Justice for All (11 page)

At first glance, they might have struck one as an unusual couple: Earl towered over the five-foot-two Nina. He was booming and hearty; she was softer, gentler. But that surface difference obscured deeper commonalities. They were deliberate, efficient people, intelligent and modest. Each was eager for a family, each capable of great affection and appreciative of the other; he was protective, she was wounded. Over the months, their relationship deepened, and Earl grew close to Nina's son. On nights when Earl was scheduled to come to the apartment, Jim would grow restless as he awaited Earl's arrival. When Earl came inside and sat down, Jim would clamber up into the big man's lap.
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Nina, so protective of her only son, would only have allowed that attachment to grow had she been confident that Earl was destined to be her husband. Still, their romance stretched forward with no wedding date in sight. The reason was practical: Warren had no intention of letting his wife work, and his income in the early 1920s would not support a family. So they waited—patience was another of their common traits—for the break that would push Warren ahead and allow their lives to take the next step.

Warren's attention to the details of political advancement paid off in 1925, when Decoto was being touted for a position on the state Railroad Commission.

The rumors of his pending appointment swirled for weeks, creating a tussle among his deputies over who would succeed him. Although the district attorney's job was an elected position, the five supervisors had the power to fill midterm vacancies, such as those caused by resignation of the incumbent. For Warren, this was opportunity, but also a moment of self-evaluation. The Board of Supervisors was dominated by a local machine boss, Mike Kelly, whose political inclinations were Progressive but whose preference for DA was Frank Shay, a Warren rival in the office. To fight Shay for the position was to challenge the Progressive-backed candidate and to join forces with the traditional Republicans of Alameda County, whose most prominent voice was the
Oakland Tribune
. To win, Warren would need to tack right ideologically, moving away from the Progressive tradition that had guided him since college and reaching for a more traditional, conservative Republican base. The alternative for Warren would have been to defer to the Progressive candidate and wait his turn.

Warren chose to run. He sought out the backing of the
Tribune
and its conservative Republican publisher, Joe Knowland. Born in 1873, less than a quarter century after California achieved statehood, Knowland was struck in the state's early image. He had started in the lumber business and expanded, as the state grew, into banking. He held state and federal offices around the turn of the century—he was featured just at the edge of the infamous “Shame of California” photograph, a young man among much older and established ones, but there nonetheless. In 1914, Joe Knowland left his seat in the House of Representatives to run for the United States Senate. He lost, and that ended his elective career but by no means his life in politics. Instead, Knowland expressed his deeply conservative views through his influential place in the state Republican Party and through his ownership of the
Oakland Tribune
, the leading paper in Alameda County.

When Warren appealed to Knowland for help in his first effort to secure an office, Knowland gave it. It came in two forms: He backed Warren directly with the paper, and he reined in one of his reporters, a Shay supporter who was using his news stories to promote Shay.
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The contest was close. Shay enjoyed the support of two supervisors, and Warren had the backing of two others. The deciding vote belonged to John Mullins, who had been elected with Kelly's help but who liked Warren and who decided to vote his conscience, not his interests. Discussing his decision in 1970, Mullins remembered walking with Warren in the Oakland estuary during the days when Decoto's resignation appeared imminent:

 

Mullins won. In his memory, Mullins not only tipped the vote to Warren but also led the move to draft him. Others recalled it differently, noting that Warren had by then already begun to cultivate backers, some of whom weighed in on his behalf, helping to lobby Mullins. What is clear is that Mullins was the swing vote, and without him Warren's plans would have ended there. Instead, on January 12, 1925, Decoto resigned his position, and Mullins backed Warren. Faced with a 3-2 vote to confirm the new district attorney, the other supervisors folded and made it unanimous.
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Mike Kelly did not bear a grudge against Warren, but he did extract his vengeance on Mullins, defeating him with a candidate of his own in the next election. Mullins never regretted the role he played in launching Earl Warren's political career. It was, he would say as he grew old, his greatest political achievement.
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Frank Shay, Warren's defeated colleague, did not take it so well. As soon as the vote was taken, Shay walked out of the district attorney's office and never returned.
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Decoto, by contrast, remained a friend of Warren's for the rest of his life, and Warren reciprocated. Their correspondence through the 1930s was affectionate and thoughtful, Decoto breezily thanking Warren for the loan of five dollars, advising him on his political options, and movingly expressing gratitude in 1930 when Warren offered to look after his business affairs when he was scheduled for a hernia operation.
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Warren's elevation to the district attorney's job gave him his first taste of politics, made him a ranking county official, and opened new professional and political opportunities that ultimately would set him on a path to the governor's office. He was now a prosecutor, yes, but also an administrator, and he would develop a talent for selecting gifted associates and supervising their work in a plain, direct manner that made an impression on subordinates and cultivated loyalty. Warren was a good boss—not an effusive one and not without his flare-ups, but greatly admired by those he worked with.

For the moment, however, the implications of his victory were more personal. He and Nina could finally marry. Their initial planned date had to be reset when Warren's mother took ill—a severe abdominal ailment required surgery—but she recovered and was in attendance when, on October 14, 1925, Alameda County's district attorney and his bride were united. Earl was a Methodist and Nina a Baptist, but she felt more strongly about her faith than he did, so the wedding took place at the First Baptist Church in Oakland. They were accompanied by a thrilled six-year-old Jim, whom Warren now adopted. Warren had hoped to have a quiet wedding with little fanfare, but two friends—an associate from the district attorney's office and the manager of the Alameda County garage—got wind of the event and showed up with the local contingent of the highway patrol. Warren then invited them to join the wedding party, and the highway patrol escorted the newly-weds through town, sirens blaring.
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Once married and back from a short honeymoon in Vancouver, the Warrens set about fulfilling their family plan—three sons for her, three daughters for him, they liked to say in later years. And so the children came. Jim, of course, was there first, and he was so thoroughly integrated into the growing Warren family that not until 1948, when Warren was a candidate for the vice presidency, did the other children learn that their brother had a different father from the rest of them (Earl Jr. recalls suspecting it after rummaging through some old family records one day, but none of the children knew it officially until later).
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Virginia was born in 1928 and named for the sister of one of Jim's friends. Two years later, Earl and Nina had their first son together, and chose to name him Earl Jr.—Ju Ju, he would be called later. Dorothy was born in 1931; Nina Elizabeth, named for her mother and the first Warren child to have a middle name but known to her siblings and to a generation of Californians as “Honey Bear,” in 1933; and, finally, Robert, forever known as Bobby, in 1935.

Sundays were Nina Warren's day off, and Earl's to tend to the children. He often took them on weekend outings, which became part of the Warren lore. On those outings, the children would be allowed to vote on where they wanted to go, and their father would transport them according to the majority's will.
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So cherished were those outings, and so central were they to the Warren family, that Warren overcame his reluctance to put down personal thoughts in writing in order to memorialize them years later. His recollection is undated, though references to himself as governor place it between 1943 and 1953, and the form is unusual: It was written for Nina to deliver, and thus in it, Warren describes himself in the third person, but the note is in his hand and clearly reflects his memory. It was filed among his family papers at the Library of Congress, but it is marked “unused.” Warren wrote:

In interviews more than sixty years later, the faces of Warren's children brightened at the memory of those Sunday afternoons, recalling trips to swim at the Athens Club or the Piedmont Club, where the Warrens were members, or to the Oakland Zoo or to the park for an afternoon picnic. “I've ridden thousands of miles on merry-go-rounds,” Warren remembered later, and visited the zoo “so many times I've forgotten.”
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Often, they recalled, the day would end with their reuniting with their mother, either at the Athens Club or at a local restaurant—the children especially enjoyed the Four Seas in San Francisco's Chinatown. When she joined the rest of the family for those dinners, the children regaled her with stories of their day. Nina would sometimes skip dinner, though, particularly if the family was heading out for Chinese—Nina never did like Chinese food. On those nights, she'd stay home, and when the children piled back inside, they'd find her at the table snacking on toast, jam, and cheese—Swedish fare was more to Nina's taste.
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“It was a great period in the lives of the children,” Warren wrote in that personal reflection of those years and those Sundays. “They came to really know their father, and they remember with fondness every place they went in those days. The governor also remembers those wonderful days and places and attributes his understanding and appreciation of his children to the things he learned about them on these occasions.”
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Earl Warren was not a demonstrative father, but as that reflection attests, he was not remote, either. He liked to engage his children in conversation, and would encourage them to discuss issues with him in the evenings. At home, dinner featured “Information, Please,” a Warren-family game that revolved around the day's news quiz in the local paper. Earl Warren would ask one of his children to read the quiz and then the others would, one at a time, offer their answers. The child reading the quiz would then proclaim the day's winner.
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Nina and Earl learned from their children and determined to let each grow up his or her own way. Jim expressed an interest in art, and eventually took over the task of producing the family's annual Christmas card, which featured carefree likenesses of each family member (including pets), often overlaid across a California landscape; his works remain, decades later, icons of the Warren era. Earl Jr., shy as a young boy, pursued taxidermy and chemistry. Virginia took up pottery. Dorothy dreamed of babies, though she, sadly, would be the only Warren sibling never to have a child of her own. Honey Bear and Bobby, too young in those days to have much in the way of hobbies, would discover horses after the family move to Sacramento; once they did, they were fixtures at the local stables.
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At bedtime each night, the boys and girls would stall, improvising ways to stretch the day out a little longer. Nina lit upon the solution to that. She told the children they could stay up until the radio signed off, then invited them into the room and lined them up before the receiver. As the station ended its day with Kate Smith's rendition of “God Bless America,” the Warren children, shoulder to shoulder and ready for bed, belted out the song with Smith. Then, spent, they tottered into their rooms and to sleep.
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Earl and Nina Warren lived a long and public life, but they created a family in which the children loved and respected one another, a safe place away from the distractions of their father's public life. To Jim Warren, Earl Warren was, quite simply and completely, his dad. “I've always had a father,” Jim Warren said, “and I never called him anything but Dad.”
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Warren's instinct toward moderation was evident in those days in his approach to the tricky question of how to respond to Prohibition. Ratified in 1919 and put in effect the following year, Prohibition banned the sale, manufacture, and transportation of intoxicating beverages. As a prosecutor, it was Warren's job to enforce Prohibition, though he himself had no qualms about social drinking. For Nina, there was no conflict. She never took a drop of drink in her life; later, when she christened ships built during the war, Nina would use fruit juice. For Earl, Prohibition provided an excuse to cut down on socializing—he felt it would be unseemly to appear at social functions where alcohol was served. But it did not cause him to give up drinking altogether. Instead, he would take a drink or two each evening after arriving home. It was, he and Nina told the children, his “medicine,” and he sipped his bourbon while changing for dinner.
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