Justice for All (43 page)

“For the first time in my life, I know what it feels like to get hit by a street-car,” Warren told the convention. He proceeded to stammer out an acceptance speech and pledged to wage a “great crusade” for the Republican ticket and to give Dewey his full support as president. That night, Warren called home to tell his sons the news. Bobby answered the phone, and his father told him he had been nominated by the Republican Party to run for the vice presidency of the United States. “Is that good?” Bobby asked.
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The crusade was a curious one, reflecting both Warren's discomfort in the fast waters of partisan politics and Dewey's firm conviction that the presidency was his to lose. He had reason to think this was a Republican year. The Democrats spent much of the summer tearing themselves to pieces. Young Strom Thurmond led the States' Rights Party, known as the “Dixiecrats,” in their abandonment of Truman; they instead held their own convention and named Thurmond as the South's candidate for president. Henry Wallace, meanwhile, attempted to stake out the left, launching his own presidential bid under the Progressive banner. Amid that confusion, Warren and Dewey conducted a mild, issue-free effort. In fact, Warren took the first weeks of the campaign off, heading to Santa Monica to join his family for time at the beach.

When Warren did begin the campaign in earnest, he followed orders issued by the top-heavy Dewey organization. They made a few perfunctory joint appearances, including a memorable one with both their families. At that gathering, Tom Dewey, Jr., found himself transfixed by Dorothy Warren—“Look at the camera, please, Tom,” his father implored.
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After that, however, the two candidates largely campaigned independently of each other. Warren's principal contribution was a thirty-one-day train trip that took him to most of the United States—outside the South, that is, where Republican inroads were deemed impossible.

When there were just six weeks to go before Election Day, Warren boarded his special campaign train in Sacramento and headed east, accompanied by his wife Nina and daughter Virginia, as well as stalwart Bill Sweigert, who joined the campaign in order to lend Warren help writing speeches. As the train prepared to pull away, the Warrens came to the rail and smiled broadly for the crowd. Warren leaned forward toward the camera, his flashy tie jutting from his double-breasted suit. At his left elbow was Nina, striking in a flowered hat, gloved hands gently resting on the rail. Behind and between her parents Virginia beamed.
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The fourteen-car train, the Aleutian, then pulled out of the station. On board, Warren settled in with the newsmen. He drank three bourbon highballs and in between them sucked on lemon drops for his voice. He carried a copy of Churchill's
The Gathering Storm
. Warren worked, read, and socialized. By midnight, as the train raced through the night and across the Nevada plain, he was asleep.
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Although the atmosphere of the train in those weeks was exciting—devoted crowds met the governor and his party at every stop—it also was wearing. It was, Warren recalled later, “a grind.”
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Warren woke early, rising sometimes on the train, sometimes in a local hotel. He spoke to a crowd almost every morning, then the train pulled out and stopped once or twice during the day. Between stops, while newsmen and staff relaxed, Sweigert would organize his thoughts and then put the next speech on paper. He then would share it with Warren, who would pull it back apart, and both men then would try to put it back together yet again. It was agonizing and repetitive. “My life,” Sweigert said, “was a life of misery on that train.”
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What's more, the speeches were singularly uninspired, as Warren was under strict orders from the Dewey team not to rock the boat. This was to be a safe campaign, and so the speeches were written to be bland. Nothing was to be said or done that would disrupt the Republicans' ordained return to power that year.

So convinced were the pundits of the ticket's victory that solidly Republican
Time
magazine treated Warren's tour more as a victory lap than as a barnstorm. On the second night of the trip, Warren addressed a Republican gathering in Salt Lake City and asked what
Time
and others called the central question of the campaign: “Is the present national administration displaying the unity, the competence and the leadership to warrant extending its tenure to 20 years? Or has the time come for better housekeeping methods that can only be supplied by new leadership and a new broom?”

Warren asked the question.
Time
answered it: “By every available piece of evidence, the voters had already made up their minds to answer: yes, it's time for a change. That was why Earl Warren could afford to campaign like a big, friendly Saint Bernard, tail-wagging his way east across the nation. The Republicans had only to raise no ruckus, make no thumping blunders, keep their fingers crossed against a world upheaval—and their election seemed assured.”
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That plan guaranteed a dull campaign, and Warren helped provide it. Traveling through the West, Warren held forth about the region and its growth, its emerging position as the American center of gravity, an empire unto itself. He knew the West and showed it. He remarked on dams that had helped conserve its water, he discussed the issues of farmers and developers, the importance of migration and resources, the common Spanish heritage of the Southwestern states. His familiarity was charming, and even his gaffes were appreciated, as when he began one speech by praising Governor Dewey for his “great record in the State of California.” The crowd laughed, and Warren corrected himself: “I mean in the State of New York. You know I can't get away from California. I never wanted to, anyway.”
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That last aside was revealing. Throughout the record of his thirty-one-day voyage, one senses his longing for California. Warren dutifully performed the role of vice presidential candidate. He lamented the disjointed state of American foreign policy, he demonstrated his own Republican internationalism by embracing the United Nations, he even launched a brief attack on the Truman administration's vulnerability to domestic Communists. “If Tom Dewey becomes President of the United States,” Warren said in Cincinnati, “. . . you will have no further trouble about getting Communists out of the national government because he will just never let them in.” Communists had infiltrated the Truman government, Warren added, “because at times the national administration has become soft on Communists. They have catered to their votes, and when they got their votes they owed them something, and because they owed them something, some of them infiltrated our government.”
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But Warren's appearances felt forced, and the attack on Truman's handling of Communists demonstrated it. To suggest that Truman's trouble with Communists was the result of electoral politics—that he needed their votes and rewarded them with jobs—fell somewhere between nonsensical and laughable. In either case, it was far below Warren's normal standards for political debate and suggests the extent to which he was operating out of his element. Virginia Warren, while enjoying the summer—with its professional, high-speed hubbub of reporters and staff—also describes her father as a harried figure in those weeks, always forced to write another speech and welcome another dignitary.
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While Warren and Dewey cautiously circled the country and tried to run out the clock, Harry Truman campaigned his way. He summoned the Republican-majority 80th Congress back to Washington and dared it to follow the lead of its party platform in enacting humane legislation. When Congress adjourned with little to show for itself, Truman had an issue. And on the stump, he was as feisty as Dewey and Warren were staid. Two days after Warren left California for his tour, Truman set out on his own, taking one of several train trips from which the phrase “whistle-stop campaign” was born. (Robert Taft, deriding Truman's rambunctious campaign, accused the president of “blackguarding Congress at every whistle stop station in the West.” Truman turned the remark to his own populist advantage; at each stop, the president would ask the crowds whether they considered themselves residents of a “whistle stop” or a town.
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) The beginning of the trip also gave the campaign its most memorable sound bite. As the train pulled away from Washington, Truman's running mate, Alben Barkley, yelled to the president, “Mow 'em down, Harry!” Truman responded, “I'm going to give 'em hell!” From then on, at almost every speech, someone would yell from the crowd, “Give 'em hell, Harry,” to which Truman would often reply, “I'll just tell the truth, and they'll think it's hell.”
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Truman's vigor merely underscored the torpor of Dewey and Warren. Constrained by their analysis of the race, they made little news. And Dewey compounded voters' suspicions with his arrogance. For Warren, one moment crystallized the frustrations of their failing effort: Campaigning away from Warren, Dewey too was on a train, and one day as he addressed a crowd, the car jerked (the engineer, Warren speculated in his memoirs, may have been testing the air brakes, an observation less interesting for its accuracy than for the fact that Warren, writing in his seventies, still remembered a thing or two about trains). “They should take that engineer out and shoot him at sunrise,” Dewey exclaimed to the crowd. Warren groaned. It was, he wrote, “a most unfortunate utterance.”
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Only in the final leg of the trip, as the Warren train rolled back across the northern plains and again hit the West Coast, did the vice presidential candidate seem to relax. Rounded up by Helen MacGregor, the younger children joined the Warrens in Wenatchee, Washington, a few days before the trip concluded. They boarded the train to help celebrate their parents' anniversary, and then to ride the last miles home to California. The governor showed off his youngsters and joked as he introduced them to the crowd early that morning. “And here's the man of the family,” Warren said, picking on Bobby. “You know, we had Bobby believing a few moments ago that he was going to have to make a speech here.” The crowd laughed along with the Warrens, comfortable in their company again.
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Four days after the Warren children joined the train in Washington, the Warrens were home. “I can't begin to tell you how good it feels to get back to California,” Warren said as the Aleutian arrived in Sacramento. “I say that without any disparagement of the 31 other states we have visited since we left Sacramento on this tour Sept. 15. You who live in California know that no apologies are necessary when a Californian declares he is glad to be back in this wonderful state of ours.”
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Over the course of thirty-one days and nights, those were the truest words that Earl Warren uttered.

Those final weeks brought every indication of a Republican victory. On October 11,
Newsweek
asked fifty political columnists for their prediction; all fifty picked Dewey. The final Gallup poll of the campaign, released on October 30, said Dewey by 5 points. Elmo Roper, another respected pollster of the day, discontinued polling on September 9. He had Dewey up by 13 points, and decided it was a waste of his time to continue sounding out the public given the landslide taking shape.
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Consequently, much of the nation went to sleep on Election Night believing it had elected Tom Dewey and Earl Warren. Editors of the
Chicago Tribune
reached their most embarrassing low with their early-edition headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman, the actual winner, brandished the paper triumphantly as he relished his needle-threading, 2,136,525-vote victory (out of more than 47 million votes cast), in which he navigated between Thurmond and Wallace while holding off the Republicans. Combined, the Republican votes and those for the minor candidates would have been enough to topple Truman, but individually, each of the other candidates fell to the incumbent. Truman went home to the White House, Dewey back to New York, and Earl Warren to the state capitol in Sacramento, where he was at his desk the morning after Election Day.

Just after Election Day, the FBI finished up work on a curious analysis of Earl Warren, whose record and overtures to Hoover had stitched up their friendship through the 1930s and 1940s. Labeled an “Espionage” file, it was a multipage profile of Warren. Long passages were deleted from the document before it was released under the Freedom of Information Act, but it presents a thoroughly admiring portrait of the California governor. Warren, it states, “is considered above reproach,” a “strong family man [and] not a drinker or carouser.” The memo notes Warren's nomination for president, though it garbles Sproul's name, identifying him as “Norman Sproul,” and does contain a few hints of skepticism about the governor. It notes, for instance, that Warren is “peculiar to Republican policies in that he has gone very far for socialized medicine” and “has backed many Democrats.” While personally admirable, it adds, Warren “is egotistical regarding his own abilities.”
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Those subdued criticisms did nothing to undermine the Bureau's relationship with Warren. Through the 1940s, the FBI maintained regular and helpful communication with him. So frequent were the contacts that the Bureau grouped them together under the category “Cooperation with Governor Warren,” a heading that described the FBI's errands for Warren and his endorsement of its work. Time and again through those years, Warren sought out the FBI's quiet assistance in vetting nominees to state positions. Before naming a person to a government post, Warren would ask the FBI to search its files for any “derogatory information.” The Bureau complied and relayed its findings back to Warren. Usually it came up empty, but in some instances, it did surface concerns.
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Warren relied on the FBI not only to check out potential appointees but even, on occasion, to brief him for meetings in order to avoid possible embarrassment. When one group asked to meet with him regarding an upcoming execution, Warren inquired whether the group was considered “Communist-infiltrated.” The FBI replied that it was, or at least that its West Coast national director had been an officer of the Communist Party for some time.
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By the end of the 1940s, Warren's relationship with the FBI was so trusting that he could even call upon its agents for personal favors. Hoover arranged for cars and drivers to assist Warren while traveling, and on the eve of a scheduled trip to Scandinavia, the Warrens discovered that citizenship records of Nina's were missing and were complicating their travel arrangement. An agitated Warren asked the FBI for help, and Hoover himself scrawled on the bottom of Warren's request: “Do everything possible.”
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For his part, Warren often mentioned the FBI in speeches, invariably to praise it; agents passed along Warren's compliments to Hoover, who would, on occasion, thank Warren for the praise. Hoover's notes in those years were addressed to “Dear Earl.”
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