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He attended the University of California at Berkeley, and later its law school. After World War I, from which Warren emerged as an infantry first lieutenant, two old chums recommended him as a law clerk to the California assembly's judiciary committee. He was in public life for good.
As Alameda County district attorney, and later as state attorney general, Warren was a zealous law-and-order prosecutor, but he also had a scrupulous regard for the rights of the prosecuted. "I never heard a jury bring in a verdict of guilty but that I felt sick at the pit of my stomach," he admitted.
Warren's success as a prosecutor inexorably pushed him toward a political career. Bluff, blond, big as a bear (6 ft. 1 in., over 200 lbs.), with a reassuring Scandinavian air of wholesomeness, he came across as the ideal public man. He had a family to match. In 1925 he married a widow of Swedish descent, Nina Palmquist Meyers, adopted her son and then sired five children of his own. An inveterate joiner (Masons, Elks, et al.) with a loose, easy "How are yuh, good to see yuh" handshaking style, he was a Republican whose personal constituency crossed party lines. In 1946 he won both the G.O.P. and Democratic gubernatorial primaries.
As Attorney General and then as Governor of California, Warren wrote a record with only one indelible blot on it: his stand on the treatment accorded Japanese Americans in the hysterical months after Pearl Harbor. He became one of the most urgent advocates of evacuating all of them to inland "relocation" (i.e., concentration) camps. But, always the learner, Warren outgrew this extremist taint, and after the war's end proposed one of the nation's first fair-employment acts, "to break down artificial barriers that give rise to demonstrations of racial prejudice."
The proposal was in line with Warren's stance as a pragmatic progressive. After an expensive hospitalization for a kidney infection, he wondered, "If it hits me this hard, and I make a Governor's salary, how can the man who earns so much less pay his bills?" He proposed compulsory medical and hospital insurance, 20 years before Medicare became law.
From the time he was first elected Governor in 1942, there was talk that he might some day be President. He led a favorite-son delegation to the 1944, '48 and '52 G.O.P. conventions and let himself be talked into being Thomas Dewey's running mate in 1948, though he had no real interest in the vice presidency: "I can't spend my years sitting up there calling balls and strikes in the Senate." Warren was always the political independent. Even in 1952, when Eisenhower needed only nine more votes to beat Robert A. Taft for the G.O.P. nomination, Warren held California's 70 votes to the last minute.