12—
"Bill, You Don't Kiss Babies"

When the 82nd Congress opened in early January 1951, the Korean War was on America's mind. So preoccupied was Congress with the war that little was accomplished other than foreign and military affairs. Defense spending in Korea rose to $56.9 billion for fiscal 1952 and $46.6 billion in fiscal 1953, all appropriated by this Congress.

Because of efforts of Knowland and other conservatives, popular liberal programs desired by the Truman administration such as national health insurance, aid to education, and increased public health benefits fell by the wayside. The Senate Republicans were aided by a strong new class elected in November, including Richard Nixon of California, Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, and James H. Duff of Pennsylvania. The Democrats also added some formidable new senators, including George Smathers of Florida and Mike Monroney of Oklahoma.

Knowland continued to strike a balance between his roles as a domestic conservative and an internationalist. He took issue with the neo-isolationists in Congress who wanted to prevent American troops from going to Europe as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization agreement required. A resolution by Senator Kenneth S. Wherry of Nebraska to bar the sending of any troops to Europe brought heated debate. "If Communism is a global menace, which it is, then it must be met on a global basis," Knowland argued. "We cannot expect [Western Europe] to build an army that would make Europe impregnable to Communist aggression before we place an additional man or dollar on the continent." His solution was to send one American division for every six European divisions until there were a total of seventy.

Knowland also spoke out strongly in defense of Douglas MacArthur and accused hatchetmen in the Truman administration of trying to undermine MacArthur's position in Korea. "Our Armed Forces in Korea are entitled to all-out support," Knowland said. "The Nation is now confronted with the choice between the far eastern policies of the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, or Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Both cannot be right." He demanded that Acheson be removed, not MacArthur: by giving full support to MacArthur, the United States would be saying that it would no longer be "playing footsie" with the enemy.^[1]

On April 11, 1951, President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur.

To his father, Knowland wrote that he believed Truman's excuse for firing the general to be a letter from MacArthur to House Republican Leader Joseph Martin calling for all-out war in Korea. The general declared, "There is no substitute for victory." Martin thought that MacArthur's popularity at home would sway Truman to step up the war in Korea, but Truman, who had told MacArthur that his job was to hold the defensive line in Korea near the Thirty-eighth Parallel, removed the general from his commands in Japan and Korea and called him home. Knowland thought that MacArthur's firing would have come anyway: "My deduction based on present available facts is that the President was preparing a March public proposal in the name of the UN for a cease fire. The deal had been worked out with most of the UN members. It was to be advertised as 'no appeasement' when in fact it would have opened the door for a Far Eastern Munich. MacArthur had shown sufficient independence that they feared he would let go with a blast when the facts became known. It was necessary to get rid of MacArthur before the proposal was made. The Martin letter gave the excuse for the administration to hang its hat on."

The general came home to address a joint session in Congress, where he reiterated his demand that the United States fight the Communists to win. In that speech, MacArthur asserted, "War's very object is victory—not prolonged indecision."^[2] That statement, which both reflected and fed the deep discontent with Truman's handling of the "police action" in Korea, ultimately would hurt Democrats in the 1952 election. Not only had Knowland strongly supported MacArthur's military judgments since first meeting him in 1946, but he too believed the United States should opt for all-out war, even if it meant risking the intervention of the Soviet Union. Knowland joined Styles Bridges and Bob Taft in helping MacArthur prepare for his testimony before Congress about the Truman administration's actions in the Far East.

In another letter to his father, Knowland complained that the administration had usurped the powers of Congress by declaring war in Korea. "The constitutional power for a declaration of war, of course, rests with the Congress," he noted and pointed out that when a member of Congress speaks on the subject of war, his statements are recorded in the Congressional Record:

The public is thereby able under our constitutional system to hold him responsible for his actions and to remove him if they do not agree.

We have now passed into a constitutional twilight stage. We are now engaged in the fourth most costly war in all of our history. [One hundred forty thousand Americans would die in Korea.] We were placed in that war by the action of the President and his advisors and without the approval of Congress.

If this country can be placed in a war en camera and the Congress can be foreclosed from inquiring as to what stand was taken by several individuals present, we have a situation then where anonymous advisors to the President without their views or their votes ever being a matter of public record or even available to a Congressional committee will be able to deprive the public and the Congress of knowledge to which I believe they have a basic right when it involves their lives, their property and their future.

That same day he delivered a speech on the Senate floor echoing the letter to his father. Indeed, his argument that the president must seek Congress's approval before entering a war would be heard again and again, long after he was out of office. Senators complained long and hard, also to no avail, that Lyndon Johnson usurped their power to decide whether the nation was to send troops to Vietnam. The same argument would be made later over U.S. intervention in Panama, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, and Bosnia. "This has nothing to do with the desirability or lack of desirability of our becoming involved there; but I merely state as a fact that under those circumstances—with the public not present and with the press not present—a decision was reached which put this nation into a war," he roared.

Before the year was through, Knowland would make another hundred speeches in the Senate about U.S. support for Nationalist China.

President Truman's popularity in 1951 was clearly on the wane; his problems with foreign policy, the charges of communism at home, and sev-

eral scandals within his administration continued unabated. Knowland, now the senior senator from California, was continuing his ascent as a rising star in the Republican Party. On March 29, 1952, Truman announced he would not seek another term. But Republicans were already lining up for a shot at the presidency, with Bill Knowland and Earl Warren right in the middle of the political action.

Nixon advisor Herman Perry had been concerned early that Representative Chet Holifield, a Southern California Democrat, might be a candidate for Knowland's Senate seat. Perry feared Holifield because the congressman was "highly regarded by liberal and conservative Democrats. He tries to play both sides of the fence. I think it is high time that Bill Knowland should definitely get busy about his campaign."^[3]

During the Republican primary, Knowland's opponent, Robert D. Adams of Los Angeles, accused him of unfair campaign practices. In a May 17, 1952, letter to the U.S. Senate, Adams asked for an investigation of Knowland's "mis-conduct" in the campaign. He charged that the money came from the notorious liquor lobbyist Artie Samish, Standard Oil Company of California, Union Oil, and General Petroleum. He also claimed that the contributions to Knowland's campaign were being carried on the books as advertising expense and that Knowland knew it. Furthermore, Adams accused the press of a conspiracy "to suppress and withhold the news about the illegality of Knowland's campaign" and claimed that Knowland directed and controlled a "press ring" in California: "The tentacles of this invalid ring reach to the source of all media of public communication, thus withholding news that would be published were it not shut off at the place of its origination. The power to suppress public information that emanates from the Tower of the OAKLAND TRIBUNE would indeed have made Boss Tweed blush for his want of temerity." He complained that earlier charges that he brought against Knowland "were treated with thundering silence" by the state's biggest newspapers, which thus provided proof of a conspiracy.^[4]

The Senate had no intention of getting involved in one state's election, and Adams's complaints were ignored. When Holifield decided not to enter the Senate race, Knowland's 1952 political problems evaporated. Yet many Republicans in California were more concerned about getting Knowland reelected than they were about any presidcntial bid by Earl Warren. From the Nixon camp, Herman Perry wrote to a colleague on April 21 that he thought it was "more essential for California to re-elect Bill Knowland than it was to have a presidential candidate

from California. . . . Unless you have been 'out in the sticks' and 'below the tracks' you have no idea as to the feeling of some people with reference to Earl's present [attitude] towards certain trends of our government. . . . I can assure you that some of the people who . . . furnish a lot of do-re-mi also have opinions on the subject which should not be overlooked." He closed his letter by saying that Knowland and Nixon more clearly represented the thinking of the Republican voter than did Warren.^[5]

On June 2, the day before the California primary, Knowland delivered a particularly harsh attack on President Truman at a campaign rally in his hometown of Oakland. He charged that the president's "vacillating policies" had "encouraged our enemies and discouraged many of our friends," noting that since the end of World War II, the number of people behind the Iron Curtain had increased from 200 million to 800 million. "An evil and ruthless force has expanded its totalitarian power at the rate of almost 100,000,000 people a year," he told the cheering crowd. He accused the Truman administration of a "catastrophic 'waiting for the dust to settle' policy in China while looking upon the Chinese Communists as agrarian reformers and which ignored the clear signal of danger in the statement of Lenin many years ago that 'the road to Paris is through Peking.'"^[6] (Knowland repeated that statement, putatively by Lenin, in almost every foreign policy speech he ever made.)

This assault on national policy was typical of Knowland's campaign. When Republican leaders complained that he was focusing too much on Asia and not enough on California, Knowland declared, "Maybe I am doing the wrong things. But I believe I am concentrating on the overriding issue of our time. Boys are dying in Korea and if we're asking them to sacrifice their lives, I can risk sacrificing my political career."^[7] Indeed, Knowland was enthusiastically received when he questioned the Truman administration's policy of a limited war in Korea. "I do not believe this government or the United Nations has the right to ask Americans to fight and die and then deny them the right to win," he insisted. The speech was one of three he used during his campaign. One took five minutes, one took fifteen, and one took half an hour, but they all harped on the same topic: the Truman-Acheson Far Eastern policy was catastrophic.^[8]

Knowland's reelection was assured when he won both the Republican and Democratic nominations by cross-filing in the June primary.

His name went on the ballot of each party, and thus only astute voters knew for sure the candidate's real party affiliation. This was a common tactic in California elections; from 1914 to 1952, as many as 90 percent of candidates for the state legislature and for Congress who cross-filed and won both party nominations were victorious in the general election.^[9] Knowland's Democratic opponent in the primary was Representative Clinton McKinnon, who repeatedly labeled Knowland the "senator from Formosa." But it didn't seem to hurt the forty-four-year-old incumbent. He won 2.5 million votes in both primaries while McKinnon was only able to scratch up 750,000 votes. In November, Knowland was reelected with 3.9 million votes, the most ever received by a public official in California. He carried fifty-seven of the state's fifty-eight counties.

The margin of victory came even though Knowland was not a particularly good campaigner. Although he professed to like campaigning, he was shy; his efforts to meet people were often awkward, and his speeches were filled with too much bluster. One of his supporters said, "Bill, you don't kiss babies." Another said, "You don't slap backs." Yet another said, "You don't see enough people personally." Asked to comment on his success, despite his awkwardness, one Republican Party official said, "Bill Knowland is a straight-thinking, forward-looking, hard-working, sincere kind of guy. What the hell more do you want in politics?"^[10]