Earl Warren : A Public Life

...he has the limitations of all Americans of his type with little intellectual background, little genuine depth or coherent political philosophy...

...In this, Warren agreed with the Plessy Court about the standard to be used, but disagreed as to whether the separation of races implied the stigmatization of one race...

...He does so by trying to refute "entrenched" assumptions about Warren's career...

...The authority of the older generation was a bad joke to be mocked or ignored according to one's mood...

...Still, in view of this, Mr...

...By creating the need for class-wide judicial remedies, Brown also gave rise to the rampant judicial activism of the Warren Court...

...Of course, the Constitution of 1787 was itself the product of a kind of l~se majestd...

...It tries to delve into the secret workings of the Warren Court by emphasizing the play of personalities--always with the statesmanlike Warren in the leading role--said to dominate it...

...The quality of Ms...

...I am a new but most enthusiastic reader of The American Spectator...

...Later he went in for insurance fraud arranging the thefts of his own paintings and jewelry...

...Nelson W. Polsby University of California Berkeley, California 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 Richard Jensen replies: The guest who points out the baby's defects expects the father to be unhappy...

...2) I do not actually say that "old pols w e r e . . , fearless champions of the common good" but rather the opposite...

...At any rate, he has reported its contents inaccurately...

...Will TV programs and video games that stupefy children be counted along with remedial programs that try to undo the damage...

...Without the United States, there would be no NATO...

...The theme of the work, not surprisingly, is how "the years of the Warren Court . . . spanned--and perhaps, spawned--the greatest American social and political revolutions since the War Between the States...

...I readily admit that there are some marvelous moments in Alice Walker's novel and I sympathize with the main character's having found salvation in lesbian love with an older woman, since it was in fact the only form of love that was ever made real to her...

...In time, however, Warren lost faith in the majority's capacity for enlightenment, which led to his conversion to ideological liberalism...

...Justice Blackmun, in his separate opinThe hallmark of Warren's ideological liberalism was his insistence that an enlightened class act as the substitute for the majority whenever the majority displays an incapacity for enlightened decisions...

...E a r l Warren has always been something of an enigma, particularly to his friends...

...By several accounts he was impotent or at least not sexually active with his last wife...

...the SEATO alliance would collapse overnight_9 Without the United States, the CENTO alliance would collapse overnight...

...As a literary and historical account Inside the Warren Court is only slightly superior to The Brethren, Woodward/Bernstein's mean-spirited attempt of a few years back to debunk the Burger Court...

...Alice Walker I have such high regard for Mr...

...Jensen's claim that this is "quite impossible" in the political system I describe is false...

...And, as recent rulings upholding "race conscious" classifications amply demonstrate, separate but equal remains good constitutional law...

...The point is, however, that the great critical blathering over The Color Purpie is largely a form of intellectual slumming...

...We have always known, for example, that Frankfurter complained loudly and bitterly that Warren played fast and loose with the Constitution...

...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...

...He wrote: "No wonder observers are puzzled about why recent Presidents seem to have had such a hard time staying in office and in the meantime have so little legitimacy and so little capacity to govern...

...What remains to be demonstrated is that the reconstruction of the Constitution by Warren and his epigones has made for a better regime...

...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...

...Absent any such stigma the Constitution is not offended...

...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...

...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...

...Foster C. Smith Akron, Ohio THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 47...

...Thanks to the power of science, human perfectibility could know no bounds...

...I call on the editor to invite the refugees of economic fanaticism in the guise of supply-side economics to join in his forum...

...Perhaps Fox is too much the British empiricist to speculate on his story's larger implications...

...As any proponent of affirmative action is quick to point out, not all racial classifications are stigmatizing...

...I certainly don't mean to force this unlikely comparison...

...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...

...Philip Groth Assistant Professor of Sociology University of Wisconsin Center Janesville, Wisconsin Peer Review Your reviewer, Richard Jensen, seems to have read my book Consequences of Party Reform carelessly (TAS, November 1983...

...It is purportedly an inside account of the Warren Court's activities drawn from conference notes and docket books of the justices, as well as correspondence, notes, diaries, and draft opinions...

...it ignores why we have redistribution...

...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...

...Buckley takes proper notice of the bad treatment that both black and white males get in The Color Purple but he really doesn't ask why or further inquire into this or try to relate it, for example, to George Gilder's theme (see his Sexual Suicide) of the emasculation of the black male in a modern welfare society which has established the black woman herself as the main custodian...

...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...

...The supply,side doctrine is economic fanaticism--it splits the economy in two, it extols only the virtues of the powerful...

...Grenier's assurance that he "has never confused Kissinger with Little Red Riding Hood...

...Perhaps he was too intent on writing a murder mystery...

...Inion in Bakke, stated it as clearly as could be: "In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently [he could have said separately...

...Walker's deep thinking is painfully evident in her first non-fictional collection (of largely Ms...

...More careful readers will find, for example, (I) an argument about why party reforms have hurt Democrats more than Republicans...

...Warren thus thrust the federal judiciary into the role of serving as the "virtual representative" of those minorities said to be permanently isolated from the majoritarian political process...

...One cannot help wondering whether he hasn't neglected his story's more important possibilities...

...Correspondence Update Some of my best friends ride bicycles...

...EDITORIAL (continued from page 9) This fire-and-brimstone was emitted three months after the speech widely quoted by the propagandists, and Kennedy could be even more zealous_9 Two months after the above speech he declared: "Without the United States, South Viet-Nam would collapse overnight_9 Without the United States...

...Fox supplies these facts but draws no inferences beyond those that help him solve the murder mystery...

...Alice Walker's The Color Purple in his review of that recent Pulitizer Prize-winning novel in the November 1983 American Spectator...

...He was a conservative Republican who turned late to ideological liberalism, yet never mastered the catechism of his new faith...

...The pols, furthermore, are amazingly adept at "peer review"--Polsby's term for the selection of candidates in smoke-filled rooms...

...Steel executives_9 The legitimacy of Kennedy's election will always remain dubious...

...I might remind readers that White wrote these statements as a defense of Warren...

...Jensen might have written a more sensible review if he had taken more careful notice of the contents of the book...

...If more people seek second medical opinions, will each opinion count toward the Gross National Product...

...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...

...Is the basic idea to tell Chrysler owners just to chalk up a loss...

...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...

...Hersh Read Abroad Richard Grenier's "Passion of Seymour Hersh" (TAS, September 1983) provides an excellent warning for readers of The Price of Power...

...Warren's impulses told him to reach results that seemed to implement the liberal fusion...

...Much about the Kennedy presidency was not mentioned during the recent media bombardment...

...The anti-industrial policy version of the supply-side fears the dead hand of government...

...Even among his most enthusiastic admirers Warren's reputation as a scholar and judicial craftsman remains slight...

...His relations with Congress were frosty, and his popularity is exaggeratedna consequence of his tragic death and the comparative unpopularity of the Presidents that followed...

...This helps to explain why Republicans, such as Ronald Reagan, get elected President and have legislative successes, as Reagan had in 1981...

...page 75] Ms...

...Hersh's book with the feeling that while the one may be a "little red," the other is still a "hood...

...Broughton epitomized just what the Bright Young People thought of the generation before them: He was cowardly, corrupt, and weak...

...New York Times essay] (3) The book dismisses campaign experts in two short, superficial pages, concluding that their use "makes no coalitions, cements no alliances, seals no deals in the world of grass roots electoral politics...

...Here White is persuasive enough, although hardly original...

...Buckley has his own reservations--but I think they would have been somewhat even more reserved if he knew more about Alice Walker's own servitude as a professional feminist for Ms...

...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...

...In a word, it became necessary to view the majority as just another "special interest...

...The Color Purple is a touching but eventually boring recreation of black Southern illiteracy in which Mr...

...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...

...Representative Kemp and his ilk inhabit a dream world in which only their own voices are heard or understood...

...Will the production of 250 cubic inch plus engines for automobiles count as growth, whatever their impact on oil importation...

...The seminal case in this reconstruction was, of course, Brown v. Board of Education...

...It learns nothing from the Homestead Act, the railway grants, or the super-highway system_9 It fails to consider the dead hand of corporations upon innovation...

...He wants a return to "the sort of system that chose Presidential nominees" before the reforms, because "It worked...

...Without the efforts of the United States in the Alliance for Progress, the Communist advance onto the mainland of South America would long ago have taken place_9 Then Kennedy added, "We are still the keystone in the arch of freedom, and I think we will continue to do as we have done in the past . . . . " He said all this on the morning of November 22, 1963, the day he was shot by a rat...

...Erroll and Broughton seem classic representatives of the bitter disillusionment that characterized the interwar years...

...Is this a case of life imitating art...

...Is there a stigma implied in the separation of the races...

...3) Nor do I " d i s m i s s . . . pollsters, election experts and media consultants" as significant actors in presidential election politics...

...But it is a surprise when paternity is denied...

...magazine, etc...

...The book reveals little that is new or interesting...

...Warren never wavered in his belief that an activist judiciary--particularly because it was not subject to the majoritarian political process--was the principal institution to implement the "ethical imperatives" that, if not exactly stated in the text of the Constitution, were certainly implied in its "ethical structure...

...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...

...New York Times op-ed essay, June 7, 1983] (2) Polsby's praise for old pols and machines on pages 169-70 and 182 of his book would make Tip O'Neill blush...

...As a reformed radical (i.e., crypto-totalitarian) of the 1960s, I came away from reading Mr...

...Although I wrote my letter with tongue in cheek, it appears I put my foot in my mouth...

...Charles M. De Wolf Chiba, Japan P.S...

...White, however, is game, and thinks he can supply the intellectual underpinnings of Warren's public life...

...This is an attempt to produce a popular version (written primarily by Lesher) of a more scholarly tome written by Schwartz entitled Super Chief...

...Buckley and others Ms...

...White puts it this way: The last stage in Warren's emergence as a liberal theorist was the development of a consonance between his ethical impulses and liberal policies...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...As Warren noted, "in the field o f public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place [emphasis added...

...articles), In Search of Our Mothers" Gardens (1983), that is self-described as "womanist" prose...

...White says it perfectly: The "jurisprudential message" of Brown was that if the Court's "search for justice"--its reading of the Constitution to make it "harmonize with current perceptions of what justice req u i r e d " - " compelled a change in the practices of other branches of government, the Court was not going to avoid THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 45 insisting on the change merely because those branches were purportedly more democratic in composition than it...

...Contrary to common opinion, Brown did not overrule Plessy tout court...

...In this position he acquitted himself with honor and his executive abilities were widely praised...

...Can you stomach the dedications by Shakespeare of his sonnets to Lord Southampton...

...Buckley care to think twice, apparently, of the frighteningly bureaucratic causes of black male rage in America.--Thomas P. McDonnell Stoughton, Massachusetts Reid Buckley replies: Mr...

...fice of the Bicentennial at the National Endowment for the Humanities...

...The idea of affirmative government, of course, had been a central Progressive tenet of Warren's political career...

...Had he suited his deeds to his words Fidel might have gone the way of Grenada's gangster regime...

...Conservative tradition is what conservatives make of it...

...Walker shows plenty of empathy for the black woman, as such, but neither she nor Mr...

...I urgently recommend to Mr...

...White has told us too much already...

...Thus, liberalism's goal of a colorblind Constitution has given way to one in which racial classifications are an indispensable instrument of equal protection under the law...

...I surrender to this judgment, and let us forget those quotes_9 [] CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 7) and in the stock market--will produce new jobs or useful new products...

...I consider slow cyclists on fast roads a hazard but I would never menace them or drive near them...

...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...

...44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1984 As evidence of the Progressives' indifference to the fights of those minorities who were not "special interests," White points to the well-known antiOriental bias of the California Progressives and to Warren's role as the "vital moving force in the formulation of the Japanese relocation plan...

...They tell me that I hit a nerve with my recent letter to The American Spectator (Correspondence, October 1983) regarding the dangers bicyclists pose to country motorists...

...1) I reported that Polsby feels that strong presidential leadership is impossible in the wake of the party reforms...

...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...

...Parties are "broadly based," are able to "generate policy on a very wide range of topics," and their ability to "gather and process information about human wants and demands nation-wide is impressive...

...Evidently, some drivers do threaten cyclists by driving close or actually forcing them off the road...

...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...

...it bulldozes the rubble created by supplyside policy in the lives of a people...

...Advocates of growth never define it in a discriminating way...

...Walker's account of her fawning visitations to Cuba in order to see where, if you'll pardon the expression, she's comin' fum...

...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 journalist of some long standing in the church press, however, I want also to disclaim at this point that Mr...

...Quite to the contrary, a section of the book discusses them and their role...

...What Warren's "liberal fusion" did was to make the protection of minority interests the principal object of "affirmative government...

...He was amazingly irresolute about Castro's Communization of Cuba...

...What a toady Cervantes was...

...If the authors wish for their hero's image to remain statesmanlike, they should go easy on the gossip...

...Counter-examples of beneficial cooperation between government and corporations are buried under a barrage of statistics of a type brought forth only when the objective is to smash governmental intervention...

...But because the Progressives never settled on what the common interest was, they understood it only in procedural terms...

...Buckley has graciously detected a certain "music of language" and all that jazz, but which is simply not on the level that Mark Twain achieved in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

...Reid Buckley and his observations, in The American Spectator and elsewhere, that I have actually said so elsewhere (Southern Partisan) and would like now to say so here in these hallowed pages...

...This could be done only by undermining the moral authority of the majority and of majoritarian politics...

...McDonnell's letter is informative and interesting, and I'm grateful for the information it contains...

...Buckley may have gone a bit too much overboard, which is like being just a bit pregnant, for Ms...

...It overlooks the fact that executives and union members often receive more despite declining productivity and profitability, as Business Week's surveys of executive compensation attest...

...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...

...This is the core of ideological liberalism...

...What Inside the Warren Court does do-although less dramatically than The Brethren--is to show the extent to which many of the Court's opinions are the product almost of accident, the result of shifting coalitions having nothing to do with any notion of principled jurisprudence...

...Yet I am not going to be critical...

...to the degree that she protects her works of imagination from her regrettable politics and "lifestyle," her readers will continue to be grateful...

...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...

...And gradually Europe would drift into neutralism and indifference...

...Shortly after his appointment to the Court, Warren wrote that determining the Constitution's "ethical structure" was a part of "the pursuit of justice" which he described as "the capacity to generalize and make objective one's private sense of wrong, thus turning it to public account_9 It is sentiments like these that continue to inspire such standard bearers of ideological liberalism as Anthony Lewis to remark, without the slightest sense of irony or critical distance, that Warren "was the closest thing the United States has had to a Platonic Guardian, dispensing law from a throne without any sensed limits of power except what was seen to be the good of society_9 he was a decent, human, honorable, democratic Guardian_9 The most recent work on the Warren Court is Bernard Schwartz's Inside the Warren Court written with Stephan Lesher...

...It seems to me Mr...

...His much greater attachment to the preservation of civil rights and liberties as a judge than as a governor can be attributed, principally, to an enhanced sense after Brown that he had no need as a federal judge to submerge his intuitive empathy for the claims of disadvantaged people...

...I would be distressed were Tolstoy's loony political and religious thinking to influence my reaction to his great fiction...

...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...

...Based on enlightened public opinion and thoroughly grounded in the majoritarian political process, affirmative government was the Progressives' antidote to "special interests...

...Still, the suspicion that behind the fairy tale may lurk a genuine ogre leaves me feeling less than satisfied with Mr...

...Buckley should have been curious about the Pulitizer Prize citation on its own...

...Brown invoked the idea of "stigma" as the standard of Equal Protection...

...In 1962 Kennedy was the first President to advocate budget deficits despite economic health, thus ushering in years of economic folly_9 Under him and his successor, wire tapping increased notably as did harassment of opponents, for instance: dawn raids on the homes of U.S...

...The governmental apparatus they sought to create was principally designed to restore open, moral, majoritarian government...

...The "liberal fusion," in short, left Warren free to inject the Constitution with a novel theory of American politics, which saw the doctrine of individual rights transformed into a doctrine of class rights...

...Walker are nevertheless extrinsic to the merits of her novel...

...He had avoided seeing action in the war by suddenly coming down with sunstroke as his battalion sailed for France in 1914...

...I would not advise anyone to reflect on the positivism of Sam Clemens before reading Huckleberry Finn...

...In the face of Warren's "intuitions," the principles of constitutional government were "theoretical baggage...

...But cautions relating to the left-wing feminism of Ms...

...Warren has not made it easy for his defenders...

...This was the work of enlightened majorities...

...White describes Warren's pilgrimage from Progressivism to ideological liberalism as a "liberal fusion...

...The media's line is that he was a saint and messiah...

...To the degree that Miss Walker may politicize her fiction, she will do it ill...

...Will the production be sold to the Russians, or, as with pornography, aggravate the disruption of our intimate lives...

...deed, insofar as it established "stigma" as a racial class concept, Brown gave new life to the principle of separate but equal...

...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...

...The real defect of Plessy, Warren suggested, was inadequate knowledge of psychology, not the application of defective principles of constitutional construction...

...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...