Joe Shell - Gubernatorial Primary Race

Gubernatorial Primary Race

When Shell declared his candidacy for governor, he did not expect Nixon to run because the former vice president had vacillated for several months about a potential candidacy and had a national perspective, rather than extensive interest in state government.

Shell remained in the race to carry the banner of the more conservative Republicans, with Nixon hence cast as the "moderate" candidate. Nixon defined himself in his own words as "a conservative —a progressive conservative."

The California primary race was covered nationally because Nixon was a national figure who was expected to run again for President in the future, and California was then on the verge of surpassing New York as the nation's most populous state. Shell was quoted in Time magazine that he had "gotten sick and tired of calling people liberals when they're basically socialists."

Among Shell's financial backers was A. C. "Cy" Ruble, former chairman of Union Oil Company of California. In Bakersfield, Mary K. Shell, then Mary Hosking (born 1927) of the Kern County Republican Women's Association, worked for the nomination of her future husband. In the same election, two other conservatives, including Howard Jarvis, the future father of California Proposition 13 (1978), challenged liberal U.S. Senator Thomas H. Kuchel in the primary. Kuchel easily prevailed to gain renomination. He had initially succeeded Nixon in the Senate in 1953. The 1962 elections were the first in California in which cross-filing across party lines had been abandoned.

During the gubernatorial campaign, Shell's plane was sabotaged: somehow, barium was placed in the second fuel tank. Had the pilot not discovered the problem, the plane would have crashed. Nixon's membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy interest group distrusted by many conservatives, became an issue in the race. Nixon arranged with the council that his name not appear on public releases as a member. The CFR (Page 42 of the 1952 Report) cautions that "Members of the Council are sometimes obliged, by their acceptance of government posts in Washington and elsewhere, to curtail or suspend for a time their participation in Council activities."

Nixon secured an easy primary victory: 1,285,151 votes (65.4 percent) to Shell's 656,542 (33.4 percent), but he did not immediately consult Shell to seek rapprochement with the conservative wing of the party. Thereafter, he declared that "those who have supported Joe Shell will see that their differences with me are infinitesimal compared with their differences with Brown." Shell first demanded that Nixon agree to trim state spending by at least $200 million (then 7 percent of the state budget) and to "espouse conservatism" as the price of his endorsement. He asked to be able to name a third of the delegates to the next national convention and to name the party's vice-chairman. When a considerable number of Shell's Assembly colleagues objected to the demands that he imposed on the basis of having polled only a third of the primary vote, Shell relented and agreed to endorse Nixon and the entire Republican ticket, including Senator Kuchel.

Two leading liberal Republicans refused to support Nixon: Kuchel and former Lieutenant Governor Harold J. Powers, who had served under former Governor Goodwin J. Knight, who, had his health permitted, would have also run again for governor that year. Nixon also declined to endorse Kuchel for reelection. Powers was particularly critical of what he called Nixon's "cheap attempt to win votes" during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred near the end of the campaign. It was unclear what Powers meant, because Nixon had hailed Kennedy's handling of the crisis. Nixon's interest in the Cuban crisis during a gubernatorial race revealed to home-state voters that his concern lay with foreign affairs, rather than California domestic matters, a situation which worked to Brown's advantage.

The Massachusetts-based John Birch Society became an issue in California politics in 1962 as well, as three JBS members, including Representative John H. Rousselot, fought unsuccessfully for seats in the U.S. House. Nixon was critical of the society's founder, Robert Welch, an erstwhile supporter of the late U.S. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who had declared U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Taft's 1952 nomination opponent under whom Nixon had served as vice president, to have been a "dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy". However, the statement has never been proven. State Republicans in their convention approved a watered-down resolution condemning the society leadership but not its rank-and-file. Shell was not affiliated with the JBS but opposed any attempts to remove society members from party activities. Nixon supporters claimed that Shell partisans sat out the gubernatorial contest and enabled Brown to win a second term. Conservatives, however, disputed that assertion. Henry Salvatori, a southern California conservative operative, had convinced Shell to endorse Nixon. Conservatives claimed that they labored unenthusiastically for Nixon, but it was liberal Republicans, such as Kuchel and Powers, whose refusal to endorse him in the general election that proved decisive. Moreover, Nixon did not draw sufficient Democratic support in a state in which the GOP was in the minority by registration.

During the Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964, Shell became Goldwater's financial chairman.

Though Nixon had attacked the JBS, he brought up the question of communist infiltration into government, including the California state government under Brown. He vowed to remove any employees found to be communist agents.

Ultimately, Nixon lost the election to Brown and held his "You-won't-have-Nixon-to-kick-around-any-more" press conference. Six years later, Nixon defeated Hubert H. Humphrey and George C. Wallace, Jr., for the presidency.