Justice for All (50 page)

A chastened Nixon pulled back and did not release the poll generally. His backers later would cite that as evidence of his intention not to harm Warren. In fact, however, Nixon already had achieved what he wanted. Publicly, he remained a Warren loyalist. But insiders, those whose attention Nixon sought, now understood that he was not there for the governor. For the stated purpose of helping to form his views on the nomination, the poll had always been a useless exercise; for telegraphing his ambivalence about Warren and his attachment to Eisenhower, it was superbly effective.

Nixon's efforts were encouraged by his closest friends, who, almost to a person, resented the governor and his politics. Murray Chotiner was still mad that Warren refused to give him and other Republicans special consideration after the 1942 victory, and others picked up their grievances as well. Herman Perry, the man who had launched Nixon into politics and was still a loyal friend, angrily wrote in April to Bernard Brennan, one of relatively few California Republicans allied with both Warren and Nixon, to express his mounting anger toward Warren. Unable to contain his irritation, Perry deprecated Warren as “the great white father,” and demanded that he release the convention delegates to Nixon and Knowland's leadership.
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Three weeks later, that still had not happened, and Perry wrote again to Brennan, again insisting that Warren withdraw his public insistence that his delegates back him. Perry called that stand “selfish” and “unrealistic” and added, “[W]ith Earl Warren out of the picture, I am further convinced that the candidate for Vice President on the Republican ticket could be Bill Knowland or Richard M. Nixon.”
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In June, a month before the convention and with his poll in the field, Nixon himself wrote to Brennan. Labeling the letter “personal and confidential,” he urged Brennan to confer with him in person before the convention began. Nixon warned that he felt Taft was close to securing the necessary delegates, and he dismissed the prospects for Warren. “I don't believe that any of us should have any illusions on the possibilities of Warren being selected for the top spot,” Nixon wrote. “As a matter of fact as a result of Knowland winning the primary, he has completely supplanted Warren as the Vice Presidential prospect and several people have been talking about Knowland as the best bet of a dark horse in the event of a deadlock. I am laying these facts right on the line because I do not feel we should go into the Convention without knowing what we are going to be up against .”
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Not only was Nixon convinced Warren was headed to defeat, he also was determined not to be aligned with that defeat, his pledge of support notwithstanding.

Perry urged Nixon not, under any circumstances, to agree to place Warren's name in nomination for the presidency. “The feeling is that if anyone is to stick his neck out in this instance, it should be Bill Knowland,” Perry wrote, adding, “I believe by proper manipulation you yet can come through the critical period of the Convention without being harmed.”
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Nixon needed no convincing: “I have neither the desire nor the intention of accepting such an assignment.”
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Nixon and his admirers would long deny that Nixon secretly worked through those weeks to deny Warren the nomination. It was Warren, they insisted, whose selfishness threatened the unity of the delegation in the service of his own far-fetched ambition. And they were right insofar as they stressed that Warren's chances were remote. But at least two aspects of the episode are undeniable. First, despite professing loyalty to Warren, Nixon undermined him at several important moments: He signed on to Warren's ticket but privately sought to advance another candidate's prospects; he conducted a poll, illegally using taxpayer money to do it, and saw that results damaging to his own candidate made their way to key decision makers; and he privately pressured Warren through intermediaries to back down. The other clear message from those months of 1952 is that Warren came to see Nixon not just as generally devious—an impression he already had from the campaigns of 1946 and 1950—but now as a personal adversary. And so when Nixon boarded the train in Denver on that summer night in 1952, the seeds of suspicion were well tended.

As the train pulled away in the dark, the engineer pressed it for speed, trying to make up for time lost in the Rockies. As it whisked through the plains east of Denver, Nixon mingled among the delegates; he reported from Chicago on the platform work he had been conducting in recent days, and passed along the latest gossip from the back rooms. Chester Hanson, the
Los Angeles Times
reporter accompanying the Warren delegation, wrote that Nixon supplied a “shot in the political arm” for the Warren supporters by publicly reporting that a deadlock could still deliver the convention to the California governor. But Hanson also noted that Brennan, then serving as one of Warren's convention managers, “was like a nervous mother coaching the bride just before the wedding.”
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What Hanson picked up was more than nerves. Brennan knew of the tension between Nixon and Warren and was doing his best to navigate it.
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Nixon moved from car to car that night, conferring mainly with the delegates loyal to him. In each case, his message was substantively the same: Warren was finished, and for the California delegation to be relevant, it needed to swing to Eisenhower. “Nixon felt that, in view of the fact that in his opinion Warren's chances were not good, that the California delegation could effectively insure Eisenhower's victory by voting for Eisenhower forthwith,” recalled John Walton Dinkelspiel, one of the California delegates loyal to Nixon aboard the train. As Nixon spoke to one group or another, rumors raced through the cars. “If you're on the front end of the train you have to run pretty fast before the statement gets to the back end of the train,” Nixon aide Frank Jorgensen remembered of that night.
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The delegates ate, drank, gossiped, and lobbied hour after hour. As sunrise and Chicago approached, the train clattered across the Great Plains, the light spirit of the first night replaced by the darker throb of intrigue. Just before the train reached Chicago, Nixon ducked out again, his late-night meetings complete. When the Warren Special arrived in Chicago, it pulled up as it had departed from Sacramento, missing the junior senator from California. Awaiting the delegates were buses to take them to the hotel. Chotiner had arranged for the transportation, and as the train neared the station, Warren aides got wind of yet another act of mischief: The buses set aside for the Warren delegation were draped in “Eisenhower for President” banners. Warren loyalists hastily rewrapped the buses before Warren arrived, but when Warren later learned of the stunt, he was “blistering mad.”
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Once in Chicago, the machinations between Warren, Eisenhower, Taft, and Nixon continued, with Eisenhower and Taft elbowing for advantage and Warren holding out hope for sufficient deadlock to permit his emergence. The Eisenhower and Taft campaigns all were headquartered in the same Chicago hotel—though the California delegation was staying elsewhere—and Warren quickly made his way to Eisenhower's suite to meet the general; although their paths had crossed before, this was to be their first serious conversation. Arriving, Warren knocked on the door and was admitted by none other than Chotiner. “Imagine my surprise,” Warren noted archly, indulging himself in a rare note of sarcasm.
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Eisenhower and Warren liked each other. Natural leaders with similar politics and easy smiles, they were rivals but not enemies. For Warren to succeed, Ike had to fail, but Warren would far sooner have seen Eisenhower get the nomination than have it fall to Taft, and Eisenhower similarly favored Warren over Taft, if it came to that. Indeed, Warren's meeting with Taft, later that same week, only reinforced Warren's preference for Eisenhower. Taft used the occasion to try to cut a deal, offering Warren the vice presidency or any other spot in a Taft administration (Taft had already offered the vice presidency to MacArthur but assured Warren that he could make that awkward problem go away) if Warren would deliver him the California delegation on the first ballot. As with Nixon's attempts to steer the delegation to Eisenhower, this backroom offer offended Warren's integrity at the same time that it undermined his personal political position. Moreover, Warren did not like or trust Taft—just days earlier, Taft and his deputies had used their control over the convention seating to put Warren's family up near the rafters. As Warren later put it mildly, “I was not particularly enamored of Taft as a candidate.”
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By 1952, Warren had led California's Republicans to their national convention four times. He knew a thing or two about the mechanics and complexities of those affairs, and he knew that this year, when he came to win, he might at some point require the services of a trusted emissary, someone who could communicate directly with Eisenhower without reporters sniffing out the contact. So Warren set out to make sure he had such a person lined up. Well before the convention began, Warren invited a close associate of Eisenhower's, who had served with the general during his tenure at Columbia University, to join him for lunch in Santa Monica. They discussed Warren's presidential efforts, and Warren expressed some irritation at Eisenhower's comments on the loyalty oath controversy (Warren and Eisenhower never would see eye to eye on oaths or Communism, among other things). A month later, Eisenhower's associate wrote back to Warren asking if he needed any help at the upcoming convention. Helen MacGregor returned the message and asked him to go ahead to Chicago, to check into a hotel, and to await a call from Warren. He did as instructed.

On July 8, the day that General MacArthur—once Eisenhower's boss, then his rival, and often the object of his scorn—spoke to the convention, pledging the party, “so help us God,” to victory in the fall, Earl Warren called for his emissary and entrusted him with a message to deliver to the general. The California delegation, Warren told him to tell Eisenhower, was becoming difficult to hold together. “The problem is this,” Warren said:

 

A “traitor.” Could any description have been more calculated to reach the general? Warren was not prone to hyperbole—or to threats, though he leveled one here as well. “I tell you,” he confided in his intermediary, “but you needn't tell Eisenhower, at this time, that if he doesn't do that we're going to take measures that will be harmful to his candidacy.” Eisenhower replied that he had no designs on California and was not intending to undermine Warren, that indeed he wished Warren well in the event that he himself should fall short of the nomination. Though Warren may have accepted Eisenhower's assurances—it is plausible that Eisenhower did not know of Nixon's attempts to sow discord among the California delegates—the general's reply did nothing to convince Warren that Nixon was trustworthy.

Again and again, Warren resisted any attempt to wrest his delegates from him on the first ballot, and found time to lobby on his own behalf with several other state delegations. But on the convention's key procedural matter, he chose a different course, one that revealed his character as surely as Nixon's maneuvering revealed his. At issue was the seating of a number of Southern delegates, those from Texas and Georgia, loyal to Taft. Given Taft's control of the party machinery, he was in a strong position to place his delegates in voting roles, a move contested by the Eisenhower forces who sought to seat their own, rival groups of delegates. Before either group could take its place at the convention, however, the question for the remaining delegates was whether the contested, pro-Taft delegations should be allowed to vote on their own seating. Eisenhower naturally opposed that, as it would allow Taft delegates to vote to seat themselves. He moved to block it, and his political adviser, Herbert Brownell, shrewdly labeled his counterproposal the “Fair Play Amendment.” So many delegates were at stake and the voting was so close that the nomination hung in the balance—by most tallies, allowing the Eisenhower slates to be seated would all but ensure his nomination. By contrast, if the Taft delegates were allowed to vote to seat themselves, it might deny Eisenhower a quick victory and thus force a protracted convention. That route, a long and contested convention, also was Warren's one chance, as he still held out hope that if Eisenhower folded, those votes would come his way. On this issue, then, Warren and Taft had common interests.
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Thomas Mellon, a member of the California delegation, knew well—they all did—what a vote for Eisenhower on the seating matter would cause: It would show Eisenhower's strength, add to his vote total, almost definitely ensure the general's victory and Warren's defeat. Knowing that, Mellon asked Warren, whom he greatly admired, what he should do. “Well,” Warren replied, “of course I'd enjoy seeing the Taft delegation supported and seated. [But] you people have to go back to California. You have an obligation, and it seems to me that you have to discharge that obligation in a way that satisfies your conscience.”
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On Wednesday, July 10, 1952, the California delegation voted 62 to 7 to seat the Eisenhower delegations from Georgia and Texas, delivering the general the votes he had sought for “Fair Play.” The following day, Warren was nominated for president amid fanfare and appreciation; William Knowland submitted the name of his old friend, saying Warren would provide “honor and purpose in both domestic and foreign affairs.”
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Twenty minutes of applause and excitement followed, yet for Warren that was the end. He fought a principled campaign for president, but did so hamstrung by an unprincipled adversary in his own delegation. When the California delegation swung over to Eisenhower on the rules vote, Ike's contingent was impressed, as it had been for months, by the young senator. As soon as Eisenhower was nominated, he asked Brownell to lead a group of political insiders in a discussion over who should be the vice presidential nominee. Warren was invited but declined, convinced that Nixon already had the inside track. It was, he wrote later, “a fait accompli.”
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