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Pursuit Is All. As Goodie Knight sees his horizon, there is only one threatening cloud: Richard Nixon. Publicly, the governor and the Vice President are on crisp good terms, but in private, Knight regards Nixon as a political upstart. The coolness between the two began when Dick Nixon returned to California in triumph after the 1952 Chicago convention. Goodie dutifully turned up at the airport to greet him, but when Nixon's supporters pushed Goodie out of camera range, he felt slighted, and huffed back home. The bad blood is still simmering.
Last summer's power struggle at the state convention centered around two candidates for assistant state chairman—one a Knight loyalist, the other a Nixon insurgent. Goodie Knight easily managed (with an able assist from Senator William Knowland) to get his man, Multimillionaire Howard Ahmanson, elected.
This month Goodie took a resolution from the California G.O.P. organizations to the President urging him to run again in 1956. Conspicuously, the resolution made no mention of Nixon.
In California, a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1,000,000 voters, there is no such thing as a party machine, and politics are played by ear. Nixon has a small following of his own and so has Knight, but the rank-and-file of voters are not organized in factions. Before next year's convention, Goodie Knight, as governor, will probably be able to pick the California delegates personally; if he does, they will be Knight's pawns. Should Nixon force a showdown for control, Goodie will almost certainly beat him and mire down the Nixon-for-President bandwagon. "The best we can do," concedes a Nixon stalwart, "is maybe slip some sneakers in on him."
"Goodie lives in the future," says Democrat Paul Ziffren. "He is a first-rate example of the Don Juan complex in men: the pursuit is everything. Once they get what they're after, they find that having it is not nearly so much fun as chasing it." Goodie's obvious enchantment with his job as governor belies the statement, but much of the fun he gets out of the governorship is the stimulation it gives to his keen anticipation of 1956. If Ike should step down, Goodie will be off in mad pursuit.
* The three: Tulelake (pop. 927), Eagleville (pop. 425), Solvang (pop. 800). * The governor's name was no capricious pun; he was named for C. C. Goodwin, a famed editor of the Salt Lake City Tribune, and his middle name, like his father's, was a shortened tribute to Great-Uncle Jesse Knight, a multimillionaire mine owner, and one of early Utah's most colorful citizens. One night in a dream, Uncle Jesse received instructions through a "manifestation" (a Mormon expression for a message from on high) to stake a claim at the supposedly worthless Humbug property. He struck gold, silver and lead, made $30 million, then gave most of it away to the church and various charities, was known for the rest of his life as "The Dream Man of Utah."