by Jim Newton
In his own race, Warren pounded Roosevelt with a ferocity he had never unleashed on Kenny. When Roosevelt argued that Warren had not done enough for schools, the indignant incumbent responded, “James Roosevelt has never been in a public school in his life, except to make a political speech.”51 Roosevelt countered that Warren was an illusory friend of labor, a Republican feigning appreciation for unions solely to curry their votes. Warren knew enough to see he could be vulnerable to that charge. There were still those who remembered Point Lobos and Upton Sinclair, and there was no shortage of voters who were squeamish about members of the Bohemian Club or friends of the Chandlers. Still, Warren felt entitled to labor’s appreciation. He was raised in a union home and found early work helping union men to their trains on time. He still carried his musicians’ union card.
On November 3, 1950, with the election just days away, Warren vented his full fury at Roosevelt and staked his claim for the votes of California’s working people. Appearing at the Sailors Union Building in San Francisco, Warren asserted his support for the “procedure of collective bargaining,” and described his accomplishments as having been judged “through the years for their fairness by the working men and women of our State.”52
And then Warren cut to the point:
It is great for me, in such surroundings, to look working people in the eye and refute as absolute falsehood the distortions, the insinuations, and detractions that have been used by my opponent to insinuate himself into the Governor’s office.
I use the term “insinuate himself into the Governor’s office” because it is the only way he could hope to arrive there in this campaign. He has absolutely no record of accomplishment of any kind in the public service, or in the civic life of our State. And outside of foraging for political insurance, the only private employment of any kind he has ever had was his employment at $25,000 a year by a group of left-wingers in Southern California which his own party eventually forced him to repudiate as a dangerous group.
I want to say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that I have not heretofore made reference to this sordid page in the history of Mr. James Roosevelt, nor have I said anything about his business activities which have received such notoriety in recent years throughout the country.
But when he repeatedly and intentionally tells the working people of California that I am a labor-hater, and that my administration has ground working people down, I not only am entitled as a matter of fair play to show the falsity of his statements, but also to make an observation based upon the facts that will throw some light on the situation.
I came from a humble workingman’s home. My father worked with his hands as a mechanic. Both he and I have worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, at 25 cents an hour. I know what better wages mean to a home. I know what better hours mean to a family. I know what better working conditions mean to the safety, the health, and the well being of all working people.53
Left unsaid, barely, was that Roosevelt—raised at St. Albans, Groton, and Harvard—knew none of that, that his upbringing of wealth and privilege undermined his claim to the hearts of labor, just as Warren’s dusty youth in Bakersfield and rearing in California’s public schools entitled him to their attention. Rarely had Warren spoken of an opponent in such personal and strident tones. He was, as the election of 1950 drew near, tired and angry, defeated once nationally and worried that a loss could finish him. He would not lose to a liar.
Warren delivered a last radio plea on Monday evening from Los Angeles, then, accompanied by Nina and Virginia, returned that night to San Francisco, where the three stayed at the St. Francis Hotel. They rose early the following morning and shuttled across the bay to their old home precinct, back to the Alameda Courthouse that had given Earl Warren his public start. There, they voted as the polls opened at seven A.M. They then joined old friends for breakfast at their home, hoping to spend a relaxing morning before settling in to hear the results of Warren’s seventh election in California. 54 The prospects of a seventh victory, a third term, and an amiable evening seemed strong indeed.
In Sacramento, the day began differently. Seventeen-year-old Honey Bear had been feeling poorly that week, nursing a fever, fidgeting and uncomfortable. As her mother, father, and sister barnstormed the state for one last time, Honey Bear and Earl Jr. stayed home. Earl tended to his ailing sister—the flu, doctors said. He rubbed her legs and soothed her to sleep. On Tuesday morning, at about the same time Earl and Nina Warren cast their ballots for his reelection, Earl came into his sister’s room to check on her. Stripping back her blankets, he glanced at her legs and knew there was trouble. The heating pads he had given his sister the night before to ease her legs had burned them. Honey Bear had not felt a thing. 55
In a panic, Earl Jr. summoned doctors and sent word for his parents. Reached by an aide at the Oakland home where they were having breakfast, the Warrens immediately hurried home to Sacramento, driving through a thick fog. 56 They arrived to find Honey Bear at Sutter Hospital in Sacramento. She had a fever of 102 degrees. Her body ached. Most terrifyingly, she could not move her legs. The lovely girl, daughter of the governor, image of horseback riding and swimming and California sun, was diagnosed with polio. 57
“It’s not so bad,” Honey Bear told her worried father. “Oh Daddy,” she added, “I’ve spoiled your big day.”58
Turning to her mother, Honey Bear suggested they go home and rest. And with that, the months of strain and the wear and tear of an election all piled up. Earl Warren never could stand to see Honey Bear in distress; the mere thought of her unhappy at moving to Sacramento had pushed him to buy her a pony. Now she was in pain. She might never walk again. She might, in fact, die. Earl Warren had to be exhausted. He had just completed a year in which he fought for his friends at the university and himself at the polls. His long campaign—every campaign is a long one for those at their centers—was ending that day, almost certainly in triumph.
And yet here was his little girl, here in a hospital bed urging him not to worry about her. Honey Bear was, simply, “his heart.”59 The man famous for his earnest stoicism, the governor who had shown his grief in public just once—in the hours after his father’s murder—walked out of his daughter’s hospital room, his broad shoulders slumped and tired. Outside, in a quiet hallway, he wept.60
Earl Warren was overwhelmingly reelected that night to the governorship of California. He was the first person ever to win a third term in that office. His political record, achieved on November 7, 1950, was never equaled, and the later imposition of term limits on the governorship makes it unlikely ever to be again. Warren’s political legacy now reached beyond that of any other governor ever to preside over California. His state was sound, his electorate satisfied, his opponent vanquished. Warren had created California’s center and now he commanded from it. But on that night of victory, Warren attended no parties, made no public appearances. He paced and fretted with his family. The next few days were crucial, doctors warned. The polio could creep up her body, paralyzing more and more of Honey Bear. Or it could subside.
Special serum was administered on November 8, and doctors reported some hope that the crisis had passed.61 Still, Warren worried. He canceled all appointments during what should have been that celebratory week. On his calendar, he drew a light pencil X across one page after another.62 Instead, he conferred worriedly with Bart Cavanaugh, whose own children were battling polio. They fretted together and with their wives. Not until November 13 did Warren allow himself so much as a lunch, finally breaking from his worries to dine with Attorney General Pat Brown. Nina spent hour after hour by Honey Bear’s side. Her secretary handled the phones for her—the mansion was deluged with calls—while Nina tended to her namesake daughter. She struggled for composure. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been here this week,” she told her aide after days of straining. With that, Nina’s strong voice cracked.63
Honey Bear improved. With her trademark vigor, she willed herself back to
health, recuperating dutifully in a closed-off wing of Sutter Hospital. She moved from bed to wheelchair to walker, straining for motion and strength in her legs. Earl and Nina struggled with her, consulting daily with her doctors and praying. The combined anxiety of his daughter’s illness and the workload of the new term finally got to Warren. On February 6, he felt a sharp pain in his arm and went to the hospital to have it checked out. He was diagnosed with neuralgia, and the painful disorder gripped him for weeks. Hospitalized through February 24, he canceled that month’s meeting of the Governor’s Council and then, in early March, accepted a ride on a National Guard plane that took him to Southern California, where the recuperating governor and his recuperating daughter settled in with Nina for a rest. By the shores of Lake Arrowhead, east of Los Angeles, Earl Warren read papers while Honey Bear swam, at first tentatively, then with growing strength.64 Both governor and daughter soon were on the mend. Honey Bear was able to spend half a day in a wheelchair on February 26.65
Her illness and pluck deeply touched the state. Honey Bear got polio, one longtime California political journalist said years later, and all of California got sick.66 Press reports suggested Honey Bear probably had contracted polio at school, where three other students had gotten the disease. Across California, parents pulled their children out of public pools and only warily allowed them into crowded classrooms. In letter after letter, they poured their fears and wishes out to Honey Bear. Servicemen stationed across the world wrote her pained notes, beseeching ones, telling their own stories of injury and fear. The bellboys at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles put together an elaborately drawn card, addressed simply to “Miss Nina Warren—That’s Honey Bear—Executive Mansion, Sacramento, California.” Beneath it, they added a note: “Hurry Postman. She’s Needing Mail These Days!” Admirers sent her pins, songs, candy, perfume, flowers, food, art books, collages, notepaper, and dozens and dozens and dozens of flowers.67
Honey Bear’s recovery was remarkable and complete. By May 1951, Warren was able to report that she was “walking more and more.”68 The following month, she walked across the stage to receive her high school diploma. By the summer after that, no traces of the illness remained. That year, Warren’s longtime aide and friend Warren Olney arrived at the Warren’s summer cottage in Santa Monica to deliver papers to his boss. Thinking he would only be a moment, Olney asked his teenage son Warren IV to wait in the car. Young Olney did, but as he whiled away the minutes, he suddenly looked up to find the Warren daughters at his window, asking if he would join them for a walk to the beach. Dressed in their bathing suits, beaming with California summer, the girls took his breath away. More than forty years later, telling the story on a sunny morning in Venice, just ten miles from where it occurred, Warren Olney IV, now an accomplished journalist accustomed to a world of fame and beauty, stammered at the memory of teenaged Honey Bear, recovered from polio, bounding away to the beach, leaving him flustered in his father’s car. He was struck numb by his encounter with the Warren girls’ radiance, and as he later remembered, only a visit from Mrs. Warren snapped him out of it. She had spied him in the car and invited him inside for cookies.69
Nineteen fifty had been a year that tested Warren’s loyalties and found them solid. Asked to choose between loyalty to an oath and to his alma mater, he chose the latter. Asked to weigh the abstraction of a Communist threat against the fact of personal friendship, he picked friendship. And forced, in one of his darkest hours, to choose between celebration of a political victory and devotion to his ailing daughter, he stayed with his daughter, crying in the hall. Having fought the loyalty oath debate through that difficult time, Warren soured even on the word “loyalty,” at least as many used it. In later years, when he searched for a way to describe the bond between a person and his nation or government, Warren chose “love of country.” “I prefer ‘love of country,’ ” he wrote, “because the other terms [loyalty and patriotism] have occasionally been adopted by extremists as labels for their own exclusive brand of ‘Americanism.’ ”70
In the end, Warren’s loyalties were vindicated. Honey Bear recovered, and the loyalty oath controversy petered out in Warren’s third term. In 1952, the California Supreme Court sided with the fired professors and ordered them reinstated. The regents, firmly under Warren’s control by then, acquiesced quietly. When finally Neylan completed his term as a regent, Sproul wrote to Warren to gloat. Warren, who generally shied away from personal remarks in writing, this time could not resist. Lamenting that he’d missed a chance to see Sproul in person, Warren added, “I had looked forward to it for a long time and was prepared to rejoice with you over the great thing that happened at the University when Neylan resigned. The sun must have shown much brighter in California for some time.”71
Much as Warren would have preferred to be finished with the loyalty issue, California in his governorship was not through debating the meaning of loyalty and the methods of testing it. In 1952, with the Korean War still grinding on, voters were given the chance to consider a pair of ballot measures to bar “subversive persons” from holding public office and to mandate still another oath for public employees. Warren by then had had enough of oaths, and he opposed the measures. His implacable Republican colleagues were furious again. They protested, but he held firm, even as it became clear that he would lose this round. On November 4, 1952, voters did, despite Warren’s objections, approve the new oath and the accompanying bar on public employment by subversives. The following day, an old colleague sat down to write Warren. The two men had supported each other and worked together. They had even run against each other for office, but their bond survived that. They shared respect and loyalty to each other as persons, not as causes. On that day in 1952, those ties were stronger than their differences.
“You and I have been corresponding on the subject of civil liberties since 1938,” Robert Kenny wrote. “I think your stand on the two propositions in the midst of the current hysteria is one of the finest things that you have ever done.”72
Chapter 14
“TRAITOR IN OUR DELEGATION”
Honorable men don’t stab their friends—or enemies—in the back!
KYLE PALMER 1
EARL WARREN SET OUT on a familiar journey on a hot afternoon in 1952. The day was typical for July in California’s Central Valley: it had peaked at 98 degrees, and the light breeze off Sacramento’s intersecting rivers did little to take the edge off a sizzling afternoon. As the sun began to drop toward the horizon, Warren boarded yet another train, headed for Chicago, as he had so many times before. He was accompanied again by fellow Californians, carrying again the mantle of that state’s favorite-son status to the quadrennial convention of the nation’s Republican Party. As he had in 1948, William Knowland, son of Warren’s patron and Warren’s own selection for the United States Senate, headed the California delegation. And as they had before, the California delegates—seventy in 1952—anticipated casting presidential ballots for their governor, Earl Warren.
There was, however, a difference in 1952. In 1952, Warren intended to win.
“I go to Chicago,” Warren announced as the train prepared to leave, “without the intention of making any deals of any kind.”2
With that, Warren and the delegates boarded the eighteen-car Warren Special and headed east. The air-conditioning units had been off all afternoon. Delegates asked porters to deliver buckets of ice to their cars, then sat around them, dipping into them for drinks and straining for a breath of cool air. It was, one delegate recalled, “hotter than the hinges of hell.”3 The train strained upward through the Sierra Nevada. Delegates and families elbowed with reporters and jostled in the drink and dining cars. Some played cards or read. Mostly they gossiped about the days ahead, when history seemed to offer the Republican Party yet another prime opportunity to regain the White House after a full generation of Democratic control. The train was professionally festive, relaxed but taut, comfortable but tinged with excitement.4
Warren had begun
his exploration of a presidential bid in January at a meeting of the Republican National Committee in San Francisco. There, he had methodically checked in with old friends and political bosses, with journalists and influential officials; by the time the committee meetings were complete, Warren had a list of seventy-two people he’d met with over the three days.5 His strategy was not to ride a national wave of delegate support for first-ballot victory—he had no national organization to support such a time-consuming and expensive campaign—but he had learned in 1948 that coming with California’s delegation alone was not enough. In 1952, then, he decided to mount a strategic challenge in one or two states outside of California, enough to show a national presence and to hope that, combined with his likely California win, he would come to the convention well positioned to emerge as a compromise candidate able to carry the party to victory in November. He built a campaign plan and organization suited to that strategy. Through mid-February, Warren constructed his political and fundraising apparatus. He opened offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento and set out to raise the $100,000 or so that his finance chairs believed was necessary to run in three states and enter the convention with a respectable showing of delegates.6
Warren entered the Wisconsin primary on February 19 and campaigned there even as the California legislative session kept him pinned in Sacramento for much of the time. An old friend wasted no time in declaring his allegiance: Two days after Warren announced, Drew Pearson proclaimed him the “surest shot to win for the GOP next November.”7 Buoyed by the support of friends, Warren worked in the California capitol every Monday through Wednesday, then flew to Wisconsin for long weekends of campaigning. The trips, made in the thick of the Wisconsin winter, were grueling, typically taking Warren to more than a dozen events a day—greetings, talks, speeches from sound trucks—all in the home state of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Warren gave the phlegmatic senator a clear rebuke—he made clear that “blanket indictments against groups of people without naming them or substantiating them by substantial evidence” did not, in his view, “serve the best interests of our country”8—but he did not engage the home-state senator in direct debate. Warren hoped instead to animate the surviving members of LaFollette’s Progressive base without driving away the remainder of the Republican electorate.
