Justice for All (9 page)

As for London and Sinclair—Warren's other remarked-upon California authors—the most striking aspects of each, insofar as they made and retained a positive impression on Warren, are that both were plainspoken tellers of narrative stories, that both were socialists, and that both were or would become personally known to Warren. During his Berkeley years, Warren and friends would tromp down to the dive bars along the Oakland waterfront. There, with the fog and mist outside and with pipe smoke curling through the wood-paneled rooms, they would sit, spellbound, as London told the tales of his adventures, as only London could.

Though Warren appears to have been drawn to London's exploits more than his politics, London's legacy is an inextricable mix of the two. In later years, London would back Warren's opponents politically, but Warren retained affection for London's work. Similarly, Sinclair was a better writer than a politician, but his career in California makes it impossible to consider one without the other. In the 1930s, Sinclair made a quixotic but nearly successful run for governor. That campaign included many participants, and one notable one was the newly appointed state Republican Party chief, Earl Warren.

Warren focused sufficiently on his studies to be awarded a bachelor of letters in jurisprudence on May 15, 1912. Newton Drury delivered the commencement address, “What the Public Wants.” The less illustrious Earl Warren sat in the audience.
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Having completed his undergraduate courses, Warren slid without much effort into Berkeley's law school. There again, he displayed modest academic interest, though he also evidenced a solidifying character marked by his sensitivity to challenge. Law school rules of the day prohibited students from working with law firms while full-time students. Warren ignored the rule at considerable peril. Discovery could well have resulted in expulsion. Still, he believed that the value of practical experience outweighed his chances of being caught, and he set his mind to it. He persuaded a local law office to hire him, then sneaked off campus to go to work. He managed to avoid detection or consequence.

Later, as his days in Berkeley were drawing to a close, Warren was warned by a law school dean that he was in danger of failing courses because he spoke up so infrequently in class. Rather than simply start contributing, Warren struck a stand on principle: Where, he demanded, was it written that he was required to volunteer in class? The dean, apparently taken aback, conceded that there was no such written rule, but warned Warren that if he failed any of his exams, he would not receive a degree. Warren passed.
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Once Warren's career took him to the pinnacle of the legal profession, his modest accomplishments as a law student would become a source of amusement to himself and to friends. When Jim Gaither, one of the many gifted students who clerked for Warren during his chief justiceship, was first interviewed for the job, he talked about the law and his shiny academic accomplishments—Gaither was a Princeton undergraduate and an outstanding law student at Stanford. Gaither was invited back a second time, and he studied rigorously for the interview, reading cases, examining the jurisprudence of the Warren Court. He showed up for the session with Warren's two-man interviewing team, and instead of grilling him about the law, the interviewers asked Gaither questions about baseball and football. “Three hours,” he recalls, “not one question of substance.” Once Gaither got the job, he asked what that had all been about. “We wanted you the first time,” one of his interviewers replied. “But we thought you were so serious you would drive the Chief crazy.”
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Warren may have taken law school lightly, but he put in enough work to graduate. A thesis was required, so he wrote one. Titled “The Personal Liability of Corporation Directors in the State of California,” it was just thirty-one pages long and a work of neither great originality nor great scholarship. It was serviceable, however, and on May 6, 1914, it was approved by the dean—the same dean who had warned Warren about his failure to speak up more often in class.
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Warren graduated with his class that month. The entire group of students was admitted to the practice of law without the need of a bar exam.

Warren now was a lawyer but one in search of work. He first accepted a job with the Associated Oil Company in San Francisco. It was not a happy experience. The company's chief counsel, Edmund Tauske, was brusque and unappreciative. Warren had worked to become a lawyer, and now that he was one, Tauske used him to fetch cigars. Warren described Tauske as “an irascible old man,” and determined to quit. When the time came, Warren took great delight in telling his boss of his discontent:

 

Warren stayed long enough to find a replacement for himself, and as he considered his own options, he debated leaving the law altogether. A respectful audience with the chief justice of the state Supreme Court turned him back around. Warren arrived one day to pick up an order, and the chief justice invited him to sit down and talk. Warren was flattered by the justice's interest in him, and it revived his enthusiasm for the law. He relocated to Oakland, joined the law firm of Robinson and Robinson, and took an active role in starting up a young lawyers' association—one of many such instances in which Warren found satisfaction in organizing professional or social clubs. The time passed quickly, and in 1917 Warren and two classmates were preparing to form their own firm, only to be interrupted by the Great War.

Warren wanted badly to fight. He tried several times to enlist, but he was turned away first in the flood of applicants, then because of hemorrhoids and a case of ether pneumonia contracted while having his hemorrhoids operated on. Once finally cleared for enlistment, he entered the service on September 7, 1917, and was promoted to sergeant less than two months later.
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He was sent first to Camp Lewis, Washington, and later Camp Lee, Virginia.

Warren was a good soldier and a capable supervisor. He was fair and patient, and his men regarded him as a good listener.
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At Camp Lewis, he met Leo Carrillo. They struck up a friendship, and Carrillo described Sergeant Warren as a “big man mentally and physically, a great hulking, strong, sturdy soldier without any pettiness.”
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Accepted into the officer program, Warren received his commission as a second lieutenant on June 1, 1918, and was shipped to Camp Lee, where he was assigned to the bayonet program. His rigorous preparation at Camp Lewis was welcome—Warren was one of only two students to survive the bayonet training without needing a stay in the hospital.
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Although Warren rarely had time to leave the bases to which he was assigned, he did manage, while in the service, to maintain a playful romance with a California girl living in New York—the first recorded romantic relationship of Warren's life. Earl had met Ina Perham back in California; she was a student at Oakland's Academy of Fine Arts while Earl was attending nearby Berkeley. Ina was a smart and adventurous young artist, as vivacious as he was staid. She seemed to bring out the mischief in Warren.

“I do wish I could get away from this camp for a few days,” Warren wrote Ina from Camp Lee. “And by the way, don't you
dare
to leave N.Y. before I get up there to see you. . . . The first chance I get I am coming to N.Y. and you must be there to celebrate with me.”

In his letter, Warren allowed himself to complain, something he rarely would do as he became a more public figure. Writing to Ina without such inhibitions, he grumbled about not liking the people of Virginia and about his confinement to the camp: “Just think, I have been here nearly five months, and have only slept outside of camp two nights in all that time.” He worried the war would end before he could fight, and envied another young man who had recently shipped out. “If he ever gets a chance to cut loose at the Huns with machine guns, he can be positive that he has ‘done his bit,'” Warren wrote, adding that he hoped his own bayonet work, once employed in battle, “would kill enough Germans to keep the rest of their army busy.” More personally, Warren encouraged Ina to fend off the advances of an older man, and he attempted humor along with charm. But Warren's naïveté is the letter's dominant undercurrent. He tried, for instance, lamely to joke about Ina's recent weight gains: “So you have gained nine pounds on your trip,” he wrote. “Just you look out or you will be in the heavyweight class, and that isn't the style now, is it?”

Closing his note, Warren added, “Well, ‘Fatty,' I guess I will say ‘olive oil.'”
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Warren did not make it to New York for his hoped-for celebration with Ina Perham and the romance fizzled out, though they maintained a formal friendship through the years. Promoted to first lieutenant on November 4, 1918, he was transferred just a few weeks later to Camp MacArthur in Waco, Texas. And then, quickly, the war ended. Warren was discharged from the Army on December 9, 1918, and returned home to Bakersfield for Christmas. He arrived in uniform and continued to wear it during his job search. Partly the reason was financial: Warren left the service with only $60 in muster pay, and spent much of that on Christmas presents for his family.
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His old suits no longer fit the more muscular veteran, so he did not have much to wear. That said, it did not hurt in 1919 to be identifiable as a veteran while looking for a job.

After a month in Bakersfield, Warren picked up his life again. His old partners had moved on, so he dropped thoughts of starting up the law firm. And he certainly had no interest in staying in Bakersfield, which he already had left once. His sister provided him with an option. Ethel, who had dropped out of high school before graduating, had by then married Vernon Plank, a Southern Pacific man just like Methias, and the couple had moved north.
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Theirs would prove a sad life—Vernon Plank died one day on the golf course before his fiftieth birthday, and their daughter, Dorothy, would die of tuberculosis after a long and unsuccessful attempt at recovery in a sanatorium. But now they offered Earl a base in Northern California, and Earl was by then far more a man of Berkeley than of Bakersfield. He accepted, and headed back to Oakland, by the Bay where he had spent his college years.

Warren stayed for a time with Ethel and Vernon before a chance encounter with old classmates sent him to Sacramento. Leon Gray, a former colleague from Robinson and Robinson, had just been elected to the state legislature from Oakland, and he offered Warren a job as a legislative analyst, a post that paid $5 a day. Warren agreed, but hoped he could find something to supplement that when he got to Sacramento. Soon after arriving, he sought out another classmate, Assemblyman Charlie Kasch. Warren, still in uniform, found Kasch in the legislature and asked him if he would check around for openings. Kasch promised he would. The next morning, Kasch was back at his desk when Warren strode up again, pleased with himself. With the help of still another classmate—Berkeley supplied more than its share of the California state legislature in those years—he had recently landed a job as clerk to the Judiciary Committee, earning $7 a day. “It was a very good [job], even better than he expected,” a friend recalled.
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Warren held the position for the length of that year's legislative session, commencing a career of public service that stretched across more than fifty years with barely an interruption.

Sacramento, this time, was a brief stop—the session ran from January through the spring—and Warren returned to Oakland. Associates had tried to use leverage to force the Alameda district attorney, Ezra Decoto, to hire Warren, but Warren demurred, uncomfortable with the notion of strong-arming his place onto the prosecutor's staff. Instead, he made one last attempt at a private career, hanging out a shingle with Leon Gray. But before Warren could land a single client, the Oakland city attorney, H. L. Hagan, offered Warren a job in his office. Warren would have the chance to advise city officials and defend them from legal action, and he would have access to policy decisions and help guide the public interest. Sensing that his meandering search for a career was over, Warren accepted. “[A]t last,” he said, “the heavy gate was opening for me.”
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Chapter 3

PROSECUTOR, FATHER

CLARENCE A. SEVERIN
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JIM WARREN, ADOPTED SON OF EARL WARREN
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WARREN TURNED DOWN his first chance to become a prosecutor, when he was considered for the job only because his political friends were willing to put pressure on District Attorney Ezra Decoto to hire him. But the alternative, his job in the city attorney's office, though an entry into public service, was never what Warren had in mind for a career. Ever since Bakersfield, he'd dreamed of the ordered romance of trial lawyering. His chance came in early 1920, when Decoto, impressed by the young man who had refused to apply pressure at his disposal, offered to let Warren try cases on behalf of the People of the State of California for $150 a month. That meant taking a pay cut—the job as city attorney paid $200 a month—and it required moving from the modern offices of the city attorney to the county's rickety courthouse, where the district attorney's office was up an old flight of wobbly stairs. None of that mattered to Warren. He was being offered the career he had imagined since he was twelve years old. He accepted, and on May 20, 1920, he became a deputy district attorney for the county of Alameda.
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