Justice for All (46 page)

Warren had come to depend upon the editorial support of the
Los Angeles Times
. Harry Chandler, son-in-law and heir of General Otis, backed Warren in his early races, and Norman Chandler, now the
Times
's publisher, had his father's admiration for the stolid, hardworking governor. Though Warren tended to stand to the paper's left, the Chandlers understood the value of his Republicanism in a state where Democrats outnumbered Republicans. Still, the
Times
believed in the loyalty oath and showed no sympathy for the quibbling of academics and their ivory tower objections. That concerned Warren, who faced reelection in 1950. Warren well knew that the
Times
would never back a Democrat to replace him, but he also was painfully aware that he needed the paper's enthusiastic support to shore up his southern base, always the most tenuous part of his coalition.

Tipped off by
Times
political editor Kyle Palmer that Chandler wanted an editorial criticizing the governor for opposing the loyalty oath, Warren asked Chandler to first talk the matter over with him. They agreed to meet in the shadow of the redwoods at the Bohemian Grove, where both were members, Warren a part of the Isle of Aves, Chandler a member of the Lost Angels camp. There, Warren recalled later, the redwoods “added a cathedral-like solemnity”
²⁶
to a discussion between California's two most important Republicans about the merits of the oath and the degree of Communist infiltration into the faculty of their state's great university. Although Warren recalled the discussion as turning on questions such as the Bill of Rights and its vitality to a free press and a free academy, those recollections were summoned by the retired chief justice, then immersed in the life of the Constitution. It seems more likely that his arguments in 1950 would have been practical ones—the unfairness of singling out the university, the questionable legality of the oath, the unlikelihood that it would ferret out real Communists but rather would only target stubborn, principled faculty members. What is clear is that whatever Warren said that day to his fellow Bohemian Club member, whatever passed between those two veterans of California's brutal politics, Warren left with the assurance that the
Times
would not abandon him. He was free to attack the oath without fear that it would cost him his alliance with the paper.
²⁷

So he did. On July 21, the regents met on the ninth floor of San Francisco's Crocker Building. Giannini was absent while Warren dawdled over whether to accept his resignation.
²⁸
Neylan continued to demand the firing of the nonsigners, Warren rehashed his arguments for backing down and stressed that not one of the thirty-nine professors at issue had ever been accused of being a Communist; they objected to the oath as an oath, not because of what it would reveal about them. Then Warren called the roll. This time, by a single vote—his own—he won. The regents, voting 10-9, agreed to let the thirty-nine professors keep their jobs.

The victory was short-lived, as Neylan regrouped his forces for the following meeting, and the regents then fired thirty-one professors (the number kept dwindling as professors signed or resigned) over Warren's objections. But Warren again prevailed, predicting that the courts would reinstate those fired. He was right, and eventually the oath controversy settled into a standoff. It revealed no Communist infiltration of the faculty, and it established no grand precedent for control of the university. But it left Warren whole politically, and it preserved his central mission: the protection of the university and its faculty. That was no small feat under the circumstances and in the climate of 1950.

Evidence that Warren's mission was about protecting the university—not about a civil libertarian objection to the oath itself—is what he did next. On September 20, Warren welcomed the California legislature to a special session with a call to emergency action against Communists at home. Warren appealed now to the public's fear, warning that an atomic attack on the United States was “a possibility.”
²⁹
He further warned of the presence of Soviet agents in the United States and called for the creation of a civil defense office to protect Californians from harm. Given such urgency, Warren asked, in his message transmitted to the legislature the following day, that all state employees in effect be deputized as part of the civil defense effort, and that they be required to swear an oath denying affiliation with Communism. In the legislature, Senator Tenney, undoubtedly surprised to find Warren in his camp, took up the call. Within days, Warren had signed and California had adopted the so-called Levering Oath, named for its assembly sponsor. It was passed as an emergency measure, and thus took effect immediately; it was binding on all public employees in California, from the governor to janitors and jail guards—including, notably, university employees.

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 agitated 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.