California Clash

"You are a damned liar," exploded the Chief Justice of the United States at a Washington cocktail party last week. Heads turned amid the crush of Justices, Senators, Congressmen and newsmen to see Earl Warren face off against Earl Mazo, 40, New York Herald Tribune reporter and author of the notably fair-minded new biography, Richard Nixon, a Political and Personal Portrait (see BOOKS).

Minutes after being introduced to Mazo, Warren attacked a passage of the book that opened up one of the old sores of California Republicanism: how Nixon won his 1950 Senate race without ever being endorsed by name by Republican Warren, then California's Governor. Author Mazo, complained the Chief Justice, was just trying to "promote the presidential candidacy of Nixon ... I don't care what you write about Nixon as long as you don't try to build him up over my body."

Repeatedly during the 20-minute, standing-up conversation, Warren held clenched fists before him, handcuffed-style, said: "Look, I'm handcuffed, really handcuffed." As Chief Justice, he explained, he could not hold news conferences to refute "lying" stories, was powerless to defend himself. "Have you read the book?" asked Mazo. When Warren admitted that he had only read excerpts in Look magazine and some book reviews, it was Polish-born, South Carolina-raised Earl Mazo who blew up. Said he: "I hope to God for the sake of the country that your decisions are based on much more full and accurate evidence than judgments on a book you haven't even read." Newsmen who had overheard the conversation at first agreed that they would consider it off the record; but the story, too intriguing and important to keep quiet, was printed two days later, first by Des Moines Register and Tribune Correspondent Clark Mollenhoff.

Host Barnet Nover, Denver Postman and old Washington hand, finally succeeded in moving Warren and Mazo to a corner of the room, where they talked for nearly an hour. Finally, Earl Warren put his hand on Earl Maze's shoulder and said, "Come see me sometime to talk things over," and left.

No-Name Endorsement. Warren's dislike for "a fellow named Nixon" began with Nixon's first race for Congress in Southern California in 1946. It picked up steam after Nixon's election, because Warren, in his campaign for Governor, was virtually nonpartisan, while Nixon was enthusiastically partisan and attracted the support of Southern California Republicans who wanted to build a permanent party organization.

When Nixon made his celebrated race for the Senate in 1950 against Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas, Governor Warren withheld endorsement until the Nixon forces goaded Mrs. Douglas into endorsing Warren's Democratic rival for Governor, Jimmy Roosevelt. Warren then endorsed Nixon in this wondrous, no-name way: "In view of ... Mrs. Douglas' . . . statement, I might ask her how she expects I will vote when I mark my ballot for U.S. Senator next Tuesday."

The big break came in 1952, before the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Warren, as he led the California convention eastward by train, had high hopes that he might get the presidential nomination through an Eisenhower-Taft deadlock. (He had been Tom Dewey's running mate in 1948.) Nixon, though pledged with the California delegation to Warren for President, was an active Eisenhower advocate who had also talked privately about the vice presidency with Ikemen Tom Dewey and Herbert Brownell. Fresh from Chicago convention headquarters, Nixon swung aboard the Warren train at Denver, began spreading the word of Eisenhower's growing strength, got some Californians to let Warren know that they would stick with him only in the first ballot, then swing to Ike. The threatened rebellion never came off, because Eisenhower got the nomination on the first ballot. But Earl Warren, bitterly disappointed, according to one friend, "to his dying day will believe that Nixon sold him out."

Blackball. Nixon's view of the rift, according to Mazo: "We are not unfriendly. We are two individuals going our own ways." Last week the Chicago Tribune's Walter Trohan added another note. According to the Tribune, Chief Justice Warren in 1957 blackballed an invitation to Vice President Nixon from the American Bar Association to attend the celebrated London meeting at which more than 3,000 U.S. and British lawyers examined the basis of the common law (TIME, Aug. 5, 1957). Said Warren, according to the Tribune, to David Maxwell, then president of the A.B.A.: "If you let that fellow in, count me out." The A.B.A. board of governors studied the unusual situation, decided not to issue the invitation to the Vice President because it had already invited and had the formal acceptance of Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States.

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