California: Who Is the Good Guy?

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When Pierre Salinger speaks, his lips move with the relish of a winetaster and his jowls quiver like jelly in a railroad dining car. He does not use a text, but he ad-libs exceedingly well, having had substantial practice with White House reporters. He spreads his fingers apart, then waves both hands in the air, looking for all the world like a Dutch windmill that has learned how to smoke a cigar.

Pierre Salinger, 39, is the Democratic Senator from California.

When George Murphy speaks, the easy Irish charm of an old-style city ward heeler pours forth. His blue eyes, set off by pink cheeks and carefully coifed, grey-streaked hair, throw a friendly glint. At the slightest sound of applause, Murphy is transported happily back to the heyday, 25 years ago, when he song-and-danced his way across the nation’s cinema screens. Then the ham in him surfaces, and he talks and talks and talks until his aides tug at him and tell him it is time to quit.

George Murphy, 62, wants to be the Republican Senator from California.

Bump in the Dark. As the most populous state in the Union (18 million), with 40 electoral votes, California is a crucial battleground in the national political contest. In California, there is no such thing as a political machine; there are only moving parts. California has almost every problem that any other state has, and some that other states never thought of. It is filled with radicals of both the left and the right; its political landscape is alive with sudden shadows, phosphorescent goblins, and things that go bump in the dark. In California, political issues ought to be piled skyhigh. Yet the Salinger-Murphy campaign, typical of so many 1964 contests, rings with no real issues; there is only the battle of personalities and “images.”

Last week, for example, Salinger and Murphy engaged in a face-to-face, no-holds-barred TV debate. They set out to tackle the issues. They wound up playing Drop That Name. For a full hour, the exchange went something like this:

Salinger: I have conferred with Secretary of Defense McNamara. I have conferred with Senator Magnuson, the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee … I had a call this morning from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall . . .

Murphy: I know, for instance, Senator Dirksen quite well . . . J. Edgar Hoover, and all the rest.

Salinger: As Mr. Romulo told me—you know General Romulo . . .?

Murphy: Very well.

And so it went. In the end, most observers agreed that Murphy had projected himself as a real good guy. That should hardly have been surprising, since he has been playing the role professionally for all of his adult life. What was surprising was that Salinger, who has also gone a long way on a well-deserved reputation as a good guy, came across as a somewhat stuffy sort.

Kittens & Rabbits. Salinger’s showing came as a bit of a shock to those who remembered him as a White House press secretary who could always be counted on to enliven dull news days in the Kennedy years. Those were the days when Pierre delivered solemn pronouncements on little Caroline’s Tom Kitten, or offered brisk communiqués about a trumpet-playing rabbit, or exhibited a grand disdain for the 50-mile hikes so highly recommended by the Kennedys. Considering his background, it is hard for many Californians to remember that Pierre is now a genuine U.S. Senator—one who has served for all of two months since his appointment to fill the seat of the late Clair Engle.

Pierre was born in San Francisco on June 14, 1925. His father, a New York-born mining engineer and a devoted amateur musician, died in a 1941 auto crash. His mother, daughter of a minor French politician-journalist, was and remains, in her sixties, an effervescent, amiable busybody with a penchant for supporting liberal causes. She now lives in Carmel, Calif., enjoys nothing more than regaling reporters with clinical details regarding the problems she had nursing little Pierre.

The Reporter. Pierre was a piano prodigy, at six played Haydn in a recital at the Canadian National Exposition in Toronto. But he finally concluded that the piano was not his forte, decided to forgo a musical career, although he still plays a passable Bach.

After a World War II stint in the navy, Pierre headed for a journalism career on the San Francisco Chronicle, finished college on the side, made a name for himself as a sharp investigative reporter. He deliberately got himself tossed into jails as a drunk and a vagrant, wrote a 17-part exposé on conditions that resulted in improvements in the county penal system.

The exposé also led to a new career for Salinger. In 1957, a big story was Dave Beck, the crooked boss of the Teamsters Union. Collier’s Magazine assigned Salinger to write a series of articles about Beck, but the magazine folded before Pierre got into print. During the course of his work on Beck, Salinger met Bobby Kennedy, who was soon to be appointed counsel to the Senate subcommittee investigating labor racketeering. Bobby asked Pierre what he was going to do with the material he had gathered on Beck. Pierre offered it to Kennedy, and later was rewarded with a job as staff investigator for the committee. Among the subcommittee members: Massachusetts’ Senator John F. Kennedy.

Outsider. By 1959, the subcommittee investigation had pretty well run its course, and Salinger was offered an attractive publicity job with the Democratic Advisory Council, an adjunct of the Democratic National Committee. He was tempted, and he said so to Bobby. Recalls Salinger: “He told me not to make a decision for 24 hours. The next morning J.F.K. called up and asked me to come to his office. He said he’d heard about the job I was offered, and he hoped I wouldn’t take it because he counted on me working in his presidential campaign.”

J.F.K. was then running for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, and Salinger joined the team as chief press aide. The first few months were not happy ones for him. “The main problem,” he says, “was that it took me quite a while to develop the kind of relationship with J.F.K. that I had with Bobby. I’d been hired completely on Bobby’s say-so; J.F.K. and I did not know each other well. In fact, I was sort of an outsider to the group: Ted Sorensen, Kenny O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien had all worked with the Senator for a long time. It took three or four months of traveling together to get to know each other well.”

Ole Tex. But Salinger came to love his job and to worship Jack Kennedy. After Kennedy was elected, he named Salinger as his press secretary, and Pierre soon became an institution of his own. There was Pierre aboard the Honey Fitz in slacks of shocking pink; Pierre in blue and yellow shorts, chugging over the decorous grass tennis courts of Newport; Pierre flailing away on the Hyannis golf course while Kennedy watched in fond amusement; Pierre playing poker, sometimes at $1,000 a pot, with three wild cards; Pierre nursing his discriminating palate with fine wines and rich sauces at Washington’s smart Le Bistro.

Sometimes White House newsmen got annoyed with Pierre’s ways, thought he was considerably less than fastidious with facts. But by and large they came to admire him as a real pro, one who was calm, cool and correct in moments of real emergency, such as the Cuba missile crisis.

When Jack Kennedy died, part of Pierre died with him. Certainly the White House never again seemed the same to Salinger. Lyndon Johnson laughed at Pierre, not with him. Once Johnson ragged Salinger into playing the piano for visiting German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard—just after Soloist Van Cliburn had performed. On another occasion, Johnson cajoled Pierre into climbing aboard a horse at the L.B.J. ranch, and while Salinger sat there like Humpty Dumpty, Lyndon whooped, “Ole Tex Salinger!” Salinger is a man of humor, but he does not like to be made a fool of, and it was only a matter of time before he would leave Lyndon.

The time came early this year, when it became apparent that Clair Engle, even then dying of brain cancer, would not be able to run for reelection. A struggle developed between California’s Democratic Governor Pat Brown and Jesse (“Big Daddy”) Unruh, speaker of the state assembly and California’s most power-conscious Democrat. Brown wanted State Controller Alan Cranston to take over Engle’s candidacy. Unruh wanted anyone Brown did not want. First, he persuaded State Attorney General Stanley Mosk to run in the Democratic primary. But Brown, in his turn, persuaded Mosk to withdraw. Big Daddy looked around for another candidate to pit against Cranston. He picked Pierre.

There was, of course, a problem: Salinger had been away from California for nine years, was now a voting resident of Virginia. But he was finally assured that all legal obstacles could be overcome, turned in his resignation to President Johnson, flew to San Francisco, and filed for the Democratic primary only two hours before the deadline. Behind him, he left his second wife Nancy, whom he married in 1957. A talented ceramist, Nancy has been staying on in Virginia to care for the three Salinger children. Pierre was awarded their custody after divorcing his first wife.

After Salinger had announced his candidacy, Pat Brown exploded. Pierre, he declared, was nothing but “a rookie.” But he changed his mind after Pierre whipped Cranston by 140,000 votes in the primary. Pierre, Brown now cried, was “the rookie of the year.” Pat appointed Salinger to fill out Engle’s term when the Senator died in July. Pierre’s incumbency would presumably help him in his campaign against the Republican nominee.

Shoot the Works. Then and now, many Democrats figured George Murphy as a pushover for Pierre. Murphy, quite naturally, sees himself differently. “I consider myself a human engineer,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life, and I have had a broader chance to study people than anyone I know. I’ve lived in every kind of place, from Beverly Hills to Hell’s Kitchen. And I’ve worked in speakeasies and in big corporations and everything in between—mines and garages.”

Born in New Haven, Conn., the son of an Olympic coach, Murphy attended Yale. Never a good student, he ran out of money and dropped out of college after two years, puttered around with odd jobs until he met a Detroit dancer named Juliette Henkel. Julie taught him some steps, they got married in 1926, and embarked upon the kind of career of which movies are made. They danced together in nightclubs, and those jobs led George to Broadway hits: he played juvenile leads in Good News, Of Thee I Sing (in which George portrayed a wiseacre White House press secretary), Hold Everything and Roberta.

Lana & Oscar. Then on to Hollywood, where George was a natural, most often appearing as the likable, big-hearted guy who might have won the girl in the end if he had not spent so much time doing paradiddles with his toe-taps. He danced with Shirley Temple in Little Miss Broadway, with much leggier chorines in Top of the Town. He played opposite Ginger Rogers in Tom, Dick and Harry (Murph was Tom), hoofed with Judy Garland in Little Nellie Kelley, romped with Cinemoppet Liz Taylor in Cynthia, and twirled in Two Girls on Broadway with Starlet Lana Turner. All that Murphy will recall for the record about that picture was that “Lana was lazy. But when she put on a sweater, no one cared about her working habits.”

Frankly, Murphy was no great shakes at the box office, a fact well realized by his boss, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer. But Mayer liked Murphy for other reasons. As a two-term president of the Screen Actors Guild, Murphy had helped clean out left-wingers and labor racketeers who had infiltrated the movie industry. Along the way, Murphy dropped his Democratic affiliation and became a Republican. Mayer, an ardent Republican himself, had heard Murphy deride Democrats, and he liked the cut of George’s gibe. He encouraged Murphy to take on after-dinner speaking assignments. Before too long, Murphy hung up his taps, became one of Hollywood’s busiest goodwill ambassadors, and with Mayer calling the turn, received an Oscar for “interpreting the motion-picture industry correctly to the country at large.”

“Low to the Ground.” Politics was only a two-step away. Murphy was a G.O.P. National Convention delegate in 1948, 1952 and 1956, served a brief stint as Republican state chairman. At the same time, he moved from the sound stages into moviedom’s business offices, where today he functions as a vice president for public relations with Technicolor Corp. And last year he began thinking seriously about running for the Senate. “I had this thing researched for months,” he says. “I wanted to learn if people would accept an actor running for office. And the word was that I had a pretty fair chance. After all, people remember me from all those old movies, and I never played a bad guy. I was always a good guy. It sounds corny, but don’t knock it. I found that my biggest support would come from the ladies, the ones over 35. They are real workers. I mean if they are for you, they go all over the neighborhood like a pack of muskrats.”

Murphy easily won the G.O.P. Senate nomination, and he has been campaigning tirelessly ever since. His pitch is Basic Barry. Liberals are “Fabian Socialists.” Democrats are a conspiratorial sort, and the words Yalta and Potsdam fall easily from Murphy’s lips as places and names of derision. On issues such as the nuclear test ban, federal aid to education and medicare, Murphy hews close to the Goldwater line, but he disagrees with Barry on the Civil Rights Act and foreign aid.

He has sidestepped California’s hottest state issue: repeal of the Rumford Act against racial discrimination in housing (TIME, Sept. 25). In agricultural areas, Murphy wins votes for his stand favoring the bracero program, under which fruit and vegetable farmers hire immigrant labor from Mexico. “You have to remember,” explains Murphy, “that Americans can’t do that kind of work. It’s too hard. Mexicans are really good at that. They are built low to the ground, you see, so it is easier for them to stoop.”

As it must to all candidates, some disappointment has come to Campaigner Murphy. Just recently, he got himself hauled out to Antelope Valley, a desert crossroads that might have served as the eerie setting for Bad Day at Black Rock. Nothing went right. The head of the arrangements committee, a Mrs. Tucker, had borrowed five cars from the local Chevrolet dealer but had lost the keys. After Mr. Tucker rounded up a new set, Mrs. Tucker remembered that the door prize, a movie projector, had been left at home. Back home went Mr. Tucker.

Later, about 50 dignitaries tried to squeeze into the five cars for the ride to the local fairgrounds. Disgusted, Murphy wound up walking all the way to the fairgrounds, slogging to the speakers’ stand through thick clouds of desert dust while Mrs. Tucker, in full pursuit, began to remonstrate with him. At length, Hollywood Star Wendell Corey, who had arrived early only to disappear mysteriously, turned up in time to make a half-incoherent speech about “my good friend and that great American, George Muffin!—I mean Murphy!”

Down the Barrel. As for Salinger, Murphy harbors only dark suspicions. “I think this guy is really vulnerable,” says he. “He’s a chubby little rascal who looks and sounds sly and disrespectful. If this guy was doing such an important job in Washington, how come he quiton an hour’s notice? My cook would give me more notice than that! He was a pressagent! I’d like to ask him what he did for the President during the Cuban missile crisis. Did he hold his coat? Did he get a fresh supply of paper clips?”

No, says Pierre, who regards his role in the Kennedy Administration as the strongest point of his campaign. He freely dispenses the impression that he took an intimate part in the play of historical events. He punctuates his speeches with phrases like “I remember when President Kennedy . . .” He frequently alludes to the time that “we looked down the nuclear barrel” during the Cuba crisis, and he implies that it is a good thing, too, for the U.S. that he was there.

Spirited. Salinger also hits hard at Murphy’s links to Goldwater. He accuses Murphy of having supported Dr. Fred Schwarz’s ultra-right Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, charges that Murphy is an “archconservative of the same stripe as Senator Goldwater, but hasn’t the courage to express his honest convictions.”

Pierre has a swift, sharp mind and salts his addresses with impressive statistics. But lately he has been spending much of his time defending himself against Murphy’s “carpetbagger” charges, and trying to convince the voters that he is not a Falstaff but a statesmanlike sort. It isn’t easy. Not long ago, for example, he found himself confronted by a Los Angeles audience so hostile that he probably wished that he was out there with Wendell Corey and George Muffin.

“Why did you register in Virginia and vote for Senator Byrd?” someone asked.

“I didn’t vote for Senator Byrd!” replied Pierre.

“How do you feel about subverting the state constitution?” demanded another.

“I’ve been upheld by the State Supreme Court!” he shot back.

“The Americans for Democratic Action is a Communist front—how do you feel about that?” snapped a woman.

“I don’t agree with everything the A.D.A. says, but to call it a Communist front is stupid!” Pierre retorted.

At the close of the meeting, Salinger beamed a grin out over the sea of glum faces and said cheerily, “Let me thank you for the opportunity of joining you tonight. We’ve had a spirited discussion, haven’t we?”

“Remind me,” murmured Pierre as he drove off, “to fire my advance man.”

“The Overall Impression.” Come November, Salinger should benefit from the fact that he is a Democrat in what shapes up as a big Democratic year. Lyndon Johnson has a healthy lead in California over Barry Goldwater. The state’s registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a big margin: 4,736,906 to 3,182,397. Even accounting for ticket splitting and other vagaries of the California voter population, Pierre should be a safe bet.

But in recent weeks he seems to have hit a plateau, while Murphy has been climbing uphill. Can George close the gap? Says he: “My job is to paint a positive picture. Most of the people already have their minds made up. I’m gonna try to talk to the undecideds. They are more interested in what a guy looks like. I think the overall impression is the big thing. If the undecideds think a guy is honest and on the level, he’s ahead of the game. My big drawback is the song-and-dance-man label. If I can overcome that, I’ll be in good shape. If I can get the undecideds to think ‘This guy knows a lot,’ that’s a plus. If I can show them I’m honest, that’s a plus. Experience, that’s a plus. If they think the other guy has not been around for too long, that’s a plus for Murph.”

And Pierre Salinger’s job is to put across his image as an important candidate of experience and influence. Says he: “The very years of my life Murphy most objects to—those spent in the Senate and the White House—have given me a grounding in Government, a knowledge of Washington, that not even as nimble a fellow as Murphy could pick up on a Hollywood sound stage.”