Justice for All (40 page)

Kenny had helped Warren respond to the Zoot Suit riots in 1943, and the two had worked together to provide for the compassionate reabsorption of the state's Japanese when the federal government at last ordered the internment camps closed near the end of 1944. “I am sure all Americans,” Warren said, “will join in protecting constitutional rights of the individuals involved, and will maintain an attitude that will discourage friction and prevent civil disorder. It is the most important function of citizenship, as well as government, to protect constitutional rights and to maintain order.”
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Warren warned law-enforcement agencies that he expected their forces to protect the returning internees and to intervene assertively in order to thwart violence and the threat of violence. Kenny, as the state's top law-enforcement officer, joined Warren in insisting on that as well. “Two county sheriffs,” Kenny recalled years later, “openly defied our efforts to obtain peace officer cooperation for the peaceful relocation of the Japanese. Gov. Warren backed me up, and said that if the local constabulary did not protect the returning Nisei, he would see that state forces did so.”
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The sheriffs backed down. Although there were isolated acts of violence against the returning Japanese, amazingly, in light of the powerful emotions that had led to the internment and the continuing bloody war with Japan, the internees returned largely in peace and quietly resumed jobs and places in the life and economy of California, though often finding their homes and possessions scattered in their absence.

By 1946, then, Warren and Kenny had long admired each other across party lines. What's more, the two men genuinely liked each other. Kenny appreciated Warren's direct honesty, and Warren delighted in Kenny's raconteur wit. Still, politics is politics, and California's Democrats in 1946 were desperate. They prevailed on Kenny to run. Reluctantly, he agreed, then proceeded to run one of the worst campaigns for governor in California's history.

Just after announcing, Kenny informed reporters that he would be traveling to Nuremberg as a guest of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, then acting as prosecutor for the war-crimes trials. Kenny laughed off those who questioned the strategic wisdom of missing the first two weeks of his own gubernatorial campaign. As long as he was out of the country, he argued, at least he couldn't make any mistakes.
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Charm was not enough for Kenny. It was no easy job for a Democrat to take on Warren in 1946. Warren had championed health care, had built hospitals, and had asked the legislature for a full-employment bill. He supported a Fair Employment Practices Act, intended to “guarantee economic opportunity” to all.
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Conservatives grumbled about their Republican governor, but Democrats could find no real way to get to Warren's left. Through most of the campaign, Kenny avoided even criticizing Warren, and when he did, it was so gentle as to often escape notice. The uneventful contest warranted just a single sentence in Warren's memoirs.

Its outcome, however, established Warren's preeminence in California politics beyond any other measure. On June 4, Republican voters unsurprisingly named Warren their candidate, preferring him to Kenny by 774,502 votes to 70,331. That was no great surprise. What was breathtaking was the action of California's Democrats. By a margin of 593,180 votes to 530,968,
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the state's Democrats selected as their candidate a lifelong Republican who twelve years earlier had chaired his party during its campaign against Upton Sinclair and who just two years earlier had delivered the keynote address at the Republican National Convention. With the 1946 primary election, the Republican Party of the
Los Angeles Times
and the Associated Farmers and the Democratic Party of Sinclair and Carey McWilliams agreed on one thing: Both picked Earl Warren to lead them. Warren thus effectively sealed the election in the primary (he still faced token opposition in November from a Prohibition candidate and a write-in, but neither gave him trouble). Kenny took the loss with typically good humor: “I saved him from oblivion in 1938 and end in oblivion myself. You've got to be careful whom you help in politics.”
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Among those heartened by Warren's victory were his friends in the FBI, who worried about the left-wing support they perceived for Kenny. The election, according to the Bureau's San Francisco special agent in charge, “provided a stunning blow to the Communist Party . . . and those laboring unions active in supporting political candidates.” Kenny, the agent reported to headquarters, had been “supported, although not publicly endorsed, by the Communist Party,” so his defeat “caused considerable doubt and speculation in the minds of Communist functionaries responsible for political activity.”
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Warren's victory thus pleased his proud benefactor in Washington, J. Edgar Hoover.

Sweigert, in his running, poetic ode to Warren, put it more brightly:

 

No other gubernatorial candidate had ever won such a victory, and none ever replicated the feat. It remains a singular achievement in the history of California politics. Warren thus emerged from 1946 as a virtually unassailable figure in his home state. His straitlaced liberal politics had become California's. His fusion of prudent spending, care with taxes, and lavish support for social and educational programs, his belief in free enterprise and public help—these values had become his state's. California's political center had at last arrived, in the program of its Republican governor and in the person of Earl Warren.

Chapter 12

IN COMMAND

You know Earl.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
POLITICAL EDITOR KYLE PALMER TO HERMAN PERRY,

FRIEND AND BENEFACTOR OF RICHARD NIXON
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WARREN'S HISTORIC VICTORY in 1946 cemented his hold on the leadership of both California political parties. It also meant that he effectively won his seat in June, as the November general election now was turned into a mere formality. That gave Warren not only influence but also the latitude to use it, since his own political fortunes were, at least for the moment, secure.

Given that, others naturally looked to Warren for help. One of those in 1946 was a young Navy veteran, attempting his first foray into politics with a campaign for a Southern California congressional seat. Richard Nixon had plenty to recommend him to the voters of his district: He was young, smart, and ambitious. He was, moreover, an archetype of Southern California, emblematic of its emphatic bond with the Midwest and of the strong pulls of religious piety and social conservatism. “Lt. Nixon comes from good Quaker stock and is about thirty-five years of age,” his first patron, bank manager Herman Perry, wrote in introducing Nixon to a Republican fact-finding committee searching for a candidate. “He is a graduate of Whittier College and a member of the Board. By hard work he obtained a scholarship to Duke University law school. He is a very aggressive individual. He was an orator and debater in high school and college.”
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Nixon was no Earl Warren, however. In fact, they seemed almost to mirror each other, their opposing images portending the life of conflict upon which the two were embarking in the early months of 1946. As they each campaigned that spring and summer, Warren was fifty-five years old, tall, strapping, and handsome; Nixon, at thirty-three, was charismatic, to be sure, but his appearance was more glowering than garrulous. Warren was a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, the state's archetypal institution of higher education; Nixon came from the smaller, more parochial Whittier College. In their political demeanor, Warren was sunny and approachable, the model of a friendly leader floating above the tumult of politics. Nixon seethed; his signature political posture was the attack. And where Warren prided himself on his professional nonpartisanship, Nixon believed strongly in the contest of the two-party system. He was firmly and unequivocally a Republican. When his daughter Patricia was born in 1946—just in time for her birth to figure in his campaign—Nixon announced, “Patricia is a lucky girl. She will grow up in the finest state in the union, in the greatest country on earth. She will grow up, go to schools and when the time comes she will register and vote Republican.”
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It is impossible to imagine Earl Warren ever uttering such a sentence.

Whatever schools she would attend and however she would register, Tricia Nixon would also grow up in the era of Earl Warren. For as Richard Nixon set out to launch a career in California politics, he did so in Warren's shadow, which had important ramifications for their relationship and for Nixon's early political development. Warren, by defining and personifying the political center of California, exerted a gravitational force on the state's ideological universe. Others bent toward him. Those who attempted to defy that force risked appearing marginal or strange. That tug was never stronger than in 1946, and one of those thus pulled into Warren's orbit was the young Richard Nixon. Temperamentally, Nixon was his own man. He railed hard against Communists, but the young candidate nevertheless presented himself as an advocate of “practical liberalism,” a self-conscious attempt to appeal to the middle that Warren had carved for Republican candidates in a Democratic electorate. In his first run for political office, Nixon cross-filed as a Democrat and a Republican, this fiercely competitive Republican thus emulating the tactic that Warren had pioneered as a self-described nonpartisan.

If all of that reflected Warren's tug on Nixon's politics, however, the more penetrating impact of Warren's influence was in the tone it established between them: From the very beginning, the relationship between Nixon and Warren was characterized by Nixon's resentment of Warren and Warren's contempt for Nixon. Nixon was in a tough race in 1946. He was challenging Democrat Jerry Voorhis, an able and intelligent iconoclast with a base among Southern California's Left and an incumbent who already had spent a decade in the House. So Nixon's associates reached out to Warren, hoping the popular governor would consider an endorsement—valuable in any race but especially in one where Nixon hoped to cast Voorhis as extreme while Nixon argued that he was the genuine moderate in tune with the district. Warren refused. Adding to the slight, Voorhis made the most of Warren's silence, releasing a complimentary letter Warren had written to him earlier and even endorsing Warren as “the better man” in the governor's race. Eager for any word to rebut those comments, Nixon's camp urged Warren at least to recant the letter to Voorhis. Warren again refused.
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Nixon's supporters were livid. “[H]e was a man who wanted everyone to support him when he was running for office, but never wanted to give anyone else any help when the other fellow was running for office,” Earl C. Adams, a Los Angeles lawyer who helped encourage Nixon to run in 1946, remembered in a 1975 interview. “It was all for Warren.”
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In the June primary, when Warren won both party nominations in his historic rout, Voorhis appeared to finish comfortably. He won the Democratic victory and tallied half as many votes as Nixon on the Republican side. It was then, however, that Voorhis made his critical mistake. He viewed those numbers through overconfidence, failing to appreciate how far Nixon had come in a few short months. Thinking he was safe, Voorhis challenged Nixon to a series of debates. That elevated Nixon to Voorhis's stage (a tactical error) and overlooked Nixon's talent for the cut and thrust of personal politics (a substantive mistake). Voorhis gave Nixon his chance. Nixon made the most of it.

Their first debate was on Friday, September 13, at a junior high school in the tiny, conservative town of South Pasadena. Introduced by Murray Chotiner, Nixon arrived late but ready. When Nixon accused Voorhis of being supported by a left-wing labor organization known as the CIO-PAC, Voorhis demanded that Nixon prove it. Nixon then reached into his pocket and took from it a copy of
Action of Today,
a publication of the National Citizens Political Action Committee, which worked with the CIO and which Nixon accused of supporting Voorhis.
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In fact, the PAC elected not to endorse Voorhis, but the congressman was unaccountably caught by surprise and mumbled an unconvincing reply, managing to damage himself further by conceding that there was a “grave question” of Communist influence at the CIO.
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Nixon partisans at the debate booed Voorhis lustily, and the congressman's career drained out of the hourglass. After the debate, Voorhis asked a longtime friend and admirer how he had done. “Jerry,” his friend answered, “he murdered you.”
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The pattern was set for the balance of the debates. Nixon was plucky and aggressive, Voorhis wavering and unsure. Still, Voorhis was an incumbent and popular among Democrats. With the election approaching, some Nixon confidants continued to hold out hope that Warren would give them a boost. In September, Warren proved that he was not averse to all endorsements, as he announced his support for William Knowland's senatorial campaign. That was hardly a surprise—Warren, after all, had named Knowland to the Senate—but it suggested that Warren might be open to helping another fellow Republican. At Nixon headquarters, however, the phone never rang.

Despite Warren's refusal to help, Nixon defeated Voorhis in 1946 by nearly 15,000 votes. This marked the beginning of his extraordinary career, one filled with accomplishment and setback, destined to unfold alongside that of Earl Warren. For now, the two men shadowed each other, Nixon heading off to Washington, miffed that the governor had not helped him, and Warren settling in for his second term as governor, astonished that Nixon's people would even have asked.