Word: knowland
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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...
Drafted into the Army as a private in 1942, Knowland had risen to major and was serving in France when California's Governor Earl Warren appointed him to the U.S. Senate vacancy created by the death of Hiram Johnson. California politicians generally regarded this as payment of a political debt to Knowland's millionaire father, who had started Warren on his career and whose daily Oakland Tribune had long supported the governor. In 1946 Knowland trounced Democrat Will Rogers Jr. Last year he won both the Republican and Democratic nominations with a total of 2,308,051 votes...
...Knowland's voting record marks him as a middle-of-the-road Republican, e.g.,-he voted for the Taft-Hartley Act, supported NATO. As acting majority leader, Bill Knowland stumbled at the start but then took a firm hold. Bob Taft started the major bills through the Senate, but Knowland was the man in charge when the final push was needed...
...that it would be folly for him to grab the reins with the determined grip that F.D.R. used. Had Ike tried, he might only have invited the congressional bucking that thwarted and infuriated Harry Truman. Ike adapted his tactics to the situation. He worked closely with Taft, Knowland, Speaker Martin and others-but he also went at the Congressmen one by one in a series of White House breakfasts and luncheons. The weight and prestige of the presidency, which could no longer be applied through party discipline, had to be applied in person...