Good-Tempered Candidate

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The special train snaked down the eastern slopes of the green Sierra, its engine backing slowly around the hairpin curves and through the snowsheds. It stopped briefly at Truckee, rolled on across the Nevada line to Reno, on to the Southern Pacific division point at Sparks. As darkness fell, the train picked up speed, racing along the alkali sinks of the bare Nevada countryside.

In his private car (the Aleutian), California's Governor Earl Warren, a man noted for his hearty friendliness, chatted with newsmen, read some pages of Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm, leisurely drank three bourbon highballs before dinner. By midnight, as the train headed toward Utah, he was asleep.

The 14-car "VicePresidential Special" was off on a 31-day tour. Candidate Warren planned to make 25 speeches and 57 platform appearances in 30 of the 48 states. A politician of considerable consistency, he had set the tone and spirit of his campaign within the first 24 hours.

He was no crusader, setting forth like Wendell Willkie to take the nation by storm. He was no debonair partisan like Franklin Roosevelt, raking the opposition with scornful broadsides.

Friendly, homy Earl Warren was not mad at anyone. He was simply going out to meet the folks and to show himself, his wife and his pretty 20-year-old daughter Virginia to the voters. He wanted to assure everyone that the nation was fundamentally sound, and that the best way to keep it sound was to elect a Republican administration in November.

Stories & Lemon Drops. From the moment that the Warren train pulled out of Sacramento, the atmosphere aboard resembled a good-will tour. The whole first day, in his invariable double-breasted suit, Candidate Warren had roamed informally through the cars, swapping stories, munching lemon drops to keep his voice in trim, inviting newsmen back to inspect his own quarters. He arranged to have lunch with a few newsmen every day "so you can get to know me better."

At every whistle stop he appeared on the back platform, amiable and chummy, to pass the time of day with the little crowds that gathered. He flourished no political banners, viewed nothing with alarm. He waved to his friends, signed autographs, clambered down to shake hands with the air of a man who really liked people, and liked to meet new ones.

He talked mostly about the West, "the greatest place on earth to live." He devoted most of another informal little speech to reminiscing about his father's job on the Southern Pacific, his own early days as a summer roustabout. "I thought I might have been a pretty good railroader," he chuckled, "but my father saw I was a failure and had no choice but to make a lawyer out of me."

Unorthodox Approach. The second night Warren appeared in Salt Lake City for the first formal speech of his campaign. It was here that he might have been expected to throw off his folksy, nonpartisan role for a slashing attack on the Democratic administration. Instead, Candidate Warren unmistakably showed his intention of campaigning in his own unorthodox way, in the same reasoned, almost nonpartisan approach which he had used in his successful California campaigns for attorney general and governor. The 1,700 Republican workers, who only half filled the South High School auditorium, listened in bewildered silence.

The real problems facing the U.S., said Warren, went beyond party and beyond purely internal affairs. They could not be laid at the feet of "any one individual, any political party or any national administration." Most of them had been caused by "world forces beyond the control of the American people."

The solution did not lie in the partisans' theory that "all good flows from their own party and all political evil from the other." Said Earl Warren: "The vast majority of Americans know . . . that good Americans are to be found in both parties. They realize that there are progressives and conservatives in the ranks of both. They know that party affiliation does not change human instincts or affect loyalty to country ... No party has a patent on progress, a copyright on governmental principles or a proprietary interest in the advances made in former days."

Then Candidate Warren stated the issue of the 1948 campaign in a nutshell: "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?"

No Default. 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.

But even such an apparently foregone result did not mean that the campaign was going to go by default. President Harry Truman, who never says die, had roared out of Washington promising to "give 'em hell," and promptly proceeded to do so in one of the most inflammatory speeches he had delivered to date. Before the week was out, the September campaign circuits would be jammed with the trails of Alben Barkley, Henry Wallace, and the Dixiecrats' J. Strom Thurmond. The nation's cartoonists were already hard at work. Before Nov. 2, the air would be crisscrossed with brickbats, insults and loud appeals to party spirit.

The whole noisy show was as much a part of U.S. politics as the convention hall. Was there any point to it? In the age of radio, television and public-opinion polls, was the American political campaign an outmoded phenomenon?

"A Horrid-Looking Wretch." No two campaigns have ever been exactly alike. They have been fought on such varied issues as Van Buren's high living ("Van, Van is a used-up man"), Al Smith's Catholicism, and Buchanan's bachelorhood ("Who ever heard in all his life, of a candidate without a wife?"). They have been won by a McKinley, sitting quietly on the front porch of his Canton, Ohio home; and lost by a Bryan, carrying his crusade 18,000 miles through 29 states. They have caused the death of at least one candidate: famed Editor Horace Greeley, who died three weeks after his defeat by President U.S. Grant.

They have descended to vicious mudslinging. Abraham Lincoln was once described as "a horrid-looking wretch . . . sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper and the night man." Andrew Jackson's mother was accused of being "a common prostitute, brought to this country by British soldiers."

And at least two elections have been decided by trifling campaign bobbles. In 1884, the Republicans' James G. Elaine lost wet, Catholic New York--and thereby the nation--when an ill-advised supporter rashly labeled the Democrats the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." It is political legend that the Republicans' Charles Evans Hughes lost California, and the nation, to Wilson by failing to shake the hand of California's potent Senator Hiram Johnson.

October Rain. But did any campaign ever have a decisive effect in a race which seemed over before it began? This was not the first time that question had been raised. It had been brought up in 1936, when it was obvious from the outset that no Republican could hope to unhorse Franklin Roosevelt. It had been brought up even earlier, when Calvin Coolidge walked away with the 1924 election by sitting on a single pre-campaign pronouncement: "I am for economy. After that I am for more economy."

The best proof that campaigns have their uses was the fact that few candidates had ever dared to ignore them. As long as one party was on the stump, the opposition could not afford to be silent. Even Franklin Roosevelt, confident as ever in 1944, became so alarmed by the possible inroads of the Dewey attack, and the whispers about his health, that he hustled out of Washington for his famed 51-mile ride through New York City in a drenching October rain.

Beyond that, a campaign was the one way to whip up the faithful party workers, charged with bringing out the party vote. It was a way to stir up interest among the bored and doubtful, to translate votes on a poll into votes in the ballot box. Above all, it was the great chance for any politician to get out where he could see and be seen, where he could make friends and influence voters, where he could work his political pitch at the grassroots level.

That was where Earl Warren fitted into Republican strategy for 1948. He brought some obvious political advantages to any party ticket: his straightforward, reassuring personality, his home in a key state, his handsome family, his undeniable success at the polls. In a campaign designed to reassure the voters, he was the living, beaming embodiment of reassurance.

It was no accident that Earl Warren had been chosen to spread the gospel of friendliness, moderation and teamwork. His whole life has been geared to just those principles. An energetic, workmanlike administrator, he has always taken pains to ruffle no feelings, stick close to the middle of the road, and work in close harness with his subordinates.

His big contribution to modern U.S. politics is the somewhat novel discovery that good government does not necessarily depend on good party politics. As a candidate for governor of California in 1946 he won an unprecedented renomination on both Democratic and Republican tickets, promptly appointed men of both parties to state office. To some party regulars, such action was close to party treason. To Warren, it meant a rise in his popularity.

Above the Storm. As a party spokesman, Warren early took his stand with the progressive Republicans--the Deweys, the Stassens and the Vandenbergs, against the Old Guard--the Tabers, the Hallecks, the Martins and the Tafts. He came out strongly for U.N., for the full Marshall Plan appropriations, for universal military training. He has always been an ardent exponent of public power and reclamation projects for the West, of a permanent FEPC, of government assistance for private housing.

He is firmly against Big Government. But he believes that government must act when private initiative cannot. One of his few disagreements with Tom Dewey is his advocacy of government health insurance, at the state level. When the special session of Congress failed to act on housing and high prices last summer, Earl Warren was one of the few Republicans who publicly criticized Congress' do-nothing approach on these issues.

As his campaign train rolled through the Royal Gorge of the Rockies, south through Colorado and into New Mexico, it was clear that Earl Warren was more determined than ever to stay above the infighting. Not until he reached Tulsa this week did he give the sins of the Democrats more than a passing swipe.

In Tulsa's Coliseum, he answered Harry Truman's declaration of war: "Such a threat can prove only . . . that the incumbent Administration is a shambles; that it is dispirited, chaotic, quarrelsome and desperate . . . The Democratic Party, and its splinters, present to the people of the U.S. in this national campaign a sorry spectacle of warring factions, city machines, rebellious elements, pressure minorities, fellow travelers and left-wingers."

But Earl Warren spoke more in sorrow than in anger. He took off for the East, still concentrating on being the candidate who is mad at nobody.

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