Justice for All (30 page)

By then, Warren was moving with studied efficiency, cutting off Olson in the areas where the governor most needed to demonstrate leadership. Richard Graves, the governor's choice to head his defense council, had agreed to take the job on the condition that Olson not impose hiring limits on him. Graves, the head of the California League of Cities, well knew Olson's reputation for using appointments to settle political debts, and so he insisted on supervising hiring at his own agency. Olson agreed to that condition, and Graves then accepted. But even though Graves had voted for Olson, he was an old friend of Earl Warren's. He consulted Warren before taking the job, and told his old friend of the condition that he'd placed on it. Warren was wary. “Watch it,” the attorney general said. “It'll come. It's only a question of when.”
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As Warren predicted, the time came. Olson called Graves one day and begged to be released from his pledge, saying he needed to find places for some Democratic allies. Graves again consulted Warren, telling him he was inclined to quit if pressed. “That's what you should do,” Warren replied crisply. The next day, Graves resigned and switched his registration from “decline to state” to Republican. Graves that day became a Warren Republican; he was not the first Democrat to do so, and he certainly would not be the last.
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Despite the deepening crisis in the Pacific, Olson did not convene the council again until April 18.
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By then, the council was enmeshed in politics, and Olson's days as governor were running out.

In the meantime, Olson tried to check Warren where he could. When Warren set about preparing his civil defense maps depicting Japanese land occupation, for instance, Olson attempted to insert himself into that project. On February 10, the governor wrote to General DeWitt to ask DeWitt to send him a map identifying all the state's military-sensitive installations. Pointedly, Olson also asked for a second copy of that map, which he promised to share with Warren; that, the governor said, was preferable to DeWitt communicating directly with the attorney general, which Olson warned would cause “confusion and duplication of effort.”
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The same week, Olson lit upon another opportunity to tweak his rival, and this one stung. When Warren's office submitted a supplementary budget request for $214,740 to cover additional expenses brought on by the outbreak of war—Warren's staff was running a 24-hour-a-day operation in early 1942—the legislature readily approved it. Olson then vetoed the bill.

Warren bit his tongue. Out of view, however, the attorney general calculated his response. Through the early months of 1942, Warren met frequently with his top political advisers, considering how to address his frustration with the governor. Was the answer accommodation or challenge? Or was it to confront the matter head on, to use the coming election to run himself and knock away the man who seemed so determined to obstruct him? Warren's choice was not an easy one. He enjoyed the job of attorney general and seemed a prohibitive favorite to win reelection. At $11,000 a year, the pay was good—always a factor in his political calculations. Indeed, Warren in those days was paid more than the governor, who made just $10,000 a year. He chafed at the obligations of his state post and the time it took him away from his family, but he worked mostly from San Francisco, so at least his children were in their own home and schools.

Warren's choice had significant implications for his family. Nina had managed to elude the public eye during Warren's time as attorney general. Asked to be excused from politics, she instead was raising their children, insulating them from the publicity of their father's work. At the beginning of 1942, their oldest, Virginia, was on the precipice of her teenage years (Jim, of course, being nine years older than Virginia, was already out of the home, having graduated in 1941 and now trying to enlist for military service), and Bobby was a kindergartner following his brothers and sisters into California's public schools. They were, to a remarkable degree, allowed to grow up outside the world of politics despite their proximity to it. Warren rarely brought work home; when emergencies occurred after hours, he dressed and went into the office. The Warrens almost never entertained for business purposes at home, relying instead on the many clubs that Warren had joined to supply meeting places. Although the pickets during
Point Lobos
had reminded the Warren family of the passions their father could stir, 88 Vernon in 1942 remained a family refuge, busy and bustling with children but unaffected by the rising influence of its presiding officer. Warren liked it that way. “My father liked his house,” Virginia Warren recalls. “He was out so much that when he was home he wanted some quiet.”
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That he was able to achieve that peace at home was a tribute, all the children agree, to Nina Warren. She would see to the children's needs and settle their disputes before Earl returned in the evening. Nina was loving but also effective and, when necessary, cleverly indirect. One week, when all the children but Jim neglected to clean their rooms, Nina pooled their 25-cent allowances, piled the quarters up on a table, and gave the whole kitty to Jim. That was the last of that insubordination.
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Thus it was almost always a quiet house that greeted Earl when he came home from work, took his nip of bourbon or scotch while dressing for dinner, and then sat to hear the stories of the children's day.

While Nina handled routine disputes, Earl was reserved for more serious matters. He himself occasionally had been on the wrong end of a birch rod as a child, but he did not strike his own children. They were instead subjected to his disappointment, which was withering enough. A child who came home with a bad grade would be asked to take a walk around the block with Earl, who would ask for an explanation and then listen, his silence conveying his disapproval.
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Sometimes his discipline was more punitive. When Jim Warren skipped Sunday school one day, Earl took away movies for a month.
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But while Earl could be stern, there was no pressure added on the children because of his position. They were expected to try hard and complete what they started, to tell the truth, and to find their own interests—not because of their father's fame but rather because that was what Earl and Nina required of their children. Remarkably, and largely thanks to Nina, they did. “As a child,” Earl Jr. recalls, “I never thought of my father in political terms.”
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To run for governor was to risk upending that hard-earned balance at home, to take a cut in pay, and to move to Sacramento. All of that argued for skipping the race. Olson, however, was bedeviling him, and Warren's closest advisers—at least those whom he consulted about politics—wanted him to run. As the state's most prominent Republican, Warren represented the party's best chance to recapture the governorship. And still a third option was raised by the war: Having missed combat in World War I, Warren was eager to lend his services to this conflict, and he had kept up his work with the reserves. With the war now on, Warren inquired about rejoining the Army, and about entering the service as a colonel. Nothing came of that, but weeks ticked by, and Warren's silence only fueled speculation. In late March, he called his staff together to tell them of his plans.

“[W]e sat down,” said Adrian Kragen, a member of the attorney general's staff. “And he said, ‘I know all these rumors are going around, that I'm going to run for Governor of the State of California. And it's caused a lot of uncertainty around this office. And I want you to know I'm not going to run.'”
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For the staff, that was a relief. They could go back to work and set politics aside. California's leading Republicans were not, however, in the mood for that answer. From March 13 to April 9, Warren met five times with Jesse Steinhart and once with Steinhart and William Knowland together.
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Through Knowland, Warren was connected to his past—to Joseph Knowland and the first campaign for district attorney, to the days of anti-Communist prosecutions in Oakland and the punishing campaign to defeat Upton Sinclair. Knowland had his father's devotion to Earl Warren. By 1942, few men knew Warren better or had better sources among the conservatives who dominated the California Republican Party. Knowland had scouted out Warren's prospects well in advance, compiling his information into a thoughtful, detailed appraisal in the fall of 1941.
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Now, with the election approaching, Knowland redoubled his campaign to draft Warren, urging him in strong terms to take Olson out. Los Angeles mayor Fletcher Bowron was considering a run, Knowland said, but he would probably lose against the incumbent. Others were similarly positioned. Only Warren, Knowland believed, could win. And so he leaned on Warren's competitiveness and irritation with Olson and on Olson's potential vulnerability to a strong challenge.

Steinhart was gentler, his pitch less political and more intended to appeal to Warren's sense of service. Steinhart was an archetype of a certain breed of public man, as rare then as it is today. He never sought elected office but helped shape a generation of California's political leadership by pressing others to service. Humble, incisive, gifted in his judgment of people, Steinhart was a successful business lawyer in San Francisco and a longtime admirer and backer of Hiram Johnson. In the 1920s, when Warren started receiving positive coverage for his work as district attorney in Alameda, Steinhart called him up and asked him to lunch. The two enjoyed each other—two such serious, civic men—and over the years since had kept in close touch, with Steinhart providing important support during the attorney general campaign of 1938. Now, Steinhart was among Warren's most regular appointments. Rarely a week went by that they did not talk, either in person or over the phone. And he brought not just depth but breadth to Warren's circle of advisers, Steinhart being a relatively rare Jew at Warren's table. Their families were close, with the Warrens occasionally spending a day at the Steinhart home in Los Altos, south of San Francisco.

On April 3, Warren, Steinhart, and Knowland met together in Steinhart's office in San Francisco. Knowland made the political case, arguing forcefully that Warren could win and that he owed it to himself and to California to run. “I pointed out to him that he was the one man in my judgment who could defeat Olson,” Knowland said. “I didn't think there was any doubt that he could be re-elected Attorney General, but he would then be faced with four more years of an Olson administration.”
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Although Steinhart's advice is unrecorded, his appeal undoubtedly was to Warren's sense of mission—that their shared commitment to service demanded that he set aside personal considerations and take the office from a governor who was failing at a time of national urgency. They went over the results of a secret poll, commissioned to give Warren a sense of how he might fare in a head-to-head against Olson; the poll had gone into the field in March, so its results were fresh. How encouraging they were is unclear, as the results have not survived, but Knowland was keen to digest the figures and clearly intent on using them to bolster his case for Warren's candidacy.
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Still, Warren refused to commit.
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And still, his advisers pushed. The following day, the Saturday before Easter, Earl and Nina Warren lunched with Steinhart yet again.
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Nina had her own reservations about a bid. Among them, Earl said later, was the question of how he might do. “[S]he asked if I thought I could win,” he said.
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Although Warren portrayed his conversation with his wife as one-sided—him announcing to her that he had at last made up his mind to run and her acquiescing after a few questions—her presence at the lunch with Steinhart on April 4 suggests otherwise. Nina Warren was not overtly political. But this would not be like 1938, when Warren was an experienced prosecutor seeking what amounted to a step up and into an open seat. To run for governor against an incumbent in the middle of a war would require Warren to campaign in a larger context, to sell his whole person to an immense state and to persuade Democrats to abandon their governor and join him. As Nina Warren surely recognized, that meant that the Warren family could no longer stay out of the campaign. Defeat would involve all of them and might well end her husband's political career. Victory would change their lives even more deeply. In addition to the required move to Sacramento—hard on five school-age children—a win in November would transform her husband into a national political figure and would bring his family along as well. For Nina Warren, defeat would be bad enough. Victory might be worse.

But whatever concerns Nina Warren had about the move were subordinated to her faith in her husband. And he had reached his wit's end. “I would not sit on the sidelines for a term as attorney general while we were in the midst of a war that threatened our very national existence,” he declared.
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After talking with him—and presumably hearing Steinhart's pitch as well—she yielded. “All right,” she told her husband, “if that is the way you feel, you should do it.”
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It fell to Nina to tell the children, which she did without fanfare. One by one, she casually let them know that their father was about to become a candidate for governor.
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Two weeks after having told his staff he was not running for governor, Warren was back. “Contrary to what I told you,” he began, and this must have elicited a chuckle or a gasp, “I have been convinced that the only way that we can save the State of California from the tremendous disaster which the continuance of the Olson administration would bring to the state, is for me to run. I don't want to run,” Warren added a bit disingenuously, since it was he who felt the frustration of fighting with Olson. “I like this job, but I'm forced, as a citizen of this state, to accept the decision of others that it's the only way we can defeat Olson, and I'm running.”
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“That was it,” Kragen recalled.