Profile in courage

ON my office wall hangs a faded leaflet I picked up on a Dallas street the day John F. Kennedy was shot. It shows two police-booking-style photos of the president, beneath which blares the line “Wanted for Treason” and the accusations that he aided “Communist inspired racial riots” and “illegally invaded a sovereign state” when he sent U.S. troops to quell a riot that greeted a black student’s entrance to the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Just weeks before Kennedy’s 1963 murder, Ku Klux Klan bombers killed four girls in a church in Birmingham, Ala. Earlier, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Mississippi, and Gov. George Wallace defied court orders to integrate the University of Alabama. Segregationist Southerners blamed Kennedy and the allegedly Communist-backed Martin Luther King for all of it.

But the man behind the destruction of the century-old Southern system of racial segregation was not Kennedy or any Democrat at all. That man was Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California who was appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. By the late ‘60s, the solidly Democratic South had defected to the GOP because of Democratic support for civil rights legislation sparked by the Warren court’s decisions.

A further irony is that Warren was an almost stereotypical Republican before joining the high court. As Jim Newton reveals in his meticulously researched and well-told new biography, “Justice for All,” Warren was a zealous prosecutor, passionately anti-Communist, pro-business, anti-New Deal, anti-gambling, anti-pornography, tough on crime (his father was murdered in their Bakersfield home in 1938), and he favored interning California’s Japanese and their American-born children after Pearl Harbor.

But Warren was no ideologue. Rather, he was guided by a strong sense of fair play and a fervent belief that the high court’s mandate was to achieve the Founders’ basic intent: All men are created equal. Sworn in as chief justice on Oct. 5, 1953, he would over the next 16 years “remake the nation’s voting rights, empower criminal defendants, break down racial segregation, halt the demagogic pursuit of Communists, expand the rights of protest and dissent, embolden newspapers to challenge public leaders, and re-imagine the relationship between liberty and security in a free society,” Newton writes. “[I]n the face of bitter opposition, the Warren Court imported the great values of America’s Declaration of Independence and the promises of its Bill of Rights into the working life of the nation.”

Newton, a longtime reporter, editor and now city-county bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, draws on a vast trove of academic, government and private materials, as well as the personal reflections of surviving relatives and associates. He traces Warren’s path from young donkey rider and indifferent student through his World War I Army service, a UC Berkeley law degree and his ambitious rise from Alameda County prosecutor to state attorney general and governor in 1943. His ingratiating personal style and generally safe politics helped him win reelection twice more, with the enthusiastic backing of the state’s business establishment and its two most influential conservative newspapers, the Oakland Tribune and The Times.

Not only were Warren’s political acts mostly safe and circumspect, but he also was a Norman Rockwell-esque vision of the staunch Western Republican -- big, bold, blue-eyed. Born in 1891 to Swedish and Norwegian immigrant working-class parents, he was a dedicated husband and father of six, an avid hunter, camper and hiker, a Mason, a passionate baseball and football fan and a regular churchgoer who liked an evening drink or two and a good cigar -- in short, a real man’s man.

As governor, Newton writes, Warren was hard-working and conscientious but always ambitious for higher office. He campaigned hard to win the GOP vice presidential nomination in 1948 and sought the top spot in 1952, only to see the winner, Eisenhower, choose Warren’s main California rival, Richard Nixon, as his No. 2. Eisenhower later wrote that Warren’s views “seemed to reflect high ideals and a great deal of common sense,” but the governor was too much like himself, and he wanted balance on the ticket, including youth. (Nixon was 39, Warren 61.) Eisenhower also passed over Warren for a Cabinet post but, after several conversations with him, finally promised the first Supreme Court vacancy through his broker, Atty. Gen. Herbert Brownell. Eisenhower viewed Warren as a perfect counterbalance to the New Deal liberals on the court. Based on that assurance, Warren had announced in 1953 his resolve not to run for governor again when Chief Justice Fred Vinson died unexpectedly.

Warren immediately “struck a pose of public reserve while at the same time moving to claim the promise he felt was his.” Eisenhower believed that he had promised Warren only an associate justice post, not the top one; he privately offered the job to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. But Warren furiously worked the phones, importuning influential political, academic, business and religious leaders around the country -- including his friend J. Edgar Hoover. Brownell finally went to Eisenhower and said, “We’re stuck with him, I guess.” The president relented -- a decision he would soon come to deeply regret.

The fractious court Warren joined was composed of one Republican (Justice Harold H. Burton) and seven Democrats, including the brilliant jurists Hugo L. Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson. The four fought often. Jackson and Frankfurter supported a restrained judiciary, while Black and Douglas argued for a more activist court. On controversial issues, not much had gotten done. In short order, Warren demonstrated his extraordinary leadership qualities.

African American ferment over segregation had been increasing rapidly since the end of World War II; by 1953, it had distilled into a battle over Brown vs. Board of Education, a case Warren inherited. The plaintiffs argued that segregated schools were intrinsically unequal because they signified racial inferiority, and sought to overturn an 1896 Supreme Court ruling that separate public facilities were not necessarily unequal, and thus were legal.

Some justices thought Congress should settle such matters with new laws. Some wanted to kick the matter back to the lower courts. Others wanted to stall for time, fearing social upheaval. While an anxious South waited, Warren charmed and cajoled. In May 1954, the court struck down the “separate but equal” doctrine and ordered schools integrated “with all deliberate speed.” The vote was unanimous. In less than a year, Newton writes, Warren “had united his brilliant Court into a single voice on an issue of moral urgency.”

Eisenhower was furious. He’d told Warren that Southerners “are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes,” the justice wrote in his memoirs. He never forgave Eisenhower for that remark and went on to lead the court on decisions that would further irritate the president -- and inflame the John Birch Society, which dotted the nation with “Impeach Earl Warren” signs.

This tough-minded but essentially admiring book is itself an act of considerable courage. Warren’s enthusiasm for locking up the state’s Japanese and refusing to apologize for so doing (he sincerely thought he was acting in California’s best interest) makes praising him politically incorrect, especially among liberal Democrats. He is an unmentionable anathema to today’s ruling Republicans. So, the legacy of Bakersfield’s Earl Warren, who died in 1974, remains suspended in silent limbo. Newton’s book is a loud protest against that silence. *