More than he seemed, and less

Judicial biographies often tilt toward hagiography. The lives of famous judges, especially Supreme Court justices, are often chronicled by former law clerks turned academics, who approach their subjects with a fondness bordering on reverence. Sharp edges get rounded; criticisms muted; virtues spotlighted for posterity. The results are usually bloodless portraits of the least public members of America’s political pantheon.

Bruce Allen Murphy’s biography of Justice William O. Douglas, “Wild Bill,” suffers no such flaw. Taking on the life story of a legal legend -- the whizziest of New Deal whiz kids who became the longest serving justice in history -- Murphy trades in the customary kid gloves for a pair of brass knuckles. The result is devastating.

The usual image of Douglas is either (depending on one’s politics) that of a visionary civil libertarian or dangerous judicial radical. But after reading the results of Murphy’s excavation of Douglas’ life, one must replace that political imagery with something personal: Douglas was a brilliant, self-centered, manipulative, philandering and, most of all, prevaricating scoundrel.

Murphy’s main agenda is to isolate the real Douglas from the carefully constructed myths Douglas created about himself. In the process -- and in the course of 15 years’ research punctuated by two other well-received judicial biographies -- he turns a classic American success story into a classic American antihero.

In essence, the story Douglas promulgated about himself runs like this: The impoverished son of an itinerant preacher, he survived a bout with polio thanks to his mother’s tireless attentions, battled devastating poverty while putting himself through college, served in the Army during World War I, arrived at Columbia Law School in New York stinking of the sheep train in which he’d ridden east from rural Washington, still managed to graduate second in his class and, after a stint at Wall Street’s finest firm, emerged as a celebrated law professor.

With the persistence of a bloodhound, Murphy has chased down the real story behind all these claims, and he reports with heavily footnoted precision that pretty much every aspect of Douglas’ self-promoted tale is either exaggerated, importantly incomplete or an outright lie. In fact, Douglas’ childhood was far less impoverished than he let on. Although sickly as a child, Douglas never had polio. His Army service, if one can call it that, took place not on Flanders fields but at Whitman College, where he was part of the student training corps.

Once in New York, Douglas’ rise to stardom was halting. At Columbia law, he did well but finished no better than fifth in his class (which may seem like a petty discrepancy, but it was a source of great internal consternation). Nor did Douglas, as he often suggested, take Wall Street by storm. Instead, he suffered a psychological breakdown and fled home to Washington before returning to start a meteoric career in legal academia.

Murphy offers a reasonable rationale for Douglas’ myth-making. The man was a thoroughly political animal driven by a raging ambition who aspired to nothing less than the U.S. presidency. As it turned out, Douglas nearly achieved his goal. In the mid-1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized Douglas’ achievements in the emerging fields of bankruptcy and securities law by appointing him to head the Securities and Exchange Commission. There, he proved to be an effective reformer of dubious Wall Street practices and, through government regulation, restored confidence in markets devastated by the Depression.

FDR took a particular liking to his economic crusader, and in 1939, rewarded Douglas by appointing him at the tender age of 40 to fill the Supreme Court seat being vacated by another economic progressive, Louis Brandeis. Today, the Supreme Court is not thought of as a stepping stone to political office. But Roosevelt parked several other political aspirants on the high bench, including former Sen. Hugo Black and former Atty. Gen. Robert Jackson.

Douglas alone approached the brass ring. As described in some of Murphy’s most interesting chapters, in 1944, Douglas was one of two names FDR approved to run as his vice president, a position likely to evolve into the presidency given Roosevelt’s failing health. Apparently, FDR actually favored Douglas for the ticket. The Democratic Party bosses, however, talked the president into recording Harry S Truman as his first choice -- and, at the convention, Truman’s operatives exploited that slight nod to rob Douglas of the prize.

The rest, as they say, is history. Douglas’ presidential ambitions did not wane. Before long, though, his weakness for women disqualified him. A pathological womanizer, Douglas finally divorced his much-neglected first wife in 1954 and, while playing hide-and-seek with various young blonds, tumbled into three more marriages.

The divorce settlements, in addition to rendering Douglas unelectable, placed one lead weight after another on Douglas’ income, and he spent much of the last two decades of his life scrambling after book contracts, loans, even a dubious arrangement with a Las Vegas shark, to keep his head above water. Indeed, as portrayed by Murphy, Douglas’ failure as a human being had few limits. He was a horrible father, abused his law clerks, alienated his colleagues, drank to excess, wallowed in self-pity and ranted like a spoiled child. So it was that Douglas died in 1975 bitter, frustrated and mostly alone.

On all these points, Murphy’s portrait is largely convincing. At times, one gets a glimpse of an author, lips pursed in moral disgust, obsessively recording yet another former clerk, wife or acquaintance dumping mud on Douglas’ grave. But even if one quibbles around the edges, the overall portrait remains damning.

That said, Murphy’s approach raises a troubling question: Shouldn’t a biography of a public man reckon seriously with his public life? Douglas enjoyed one of the most remarkable careers of the 20th century. He produced the kind of visionary ideas that inspired nearly unrivaled allegiance and disdain (including multiple impeachment attempts) and which still shape the law and life of the nation he served for 40 years. About all this Murphy is worse than silent. By constantly treating Douglas’ ideas as mere instruments of selfish pursuits, Murphy subverts the important truth: Douglas was a courageous and pioneering intellectual force.

For Murphy, it counts for almost nothing that, as a young academic, Douglas became an early leader of the most important (and still influential) reform movement ever to hit legal academia: the legal realist movement, which brought the study of social science and human behavior into the sphere of legal thinking. At the SEC, Douglas basically rewrote American securities law, putting an end to any number of shady practices. Murphy, however, devotes almost no time to Douglas’ accomplishments. Instead, he ascribes his bold reforms to political grandstanding.

And what about Douglas’ 36 years on the court? True, Douglas was not a great justice. Like Byron White, with whom he served for a decade, Douglas was too restless a spirit to prosper in the cloistered world of the court. He churned out more opinions than any other justice in history. Yet remarkably few are true landmarks or exemplars of the laborious craft of judging.

In some fields, however, Douglas was preeminent. He was the first justice ever to speak about a right to work and to imagine a person’s job as a form of protected property. At the height of 1950s anti-communism, Douglas used the forum of anti-communist prosecutions to defend the then unpopular view that no man should be punished “not for what they did, but for what they thought.” And he played a decisive role in building the right to privacy that now holds center stage in legal debate.

In his later years especially, Douglas lost sight of the limits on judicial power. It was as though, sensing his own mortality, Douglas wanted to inscribe in the book of court history his personal views on every issue from the war in Vietnam to the legal rights of trees.

In this respect, Douglas embodied both the best and worst of the court: He possessed a genius for understanding the components of human freedom but, from selfishness or arrogance, paid little heed to the proper role of a single, unelected, life-tenured judge in a constitutional democracy.

On these matters (and much more), Murphy offers little insight and instead canvasses Douglas’ judicial career through a series of dreary summaries and block quotes. This is a shame. For in choosing Douglas as a subject for biography, Murphy wisely decided that this is a life to which attention must be paid. What Murphy gets importantly wrong is the question of attention to what.