The Senator From Formosa

In the 1950s, when Ronald Reagan was still an actor, the face and voice of American conservatism was Sen. William F. Knowland of California. Now he is nearly forgotten, but he was a towering figure in the days of Eisenhower, Joe McCarthy and the Cold War.

Knowland was groomed by his father, the owner of the Oakland Tribune, to be president of the United States, but he fell far short of the mark. In the end, he was a defeated man burdened with debt and a messy private life, running the family newspaper into the ground. Finally, in 1974, he took a handgun and killed himself.

Though memories of Knowland have grown dim, they still remain clear to those of us who survived working on the Tribune: a wild, demanding, high-pressure, exhilarating, depressing and heavily alcoholic madhouse. Two of the survivors, Gayle Montgomery, the Trib’s political editor, and James W. Johnson, a former editorial writer, now associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona, have gone back to that era and examined the life of their old boss in a revealing, carefully researched and thoughtful biography, “One Step From the White House.”

The book exposes the huge gulf between a politician’s public and private life. To the world, Knowland was the picture of pompous rectitude. But in reality, he was an undisciplined habitue of Las Vegas who spent the family fortune on gambling and women. Montgomery and Johnson have recounted this life, debt by debt, girlfriend by girlfriend. Yet this was not the central part of Knowland’s life, or of the book. At the height of his power, Knowland was Senate majority leader and a decisive player in the shaping of American foreign policy, especially in Asia. The authors chronicle his time on the world stage, when Knowland was known as “the senator from Formosa” because of his uncompromising support of the Chinese Nationalist regime.

Knowing the man, the paper and his hometown, however, I was disappointed by the book’s spare journalistic style that does not do justice to the era, to the colorful working-class city of Oakland or to the newspaper that was the source of Knowland’s power. I can just hear Fred J. Monteagle, the Tribune’s old assistant city editor, shouting to the writers, “Smoke it up!”

Smoke it up. Make it exciting enough to rate a screaming headline for one of the street editions that rolled out of the Tribune plant, which sprawled over several floors of a ramshackle building that was once a furniture store. Dark, narrow stairways connected the floors, and copy boys traveled them at top speed delivering proofs, copy, engravings and pictures on deadline.

Connected to this building was the Tribune Tower, the most imposing building in town for many years. The tower elevator was operated by a Russian exile named Paul who would stop between floors, especially if the passenger had a Russian name, and recount the glories of the czar.

Near the elevator was the office of the publisher, Joseph R. Knowland, patriarch of the Knowland clan who, as Montgomery and Johnson note, obtained the paper at an extraordinarily low price in a legal dispute with the estate of the late widow Hermania Peralta Dargie. (The family of the judge who awarded the paper to Knowland was rewarded over the years with the Tribune’s support in political campaigns.)

The paper was on Franklin Street, nicknamed Bash Boulevard by the Tribune’s then-sports editor, Alan Ward. The street was where the fight crowd hung out; the managers, promoters and old fighters drinking at a bar called the Ringside. We reporters favored the Hollow Leg and the Mint Julep. The printers drank at the Alaska, open at 6 a.m. Not far away was City Hall, controlled by the Knowlands as surely as they controlled the paper. The press room was on the first floor. Its ceiling was riddled with bullet holes, and a half pint--a “mickey”--of Bourbon Deluxe was always open in the back room.

With the press room, the newsroom and bureaus stretching from the city of Martinez in the north to Livermore in the south, Tribune reporters and editors, working under heavy pressure and at low pay, put out at least seven editions a day and told the stories of a city and suburbs of working families, a no-frills, unpretentious place. They were constantly tongue-lashed by a tyrannical editor named Stanley Norton, who, in a voice grown hoarse from shouting, would scream: “That’s not the goddamn lead!”

Knowland was a remote figure at the paper during this period.

His father had been a congressman and an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate. The son fulfilled the father’s dreams. He was elected to the State Assembly, the State Senate and, along with fellow Oaklander Earl Warren, became a power in the Republican Party. Warren was elected governor in 1942. The same year, Knowland, a 34-year-old father of three, was drafted into the Army as a private. Because the Tribune had supported the Selective Service Act, Knowland said, “I was, of course, not going to be put into the position of advocating something for the other fellow which we would not be willing to do ourselves.” In 1945, when Knowland was a major serving in Europe, California’s famous old senator, Hiram Johnson, died, and Warren appointed Knowland to take his place.

Knowland remained pretty much away from the paper until he self-destructed his political career in 1958 by running for governor on an anti-union, right-to-work platform. When he returned to the paper, we expected the worst. When several of us started to organize an American Newspaper Guild unit, we told our revered city editor, Al Reck, what we were doing. We didn’t expect his support. Reck was so anti-union that he had carried a gun during a general strike several years before and said he’d shoot any picket who tried to stop him from entering the paper. But working conditions were getting so bad that he told us to go ahead. We had Reck’s tacit blessing. And we had a message that resonated with even the most dedicated Knowland loyalist--the senator is back and he could fire us all. Our grass-roots campaign succeeded and the union won by a huge majority.

We soon found out that the senator was a straight shooter. I remember going up to the ratty old employee lunch room on the roof and watching his first meeting with the guild negotiators. He was straightforward and respectful of the process and of those across the table from him.

It is this Knowland, the straight shooter, who emerges in Johnson and Montgomery’s book. The two worked closely with Knowland after his return from Washington. “The senator was one of the finest statesmen of the 1950s,” they wrote, “a man of principle who spoke his mind, stood behind his ideals and damned the consequences.”

For example, in 1952, Knowland went to the Republican National Convention and pledged, with the rest of the California delegation, to support Warren for the presidential nomination. Knowland could have switched, backed Sen. Robert Taft for the nomination and become the vice presidential nominee, but he stuck with family friend and fellow Oaklander Warren. Sen. Richard M. Nixon, although also pledged to Warren, worked behind the scenes to switch the California delegation to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and became Ike’s running mate. Montgomery and Johnson relate that Knowland was appalled. “Do you think Nixon double-crossed you?” his wife, Helen, asked him. “Yes, I think so,” he replied.

But, perhaps because they admired these steadfast qualities so much, the authors do not make some of the analytical judgments that are now due, 24 years after the senator’s death. Instead, they too often retreat into the protective conventions of journalism, giving one side, then the other, and letting the readers make up their minds.

Take, for example, the book’s failure to criticize Knowland for not trying to stop the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, anti-Communist witch hunter extraordinaire. Knowland was one of 22 senators who voted against censuring McCarthy. Knowland said McCarthy was on the right track and was just loose with his figures on how many Communists had infiltrated government.

You can’t take a politician’s words at face value. Knowland was the leader of the Republican Party’s conservative wing, which greatly admired McCarthy. For the GOP, fighting Communists then was as defining and divisive an issue as abortion is today. Knowland intended to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 1956 if Eisenhower didn’t run, or in 1960. The authors hint at this: “Many people viewed Knowland’s stands against censuring McCarthy . . . as a prelude to running for the presidency in 1956 should Eisenhower bow out.” But in this case, the requirements of biography require a judgment on Knowland’s appeasement of the right wing and failure to condemn a demagogue whose ruthless, unprincipled behavior was far below the senator’s own political standards.

Regarding his public life, Knowland’s greatest contribution may have been as the outspoken and uncompromising voice of conservatism in an era when political debate was dominated by New Dealers and moderate Eisenhower Republicans. Conservatives were on the fringe after World War II, scorned by the majority because of their opposition to the New Deal and their prewar isolationism. Knowland’s hard line against the Communist regime in China, his constant assault on foreign-policy compromises and on budgets he considered excessive liberal domestic proposals were expressed in blunt language that took on added power from his deep voice, ponderous delivery and big, bulky body.

This was true in California as well as in the rest of the nation. Warren was a liberal Republican, despised by the party’s right. To have Knowland in office, giving speeches and interviews, fighting their battles on the Senate floor, being at the center of political debate gave the Republican right someone to rally around. As Kurt Schupara points out in his forthcoming book, “Triumph of the Right: The Rise of the California Conservative Movement, 1945-1966,” when Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan came on the scene in the ‘60s, Knowland followers provided the core of their organizations.

Reagan, Goldwater and other great figures streak across the pages of “One Step From the White House.” There are glimpses of them, snapshots, hints, but I wanted more, for a closer look at the now-distant Warren, at the hungry young Nixon just as he was emerging as Tricky Dick and at the California of the ‘50s, magnet for a postwar generation in search of a new life.

In describing Knowland’s last years, when the authors were at his side, the book takes on the power and authority the senator deserves. They recount his battles, carried on in the pages of the newspaper, with the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley and the radical political movements of Oakland, including the Black Panthers. They report what the radicals of the time ignored: that Knowland worried about the decay infecting Oakland. With poverty and unemployment increasing in the city’s African American community, Knowland knew something must be done to save the city. “A few years earlier, as a senator, he might have voted against aid to cities but now he was ready to accept it willingly,” Montgomery and Johnson write.

At the end, the Tribune was in trouble after Knowland made a disastrous decision to cut back its suburban coverage to save money. His personal debts were up around six figures. Knowland’s personal life was out of control. He left his wife, Helen, for a tempestuous woman he had met during one of his frequent gambling trips to Vegas. “The man who had argued with presidents and set national policy had more than met his match in his second wife,” the authors wrote. On Feb. 23, 1974, he drove to the family retreat on the Russian River, north of San Francisco Bay, and shot himself in the head.

Several months later, my editor at The Times, the late Art Berman, sent me to Oakland to find out why Knowland killed himself. At the county courthouse, I learned of his debts and his trips to Vegas. We sent a reporter to Vegas to fill in the gaps. We put it on Page One, but I sensed that it was just part of the story of the fall of Bill Knowland. In “One Step From the White House,” Montgomery and Johnson, with the help of the senator’s family, have finally told the full story of this stubborn, self-destructive, courageous and honorable Californian.