The Partners

Early this year, to the surprise of no one, California's Governor Goodwin J. Knight announced that he was a "nominal" candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. He wants the yoman California delegation pledged 1) to President Eisenhower, if he chooses to run, and 2) to Goodie himself if Ike is not a candidate. The governor's announcement was a warning to others--especially Vice President Richard Nixon--who might covet the delegation for themselves and try to capture it at next June's primary. This week Knight underscored the warning with another announcement of considerable significance: "I have asked Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter to serve as our campaign directors."

Whitaker & Baxter, political pressagents, are a lanky, gentle-looking white-haired man and an uncommonly pretty redhead. In nearly 25 years, the firm of Whitaker & Baxter has managed 75 political campaigns (all but two confined to California) and has lost only five. Their biggest foray onto the national political landscape was management of the American Medical Association's successful campaign against Harry Truman's compulsory-health-insurance plan.

In private life, Clem, 56, and Leone, a youthful looking 49, are Mr. and Mrs. Whitaker. They alternate at being president and vice president, switching jobs every year. They hardly know the pronoun "I"; almost always they are "we." Usually, they answer telephone calls together on two extensions, divide profits equally, plot their campaigns together (often in the seclusion of an oceanside resort). Clem has a genius for long-range planning and Leone tends to defer to his political judgment. Leone is a talented writer, a minter of bright ideas, and more the day-to-day executive than Clem.

The partnership began in 1933, at a meeting in Sacramento. At the time, the state legislature had just passed a bill authorizing the Central Valley Project, which was conceived largely as a flood-control, irrigation and salinity-control development in Northern California. But the powerful Pacific Gas & Electricity Co. correctly foresaw that the project might become a threat to private power, and initiated a referendum to defeat it. In some alarm, State Senator Jack McColl and other Central Valley advocates called a strategy meeting and asked Whitaker, a rising young pressagent, to sit in. Also at the meeting was Leone Smith Baxter, 26, a recent widow who was also something of an expert in publicity as well as a prime mover in the C.V.P.

Clem and Leone agreed to run the campaign together for a frugal $40,000. Bearing down on the farmers and making heavy use of small-town newspapers and the relatively uncultivated medium of radio, they defeated the referendum handily. The astonished Pacific Gas & Electric Co. promptly signed Whitaker & Baxter to an annual retainer, has employed them ever since. Incorporating themselves as Campaigns, Inc., they became the acknowledged originals in the field of political public relations (they are still the world's only permanent specialists in the field). In 1938 they made it a full-time partnership by getting married, and settling down in a rambling Marin County house with a heated, kidney-shaped swimming pool.

Between them, Whitaker & Baxter have elected two governors, a gaggle of lieutenant governors, mayors and assorted lesser officials. The political climate of California is exactly right for an operation such as Whitaker & Baxter's. The state has no real political machine, and California voters have little party loyalty. California's "modern" constitution gives the people the power to initiate legislation by ballot, to pass on acts of the legislature by referendum and to recall elected officeholders by popular vote before their terms have expired. All this puts a high premium on public sentiment and on shifts in it. Whitaker & Baxter, filling the vacuum created by the destruction of old-style party organization, are specialists in public sentiment.

Too Much Breakage. Though they have often been accused of selling their services to the highest bidder, their record has considerable consistency. They refuse to take a campaign, at any price, unless they believe in it. "There is too much personal breakage in this business to do it any other way," says Clem. "You give too much of yourself during a campaign." After they signed up with P.G. & E., Whitaker & Baxter were suspected of selling out to the private power interests. Not at all, says Clem: "The Central Valley Project was not conceived as a power project, but it began to turn into one when the Federal Government stepped in. We were against that, but not the original purpose of C.V.P."

Whitaker & Baxter are deeper than the cliches of liberals and conservatives. When schoolteachers came to them with a mammoth program for increasing school salaries, the teachers told them that big business would oppose the plan because it would increase taxes. Whitaker & Baxter did not agree, and succeeded in lining up the business community behind the teachers. Accosting one corporation president, Clem says, "We asked what his receptionist earned. He said $300 a month. We showed him that the minimum teacher salary at that time was just over $100 a month. He was a man who was always complaining about radicals among schoolteachers. We asked him what the hell he expected. And he came around." So did the voters, who pushed through three pay raises within eight years. Whitaker & Baxter charged the California Teachers Association a stiff $772,000 for the campaigns, but succeeded in raising the payroll from $77 million to $400 million a year.

The partners' most notable successes have been in the defeats they have handed out. Many of the zany schemes that have characterized California politics of the past generation--e.g., the "Thirty Dollars Every Thursday" pension plan, Upton Sinclair's EPIC ("End Poverty in California") campaign--were victims of Whitaker & Baxter's attacks. Similarly, many of the recent political eminences in California were created by the two. They taught Earl Warren how to smile in public, and were the first to recognize the publicity value (e.g., at a Malibu Beach grunion hunt) of his handsome family. They brought the ebullient Goodie Knight before the public with a grueling speechmaking campaign, and have tried to keep a check on him ever since. When San Francisco Mayor Roger Lapham was threatened by a petition for his recall, Whitaker & Baxter saved his job with a brilliant campaign against "the Faceless Man." The Man was the creation of Leone--a drawing of an evil-looking politician with no face, which she doodled on a restaurant tablecloth and transferred to billboards all over San Francisco. It had, like most Whitaker & Baxter creations, a certain basic logic. In the very nature of recall fights, the challenged official must expose his record to attack, but there is no opponent to take the counterpunches.

The Wilting Candidate. Whitaker & Baxter throw everything into the job. Often they will beef up their own 14-man staff by employing an entire public-relations firm. They are unrelenting perfectionists: during the 1954 gubernatorial campaign they once kept Goodie Knight wilting under the klieg lights and cameras for a full day before they were satisfied with four 60-second TV spot films. In one campaign they flooded California with 10 million pamphlets, 50,000 letters, 4,500,000 postcards, 70,000 inches of display advertising in newspapers, trailers in 160 theaters attended by 2,000,000 people, spot announcements on 109 radio stations, twelve TV shows, 1,000 billboard ads and 20,000 small posters. They have a deep disdain for lobbying, and scrupulously refrain from asking political favors. Their services are expensive (the four-year A.M.A. fight cost $4,700,000; Whitaker & Baxter's fee, $400,000), but the results, most of their satisfied customers agree, are worth it.

Last week a reporter asked the partners a question: Would they have had their record of 70 successful campaigns if they had worked for the other side? Whitaker was uncertain, but Baxter said: "I think we could have won almost every one of them--but it wouldn't have been worth it."

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