The Spin of the Wheel

Just before the Senate adjourned last week, Majority Leader Bill Knowland rose at his desk to speak warm words of praise and commendation for the presiding officer of the Senate, Vice President Richard Nixon. Facing each other thus, from the pinnacles of the Eisenhower Administration, the two young Californians (Nixon, 40; Knowland, 45) were a sharp reminder of the breathtaking fortunes of politics. At the adjournment of the last Congress Knowland was the senior and Nixon the junior Senator from California. In the spin of a year their evident talents and a whirl of fate had made them national figures.

There was a malicious twist in the spin because--despite Knowland's warm words for the record--Dick Nixon and Bill Knowland have long been rivals, and there is a serious conflict between them. The two Californians raced to the pinnacles by quite different routes. Nixon is the son of a grocer in Whittier, in Southern California. A young lawyer-war veteran, he had little political background when a friend submitted his name to a citizens' committee which was seeking a candidate for Congress in California's Twelfth District in 1946. Knowland, son of a wealthy and powerful publisher-politician from Oakland, in the northern half of the state, was born and bred to politics. He served long at local and state levels before he vaulted into the U.S. Senate in 1945 on an appointment from California's Earl Warren.

Averted Gaze. Subject to all of the traditional tensions between northern and southern Californians (as well as the natural political stresses), Nixon and Knowland never have been close. Real coolness developed in 1950 during Nixon's tough campaign for the Senate against Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas. Both Senator Knowland and Governor Warren considered Nixon something of an upstart. They offered him no help, gazed steadily the other way. Nixon told friends: "When the going gets hard, you learn who your friends are not--and Warren and Knowland certainly are not."

After Nixon was elected, Knowland continually referred to him in speeches as -"the junior Senator"--with emphasis on "junior." Real trouble developed last year before the G.O.P. convention. Nixon flew to Denver, boarded the California delegation's train, tried to persuade a bloc of Warren-pledged delegates to bolt to Eisenhower after the first ballot. Delegation Chairman Knowland, publicly for Warren, privately listing toward Robert A. Taft, was furious. He had a private label for Nixon's intervention: "fifth-columning."

In the campaign, when Nixon was being bludgeoned in the "Nixon fund" uproar, Knowland turned his back. Right down to election day, Knowland (as well as Warren) made only perfunctory mention of Nixon. Since the election, Knowland and Nixon have had differences on patronage (TIME, April 13). Last week Washington gossiped that Nixon, by getting New Hampshire's Senator Styles Bridges to press for delay in the election of a Senate majority leader to replace Taft, tried unsuccessfully to head off Knowland's sprint to the majority leadership.

Distant Aim. This week both Nixon and Knowland were planning trips through the Far East. Departing early in October, the grocer's son will go as the representative of the President, surrounded by protocol, ceremony, official conferences and social events. Departing late in August, the wealthy publisher-politician's "son will go on his own, at his own expense, without much benefit of protocol or pomp.

From now on, increasing competition between Californians Nixon and Knowland seems inevitable. The immediate, specific political aims of each are 1) to be higher than the other in the esteem of President Eisenhower, and 2) to control the California delegation to the Republican National Convention in 1956. But there is another aim in the distance. Neither Nixon nor Knowland has to stretch his imagination far to see the White House in his future. One of them may well make it. There is no chance that both of them will. That is the real seed and soil of the conflict.

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