to run for reelection in 1946, Democrats were hard-pressed to make an argument for unseating him. Even worse, they had no obvious candidate, so thoroughly did Warren now dominate the political landscape. Divided among themselves and unable to stomach the unopposed reelection of a Republican governor in a state that had not elected the same man twice in a row since Hiram Johnson, they turned to their only statewide elected official, Attorney General Robert Kenny.

  That the burden of running against Warren should fall to Kenny was ironic and unfortunate. It was Kenny who had given Warren an important boost in Warren’s first statewide campaign, the 1938 election that made Warren attorney general. Kenny had weathered Democratic criticism then for crossing party lines, but had survived it to become attorney general himself in 1942. Since then, he and Warren had resumed their collegial relations, finding common, practical solutions to the issues that confronted both as elected leaders of California.

  Kenny had helped Warren respond to the Zoot Suit riots in 1943, and the two had worked together to provide for the compassionate reabsorption of the state’s Japanese when the federal government at last ordered the internment camps closed near the end of 1944. “I am sure all Americans,” Warren said, “will join in protecting constitutional rights of the individuals involved, and will maintain an attitude that will discourage friction and prevent civil disorder. It is the most important function of citizenship, as well as government, to protect constitutional rights and to maintain order.”40

  Warren warned law-enforcement agencies that he expected their forces to protect the returning internees and to intervene assertively in order to thwart violence and the threat of violence. Kenny, as the state’s top law-enforcement officer, joined Warren in insisting on that as well. “Two county sheriffs,” Kenny recalled years later, “openly defied our efforts to obtain peace officer cooperation for the peaceful relocation of the Japanese. Gov. Warren backed me up, and said that if the local constabulary did not protect the returning Nisei, he would see that state forces did so.”41 The sheriffs backed down. Although there were isolated acts of violence against the returning Japanese, amazingly, in light of the powerful emotions that had led to the internment and the continuing bloody war with Japan, the internees returned largely in peace and quietly resumed jobs and places in the life and economy of California, though often finding their homes and possessions scattered in their absence.

  By 1946, then, Warren and Kenny had long admired each other across party lines. What’s more, the two men genuinely liked each other. Kenny appreciated Warren’s direct honesty, and Warren delighted in Kenny’s raconteur wit. Still, politics is politics, and California’s Democrats in 1946 were desperate. They prevailed on Kenny to run. Reluctantly, he agreed, then proceeded to run one of the worst campaigns for governor in California’s history.

  Just after announcing, Kenny informed reporters that he would be traveling to Nuremberg as a guest of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, then acting as prosecutor for the war-crimes trials. Kenny laughed off those who questioned the strategic wisdom of missing the first two weeks of his own gubernatorial campaign. As long as he was out of the country, he argued, at least he couldn’t make any mistakes. 42 Charm was not enough for Kenny. It was no easy job for a Democrat to take on Warren in 1946. Warren had championed health care, had built hospitals, and had asked the legislature for a full-employment bill. He supported a Fair Employment Practices Act, intended to “guarantee economic opportunity” to all.43 Conservatives grumbled about their Republican governor, but Democrats could find no real way to get to Warren’s left. Through most of the campaign, Kenny avoided even criticizing Warren, and when he did, it was so gentle as to often escape notice. The uneventful contest warranted just a single sentence in Warren’s memoirs.

  Its outcome, however, established Warren’s preeminence in California politics beyond any other measure. On June 4, Republican voters unsurprisingly named Warren their candidate, preferring him to Kenny by 774,502 votes to 70,331. That was no great surprise. What was breathtaking was the action of California’s Democrats. By a margin of 593,180 votes to 530,968,44 the state’s Democrats selected as their candidate a lifelong Republican who twelve years earlier had chaired his party during its campaign against Upton Sinclair and who just two years earlier had delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. With the 1946 primary election, the Republican Party of the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Farmers and the Democratic Party of Sinclair and Carey McWilliams agreed on one thing: Both picked Earl Warren to lead them. Warren thus effectively sealed the election in the primary (he still faced token opposition in November from a Prohibition candidate and a write-in, but neither gave him trouble). Kenny took the loss with typically good humor: “I saved him from oblivion in 1938 and end in oblivion myself. You’ve got to be careful whom you help in politics.”45

  Among those heartened by Warren’s victory were his friends in the FBI, who worried about the left-wing support they perceived for Kenny. The election, according to the Bureau’s San Francisco special agent in charge, “provided a stunning blow to the Communist Party . . . and those laboring unions active in supporting political candidates.” Kenny, the agent reported to headquarters, had been “supported, although not publicly endorsed, by the Communist Party,” so his defeat “caused considerable doubt and speculation in the minds of Communist functionaries responsible for political activity.”46 Warren’s victory thus pleased his proud benefactor in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover.

  Sweigert, in his running, poetic ode to Warren, put it more brightly:

  ... Earl had a trusted weapon

  Just suited to his style,

  And brandished it with gusto,

  ’Tis called the great Cross File.

  And with it mighty Warren

  Made all the yokels swoon;

  Not waiting for November,

  He slew young Bob in June.47

  No other gubernatorial candidate had ever won such a victory, and none ever replicated the feat. It remains a singular achievement in the history of California politics. Warren thus emerged from 1946 as a virtually unassailable figure in his home state. His straitlaced liberal politics had become California’s. His fusion of prudent spending, care with taxes, and lavish support for social and educational programs, his belief in free enterprise and public help—these values had become his state’s. California’s political center had at last arrived, in the program of its Republican governor and in the person of Earl Warren.

  Chapter 12

  IN COMMAND

  You know Earl.

  LOS ANGELES TIMES POLITICAL EDITOR KYLE PALMER TO HERMAN PERRY,

  FRIEND AND BENEFACTOR OF RICHARD NIXON1

  WARREN’S HISTORIC VICTORY in 1946 cemented his hold on t
he leadership of both California political parties. It also meant that he effectively won his seat in June, as the November general election now was turned into a mere formality. That gave Warren not only influence but also the latitude to use it, since his own political fortunes were, at least for the moment, secure.

  Given that, others naturally looked to Warren for help. One of those in 1946 was a young Navy veteran, attempting his first foray into politics with a campaign for a Southern California congressional seat. Richard Nixon had plenty to recommend him to the voters of his district: He was young, smart, and ambitious. He was, moreover, an archetype of Southern California, emblematic of its emphatic bond with the Midwest and of the strong pulls of religious piety and social conservatism. “Lt. Nixon comes from good Quaker stock and is about thirty-five years of age,” his first patron, bank manager Herman Perry, wrote in introducing Nixon to a Republican fact-finding committee searching for a candidate. “He is a graduate of Whittier College and a member of the Board. By hard work he obtained a scholarship to Duke University law school. He is a very aggressive individual. He was an orator and debater in high school and college.”2

  Nixon was no Earl Warren, however. In fact, they seemed almost to mirror each other, their opposing images portending the life of conflict upon which the two were embarking in the early months of 1946. As they each campaigned that spring and summer, Warren was fifty-five years old, tall, strapping, and handsome; Nixon, at thirty-three, was charismatic, to be sure, but his appearance was more glowering than garrulous. Warren was a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, the state’s archetypal institution of higher education; Nixon came from the smaller, more parochial Whittier College. In their political demeanor, Warren was sunny and approachable, the model of a friendly leader floating above the tumult of politics. Nixon seethed; his signature political posture was the attack. And where Warren prided himself on his professional nonpartisanship, Nixon believed strongly in the contest of the two-party system. He was firmly and unequivocally a Republican. When his daughter Patricia was born in 1946—just in time for her birth to figure in his campaign—Nixon announced, “Patricia is a lucky girl. She will grow up in the finest state in the union, in the greatest country on earth. She will grow up, go to schools and when the time comes she will register and vote Republican.”3 It is impossible to imagine Earl Warren ever uttering such a sentence.

  Whatever schools she would attend and however she would register, Tricia Nixon would also grow up in the era of Earl Warren. For as Richard Nixon set out to launch a career in California politics, he did so in Warren’s shadow, which had important ramifications for their relationship and for Nixon’s early political development. Warren, by defining and personifying the political center of California, exerted a gravitational force on the state’s ideological universe. Others bent toward him. Those who attempted to defy that force risked appearing marginal or strange. That tug was never stronger than in 1946, and one of those thus pulled into Warren’s orbit was the young Richard Nixon. Temperamentally, Nixon was his own man. He railed hard against Communists, but the young candidate nevertheless presented himself as an advocate of “practical liberalism,” a self-conscious attempt to appeal to the middle that Warren had carved for Republican candidates in a Democratic electorate. In his first run for political office, Nixon cross-filed as a Democrat and a Republican, this fiercely competitive Republican thus emulating the tactic that Warren had pioneered as a self-described nonpartisan.

  If all of that reflected Warren’s tug on Nixon’s politics, however, the more penetrating impact of Warren’s influence was in the tone it established between them: From the very beginning, the relationship between Nixon and Warren was characterized by Nixon’s resentment of Warren and Warren’s contempt for Nixon. Nixon was in a tough race in 1946. He was challenging Democrat Jerry Voorhis, an able and intelligent iconoclast with a base among Southern California’s Left and an incumbent who already had spent a decade in the House. So Nixon’s associates reached out to Warren, hoping the popular governor would consider an endorsement—valuable in any race but especially in one where Nixon hoped to cast Voorhis as extreme while Nixon argued that he was the genuine moderate in tune with the district. Warren refused. Adding to the slight, Voorhis made the most of Warren’s silence, releasing a complimentary letter Warren had written to him earlier and even endorsing Warren as “the better man” in the governor’s race. Eager for any word to rebut those comments, Nixon’s camp urged Warren at least to recant the letter to Voorhis. Warren again refused.4

  Nixon’s supporters were livid. “[H]e was a man who wanted everyone to support him when he was running for office, but never wanted to give anyone else any help when the other fellow was running for office,” Earl C. Adams, a Los Angeles lawyer who helped encourage Nixon to run in 1946, remembered in a 1975 interview. “It was all for Warren.”5

  In the June primary, when Warren won both party nominations in his historic rout, Voorhis appeared to finish comfortably. He won the Democratic victory and tallied half as many votes as Nixon on the Republican side. It was then, however, that Voorhis made his critical mistake. He viewed those numbers through overconfidence, failing to appreciate how far Nixon had come in a few short months. Thinking he was safe, Voorhis challenged Nixon to a series of debates. That elevated Nixon to Voorhis’s stage (a tactical error) and overlooked Nixon’s talent for the cut and thrust of personal politics (a substantive mistake). Voorhis gave Nixon his chance. Nixon made the most of it.

  Their first debate was on Friday, September 13, at a junior high school in the tiny, conservative town of South Pasadena. Introduced by Murray Chotiner, Nixon arrived late but ready. When Nixon accused Voorhis of being supported by a left-wing labor organization known as the CIO-PAC, Voorhis demanded that Nixon prove it. Nixon then reached into his pocket and took from it a copy of Action of Today, a publication of the National Citizens Political Action Committee, which worked with the CIO and which Nixon accused of supporting Voorhis.6 In fact, the PAC elected not to endorse Voorhis, but the congressman was unaccountably caught by surprise and mumbled an unconvincing reply, managing to damage himself further by conceding that there was a “grave question” of Communist influence at the CIO.7 Nixon partisans at the debate booed Voorhis lustily, and the congressman’s career drained out of the hourglass. After the debate, Voorhis asked a longtime friend and admirer how he had done. “Jerry,” his friend answered, “he murdered you.”8

  The pattern was set for the balance of the debates. Nixon was plucky and aggressive, Voorhis wavering and unsure. Still, Voorhis was an incumbent and popular among Democrats. With the election approaching, some Nixon confidants continued to hold out hope that Warren would give them a boost. In September, Warren proved that he was not averse to all endorsements, as he announced his support for William Knowland’s senatorial campaign. That was hardly a surprise—Warren, after all, had named Knowland to the Senate—but it suggested that Warren might be open to helping another fellow Republican. At Nixon headquarters, however, the phone never rang.

  Despite Warren’s refusal to help, Nixon defeated Voorhis in 1946 by nearly 15,000 votes. This marked the beginning of his extraordinary career, one filled with accomplishment and setback, destined to unfold alongside that of Earl Warren. For now, the two men shadowed each other, Nixon heading off to Washington, miffed that the governor had not helped him, and Warren settling in for his second term as governor, astonished that Nixon’s people would even have asked.

  In Sacramento, Warren returned to office with barely an interruption. His command of California was confirmed by his reelection, and he now enjoyed surveying his domain from a favorite perk of office. Warren converted a National Guard C-47 plane into one at the service of the governor. He nicknamed it “Grizzly Bear” and loved riding in it up and down his far-flung state, typically logging seven or eight trips a month and eventually amassing more than 250,000 miles in it.9

  Warren’s second inaugural address, delivered on January 6, 1947, conti
nued along the lines Warren had established in his first term. With the war now over, Warren redoubled his denunciation of partisanship—“There has been little blind partisanship or personal controversy to hinder our attention to the job to be done,” he said—insisted that the state pay for programs as it went, argued for extension of the 1943 tax cuts, and called for expansion of programs and institutions that served the state’s growing population. Warren never raised his voice, never harangued or pleaded, but his enthusiasm for the task of leading permeated his address.

  “Our task will not be easy,” he said. But he added, “It can be thrilling.”10

  Addressing the state’s principal problems, Warren identified two, both associated with its rapid growth. Housing was needed to accommodate returning veterans and new immigrants, and Warren was unwilling to wait for the private sector to adjust to the need. Housing materials were available as a result of the federal government’s closing of bases and the like, and Warren proposed that the state take over that material and put it to use. “It is the obligation of State Government to assist in every way to make this material easily and promptly available to veterans who desire to purchase it,” he said. Similarly, Warren urged legislators to take advantage of a building boom in order to “make it possible to eliminate the blighted areas of our cities.” Here again, the pattern of previous political advocacy held: Warren used veterans to justify a program, then found ways to extend it to others, largely the poor and middle class. Turning then to another area of concern, Warren added, “Comparable only to the distress resulting from the housing shortage is the tragic situation in which we find ourselves as the result of an outgrown highway system. Our streets and roads have become places of frightful danger, and our economic development is being retarded.”11