by Jim Newton
The next day brought more bad news, and a further increase in the pressure. Harold Stassen, long-standing leader of the Republican Party’s liberals, wired Nixon to tell him to pull the plug. “After a thoughtful review of the entire situation, Dick, I have regretfully reached a conclusion which [I] feel that I should frankly tell you,” he wrote, forwarding along a statement for Nixon to read. Its conclusion: Nixon, Stassen felt, should offer to quit. “If [Eisenhower] decides to accept your offer,” Stassen said, “Earl Warren should be named to step in.”56
Warren was silent. Just as Warren’s fall in Chicago had paved the way for Nixon’s ascent, so now did Nixon’s potential fall offer opportunity for Warren. He watched and waited. As late as September 22, four days after the stories had first broken, Warren remained aloof, “withholding comment . . . until all the evidence has been presented.”57 Finally, on September 23, Nixon spoke. He addressed the nation on television, speaking from Los Angeles at six-thirty that night. Forever remembered as the “Checkers” speech, Nixon’s address emphasized that he had received none of the money from the fund, that it had underwritten expenses but paid him no salary, that in contrast to his well-to-do Democratic opponents, Nixon and his wife Pat were a couple of modest income. “I should say this,” he implored, “that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat, but she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat; and I always tell her that she’d look good in anything.”58
The speech’s signature passage, however, was one of mawkish defiance:
One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog; and, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from the Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us.
We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little Cocker Spaniel dog, in a crate, that he’d sent all the way from Texas; black and white spotted, and our little girl, Tricia, the six-year-old girl, named it “Checkers.” And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog; and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep him.59
That was Nixon’s touch: He was a decent, average man, and his opponents were the type of people who would take a puppy from a six-year-old. His tactical success, meanwhile, was in asking viewers to register their response to his speech by wiring the Republican National Committee. Nixon promised he would accept the committee’s judgment. With that, he left the stage, angry with himself for overrunning his time, sure that he had failed.60 He had not. Thousands of letters and telegrams poured in, overwhelmingly in support of Nixon. Not everyone liked the speech; Eisenhower, for one, was furious at Nixon’s demand that the Democratic candidates disclose their personal finances; the general well knew that if they complied, he would have to as well. As Nixon reached that point in his address, Eisenhower, holding a pencil and a legal pad, pressed so hard that the pencil point snapped.61 But once the public had spoken, Eisenhower had no choice. He summoned Nixon to Wheeling, West Virginia, and, when Nixon arrived, greeted him at the plane. Nixon was flustered and responded that Eisenhower had not needed to meet him.
“Why not?” Eisenhower asked. “You’re my boy.”62
Nixon’s future was saved, and the Checkers speech passed into history as a signature act of self-recovery. Less remembered, however, is how close Nixon’s career came to ending that September. And still less recalled is the role that Warren played in it. While Warren did not himself leak the secret-fund story, people loyal to him apparently did. Leo Katcher, the New York Post reporter who was among the first to break the story, would later go on to write an admiring biography of the then chief justice in 1967, and Warren, alarmed that Katcher would embark on such a project, took unusual pains to make sure others knew he was not cooperating with it.63 In that book, Katcher would claim that he first heard of the fund from “an intimate of Nixon,” and would discount rumors that Warren friends were behind it,64 but years earlier, when the story was still fresh, he attributed it to a “Warren Republican”65 unhappy with Nixon’s selection as vice president. Warren himself, though tactically distant from the leak, nevertheless was happy to let Nixon dangle and to let others lean on Eisenhower. When Nixon saved himself, Warren had no choice but to come back to the ticket. He had, however, enjoyed the spectacle.
Once the fund controversy had subsided—aided substantially by the fact that Adlai Stevenson also kept such a fund—the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket got back on track. Aided by a confused Democratic ticket—in a vain effort to achieve balance, the Democrats paired liberal intellectual Stevenson with Alabama senator John Sparkman, added to attract Southern voters uncomfortable with Stevenson. The gambit partially succeeded—the Deep South stayed with the Democrats in November. But the price for the continued loyalty of those votes was the failure of the ticket in virtually every other part of the country. In the West, Warren did his duty, appearing for Eisenhower and Nixon and helping to put out a late-breaking controversy. When Eisenhower had bumblingly implied that he would not support federal government involvement in the further development of Western water and power, Warren was hustled in to deliver a speech to California, Oregon, and Washington, which depended on those resources. “Out here,” Warren reported calmingly, “Eisenhower stands for the development of our great river basins, the development of hydroelectric power, irrigation and all the other multiple purposes that water can be used for.”66 That crisis averted, Eisenhower succeeded in carrying all three of those states, along with the rest of the Western United States. His war-hero popularity and the Democrats’ uncertainty on issues such as civil rights—exemplified by their cobbled-together ticket of North and South, urban and rural—carried Ike to sweeping victory. On Election Day, he won over 33 million votes, almost 55 percent of those cast. His victory included the first Republican inroads on the periphery of the Old South since the Civil War, as Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida all went to Eisenhower and Nixon.
Eisenhower then moved to construct his cabinet, finding no place there for Warren that Warren wanted. Warren instead returned to Sacramento, where his first post-election act was the naming of a new senator to fill the vacancy left by Nixon’s departure for the vice presidency. Warren picked Tom Kuchel, then serving as California’s state controller. Kuchel, a liberal Republican in Warren’s tradition, accepted the post but asked Warren if he could take Merrell Small, Warren’s top press aide, with him to Washington. Kuchel needed Small, he explained, because he was going to Washington without any experience or contacts there and needed an assistant he could trust. “Tom, I have stolen so many men from friends of mine to set up my organization that I can hardly object to your committing a little larceny on me,” Warren replied.67 With Kuchel’s appointment, Warren’s influence on the California congressional delegation went from substantial to profound: Kuchel joined Knowland in Washington, so both California senators now had been placed there by Warren.
Small’s departure stirred speculation that Warren was closing up his governorship and preparing to move to Washington (later in the summer, the rumors would redouble, as Warren named Helen MacGregor to serve as a member of the board overseeing the California Youth Authority). He continued to serve, however, and on July 1, 1953, signed the Ralph M. Brown Act, providing for public and press access to the meetings of state and local governments. It was a fitting act for an heir to Hiram Johnson, whose tenure would always be remembered for its forceful ejection of the Southern Pacific from the back rooms of California government. Now Warren moved to complete that crusade by opening the rooms themselves. Although the Brown Act has been subjected to much criticism over the years—some government officials complain that it forces them to do too much in the open, slowing deliberations and confining their ability to cut deals—it survives and sets the parameters of an open government in California.
Warren realized, however, that it was time to move on. He was sixty-two years old and had served longer than any man before him as governor of California. He had accomplished more than he had once imagined possible, but was increasingly at odds with powerful elements of his own party. So when Eisenhower proposed that Warren become solicitor general, Warren accepted, taking the post with the understanding that he was there to warm up for a Supreme Court vacancy. And then, on September 8, 1953, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died of his heart attack, and Warren held Ike to his word, extracting from him the chief justiceship of the United States.
On October 2, Warren said farewell to his home state, the state whose politics he had revolutionized, whose rivers he had dammed, whose highways he had built, whose children he had educated, whose extremes he had tempered, softened, and mollified. He left behind an angry right wing, an appreciative Democratic Party, and a jubilant Republican lieutenant governor, Goodwin Knight, at last cleared for the office he had impatiently sought in Warren’s shadow. On that final Friday night of his tenure, Warren’s calm voice—the familiar flat accent, the stylized formal diction—beamed out to California one final time. Some of those who listened had never voted for another governor; some had a hard time imagining California without him. To his colleagues, his voters, and his home, he said good-bye.
“My fellow Californians,” Warren began that Friday night,
For many years I have made a report to you each month over this ABC network concerning the affairs of our State government. Tonight as I leave the service of my State to assume national office, I conclude those reports by endeavoring to say goodbye to my associates who have served both you and me so well throughout the years and to you who have made it possible by your suffrage for us to serve you. . . .
I have been in the service of my city, my county or my State since January, 1919—almost 35 years. It is a long time, and the road we have traveled was not always smooth. But it has been a satisfying experience—every year of it. It is always satisfying when those whom we serve are understanding of our efforts, tolerant of our mistakes and fair in their appraisal of the results obtained. That is exactly the kind of treatment I have received from the people of California during my many years of public service. For it I am very grateful, and in the turmoil and confusion of politics it would have been so easy at times for them not to understand.68
Warren then listed, his pride rich and evident, the accomplishments of his eleven years as governor of the state he had tamed. He spoke of the schools and colleges, highways and canals, hospitals and prisons. He marveled at all that he and California had done, of all those who had come to share in its experience and had arrived to find jobs and welcome. Four million people—four million—migrated to California while Earl Warren was governor. Its Japanese had been expelled, to his great shame, and reabsorbed, to his great credit. When he was a boy, California had shaped him; as an adult, he had refashioned it. Now Warren prepared to leave a state nearly twice the size of the one he inherited, one immeasurably larger, more modern, more sophisticated than the one he grew up in, when Western shoot-outs had captivated him in his Bakersfield boyhood. When Earl Warren became governor of California, the state had 2.9 million cars and 24,000 state workers; when he left it, its bustling freeways carried 5.9 million cars, and the state employed 56,545 workers. The state was in debt when he arrived; he left a balanced budget.69 A hotel maid working in California in 1940 made about $19 a week; by 1953, she made nearly $45 a week. Salaries for auto workers, aircraft builders, and other manufacturing workers similarly tripled or quadrupled. In the state’s motion picture business, a man or woman working in production took home about $55 a week the year before Warren became governor. When he left, that same person made twice that.70
“Where on earth have so many new people been integrated into a Commonwealth in so short a period of time?” he asked. “It is my belief that this accomplishment, which is your accomplishment, will be recorded in history as one of the most outstanding of our generation.”
And then he concluded:
I do not intend to cut my moorings from my State. Here I was born. Here Mrs. Warren and I have reared our family. Here our children have attended the public schools. . . . Here our fondest memories and our greatest hopes are. Here my home will always be. . . .
I thank all of you—the people of California—from the bottom of my heart. You have been so gracious to me and to my family. I thank you all for your kindness through the years, and I pledge you my continued interest in the welfare of your California and my California—the greatest place on earth in which to live.71
Warren would never again appear before California’s people as their governor. His speech concluded the second great act of his three-act life, bringing to a close the years in which he fashioned a new California out of his own solidifying politics. He had begun 1942 as a politician seeking firm principles. That year’s campaign had helped broaden and toughen him; the gubernatorial years had only furthered that development. His centrism in 1953 was no longer merely a middle course between left and right but an activist, humane philosophy of leadership. Warren had invented affirmative nonpartisanship for California; now he prepared to carry that with him to Washington, where the nation was about to learn what it meant to be governed by Earl Warren’s humanism.
But before he finished and left for Washington, Warren had one last piece of business to conclude, one remaining loose end whose string connected back to his youthful rise. Warren’s political ascent could well be said to have begun with his Point Lobos prosecution. That case had established his credentials on the business side of California’s then wide labor-business chasm. That case had helped Warren befriend the Chandlers, helped seal his attachment to the Knowlands. It had angered Carey McWilliams, Max Radin, and California’s vigorous, engaged left. By 1953, few people remembered it. The emotions it aroused, once so intense, were now quieter, more reflective. But a shadow of that case remained.
Ernest Ramsay, freed by Culbert Olson over Warren’s denunciations, in fact remained just part free in 1953. His criminal conviction still haunted his record, and that year he faced deportation to Canada because he was a felon. His appeals were exhausted, and Ramsay was on the verge of removal from the United States. For nearly thirty years, the lives of Ernest Ramsay and Earl Warren had been intertwined by the events in a darkened cabin on the Point Lobos—by Warren’s prosecution of that crime, by Ramsay’s prison sentence for it, by Olson’s release of Ramsay, by Warren’s anger over that release.
Earl Warren would never admit he was wrong about Point Lobos, never admit that his office overstepped, much less concede that Ramsay or the other defendants were anything but guilty as charged.72 But now, in those final hours of his governorship, he and Ramsay crossed paths one more time. Just before leaving for Washington, Earl Warren reviewed Ramsay’s case, asked whether Ramsey would be willing to testify if the lone fugitive from the case ever turned up, and was assured that Ramsay would.73 With that, Warren signed the pardon for Ernest Ramsay, wiping his record clean. 74
The governorship was over. Earl Warren had cut the last mooring that tied him to his youthful life as a prosecutor. The following Monday morning, Warren was sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States.
PART THREE
AMERICAN JUSTICE
Chapter 15
THE CHIEF AND HIS COURT 1
Where there is injustice, we should correct it; where there is poverty, we should eliminate it; where there is corruption, we should stamp it out; where there is violence, we should punish it; where there is neglect, we should provide care; where there is war, we should restore peace; and wherever corrections are achieved we should add them to our storehouse of treasures.
EARL WARREN 2
WHEN EARL WARREN departed California, he left behind a personal staff of advisers, more than a dozen department heads, and a team of secretaries. He had commanded a $1 billion budget with functions spread across America’s second-mos
t-populous state. Arriving in Washington, he put all of that behind him. Now Warren had a secretary and three law clerks, along with a handful of Court workers, messengers, security guards, and custodial workers. He brought just one assistant with him, a personal secretary named Maggie Bryan, to handle California mail.
Though he was chief in name, Warren in fact was colleague to eight men, heirs to an institution unlike the other branches of federal government—one whose members served for life and answered to no voter, one whose character blended the cool reasoning of legal analysis with the hot urgency of national politics, and one distinctly male. Not until Sandra Day O’Connor’s appointment in 1981 did a woman sit on the Court. Until then, the men who occupied America’s high bench at times resembled nine elbowing brothers, each with his own place at a boisterous table. With no terms of office, the justices fought, then returned to fight again, year after year. Isolated from conventional politics, bound by the secrecy of their deliberations, their colleagues became their families; wives of deceased justices remained part of the Court even after their husbands had died, returning for annual dinners, joining in retirement celebrations and funerals. When children married, the justices would chip in and buy a silver platter for the new couple. They were “the brethren.”
Proximity and time fused them in a common endeavor, but also ripened differences. By the time Warren joined the Court in October 1953, the surface commonality of the bench—the other eight members had been placed there by Democrats during the party’s long reign from FDR through Truman—belied deep doctrinal and personal disagreements. Those had been nursed over time, and flared occasionally in public, more often in the weekly conferences of the justices.