Justice for All (49 page)

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.”
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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”
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—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.

Fighting the demands of his schedule and the angry anti-Communism of McCarthy and his admirers, Warren persisted. He spoke on behalf of the United Nations and international cooperation, and he met with crowds in the easy, gentle fashion with which he campaigned in California. Despite a thin organization and limited time, Warren polled more than 260,000 votes on Wisconsin primary day, finishing second to Senator Robert Taft. Warren carried Madison and a few other districts, enough to have delegates from outside his home state.
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He had proven he could get votes outside of California.

His second effort, in Oregon, was less successful. The American Medical Association, still angry about Warren's health care proposal, opposed him. And though Warren campaigned with vigor, condemning Truman's seizure of the nation's steel mills and warning of the administration's “great complacency,” Eisenhower was gaining strength rapidly by that point in the contest. Ike polled more than 150,000 votes, while Warren, though he finished in second place, finished short of Eisenhower by more than 100,000 votes.
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That left Warren far short of the front-runners but still viable. In the weeks leading up to the convention, most political insiders picked Taft, whose father had been president and who, by 1952, was the unchallenged standard-bearer for the Republicans' conservative wing. Nicknamed “Mr. Republican,” he was noted for an isolationism so deep-set that he opposed aid to Britain during World War II and the creation of NATO after the war's conclusion. He deplored the expansion of presidential power under FDR and Truman, and his commitment to personal freedom included opposition to the military draft. Taft commanded the GOP's political machinery, and his reach in 1952 was at its peak: He controlled the most basic party decisions, down to such a level of detail that even the seating of delegates and their guests in the Chicago hall was cleared by him.
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With the convention approaching, Taft and his allies worked to fasten up votes and give the senator a first-ballot victory. But they confronted a fast-rising force in the Republican Party, one whose late entry into the race was scrambling the conventions of American politics. Dwight Eisenhower was the general who had saved Europe, the man most responsible for D-Day, the liberation of France, and the destruction of Hitler. He was an American hero with an infectious grin, a bounce in his step, and a keen, clever mind. Although a committed Republican, Eisenhower kept his politics so quiet after the war that Truman had personally lobbied him to accept the Democratic nomination and had contrived ways to bring Ike into the administration's response to the outbreak of the Korean War. For a time, Eisenhower agreed to advise Truman and his generals, but eventually he backed out, preferring to criticize the administration publicly rather than to counsel it privately.
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As Ike moved about the country in 1950, he did so firmly denying any intent to run for president. Besieged by requests, he demurred, not even conceding to his diary that he would consider such a draft. And yet Eisenhower acted like a candidate. He spoke forcefully about the war and the president. He met political leaders to hear their analysis of the campaign—the campaign he insisted he would not join. He conferred with business and civic leaders. Indeed, the same week that Earl Warren buttonholed
Los Angeles Times
publisher Norman Chandler in the redwood glens of the Bohemian Grove, Dwight Eisenhower arrived at the Grove as a guest. There, Eisenhower introduced himself to the other members of the Republican leadership and sidled up to a young congressman from Southern California then engaged in a tough campaign for the Senate, Richard Nixon.
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Warren was not terribly impressed, especially when Eisenhower used the occasion to extol loyalty oaths .
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And still, Eisenhower resisted entreaties through all of 1950 and 1951. The general returned to his post in Europe, where he was building NATO. From there, he fumed at Taft's isolationism and Truman's stingy defense spending. A choice between those two candidates, Eisenhower ultimately concluded, was so grim that it required him to intervene. His supporters placed his name on the New Hampshire primary ballot in January 1952 (apparently against his wishes). The following month, after viewing a film of an Eisenhower rally in New York, the general was moved to tears by the emotion of the crowd. He agreed to run.
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Four months later, the Republicans prepared their arrival in Chicago. On the eve of the convention, reporters estimated that Eisenhower could count on 414 delegate votes, and Taft had the support of 516, though Eisenhower was gaining fast and some believed delegates were swinging his way. It was important that both were short of the votes needed to win on the first ballot—leaving a small window of hope for Earl Warren, who arrived with 76 delegates pledged to him.
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Although numerically far behind, Warren was stronger than his delegate count. He, like many Republican observers, believed going into the convention that Taft's strong hold on the party would deny Eisenhower the delegates needed to win. And since Warren represented the socially moderate, internationalist element of the party—Eisenhower's wing—the general's delegates were much more likely to see Warren as acceptable than Taft should their champion fail. What's more, Harold Stassen of Minnesota commanded a handful of delegates himself, and he too was inclined to favor Warren over Taft, if that's what it came to.

Said Warren, “Either somebody has a majority of the votes when he goes to Chicago, or he hasn't. And if he hasn't, it's a wide-open convention.”
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With less than a week before the delegate count began, no candidate had a majority. It was, then, at least in Warren's view, “wide-open.”

The trip through the Rockies took longer than expected. The Warren Special arrived in Denver about two hours late. There it stopped and took on the only delegate who had not left California with the rest of the group. Senator Nixon had been in Chicago, working on platform matters, but flew to Denver to join the delegation for the final leg of its trip. As Nixon boarded the train that night, the mood turned detectably sour. After climbing into the train, Nixon immediately slighted Warren by heading straight for his own car, not bothering to pay the governor the courtesy of greeting him first. That might have offended Warren in any event. Formality was important to the governor. But it was especially vexing in Nixon's case, as their antagonism toward each other was already a barely concealed fact of California politics, the residue of their strained relations in the 1946 and 1950 campaigns. By 1952, Warren and Nixon had plenty of reason to distrust each other.

And the early months of that year had been trying. Nineteen fifty-two was the time when Warren's enemies found one another and put aside their many differences to oppose Warren's presidential bid. From the loyalty oath debate came John Francis Neylan, still mad, now on the attack, charging that Warren's campaign was egotistic and that his politics were dangerously liberal.
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From the gas tax debate came Bill Keck, still smarting over Warren's successful push for that tax hike. Loyd Wright, the pompous president of the State Bar Association—a “domineering little Napoleon,” one Warren supporter called him
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—felt Warren had betrayed his party and was looking for a candidate who spoke to its traditional conservatism. The American Medical Association, never to forgive Warren's compulsory health insurance efforts, asked members to give $10 each to the Taft campaign. The Associated Farmers, once so fond of the governor they helped elect, now found themselves increasingly distressed by his unwillingness to defy organized labor. “[Y]ou have abandoned Republicanism,” the farmers concluded .
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In 1952, Keck, Neylan, Wright, and the others gave up on Warren for good and instead sought out Congressman Tom Werdel of Bakersfield, Warren's hometown, to challenge Warren's presidential primary candidacy in California.

Although Werdel was hardly Earl Warren, his challenge was distracting, and posed some real threat. Warren was difficult to assail from the right during a general election—Democrats could be counted on to cross over to vote for him, and Republicans could hardly abandon him for an even more liberal opponent—but a Republican primary brought out more conservative voters, those who might be more unhappy with Warren and more willing to consider an alternative. In addition, the Werdel group had money—doctors, oilmen, wealthy conservatives—linked by their common exasperation with the governor. Given all that, Warren needed protection from conservative friends. Nixon agreed to help.

On November 8, 1951, Nixon signed—along with Knowland and other leading California Republicans—a public letter asking Warren to seek the nomination. When the Werdel faction emerged to challenge Warren, Nixon stood by the governor, at least publicly, bragging that he did so despite the risk of offending some conservative supporters. “You can rest assured,” one constituent wrote him, that we “will remember when another election comes around.”
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But even as Nixon publicly allied himself with Warren, he played both sides. In order to appease Werdel supporters, Nixon assured them that he eventually would work for Taft at the convention anyway—that he would protect the party's conservative plank under the cover of the Warren delegation.
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Nixon, in fact, was courting the favor not of Taft but of Eisenhower, but the Werdel supporters did not know that.

Werdel went ahead anyway, and his critique of Warren brimmed with years of repressed anger by California's conservatives. “His Trumanistic idolatry is well known,” the group's “Declaration of Policy” proclaimed of Warren. “His record supports the conclusion that he endorses socialistic governmental policies, including limitless taxation and planned inflation; that he is vacillating in his opposition to Communism and government, and that for all these reasons he has forfeited any claim to the voting support of this delegation at the convention.”
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Warren fought back through the spring and summer of 1951. His calmer logic eventually prevailed, and Warren defeated Werdel by a 2-1 margin. The race had been difficult, however—Werdel actually carried Orange County—and served as a reminder that the right wing and Warren had now permanently parted ways. In addition, Warren had cut some deals to protect himself. He agreed, for instance, to allow Nixon to name some of the delegates who would compose the Warren slate at the Republican convention. It was a fateful compromise.

Just a week after the campaign ended but before the convention began, Nixon once again sought to distance himself from Warren's candidacy despite his public pledge of support. Using the free mailing privileges given to members of Congress for nonpolitical constituent communications, Nixon sent 23,000 cards to California Republicans asking them to name their favorite candidate for president in 1952 in the event that Warren failed to win the nomination.
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Nixon's poll was accompanied by a misleading letter—“I am writing to a selected group of those who were active in my campaign . . . for the purpose of obtaining their views on this problem”—and the poll made it clear that Nixon was looking for a backup when, not if, Warren fell short.

Nixon demanded secrecy in handling the returns; indeed, he promised confidentiality to those who responded. But he also made sure select politicians and journalists knew the results favored Eisenhower. Nixon, whose support from the
Los Angeles Times
was a bulwark of his political base, shared the results with Kyle Palmer. Nixon undoubtedly expected a positive response from Palmer, who had championed Nixon at every turn and who occasionally blanched at Warren's overtures to the left. This time, however, Palmer reacted strongly in the opposite direction. Rather than protect Nixon's secret, Palmer promptly told Warren, who was understandably angry. “I told Palmer that was not consistent with the oath that all the delegates had taken to support my candidacy,” Warren said.
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What Palmer said in private to Nixon is not known. But there is no secret about how he felt, for on June 20, the
Times
published Palmer's regular column and it came as close as the
Los Angeles Times
would ever come to flaying the senator. Without naming Nixon, Palmer wrote in the
Times
of Knowland's honor, noting that Knowland could be counted on to support Warren unless and until Warren freed him to do otherwise. “Why am I so sure?” Palmer asked. “He is an honorable man. He didn't make any pledge to support Earl Warren for President with any shabby reservations. Honorable men don't stab their friends—or enemies—in the back!”
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