The Court Years/Independent Journey

...Isidore silver teaches constitutional law and history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City...

...Simon catalogues the Justice and the man, "warts and all" (indeed, one section is called "The Opportunist"), while Douglas is preaching and cautioning...

...Although Simon's judgment about Go East, Young Man, the first volume of the Justice's opus- "It was not a modest book...

...foreign policy...

...Despite the warts-and they are numerous (especially in his personal life, not a word of which is mentioned by Douglas)-this son of a Presbyterian preacher was a titanic, even seminal figure, not only as judge, but as political analyst without portfolio...

...the autobiography -if such it can be called-often demonstrates the former while the biography ably depicts the latter...

...Nor was it entirely candid''-is true of much of the second, Douglas's journey was indeed largely independent, always fascinating, always instructive...

...Ironically, Douglas's negative assessment of his chief rival on the Court stands in marked contrast to his benign feelings about other judicial conservatives, including the notorious "four horsemen" who bitterly opposed most New Deal legislation...

...Douglas's derisive comments about Frankfurter's "feeling of inadequacy" and his "longing to be accepted" are ironic projections of Douglas's own "uncanny ability to poke fun at authority one minute and court that same authority the next," as Simon sympathetically observes...

...Accuracy thus becomes the hallmark of the first estimable effort, while rectitude is the theme of the second...

...Inevitably, this engendered a major, continuing conflict with Frankfurter, a dispute now largely resolved in Douglas's favor, but one which embittered the two men...

...Though neither admitted it, Frankfurter and Douglas competed for influence with FDR after their appointments...

...His thirty-one books-addressed to the nation-set forth a liberal agenda,which has not yet come close to being fulfilled.REVIEWERS FATHER JOHN A. COLEMAN, S.J., is a Fellow of The Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C...

...Matthew Mestrovic teaches at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey...

...Douglas refused to cast a decisive vote to hear parts of the case (only parts came up for technical reasons after the Court at first denied review of the trial...

...Most accounts of Brown v Board of Education (including Simon's sketchy treatment) emphasize Frankfurter's central role in moving toward the unanimous ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional...

...Indeed, there can be little doubt that the second volume of his autobiography is meant as little more than a legacy, complete with moral lessons and admonitions about freedom and democracy (and their precarious states) rather than a true biography...

...nicolaus mills,author of The Great School Bus Controversy (Teacher's College Press), writes frequently on art for Commonweal...

...The terms "wholesale" and "retail," incidentally, were used by Oliver Wendell Holmes-and later, by Felix Frankfurter-to describe the roles of the legislature and courts in "making" law.In general, these jurists believed that Congress (and state legislatures) had the Constitutional authority to make laws and that courts (including the Supreme Court) should "legislate" only by filling in the gaps not explicitly covered by the broad language of statutes...

...Simon suggests that there were deeper roots to the rivalry...

...Unfortunately, fists often flail as hit...

...Justice in New York City...

...Although, at the end, Douglas was heroic, Simon is right in arguing that "there was something profoundly unsettling" about his behavior prior to that...

...In contrast to Douglas's self-serving hagiography, the true hero of that lamentable affair was Frankfurter who was resolute in his desire to review their convictions...

...If Douglas could accurately note, though uncharitably characterize as "duplicitous", Frankfurter's pouring of "emotions . . . into decisions, while professing just the opposite," Simon could dispassionately observe that "Douglas believed, with considerable justification, that Frankfurter went to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate his political and judicial philosophies...

...Douglas's distate for Frankfurter is almost unmitigated and leads to a glaring error...

...Isidore Silver Revolutions-including "constitutional" ones-often are characterized (perhaps symbolized) by individuals who represent what might be called those upheavals' "heart," "mind," and "fist...

...Although this "driven introvert" and "intensely private man" "was not writing for the Harvard Law Review," (Simon) neither was he "the one Justice in the long history of the Court never to proselytize (Douglas...

...Douglas contends that "Frankfurter's view was that it was not unconstitutional to treat a Negro differently from a white but that the cases should be re-argued" and that he offhandedly accepted Earl Warren's analysis only because Warren had been a politician so "why should a professor object...

...Equivalent roles in the 1960s Warren Court "revolution" were played by the Chief Justice-"Yes, but is it fair?'' was his enduring refrain when a governmental practice was at issue- and Hugo Black and William O. Douglas...

...Projection" was not Douglas's only defense mechanism-"denial" in the form of a refusal to admit to any political ambitions during the Court years, to other forms of "relentless ambition" during his career, and to acknowledgement of aid by others, including his first wife, is strong...

...This slight is matched by the sin of omission about another critical matter, the Rosenberg case...

...The Russian Revolution had its Lenin, Marx, and Trotsky (as founder of the Red Army) and the American Revolution's eminences were Jefferson, Adams, and Washington...

...Perhaps the decision was personally painful, since it compelled his great ally, Black, to dissent, but, whatever the reason, it is apparent that Douglas was simply not interested-in his valedictory- in describing his "role" on the Court during the tumultuous thirty-six years of his service...

...INDEPENDENT JOURNEY THE LIFE OF WILLIAM 0. DOUGLAS James F. Simon Harper & Row, $16.95, 503 pp...

...At times Douglas's (rare) intellectual leadership on the Court went unrecognized, even by himself...

...He remains contemporary, as his comments about Iran and Ronald Reagan demonstrate...

...Both men were remarkable, not only for their intellect but for their powers of rationalization of their own actions and attribution of malevolence to their enemies...

...His greatness is not diminished but enhanced by the known truths of what was, after all, a remarkable and productive-and, let us hope influential-life...

...Of course, his great rival was not free of delusions either...

...Douglas agreed that deference should be paid to legislative enactments in economic matters, but decried judicial passivity in the face of legal attacks on civil liberties and rights...

...As Simon notes, "And as he was to show later in Vietnam, Douglas exhibited a remarkable, almost prophetic capacity to pinpoint the weaknesses of U.S...

...For instance, Simon's acknowledgement that Griswold v Connecticut was "one of the most important Constitutional decisions of the twentieth century" is counterpointed by Douglas's startling failure to even mention that case or the "right to privacy" it enunciated...

...Wells (Oxford...

...In those realms, he fervently believed, the roles of the different branches of government should be reversed...

...While Black carefully crafted a constitutional philosophy that underlay significant expansions of the reach and meaning of the Bill of Rights, Douglas, as Simon notes, "went beyond Black with direct, incisive [intellectual] forays that cut through technical verbiage to the core issues" of the great controversies that remain, even in this dismal era, remarkable testaments to a spirit of liberty expounded by the Warren Court...

...The book is a fertile, rambling, topic-oriented (rather than chronological) chronicle of his loves, hates, and fears, an often meandering combination of "Ulysses" and Parson Weems...

...The difference in treatment of the "Frankfurter issue" between Douglas and Simon strikingly reflects the differences between the two books...

...Of course, the categories of revolutionary symbolism enumerated above are not exclusive, for Douglas (as, for instance, Jefferson) was simply too brilliant and restless a soul to be easily confined to the scholar's pigeonhole...

...Even on the Court he was in the maelstrom of events ("It seemed to me that I had hardly reached the Court when people were trying to get me off')-as sometime teacher of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, as dedicated environmentalist, and as occasonal victim of Richard Nixon's fury...

...FRANK McCONNELL's most recent book is The Science Fiction of H.G...

...While righteousness need not preclude fidelity to truth, it often severely qualifies it-and the biography should be taken "at wholesale" (it is broadly true) while Simon's work is accurate on the retail level...