Justice for All (14 page)

The composition of the grand jury that delivered indictments in the case reinforced doubts about the fairness of the case against the defendants. In selecting citizens to serve on the county grand jury, Warren and his staff scoured the community for respectable citizens—seeking, for instance, the recommendations of local bankers, lawyers, and other businessmen. Although the practice of relying on leading citizens for grand juries was not limited to Warren in those days, it had particular implications when that group of citizens took the measure of the evidence in the
Point Lobos
case, with its overtones of Communism and violence. The
Point Lobos
defense lawyers were convinced that jurors had been picked for their loyalties, if not to Warren directly then at least to a status quo unfriendly to labor. “The ordinary worker or the ordinary person didn't have much of a chance to make it,” one of the defense lawyers, Aubrey Grossman, said later.
⁸²

Finally, Warren intervened personally in the selection of the judge to hear the case. Both sides agreed that the first judge assigned to the case, Edward Tyrrell, was not up to such a complicated and important trial. But Warren managed to have Tyrrell replaced by Frank Ogden, who had worked with and for Warren in the district attorney's office. Ogden's association with Warren made defense lawyers suspicious, and his sympathetic treatment of the prosecution case reinforced those suspicions.

The
Point Lobos
trial opened on October 26, 1936. That same week, maritime unions called a strike. On October 31, at midnight, 15,000 longshoremen, 7,000 sailors, 4,000 cooks and stewards, 3,000 firemen, 3,000 engineers, 2,000 radio operators, 2,000 warehouse men, and thousands of mates, masters, and pilots walked off their jobs and joined picket lines along the entire Pacific Coast of the United States.
⁸³
Violence followed swiftly. The lead photograph in that morning's
Los Angeles Times
was of a bandaged man, above the predictable headline “Injured in Attack by Unionists.”
⁸⁴
With tensions high and thousands engaged on both sides, Warren and his prosecution team entered the courthouse through cordons of protesters. The protesters would stay for the entire case, badgering lawyers and witnesses for the government and forcing the jury to be sequestered. Threats were directed toward the Warren family as well, and pickets occasionally massed in front of their home on Vernon Street. A member of Warren's staff was given the job of shuttling the children to and from school.

At trial, Wallace broke from the other defendants and testified against them, earning him the lifelong enmity of organized labor and forcing him out of the defense pact that enveloped King, Ramsay, and Conner (once Conner had recanted his confession, he had been welcomed back).

Warren personally led the prosecution of the
Point Lobos
defendants and even took the stand twice as defense lawyers turned him into a witness regarding the facts surrounding Conner's contested confession. As a lawyer and even as a witness, Warren was even and unflappable, righteous, and, to the defendants, infuriating.

Warren delivered the prosecution's closing statement himself, and he used it to try to separate the defendants from their union supporters. “This is not,” he insisted, “a case against union labor, it is a case against four men.” Of those men, Warren was unforgiving. “All I want is the law enforced,” he said. “All I want to see is life and property safe in this community.”
⁸⁵

Judge Ogden then did his part. Using a prerogative of California judges during that period—one created by a constitutional amendment that Warren's staff had helped write—Ogden told the jurors that Wallace's confession was persuasive to him and that Conner's confession, despite his attempt to recant it, also was made voluntarily.
⁸⁶
In effect, Ogden directed the jury to convict the defendants. On January 5, 1937, the jury complied. It deliberated for five hours and forty minutes and then returned guilty verdicts of second-degree murder against all four defendants.
⁸⁷

Defense lawyers then and later complained bitterly of Warren's prosecution. In some cases, their charges against Warren were plainly false. Despite defense claims, for instance, no evidence ever surfaced of defendants being physically mistreated while in Warren's custody. Still, the composition of the grand jury, the selection of a clearly proprosecution judge, and the secretive questioning of Conner all undermined Warren's insistence that he ran an exceptionally principled prosecutorial staff, at least in this case. Moreover, unbeknownst to the defendants or their lawyers, Warren's staff also secretly recorded at least one of the defendants while in custody, parking an office secretary nearby to transcribe his conversation with another inmate.
⁸⁸
And Warren investigators broke into a San Francisco hotel room, installed a hidden microphone, and used it to listen in on conversations involving King and another union official, Albert Murphy.
⁸⁹
When they confronted Murphy with the evidence of their eavesdropping, he implicated King, Ramsay, Wallace, and Sakovitz in the murder in order to avoid prosecution himself.
⁹⁰
In later years, Warren would make much of his refusal to use hidden microphones, and it is not clear whether he knew that his deputies had used them in this case.

Warren was pleased by the outcome of the trial and undoubtedly shared his reaction with his friend the judge. Warren's personal calendar shows that he lunched with Judge Ogden three weeks after the defendants were convicted and just seven days after Ogden sentenced them to prison. They remained close afterward, with Warren attending an Elks reception for him in April and meeting again with him for breakfast in May.
⁹¹

That was not the last of the
Point Lobos
case, however. While the trial was under way, some of the defendants spied clues of what they believed was improper contact between Wehr, the lead prosecutor, and a juror named Julia Vickerson. In the screening of prospective jurors, Vickerson had acknowledged a passing relationship with Wehr, who had drawn up a will for Vickerson's aunt. Vickerson denied any more personal contact with the prosecutor, however, and she was seated with the rest of the jury. During trial, Ramsay kept an eye on her and said he noticed exchanges of winks and sly nods between the two. Once the defendants were convicted, their lawyers continued to press their investigation. They concluded that Vickerson and Wehr were romantically involved and that Wehr had urged her to conceal that fact so that he could be assured of her support for a guilty verdict. Their suspicions only seemed confirmed when Wehr died a few years later and Vickerson sought $15,000 from his estate, saying she had lent him the money years earlier and now wanted it repaid. Those issues were piled into the defendants' appeal, and for Warren they formed a potentially lethal political threat. Had a judge accepted the argument of jury tampering in the most prominent case of his prosecutorial career, Warren would have been tainted by a serious charge of misconduct—potentially devastating to a prosecutor whose probity was his chief political asset. It is not too much to think the scandal could have ended Warren's career. But as it turned out, a retired Los Angeles County judge, Hartley Shaw, heard the evidence and decided against the defendants, a ruling based partly on his finding that Vickerson's claim against Wehr's estate was not believable. That ruling was upheld later by the California Supreme Court. The defendants remained in prison. Warren was saved.

Defense lawyer Aubrey Grossman, who helped argue the appeal, believed his failure to win had cleared Warren's political path, and for the rest of his life, that irony haunted him. Grossman firmly believed that Warren and his staff had broken the law in securing the
Point Lobos
convictions. As chief justice, Warren would invalidate some of the same practices that had infuriated Grossman during the
Point Lobos
case. As a result, the failure of Grossman's appeal can credibly be said to have made possible the enshrinement of the principles upon which that appeal was based. The steely leftist lawyer wrestled for decades with the question of whether right had been served in that appeal. “Was I right or wrong?” he mused a half century later. “Was it good or bad? Was it good for society . . . ? It's a difficult thing to determine.”
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Many lives turned on the trial. King, Ramsay, and Conner—as well as Wallace—went to San Quentin. They remained there until a few days before Pearl Harbor, paroled in November 1941 by Governor Culbert Olson, over then Attorney General Earl Warren's loud objections.
⁹³
King went to work as a janitor and eventually made his way back to the sea. Conner did not handle freedom as well. He suffered a nervous breakdown and ended his days in a New York mental hospital, gazing at the ocean and convinced that he owned the fleet. Ramsay found work and fought deportation proceedings that were the result of his conviction, a fight that eventually would reunite him with Warren.

Some of those who criticized Warren's handling of
Point Lobos
ultimately forgave his excesses, writing them off as a small blot against an otherwise impressive record. “During the 13 years that he was District Attorney of Alameda County, no case that Warren tried was reversed by a higher court,” Irving Stone, his admiring biographer, wrote of Warren in 1948. “No complaint was ever lodged against his methods by the vigilant American Civil Liberties Union. He prosecuted only when he had to and when the evidence was complete.”
⁹⁴

Edward White, in his more balanced accounting, concludes that Warren's critics exaggerated in some respects—the trial, he finds, was largely conducted according to the legal standards and norms of the period. Still, he notes, “Under Warren Court standards of criminal procedure, King, Ramsay, Conner, and possibly Wallace would never have been convicted.”
⁹⁵
That, White argues, is because Conner's confession was coerced under Warren Court standards, King and Ramsay were convicted partly on the basis of eavesdropping devices that the Warren Court disallowed, and Wallace might have argued that his conviction was tainted by the pretrial publicity that Warren generated. Those are provocative reminders of how Warren's jurisprudence would evolve from his days as a prosecutor to his tenure as a justice. His character may not have changed—he remained principled and devoted to the rules of his job—but as his job changed, so did the scope of his thinking. And yet none of those rules were in effect until Earl Warren, much later, helped put them there, so the defendants could not reasonably claim them at the time. The forty-five-year-old Warren can hardly be blamed for failing to adhere to the rules that the seventy-four-year-old Warren would write.

For the survivors of the
Point Lobos
case, Warren's zeal was harder to rationalize. Myron Harris, a sharp-witted defense lawyer who had worked with Warren in the DA's office but who was part of the
Point Lobos
defense team, stewed in his anger to the end of his life. On June 14, 1972, he lay in bed in his Piedmont Hills home, watched over by a nurse, less than a year from death. By then, Earl Warren had served and retired from the United States Supreme Court, leaving to the acclaim of liberals and civil libertarians across the nation. He was a hero to many Americans whose politics were shared by Harris. But Earl Warren had no friend that day in Piedmont.

“Tears as big as apples will roll down [liberals'] cheeks when Earl Warren dies,” Harris said. “You won't see tears on my cheeks.”
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Chapter 4

POLITICIAN

EARL WARREN
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AS DISTRICT ATTORNEY of Alameda County, Earl Warren was the chief law-enforcement officer for California's third-largest county. The job was defined principally in terms of crime fighting, but because it was an elected office, it also represented his move into politics, and Warren's early approach to the challenges of winning and holding office paralleled his personal maturation.

At Berkeley, he had joined clubs and a fraternity, and from them extracted companionship. As a politician, he followed the same pattern. He joined groups, then drew upon those friends for political ideas and for support. And in that company, he developed without much consideration an ideological centrism that naturally expressed his personal moderation. He tended to trust majorities and to express skepticism for extremist or radical thought. And just as he was moderate ideologically, he was also cautious temperamentally. Warren never took an opponent for granted. He picked his races with care. He built his record one trial at a time, always with an eye toward accomplishment that he could demonstrate to voters. Later, as a justice freed of the restraints of politics, Warren would show a more daring willingness to challenge social norms. In the meantime, there were elections to win.

The first of Warren's political affiliations—an attachment he made before ever entering politics—was the Republican Party. But he joined the party without much thought and certainly without embracing the entirety of its program for California. In those years, the ideological banner of the Republicans stretched all the way from the early Progressives to the hard, anti-Communist right of organizations such as the Associated Farmers, the lobbying organization for California's notoriously right-wing agricultural interests. Warren was a Progressive, but that placed him in the company of more conservative forces, whom he neither renounced nor fully embraced. Given that he was not inclined to close ideological self-examination, his Republicanism was loosely adhered to; he embraced the party's general values and sought its support without finely tuning his own beliefs toward hard-line loyalty.