William F. Knowland: Youngest Majority Leader and the 1958 Big Switch

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William F. Knowland was born in 1908 in Alameda, California, heir to a lumber fortune and son of Joseph R. Knowland, a congressman and publisher of the Oakland Tribune; his mother died less than a month after his birth. At 12 he gave campaign speeches for Harding and Coolidge, married at 19, finished UC Berkeley in three and a half years, and won a state Assembly seat at 25. Drafted in 1942, he rose from private to major. When Hiram Johnson died in 1945, Governor Earl Warren offered the Senate seat to Joseph Knowland, who asked that his son get it instead; William learned of his appointment from Stars and Stripes after military censors blocked his wife's call.

Called the Senator from Formosa for his support of Chiang Kai-shek, he won both party primaries in 1952 through cross filing and took 88 percent of the vote. In 1953 he succeeded Robert Taft as majority leader at 45, worked with Lyndon Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and wept at how diluted it became, and denounced Joseph McCarthy over attacks on John Foster Dulles. In 1958 he pushed Governor Goodwin Knight into the Senate race so he could run for governor, tied his campaign to the Proposition 18 right to work measure, and lost to Pat Brown by more than a million votes. He later took over the Oakland Tribune after his father's death.

• V.K. Krishna Menon suggested he needed psychiatric treatment during an argument over admitting China to the UN.
• Eisenhower's diaries described him as meaning to be loyal but personally cumbersome.
• His father sold family assets, including a radio station, to cover the 1958 campaign debts.
• After the 1973 killing of Oakland superintendent Marcus Foster he offered a $100,000 reward, and the Patty Hearst kidnapping left him fearful for his safety.
• Nearly $1 million in debt, much of it to organized crime, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound by the Russian River on February 23, 1974.