Milestones of a Maverick Justice

...The leading deportation and internment cases, Hira-bayashi (1943) and Korematsu (1944), were decided after fears of Japanese landings in San Francisco Bay had subsided, yet he upheld the continued internment of 70,000 native-bom Japanese Americans...

...Douglas continued to play his familiar dissenting role to the end, usually in the company of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan...

...Marco DeFunis, a Sephar-dic Jew, was twice rejected by the University of Washington Law School despite the fact that his grades and admissions test scores were much higher than those of most of the successful minority applicants...

...The great unwashed public has long thought as much...

...He corrects many of Douglas' "facts," dabbles in psychiatric interpretations of his subject's amorous misadventures with merciful brevity—as usual, mother was to blame—and endorses Douglas' unabashed inclination to aim at socially desirable results in his decisions...

...For the most part, Douglas was faithful to his conviction that the intentions of the Founding Fathers were "to take the government off the backs of the people...

...Douglas' closest approximation to repentance, however, was the casual admission that the government case was "not much of an argument but it swayed a majority of the Court, including me...

...Where Frankfurter treated clerks like members of his family, Douglas saw them as employees, worked them long hours, and rarely solicited their opinions...

...For example, he shared the public hysteria after Pearl Harbor...

...an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history...

...Appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939 when Charles Evans Hughes was Chief Justice, he took his seat next to such veteran reactionaries as Pierce Butler and the anti-Semitic, anti-black James Mc-Reynolds, the last of the Nine Old Men who struck down so many New Deal measures that they provoked Roosevelt's notorious 1936 court packing scheme...

...Douglas' role in the Rosenberg atom bomb spy case is probably the most puzzling of his career...

...James P. Simon reports: "During the McCarthy era, Douglas wrote many judicial opinions that shocked and angered a public intent on punishing real and imagined Communists...

...How one evaluates Douglas' influential dissent in the mooted DeFunis case depends on one's view of affirmative action...

...Nevertheless, there were times when Douglas' positions were difficult to justify in the light of his own criteria...

...Among environmentalists, critics of big business and big government, and partisans of civil liberty, Douglas always enjoyed the reputation underscored by Clark Clifford's funeral eulogy on January 23, 1980: "Because of Bill Douglas, each one of us is freer, safer and stronger...

...Although the next day, at some cost to procedural custom, his brethren overruled him and the Rosenbergs were electrocuted on schedule, Douglas was lionized in the liberal community for his attempt to save them...

...and according to Douglas, in 1948 Truman offered him the Vice Presidency...

...503 pp...

...In 1944, Roosevelt designated Truman and Douglas as acceptable running mates, possibly in reverse order...

...The crime Douglas stood accused of was indeed grave...

...In time, the public stopped perceiving Douglas as a potential President and began to view him as a husband of successively younger women, and a compulsive traveler and author...

...Even after he became a justice, Roosevelt and Truman considered him too large and vigorous a figure to spend the rest of his life haggling over lawyers' arguments...

...He charged he was the victim of reverse discrimination...

...On Wednesday, June 17, 1953, Justice Douglas, acting alone and without consultation with the full Court, stayed the executions of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg...

...On two of those occasions, Justices Black, Harold H. Burton and Felix Frankfurter voted for a hearing, making Douglas' opposition decisive because it has long been Court practice to accept any case considered suitable by four members...

...Douglas' contempt for the Harvard tradition of legal craftsmanship, devotion to precedent, and respect for other branches of government was severe...

...Douglas also was a martinet within his own home...

...Simon, a lawyer, journalist and law teacher, has written a balanced, judicious but basically favorable chronicle...

...Only his fourth and last wife, nee Cathy Heffernan, herself a strong personality, succeeded in standing up to him...

...Countryman deems the decision in Hirabayashi "the worst opinion that Douglas ever wrote...

...At the constitutional level where we work, 90 per cent of any decision is emotional...

...It was one of his writings that prompted Gerald Ford's efforts to impeach him—the most noteworthy episode of our un-elected President's placid prior quarter century in the House of Representatives...

...For his predilections almost always favored unfettered utterance, unpopular causes, individual freedom, and institutional restraint...

...Accurately or otherwise, Douglas quotes no lesser a personage than Charles Evans Hughes to support his own attitude: "Justice Douglas, you must remember one thing...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman William O. Douglas served on the Supreme Court for 36 years, longer than anyone else in history...

...Earl Warren, governor of California during World War II, lived to regret such statements as "If the Japs are released, no one will be able to tell a saboteur from any other Jap...

...Rejecting racial classifications, Douglas offered an alternative rationale for favoring students, white or black, male or female, who came from disadvantaged backgrounds...

...As a successful Securities and Exchange Commission chairman before his elevation to the Supreme Court, Douglas impressed a good many polit-cal observers with his forceful personality...

...Yet as his major Court opponents angrily commented, on three previous occasions Douglas had voted against a Supreme Court review...

...Since The Court Years, Douglas' second volume of autobiography, consists largely of the paying off of old scores against critics and colleagues, it will not enhance the admiration of even sympathetic readers...

...The rational part of us supplies the reasons for supporting our predilections...

...The man who emerges from these books was not a particularly attractive individual...

...With Hugo L. Black, Douglas steadfastly argued that the First Amendment protected all speech, however scurrilous, unprincipled, cynical, or pornographic...

...In the process, Ford made a memorable contribution to constitutional law by declaring that...

...No wonder Frankfurter thought Douglas had pulled a "grandstand play...

...Still, warts and all, Douglas will probably grow in reputation, even among lawyers...

...Douglas changed his mind when the Rosenberg attorneys submitted a fourth appeal, but by that time so had Burton, and again a single missing vote barred Supreme Court consideration...

...When one daring young man sought time off to get married, his gracious superior granted him a mere 24 hours...

...Independent Journey, The Life of William O. Douglas By James P. Simon Harper & Row...

...No major political office quite worked out, though...

...16.95...

...He had allowed an article of his to be published in one of Ralph Ginzburg's gamy magazines...

...The child of poor white, West Virginia parents, he argued, deserved preference at Harvard or Yale over graduates of Groton and Philips Andover who had earned higher scores on standardized tests with much less effort...

...By the time the permanent brain damage and incessant pain of a severe stroke compelled him to retire in 1975, the Court was back in conservative hands...

...Rather ironically, it was Frankfurter, the paladin of judicial restraint, who sought to hear the Rosenbergs out, while Douglas, the implacable partisan of freedom, peremptorily dismissed their appeals...

...Vern Countryman, now at Harvard Law School and the compiler of a useful collection of Douglas' opinions, was then serving as Douglas' clerk and argued unsuccessfully that the anti-Japanese action was racist...

...Even so, one controversial opinion stood above the rest...

...Douglas' tenure extended from Hughes through Harlan Stone, Fred Vinson, Earl Warren, and into the term of the incumbent, Warren Burger...