by Jim Newton
The delegates ate, drank, gossiped, and lobbied hour after hour. As sunrise and Chicago approached, the train clattered across the Great Plains, the light spirit of the first night replaced by the darker throb of intrigue. Just before the train reached Chicago, Nixon ducked out again, his late-night meetings complete. When the Warren Special arrived in Chicago, it pulled up as it had departed from Sacramento, missing the junior senator from California. Awaiting the delegates were buses to take them to the hotel. Chotiner had arranged for the transportation, and as the train neared the station, Warren aides got wind of yet another act of mischief: The buses set aside for the Warren delegation were draped in “Eisenhower for President” banners. Warren loyalists hastily rewrapped the buses before Warren arrived, but when Warren later learned of the stunt, he was “blistering mad.”35
Once in Chicago, the machinations between Warren, Eisenhower, Taft, and Nixon continued, with Eisenhower and Taft elbowing for advantage and Warren holding out hope for sufficient deadlock to permit his emergence. The Eisenhower and Taft campaigns all were headquartered in the same Chicago hotel—though the California delegation was staying elsewhere—and Warren quickly made his way to Eisenhower’s suite to meet the general; although their paths had crossed before, this was to be their first serious conversation. Arriving, Warren knocked on the door and was admitted by none other than Chotiner. “Imagine my surprise,” Warren noted archly, indulging himself in a rare note of sarcasm.36
Eisenhower and Warren liked each other. Natural leaders with similar politics and easy smiles, they were rivals but not enemies. For Warren to succeed, Ike had to fail, but Warren would far sooner have seen Eisenhower get the nomination than have it fall to Taft, and Eisenhower similarly favored Warren over Taft, if it came to that. Indeed, Warren’s meeting with Taft, later that same week, only reinforced Warren’s preference for Eisenhower. Taft used the occasion to try to cut a deal, offering Warren the vice presidency or any other spot in a Taft administration (Taft had already offered the vice presidency to MacArthur but assured Warren that he could make that awkward problem go away) if Warren would deliver him the California delegation on the first ballot. As with Nixon’s attempts to steer the delegation to Eisenhower, this backroom offer offended Warren’s integrity at the same time that it undermined his personal political position. Moreover, Warren did not like or trust Taft—just days earlier, Taft and his deputies had used their control over the convention seating to put Warren’s family up near the rafters. As Warren later put it mildly, “I was not particularly enamored of Taft as a candidate.”37
By 1952, Warren had led California’s Republicans to their national convention four times. He knew a thing or two about the mechanics and complexities of those affairs, and he knew that this year, when he came to win, he might at some point require the services of a trusted emissary, someone who could communicate directly with Eisenhower without reporters sniffing out the contact. So Warren set out to make sure he had such a person lined up. Well before the convention began, Warren invited a close associate of Eisenhower’s, who had served with the general during his tenure at Columbia University, to join him for lunch in Santa Monica. They discussed Warren’s presidential efforts, and Warren expressed some irritation at Eisenhower’s comments on the loyalty oath controversy (Warren and Eisenhower never would see eye to eye on oaths or Communism, among other things). A month later, Eisenhower’s associate wrote back to Warren asking if he needed any help at the upcoming convention. Helen MacGregor returned the message and asked him to go ahead to Chicago, to check into a hotel, and to await a call from Warren. He did as instructed.
On July 8, the day that General MacArthur—once Eisenhower’s boss, then his rival, and often the object of his scorn—spoke to the convention, pledging the party, “so help us God,” to victory in the fall, Earl Warren called for his emissary and entrusted him with a message to deliver to the general. The California delegation, Warren told him to tell Eisenhower, was becoming difficult to hold together. “The problem is this,” Warren said:
We have a traitor in our delegation. It’s Nixon. He, like all the rest, took the oath that he would vote for me, until such time as the delegation was released, but he has not paid attention to his oath and immediately upon being elected, started working for Eisenhower and has been doing so ever since. I have word that he is actively in touch with the Eisenhower people. I wish you would tell General Eisenhower that we resent his people infiltrating, through Nixon, into our delegation, and ask him to have it stopped.38
A “traitor.” Could any description have been more calculated to reach the general? Warren was not prone to hyperbole—or to threats, though he leveled one here as well. “I tell you,” he confided in his intermediary, “but you needn’t tell Eisenhower, at this time, that if he doesn’t do that we’re going to take measures that will be harmful to his candidacy.” Eisenhower replied that he had no designs on California and was not intending to undermine Warren, that indeed he wished Warren well in the event that he himself should fall short of the nomination. Though Warren may have accepted Eisenhower’s assurances—it is plausible that Eisenhower did not know of Nixon’s attempts to sow discord among the California delegates—the general’s reply did nothing to convince Warren that Nixon was trustworthy.
Again and again, Warren resisted any attempt to wrest his delegates from him on the first ballot, and found time to lobby on his own behalf with several other state delegations. But on the convention’s key procedural matter, he chose a different course, one that revealed his character as surely as Nixon’s maneuvering revealed his. At issue was the seating of a number of Southern delegates, those from Texas and Georgia, loyal to Taft. Given Taft’s control of the party machinery, he was in a strong position to place his delegates in voting roles, a move contested by the Eisenhower forces who sought to seat their own, rival groups of delegates. Before either group could take its place at the convention, however, the question for the remaining delegates was whether the contested, pro-Taft delegations should be allowed to vote on their own seating. Eisenhower naturally opposed that, as it would allow Taft delegates to vote to seat themselves. He moved to block it, and his political adviser, Herbert Brownell, shrewdly labeled his counterproposal the “Fair Play Amendment.” So many delegates were at stake and the voting was so close that the nomination hung in the balance—by most tallies, allowing the Eisenhower slates to be seated would all but ensure his nomination. By contrast, if the Taft delegates were allowed to vote to seat themselves, it might deny Eisenhower a quick victory and thus force a protracted convention. That route, a long and contested convention, also was Warren’s one chance, as he still held out hope that if Eisenhower folded, those votes would come his way. On this issue, then, Warren and Taft had common interests.39
Thomas Mellon, a member of the California delegation, knew well—they all did—what a vote for Eisenhower on the seating matter would cause: It would show Eisenhower’s strength, add to his vote total, almost definitely ensure the general’s victory and Warren’s defeat. Knowing that, Mellon asked Warren, whom he greatly admired, what he should do. “Well,” Warren replied, “of course I’d enjoy seeing the Taft delegation supported and seated. [But] you people have to go back to California. You have an obligation, and it seems to me that you have to discharge that obligation in a way that satisfies your conscience.”40
On Wednesday, July 10, 1952, the California delegation voted 62 to 7 to seat the Eisenhower delegations from Georgia and Texas, delivering the general the votes he had sought for “Fair Play.” The following day, Warren was nominated for president amid fanfare and appreciation; William Knowland submitted the name of his old friend, saying Warren would provide “honor and purpose in both domestic and foreign affairs.”41 Twenty minutes of applause and excitement followed, yet for Warren that was the end. He fought a principled campaign for president, but did so hamstrung by an unprincipled adversary in his own delegation. When the California delegation swung over to Eisenhower on
the rules vote, Ike’s contingent was impressed, as it had been for months, by the young senator. As soon as Eisenhower was nominated, he asked Brownell to lead a group of political insiders in a discussion over who should be the vice presidential nominee. Warren was invited but declined, convinced that Nixon already had the inside track. It was, he wrote later, “a fait accompli.”42
Nixon received the nomination, and Warren congratulated him through gritted teeth. With the train trip behind him and his chances of ever becoming president now effectively gone, Warren turned to a friend and confessed his bewilderment at what had occurred. “How do you account for him doing a thing like this?” Warren asked, speaking to himself as well as his listener. “I just can’t understand anybody doing such a thing as that.”43
Warren never publicly vented his full anger at Nixon over the events of that night and the days to come. But it rankled him as few other events in his life did. The full measure of his unhappiness would come to light only in glancing admissions and occasionally unguarded remarks. In later years, Warren would grumble to his clerks and children, would complain to an occasional close friend. And he would, in time, find ways to get even. But while their feud was a long one, and did not begin in 1952, it was that night on the train that would sear Warren’s impression of Nixon as untrustworthy. As with the internment, his memoirs offer a clipped version, one in which he ratcheted down his anger while still displaying a telltale sliver:
[D]uring the night [that Nixon arrived on the train], the Nixon delegates—but not the senator as far as I know—held caucuses and urged other delegates to vote for General Eisenhower on the first ballot. Some of those who were importuned came to me and asked what the situation was. I told them what I had told the voters: that the delegation was not a front for anyone, and that no matter what happened it was obligated to vote for me on the first ballot at least.44
Those terse sentences contain hints of Warren’s feelings—the indignant insistence that he would not “front for anyone,” the pointed notation that the delegate caucuses did not include Nixon “as far as I know,” even the reference to “Nixon delegates” when in fact all those aboard were at least nominally pledged to Warren. Those all suggest a still-angry Warren recalling that night nearly twenty years later. An even clearer sign comes from the reaction of one person close to him reading those same words. When Warren sent his manuscript draft to Merrell Small, an old friend and colleague from the gubernatorial years, Small read those sentences and suggested that Warren was pulling his punches:
Have you not treated Richard Nixon with too kindly a touch? This book you are writing becomes part of the written history of America, and although he is President now and that office must have our respect, your account deals with conditions precedent. . . . I have had the understanding that you believed Richard Nixon was at least prepared in 1952, at the Republican convention in Chicago, to cut your political throat.45
Nixon came to Sacramento in August, and now it was the forty-year-old senator who held the spotlight, the governor twenty years his senior accompanying him, dutifully posing for photographs and calling on Republicans to unite.46 A few days later, Eisenhower himself, taking a break from his postconvention vacation in Colorado, arrived in Los Angeles to address a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, a group naturally well disposed toward the general. Warren, still smarting, again accompanied Nixon—and this time Eisenhower, too—but the event went poorly. Eisenhower asked Warren, Warren remembered later, “to take no part in the affair,” by which he apparently meant not to take part in planning the visit. Warren held back, then watched in amusement as it flopped.
A parade was scheduled for late afternoon, when Los Angeles traffic made it impractical. The motorcade shoved off early, taking the few people lining the route by surprise. And at the Los Angeles Coliseum, a sparse crowd greeted the nominees. The Los Angeles Times did its best for its fellow Republicans, seeking out just the angle to make the stadium appear as full as possible. Even those efforts were not enough. The corners of its photographs on the full page devoted to pictures of Eisenhower’s day showed empty bleachers, undermining the paper’s insistence of an electrifying address before “thousands of cheering listeners.”47 Warren’s testy recollection was closer to the truth. “The affair,” he wrote, “was a complete washout. . . . It was a humiliating and almost ludicrous experience.” Riding with Eisenhower to the airport, Warren assured him that the sparse crowd along the route and the embarrassing spectacle of speaking to a nearly empty stadium would not be repeated. “We would fill the stadium for him,” Warren said, and one can imagine him leaning on the “we” in that sentence. He then added with evident satisfaction, “We did exactly that sometime later, giving him a rousing welcome.”48
After that bumpy start, the Republican campaign settled into a more favorable rhythm in September. Running against Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower led in most polls. But Warren’s friends, despite their surface support for their party’s ticket, continued to nurse their convention wounds. In mid-September, they retaliated, and just as surely as June and July had launched Nixon’s national political standing at the expense of Earl Warren, so did September nearly finish it, this time at the hands of Warren loyalists.
In mid-September, Nixon departed on a train trip through California, starting in the south and traveling north, heading eventually for Oregon. Warren was invited to join, but declined, citing a previous engagement.49 As Nixon’s train passed through Southern California on September 18, Keith McCormac boarded and showed Nixon a copy of a newspaper. For a moment, Nixon was dumbfounded. “He was just sitting there, looking at it,” McCormac said. Nixon aides shuffled the candidate into a car by himself and canceled the next whistle-stop on the tour. It was not until Tulare that Nixon had regained enough composure to appear again in public. 50
The story being carried in the nation’s newspapers that day had been slow to break, and its bounce startled the Nixon team. For months, sources in California had trafficked in the rumor that Nixon kept a “secret fund,” a stash of money raised from supporters to help him make ends meet. In one sense, the fund was not secret at all. Wealthy donors, many from the well-to-do Los Angeles suburbs of Pasadena and San Marino, had been asked for contributions, and had complied, sending checks to Dana Smith, a friend of Nixon’s who had the job of managing the fund. Nixon had discussed the fund with at least one reporter, Peter Edson, who had given the story a light treatment, referring to the money as “an extra expense allowance” and stressing not only that donors were not entitled to ask for favors in return for contributions but even that the names of donors were concealed from Nixon to prevent any such overtures .51
The version of the story by New York Post reporter Leo Katcher was notably different—in tone as well as in effect. “Secret Rich Men’s Trust Fund Keeps Nixon in Style Far Beyond His Salary,” the tabloid headline blared. The fund, Katcher reported, accurately if luridly, was “devoted exclusively to the financial comfort of Sen. Nixon.”52 It was that account that struck Nixon dumb that September morning. The next several days were the most agonizing of Nixon’s life, up to that point at least. His handlers first tried to ignore the story, then argued that it was the sensationalized work of leftist opponents of Nixon, Communist foes afraid of what it would mean for them should he be elected. The former approach was futile—the story, with its charges that Nixon had amassed $18,000 for his personal and political benefit, now had legs, and ignoring it was doing nothing to make it go away. The latter response was disingenuous—those behind this charge were not Communists. Suddenly, the heavily favored Republican ticket was in jeopardy, and Eisenhower came under pressure to dump Nixon.53
Tom Dewey warned Nixon that his days could well be numbered. “Did Ike tell you that he went to lunch with a lot of his old friends today, and that everyone of them except one thought you ought to get off the ticket?” Dewey asked Nixon on September 20. Ike had told Nixon no such thing. In fact, he told Nixon nothing. Instead, he delibera
tely, cruelly, left him hanging. Days passed, and Eisenhower declined to speak with Nixon or to come to his aid. He waited, refusing to be rushed. Finally, on the twentieth, the two men spoke by phone, and Nixon snapped.
After remarking on how difficult the past couple of days had been for young Nixon, Eisenhower cautiously made clear that he remained undecided about Nixon’s future. “This is an awful hard thing for me to decide,” he ventured.
For Nixon, that was too much. “Well, General,” he responded, “I know how it is, but there comes a time in matters like this when you’ve either got to shit or get off the pot.”54
Men did not speak that way to General Eisenhower. They did not bully him, and they did not curse at him. Faced with Nixon’s impertinence as well as his advisers’ conviction that the senator was fast becoming a liability, Eisenhower forced the matter back into Nixon’s hands:
I have come to the conclusion that you are the one who has to decide what to do. After all, you’ve got a big following in this country, and if the impression got around that you got off the ticket because I forced you to get off, it’s going to be very bad. On the other hand, if I issue a statement in effect backing you up, people will accuse me of wrongdoing. 55
