Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made
 
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From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Los Angeles Times editor and reporter Newton delivers the definitive biography of Earl Warren (1891–1974) for this generation. Newton's masterful narrative synthesizes Warren in all his contradictory guises: the dynamic and outsized California prosecutor and attorney general whose own father's mysterious murder perhaps derived from that ambitious career; the man of great liberal instinct who (as a three-term Republican governor of California) insisted on the internment of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor; and the hard-driving Supreme Court chief justice (1953–1969) who'd never sat on a bench anywhere, but nevertheless shepherded such historic decisions as that in Brown v. Board of Education. It was also under Warren that the Court articulated the constitutional right to privacy, abolished prayer in public schools, clarified and guaranteed voting rights for minorities and created a right to counsel in state criminal trials. As well, Warren served as head of the commission bearing his name and charged with examining the Kennedy assassination--an exercise Newton reveals as to have been part investigation, part experiment in public relations and damage control. In the course of his research, Newton has garnered extensive interviews with Warren's surviving colleagues and children, and uncovered significant new archival sources, all of which he marshals to great effect. For the first time, Newton portrays an intricately complex Warren who--though liberal in his interpretations of the Constitution and progressive in his agenda for America--remained far from radical in other respects. Using testimony of insiders who knew the man well, Newton brilliantly depicts the many-sided Warren as ferociously ambitious, smartly calculating in advancing his career, prickly and contrary when challenged and eminently attracted to both wealth and power. As Newton shows, the ardent judicial defender of the dispossessed summered at California's Bohemian Grove and made a point of dying a rich man. Warren, writes Newton, "was no Eldridge Cleaver," despite rhetoric by contemporary conservatives who routinely invoke him as the poster boy for "bad behavior" in the form of liberal judicial activism. (Oct. 5) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com This is a good time for a reexamination of the late Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. The recent appointment of a new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., raises the question of what makes an effective chief. And Roberts's rejection of the freewheeling pursuit of justice and fairness that Warren represented makes it useful to ask whether Warren deserves to be ranked among the handful of chiefs who have been considered an unequivocal success. In his excellent new biography, Jim Newton, a reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times, argues that Warren was indeed among the greatest chiefs in history precisely because there was little divergence between his politics and his jurisprudence. As the Republican governor of California from 1943 to 1953, he had been a centrist progressive who devoted himself to building consensus among ideological opponents; on the court, he did much the same thing. Although not all readers will share Newton's admiration for Warren's jurisprudence, Justice for All argues convincingly that the most effective chiefs are the most politically savvy -- and are more concerned about unanimity and consensus than about ideological purity. Although President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed disappointment in Warren's judicial apostasy after appointing him in 1953, he should hardly have been surprised. In Sacramento, Warren was known as a liberal moralist who ended discrimination against Mexican schoolchildren, opposed loyalty oaths at the University of California, infuriated the state's medical establishment by championing universal health insurance, and opposed gambling and vice. During World War II, he had supporte

Submitted On:

09 Sep 2007

File Author:

Newton, Jim

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36.85 MB