26—
Revitalizing a City

In 1962 Knowland was named Oakland's outstanding citizen of the year by the Oakland Inter Service Club Council and the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. Not only had he become a newspaperman, but he was helping his newspaper lead a city. What he could ignore as a senator, he could not overlook in his new position. He supported the Port of Oakland during its development into the second-largest containerized port in the world—only Rotterdam was bigger. While San Francisco officials were arguing over who would get the spoils from its once-thriving waterfront, Oakland stole the Bay Area's shipping industry. And during a time when Detroit and the Watts section of Los Angeles were burning, Oakland smoldered, but did not erupt in flames.

His daughter Estelle described his influence in the early 1960s. "Oakland's not the most dynamic economic city in the country, and we do have a high unemployment rate, and still have tremendous problems. But we didn't burn, we didn't riot, and the people on both sides of any fence in this town have learned how to begin to talk to each other. I think Dad's contribution was the primary one of all the individuals in this town." She added, "There was the kind of thing at the Tribune Tower just like his father: the door was always open. No matter who it was in town, you could go to him and say, 'We want a hotel,' or 'We've got too much unemployment, what are we going to do about it?' It wasn't that there was a pot of gold there, or any elixir, but it was a start to get people to talk about it and see what we could work out."^[1]

Many things were being worked out. With industrialists Edgar Kaiser

and Steve Bechtel, Knowland pushed for a stadium for the fledgling Oakland Raiders, a ragtag football team playing its home games at a junior college field near the decaying downtown center. He joined organizations; if he couldn't join himself, he sent someone. Paul Manolis became a director of the Oakland Museum and the Oakland Symphony. Whenever there was a civic cause in the East Bay (spelled "Eastbay" in the Tribune ), Bill Knowland supported it.

Oakland was still plagued with a virtually empty downtown in the early 1960s, as buildings had been razed to make way for new developments that weren't happening. But with the Tribune 's support, a new museum was built six blocks from the center of town, the Bay Area Rapid Transit district headquarters was constructed in Oakland, not San Francisco, and downtown reconstruction gradually began. In 1966 the Oakland Raiders got their stadium, and the Oakland Athletics moved into town. The new stadium, the Oakland Alameda County Coliseum, was built along the Nimitz Freeway between downtown and Oakland International Airport. A new indoor sports arena was added to the Coliseum complex, allowing Oakland to draw a professional basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, away from San Francisco.

William Knowland and Richard Nixon, two of the most powerful Republicans of the mid-twentieth century, had a profound dislike for each other, and both had long memories. When Nixon was running for governor in 1962, he came across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland with some campaign workers. One of them was June Stephens, who earlier had worked for Knowland; she pointed to an imposing structure on the Oakland skyline and said, "That's the Tribune Tower." Nixon looked over at the tower and said one word: "Bastard!"

Later, Nixon paid an obligatory campaign visit to Knowland in the Oakland Tribune offices. Nixon needed Knowland's newspaper's support in his run for governor of California. A receptionist told Knowland that Nixon was in the lobby. Knowland, who had no one in his office, kept Nixon waiting twenty minutes before inviting him in. After talking briefly, Nixon asked Knowland for permission to campaign in the Tribune offices. Knowland acquiesced, and instructed his receptionist to "show him around." Nixon was unceremoniously dropped off in the newsroom, where he was left to fend for himself.^[2]

Nonetheless, Knowland was always loyal to the Republican Party, and

he reluctantly put his personal feelings aside. Soon thereafter, the Tribune 's editorial writer Jack Ryan came out of a meeting with Knowland, shaking his head. "I've got to write an editorial endorsing Nixon," he said, "without saying one word against Pat Brown," Nixon's opponent in the gubernatorial race. In effect, the editorial said that Nixon was getting the nod because he was a Republican. But the day after Nixon lost to Brown, Knowland walked around with a broad smile.^[3]

Ten years later, President Richard Nixon was in San Francisco at a state dinner for South Korean leader Park Chung Hee. The president exchanged pleasantries with the Tribune political editor and asked him to "give my best" to Senator Knowland. The next day, when the message was delivered, the senator stared straight at the editor, said nothing, then frowned and turned away.

Bill Knowland was obviously uncomfortable in elevators with Tribune employees and worked out his own way to deal with the problem.

"Have you had your vacation yet?" he would boom out as he entered the elevator. If the answer was no, he would ask, "When do you plan to go?" If the answer was yes, he would ask, "Where did you go?" Either reply was enough to get him through the interminable ride from the first floor to the fourth, where his offices shut him off from further confrontations.

One day he deviated from the routine, and asked photographer Russ Reed, "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

The nonplussed Reed answered, "Yes, Senator, I've worked for you for nearly thirty years."

After that, he returned to the tried and true, "Have you had your vacation yet?"

Rumors were circulating through Washington in 1963 that Bill Knowland might attempt a political comeback. They were supported in part by the senator's refusal to make an absolute statement that he would not run against Clair Engle for his old Senate seat. "I can't predict what the situation will be later this year or early in 1964, so I have no [General] Sherman like statement renouncing all political plans for all times," Knowland told the Washington Evening Star . "But up to today, I have

not said 'yes' to anyone who has asked me to be a candidate for the Senate next year."^[4]

In March, speculation on Knowland's political planning took a different turn, as a California group headed by GOP conservative Del Kirkpatrick named him as their choice as a favorite-son candidate for president. Kirkpatrick also was heading a movement to draft Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for president. By this time, Richard Nixon had moved to New York, and Democratic Senator Engle fueled the talk about Knowland's plans by expressing his belief that the former vice president's move would allow Knowland to take center stage in California's Republican Party. Yet a confidential report to J. Edgar Hoover out of the San Francisco FBI headquarters assessed Knowland's chances tersely: "He couldn't be elected dogcatcher in California."

By mid-1963, Knowland was announcing publicly that Goldwater would be the likely Republican nominee. With the nominating convention scheduled for San Francisco's Cow Palace, the backing of the former senator would have a powerful effect on Republicans. Thomas Kuchel, who had become California's senior senator on Knowland's retirement, was coming closer to endorsing Nelson Rockefeller for president.

On September 10, 1963, Knowland finally put an end to the talk about another run for Senate. A poll by the Citizens Committee to Support Conservative Republicans showed Knowland far out in front for the Senate seat, but he issued a statement from his Oakland office saying, "I am not a candidate for the Senate in 1964." He said he was honored, but business and personal commitments made such a campaign impossible. Later in September he went to the California Republican State Central Committee Convention to invite Goldwater to enter the 1964 Republican primary. He left no doubt that his intentions were to support the Arizona senator rather than run himself in 1964.

Knowland then embarked on a national speaking tour on which he predicted that Goldwater would be nominated on the first or second ballot. He insisted that Rockefeller could not command enough support to deadlock the San Francisco convention. By mid-October 1963, he had become chairman of the Goldwater California advisory committee and formally endorsed the Arizona senator. Despite his support of Goldwater, Knowland acknowledged that California would be a "doubtful" state for the Republicans in 1964. Although he wouldn't concede the state, he pointed out that by 1964 it would have 1.3 million more registered Democrats than Republicans. He also noted that Richard Nixon, a native Californian, had carried the state by only 30,000

votes in the 1960 presidential election, then lost the governorship in 1962. Still, he said, California would be no sure thing for President Kennedy in his reelection bid.

In November 1963 Bill and Helen Knowland were on a trip to the Far East when they received word that President Kennedy had been assassinated. From his hotel in Osaka, Japan, he told the Associated Press, "I was deeply shocked to learn of the death of the president. It is a great threat to the nation and the free world." On his return to the United States, Knowland recalled that he was majority leader of the Senate when Kennedy was elected to that body. He expressed regrets, but said he felt the nation was lucky that it had Lyndon Johnson to take over. Knowland compared the tragedy to the assassination of President Lincoln. "The government in Washington still lives," he said.^[5]

As the shock of Kennedy's death lost its edge, politicians began to remember that there was an election to be won in 1964.

Both the Democrats and Republicans were having trouble in California. Senator Clair Engle, who had defeated Goodwin Knight by 730,000 votes in the "big switch" of 1958, was a shoo-in for reelection until he became incapacitated by a brain tumor. He had to drop out of the race, and State Comptroller Alan Cranston was his heir apparent. But then Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary and a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, moved back to California and announced he would run for Engle's seat. California Democrats, still stunned by the president's assassination, grabbed for a last piece of JFK's Camelot and nominated Salinger. When Engle died that summer, Governor Brown appointed Salinger to the Senate, giving him the mantle of incumbency. Salinger, however, was a terrible campaigner, who didn't look or talk like a Kennedy; and by November California voters had lost much of their nostalgia for his White House connection. They elected Republican George Murphy, a former movie actor and tap dancer.

Since his 1958 defeat, Knowland had stayed in the background of California politics, but with the Goldwater campaign looming, the old political fires began to burn more fiercely. "Be gentle and understanding of a man who feels he is approaching the point where he has one good fight left in him," he scribbled in a note to his wife, Helen, in January 1964. "This is mine."

The 1964 primary was a battle of the heavyweights. On the Goldwater side were Bill Knowland; Los Angeles County sheriff Pete Pitchess; Nixon's 1960 California campaign manager, Bernard Brennan; Los Angeles financier Henry Salvatori; Schick Safety Razor Company and

Technicolor chairman Patrick J. Frawley; and industrialists Leland Kaiser and Cy Rubel of Union Oil. Goldwater also had a Hollywood cast, which included John Wayne, Raymond Massey, Walter Brennan, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Clint Walker, Hedda Hopper, and, most important, Ronald Reagan. Rockefeller's list of heavy hitters was headed by Senator Thomas Kuchel. With Kuchel were former governor Goodwin Knight; John Krehbiel, immediate past state Republican chairman; Joseph Martin Jr., who left his post as national committeeman to join Rockefeller; former national committeeman Edward S. Shattuck; Jack McCarthy, minority leader of the state senate; former San Francisco mayor George Christopher; and James P. Mitchell, former U.S. secretary of labor.^[6]

In the spring of 1964, Knowland returned to the campaign trail, going all out for Barry Goldwater. In Atlanta, Montgomery, Los Angeles, Topeka, and Washington, D.C., he carried Goldwater's banner. He returned to Northern California and campaigned in the small towns of Loyalton, Sierraville, Portola, Greenville, Chester, Likely, Cedarville, Canby, Adin, McArthur, Fall River Mills, Burney, Yuba City, Alturas, Tulelake, and Quincy. He spoke to the fortieth annual convention of the California Grain and Feed Association in Los Angeles. He battled with Joseph Martin Jr. when Martin announced he was quitting his GOP job to work for Nelson Rockefeller in the California primary. Although Goldwater had never been associated with the John Birch Society, Knowland found himself having to defend Goldwater against the Rockefeller team's attempt to link the Arizona senator with the right-wing group.

George Young, part of the Spencer-Roberts public relations team that was running Rockefeller's California effort, sympathized with Knowland. "The Goldwater people have the ready-made Republican organization and they have all those volunteer workers, but they have the problem of trying to get along with the kooks and the nuts. As I see it, that is Bill Knowland's job—he is known as the campaign manager but his job is to keep the kooks and the nuts from embarrassing the responsible people who are working for Barry. I wouldn't want the job."^[7]

The California GOP was in a mean mood. The right wing had gained control and as much as told Republican moderates to get aboard or get out. After Nelson Rockefeller lost the primary to Barry Goldwater, Bill Knowland issued a warning through the press for Senator Kuchel to support Goldwater or face loss of future support, insisting, "We expect to achieve party unity and get the support of Senator Kuchel and others who supported Rockefeller." Knowland, who was to be chairman

of Goldwater's California delegation to the Republican National Convention, said flatly that liberal or moderate Republicans were under a "grave obligation" to support Goldwater, and should Kuchel or any other fail to support the Arizona senator, he would lose any right to claim GOP loyalty when seeking reelection.

Kuchel, chairman of Rockefeller's unsuccessful California campaign, replied, "I am not going to respond to threats of reprisal or attempts at intimidation by Senator Knowland or anyone else. That is not the way I fulfill my public trust . . . that is the way I will remain whether I am a public servant or a private American citizen."^[8] Four years later, Kuchel was a private American citizen, defeated in the 1968 primary by California State School Superintendent Max Rafferty—the smooth-talking darling of the GOP right.

The 1964 GOP convention in San Francisco's Cow Palace was an ugly display of brute force by the right-wingers. They shouted down those who disagreed with them, fought with reporters, and denounced all news media as being biased toward the Democrats. They even passed out daily lists of "Do" and "Don't Do" items. One of the things to "Do" daily was "Read the Goldwater Convention Newsletter, your state's newspapers, and the Oakland Tribune , which is published by Mr. Knowland. These will be available in your state headquarters."^[9]

Just before the Republican convention began, Knowland summoned Tribune circulation director Bill Ortman to his office and told him he considered it extremely important that the Oakland Tribune be well represented on San Francisco newsstands. Even though Ortman put his best distributors on the job, when the senator went to the news counter at the Hilton Hotel early on the Sunday morning of the convention, he was told that the Tribune wouldn't be available until 11 A.M. Ortman got a call from the extremely irate Knowland telling him to get over to San Francisco and straighten out the problem. Ortman was still half asleep, but he made it from Oakland to the lobby of the downtown San Francisco Hilton in half an hour. His publisher was furiously pacing back and forth in front of the news counter. When Ortman questioned the clerk on duty, he responded, "Oh, I thought he was asking for the Chicago Tribune . I haven't opened the bundle of Oakland Tribune s yet. We actually don't open the newsstand 'til 8 A.M." As the clerk opened the bundle, Knowland snatched one off the top and thundered, "Young man, there is only one Tribune ."

When forces supporting Pennsylvania governor William W. Scranton tried to get the convention to endorse the constitutionality of new civil rights laws, they were brushed aside. "Did any member want a

stronger civil rights plank?" a reporter asked Knowland. "I would say no," replied Knowland. "They felt the platform is satisfactory as now written."^[10] Just six years earlier, he had been in the Senate working with Lyndon Johnson for civil rights protections.

Goldwater was virtually shouted into nomination at the Cow Palace, with GOP National Chairman William Miller of New York as his running mate. It would be Knowland's last GOP convention as a delegate. He would go to Nixon's nominating convention in 1968 as a newsman and stay home during Nixon's renomination in 1972.

Throughout the fall in the 1964 presidential campaign, the Goldwater forces used Knowland mainly outside of California. They needed Democratic votes, and Knowland's right-to-work stance in 1958 was not forgotten by union members in his own state. He made speeches for Goldwater in fifteen other states, and he found himself continually defending the California GOP from attacks linking it to the radically conservative John Birch Society. "It is not a Republican organization," Knowland said in an October 8 speech in Columbus, Ohio. "It has never claimed to be. They do claim to have as many Democrats as Republicans."^[11]

Two major international incidents in October 1964 hit an already troubled Goldwater campaign: the Chinese exploded their first atomic bomb and Nikita Khrushchev was ousted from power in the Soviet Union. Knowland called them "earth-shaking events" and predicted that they might lead Communists to take a tougher line in their relations with the West. At home they might also have brought the nation even more closely behind President Lyndon Johnson, for he defeated Goldwater easily in the November election. It was Knowland's last campaign. Although he would continue to contribute to Republicans such as Ronald Reagan for the rest of his life, he would no longer actively participate.

He returned to what was becoming a much more complex life in California. In the following months and years, the Free Speech Movement, the People's Park Rebellion, the Black Panthers, Hell's Angels, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and hundreds of what would come to be routine antidraft and antiwar demonstrations would rock the East Bay.

During the Goldwater campaign, Bill Knowland became enamored with a woman named Evelyn Kelley. After meeting her at the pool in the

Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he began an on-again, off-again relationship that would go on for seven years and cause him a great deal of embarrassment.

Kelley, described by Paul Manolis as a pudgy, Mediterranean-looking woman,took the relationship far more seriously than did the senator. Wishing to marry him, she went so far as to go to Los Angeles Superior Court to have her name legally changed to Knowland. On January 6, 1972, when she learned he had remarried, she sent out announcements that said in part, "The Honorable William Fife Knowland and Evelyn Mugello Kelley no longer have a marriage."

At various times, Kelley would call and make threats to editors and reporters at the Oakland Tribune , as well as to Joe Knowland and his sister Emelyn. She would identify herself to the news staff as "the real Mrs. Knowland." The brother and sister each went to the senator to offer help, without the other's knowledge. Early in 1971, Kelley panicked the senator by falsely saying she was pregnant. Her teenage son told friends in Los Angeles that he was Bill Knowland's illegitimate son, even though he was fourteen years old when she met Knowland. As late as April 1973, the senator drew a cashier's check for $12,000 for a Bert Kelley, who was identified in Oakland police files as the son of Evelyn Kelley.

"I wasn't embarrassed by his women," the senator's son, Joe, told us. "I knew presidents and kings had girlfriends." But the private life of William F. Knowland was beginning to be known by a wider circle of his employees and acquaintances.

At Senator Knowland's alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, which in the 1960s he referred to derisively as "the Little Red School House," trouble was brewing. It had begun before the Republican convention when the Oakland Tribune city desk got a phone tip that the W. E. B. Du Bois Club was collecting contributions for William Scranton on university property at the Student Union Plaza. Since the Tribune was supporting Goldwater, the tipster suggested, it might be interested that such political solicitations were in violation of university policy.

Because of the ban on political activities on campus, for years activists of all political stripes had set up card tables and solicited donations

on a walkway at Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue. When Tribune reporter Carl Irving checked and found the W. E. B. Du Bois Club didn't have a table set up at the time, no story was written. But although the Tribune had lost interest, university officials were stirred by the newspaper's inquiries. For them, the problem was complicated by the fact that while the area concerned appeared to be the city of Berkeley's sidewalk, it actually was university property; the question thus arose why political activity was permitted there that was not allowed on the rest of the campus. Alex C. Sherriffs, vice chancellor for student affairs, already had complaints that bongo drums in the Student Union Plaza were disruptive, and he decided that the dean of students was not enforcing campus rules.

Before long, University of California president Clark Kerr was drawn into the situation, and at his Charter Day speech on the university's Davis campus, he stated, "The University will not allow students or others connected with it to use it to further their non-University political or social or religious causes, nor will it allow those outside the University to use it for non-University purposes."^[12] The problem was tossed in the lap of Katherine Towle, the dean of students. Though somewhat concerned about litter left in the area, she said later, "In fact, if I thought about it at all, which I think was not very often, I—it seemed to me as sort of a safety valve, and there was no harm in what they were doing."^[13] The safety valve was about to be closed—and, soon after, it would blow.

As the fall semester opened, university officials still were pondering what to do about the increasingly political area. A student activist named Brad Cleveland put out a twelve-page pamphlet that called on Berkeley students to make a series of demands on the board of regents, which included the resignation of Clark Kerr and reconstitution of the board itself. The pamphlet created only a small stir, but it became the basis for a group called the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination, which announced plans unrelated to the university: it would picket the Knowlands' Oakland Tribune . The committee accused the Tribune of discriminatory employment policies. Jacqueline Goldberg, head of the campus Women for Peace and a member of the ad hoc group, said that the committee didn't expect to win against Bill Knowland because he was too powerful and couldn't be frightened. She also acknowledged that a sit-in at the Tribune might mean a lot of jail time, because Knowland would not back down.^[14]

On the same day that the ad hoc group announced its plans to picket

the Tribune , Dean Towle sent out a letter declaring that campus rules against political solicitations would be enforced throughout the campus, including the twenty-six-foot strip of brick walkway on Bancroft Way at Telegraph Avenue. Posters, easels, and card tables would not be permitted and the area could not be used by those supporting or advocating off-campus political or social action. The effective date was September 21, 1964.

A strange coalition of radical and conservative groups joined to protest the new rules, and eighteen groups formally petitioned Dean Towle to reopen the area with limitations on the number of tables and posters, as well as on the way tables would be operated. Jackie Goldberg, who had become the official representative of this ad hoc group, met again with Towle and came away with the feeling that William Knowland was applying pressure to get rid of the political meeting place. Out of it all came a growing group called the United Front, which agreed to conduct vigils, raffles, and in some cases acts of civil disobedience if the university continued its hard line on the narrow strip at Bancroft and Telegraph. The Daily Californian followed with an editorial headlined "The Fight for Free Speech Begins."^[15]

There is no doubt that the Tribune was hostile to the student agitators, but so were the other Bay Area papers. Many of the students and nonstudents involved were left-wing radicals and some were linked publicly to the Communist Party. The newspapers of the 1960s just weren't quite ready for that. It would be years before the public and press moved closer to the protesters as general opinion turned against the Vietnam War.

And Oakland was having its own problems. With a growing unemployment rate, particularly among the blacks who made up about 23 percent of its population, it was ripe for an eruption. City officials estimated they had about a year to do something about it. About $50 million in federal funds had been spent in the first half of the 1960s, much of it in job-training programs, but the city had little to show for it. When the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded into violence in 1964, many urban specialists felt it was only a matter of time before Oakland would follow.

There was a major difference between Los Angeles and Oakland, however. Watts was a relatively small area of about 65,000 residents, mostly black, surrounded by other minority communities. From the beginning of World War II to 1964, the black population in Los Angeles had increased nearly tenfold. While many of Oakland's minorities had come out from the South and the East during World War II to work

in the defense industry, many of the middle-class black families making up the base of the city's population had been there for two or three generations. In addition, Oakland officials were aware of the magnitude of the problem, and when the Federal Economic Development Administration (EDA) offered them up to $23 million to stimulate industrial expansion to provide jobs, they listened. Under the guidance of Mayor John Houlihan, the leaders of Oakland were brought together. Bill Knowland, president of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce as well as publisher of the city's newspaper, generally was regarded as the most important figure in the city's power structure. He also was considered by the soldiers in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty to be an ultraconservative who would be difficult to deal with.

While some of the participants expected opposition or even hostility to the EDA program, Knowland listened with interest and in general terms offered assistance. A week earlier, the Tribune had published a large section on economic development, with a signed lead-in from Knowland that blamed unemployment for much racial unrest. He suggested that many problems would be solved when education provided skills and jobs were made available to minorities.

From this first meeting came a curious alliance of conservative business leaders, industrialists, federal bureaucrats, labor leaders, minorities, and city officials determined to see that Oakland did not suffer the fate of Detroit or Watts. Like most of the other Oakland power players, Knowland was deadly serious. A few years earlier, as a senator, he might have voted against aid to cities, but now he was ready to accept it willingly. In a meeting on the subject at the Tribune some time later, an editorial writer suggested that additional freeways needed for new industries in Oakland might create smog and lower air quality. "Burning cities create smog and lower air quality!" he thundered in reply.

Those outside the power structure had reason to be suspicious. For years, public elective bodies in Oakland had been selected by an "old boys" process that was self-perpetuating. From the city council to special districts to school boards, there was a common pattern: incumbents stepped down in midterm, then allowed their fellow board members to appoint a successor. From the 1930s to the 1960s, the ratio of appointees to elected officials was about seven to one. Mayor Houlihan himself was replaced by appointment when he left the mayor's office in 1966. His successor, John Reading, would be reelected twice on his own.

Every slight gain made in improving the city was tortured, highly contested, and fraught with peril. In the fall of 1966, while the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum was being completed, the Black Panther

Party for Self Defense was being formed in Oakland by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton. There would be pickets at the Tribune , antidraft demonstrations, parades of Hell's Angels, petty corruption, and political battles as the city struggled to maintain a degree of equilibrium.

But Oakland did not burn.

Joseph R. Knowland's health had been failing for some time, and the senator was effectively running the Tribune . When J.R. died on February 2, 1966, at the age of ninety-two, his son Bill became publisher in name as well.

At the same time that Bill Knowland was tending to the economic recovery of Oakland, he made an unexpected decision that turned the Oakland Tribune inward and away from the affluent suburban areas growing rapidly in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. At a meeting of the entire editorial department, managing editor Steve Still announced a plan to "metropolitanize" the Tribune .

A ripple of protest went through the staff. The Tribune had the best suburban coverage in the Bay Area. There were bureaus in Fremont, Hayward, Livermore, San Leandro, Alameda, and Berkeley in Alameda County. Contra Costa County, which is smaller, had bureaus in Pittsburg, Concord, Walnut Creek, Martinez, Richmond, and El Cerrito. "We had a reporter behind every rock," assistant city editor Robert Cuthbertson said. Sales of newspapers were at an all-time high. Eighty-five percent of the residents in affluent Orinda subscribed to the paper, and circulation was growing in all parts of Contra Costa and Alameda Counties. The Tribune was going to turn its back on a growing gold mine of advertising and circulation dollars in the suburbs.

The reason given was the high cost of maintaining circulation outside metropolitan Oakland, but the Tribune would never recover from the decision. Dean Lesher would immediately expand a group of small suburban Contra Costa County papers based in Walnut Creek into a rich chain of dailies, anchored to malls and laden with advertising dollars. Floyd Sparks, his Alameda County counterpart, would do the same with his small newspaper network. The Tribune would be left with a deteriorating city that every day was leaking businesses into the suburbs, businesses that took their advertising dollars with them. A few weeks after the announcement, a Tribune reporter ran into Lesher in a Concord bar. Lesher grinned and said, "Tell Bill I like what he's doing." Sparks responded similarly. "With enemies like that, who needs friends?"

The Tribune 's circulation went up momentarily during a San Francisco newspaper strike, then started on an inexorable downward slide. "It wasn't a decision taken lightly," Manolis recalls. "We didn't have an A.M. AP franchise. We were a P.M., and they [afternoon papers] were dropping like flies. Where we missed the boat is in not having gone A.M. ten or fifteen years earlier. [The Knowlands] would have had to invest in the future."

Despite his shyness and perceived aloofness to employees, Bill Knowland was a compassionate man. When science writer Henry Palm died of cancer, leaving a young widow with two small children, Knowland joined a benefit softball game with total abandon. He hit, fielded, and tripped over first base in an attempted slide before retiring to the sidelines.

Lee Susman, a mischievous member of the art staff, had brought along a large thermos full of martinis, and he offered one to the senator as he huffed and puffed to the bench. The thermos was one of the old-fashioned kind, with a metal cup that both formed the top of the container and served as a drinking glass.

Knowland gratefully accepted the cup Susman filled, drank the martini in a gulp, and in one powerful motion crushed the cup as if it were paper and tossed it aside.

"Thank you, Lee," he said.

"You're welcome, Senator," Susman said wryly as he stared at the remains of his thermos cup.

On another occasion, a raucous retirement party was held in a downtown Oakland restaurant for an editor who was leaving the Tribune . Two of the participants ended up in the Oakland jail for driving under the influence. One of them—a rather insecure sports columnist—had smashed his Tribune car into a couple of parked autos on the way home. Knowland, knowing of the columnist's tendency to worry, called him into his office the following morning and assured him that his job was not in danger. Then as the columnist left, the senator added, "It must have been a helluva party!"

Knowland was drifting further and further away from the political scene. He respected Ronald Reagan, whose reelection as governor he

supported in 1970. Editorially, he supported George Murphy's attempt to hold on to his old Senate seat, but he virtually dismissed the incumbent senator as incompetent. Even a dozen years after he had left the Senate, the Tribune publisher was vitally concerned with the seat he had represented.

When John V. Tunney, a young Kennedy clan Democratic congressman from Southern California, challenged Murphy in 1970, Knowland invited Murphy to Oakland for a strategy session. Tunney, son of the world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, was the former college roommate and close friend of Senator Edward Kennedy; he was expected to be a strong Democratic candidate. Over a luncheon catered by Trader Vic's restaurant in the Tribune 's twentieth-floor executive suite, Knowland vigorously described Murphy's problems in Northern California in general and the Bay Area in particular. He outlined several moves the senator could make to raise both money and his level of support in the north. The Tribune publisher offered to help, pointedly remarking that Northern Californians still considered Murphy to be a lightweight movie actor more noted for tap dancing than for his legislative career.

Murphy appeared to be totally unaware of the advice Knowland was offering; instead, he started a rambling discourse on how well things were going. "You know, Bill," he said in the raspy voice left scarred by an operation for throat cancer, "as I was coming home the other night, I ran into Frank Sinatra. I said 'How you doing, Frank?' He said, 'Fine, George. You know, I've been thinking of endorsing you.' I said, 'Frank, that's wonderful."' Turning to Knowland, Murphy asked, "What do you think, Bill, isn't that wonderful?"

Bill Knowland's neck turned first red, then purple. He rose from a half-finished lunch and said in a firm, cold voice, "Well, Senator, I'm sure you have more important things to do. We don't want to keep you any longer." He then almost physically forced Murphy to the elevator and the street below.

That November, John V. Tunney was elected to the U.S. Senate, and Murphy retired to private life.

During this time, Knowland was trying to turn his paper away from its image as a right-wing mouthpiece. When Dave Hope, the respected but extremely conservative Tribune political editor, died at his typewriter in the city room on February 14, 1969, the senator appointed a young registered Democrat as his new political editor and immediately ordered him to give equal coverage to both parties. The editorial pages

remained Republican, but the Tribune began to endorse an occasional Democrat. The senator himself even grew a stylish mustache.

His family noticed the change. "I'd have to say that when Dad aged, he moved more to the left," his daughter Estelle recalled. "For example, his feeling on Nixon's trip to China was, 'It's about time.' He had tremendous praise and admiration for the trip and for the beginning of opening the door. We were together the morning that the news broke." She said that he turned away from the Republican right wing. "Dad just couldn't tolerate that kind of conservatism any longer as he got older. As a result, he may have become someone who was believable by both the moderates and conservatives in the party. He was the elder statesman, the only one left in town, so to speak." When there was an attempt to revive the right-to-work movement in the early 1970s, Knowland quietly discouraged it.

The senator continued to have disagreements with his son over the operation of the Tribune and over Joe's part in the newspaper. In particular, Joe continued to question Manolis's high place in the newspaper's chain of command. In a letter to his son, Bill Knowland defended Manolis, saying, "I owe him more than I could repay in a lifetime. Outside of my immediate family he was closer to me than any other person. He was the bridge between my life in Washington and Oakland. He knows my political, economic and civic policies and aspirations. He has given me loyal and dedicated service over and beyond that of a valued employee and beyond the call of duty."

Curiously, he described Manolis in the same way his daughter Emelyn described her mother, Helen—as a "brutal friend." And twice in his letter, the elder Knowland referred to himself as "Stubby," a nickname hung on him not by his son, but by Manolis, in reference to his stubbornness. He insisted that every leader needs such a friend "who will tell his principal the facts, good and bad, who has the guts to say what the timid 'ass kissers' don't dare to say. [Manolis] was invaluable to me, let him be to you. He can do things for you that at times you can't do as well for yourself."

The senator began casino gambling as early as 1962. "All the years when he was in the Senate, he never went to Reno or Las Vegas," Manolis said. But at a quarterly meeting of the California Newspaper Publishers Association at Lake Tahoe, he recalls, the senator said, "Let's go do

some gambling." They played some blackjack. At that time, Manolis suggested, it was secondary in the senator's life; he had never seen him gamble before. Soon, however, Knowland was making trips to Las Vegas just to visit the casinos.

In the beginning, he was winning. He would send notes to Manolis: "Please deposit in my account at United California Bank," or "Please deposit Crocker-Citizens Account. Having a good time. Wish you were here." One such note said, "Dear Paul. You doubled your $5.00. The $10.00 is yours. Please deposit $100.00 for me in Crocker-Citizens. Deposit tag in upper left hand drawer in back of check book. Bill." Another note, on a greeting card, said, "Dear Paul, Profitable delay! Our plane was 2 hours late leaving Las Vegas—We went to the Tropicana [near the airport] and I won $300.00. Here is $100.00 to deposit for me in Crocker account."

Knowland's chief editorial writer in the late 1960s and early 1970s was Virgil Meibert, a talented horse handicapper who would spend hours at night studying racing forms. When he would go to the senator's office to discuss editorials, they also would talk about horses. Later, at Golden Gate Field in Albany, Meibert would go to the two-dollar window to collect his meager winnings and look over at the fifty-dollar window where the senator was collecting stacks of large bills on his bigger bets.

Knowland may have tried to break the gambling cycle. He wrote to Helen in November 1969, "I'm seeking a different vacation spot that we both would enjoy once a year. I have 'had it' with Las Vegas." He suggested trying Bermuda, Acapulco, or New Orleans. But a year later, he was traveling to Las Vegas to gamble on his own. "He would play craps," says his son, Joe. "He wasn't a logical [gambling] person. I never saw him playing roulette, or even 21 [blackjack]." Joe recalls, "He loved to win, and throughout his life, he played each staged role to 'win.' Furthermore, throughout his life he never lost. He was never taught to lose."

The gambling would turn deadly serious in the early 1970s, and Bill Knowland would learn about losing.