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At 17, he joined the Marine Corps, which sent him to nearby Occidental under the officer-training V12 program. As the man of the family and rather awed by that responsibility, he dispensed spine-stiffening advice to his twelve-yearold sister, now Mrs. Kenneth Schechter. "You know, Sue," he wrote once, "I have been here about two weeks, and already it's quite obvious which are leaders and which are those of poor caliber. The leaders, the ones that are respected, are those that have a fine background, such as we have (you and I). But more important, they have lived and do live a life of which they can be proud. It has helped me immensely to listen to Mother (your conscience), pray often, and think what Dad would say."
At Occidental, his wife Carol, two years his senior, remembers him as a strait-laced type who neither drank nor smoked—and once wrote a poem urging her to give up cigarettes. She did—only to see him succumb. Until he took his present job, where he feels he has to set an example, he was smoking three packs a day.
After a stint at the Quantico Marine base—he trained as a platoon leader for an invasion of Japan—Finch returned to Occidental. He became student-body president, and married Carol, who had worn his fraternity pin for two years. Even then, recalls classmate Don Muchmore, the California pollster, "he was a practically invincible campaigner because he was—and still is—curious about people and he always wanted to know why they do what they do. The why, in Bob's thinking, has always been as important as the how, and perhaps more so."
During his senior year, Finch plunged into the successful congressional campaign of Norris Poulson, later mayor of Los Angeles. Only 21, he went to Washington as Poulson's executive secretary, and soon struck up an acquaintance with another freshman California Congressman down the hall. At the end of the day, Nixon and Finch would talk politics—"war games," in Finch's words—and found that they generally agreed. For Finch, 13 years Nixon's junior, it was, as he recollects, "all very flattering." On Nixon's urging, Finch returned to California two years later to get a law degree from the University of Southern California. Against Nixon's advice, he decided, at 26, to challenge veteran Congressman Cecil King in a strongly Democratic district. Two years later, he tried and lost again. In 1962, he returned Nixon the favor, advising him against his disastrous run for the California governorship. For once, he stayed out of a Nixon campaign.
With three U.S.C. classmates, Finch formed the law firm of Finch, Bell, Duitsman & Jekel in Inglewood. They were no overnight success. Bell had to moonlight at a dietetic-ice-cream factory; Duitsman worked in the post office; Jekel was a scenic artist at MGM; Finch, who had been called back to the Marine Corps by the Korean War, commuted between Los Angeles and Camp Pendleton, 75 miles distant. However, his congressional campaigns had not been entirely wasted. The publicity brought his fledgling firm more and more work, and by all accounts he was an excellent lawyer. The law, however, was not Finch's métier.
The Campaigns Begin