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When his first senate term expired, Billy quit. His ambition was pointing to Washington, where California's aging Senator Hiram Johnson was living his last years.
Succeeding Earl Warren as California's Republican national committeeman (Warren resigned to become state attorney general), Knowland used the post to travel the length and breadth of the state, getting to know people and letting them know him. He made news on being elected chairman of the Republican National Committee's executive committee, posed for pictures with every leading G.O.P. candidate who came through town, including Republican Leaders Tom Dewey and Wendell Willkie. He was, in fact, carefully preparing for the day when Hiram Johnson's Senate place would become vacant.
His strenuous efforts were interrupted. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Knowland was having breakfast in bed when Tribune City Editor Al Reck called with the news of Pearl Harbor. Scrambling out of bed, Knowland sent his breakfast dishes flying in all directions. Six months later he was off to the Army, soon was bound for Europe as a public information and military government officer. It was in the summer of 1945 when Major William Knowland, drinking coffee in an Army cafeteria in Paris, picked up a copy of Stars and Stripes and read that he had been appointed by Governor Earl Warren to succeed the late Hiram Johnson in the U.S. Senate.
Busting his Britches. The new Senator hustled himself onto the first plane to Washington, received his Army discharge there in a single afternoon. He was a strange sight. He had put on weight in the Army (the harder he works, the more he eats and the rounder he gets), and now, with no time to waste on clothes-buying, he tried to stuff himself back into his prewar civvies. For months, until Helen Knowland finally took charge and ordered him some new suits, Washington held its breath in anticipation of the occasion when California's young Republican Senator William Fife Knowland would literally bust his britches.
Knowland was a britches-buster in other ways to the august U.S. Senate. In a forum where youngsters are supposed to be seen but not heard, Knowland set out by tackling—and tumbling—none other than Mr. Republican, Ohio's Bob Taft, on an issue of budget policy. In an institution where seniority is the road to prominence, Knowland leaped to the forefront before his first full term was half over. He became the Senate's leading Republican spokesman on the most acrimonious issue of the day: U.S. policy toward Asia. How it happened is typical of Bill Knowland.
In the winter of 1945-46, Knowland made his first trip to the Far East with a Senate committee investigating the disposal of surplus war properties. In Tokyo he met General Douglas MacArthur and was enormously impressed, but not overwhelmed (Knowland is a hard man to overwhelm). He was fascinated by Asia's political and economic problems and, once back in Washington, began studying them. After hours and weeks and months of concentrated self-education, he came to an unshakable conviction: in its preoccupation with Europe, the U.S. was disastrously neglecting Asia.