by Jim Newton
In substance, the Levering Oath was in many respects worse than the oath Warren had fought for so many months at the university. It required those who signed not only to swear to support and defend the Constitution but also to pledge not to advocate or be a member of any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government. In addition, workers were required to state specifically that they had not been members of any such organization within the past five years and to promise not to join any such organization in the future. Substantively, then, Warren appeared to have capitulated to advocates of the oath and to have extended its reach beyond the university to all public employees.
Then and since, some have speculated that Warren was motivated by politics. His November reelection was just a month away when he signed the Levering Oath Act, and he was facing James Roosevelt, son of the revered former president. That, however, ignores the realities of the campaign by that point. By the time the Levering Oath came to him for his signature, Warren already had dispensed with the threat of conservative opposition (indeed, Warren seems far more likely to have been motivated by politics in 1949, when Knight was challenging him from the right and he stayed out of the debate). By 1950, when he was effectively unopposed in the Republican primary, Warren carried all fifty-eight California counties. If he felt any pressure going into the November election, he felt it from his left, as Roosevelt had virtually no crossover appeal for Republicans or conservatives. As a result, Warren had little reason to worry about his restive conservative allies in September and October of 1951 and thus no reason to appease them with an oath.
Only those who viewed the oath controversy in philosophical or ideological terms, however, would find Warren’s support for the Levering Oath hard to explain. If Warren’s actions in the university debate are viewed, rather, as a defense of the university and its president, they become entirely consistent with his later support of the Levering Oath. The university oath was odious not because it was an oath per se but rather because it implied disloyalty by the university. Warren had attended that university and had sent his children to be educated there. He would tolerate no suggestion that it was undermined by Communism. Tellingly, those issues—the singling out of the university and the legally suspect quality of the oath requirement—were what Warren identified as the basis for his opposition when he reflected on the matter in 1954, just a few years after it had subsided. In an unsigned memorandum, but one typed on his typewriter and kept with his papers, Warren listed those issues as the reasons that he opposed the oath. The words “academic freedom” and “rights of expression and association” never appear in that document. 30
Warren’s stand was, in fact, about loyalty, but not about loyalty to an idea or even to government in the abstract. It was about loyalty to his friends, to his family, and to his university—the tangible, real-life loyalties that always for Warren prevailed over theory and abstraction. He had attended the University of California with Bob Sproul; he trusted Sproul and determined to see him through. That meant squashing Neylan, not on the principle of loyalty as articulated by the oath but on the principle of loyalty to one’s friends. Sproul stayed as president, and professors were not asked to sign anything other than that given to all state workers. On his terms—the terms he set in 1949 and 1950—Warren won.
LIFE WOULD be simpler for governors if it served them up one issue at a time—if tax cuts gave way to health insurance and health insurance was resolved before prison reform was required and if a new prison system was in place before the legislature considered a gas tax. Such is rarely the case, however, and certainly not in the fast-moving epoch of Earl Warren’s governorship. For even as Warren tiptoed through the loyalty-oath debate, his old frustrations with corruption and Sacramento lobbyists crested in one imbroglio, which in turn segued into another.
Those interlocking issues had their genesis in the 1946 election, when Warren defeated Kenny in the primary. Kenny vacated his seat as attorney general to challenge Warren, and the Los Angeles district attorney, Frederick Howser, ran for Kenny’s slot. Warren was wary of Howser even before he arrived—while serving as district attorney in Los Angeles, Howser had arranged for Tony Cornero, captain of the Rex, to return his gambling business to Southern California, undermining Warren’s celebrated victory over Cornero in 1939. Despite that, Howser had the audacity to ask for Warren’s support in the 1946 elections; Warren refused. Howser instead relied on the less savory support of Sacramento liquor lobbyist Artie Samish. Thanks to Samish’s backing—and to the similarity of his name to that of Lieutenant Governor Fred Houser—Howser won. The next act was predictable: Within months of Howser’s taking office, Warren heard rumors that organized crime was extending feelers into the state. “The word was out,” he said, “that the state was to be opened up to gambling and other illegal activities.”31 Warren warned Howser he knew what was developing. Howser professed innocence, and though promising to act, did not. Warren then did what Warren did in situations where the public interest was at stake and he was hamstrung: He called Olney.
Olney was then in the midst of one of his periodic returns to private life, but Warren prevailed upon him, as he had before, to leave it for public service, this time to serve as counsel to Warren’s California Crime Study Commission on Organized Crime. Howser objected to the formation of the commission, arguing through the summer and fall that reports of organized crime in California were exaggerated, that, in effect, he had matters under control. Warren did not believe him from the start; after June 20, 1947, few others did, either. It was that day that Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, founder of Las Vegas’s Flamingo Hotel and a flamboyant mobster, was shot to death in his mistress’s Beverly Hills home. Confronted with the hard-to-deny facts that the bullet-riddled body of a known mobster had now turned up in an elegant Southern California neighborhood, Howser continued to insist that there was no real problem. On September 12 of that year, Howser called together California police and sheriffs—he did not invite the FBI—and downplayed the talk of troubles. Organized-crime conditions in California were, he insisted, not “as bad as they have been indicated.” Howser also remarked that he was “tired of the talk of ‘some people’ on this subject.”32
Warren was not persuaded, and chose retired Admiral William Standley, a Navy man of great distinction and a former American ambassador to Russia, to head the commission. Olney agreed to serve as its chief counsel. As expected, the commission soon clashed with Howser, who professed a desire to cooperate with the commission even as he worked to undermine it. By 1948, Howser was trying to push Olney off the commission staff, alleging that the commission somehow had signed him on improperly. Indignant, Warren cabled his support: “Mr. Olney has performed his duties fearlessly and in the public interest. His job is not yet completed. It must be completed.” If there were problems with Olney’s hiring, Warren promised to pay his $625-a-month salary out of his own pocket.33
Olney stayed on the job through 1952, as Warren’s first commission and then a second probed organized crime activity throughout California and submitted extensive reports on bookmaking, rackets, and other manifestations of the mob. The commission did not adopt Howser’s sanguine view of the situation. “The menace of organized crime is one of the major problems of contemporary political life,” the commission concluded. “Organized rackets are not managed by ignorant men or desperate nitwits. They are controlled by greedy men who are as alert and sagacious as they are ruthless and persistent.”34 The commission was as thorough as it was biting. Included in its report were biographies of leading California mobsters and even pictures of their luxurious homes and the resorts they frequented. Even before the commission had submitted its final work, it had effectively devastated Howser.
The undoing of California’s attorney general also had the effect of drawing attention to Samish, who compounded his difficulties by encouraging that scrutiny. The presence of lobbyists in Sacramento was a nettlesome one for Warren from the beginning. Banking representatives ag
itated him during the debate over taxes in 1943, and lobbyists for doctors and oil companies bedeviled him thereafter. But the issue jumped to public attention with the publication of a two-part series in Collier’s magazine in August 1949. Entitled “The Secret Boss of California,” the series profiled Samish, whose fame and influence had grown through the 1940s. By 1949, Samish was a controlling force in the state legislature, and power had made him brazen. When Lester Velie of Collier’s came to write about Samish, the lobbyist forgot the cardinal rule of backroom influence, which is that to maintain it, one must keep it in the back room. Instead, Samish boasted and mugged and posed for a fatal picture, in which he held a ventriloquist’s dummy in his left hand and pretended to address it: “How are you today, Mr. Legislature?” the caption read.
Samish represented beer, liquor, bus companies, railroads, cigarette manufacturers, banks, racetracks, and chemical companies—among others. To Velie and Collier’s, he boasted of putting Howser in office; of controlling votes on the state Board of Equalization, which regulated liquor laws and tax assessments; and of a conspicuous willingness to reward friends and punish enemies with his acute sense of a legislator’s needs. “I can tell if a man wants a baked potato, a girl, or money,” Samish offered.35 When Warren was asked by Velie who was the most influential person in the legislature, Warren replied, “On matters that affect his clients, Artie unquestionably has more power than the governor.”36
Warren’s comment raised the question of why a governor so offended by lobbyists and so intolerant of corruption had in fact tolerated Samish for so long. Sensitive to that charge, Warren asked the legislature for a bill to curb lobbying, and though he got less than he wanted, he signed such a bill in 1949. With that, he was through with Samish, but Olney was not quite. Samish would eventually be prosecuted for income tax evasion, and the prosecutor in that case was none other than Olney, then working for the Justice Department but then, as always, a premier expert on crime in California. Samish was convinced that he would have beaten the case against him, that the government simply would have tired of poking through his records, had it not been “for my old friend Warren Olney III.” 37
Samish eventually served twenty-six months in a federal penitentiary. As for Howser, his association with Samish and his transparent efforts to whitewash the threat of organized crime persuaded voters that Warren and the Crime Commission were right—that Howser was not to be trusted. He served out his term and then was gone from public office, replaced by Democrat Pat Brown.
WITH THE Crime Commission under way and the university’s loyalty oath controversy largely superseded by the enactment of the Levering Oath, Warren turned to his reelection in early 1950. He announced his candidacy in February and prosecuted it with practiced efficiency. As had become his routine, Warren began his campaign with a trip through the Mother Lode counties, speaking once, twice, sometimes even three times a day in those old Sierra mining camps through May.38 The electorate knew Warren and trusted him. Now when he said he intended to govern in nonpartisan fashion, he was taken at his word, particularly since he could point to a record of accomplishment that would be the envy of almost any official.
In plain, calm language, Warren reminded voters of the change he had managed for California in his eight years as governor: 20,000 classrooms and at least that many new teachers to serve a student population that had grown by 500,000 children in ten years; improved mental health centers serving 10,556 more patients; an increase of 1.45 million jobs; a tripling in the annual value of state crops; construction of 4,025 miles of new highways; and despite acute housing shortages in some parts of the state, a galloping boom that saw the construction of 625,000 new homes, a fourth of all new homes built in America, in the five years beginning with the end of the war. All that with a balanced budget and a reduction in state taxes over the same period (though also with the imposition of California’s gas tax).39 Moreover, though social issues did not form the mainstay of Warren’s reelection effort, there was substantial evidence supporting Warren’s claims of nonpartisanship as he turned to Democratic legislators for support for his social agenda—health care, for instance—and Democrats readily complied.40
While he was governor, Warren’s social record had mounted. He had signed the bill that ended discrimination against Mexicans in schools. He backed the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission and supported fair employment legislation as well as nondiscriminatory housing requirements, substantial increases in public pensions, and expansion of eligibility for receiving government support.41 Some critics, Warren conceded late in the campaign, “believe we have been too liberal. I don’t. I believe that most Californians want our State to be as liberal as our finances will permit.”42
Under Warren’s leadership, California had transcended the historical extremes that so long had marked its history. Supported by an enthusiastic and diligent Warren, the great water projects planned for the Central Valley would soon bring rivers from the cool north to the arid south, where they would irrigate rich, loamy fields. The grand distances that once made Los Angeles and San Francisco remote and opposite provinces now were shortened by highways and rail lines. Government-supplied electricity cooled California’s desert homes and warmed those in its northern forests. Under Warren’s watch, it had become a nation-state, its economy robust, its natural resources abundant and in use.
Jimmy Roosevelt would go on to an honorable career as a member of Congress, but in 1950, he ran a mean and occasionally stupid campaign for governor of California. In August, he attempted to capitalize on war fears by proposing that California construct a series of “open cities” inside the state. Those were intended to be fully functional metropolitan areas that would sit vacant unless and until California was attacked, at which time 4 million residents could evacuate to them. More perplexed than threatened, Warren described the plan as “hysterical, nonsensical and wholly demagogic.”43 Beyond that proposal, Roosevelt was elitist in every sense that Warren was not, and Roosevelt even came with the hint of scandal, as newspapers probed his business dealings and political connections. All that hampered Roosevelt’s effort and threatened to make him a laughingstock. When Roosevelt made his first speaking trip as a candidate to Sacramento in February, the Los Angeles Times played the story on the same page as a piece headlined “Other Planets Send Saucers, Navy Man Says.”44 So what did Earl Warren have to fear from little Jimmy Roosevelt? The name, of course.
As usual, Sweigert understood and captured Warren’s mood:
The Earl of Warren rallied
’Til one night in the dark,
He saw a figure moving—
The ghost of old Hyde Park.
“I know that voice,” said Warren,
“But not that baldish head.”
And then cried out in horror—
“Is Franklin really dead?”45
In 1942, Warren beat a failed Democrat in part by drawing Democratic support away from the incumbent. In 1946, he so thoroughly dominated the state’s politics that Democrats abandoned Robert Kenny and claimed Warren as their own candidate. Now, however, there was the risk that voters were tiring of Warren, and Roosevelt offered the glamour of his father’s presidency. Why, Roosevelt’s candidacy implicitly asked voters, settle for Warren’s milder New Deal when here was the real thing? Roosevelt’s mother appeared on her son’s behalf in September in order to draw that connection more explicitly. Her appearance drew a rare witticism from Warren as he brushed off her significance to the election. “I don’t like to argue with a mother about her boy,” Warren told reporters.46 And yet Warren may have seen Roosevelt as more threatening than he really was. Warren had just come off the experience of running nationally in 1948, when all signs pointed to an easy Republican victory, only to have Truman outcampaign the cocky Dewey-Warren ticket. It was one thing to lose the vice presidency, an office Warren never much coveted anyway. To suffer a loss at home, in defense of his own seat, would be quite another.
Tho
se were months of tough politics in California. For as Warren and Roosevelt waged their campaign in the flickering light of the Loyalty Oath controversy, two vigorous contestants vied for a California seat in the United States Senate. Congressman Richard Nixon was running against Helen Gahagan Douglas, an attractive, liberal congresswoman from Southern California, for an open United States Senate seat. With Murray Chotiner helping to direct the campaign, Nixon unleashed a scaled-up version of his Voorhis strategy, suggesting in this campaign that Douglas was sympathetic to Communism and comparing her voting record to that of leftist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio—“a notorious Communist party-liner,” as the flyer pointed out;47 a “red-ass red,” as one Nixon associate colorfully recalled.48 The Douglas-Marcantonio comparison was exaggeration, its visual impact enhanced by Chotiner’s decision to print the flyer on pink paper. It became known as “The Pink Sheet.”“We put it on pink paper,” Nixon aide Frank Jorgensen said later. “People drew their own conclusion.”49
For Nixon in 1950 as in 1946, a kind word from Warren would have had huge ramifications, as it would have helped persuade moderates that they could trust the young congressman. But as in 1946, Warren was unwilling, and Nixon’s camp this time decided to try to bait him. For weeks, Nixon aides hectored Douglas at public events, demanding to know whom she would support for governor. Finally, their pursuit paid off when she cracked and acknowledged that she favored Roosevelt. Warren still would not endorse Nixon—which was telling, given that both were Republicans and Nixon now was running against an avowed Warren opponent—but the governor did allow this: “In view of her statement . . . I might ask her how she expects I will vote when I mark my ballot for United States senator on Tuesday.”50 Chotiner had what he wanted, and trumpeted Warren’s hedged remark as an endorsement. Warren filed it away, part of his growing accumulation of grievances against Nixon and his friends.
