Justice for All (42 page)

Another lifelong friendship was struck by happenstance in the clattering comfort of a train. It was the summer of 1944, and Earl and Nina were returning to California from Chicago on the City of San Francisco, which ran the route in those days. Jesse Steinhart was on board as well, and he introduced the Warrens to another passenger, Benjamin H. Swig. Swig was one of the most ambitious and successful real estate investors in America, having mastered a system of purchasing expensive properties with little cash outlay of his own. None of that would have impressed Warren much, but Swig also nurtured an abiding appreciation for public service, and as the two men talked, they found much to like about each other. Swig was on his way to take over his newest acquisition, the Fairmont Hotel, an iconic San Francisco monument that had survived the 1906 earthquake, only to fall into shabbiness during the Depression. Swig appreciated luxury, and he would soon refashion the Fairmont into one of San Francisco's great hotels—it would become The City's traditional Election Night home for Democratic candidates, and in later years the Warrens' home away from home, when they would return to California from Washington for holidays. With his canny eye for a deal, Swig also assumed another role for the Warrens. A lifetime of public service gave Warren power and importance, but it did not make him rich. As a result, he worried about money, and Swig helped ease those concerns by guiding Warren's investments. He kept an eye out for promising real estate opportunities in the West, and eventually got Earl and Nina Warren a share of the Fairmont itself.
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The third of Warren's new friendships in those years was, in at least one way, the least likely. Reporters liked Warren. His professionalism was so thorough that it overcame their doubts, and they allowed that he was straight and honest. But that admiration was not often reciprocated. With rare exceptions, Warren did not confide in reporters. He presented to them and answered their questions, but they were kept apart from him. One exception was Drew Pearson. A sharp-tongued liberal, educated in elite private schools, Pearson was an enthusiastic champion of the New Deal and a fierce advocate of American involvement in World War II (as with Warren, Pearson's support for the war had triumphed over his commitment to civil liberties; he too supported the internment of the Japanese). Pearson launched his career as a correspondent for the
Baltimore Sun
but moved in the early 1930s to the
Washington Post,
where he wrote a widely syndicated and much-feared column, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Pearson was flashier than most Warren friends—no one would ever accuse Warren Olney or Bart Cavanaugh of coveting the limelight. But Pearson was passionate about his work and his country. He was connected to power but not in awe of powerful men or women. All that appealed to Warren, who appreciated Pearson's work more and more as they came to know each other—Pearson would, in fact, help Warren decode some of Washington's mores when Warren's career took him there in 1953.

They first met on November 7, 1947, “on a floodlit platform on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood,” as Pearson remembered it.
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Pearson then was stumping for a project he had conceived and promoted in his column, a Friendship Train intended to solicit food contributions for Europe and to embarrass President Truman for not doing more to help the continent then paralyzed by strikes, suffering under a poor harvest, and still trying to shrug off the ravages of war. Pearson hoped the train would stir American sympathies and invited governors to join him in order to drum up support for the idea; their endorsement, he hoped, would bring the campaign credibility and seriousness, would elevate it beyond a mere columnist gimmick. “I confess therefore to a feeling of considerable gratitude when I met the Governor of California on the platform,” Pearson wrote, adding that Warren arrived with Nina and “one statuesque blond daughter.” They rode together on the train that day, and Warren spoke at each stop, “nothing very pretentious,” but sincere and political—Warren made a point of telling each audience that no federal official was aboard the train. At each little city, local volunteers brought another bundle of food. By the time the Friendship Train arrived in Sacramento, the project was a success, and Earl Warren and Drew Pearson were friends.
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At home, the Warrens were settled into their public life. Their children were growing, and, as Pearson was hardly the only one to notice, attracting attention. Virginia was an eye-catching young woman, and men and boys regularly would write to her unbidden. During the war, she took to corresponding with servicemen. She did it as a wartime duty, and most appreciated the notes in the spirit they were sent, but at least one of her correspondents took it too far. He showed up one day at the mansion to ask Virginia on a date and explained to the guard that they had been writing each other. Virginia was suddenly confronted with her own growing effect on men: “I got kind of scared,” she confided to her mother's assistant. “I sort of stopped writing letters after that.”
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Earl Jr. was more studious, while Dorothy was quiet and levelheaded, and she sometimes seemed forgotten between her magnetic older and younger sisters.
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Bobby and Honey Bear were the family spitfires, athletic and spirited. There was little they would not attempt. Honey Bear took up skiing as a youngster, and headed off on adventures by herself. Before dawn on Saturday mornings, sometimes as early as three-thirty A.M., she trudged to the local bus stop with her skis and equipment and caught the bus for Lake Tahoe. She spent the day on the slopes, then came back the same night (the bus trip took four to five hours). It was nine P.M. by the time she got home, but Nina would run her a bath and bring her dinner in bed. The next morning, she was off again. Honey Bear was a fixture on the slopes as she was in the California imagination; when Squaw Valley opened in 1949, Honey Bear was the first person after the ski patrol to ski the mountain. A friend on the patrol got her the first ride.
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One person who watched her grow up remembered that Honey Bear “had no physical fear of anything.”
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Bobby was just as daring. So driven was he on the football field—as a high school junior, he started as a defensive guard, and in his senior year moved to starting at offensive center—that his mother refused to go to games, afraid to see him hurt. Bobby played anyway, making the all-city team that year and going on to an impressive college career as well. He also followed his sister's footsteps into skiing, with one difference: As a boy, Bobby was allowed to spend the night at Lake Tahoe, rather than having to return and head for the slopes again the next morning.
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Initially apprehensive about being California's First Lady, Nina came to enjoy it and balanced its obligations with her responsibilities for the Warren children. Her small staff adored her. She was blessed, her aides liked to say, with an “educated heart.”
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When she traveled with Earl, she would spy trinkets or modest presents to give to staff members, picking them with care and explaining the gift in such a way that made it more personal. When she gave her secretary, Betty Foot Henderson, a cashmere sweater, Nina explained, “Once you have a cashmere sweater, nothing else is quite as comfortable. My girls just love these, and so do I, and so I just thought you should have one, too.”
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Nina's attention to others extended beyond her staff. There was a woman who lived nearby in Sacramento. She was alone and on welfare, and survived on modest meals cooked on her hot plate in a one-room apartment. Somehow her path crossed with Nina's, and Nina was touched by her situation and her pride—the woman refused offers of help. Every so often, when Earl was scheduled to be out of town, Nina would cook a large meal—a turkey, say. She would then call one of the governor's security officers and instruct him to take it to the woman and to explain to her that Nina had made it expecting the governor to return and then had learned that he was busy for dinner. Nina would then phone the woman and urge her to take the food. “Please do me a favor and take this food off my hands,” she asked. Happy to do so, the woman would then invite other struggling neighbors to join her in a meal provided by California's First Lady. “So you see,” Betty Foot Henderson recalled, “Mrs. Warren's gifts were more than giving.”
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Nina Warren enjoyed her husband's success, and ran the governor's mansion with the same cheerful efficiency that she had shown at 88 Vernon. Earl Warren's rising stature did, however, expose him to a wider range of celebrities, and Nina occasionally displayed a protective streak. There was, for instance, the time that Warren was invited to lead a parade in the coastal city of Monterey. His staff accepted the invitation, but Nina Warren asked to skip the event and stay home. When that was communicated to the sponsors, they suggested that Ginger Rogers accompany the governor. Warren's aide agreed. “The governor will be very happy,” he said. “Miss Rogers is a friend of theirs.” Earl might have been agreeable to spending an afternoon in an open car with a beautiful actress, but Nina was not about to let that happen. When her assistants heard of the arrangements, one turned to another and remarked, “I'll bet Mrs. Warren decides to go.” The parade went off as scheduled, led by two cars. One carried Ginger Rogers, the other bore Nina and Earl Warren.
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WARREN' S EXTRAORDINARY record and centrist appeal—the tax-cutter who still managed to attack segregation and build roads and water projects, hospitals, prisons, and mental health facilities—drew him back to national politics through the 1940s. As in 1944, the run-up to the 1948 Republican convention centered first on Dewey, the party's presumptive nominee, but Warren remained a contender in his own right. Coming to Philadelphia as the head of California's delegation and with its votes pledged to him, Warren stood an outside chance at securing the nomination if it deadlocked between Dewey and his principal rivals, Harold Stassen, Arthur Vandenberg, and Robert Taft.

On June 23, 1948, Warren's old friend, University of California president Robert Gordon Sproul, placed Earl Warren's name in nomination for the presidency of the United States. His speech was given in Warren's name and in keeping with his gentle style of persuasion. No rivals were derided, no nastiness expressed. “Our pleasant difficulty,” Sproul told the delegates, “is the selection from among these well-qualified aspirants, of that one [who] will most surely appeal to the majority of the voters of the country, in all its parts and from all walks of life.”
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Sproul's nomination of his friend was relatively brief—just fifteen minutes—but it wittily and thoughtfully summed up Warren's appeal. Warren, Sproul said, was a man raised modestly, a university graduate—“and of no mean university,” the university president added for laughs—a lawyer, a veteran, and a dynamic, vigorous leader:

Explaining Warren's political philosophy to the delegates, Sproul was emphatic: “Earl Warren is a liberal,” he said, “but only in the true sense of that much-abused word, i.e. he understands the basic forces at work in our society, and recognizes the weaknesses and defects of our system, as well as the unmatched merit of its performance and promise.” Finally, after recounting Warren's tremendous string of political successes in California, Sproul insisted that Warren could win nationally as well. “Make no mistake about it,” Sproul said, “this man Warren has the mark of victory upon him.”
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Not in 1948. Warren hoped protracted disagreement would turn the convention to him, but he did little to help his own cause. He arrived with California's 53 delegates in his pocket and hoped for a long enough deadlock that other candidates would fold and release their votes. Instead, Dewey came on strong. Needing 548 votes to secure the nomination, he got 434 on the first ballot. He picked up 81 more in the second round and was clearly rolling toward a victory when Warren, seeing there was no more use in fighting, called to concede and to pledge California's delegates to Dewey's cause. That sealed the nomination, and then Dewey turned to the same idea he had tried but failed to execute in 1944. He leaned on Warren to accept the vice presidency. At four-thirty A.M. on June 25, with the sky still dark over Philadelphia, Dewey summoned Warren to his hotel suite and began to work on him.
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For hours, the New York governor tried to persuade Warren to take a spot on the ticket—the same spot Warren had turned down in 1944 and vowed not to accept this year. Warren attempted various defenses. He objected to taking a cut in pay to become vice president; Dewey vowed to seek an increase. Warren complained that he would have little to do beyond presiding over the Senate; Dewey promised to make him a member of the cabinet. And this time, Dewey impressed another fact on Warren: Party leaders would not come calling forever. Warren might prefer the top of the ticket, but it was not his, and should he continue to rebuff the party, it might well lose interest in him.

Sometime during those talks, Eugene Meyer, patriarch of the
Washington Post,
found a moment to twist Warren's arm further, implying that Warren's resistance was egotism. “No man,” Meyer told the governor, “is too big to run for Vice President.”
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It was this year or nothing, Warren became convinced. Sometime after dawn Warren gave in.
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He trudged back to his hotel suite and broke the news to Nina, who reluctantly endorsed the idea but worried her husband would not take well to running in Dewey's shadow.