Justice for All (37 page)

Even where Warren was less enthusiastic about the substantive work of the conferences, he enjoyed the process. Bringing more than a thousand people from all walks of life under a single roof to hash out a matter of public concern appealed to his sense of a functioning democracy with enlightened leadership. He enjoyed stimulating public conversation, nonpartisan debate, on issues that affected the lives of his state. “These gatherings took much of my time and energy,” Warren wrote later, “but they were also great educators for me as to both public affairs and people.”
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The conference thus became an end unto itself, a fulfillment of citizen democracy, with Warren at its head. He benefited, to be sure, as those who participated left with the strong sense of inclusion in California's affairs and connection to its governor. But for Warren, the conference was more than the achievement of political advantage; it was “public affairs and people,” the reasons for governing at all.

“What better way was there to plumb group opinion and still control the outcome to a degree?” asks Richard Harvey, an astute political analyst of the Warren governorship. “What superior method to stimulate that unity so cherished by the Governor?”
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Although effective on his own terms, Warren's style of leadership was curiously impersonal, especially when viewed by a modern eye. Warren rarely attempted to steer the legislature—he proposed, it debated, he decided. That was partly out of respect. Warren honored the separation of powers between his office and those of California's legislators. It was also a measure of political realism: Squabbling with the Assembly and Senate had reduced Olson's stature, and Warren preferred the high ground. For the most part, he succeeded, though legislators also found it, on occasion, easy to defy him, knowing that Warren was unlikely to come down off his perch and attempt to get even. In his relations with the legislature, as in other facets of his life, Warren was deliberate rather than emotive. Warren, it was said, never roused an audience to laughter or tears—nor did he put it to sleep. Indeed, a temperamental consistency united his parenting, his governance, and his political style. Warren presented himself to aides, children, and voters in essentially the same way—as a plodding but persistent leader, intolerant of mistakes while generally optimistic and even-tempered. He was attentive to detail—a typographical error in a letter from his office was unthinkable to the secretaries in his pool. He was cautious—as the debate over the Corrections Department demonstrated, Warren liked to wait for a political issue to develop before committing himself, then strike at what he saw as a propitious moment to capitalize on public anger or interest. And once he was committed to a policy, Warren was fierce. He was, as a clerk later would describe him, a “stubborn Swede,” slow to anger, hard to budge.
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Of himself, Warren liked to say that he emulated Lincoln. He took slow steps, Warren said, but never backward.

Warren's approach did not thrust him immediately to national prominence. There was too little controversy about him to bring on instant reviews. But California, which had struggled so mightily under his predecessor, came to life with Warren in the governorship. As jobs filled and the state budget swelled, national political attention overcame its Eastern bias and the limelight found California's governor. Once it discovered him and his photogenic family, it would never again leave him for long.

On January 31, 1944,
Time
magazine published its first issue ever printed in California (a breakthrough it announced with a special banner across the cover). On its cover was Earl Warren. Beside him was an elephant—
Time,
like Warren, was Republican. The elephant held an orange that radiated beams of energy. The story was an homage to Warren, championing him for national office despite what it called his “safe, dull political prose.” His record, however, was big and growing, and
Time
imagined great things for Warren. “Big, blond, blue-eyed Governor Warren seems to radiate goodness and warmth,” the magazine reported. “Impressed by his relaxed good nature, his evident simplicity, the eager ‘yes-yes' and ‘uh-huh, uh-huh' with which he indicates earnest interest in everything they have to say, his visitors often begin to fit him into a scheme of history. They see him not merely as a perfect political candidate, but as the forerunner in U.S. politics of a new era of friendly men to succeed the recent era of angry men.”
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As the 1944 Republican National Convention approached, many party leaders sought to persuade Warren to join the ticket. He was, in the thinking of the day, the perfect counterpart to New York governor Tom Dewey, two moderate Republicans from opposite coasts, each compiling impressive records of management in two of the nation's largest states. Roosevelt, his health failing, was seeking a fourth term, and some Republicans hoped the country might at last have wearied of his stewardship.

Warren knew better. Although his instincts for national politics would prove erratic in the coming years, in 1944 Warren saw more clearly than many of his Republican allies the strength of Roosevelt's appeal. He determined to keep his distance from the ticket and succeeded in fending off Dewey's advances to join as vice president. At one point, Warren pushed back too hard, publicly suggesting that to leave the governorship so soon would be a dereliction of his duty to his state, an awkward pronouncement given that Dewey was preparing to do just that. “I have made certain commitments and assumed certain obligations to my state which are yet unfulfilled,” Warren wrote to members of the Oregon delegation when they attempted to draft him. Warren emphatically urged the delegation not to nominate him for vice president.
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Warren escaped the vice presidential nomination—it went to Ohio governor John Bricker—and instead delivered a keynote address to the delegates gathered that year in Chicago. He prepared carefully for the occasion, soliciting and receiving help from, among others, Raymond Moley, by then a disenchanted New Dealer working at
Newsweek
magazine. Moley advised Warren to stay “far above the political battle. It is a time,” he stressed, “for the eternal verities.”
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Warren strove for that, continuing to labor over drafts only days before the convention opened, but what he produced was less lofty than it was obvious. Where his strength at home was always in his devotion to facts and practical solutions, he found it difficult to project those virtues to the nation, where he had less command of his subject and where audiences, less familiar than Californians with his record, craved a more effusive personality. So Warren fell back on rhetoric, never his strength, and he teetered between appeals to national unity and to Republican enthusiasm. States with Republican governors, Warren argued, were producing much of the American war machine. “From the record of those states,” he concluded, “it is clear that Dr. Win the War is a Republican.”
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In the next breath, however, he insisted that the war tolerated no partisan differences—generals and admirals served their nation, not their party. Warren renounced the New Deal, blaming it for centralizing power under one man, destroying the Democratic Party, and threatening basic American freedoms. But he offered little in its place other than the assertion that Republicans were better.

Returning to California and more comfortable terrain, Warren did his best for the doomed Republican ticket of 1944. Bricker brought little strength to the campaign. His ardent isolationism reassured the piece of the Republican Party that was uncomfortable with Dewey, but he alienated many moderates, including Warren. Still, Warren understood his duty. He praised the ticket and urged support for it. In October, Bricker came to California, where Warren and he made a joint appearance at the Senator Hotel, a Sacramento office building across from the capitol.
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Warren introduced him there and at a second appearance that day in San Francisco. Bricker praised Warren as “one of the finest Governors you have ever had,” and Warren returned the compliment. “No one who meets and hears him,” Warren said of the Ohio senator, “but realizes he has lifted the candidacy of the Vice Presidency to a new high level.”
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On October 17, with the election just weeks off, Warren arrived for work as usual and put in a few hours. He and Sweigert went to lunch together at the Sutter Club, a short walk from the capitol. Warren excused himself at one point and went to the men's room. Returning, he was pale. “You know,” he said to Sweigert, sitting down, “I just passed some blood.”
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Warren secured an appointment with his doctor, Red Harris, who concluded that Warren was suffering from a kidney infection and required hospitalization. Warren was admitted the same day.

As Election Day approached, Warren reached out from his hospital bed to make one last effort on behalf of the Republican ticket. “The New Deal machine,” Warren said of FDR's coalition, “is being held together today by the domination of one man, not by a common philosophy of government or by any common program for the future of America.” By contrast, Dewey and Bricker, “men of youth and courage and determination,” stood able to conclude the war and prepare America for a lasting and prosperous peace, Warren declared.
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He was still too sick even to speak into a microphone, so his comments were transcribed and read over the radio, as well as widely published in the state's appreciative Republican press.

Roosevelt and Truman thumped Dewey and Bricker. The Democrats carried all but twelve states. And in California, Warren's pleadings had little effect: The same state that had resoundingly elected a Republican governor in 1942 went heavily for FDR in 1944, delivering him a 13-point victory over Dewey.

It would be nearly three more weeks before Warren dragged himself to the office, ending the longest illness of his life. When, just before Thanksgiving, Warren reappeared at work, he confided to Robert Kenny that the experience had been enlightening. Not only had he weathered a painful ordeal, the governor said, the long rest had given him a chance to consider the difficulties of working people forced out of a job for weeks or months at a time, with little cushion to support them financially. Recalled Kenny:

 

Earl Warren returned to work and announced that in the coming term, just a few days away, he would propose that California become the first state in America to create and support a system of compulsory health insurance. No longer, Warren said, would middle-income residents need to worry about the financial effects of a catastrophic illness. This governor, a Republican, would see that the common men and women of California were protected by their Progressive, activist, compassionate government. Warren intended to offer them health care, fulfilling the message of his inaugural and the spirit of his campaign. It was a natural response to his personal experience and utterly in line with his compassion for others. For Warren, health care for working people was as logical as accident insurance, as indisputable as public sanitation or unemployment relief. For his enemies—and Warren was about to discover just who they were—it was something else entirely.

Chapter 11

CALIFORNIA'S FAIR DEAL GOVERNOR

ASSEMBLYMAN GEORGE COLLINS
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WARREN'S HEALTH CARE INITIATIVE was self-consciously aimed at helping California's working class. The wealthy did not face sudden ruin because of illness—and neither did the very poor, those qualified under California law to receive state government assistance. But the middle, the same middle whose politics Warren was pioneering in California, had neither personal resources nor public help. They were left to fend for themselves in a system that could swallow them with a single illness or accident. Having pondered that question while sick himself, Warren returned to work and decided to fix it.

It was a prototypical Warren exercise: The problem was broad and tangible, the victims spread across ideological lines. The path to success was satisfyingly strewn with surmountable obstacles. By avoiding partisanship, Warren believed he could create a program that would help common Californians through one of their most persistent worries. The governor was no New Dealer, contrary to the grumbling of George Collins and others. He was not prepared to put the state budget into the red to finance the program, and he did not launch his health care initiative to stimulate the economy or create jobs. But he was clearly no conservative, either: Warren saw the opportunity for state action, and believed the needs of common people were sufficient to justify an entirely new system of health insurance, backed by an assertive government paying its way as it went forward.

Warren may have been relatively new to the governor's office as 1944 closed, but he was sufficiently seasoned in politics to know that his program would founder if he could not win at least the acquiescence—and with luck, the support—of those most affected by it. In this case, that meant a visit to one of California's most slavishly conservative organizations, the California Medical Association. In mid-December, Warren met with Philip Gilman, president-elect of the CMA.
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Warren had reason to believe that he might win the backing of the association, at least in principle, for an insurance system paid for by worker and employer contributions. The association had supported a version of such a program in 1935, when the Depression had cut badly into the medical profession. The desperation of those years, however, had jarred many people and organizations into aberrant positions; stability had cooled the CMA's ardor for reform. By 1944, it had settled back into its habitual complacency.