Justice for All (35 page)

The move was hard on the children at first, particularly the younger ones. Bobby moped through his early days at school. Honey Bear was even more morose.
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At the end of each school day, she would return home, pull out sad records, and play them on the family phonograph. Through the warm fall of Sacramento, she whiled away afternoons to the mournful voice of Lena Horne. One day, her father returned home early to find her that way. His heart, always tender for his youngest daughter, broke at the sight of her. In his youth, Earl Warren had been comforted by his loyal donkey, Jack. Now, seeing his daughter in distress, Warren lit upon a solution: Honey Bear got a pony, a pinto she named Peanuts. From that day onward until a tragic morning in 1950, Honey Bear spent part of almost every day on the back of a horse.
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She and Bobby shared the pony, and Honey Bear's horseback riding became one of the emblems of the Warren family legend, one more aspect of the big, handsome, healthy family.
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The Warren children were neither shy nor pretentious. When they worried about what other children would think of them being chauffeured in an official state car, Bobby persuaded the driver, Pat Patterson, to pull over a block or so away. Out of view of their classmates, the children would tumble out, each one hustling to his or her own campus—elementary school for the little ones, high school for Virginia, with the rest following. Being the governor's children made them objects of attention, naturally, but they bore the attention well. Earl Jr. drank beer with other boys on the levees outside Sacramento, and though the thought of getting caught and turning up in a newspaper story crossed his mind, it didn't keep him at home.
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All the children experimented with smoking, climbing up to the top of the mansion to sneak cigarettes. Their parents did not do much to catch them. Sometimes the children could smell the smoke on one another, nervously tittering at dinner, convinced that they would be caught. Earl and Nina either silently tolerated the habit or preferred not to notice.
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Mischief notwithstanding, the Warren children mostly asserted themselves in the ways that parents would hope. “I remember how the governor used to kiss Bobby goodbye every morning,” Pat Patterson recalled for Warren biographer John Weaver. “Then as he got older, Bobby began to get embarrassed. He'd duck away. The governor got the point. I'll never forget the first time he stuck out his hand to Bobby instead of kissing him.”
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For all its obligations, the governorship in some ways actually reunited Warren with his family. Where his job as attorney general had forced him to miss many a dinner at home, now he was just blocks from work and able to join his family more often in the evenings. Dinner was the highlight of the Warren family day, as Nina and Earl Warren took their places at opposite ends of the rectangular dining room table and the five children occupied the flanks. Conversation was lively, though never rowdy. At the table, Earl Warren led the conversation as he always had, asking questions and drawing his children into gentle debates.

After dinner, Warren usually enjoyed a few quiet moments, often in the company of Honey Bear. He sipped tea while she peeled grapes for him. Sitting at her father's elbow, she entertained him with news of her day, while he listened quietly, interjecting with a question or praise.
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Mornings were, as they had to be in a home with five school-age children, more frenetic. The children pounded down the stairs to the kitchen at the rear of the house, where they wolfed down breakfast before heading for school. For a few minutes there would be quiet, and then the governor would dress. Nina Warren took care to pick his suits out for him, and she left them painstakingly arranged. Each shirt hung in the closet, pressed without starch, cufflinks already in the cuffs. Jackets had pens in the breast pockets. Earl Warren, almost as if a fireman, merely slipped on his uniform and was ready for work.
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He then headed for the capitol, taking in the ten blocks in his big, assertive strides. Crossing over onto the capitol grounds at K Street, Warren jaywalked across the middle of the block. He often paused to chat with a gardener or pedestrian or to have his shoes shined at Fourteenth and J. Warren was too hearty to dislike, too open to suspect, and yet too serious and driven to be taken lightly.

His serious professionalism made him a quick hit with a tough audience, the Sacramento press corps. Those reporters were not easily impressed; having seen enough graft, greed, and cynicism in elected officials, they were wary of those who pretended otherwise. And yet Warren, from his very first days in office, struck them as different. An early, minor controversy helped set that tone. Soon after Warren took office, Oscar Jahnsen was inspecting the governor's suite and noticed some suspicious wiring. He traced it back through the walls and discovered a room upstairs in the capitol where the wires connected to recording equipment. He suspected that meant the governor's suite had been bugged, but Jahnsen could not find the microphones. After a flurry of activity, a source in Southern California tipped off the speaker of the Assembly that the microphones could be found in a janitor's closet. The speaker, Charles Lyon, called Helen MacGregor, who invited him over to investigate. Before opening up the closet, the two rounded up three newspaper reporters so they could witness the hunt. When the door to closet #7 was opened, the sleuths uncovered cleaning supplies, some vases, and in a wooden box, five telephone sets. Their cords were cut, and when one of the newspapermen unscrewed the bottom, they found the insides hollowed out and replaced with a microphone.
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Olson explained away the embarrassing discovery. The devices, he said, were merely installed to record the debates of the legislature (why the microphones needed to be hidden in hollowed-out phones was never entirely explained). But what may have left the most lasting impression was that the press was invited along on the search.

“Warren's relationship with the press was not close,” recalled one reporter, William Allen. “It was professional. We were invited once a year to the mansion for a very nice event, but most of the contact was formal.”
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Though he rarely granted exclusive interviews—Warren's press aides worried about alienating newspapers—he held press conferences regularly, alternating between mornings and afternoons so both cycles of papers would get their firsts, and spoke at such length that they sometimes ended without questions, Warren having answered everything the reporters could think to ask. He could be stiff around reporters, but they did not feel deceived, and his honesty charmed them. Morrie Landsberg, bureau chief of the Associated Press and dean of the Sacramento press corps, admired him, as did the leading reporters and editors at the
Sacramento Bee
and the
Los Angeles Times
. Warren sought out each—trips to Los Angeles generally included a personal meeting with Kyle Palmer, not to mention social visits with the Chandlers.
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And Warren occasionally asked Walter Jones at the
Sacramento Bee
for advice on judicial nominees or people under consideration for important state jobs.
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Toward the end of each year, the press corps would gather over drinks and informally designate its man of the year. Skeptical by nature and training of elected officials, the press invariably gave the honor to a man outside the elected circle. That continued under Warren—a press favorite was Warren's finance chief, James Dean. But Warren occasionally came in second, a high mark indeed for a man in a position reporters yearned to disparage.
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“[T]he working press in Sacramento,” Warren wrote, on reflection, “treated me with what I considered to be kindness and generosity throughout my years there.”
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After the liberal message of his inaugural, Warren tacked back to the center, at least symbolically. On January 5, one day after proclaiming his commitment to “the common man,” Warren fired Carey McWilliams from his post as the head of the state's Division of Immigration and Housing. The job, Warren remarked, had “grown out of all proportion” and had encroached on areas best left to local government.
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There was no question of McWilliams's staying. Gubernatorial cabinets leave along with governors. Still, Warren dropped McWilliams with particular gusto, and Warren's friends approved. McWilliams, in the words of the
Los Angeles Times,
was “known as a left winger,” and even the increasingly big tent that Warren was erecting to house his personal philosophy had no room in those days for a liberal of McWilliams's convictions.

Warren came to office as California moved decisively to the war footing that upended the state—and did so in curiously symmetrical fashion. Having been born in the Gold Rush and shaped by that mass migration of young men who came to work the fields and streams of the Sierras, California was born again in a second cascade of young men, this time stopping over along its coast before embarking on their voyage into the War of the Pacific. The military's wartime embrace of California began in 1942 with the establishment of the Desert Training Center east of Los Angeles. There, a California native, General George Patton, began drilling in desert conditions resembling those he would soon discover in North Africa.
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San Diego already was dominated by the Navy; now, with the Pacific fleet's Pearl Harbor in tatters, that city teemed with the arrival and departure of sailors. The federal government seized 122,000 acres north of San Diego to establish Camp Pendleton, where divisions of Marines trained before shipping out. Still farther up the coast, San Francisco's Presidio was the Army's Western headquarters, nestled among the eucalyptus trees with an inspiring view of the recently completed Golden Gate Bridge, whose span was joined in 1937, a year after the Bay Bridge linked San Francisco to Oakland. On the other side of the Golden Gate, forty miles up one of the slivering tributaries of San Francisco Bay, Camp Stoneman welcomed 30,000 men every month. They rushed through final paperwork, received last-minute instructions and equipment, and shipped out. By the time the war was over, more than a million men had spent an average of one to two weeks at the camp; for many, those would be their final footsteps on American soil.
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Among those who volunteered for service in those tumultuous days was Warren's oldest boy, Jim. He had broken his arm as a youngster, and it had been set poorly. When a military recruiting officer, thinking of doing the governor a favor, used that as an excuse to block Jim's enlistment as a paratrooper, Warren was furious. “How dare one man interfere with another man's life like that,” he thundered. Jim kept at it, was accepted, and shipped out to the Pacific Theater.
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Defense industries clustered around military bases, and they too churned into high gear. The economy, so encumbered by poverty during Lorena Hickok's tour, now burst with activity. All California factories combined produced $2.8 billion worth of goods in 1939. By 1944, that number had nearly quadrupled, to $10.14 billion.
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In 1939, California employed 400,000 people in manufacturing. By 1943, it had increased to more than 1 million, and many of the new workers were women, often embarking on their first jobs.
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Company after company expanded to meet the demand for material. In 1937, Lockheed built 37 airplanes; by the time the war ended, it had built 18,000.
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The Kaiser shipyards north of San Francisco pushed out new vessels with extraordinary, sometimes alarming, speed. More than a quarter million workers built aircraft in California during the war, joining hundreds of thousands more in other defense-related industries. Wages soared, unemployment evaporated. California, in just a matter of months, had become a land of wealth, flush with its second Gold Rush.

As that mass of young men passed through California, it created frictions. In June 1943, just six months after Warren took office, two sailors out for the evening in Venice, a neighborhood in West Los Angeles, approached a pair of Mexican-American young women. Male friends of the women interceded, and pushing and shoving soon became a melee. Local military commanders perversely encouraged the fighting by allowing servicemen to leave their bases to join it. The so-called Zoot Suit riots surged back and forth across Los Angeles for days. The spectacle was dispiriting: American soldiers pausing en route to fight a racist enemy in order to indulge in racist violence.
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When order was restored, Warren convened a commission to examine the outburst, and its clear-eyed criticism of the violence was a model of citizen inquiry. Unbeknownst to the governor, Carey McWilliams was behind the idea but had the sense to lobby for it through Robert Kenny, whom Warren had liked and trusted ever since his influential 1938 endorsement.
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Amidst wartime plenty, wealthy Californians argued that the government could now afford to refund some of the money the state claimed in taxes. Warren naturally was sensitive to the popularity of such a move, especially among his Republican base. He could have proposed deep tax cuts and returned all of California's surplus to those who had paid it. Instead, he consciously protected the programs and institutions he had trumpeted in his inaugural address, and commissioned a citizens' panel to study tax reform. That group recommended a measured set of tax cuts, and Warren endorsed its approach. “It is true we should have some tax reduction,” Warren said soon after taking office, “but it should be temperate and without materially affecting the base of the structure.”
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The cuts that eventually were enacted reflected Warren's evenhandedness, as well as his faith in the citizens' group that studied the issue. Sales taxes, which hit the poor hardest, were reduced by a half cent per dollar. The maximum income tax rate, which fell most heavily on the rich, was reduced, as were bank and corporation franchise taxes. The overall package reduced California taxes by $56.5 million in a single year, the first overall reduction in taxes enacted in the state's ninety-three-year history.
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Although the tax cuts had been approved as a temporary measure, Warren and the legislature extended them year after year until the 1940s were ending, and one of California's periodic pension measures won voter approval and forced Warren to pay for it.
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