White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll
McCartney, George P.
anthropomorphic God. This kind of personal theology dispenses with argument and hence can be neither proved nor refuted. Whether or not one takes the leap depends solely on one's temperament....
...a man who has probably never bothered with an abstract thought twice in his l i f e . . , no more a statesman.., than Typhoid Mary Edward J. Erler is Director of the Of- ~ is Einstein...
...Erroll, however, was not to be deterred...
...He had avoided seeing action in the war by suddenly coming down with sunstroke as his battalion sailed for France in 1914...
...Fox's title invokes Waugh's Black Mischief in which the cynical bounder, Basil Seal, makes a career of taking advantage of the ingrained stupidity and hypocrisy of his elders...
...It doesn't require a course in Freudian analysis to suspect that Erroll might have been driven by an Oedipal compulsion to subvert paternal authority by humiliating older men...
...In this position he acquitted himself with honor and his executive abilities were widely praised...
...Even among his most enthusiastic admirers Warren's reputation as a scholar and judicial craftsman remains slight...
...The party would never be the same...
...As a compulsive and arrogant womanizer, Erroll had acquired more than his share of enemies among his jilted mistresses and their cuckolded husbands...
...Womanizing is one thing...
...At that time they turned up a good deal of new evidence, but were unable to determine conclusively who murdered Erroll...
...and PRINTS by January 17, 1984 to February 10, 1984 Gotham Book Mart 41 W. 47th Street New York, New York Gunther, of course, was wrong: Warren did set the world on fire...
...One cannot help wondering why...
...In one instance he helped himself to a colonial rancher's wife and two of his Buicks (this seems to have been the colonial car of choice) and set out for a romantic safari...
...Evidently Erroll did not consider an affair fully successful unless it included an enraged husband in the wings...
...Although the Somalis knew exactly where Erroll had gone, they misled their master as long as they could "apparently out of flawless discretion and because this was, after all, how Bwanas chose to spend their time," Fox explains in one of his marvelously understated asides...
...What remains to be demonstrated is that the reconstruction of the Constitution by Warren and his epigones has made for a better regime...
...The political world was an infinity of means informed by no ends, certainly none supplied by nature or nature's God which would only limit the "perfectibility" of the human estate...
...As a result it came to be populated by a knockabout lot of "aristocratic fugitives" intent on pursuing their various pleasures undisturbed by their tamer stay-at-home countrymen...
...Fox supplies these facts but draws no inferences beyond those that help him solve the murder mystery...
...Disgusted with the pieties with which their fathers excused their complicity in a grotesquely wasteful war, convinced Western civilization was in precipitous decline, THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...No doubt the question is of interest but at this date it's hardly the most important question to be raised, nor is it nearly as difficult to answer as Fox would have us believe...
...Calling them a "community of English squires established on the Equator," even the professionally unflappable Evelyn Waugh was impressed by this band of desperadoes who inhabited a world of eighteenth-century licentiousness...
...What distinguished Warren, White informs us, was his willingness to disregard the dictates of the Constitution and principled jurisprudence if they stood in the way of what "he perceived to be ethical imperatives": Most of Warren's energy on the Court was directed toward achieving the "right" results...
...Broughton epitomized just what the Bright Young People thought of the generation before them: He was cowardly, corrupt, and weak...
...He spent his time on discerning results that seemed just and on marshalling support for those results by attempting to convince others of their inherent justice...
...The rancher was bound to discover his losses and when he did, he went after them with his Somali servants...
...most were clearly dalliances of the moment...
...It wasn't as though these connections were grand passions...
...By several accounts he was impotent or at least not sexually active with his last wife...
...This action, in Madison's view, was occasioned by "the absolute necessity of the case" and proceeded from the "transcendent law of nature and nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed...
...James Fox first became involved with the Erroll murder case in 1969 when he worked with Cyril Connolly on a lengthy article about it for the London Sunday Times...
...Using this and his o)vn previous findings, together with another round of interviews with everyone, colonial or native, who was in any way involved with the case, he has reconstructed the story and drawn George P. McCartney teaches English at St...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...Warren has not made it easy for his defenders...
...And now in Earl Warren: A Public Life, G. Edward White attempts to vindicate Warren's role as prime mover in the universe of judicial activism created by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board o f Education in 1954...
...White, however, is game, and thinks he can supply the intellectual underpinnings of Warren's public life...
...Why did Erroll make so much trouble for himself...
...The delegates to the Constitutional Convention deliberately ignored their instructions to reform the Articles of Confederation and drafted instead a constitution that, according to Madison, was nothing less than "an alteration in the first principles...
...Although Diana Caldwell, unlike his other married mistresses, was younger than Erroll, her husband was eighteen years his senior...
...The much more interesting question is the one Fox never asks...
...Most Progressives did not number among their paramount concerns the protection of minority rights, and most Progressives did not envisage creating a governmental apparatus to facilitate that protection...
...Finally arriving at the lovers' camp, the furious cuckold chased Erroll through the bush laying about him with a rhino whip...
...Based on enlightened public opinion and thoroughly grounded in the majoritarian political process, affirmative government was the Progressives' antidote to "special interests...
...He did not often agonize, as did Frankfurter, over an outcome in a case, nor did he despair of finding an adequate constitutional basis for justifying his intuitions, nor did he worry about being overly activist...
...His last affair certainly supports this interpretation...
...Any limits demanded by the immediate exigencies of political life could be legitimate only insofar as they were self-limitations, that is, a kind of categorical imperative, where the limits would themselves be an expression of human freedom...
...Born in 1901, Erroll was too young to fight in the war but old enough to feel its demoralizing consequences...
...You or I?" There's little doubt Erroll enjoyed the melodramatic scandals he instigated...
...The list is quite long...
...The idea of affirmative government, of course, had been a central Progressive tenet of Warren's political career...
...The conflict between t h e s e men seems a perfect instance of the hostility that divided the generations on either side of the First World War...
...John's University...
...The authority of the older generation was a bad joke to be mocked or ignored according to one's mood...
...Perhaps he was too intent on writing a murder mystery...
...Though I found Gardner's discussion of worldly matters more invigorating than his confession of faith, I much enjoyed his company all the way along...
...Had he meant them as an indictment, then the following would surely be a case of l~se majestd: "Warr e n . . , equated judicial lawmaking with neither the dictates of reason, as embodied in established precedent or doctrine, nor the demands imposed by an institutional theory of the judge's role, nor the alleged 'command' of the constitutional text, but rather with his own reconstruction of the ethical structure of the Constitution [emphasis added...
...Upon his death, Connolly left Fox his research...
...White describes Warren's pilgrimage from Progressivism to ideological liberalism as a "liberal fusion...
...Thanks to the power of science, human perfectibility could know no bounds...
...Was Erroll one of Waugh's aging youths bent on savagely twitting his father's generation for having emptied the world of order and purpose...
...His liaisons were almost always with married women older than himself (Fox accounts for at least five) and he conducted these affairs in such a fashion that the husbands were always sure to find out...
...Here White is persuasive enough, although hardly original...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone ! - I In Amerir Phone Number AS I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 43 soon to be polished off by the next war into which they were unavoidably drifting, they saw no point to life beyond the pleasure of the immediate moment...
...Erroll and Broughton seem classic representatives of the bitter disillusionment that characterized the interwar years...
...Far from encouraging prudence, these episodes only served to spur Erroll on to even more adulterous effrontery...
...Is this a case of life imitating art...
...White e x p l a i n s : Progressivism can be said to have been a protest on behalf of a hitherto silent, disadvantaged majority (the "public") against the control of government by vested minorities ("special interests...
...It is both ironic and illuminating that when Erroll was given an opportunity for purposeful action, he was able to forego enough of his dissolute habits to carry out his duties commendably...
...On another occasion, with someone else's wife, he insisted on "having his way" with her on the local hotel's billiard table where, he must have realized, their sport was sure to be observed and duly reported...
...But because the Progressives never settled on what the common interest was, they understood it only in procedural terms...
...cultivating scandal quite another...
...But when he tries to show Warren as the adherent of a consistent jurisprudence he is on shakier ground, however ingenious his rationale: "I shall contend that Warren was merely a different kind of legal technician, unorthodox rather than inept, and that his theory of judging, while uniquely his, was not without its own theoretical integrity...
...E a r l Warren has always been something of an enigma, particularly to his friends...
...Either way, we are left with this troubling question: Was Erroll a victim of sexual jealousy or his own disillusionment with the world his elders had unmade for him...
...He was a conservative Republican who turned late to ideological liberalism, yet never mastered the catechism of his new faith...
...Warren simply saw no reason to account for his jurisprudential stance whether in the many opinions and articles he wrote during his years on the Court, or in his posthumously published memoirs...
...Fox attributes Erroll's behavior to a "professional contempt for husbands," but this seems hardly adequate to explain the older women and Erroll's need to affront their spouses, some of whom were old enough to be his father...
...He does so by trying to refute "entrenched" assumptions about Warren's career...
...He belonged to the interwar generation Waugh named the Bright Young People...
...One cannot help wondering whether he hasn't neglected his story's more important possibilities...
...Like the engagingly disreputable characters of Waugh's novels, these were rogues who went their own way "careless of consequence...
...According to White, Warren's conversion to ideological liberalism was not a radical departure from his earlier views, but the logical--indeed necessary-outgrowth of his earlier Progressivism...
...Why would a man of Erroll's charm, position, and influence have insisted on making public spectacles of his sexual indiscretions...
...But then their seemingly "permanent feast of dissipation and sensuous pleasure" was violently interrupted on January 24, 1941 when their leading reveler, Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, High Constable of Scotland, and Kenya's foremost adulterer, was found shot through the skull in his overturned Buick a few miles outside Nairobi...
...Warren had fused the idea of rights against the state, chiefly personified by the claims of dissident minorities, with the idea of affirmative action by government to protect disadvantaged persons...
...Perhaps Fox is too much the British empiricist to speculate on his story's larger implications...
...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984...
...I might remind readers that White wrote these statements as a defense of Warren...
...up a list of possible murderers painstakingly reviewing their motives...
...Like many another imperial outpost, Kenya was a place for those with something to hide...
...In the face of Warren's "intuitions," the principles of constitutional government were "theoretical baggage...
...Which of them killed Erroll...
...In 1939, just two years before his murder, he was made Military Secretary for Kenya responsible for gathering the troops necessary to launch the campaign against Mussolini's army in Abyssinia...
...I n 1947 John Gunther wrote in his best-selling Inside USA of the then Governor Warren that he will never set the world on fire or even make it smoke...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...The night he met Diana Caldwell, who was then newly wed to Sir John Henry ("Jock") Delves Broughton, his first words to her when they were alone were, "Well, who's going to tell Jock...
...The repetitive pattern of his affairs invites speculation...
...Later he went in for insurance fraud arranging the thefts of his own paintings and jewelry...
...he has the limitations of all Americans of his type with little intellectual background, little genuine depth or coherent political philosophy...
...Of course, the Constitution of 1787 was itself the product of a kind of l~se majestd...
...The governmental apparatus they sought to create was principally designed to restore open, moral, majoritarian government...
...This was the work of enlightened majorities...
...B y ' the 1920s Kenya had become t h e colony of choice for those members of the British upper class who were shiftless, bankrupt, alcoholic, larcenous, addicted to drugs, given to irregular sexual habits, or otherwise indisposed for polite company at home...
...fice of the Bicentennial at the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...In time, however, Warren lost faith in the majority's capacity for enlightenment, which led to his conversion to ideological liberalism...
...His major sin was his failure to give ideological liberalism a solid grounding in constitutional law, and many of his followers believe that his inability to do so--indeed his insistence on interpreting the Constitution by judicial fiat--has given ideological liberalism a bad name...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
Vol. 17 • January 1984 • No. 1
