Justice for All (31 page)

On April 9, 1942, Warren announced his candidacy for governor of California.
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The times, he said, required “a unity of purpose that rises above every partisan consideration.” While Warren acknowledged his long association with the Republican Party, he said he did not consider that relevant to the issues confronting California or to those he had addressed thus far in his career. California's issues, Warren said, were those of “the security of the people in their homes, the administration of our schools, business methods in government to prevent overtaxation, civil service to prevent the spoils system, conservation of our resources, both human and natural, to prevent exploitation, the social services to raise living standards, co-operation with the agencies of the Federal government to carry out national policies, and now civilian protection to further the war effort.” None of those, Warren argued, required partisanship, merely leadership.
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Olson issued no immediate response, but others took quick note. Wasting no time and surprising none of its readers, the
Los Angeles Times
endorsed Warren on April 11.
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Although newspaper support was assured, Warren did not enter the campaign as a favorite. He had no conventional political machine to press his candidacy. His fundraising apparatus was essentially nonexistent, and his relations with some Republican Party leaders were tenuous. He had sparred with Herbert Hoover, Frank Merriam, and William Randolph Hearst—a Republican former president, a Republican former governor, and a Republican newspaper baron—and all within the last few years. He discouraged his own staff from participating in his campaigns, telling them that the best they could do for him was to produce a record he could run on. Some helped anyway, which Warren allowed without much comment. But that hardly constituted a full-fledged campaign.
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And yet Warren was not without other resources. The anti-Sinclair campaign in 1934 had introduced him to top political operatives, and his own 1938 race had broadened his political appeal and spread his name identification. Warren's chief task in those early days was to find someone to organize his effort. He turned to the consulting firm of Whitaker and Baxter, the husband-and-wife team who had overseen Sinclair's demolition.

Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter were the best political operation in America, and their talents were particularly well suited to the emerging politics of California—especially the opportunities that its Progressive-era reforms had created for political operatives such as themselves.

Clem, a journalist as a teenager and young adult, came from a left-wing family. His uncle, a Socialist minister, had delivered one of the eulogies at Tom Mooney's funeral. And Clem himself had once been a friend of Sinclair's. But Clem Whitaker left journalism for business, and in 1933 founded Campaigns Inc. As a businessman, he moved sharply to the right—that was, after all, where the money was—specializing in campaigns for conservative candidates and causes. Whitaker's partner, Leone Baxter, had started as his employee and then became his wife. He was intensity and blaze—tall, thin, chain-smoking, fast-talking, demanding. She was curvy and genteel, an attractive redhead with a deceptively soft touch.

What they shared was ruthlessness. Whitaker and Baxter were dedicated to the creation of a new form of politics and devoted to winning for their clients. Long before it became commonplace, they brought all the elements of a campaign into a single operation—they handled media, speechwriting, advertising, public appearances, endorsements. They conducted negative research on opponents, crafted strategy, and recruited volunteers. Cross-filing and the initiative had weakened traditional party leadership in California; Whitaker and Baxter picked up the work that state party organizations did elsewhere. They were a full-service political operation, maybe the first of its kind. In 1942, they put that machinery to work on behalf of Earl Warren.

Four days after Warren announced his candidacy, Clem Whitaker called to gather materials for the campaign. That initial request suggested the dual lines that the campaign was to take: He needed a detailed story of Warren's life and a “running and complete story of the King, Ramsay, Conner case.”
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Warren's own story would represent the campaign's positive element; Olson's pardons and paroles would form the principal line of attack.

The first stop of the campaign was California's mining country, the string of mountain towns along the western edge of the Sierra Mountains. Given his birth in Los Angeles, upbringing in Bakersfield, and education in the Bay Area, Warren had strong roots in nearly every part of California. The mining country was an exception, but he worked hard to remedy that. It was there in the California spring that Warren went to work on the electorate. Those towns were verdant at that time of year, the last of the winter snows melting down their flanks in swollen rivers. The air was fresh and cool, the heat of summer still months away. Each little town had its dusty streets and historic markers, placed there by the Native Sons and commemorating their place at California's birth. They were fierce in their attachment to California, many first settled in the Gold Rush less than a century earlier. They were far away from San Francisco and Los Angeles culturally and politically as well as geographically. In these pioneer towns, there was not much regard for Olson's vaguely socialistic notions of attacking poverty. Their citizens did not know Warren well at the beginning of 1942, but they were Warren country. As he worked those little hamlets, Warren enjoyed their people, their small-town papers, their cantankerous warmth. They responded in kind.

Traveling through them in 1942, Earl Warren would demonstrate, more than in any campaign before or later, why politics was his calling. His facility for names was astounding. In town after town, he would walk up to a man or woman, stick out his hand, and call the person by name, often asking further about a wife or husband or child. So remarkable was his ability to recall names, faces, and facts that an aide once asked him how he did it. Warren responded that it was all about focus. “I never look at their neckties,” he said.
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But Warren supplemented his natural gift with a typically meticulous system. In his office was a card file listing every person he had ever met, along with a few details about the person's life—spouses, colleges, favorite sports, and the like. Sweigert and others filled up cards with details about notable friendships or enemies to avoid. Helen MacGregor would add information on influential women. As the campaign developed, the card file formed a stockpile of political information.

On the trail, Warren stormed through California's sparsely populated interior. Warren, said his driver, “would go into a town, shake hands with half the people, make a talk, shake hands with the other half, then we'd be on our way.”
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No one was better at it. The campaign, in fact, seemed to highlight Warren's strengths and minimize his weaknesses. His sternness, for instance, was reserved for his staff—and occasionally his children—but not constituents. To them, he conveyed earnest sincerity. Greeting crowds involved just the right amount of connection for Earl Warren. He listened to the problems of others but was under no obligation to reveal any of his own. He sympathized, offered ways to help, and then, with a slap on the back and a firm grip, moved on to the next person. If he overpromised, and he did—Warren's secretaries complained about men and women showing up at the office to speak with him because he'd casually extended an invitation to do so—well, Mrs. MacGregor was there to sort that out, and she efficiently did so. So persuasive was Warren's presence, so effective was his measured garrulousness that he invariably seemed taller in memory than in person. Warren was just a shade over six feet tall, but taller men, in their recollections of him, almost always remembered looking up at him.

He was not always an easy man to work for. Speech-writing for Warren, for instance, was a difficult and often unappreciated chore. Typically, Warren would block out a speech, outlining in broad strokes the themes he hoped to express. Then he would turn it over to an aide and ask him to “put it on the typewriter.” With that, Warren would often forget about the speech until the day of its delivery drew near. When the speech finally received his attention, Warren was demanding and particular. He disliked ending a sentence with a preposition, and he insisted on plain, direct language. He could be brusque if the draft came up short. In one particularly bruising episode, Warren dressed down a staff member who had prepared remarks for him on a public works speech. “This thing is no good,” he raged. “I asked you to give me a strong message on public works, and you haven't done it. A high school sophomore could write a better speech without half-trying. I just don't understand what's going on around here.” The sputtering aide tried to reply, as another senior member of the staff asked what they could do to improve the draft. “I don't want you to do a damned thing,” Warren snapped. “I'll write my own message. Nobody ever does anything for me around here.”
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Outbursts such as those were not common, but they did occur, and they strained relations between Warren and some of his staff. His loyal core stayed with him through many campaigns and offices, but other turnover on his staff was high, in part because of the demands he placed on them. He was notoriously stingy with raises. He guarded compliments and rationed praise. “Flattery,” Warren's press secretary reflected, “was a habit to which Earl Warren was not addicted.”
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One secretary who worked for Earl and Nina for years remembered afterward always having felt appreciated but could not recall a single time that Earl thanked her.
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Still, he inculcated a powerful sense of loyalty among his closest aides. Warren Olney, Helen MacGregor, Bill Sweigert, Oscar Jahnsen, and others would dip in and out of Warren's life, but they were loyal to the end. Sweigert agreed that Warren was “a hard man to work with.” But he stayed for nearly a decade. Warren, he said, “was always fair.”
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Until 1942, the face that Warren had presented California was in some ways that of a forbidding figure. He ran first for district attorney, then for attorney general, serious jobs for crime fighters. He rarely attempted humor in his public addresses—once, when a secretary taking dictation suggested a joke for a speech, Warren smiled, thought for a moment, and then responded, “I think I'll leave jokes to the master of ceremonies”
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—and his campaigns up to that point had always been built around law enforcement. The result is that many voters undoubtedly had a positive but somewhat narrow view of the man who now asked to be their governor. Whitaker and Baxter saw that Warren's image needed to be completed—the prosecutor in their client was perfect to point out Olson's failings, but they needed a candidate that voters could like, not just respect. The two consultants, with their gift for imagery, realized that they needed to show Warren as a father and husband, not just as a prosecutor. His wife was the image of devotion, his children sunny and appealing. Whitaker and Baxter's task was to overcome the Warrens' resistance and bring the family into politics.

Leone Baxter pressed hard. “Nina didn't want to do that,” she remembered. “She didn't want to exploit her family. But we knew we had to get that family. . . . He wasn't very colorful, and he didn't say anything particularly directed to women. You couldn't get a feel for him. So she finally agreed that it would be alright to use the picture.”
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“The picture.” In it, Earl Warren stands at the end of a line of his family. Dressed in a dark suit, his tie neatly cinched at his throat and his wife's hand gently entwined around his right elbow, Earl Warren is straight and tall. And he smiles, a wide grin of pride and appreciation. To his right, Nina beams as well. Jim Warren, handsome and tall like his dad, grins between big ears, his skinny frame tucked into a wool suit. To his right the younger Warrens are arrayed in descending order of age. Virginia wears a cheerful summer dress, Earl Jr. and Dorothy sport Scout uniforms, bandannas knotted in front. Honey Bear, always the picture of beauty and charm, laces her fingers together at the waist of her jumper. And rounding out the family is Bobby, in uniform and tie, a delighted smile tugging at the corners of his mouth as he looks offstage, tickled by something out of view.

The picture was mailed first to Warren's clubs and the friends in his card files. After that, requests came pouring in. By the time Election Day arrived, more than 3 million copies of the cards had been printed, distributed, and clucked over in homes throughout California. It was more than just a political photograph, as its popularity proved. It captured a slice of California itself—sunny and healthy, friendly, sturdy, and captivating. Displayed together, caught happily in motion, in full stride, the Warrens were pretty without being soft. They spoke to California's sense of itself, of hopefulness and health, of promise. In political terms, the picture accomplished exactly what Whitaker and Baxter had desired: It humanized their law-and-order candidate, presented him as a father, not just a prosecutor. Running against Earl Warren was bad enough, California's politicians learned right then. Running against his family was impossible.

The photograph softened and expanded Warren's image, but he was not just altering his appearance for political purposes. Day after day, Warren was facing California's people and slipping the ideological bonds of his upbringing. These men and women out in California's mining towns were not newspaper publishers or members of the Grove. They were not wealthy or powerful. But they were Californians, and he liked them. People turned out to hear him speak and stayed to share their problems with him. Many politicians treat campaigns as a necessity, a burdensome undertaking required in order to govern, or as a contest, a battle of strategies intended to yield a winner and crush a loser. For Warren, they were all those things, but they also were a chance to listen to people, to think about issues, and to learn. As the 1938 campaign for attorney general forced Warren to contemplate the significance of civil rights, so the 1942 race required him to think beyond prosecutions and public safety.