William Fife Knowland was an American politician and newspaper publisher.
49 Facts About William Knowland
2.
William Knowland was Senate Majority Leader from August 1953 to January 1955 after the death of Robert A Taft, a position he briefly regained from November 1956 to January 1957, and would the last Republican Senate Majority Leader until Howard Baker in 1980.
3.
William Knowland opposed sending American forces to French Indochina and was a sharp critic of Communist China under Mao Zedong.
4.
William Knowland voted in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
5.
William Knowland was defeated in his 1958 run for Governor of California.
6.
William Knowland succeeded his father, Joseph R Knowland, as the editor-in-chief and publisher of the Oakland Tribune.
7.
William Knowland was born in the City of Alameda, Alameda County, California.
8.
William Knowland was the third child, with an older sister, Elinor, and a brother, Joseph Russell "Russ" Knowland Jr.
9.
William Knowland married at 19, became a California State Assemblyman at 25, entered the US Senate at 37, and became a grandfather at 41.
10.
William Knowland graduated with a political science degree in three and a half years from the University of California, Berkeley in 1929.
11.
William Knowland was a member of Zeta Psi fraternity and the Order of the Golden Bear.
12.
William Knowland did not seek re-election in 1938 but remained active in the California Republican Party.
13.
William Knowland was influential on the national scene, serving as the chairman of the executive committee of the Republican National Committee from 1940 to 1942.
14.
In June 1942, William Knowland was drafted into the US Army for World War II service.
15.
William Knowland served as an aide-de-camp to Brigadier General Marcellus L Stockton Jr.
16.
William Knowland was sent to Europe in 1944 and landed in France a month after D-Day.
17.
William Knowland served in France initially with the Forward Echelon Communications Zone headquarters in France and Belgium, and later with the Fifteenth United States Army headquarters in Germany.
18.
William Knowland was sworn in as a freshman Senator of the 79th Congress September 6,1945, the day the Senate adjourned in memory of Hiram Johnson.
19.
William Knowland was assigned membership in the Commerce Committee, the Irrigation and Reclamation and Immigration Committee, and the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program.
20.
In 1946, in a special election for the last part of Johnson's term, William Knowland defeated Democrat Will Rogers Jr.
21.
William Knowland defeated Rogers in the general election by nearly 261,000 votes, winning a full term in the Senate in his own right.
22.
William Knowland was publicly critical of the actions in the "loss" of China to Communism and the Korean War.
23.
William Knowland sometimes was called the "Senator from Formosa" for his strong support for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist government in China against Mao Zedong and the Communists.
24.
In later years, William Knowland moderated his position, praising President Nixon's diplomatic overture to China in 1972.
25.
At the 1948 Republican National Convention, Knowland made the nominating speech for Warren as the Vice Presidential candidate, and he was seen on the podium with presidential candidate Thomas E Dewey.
26.
William Knowland got 2.5 million votes to 750,000 for his Democratic opponent, Clinton D McKinnon, and won both nominations.
27.
Eisenhower's aides contacted William Knowland and persuaded him to fly from Hawaii to join Eisenhower and be available as a potential replacement running mate.
28.
When Taft died on July 31,1953, William Knowland was chosen to succeed him as Senate Republican Leader.
29.
William Knowland called the Senate the "most exclusive club of 96".
30.
William Knowland was slow to criticize its most infamous member, Wisconsin's Republican junior Senator Joseph McCarthy.
31.
In 1953, McCarthy questioned the "integrity and good faith" of US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, which led William Knowland to denounce McCarthy publicly.
32.
Amid speculation that Eisenhower might not run for re-election, William Knowland briefly floated his candidacy for president in 1956, but he withdrew when Eisenhower decided to seek a second term.
33.
William Knowland was Temporary Chairman of the 1956 Republican National Convention in the San Francisco Cow Palace.
34.
William Knowland had a long-running battle with Nixon, with whom he served in the Senate from 1951 to 1953, for influence in California Republican Party affairs.
35.
In 1958, William Knowland decided to run for Governor of California instead of re-election to the Senate.
36.
William Knowland's father was shaken by the decision, as he cherished the Senate seat; voters had denied him California's other Senate seat in 1914.
37.
William Knowland endorsed Proposition 18 in excessive language, but Proposition 18 was highly unpopular, and the endorsement hurt William Knowland.
38.
William Knowland backed the Goldwater-Miller ticket and spoke for the Arizona Senator across the country.
39.
William Knowland was the titular head of the California Republican Party from 1959 to 1967, when he passed the party leadership to the new governor, Ronald Reagan.
40.
William Knowland became the sole successor to his father and to control of the Oakland Tribune.
41.
William Knowland became president, editor, and publisher of the Oakland Tribune in 1966, after the death of his father.
42.
William Knowland was typically called "Senator" by the staff after his return to the paper from Washington.
43.
William Knowland kept the editorial pages of the Tribune solidly Republican.
44.
William Knowland offered a $100,000 reward for the conviction of those responsible for the 1973 murder of Marcus Foster.
45.
William F Knowland was married to Helen Davis Herrick, whom he had met in the sixth grade.
46.
William Knowland then married Ann Dickson on April 29,1972, but the two were estranged by the end of that year.
47.
William Knowland had two stepchildren, Kay and Steve Sessinghaus, from his marriage to Dickson.
48.
On February 23,1974, William Knowland died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, an apparent suicide, at his summer home near Guerneville, California.
49.
At the Main Mausoleum of the Mountain View Cemetery, in Oakland, California on Floor I, M8J, N2, TI, William Knowland is with his first wife, Helen William Knowland Whyte and her mother, Estelle Davis Herrick.