Justice for All (39 page)

The California Medical Association responded with a denunciation that called Warren's proposal “outrageously impractical.” Its adoption, the CMA contended, would drive business from California and force huge tax hikes to pay for a program that would quickly spiral out of control.
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Warren counterpunched again. California's climate, economy, and infrastructure would always make it attractive to business, he argued, and industry would only be further enticed by the prospect of a “healthy, happy working population.” Warren reiterated that no patient would be forced to see a certain doctor, and that no doctor would be forced to participate. Those decisions would continue as before. The difference, Warren said, would become evident only in the moments that a working family most dreaded. Speaking of a hypothetical father, who had had 1.5 percent of his paycheck deducted for payment to the state insurance program, Warren then described that moment:

 

This time, Warren's foe was not Culbert Olson or Japanese-Americans. He was up against a determined and wealthy adversary acting in defense of what it believed were its core interests. What's more, though the CMA pushed its argument with hyperbole, it had genuine points to make. The threat of a health care bureaucracy was real, and though Warren and his allies argued that it paled beside the reality of an underinsured state, it alarmed some legislators, particularly Republicans. Whitaker and Baxter capitalized on that, as did the medical profession's lobbyists. Warren had tangled with banking lobbyists in considering his tax plan in 1943 and 1944; now the assembled medical lobby turned on him as well, deepening his conviction, which he never abandoned, that lobbying was a pernicious business that served to undermine democracy. Complicating matters still further, organized labor drafted legislation of its own, even more aggressive health insurance legislation. This was the prospect Warren had warned about—that more extreme voices would demand to be heard. The introduction of the labor bill probably increased public awareness and support for mandatory insurance, but it also had the effect of dividing support between labor's legislation and Warren's.

The Warren and labor bills were referred to the Assembly's Public Health Committee, where the Republican strategy soon became obvious: stall the matter in committee and avoid a roll-call vote that would expose members to retaliation. Warren worked furiously to dislodge his program—by March, Sweigert had convened a daily five P.M. meeting of cabinet secretaries to plot strategy.
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In speeches and press conferences, Warren hammered at his opposition. When they refused to yield, Warren's comments reflected his deepening irritation. “They reminded me of the people whom Abraham Lincoln said ‘could not distinguish between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse,' ” he wrote later.
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The tension surrounding the bills grew as the Public Health Committee staged hearings in March. At one, Warren's point person on his bill, Nathan Sinai, fended off sharp questions about the program. Then one Republican opponent of the legislation, who had promised reporters a show at the hearing, grilled Sinai about his credentials. Sinai explained that he had multiple degrees, but the assemblyman wanted specifically to know about his medical education. When Sinai reluctantly admitted that he was credentialed as a veterinarian, the room burst into laughter. Merrell “Pop” Small, then a small-town newspaperman but soon to join the Warren administration, was watching from the press section. He realized at that moment that Warren was done. “Warren's health insurance bill,” he wrote later, “was laughed to death.”
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It was, Sweigert admitted, “very embarrassing.”
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Still, Warren fought on. Working through his chief legislative ally, Assemblyman Albert Wollenberg, Warren pushed for a vote to dislodge his bill from committee and force full consideration by the Assembly. On April 10, 1945, Wollenberg requested that the full Assembly consider the bill; his motion failed by a single vote, 39-38. Warren's bill was finished.

Less than a month later, on May 7, Admiral Karl Dönitz, having ascended to command of the German Reich upon Hitler's suicide a week earlier, announced his nation's unconditional surrender to Allied forces. At 11:01 P.M. the following day, fighting in Europe ended.
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In the Pacific Theater, the war continued and appeared destined to culminate in a protracted and devastating island-to-island campaign. Military leaders predicted that hundreds of thousands would die on each side. Parents anxiously awaited word of the war's next turn. And then, on August 6, the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima, and on August 9, Nagasaki fell in a single blast. With those cities reduced to rubble by the only atomic weapons ever used in combat, Japan's emperor surrendered. He spoke to his nation over the radio on August 15 to announce that its war was lost. It was the first time the Japanese people had ever heard his voice.

World War II restructured the world. It left a scarred and devastated Europe, its fields trod upon by millions of boots, its cities gutted by gunshot and bombs. Germany lay in ruins, as did Poland, Italy, the Low Countries, and the western Soviet Union. Britain was resurrected from the Blitz, and staggered back to its feet. Europe's Jews were not so fortunate. Across the globe, two of Japan's industrial cities had evaporated in a single blast each, and the world contemplated the implications of those blinding explosions on the future now before it.

Beyond the physical ruin of Europe and Japan lay the political reassembly that the end of the war wrought. A curtain, as Churchill put it, came down across the center of Europe. Behind it, the menacing Soviet empire consolidated its territorial gains and girded for the next war, the global struggle between communism and capitalism foreseen by Marx and encouraged by the Soviet heirs to his ideology.

The world's peace was America's victory, but it came at a staggering price. World War II cost America 405,399 lives in battle. Another 78,000 men, more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam, were simply lost, forever declared missing in action. Thousands of children would grow up without fathers, thousands of widows would raise those children alone. And yet the war also had freed the nation from the Depression and unleashed its industry. The era defined by streams of Okies heading west, straggling across the California border in search of promise—the ravaged faces captured by Dorothea Lange, the dusty, dissipated lives memorialized in fiction by John Steinbeck—ended with the vitality of war. Now there was work and industry, and with them wealth. “At the end of the Depression decade, nearly half of all white families and almost 90 percent of black families had still lived in poverty. One in seven workers remained unemployed,” writes David Kennedy in his unsurpassed account of that era. “By war's end unemployment was negligible. In the ensuing quarter century the American economy would create some twenty million new jobs, more than half of them filled by women.”
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California lost its share of young men in combat during World War II. All told, 23,628 Californians perished in that conflict, dying in the myriad ways that the battlefield claims victims—of shots and explosions, of wounds, injuries, and illness, on ships at sea, in trenches, on cobbled streets and stifling jungles, and in the slow death of prison camps. Another 176 Californians vanished, their families deprived even of the solace of their remains.
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And yet nowhere was the resurgence of American might more evident than in California. In place of those nearly 24,000 men lost to battle would come 850,000 more, streaming into the state from which many had shoved off during the war.
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Most settled into the suburbs of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco. And just as their forebears had sent for family after the Gold Rush had peaked, so now did these men gather wives and children around them. They desperately needed housing, and a sizzling home-building industry hastened to supply it. They bought cars and set out on the new highways California was hurrying to pave. They brought energy and optimism—they had survived a war and were ready to live again.

“Along the highways into California,”
Life
magazine reported in 1946, “are lines of automobiles bearing license plates from every state. New Californians are flooding auto courts, drive-ins, super-markets and schools.”
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Life
's pictures illustrated that cavalcade of newcomers: a farm family from Oklahoma in California for picking season but hoping to stay; an Ohio veteran dishing out ice cream at the local soda fountain; a Navy lieutenant who passed through California on his way to the war and came back to sell Buicks (cars were in such demand that the lieutenant started off by repairing cars, waiting for more Buicks to arrive); a doctor unable to find office space and instead working out of a lean-to; a sign painter from Memphis who shipped out to Manila from California during the war and who settled there afterward for the climate and because, as
Life
put it, “he noticed there were more signs there than anywhere else in the country.”
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Those men and women needed schools and electricity and water and jobs and every other amenity that modern life had to offer. Warren flogged the state government to supply them.

The war's end brought that new era to California, and as the conflict drew its final breaths, the state and its governor experienced a moment that brought past, present, and future together. On August 6, 1945, the same day that the United States exploded the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Hiram Johnson, Earl Warren's idol and California's principal contribution to Progressive politics in America, died at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.
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Johnson's final bequest to his political heir, the sitting governor of California, was an opportunity: Warren had the chance to fill the vacancy created by Johnson's death, the power to appoint a United States senator. Warren used the opportunity to repay an old family friend, his first patron and trusted adviser, J. R. Knowland of the
Oakland Tribune,
whose support had helped Warren win his first seat as Alameda County district attorney and whose son had guided Warren into the 1942 contest for governor. William Knowland, then an Army officer stationed in England, was plucked from his military service and installed in the United States Senate. It was, self-evidently, the repayment of a personal and political debt, made easier by the competence of the man whose appointment fulfilled it. Still, for Warren, who loathed the notion of alliances based on anything but merit, it was hard to repay the family that had launched him. One reporter at his news conference announcing the appointment recalled years later that it was the only time he ever saw Warren uncomfortable.
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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.”
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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.