Justice for All (47 page)

Samish represented beer, liquor, bus companies, railroads, cigarette manufacturers, banks, racetracks, and chemical companies—among others. To Velie and
Collier's,
he boasted of putting Howser in office; of controlling votes on the state Board of Equalization, which regulated liquor laws and tax assessments; and of a conspicuous willingness to reward friends and punish enemies with his acute sense of a legislator's needs. “I can tell if a man wants a baked potato, a girl, or money,” Samish offered.
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When Warren was asked by Velie who was the most influential person in the legislature, Warren replied, “On matters that affect his clients, Artie unquestionably has more power than the governor.”
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Warren's comment raised the question of why a governor so offended by lobbyists and so intolerant of corruption had in fact tolerated Samish for so long. Sensitive to that charge, Warren asked the legislature for a bill to curb lobbying, and though he got less than he wanted, he signed such a bill in 1949. With that, he was through with Samish, but Olney was not quite. Samish would eventually be prosecuted for income tax evasion, and the prosecutor in that case was none other than Olney, then working for the Justice Department but then, as always, a premier expert on crime in California. Samish was convinced that he would have beaten the case against him, that the government simply would have tired of poking through his records, had it not been “for my old friend Warren Olney III.”
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Samish eventually served twenty-six months in a federal penitentiary. As for Howser, his association with Samish and his transparent efforts to whitewash the threat of organized crime persuaded voters that Warren and the Crime Commission were right—that Howser was not to be trusted. He served out his term and then was gone from public office, replaced by Democrat Pat Brown.

 

 

WITH THE Crime Commission under way and the university's loyalty oath controversy largely superseded by the enactment of the Levering Oath, Warren turned to his reelection in early 1950. He announced his candidacy in February and prosecuted it with practiced efficiency. As had become his routine, Warren began his campaign with a trip through the Mother Lode counties, speaking once, twice, sometimes even three times a day in those old Sierra mining camps through May.
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The electorate knew Warren and trusted him. Now when he said he intended to govern in nonpartisan fashion, he was taken at his word, particularly since he could point to a record of accomplishment that would be the envy of almost any official.

In plain, calm language, Warren reminded voters of the change he had managed for California in his eight years as governor: 20,000 classrooms and at least that many new teachers to serve a student population that had grown by 500,000 children in ten years; improved mental health centers serving 10,556 more patients; an increase of 1.45 million jobs; a tripling in the annual value of state crops; construction of 4,025 miles of new highways; and despite acute housing shortages in some parts of the state, a galloping boom that saw the construction of 625,000 new homes, a fourth of all new homes built in America, in the five years beginning with the end of the war. All that with a balanced budget and a reduction in state taxes over the same period (though also with the imposition of California's gas tax).
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Moreover, though social issues did not form the mainstay of Warren's reelection effort, there was substantial evidence supporting Warren's claims of nonpartisanship as he turned to Democratic legislators for support for his social agenda—health care, for instance—and Democrats readily complied.
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While he was governor, Warren's social record had mounted. He had signed the bill that ended discrimination against Mexicans in schools. He backed the creation of a Fair Employment Practices Commission and supported fair employment legislation as well as nondiscriminatory housing requirements, substantial increases in public pensions, and expansion of eligibility for receiving government support.
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Some critics, Warren conceded late in the campaign, “believe we have been too liberal. I don't. I believe that most Californians want our State to be as liberal as our finances will permit.”
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Under Warren's leadership, California had transcended the historical extremes that so long had marked its history. Supported by an enthusiastic and diligent Warren, the great water projects planned for the Central Valley would soon bring rivers from the cool north to the arid south, where they would irrigate rich, loamy fields. The grand distances that once made Los Angeles and San Francisco remote and opposite provinces now were shortened by highways and rail lines. Government-supplied electricity cooled California's desert homes and warmed those in its northern forests. Under Warren's watch, it had become a nation-state, its economy robust, its natural resources abundant and in use.

Jimmy Roosevelt would go on to an honorable career as a member of Congress, but in 1950, he ran a mean and occasionally stupid campaign for governor of California. In August, he attempted to capitalize on war fears by proposing that California construct a series of “open cities” inside the state. Those were intended to be fully functional metropolitan areas that would sit vacant unless and until California was attacked, at which time 4 million residents could evacuate to them. More perplexed than threatened, Warren described the plan as “hysterical, nonsensical and wholly demagogic.”
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Beyond that proposal, Roosevelt was elitist in every sense that Warren was not, and Roosevelt even came with the hint of scandal, as newspapers probed his business dealings and political connections. All that hampered Roosevelt's effort and threatened to make him a laughingstock. When Roosevelt made his first speaking trip as a candidate to Sacramento in February, the
Los Angeles Times
played the story on the same page as a piece headlined “Other Planets Send Saucers, Navy Man Says.”
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So what did Earl Warren have to fear from little Jimmy Roosevelt? The name, of course.

As usual, Sweigert understood and captured Warren's mood:

 

In 1942, Warren beat a failed Democrat in part by drawing Democratic support away from the incumbent. In 1946, he so thoroughly dominated the state's politics that Democrats abandoned Robert Kenny and claimed Warren as their own candidate. Now, however, there was the risk that voters were tiring of Warren, and Roosevelt offered the glamour of his father's presidency. Why, Roosevelt's candidacy implicitly asked voters, settle for Warren's milder New Deal when here was the real thing? Roosevelt's mother appeared on her son's behalf in September in order to draw that connection more explicitly. Her appearance drew a rare witticism from Warren as he brushed off her significance to the election. “I don't like to argue with a mother about her boy,” Warren told reporters.
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And yet Warren may have seen Roosevelt as more threatening than he really was. Warren had just come off the experience of running nationally in 1948, when all signs pointed to an easy Republican victory, only to have Truman outcampaign the cocky Dewey-Warren ticket. It was one thing to lose the vice presidency, an office Warren never much coveted anyway. To suffer a loss at home, in defense of his own seat, would be quite another.

Those were months of tough politics in California. For as Warren and Roosevelt waged their campaign in the flickering light of the Loyalty Oath controversy, two vigorous contestants vied for a California seat in the United States Senate. Congressman Richard Nixon was running against Helen Gahagan Douglas, an attractive, liberal congresswoman from Southern California, for an open United States Senate seat. With Murray Chotiner helping to direct the campaign, Nixon unleashed a scaled-up version of his Voorhis strategy, suggesting in this campaign that Douglas was sympathetic to Communism and comparing her voting record to that of leftist New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio—“a notorious Communist party-liner,” as the flyer pointed out;
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a “red-ass red,” as one Nixon associate colorfully recalled.
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The Douglas-Marcantonio comparison was exaggeration, its visual impact enhanced by Chotiner's decision to print the flyer on pink paper. It became known as “The Pink Sheet.”“We put it on pink paper,” Nixon aide Frank Jorgensen said later. “People drew their own conclusion.”
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For Nixon in 1950 as in 1946, a kind word from Warren would have had huge ramifications, as it would have helped persuade moderates that they could trust the young congressman. But as in 1946, Warren was unwilling, and Nixon's camp this time decided to try to bait him. For weeks, Nixon aides hectored Douglas at public events, demanding to know whom she would support for governor. Finally, their pursuit paid off when she cracked and acknowledged that she favored Roosevelt. Warren still would not endorse Nixon—which was telling, given that both were Republicans and Nixon now was running against an avowed Warren opponent—but the governor did allow this: “In view of her statement . . . I might ask her how she expects I will vote when I mark my ballot for United States senator on Tuesday.”
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Chotiner had what he wanted, and trumpeted Warren's hedged remark as an endorsement. Warren filed it away, part of his growing accumulation of grievances against Nixon and his friends.

In his own race, Warren pounded Roosevelt with a ferocity he had never unleashed on Kenny. When Roosevelt argued that Warren had not done enough for schools, the indignant incumbent responded, “James Roosevelt has never been in a public school in his life, except to make a political speech.”
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Roosevelt countered that Warren was an illusory friend of labor, a Republican feigning appreciation for unions solely to curry their votes. Warren knew enough to see he could be vulnerable to that charge. There were still those who remembered
Point Lobos
and Upton Sinclair, and there was no shortage of voters who were squeamish about members of the Bohemian Club or friends of the Chandlers. Still, Warren felt entitled to labor's appreciation. He was raised in a union home and found early work helping union men to their trains on time. He still carried his musicians' union card.

On November 3, 1950, with the election just days away, Warren vented his full fury at Roosevelt and staked his claim for the votes of California's working people. Appearing at the Sailors Union Building in San Francisco, Warren asserted his support for the “procedure of collective bargaining,” and described his accomplishments as having been judged “through the years for their fairness by the working men and women of our State.”
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And then Warren cut to the point:

 

Left unsaid, barely, was that Roosevelt—raised at St. Albans, Groton, and Harvard—knew none of that, that his upbringing of wealth and privilege undermined his claim to the hearts of labor, just as Warren's dusty youth in Bakersfield and rearing in California's public schools entitled him to their attention. Rarely had Warren spoken of an opponent in such personal and strident tones. He was, as the election of 1950 drew near, tired and angry, defeated once nationally and worried that a loss could finish him. He would not lose to a liar.

Warren delivered a last radio plea on Monday evening from Los Angeles, then, accompanied by Nina and Virginia, returned that night to San Francisco, where the three stayed at the St. Francis Hotel. They rose early the following morning and shuttled across the bay to their old home precinct, back to the Alameda Courthouse that had given Earl Warren his public start. There, they voted as the polls opened at seven A.M. They then joined old friends for breakfast at their home, hoping to spend a relaxing morning before settling in to hear the results of Warren's seventh election in California.
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The prospects of a seventh victory, a third term, and an amiable evening seemed strong indeed.