by Jim Newton
Bobby was just as daring. So driven was he on the football field—as a high school junior, he started as a defensive guard, and in his senior year moved to starting at offensive center—that his mother refused to go to games, afraid to see him hurt. Bobby played anyway, making the all-city team that year and going on to an impressive college career as well. He also followed his sister’s footsteps into skiing, with one difference: As a boy, Bobby was allowed to spend the night at Lake Tahoe, rather than having to return and head for the slopes again the next morning.31
Initially apprehensive about being California’s First Lady, Nina came to enjoy it and balanced its obligations with her responsibilities for the Warren children. Her small staff adored her. She was blessed, her aides liked to say, with an “educated heart.”32 When she traveled with Earl, she would spy trinkets or modest presents to give to staff members, picking them with care and explaining the gift in such a way that made it more personal. When she gave her secretary, Betty Foot Henderson, a cashmere sweater, Nina explained, “Once you have a cashmere sweater, nothing else is quite as comfortable. My girls just love these, and so do I, and so I just thought you should have one, too.”33
Nina’s attention to others extended beyond her staff. There was a woman who lived nearby in Sacramento. She was alone and on welfare, and survived on modest meals cooked on her hot plate in a one-room apartment. Somehow her path crossed with Nina’s, and Nina was touched by her situation and her pride—the woman refused offers of help. Every so often, when Earl was scheduled to be out of town, Nina would cook a large meal—a turkey, say. She would then call one of the governor’s security officers and instruct him to take it to the woman and to explain to her that Nina had made it expecting the governor to return and then had learned that he was busy for dinner. Nina would then phone the woman and urge her to take the food. “Please do me a favor and take this food off my hands,” she asked. Happy to do so, the woman would then invite other struggling neighbors to join her in a meal provided by California’s First Lady. “So you see,” Betty Foot Henderson recalled, “Mrs. Warren’s gifts were more than giving.”34
Nina Warren enjoyed her husband’s success, and ran the governor’s mansion with the same cheerful efficiency that she had shown at 88 Vernon. Earl Warren’s rising stature did, however, expose him to a wider range of celebrities, and Nina occasionally displayed a protective streak. There was, for instance, the time that Warren was invited to lead a parade in the coastal city of Monterey. His staff accepted the invitation, but Nina Warren asked to skip the event and stay home. When that was communicated to the sponsors, they suggested that Ginger Rogers accompany the governor. Warren’s aide agreed. “The governor will be very happy,” he said. “Miss Rogers is a friend of theirs.” Earl might have been agreeable to spending an afternoon in an open car with a beautiful actress, but Nina was not about to let that happen. When her assistants heard of the arrangements, one turned to another and remarked, “I’ll bet Mrs. Warren decides to go.” The parade went off as scheduled, led by two cars. One carried Ginger Rogers, the other bore Nina and Earl Warren. 35
WARREN’ S EXTRAORDINARY record and centrist appeal—the tax-cutter who still managed to attack segregation and build roads and water projects, hospitals, prisons, and mental health facilities—drew him back to national politics through the 1940s. As in 1944, the run-up to the 1948 Republican convention centered first on Dewey, the party’s presumptive nominee, but Warren remained a contender in his own right. Coming to Philadelphia as the head of California’s delegation and with its votes pledged to him, Warren stood an outside chance at securing the nomination if it deadlocked between Dewey and his principal rivals, Harold Stassen, Arthur Vandenberg, and Robert Taft.
On June 23, 1948, Warren’s old friend, University of California president Robert Gordon Sproul, placed Earl Warren’s name in nomination for the presidency of the United States. His speech was given in Warren’s name and in keeping with his gentle style of persuasion. No rivals were derided, no nastiness expressed. “Our pleasant difficulty,” Sproul told the delegates, “is the selection from among these well-qualified aspirants, of that one [who] will most surely appeal to the majority of the voters of the country, in all its parts and from all walks of life.”36 Sproul’s nomination of his friend was relatively brief—just fifteen minutes—but it wittily and thoughtfully summed up Warren’s appeal. Warren, Sproul said, was a man raised modestly, a university graduate—“and of no mean university,” the university president added for laughs—a lawyer, a veteran, and a dynamic, vigorous leader:
He is a modest man, with a high sense of duty, who surrounds himself with men of similar character, with records of achievement elsewhere than in a corrupt city or county machine. . . .As Governor of California, a commonwealth larger, wealthier and more complex than many of the nations of the world, Earl Warren has demonstrated unusual capacity to replace public dissatisfaction with government by good will, confidence and cooperation. He is calm, logical and judicial in his approach to the problems of government.37
Explaining Warren’s political philosophy to the delegates, Sproul was emphatic: “Earl Warren is a liberal,” he said, “but only in the true sense of that much-abused word, i.e. he understands the basic forces at work in our society, and recognizes the weaknesses and defects of our system, as well as the unmatched merit of its performance and promise.” Finally, after recounting Warren’s tremendous string of political successes in California, Sproul insisted that Warren could win nationally as well. “Make no mistake about it,” Sproul said, “this man Warren has the mark of victory upon him.”38
Not in 1948. Warren hoped protracted disagreement would turn the convention to him, but he did little to help his own cause. He arrived with California’s 53 delegates in his pocket and hoped for a long enough deadlock that other candidates would fold and release their votes. Instead, Dewey came on strong. Needing 548 votes to secure the nomination, he got 434 on the first ballot. He picked up 81 more in the second round and was clearly rolling toward a victory when Warren, seeing there was no more use in fighting, called to concede and to pledge California’s delegates to Dewey’s cause. That sealed the nomination, and then Dewey turned to the same idea he had tried but failed to execute in 1944. He leaned on Warren to accept the vice presidency. At four-thirty A.M. on June 25, with the sky still dark over Philadelphia, Dewey summoned Warren to his hotel suite and began to work on him.39 For hours, the New York governor tried to persuade Warren to take a spot on the ticket—the same spot Warren had turned down in 1944 and vowed not to accept this year. Warren attempted various defenses. He objected to taking a cut in pay to become vice president; Dewey vowed to seek an increase. Warren complained that he would have little to do beyond presiding over the Senate; Dewey promised to make him a member of the cabinet. And this time, Dewey impressed another fact on Warren: Party leaders would not come calling forever. Warren might prefer the top of the ticket, but it was not his, and should he continue to rebuff the party, it might well lose interest in him.
Sometime during those talks, Eugene Meyer, patriarch of the Washington Post, found a moment to twist Warren’s arm further, implying that Warren’s resistance was egotism. “No man,” Meyer told the governor, “is too big to run for Vice President.” 40 It was this year or nothing, Warren became convinced. Sometime after dawn Warren gave in.41 He trudged back to his hotel suite and broke the news to Nina, who reluctantly endorsed the idea but worried her husband would not take well to running in Dewey’s shadow.
“For the first time in my life, I know what it feels like to get hit by a street-car,” Warren told the convention. He proceeded to stammer out an acceptance speech and pledged to wage a “great crusade” for the Republican ticket and to give Dewey his full support as president. That night, Warren called home to tell his sons the news. Bobby answered the phone, and his father told him he had been nominated by the Republican Party to run for the vice presidency of the United States. “Is that good?” Bobby ask
ed.42
The crusade was a curious one, reflecting both Warren’s discomfort in the fast waters of partisan politics and Dewey’s firm conviction that the presidency was his to lose. He had reason to think this was a Republican year. The Democrats spent much of the summer tearing themselves to pieces. Young Strom Thurmond led the States’ Rights Party, known as the “Dixiecrats,” in their abandonment of Truman; they instead held their own convention and named Thurmond as the South’s candidate for president. Henry Wallace, meanwhile, attempted to stake out the left, launching his own presidential bid under the Progressive banner. Amid that confusion, Warren and Dewey conducted a mild, issue-free effort. In fact, Warren took the first weeks of the campaign off, heading to Santa Monica to join his family for time at the beach.
When Warren did begin the campaign in earnest, he followed orders issued by the top-heavy Dewey organization. They made a few perfunctory joint appearances, including a memorable one with both their families. At that gathering, Tom Dewey, Jr., found himself transfixed by Dorothy Warren—“Look at the camera, please, Tom,” his father implored.43 After that, however, the two candidates largely campaigned independently of each other. Warren’s principal contribution was a thirty-one-day train trip that took him to most of the United States—outside the South, that is, where Republican inroads were deemed impossible.
When there were just six weeks to go before Election Day, Warren boarded his special campaign train in Sacramento and headed east, accompanied by his wife Nina and daughter Virginia, as well as stalwart Bill Sweigert, who joined the campaign in order to lend Warren help writing speeches. As the train prepared to pull away, the Warrens came to the rail and smiled broadly for the crowd. Warren leaned forward toward the camera, his flashy tie jutting from his double-breasted suit. At his left elbow was Nina, striking in a flowered hat, gloved hands gently resting on the rail. Behind and between her parents Virginia beamed.44 The fourteen-car train, the Aleutian, then pulled out of the station. On board, Warren settled in with the newsmen. He drank three bourbon highballs and in between them sucked on lemon drops for his voice. He carried a copy of Churchill’s The Gathering Storm. Warren worked, read, and socialized. By midnight, as the train raced through the night and across the Nevada plain, he was asleep.45
Although the atmosphere of the train in those weeks was exciting—devoted crowds met the governor and his party at every stop—it also was wearing. It was, Warren recalled later, “a grind.”46 Warren woke early, rising sometimes on the train, sometimes in a local hotel. He spoke to a crowd almost every morning, then the train pulled out and stopped once or twice during the day. Between stops, while newsmen and staff relaxed, Sweigert would organize his thoughts and then put the next speech on paper. He then would share it with Warren, who would pull it back apart, and both men then would try to put it back together yet again. It was agonizing and repetitive. “My life,” Sweigert said, “was a life of misery on that train.”47 What’s more, the speeches were singularly uninspired, as Warren was under strict orders from the Dewey team not to rock the boat. This was to be a safe campaign, and so the speeches were written to be bland. Nothing was to be said or done that would disrupt the Republicans’ ordained return to power that year.
So convinced were the pundits of the ticket’s victory that solidly Republican Time magazine treated Warren’s tour more as a victory lap than as a barnstorm. On the second night of the trip, Warren addressed a Republican gathering in Salt Lake City and asked what Time and others called the central question of the campaign: “Is the present national administration displaying the unity, the competence and the leadership to warrant extending its tenure to 20 years? Or has the time come for better housekeeping methods that can only be supplied by new leadership and a new broom?”
Warren asked the question. Time answered it: “By every available piece of evidence, the voters had already made up their minds to answer: yes, it’s time for a change. That was why Earl Warren could afford to campaign like a big, friendly Saint Bernard, tail-wagging his way east across the nation. The Republicans had only to raise no ruckus, make no thumping blunders, keep their fingers crossed against a world upheaval—and their election seemed assured.”48
That plan guaranteed a dull campaign, and Warren helped provide it. Traveling through the West, Warren held forth about the region and its growth, its emerging position as the American center of gravity, an empire unto itself. He knew the West and showed it. He remarked on dams that had helped conserve its water, he discussed the issues of farmers and developers, the importance of migration and resources, the common Spanish heritage of the Southwestern states. His familiarity was charming, and even his gaffes were appreciated, as when he began one speech by praising Governor Dewey for his “great record in the State of California.” The crowd laughed, and Warren corrected himself: “I mean in the State of New York. You know I can’t get away from California. I never wanted to, anyway.”49
That last aside was revealing. Throughout the record of his thirty-one-day voyage, one senses his longing for California. Warren dutifully performed the role of vice presidential candidate. He lamented the disjointed state of American foreign policy, he demonstrated his own Republican internationalism by embracing the United Nations, he even launched a brief attack on the Truman administration’s vulnerability to domestic Communists. “If Tom Dewey becomes President of the United States,” Warren said in Cincinnati, “. . . you will have no further trouble about getting Communists out of the national government because he will just never let them in.” Communists had infiltrated the Truman government, Warren added, “because at times the national administration has become soft on Communists. They have catered to their votes, and when they got their votes they owed them something, and because they owed them something, some of them infiltrated our government.”50
But Warren’s appearances felt forced, and the attack on Truman’s handling of Communists demonstrated it. To suggest that Truman’s trouble with Communists was the result of electoral politics—that he needed their votes and rewarded them with jobs—fell somewhere between nonsensical and laughable. In either case, it was far below Warren’s normal standards for political debate and suggests the extent to which he was operating out of his element. Virginia Warren, while enjoying the summer—with its professional, high-speed hubbub of reporters and staff—also describes her father as a harried figure in those weeks, always forced to write another speech and welcome another dignitary. 51
While Warren and Dewey cautiously circled the country and tried to run out the clock, Harry Truman campaigned his way. He summoned the Republican-majority 80th Congress back to Washington and dared it to follow the lead of its party platform in enacting humane legislation. When Congress adjourned with little to show for itself, Truman had an issue. And on the stump, he was as feisty as Dewey and Warren were staid. Two days after Warren left California for his tour, Truman set out on his own, taking one of several train trips from which the phrase “whistle-stop campaign” was born. (Robert Taft, deriding Truman’s rambunctious campaign, accused the president of “blackguarding Congress at every whistle stop station in the West.” Truman turned the remark to his own populist advantage; at each stop, the president would ask the crowds whether they considered themselves residents of a “whistle stop” or a town.52) The beginning of the trip also gave the campaign its most memorable sound bite. As the train pulled away from Washington, Truman’s running mate, Alben Barkley, yelled to the president, “Mow ’em down, Harry!” Truman responded, “I’m going to give ’em hell!” From then on, at almost every speech, someone would yell from the crowd, “Give ’em hell, Harry,” to which Truman would often reply, “I’ll just tell the truth, and they’ll think it’s hell.”53
Truman’s vigor merely underscored the torpor of Dewey and Warren. Constrained by their analysis of the race, they made little news. And Dewey compounded voters’ suspicions with his arrogance. For Warren, one moment crystallized the frustrations of their failing effort: Camp
aigning away from Warren, Dewey too was on a train, and one day as he addressed a crowd, the car jerked (the engineer, Warren speculated in his memoirs, may have been testing the air brakes, an observation less interesting for its accuracy than for the fact that Warren, writing in his seventies, still remembered a thing or two about trains). “They should take that engineer out and shoot him at sunrise,” Dewey exclaimed to the crowd. Warren groaned. It was, he wrote, “a most unfortunate utterance.”54
Only in the final leg of the trip, as the Warren train rolled back across the northern plains and again hit the West Coast, did the vice presidential candidate seem to relax. Rounded up by Helen MacGregor, the younger children joined the Warrens in Wenatchee, Washington, a few days before the trip concluded. They boarded the train to help celebrate their parents’ anniversary, and then to ride the last miles home to California. The governor showed off his youngsters and joked as he introduced them to the crowd early that morning. “And here’s the man of the family,” Warren said, picking on Bobby. “You know, we had Bobby believing a few moments ago that he was going to have to make a speech here.” The crowd laughed along with the Warrens, comfortable in their company again. 55
Four days after the Warren children joined the train in Washington, the Warrens were home. “I can’t begin to tell you how good it feels to get back to California,” Warren said as the Aleutian arrived in Sacramento. “I say that without any disparagement of the 31 other states we have visited since we left Sacramento on this tour Sept. 15. You who live in California know that no apologies are necessary when a Californian declares he is glad to be back in this wonderful state of ours.”56 Over the course of thirty-one days and nights, those were the truest words that Earl Warren uttered.