Justice for All (33 page)

Warren's embrace of social justice and international leadership, and his solidifying identification with working people, was not to be confused with softness. He kept up his attack on Olson throughout the campaign, and regularly derided the incumbent as bungling, partisan, inept, and unfit to lead a great state in a time of war. One particularly hard-edged piece of campaign literature was entitled “California Indicts Governor Olson.” It listed area after area in which the Warren campaign contended that Olson had put the state's defenses at risk, and contrasted Olson's wavering sympathies toward California's Japanese with Warren's firm resolve. Olson, it said, received delegations of Japanese in Sacramento and “intimated he ‘had his own plans' for dealing with the Japanese situation—a plan to the rather vague effect that evacuation was unnecessary.” At the same time, the flyer noted, Warren created his maps of Japanese land holdings and supplied “federal authorities with factual data necessary for the prompt evacuation of the Japanese from California.”
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Whitaker distributed copies of that mailer to key civic groups and campaign leaders in mid-August. More than 100,000 were printed. Whitaker, always happy to be on the attack, was pleased. “To my mind,” he wrote to a friend, “this is the most effective thing we've had in the campaign.”
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That duality—Warren as tough on foreign enemies but generous toward children, the elderly, union members—made him a formidable candidate in 1942. And yet, despite his strong appeal, Warren did not receive lavish financial support in the primary. Many of the state's conservative Southern California financiers remained uncertain about Warren's ability to win, and believed their money would be better spent on legislative races, where they hoped to build Republican representation and check any initiatives by Olson. Although that limited Warren's campaign at the outset, it was to prove a blessing, as it encouraged him to run a frugal effort, unencumbered by the interests of financial backers. Warren made no promises in return for money, and thus later there were none to be redeemed.

The primary was in August, and Warren appeared on the Republican and Democratic tickets. Olson, having eschewed bipartisanship as a value, ran only as a Democrat. With Election Day approaching, Whitaker reached out to a reliable friend in the press for advice. In a telegram to Kyle Palmer, the political editor of the
Los Angeles Times,
Whitaker asked for his “frank analysis” of the approaching vote.
⁵¹
Palmer's reply demonstrated both his acumen and the unembarrassed place that the
Times
occupied in state Republican politics:

 

On August 25, Warren smashingly defeated Olson. The attorney general swept the Republican primary, to no one's surprise, but also tallied 404,778 Democratic votes, barely coming in behind Olson's 514,144 on the governor's own ticket. Added to Warren's Republican tally of 635,230 votes, his primary victory was a two-to-one drubbing. Those returns gave Warren a decided, almost insurmountable advantage heading toward the general election.

So ringing was Warren's victory that he allowed himself a rare moment of gloating in a private letter to his friend and confidant William Knowland:

 

Warren was right. FDR, who had let Sinclair sink rather than ride to his rescue in 1934, did the same with Olson. With the Democrat clearly in trouble, the same donors who had shunned Warren during the primary now were eager to take command of his fundraising. Warren refused, leaving it in the hands of Gordon Campbell, the lone Southern California business leader who had stood up for Warren in the primary. Campbell took the position that latecomers to the campaign were somewhat suspect. “Why are you offering to contribute
now
?” Campbell would ask prospective donors. “Don't think there is anything for it because there is nothing for sale.” Warren described that as “abrasive honesty” and added, “I gloried in his spunk.”
⁵⁴

Warren was in command of the race, but it was not over yet. In October, Warren had his one brush with political danger. Before a packed and partisan crowd whose affections were for Olson, the two candidates met on the same stage in San Francisco for their only debate on October 11. It was a rollicking encounter—“a fire in the Curran Theater” was how the
San Francisco Chronicle
described it.
⁵⁵
Olson and Warren had not spoken in private in nearly four years, and they now took the chance to flail each other in front of a raucous audience. Warren accused Olson of frittering in the face of war, of excessive partisanship, and of allowing relations with the legislature to fall apart. Olson charged Warren with subverting his efforts to defend California, of fronting for the state's reactionaries, and of lying about his commitment to nonpartisan government. Nonpartisanship, Olson said, “in the presence of these sharp and fundamental differences is sheer nonsense. Moreover, to profess nonpartisanship is to confess a lack of honest, firmly held convictions, without which no man is fit or competent to be a governor.”
⁵⁶
Abundantly clear from the debate was that by that point the two men had come genuinely to dislike each other. During one exchange, for instance, Warren attempted to explain his criticism of Olson's State Defense Council, only to be interrupted. “You've been as dumb as an oyster,” Olson snorted. “If I've been that dumb, I couldn't have been as much of an obstructionist as you've tried to make me,” Warren responded, his best retort of the afternoon.
⁵⁷

The debate did not go especially well for Warren. As the front-runner, he had more to lose than Olson, and Olson proved puckish. Nina Warren, listening to the radio broadcast while doing housework, heard the boos directed at her husband and was so distraught that she cried. She feared “all was lost.”
⁵⁸
Warren shrugged it off. It “didn't prove anything, but it did put a little fire into the campaign,” he wrote later.
⁵⁹
And it came too late to affect the outcome. Olson challenged Warren to more debates, but Warren refused. Newspaper attention moved to other, closer races, a sure sign that Olson's time was running out.

Already, the campaign had broadened Warren's politics. In the final weeks, he continued to press for Democratic votes, espousing liberal positions and affiliating himself with FDR. Critics questioned his sincerity. Olson accused him of cowardice for refusing to acknowledge his partisanship, and bitterly denounced the attempt to curry Democratic support. “This non-partisan, non-political propaganda is a piece of colossal deceit,” he said during the waning days of the primary campaign. “It is essentially a lie.”
⁶⁰
It was natural that Olson should think that, just as it was predictable that he would have seen Warren's early civil defense efforts as politically motivated; in both cases, Warren's moves were without much precedent in California's political history, and Olson's interpretation was a natural act of projection from his own partisanship.

In fact, however, Warren was steadily acquiring new politics and cutting away the old. As he drew closer to the ideas of Sweigert and Steinhart, he moved further from those favored by his own campaign managers, Whitaker and Baxter. Ten days before the final vote, Warren tossed them over the side. They would forever disagree about what caused their final break. Reflecting on it thirty years later, Baxter blamed Warren's temper. According to her, Warren authorized the release of a text of a speech he was to deliver on the elderly. Whitaker sent embargoed copies to leading reporters, giving them the chance to read it before publishing it a few days later. In the meantime, however, Warren changed his mind about the speech and demanded that Whitaker retract it. When Whitaker refused, “Earl got very angry,” Baxter recalled. “He wasn't accustomed to being reversed on anything.”
⁶¹

Whitaker was just as stubborn as his boss. He said he would quit if Warren recalled the speech. Warren retracted it anyway. Although Baxter said that other Warren supporters talked them into staying with the campaign, Warren did not call on them during the final days, effectively ending their relationship on the eve of victory.

As Warren remembered it, Whitaker and Baxter were under pressure from another client, Frederick Houser, running as a Republican for lieutenant governor, to produce an endorsement by Warren for his candidacy. Houser had been dogging Warren for weeks for an announcement of their joint campaign, but Warren refused. Such an announcement, Warren reasoned, would undermine his claims of a commitment to nonpartisanship. As Houser became more desperate for Warren's support, he threatened to pull out of the race and say Warren had double-crossed him.
⁶²
Nothing could have been more calculated to incur Warren's resistance, and he stiffened in the face of Houser's demands. But Houser continued to press Whitaker to secure Warren's help, and with just days remaining before the election, Whitaker issued a press release in the name of both candidates, subtly suggesting that they were working together. “I called [Whitaker] and told him to close the office and issue no more bulletins,” Warren wrote. “That was my last personal experience with Whittaker,” he added in his memoirs, adding insult to injury by misspelling Whitaker's name.
⁶³

Warren coasted into the final days, a 4-1 favorite among bookies to win. He delivered. On Election Day, 1942, there were 1,275,287 ballots cast for Earl Warren; in a state that had a solid Democratic majority, just 932,995 voted for the Democratic incumbent, Culbert Olson. Olson would never again return to elected politics.

For Warren, the campaign had been enlightening and uplifting. He ended it a winner, of course, but the victory was more than a political one. It was transformative, not just satisfying. Warren had felt his way to a new political center and then had proven that it could win. He created a space between the cranky, old-guard Republican Party and the testy, self-destructive liberal Democratic Party. He had created Warrenism, a blend of hard politics and genuine compassion for the poor and underprivileged. Warren sensed the importance of what he had gone through, and he was elevated by it. “It is a great experience even to campaign for the governorship,” he reflected a few months later. “No one can really appreciate the size and complexity of our State until he has tried to cover it in a campaign and discuss the problems with the people. Whether I had been elected or not, I would have considered the campaign one of the great experiences of my life.”
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Olson ended the campaign in a far darker mood. As he prepared to vacate his office, he ran into Earl and Nina Warren. “Warren,” he said to the governor-elect, “if you want to know what hell is really like, just wait until you have been governor for four years.”

“Governor,” Warren replied, “I hope it won't be that bad.”
⁶⁵

Two days after the election, the new governor-elect of California went fishing. Clem Whitaker called the office. Finding Warren out, Whitaker left a message instead. “Clem Whitaker,” it read, “is as happy as you are over the results.”
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Warren never returned the call. Instead, the new governor and his former consultants moved into opposing corners. The state's fierce politics eventually would reunite Whitaker and Baxter with Warren. It would not be as friends.

Chapter 10

ASSUMPTION OF POWER

ROBERT KENNY
¹

 

 

 

 

 

TO THE ATTENTIVE EAR, Earl Warren's first inaugural address, delivered beneath the state capitol dome on January 4, 1943, heralded the changes in the man who now ascended to California's governorship. Warren rose to the dais in California's General Assembly at three in the afternoon. He stood beneath the Assembly's motto, emblazoned in gold letters across a pale green background:
Legislatorum est justas leges condere,
“It is the duty of legislators to pass just laws.” The shade of green was taken from the British House of Commons (and snickered over by generations of California reporters as having been chosen because it resembles the color of money), and the columns to Warren's left and right were meant to evoke ancient Rome. Warren took the oath of office from California chief justice Phil Gibson, and then was introduced to the legislature and audience by Charles Lyon, speaker of the California Assembly.
²

Warren spoke for nineteen minutes. Before him, Warren's principal audience was the California state legislature, composed largely of grim, wizened men, mostly conservatives, pleased to have a Republican leader back before them after four exasperating years of Culbert Olson.