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“Originally believed to be little more than an electoral ploy, Warren’s bipartisanship soon came out as the time came for building a cabinet.”


“Chosen as Chief of Staff for Warren was fellow Californian and fellow moderate, Thomas Kuchel. It was hoped that Kuchel’s ability to play the moderate centrist would be helpful in balancing the different wings of the party and for pushing through the President’s goals.”


“It is widely believed that the announcement of Kuchel as Chief of Staff was taken as a personal snub by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. who had, many assert, believed that he would be transitioned from managing the campaign to managing the White House.”


“Chosen for Secretary of State was the man at the head of Republican foreign policy and the advisor of both Dewey and Warren on foreign policy issues, John Foster Dulles. Dulles was a response to the failures of Truman’s foreign policy and a commitment to push back against Communism rather than merely contain it.”


“Warren was also forced to make drastic compromises regarding the Secretary of Defense. The MacArthur-ites, who had still not resigned to defeat, demanded various radical choices from MacArthur himself to another man they thought would be their ally General Curtis LeMay. On the other hand, business interests wanted one of their own in the office and pushed various officials from a handful of companies to hold the position.”

“Supposedly the decision occurred sometime in late January of 1953, the two men [Warren and Eisenhower] were to discuss the military, foreign policy, and more specifically the war in Korea. It is said that the President asked Eisenhower what to do regarding the Secretary of Defense issue, and the General apparently considered it for a while before choosing his old friend and previous deputy, General Lucius Clay.”


“Warren also had in mind various reforms to the Cabinet system to reflect his devotion to the New Deal policies and to technocratic policy expansion in general, more specifically, splitting the Department of Commerce’s transportation and urban development portions into the Department of Public Works, as well as developing the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.”

“The new Department of Public Works as it was now known, soon encompassed various old New Deal programs and agencies such as the Federal Housing Administration, a mixture of old policies from the Federal Works Agency, and the Bureau of Public Roads. The Department was a leviathan of infrastructure, development, and urban planning, and choosing who was to run it and how it was to be run would make or break the department. It is then quite odd that the choice went to an unelected and local level official, even if it was someone with the record and now legacy of Robert Moses.”


“The appointment of Robert Moses showed a sort of blithe ignorance on the part of the Warren White House, a belief in progress and development that was deeply blind to the faults of the man and the faults of his philosophy. It was a blindness indicative to an era of pushing growth and success at all costs.”


“The most controversial and directly opposed appointment was that of Truman and Roosevelt healthcare and Social Security advisor, Isidore Sydney Falk, to be Secretary of the newly created Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This quickly raised fears in the business community that Warren would bring back his universal state healthcare plans from California and try to implement them on a nationwide level. This not only caused panic amongst the party, but also caused the American Medical Association to begin publishing a litany of pamphlets and expand their lobbying funding”


“Mr. Falk has shown himself to be deeply submerged in the highly partisan politics and pure propaganda of the National Health Assembly and the rabid ‘reformers’ of the Truman age. With such a bias leading head, the Department has fallen from what it could have been. What should have been a leading table of healthcare leaders and officials has become the meeting room of the radical and the misguided.”


“The days after the announcement of the choice of the President of Mr.Falk were hectic ones. Conservative Republicans came in asking to see the President with a clear amount of anger and frustration, I remember one Congressman in particular came in and almost barked at me to see the President. I was told to redirect such men to the Chief of Staff, and I imagine he would smooth talk many of them. To make matters worse, you had well meaning but oblivious progressives coming in to talk policy, whenever they came in the AMA and all would start roaring about healthcare again.”


“It is time for American business and the American employer to come back to the fore and take up responsibility. For too many years, the government in Washington has told us what to do, and we will not allow that to expand to healthcare. After many years of promised ‘Deals’, the American people now want a chance to run their affairs themselves.”


“Pushing labor further into the Democratic Party was Earl Warren’s nomination of Fred Hartley Jr, of Taft-Hartley Act fame, to be the Secretary of Labor. This showed, quite early on, that the Warren administration had little intent to ‘compromise’ on labor as it had with healthcare and other old Fair Deal programs.”


“Repeal of Taft-Hartley went from an idea of only the few devotees of the Fair Deal to the core of the Democratic Party when it became obvious based on union and worker reactions to the appointment of Secretary of Labor Hartley that the assault on labor rights was something that Democrats could finally use to differentiate themselves from the Progressive Republicans.”


“The appointment of Hartley has been explained through various means, which will be quickly explored here. The first was that this was a very political move to satisfy the Taft Conservative wing of the party and that Warren had no hostile intent toward labor but was willing to sacrifice it. Another view is that Representative Hartley seemed to have some expertise on labor and that Warren truly believed that the Taft-Hartley Act was not anti-labor as much as a bill well designed to address past issues. The final view, which was espoused at the time, was that Warren had always been an opponent of labor, looking all the way back to the 1920’s when he had taken a heavy hand to fight back a general strike in San Francisco. This also raised old leftist fears that he was secretly a McCarthy in disguise, fears grown from his role in Whitney v California”


“JUSTICE FOR WHITNEY, JUSTICE FOR LABOR, JUSTICE FOR AMERICA”


“From the very beginning, the Warren administration was built on the value of the man himself, compromise. Compromise between progressive and conservative, Republican and Democrat, business interests and the working American. But often this compromise only made matters worse. Warren would assuage American corporate interests while enraging the left on labor matters but then immediately lose business support due to fears of his healthcare plans. What was meant to be a compromise cabinet became a compromised cabinet to many.”


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