Politics: Picnic

With seven months still left before the California Republican primary, the gubernatorial contest between Richard Nixon and Goodwin Knight had already achieved the social level of a Juke-Kallikak picnic.

Prickling both men last week was Knight’s charge that a Nixon emissary had offered him any state job he wanted if he would only get out of the race (TIME, Oct. 6). Cried Nixon: “I categorically deny the charge, and I am willing to state this under oath and with my hand on the Bible.” Bawled Knight: “I’ve taken over 500 oaths in my political career. I’ll swear on a Bible to this one.”

“You Tell Dick . . .” Last week, standing on a red-white-and-blue-bannered platform in his Los Angeles campaign headquarters, Goodie Knight named names and dates. Waving in his right hand a paper chit, Knight said it was a receipt for a $6.21 telephone call made on the morning of Sept. 8 from his room No. 108 in Sacramento’s El Dorado Hotel. The call was to Los Angeles Banker J. Howard Edgerton, who had earlier tried and failed to reach Goodie by phone. According to Knight, the conversation went like this:

Edgerton: Goodie, I have talked to Dick and he is going to run for Governor.

Knight: Well, Howard, you tell Dick I am going to run anyway.

Edgerton: But would you be willing to sit down and have a meeting with Dick?

Knight: Yes, but for what purpose?

Edgerton: He will offer you anything you want—the chief justice of the Supreme Court of California—or any job in California, if you won’t run for Governor.

Knight: No, Howard, I don’t want any part of it.

On hand with Goodie last week as his witnesses to the conversation were his wife Virginia and Paul Mason, 63, onetime state motor-vehicle director under Goodie Knight. They, somehow, had had their ears glued to the telephone along with Goodie’s.

As for Edgerton, he admitted the fact of the telephone call. The president of the California Federal Savings and Loan Association, and a fund raiser in past campaigns for both Nixon and Knight, he said: “The conversation was completely without Dick Nixon’s knowledge and certainly without any authority.” It was simply his “personal effort” to avoid a party-splitting primary fight.

At week’s end, Nixon aides threw countercharges against Knight, who had, they said, once offered to pledge the California Republican delegation to support Nixon for President in 1964 if Nixon would step out of the way and let Goodie be elected Governor.

Dangerous Footing. It was all very noisy, but it should not have seemed so shocking. The offering of jobs, in return either for support or for the withdrawal of candidacy, is about as old as politics itself. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s aides promised Political Boss Simon Cameron a place as Secretary of War in return for the Republican convention backing of Cameron’s key Pennsylvania delegation. In 1951, President Harry Truman appointed Minnesota Republican Luther Youngdahl to a federal district judgeship (a position he still holds) to remove Youngdahl from an impending contest with Democrat Hubert Humphrey for the U.S. Senate.

But for all that, Goodie Knight’s charges were surely going to plague Nixon right up to the primary. This was only one of Nixon’s problems. Although he leads in polls taken so far, many California Republicans feel that Nixon ran a weak, lackluster 1960 presidential campaign; rather than let him use the Governor’s chair in Sacramento as a springboard to the 1964 presidential nomination, they might vote for almost anyone else. In his announcement of gubernatorial candidacy, Nixon declared himself against a state right-to-work labor law, disavowed the way-right John Birch Society. Thus, many concrete-hard conservative votes will go to a third gubernatorial Republican runner, State Assembly Republican Leader Joseph Shell, 42. Nixon had mapped a tough route for himself—and if he missed his footing, he was politically dead.