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By Root 3543 0

confident chatter about stocks, the aura of a prodigy, the tinny twang of the ukulele, were wrapped around a fragile, needy core: a boy who was stumbling through his days in a shroud of desolation. “I was a mess,” he says. “It was incredible the way Susie saw through to some of that.” Indeed, somebody who felt like a wreck and a mess was catnip to Susie. Warren would later say of her need to turn him into a cause that he “was Jewish enough for Susie, but not too Jewish” for her dad. And so she started coming around.

Warren, who was nearly blind to the way others dressed—even women—was so in love with Susie by now that he actually noticed her clothes. He would never forget the blue dress she wore on their dates or the black-and-white print outfit he called the “newspaper dress.”36 Amid the summer fireflies at the Peony Park pavilion, they stumbled around the dance floor to the sounds of a Glenn Miller tune. Warren had still never learned to dance and tried as hard as he could. He was about as cozy on the dance floor as a sixth grader at a sorority social. But “I would have done anything she asked,” he says. “I would have let her put worms down the back of my shirt.”

By Labor Day, when Warren took her to the state fair, they were a couple. Susie registered at the university as a sophomore majoring in journalism, signed up for the debate team,37 and enrolled in the Association for the Study of Group Dynamics, a psychology group.38

Warren wrote his aunt Dorothy Stahl in October 1951 in his best smart-alecky style: “Things in the girl department are at an all-time peak…the hooks have been sunk pretty deep into me by one of the local gals. As soon as I get the go-ahead from [my uncle] Fred and you, I may proceed further. This girl has only one drawback; she knows nothing about stocks. Otherwise she is unbeatable and I guess I can overlook her Achilles’ heel.”39

Cautiously “proceeding further” was putting it right. Warren worked up his nerve. Instead of proposing marriage, he “just sort of assumed it, and kept talking.” Susie, for her part, “realized she had been chosen,” although “she wasn’t sure how.”40

Triumphant, Warren went to his Dale Carnegie class on schedule. “That’s the week I won the pencil. They gave a pencil award for doing something difficult and doing the most with the training. The week I won the pencil was the week that I proposed.”

Afterward, Susie wrote a long, sad letter to Milton Brown, telling him the news. He was shocked. He knew she had been out on some dates with Warren but had no idea it was anything serious.41

Warren went to talk to Susie’s father to get his blessing. This, he already knew, would be easily had. But Doc Thompson took a while—quite a while—to get to the point. He started by explaining that Harry Truman and the Democrats were sending the country straight to hell. Pouring money into Europe after the war through the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift42 was just proof that the policies of that devil Roosevelt were still in place, and that Truman was sending the country straight into bankruptcy. Look at how the Soviets got hold of the atomic bomb right after Truman had dismantled part of the military. Senator Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee was proving what Doc Thompson had known all along, that the government was riddled with Communists. HUAC was finding Commies everywhere. The government was downright ineffectual—or worse—when it came to dealing with Communism. Truman had lost China for democracy. He would never be forgiven for firing the heroic General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination after he made repeated efforts to go around Truman and get approval to attack the Chinese Commies in Manchuria. But it was probably too late for even MacArthur to save the country now. The Communists were taking over the world, and stocks were going to be nothing but valueless bits of paper. So Warren’s plan to work in the stock market was going to fail. But Doc Thompson would never blame Warren when his daughter starved. He was a smart young man. If not for the Democrats