Suspected U.S. Agents of Planting Marijuana on His Ranch : Book Offers Insight Into Life of Douglas

The late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas thought that federal agents had tried to plant marijuana at his Goose Prairie ranch and that a Pennsylvania mob was going to lynch him for his role in the Rosenberg spy case.

Those and other glimpses of the personal life of Douglas, who served on the high court for 36 years and built a reputation as a fierce defender of individual liberties, emerge from a new book called “The Douglas Letters.”

The book, edited by Melvin I. Urofsky, Virginia Commonwealth University history professor, is filled with letters to the famous and not-so-famous. It chronicles Douglas’ career from his days as a law school professor to his relationships with the brethren on the Supreme Court.

It also offers insights on Douglas’ views on everything from foreign affairs to the constitutional freedoms reflected in the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land.”

But it is the letters to his friends, family and neighbors that flesh out the rich and often controversial tapestry that was Douglas’ life.

In a 1970 letter to two of his Cascade Mountains ranch neighbors, Douglas wrote that he suspected federal agents spotted on his land were “planting marijuana with the prospect of a nice big TV-covered raid in July or August.

“I forgot to tell you that this gang in power (the Nixon Administration) is not just in search of the truth. They are ‘search and destroy’ people.”

Douglas, who retired from the court in 1975 and died in 1980, added that he wasn’t even sure what marijuana looked like or whether it would grow in the harsh climate of the central Washington Cascades.

“Mint, white clover, and rhubarb do well there, as you know,” Douglas wrote. “But now that the snow is gone and summer is near, you might look to see if you can spot any marijuana.”

In a string of 1967 letters to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, President Lyndon B. Johnson and Washington Democratic Sen. Henry M. Jackson, Douglas demanded that Air Force planes stop producing sonic booms over the Cascades because it was spooking horses.

“We have had very close squeaks riding horseback in those mountains,” Douglas wrote Johnson. “Some people have been badly injured; none has yet been killed. McNamara writes polite letters that tell us to go to hell. . . .

“People here are up in arms; and many lawsuits will follow.”

Douglas wrote McNamara that the Air Force reaction to the complaints had been “callous.”

“I assure you, Mr. Secretary, that your ‘villagers’ here are not as voiceless and impotent as your ‘villagers’ in Vietnam,” Douglas said.

In a letter to Robert Lynd in 1959, Douglas recalled the “volatile atmosphere” in Washington, D.C., and around the country when he issued a stay in the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for espionage.

“The atmosphere seems to be as inflammable as that in a gasoline plant,” Douglas said in his letter to Lynd, who along with his wife had done the Middletown sociological surveys.

Douglas said he had received one letter from some Western acquaintances who promised a “lynching party when I reached that part of the country” and described a mob that surrounded him outside a Pennsylvania motel.

“That was the only real mob I had ever seen face-to-face and I thought surely they were going to move into action,” Douglas wrote. “But they broke forth into loud cheers and applause.