Doing Marshall an Injustice
FRANKEL, MARVIN E.
Doing Marshall an Injustice Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall By Carl T. Rowan Little, Brown. 454 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Marvin E. Frankel Practicing...
...Marshall's building of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund into the first public-interest law firm and one of the greatest law offices around is another story Rowan does well to remind us of...
...District Judge The epic history of African-Americans—unbearably tragic for the most part, still soaked in bitterness, but marked finally by some triumphs in this century —has, among its many heroes, a number of true giants...
...For this reviewer at least, the seemingly gratuitous declaration was an occasion for wonderment...
...They are situated in a broad canvas of Marshall's times, from the lynching era he was born into in 1908 through his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1991 and replacement by President George Bush's best-man-for-the-job—who is appraised in the penultimate chapter, "The Clarence Thomas Fiasco...
...former U.S...
...Reading of Marshall's lonely and often terrifying travels as a young lawyer through the streets and courts of lynch-mob country, during which he had at least one close call with a rope at the ready and was subjected to countless threats of violence or death, is enough to make the heart pound...
...We are given what purport to be the Justice's statements, enclosed within quotation marks and averaging a halfpage or less, on some of the agonizing constitutional issues of our time—the death penalty, privacy, women's rights, the Constitution in general, "original intent," and others...
...the first-person pronoun is rarely absent for more than a page...
...Prime facie that sounds like a plus...
...The origins and internal battles of the NAACP, the evolving plight of black Americans in this century, the politics of racism and the legal crusade against it—all make gripping stories that bear telling and retelling...
...While the outcome of that struggle is not yet assured, the Justice's spectacular role in it will endure as invincible evidence of what mortals can do...
...The sense of slighting is the more obvious flaw...
...Or perhaps the many hours of interviews with Marshall that Rowan reports were not as revealing or confiding as the author would have wished...
...The book certainly is not an "attack" on the Justice...
...The further sense that the book in some degree actually diminishes the Justice arises from repeated details of his reported intimacy with the author...
...Thurgood Marshall is surely one of them...
...I see that I've wound up with harshly negative observations about a volume I'm not sorry to have read...
...In the next breath the author volunteers that "this book is not a hostile assault on Justice Marshall...
...Along the way the personal story of Thurgood Marshall is also told, although in a somewhat bemusing and far less satisfying fashion...
...Consider the author's "defense'' of the Justice against reports that he let his law clerks author his opinions...
...The biographical details promised by the subtitle are all in place, but the treatment is rarely more than skin-deep...
...With defenses like this, the Justice's memory needs no attackers...
...It remains a useful reminder of great events, a record of incredibly courageous acts, a chronicle inspiring hope for the future...
...And yet one comes away with a feeling that Thurgood Marshall has been slighted—and indeed diminished—by Rowan...
...The history is a good journalist's account, reflecting the comprehensive use of files and extensive close-up observation...
...That brings me, finally, to the most offputting aspect of Dream Makers, Dream Breakers...
...authorized biographies put us on the qui vive for whitewashing...
...We are treated to extended interviews he did with Eleanor Roosevelt, Wilt Chamberlain, and George Wallace, among others, all of dubious relevance...
...To cite a single example among far too many, the Justice is quoted in 1973 expressing his concern to his friend Rowan about the Court's turning away from affirmative action with the insightful question, "What the f?is going on...
...An odd assurance, that —especially considering that the same paragraph reports a 40-year friendship between Marshall and Rowan...
...One wishes only that it could have been a better book—more focused, more modest, less padded...
...they would be D+ responses from a student or a law clerk, and are unquestionably country miles from what the Justice could have wanted to go on record as his legal positions...
...Beyond what is his as leader and symbol, the record of his personal achievements fixes his high place...
...The same goes for his account, however imperfect, of the legal strategies that gave African-Americans the right to vote, the still far from complete right to justice in court, the uncertain right to unsegregat-ed schools, and the array of other rights won for all Americans through the leadership of African-Americans and other minorities...
...Nor are they enhanced by what must be meant as constant evidences of buddy-ship, like the casual four-letter words that Marshall is represented as sprinkling his speech with...
...Whatever the case, one finishes the book with little or no sense of what the Justice was really like, or what made him the revered and effective leader he was...
...To the contrary, he is praised and extolled throughout, in sometimes fulsome fashion...
...The best to be supposed about this is that the journalist-author is better equipped to recount events and public appearances than to plumb the inward qualities of his subject...
...The title refers to the lineup of good guys—including Charles H. Houston (Marshall's law dean and initial boss at the NAACP), Eleanor Roosevelt (emphatically not FDR), and Lyndon B. Johnson—and bad guys?like Strom Thurmond, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard M. Nixon—all ranged in accordance with their support of or hostility to racial justice and Thurgood Marshall, as seen variously by Marshall and the author...
...Quite possibly this is why I ended up feeling the Justice to have been diminished: He is obscured by the shadow of the author...
...For a lawyer, Rowan's handling of the legal / judicial aspects of the Justice's career is among the least satisfactory parts of the book...
...The reason the quoted bromides are given as the Justice's views, one cannot help suspecting, is that they were uttered to Carl Rowan...
...The events that he helped shape and that shaped him are central to this country's ongoing struggle for its soul...
...No revisionists or inside dopesters will ever change that...
...So Carl Rowan's book takes on a splendid subject, albeit one only moderately well-served in the event...
...Reviewed by Marvin E. Frankel Practicing lawyer...
...If much of it will be familiar to many older readers, there are numerous fresh details and anecdotes...
...At the beginning of his Acknowledgements Rowan informs us that "This book is not an authorized biography...
...though usually "right" (i.e., like mine), they are nonetheless distracting...
...The journalist seems impelled to intrude himself anywhere and everywhere...
...Numerous statements Marshall made to Rowan, given in quotation marks, are the veriest banalities and trivia, the sort of thing we could have done without...
...Rowan, we're informed, was unable to answer...
...Rowan's personal opinions —on law, people, history, politics?are ubiquitous...
...These curbstone comments are flat, trite and grossly incomplete...
...In a chapter entitled "Marshall with and without Law Clerks," Rowan lets us have "the chance, as [he] did, to listen to Marshall unvarnished by law clerks...
...I continue to wonder...
Vol. 76 • May 1993 • No. 6
