These Truths: A History of the United States

by Jill Lepore

What really changed Earl Warren was Campaigns, Inc. Whitaker and Baxter took a piece of legislation that enjoyed wide popular support and torpedoed it. Fifty newspapers initially supported Warren’s plan; Whitaker and Baxter whittled that down to twenty. “You can’t beat something with nothing,” Whitaker liked to say, so they launched a drive for private health insurance. Their “Voluntary Health Insurance Week,” driven by 40,000 inches of advertising in more than four hundred newspapers, was observed in fifty-three of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Whitaker and Baxter sent more than nine thousand doctors out with prepared speeches. They coined a slogan: “Political medicine is bad medicine.”27 They printed postcards for voters to stick in the mail: Dear Senator: Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germany—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here.28 When Warren’s bill failed to pass by just one vote, he blamed Whitaker and Baxter. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” he complained, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.”29 It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It would not be the last.