The Court Years 1939-1975: The Autobiography of William O. Douglas

...To Justice Felix Frankfurter, a fellow New Dealer and Roosevelt appointee, Douglas was "malignant," "one of the two genuinely evil men I have known...

...Part of the difficulty, as his sympathetic recent biographer, James F. Simon, has conceded, is that Douglas was notoriously unreliable and self-servingly selective in recounting the past...

...William O. Douglas, of course, was a liberal's liberal-regarded by his admirers as an unflinching defender of the Bill of Rights, uncompromising champion of liberty, courageous spokesman for the downtrodden, despised, and dispossessed, who used his position on the Supreme Court to inspire the nation with renewed devotion to the highest ideals of its founders...

...Admittedly one of the most gifted lawyers and administrators of his generation, he lacked the requisite humanity, wisdom, judgment, and inner poise for sound work as a Supreme Court justice...

...Douglas is not content simply to criticize Marshall, but goes on to cast vile aspersions at and impute dishonorable motives to him...

...Douglas accuses Marshall of acting "lawlessly" and expresses his suspicion that "some Nixon men put pressure on Marshall to cut corners...

...If Douglas possessed any capacity for self-examination or introspection, it is not in evidence in this volume...

...Where his admirers saw idealism and generosity of spirit, Frankfurter and many others discerned shameless opportunism, a wilful, result-oriented, and unprincipled approach to his work, a tendency to play to various constituencies thought favorable to his political ambitions, and an arrogant wrecklessness in the conduct of his personal affairs...

...Yet for one event in Douglas's life we should be thankful-his failure to be nominated for Vice President on the Democratic ticket in 1944...

...What rankles is not that these views are indefensible, but that their proponent deems them so self-evidently true, that the thought that they might require buttressing does not occur to him...

...However unfavorable one's feelings about the late Justice William O. Douglas, this volume can only be regarded as unworthy of its subject and a dereliction of editorial responsibilities on the part of its publisher...

...According to Douglas, Roosevelt, having decided to rid himself of Henry Wallace, narrowed his choice to Douglas and Truman in that order of preference...

...As it gradually became clear that the path to high political office was closed off, a certain embitterment and rancor took hold of him and hastened the erratic conduct of his later years...

...If this story is true, then is entitled to a place among the unsung heroes of American history...

...Thus his old friend, Clark Clifford, at Douglas's memorial service: "Because of Bill Douglas, each one of us is freer, safer and stonger...

...In any case, it is difficult to take seriously the notion that Douglas, the second youngest man ever appointed to the Supreme Court, the holder of an endowed chair at Yale Law School when he was thirty, the best-selling author, the handsomely paid star of the college lecture circuit, the friend of four Presidents and of scores of others of America's most powerful men, was somehow a prophet without honor in his own country...

...Throughout Douglas affects the unconvincing posture of one constantly besieged and vilified for his fearless espousal of unpopular views...

...For him, to paraphrase Clausewitz, adjudication was a continuation of politics by other means...

...Unfortunately, an overly inventive memory is not the only personality flaw betrayed in his autobiography: There is also displayed the disagreeable habit of almost casually traducing those who acted in ways of which he disapproved...

...But about Paul Freund of Harvard, generally acknowledged as one of the most profound and humane constitutional scholars of his time, Douglas writes: "he had a gimmick-the ostensible profundity of a scholar...

...Despite occasional passages of insight and, even, here and there, fleeting eloquence inspired by the author's love of the American wilderness, this book is in the main a disjointed, meandering pastiche of self-congratulatory reminiscences, popuTHE COURT YEARS 1939-1975 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS William O. Douglas / Random House / $ 16.95 Maurice J. Holland list animadversions against what is with tedious regularity termed "the Establishment,'' sententious pronouncements on good government platitudinously uttered, all interspersed with extended and unaccountable excerpts from the author's own judicial opinions or those of other liberal stalwarts on the Bench...

...His description of the last effort to impeach him, in 1970, conveniently omits mention of the most damaging information in the case developed against him by Gerald Ford and others in the House and dismisses this attempt as nothing more than malicious harassment- "the Establishment" and the endlessly malevolent Nixon up to their old tricks...

...Douglas's perceptions betray not the slightest element of doubt, no sense of complexity or ambiguity, or of the serious costs entailed in his single-minded pursuits...

...Sad to say, he did so and thus emulated the 'law and order' man during the Watergate period...

...To credit this account requires one to believe that Roosevelt, perhaps the deftest political operative in American history, on the verge of victory in World War II, with his party at his feet, allowed his wishes about his likely successor to be set at naught by a party functionary's alteration of a letter, an alteration which could not have been concealed from the writer whose wishes it purported to express...

...The irony of these pages is that a man who obviously enjoyed thinking of himself as a colorful and inveterate iconoclast consistently comes across as a predictable, almost smug, purveyor of the safest orthodoxies of his time...

...The Court Years dissappoints most, however, because it contributes little to the understanding of its elusive and exasperating subject...

...A highly, successful and prolific author in his prime, Douglas was once capable of much better than this product of his final, pathetically enfeebled years...

...But because Robert Han-negan, national chairman of the Democratic party, reversed their order in FDR's letter to the convention delegates, it appeared that Roosevelt's first choice was in fact Truman...

...In his later years he exalted militant and widespread civil disobedience, holding it essential to the health of democracy, never troubling to consider, much less reconcile, the tension between such tactics and the premises of majority rule...

...Douglas was, of course, subjected to four impeachment efforts, and was attacked from many quarters more often and more vehemently than any other Supreme Court justice in recent times, yet his ability to epater les bourgeois was quite transparently more a source of satisfaction than of pain to him: One of his keenest disappointments was his failure to be included on Nixon's "enemies lists...

...He became pathetically enamored of the youth culture and fawning in his praise of the most raucous dissent, embracing in his enthusiasm the whole litany of anti-American attitudes of the New Left...

...In fact, the first volume of his autobiography, Go East, Young Man: The Early Years, published in 1974 with the expert, though unacknowledged, editorial assistance of Dagmar Hamilton, was incomparably better, even though it is only with the sequel that Douglas's period of service on the Supreme Court is reached...

...He even came perilously close to an implicit endorsement of violence, as in his assertion that Richard Nixon was the George III of his time...

...Attempts by government at any level to enforce some modicum of whole-someness or reticence in public display were, in Douglas's mind, nothing more than officially sponsored hypocrisy and arrant philis-tinism...

...Still more execrable is Douglas's treatment of Thurgood Marshall, who as Second Circuit Justice vacated a Douglas order which had in effect enjoined the Secretary of Defense from obeying the commands of the President to conduct bombing operations in Cambodia...

...By overriding an earlier ruling in the same case by Justice Marshall (who had primary responsibility for the Second Circuit where the case had originated), Douglas violated the norms of orderly judicial procedure...

...To Clifford and many like-minded contemporaries, Douglas was true heir to "Freeborn John" Lilburne, cantankerous and obstreperous to be sure, and not always well mannered, but withal one of freedom's stoutest heroes, with perhaps just a touch of Natty Bumppo thrown in to give a flavor of rugged outdoor-siness...

...He frequently expressed regret that his colleagues on the Court refused to join him in ending the Vietnam War by judicial fiat...

...But to his detractors, who were by no means to be found only in such predictable quarters as American Legion posts, chambers of commerce, or watch and ward societies, Douglas was quite another matter...

...This volume has strengthened my inclination to regard Douglas as a "brilliant fool" and something of a scoundrel...

...Efforts to foster patriotism in the schools he equated with Nazi authoritarianism...

...During his last decade on the Court, as his opinions grew ever more baldly assertive, idiosyncratic, and heedless of both precedent and fundamental constitutional doctrine, Douglas became something of an embarrassment even to many partisans of the judicial activism he epitomized...

...Typically, Douglas embellishes this story by recounting how Hannegan later admitted to his face that he had pulled off this gambit...

...When a book is scantily .endowed with thoughtfulness and ideas, it may still find its salvation by providing a few bits of new and interesting information...

...Douglas's opinions from this latter period were prone to extensive quotations from such jurisprudential sources as The Greening of America, and to reaching such conclusions as that trees should be accorded standing to sue and that the Bill of Rights should be understood to afford special protection to "the freedom to walk, stroll, or loaf...

...If it is not true (as it almost certainly is not), then Douglas has indulged his characteristic penchant for rewriting history...

...Spectacular success and widespread adulation achieved too easily at too youthful an age are apt to fan inordinate ambition which, if balked by fortune or circumstance in later life, is likely to prove more and more corrosive as it is consistently frustrated...

...Since that career was so important for the recent judicial and political history of the United States, this dismal book is to be lamented even by those who did not count themselves among the Justice's admirers...

...Douglas obviously intended this work to serve as an elucidation of the ideals and commitments which shaped his lengthy and controversial career...

...Much of the book is written as if the reader were scarcely conversant with the great events of the last fifty years-we are subjected to rambling discourses on the coming of the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, all described in terms which can best be characterized as boilerplate liberalism...

...If pressed on whether he really thought Henry Cabot Lodge, of all people, was a "neo-fascist," would Douglas daintily point out that he merely observed that Lodge had a "neo-fascist image...

...If challenged to clarify what he meant by "pressure," would Douglas slyly retreat from the charge of flagrant impropriety implied by the word "pressure," avowing that all he really had in mind was a formal argument in chambers by Justice Department lawyers...

...His political philosophy, particularly when applied to civil disobedience and the role of government in sustaining public morality, was, as Sidney Hook and Walter Berns among others have demonstrated, so jejune as to merit a failing grade in any moderately demanding civics course...

...Despite frequent disavowals of presidential ambitions, he left the distinct impression that his youthful appointment to the Court had led him to conceive of himself as FDR's eventual successor...

...Actually he was the dispenser of warmed-over theories of law that seemingly were objective but actually were tools to keep the 'proper' people in control of society...

...The source of this hostility to Freund, which Douglas extended with equal cordiality to Alexander Bickel, is well known-it sufficed that both were prote'ges of Frankfurter...

...Thus the unbending forth-rightness and unstinting friendship for the downtrodden perceived by Douglas's friends to be the animus of his politics were called upon to fill the void of his self-conceived failure, and in that void they became a rigid iconoclasm in the attempt for the stature of a personage, and an unending resentment of the successful...

...Its motifs-"the People versus the Interests," the greedy plutocrat versus the high-minded servant of the public interest enlisted under the banner of the New Deal, the swaggering exploiter versus the upright and honest common man- are unrelenting and unrelieved even by the quaint grandiloquence of the speeches of William Jennings Bryan...

...There is, however, very little of this either...

...Nothing in this volume quite matches the "neo-fascist image" attributed to Henry Cabot Lodge II in Go East, Young Man...