Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: loyalty oath debate, segregation case file, gambling file, Earl Warren, Supreme Court, United States (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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)
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From The Washington Post

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 supported the relocation of Japanese aliens from the coast to internment camps -- a position he came to regret -- but otherwise defended civil liberties.

Throughout his life, Warren detested his fellow California Republican Richard M. Nixon -- Warren and President John F. Kennedy giggled like schoolboys on Air Force One after Nixon's gubernatorial defeat in 1962 -- and denounced the red-baiting illiberalism that Nixon embodied. When he joined the court in 1953, Warren considered himself an activist nonpartisan, despite having run for vice president as a Republican in 1948. He was a self-described liberal, at least on social issues, and far more progressive on race than the Southern Democrats of his era.

As chief justice, Warren had little hesitation about acting in the same way he had as governor. Guided above all by his personal instincts, and by his quest for what his fellow moderate Republican lawyer Leonard Garment called "nontechnical justice," Warren moved quickly to persuade his new colleagues to embrace his vision. Warren's greatest success came right away in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Newton describes how Warren worked the high court like a canny politician, seeking out his colleagues for advice rather than trying heavy-handedly to impose his will, and in the process persuading them to join a unanimous opinion striking down school segregation.

Warren wrote some of the most famous passages in Brown in his own hand. But for much of his tenure, he delegated most of the writing to his clerks, giving them broad guidance about his vision of fairness and justice and not fussing about the technical details. This emotionalism sometimes made his jurisprudence seem unprincipled, despite his purported devotion to principle. Warren's draft opinion in the case requiring police to read suspects their Miranda rights, Newton acknowledges, seemed "nearly as much the work of a governor as that of a justice." And Warren opposed the burning of draft cards in 1968 but supported students' right to curse the draft in 1969, apparently because his nemesis, Nixon, had won the 1968 presidential election and Warren had turned against the war. At times, his tendency to view all legal issues in personal and human terms seemed jarringly political.

Newton's subtitle -- "Earl Warren and the Nation He Made" -- suggests that Warren single-handedly transformed the country by imposing his enlightened vision of humane, nontechnical justice on a divided America. But Newton's scrupulous narrative points to a more subtle conclusion: Warren was most successful when the White House and Congress supported his vision and less successful when the political branches opposed him. Because Eisenhower hardly concealed his distaste for the Brown decision in 1954, meaningful desegregation didn't occur until a decade later; by contrast, some states reluctantly obeyed the decision striking down school prayer in 1962 largely because President Kennedy unequivocally endorsed it. As a practical politician, Warren understood that the court is powerless in the face of strong political opposition.

Because the hearty, wholesome Warren was a somewhat bland figure, Newton's biography is necessarily less colorful than biographies of judicial rakes such as justices William O. Douglas and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. And readers who prefer more analysis of Warren's decisions may prefer earlier biographies by the legal scholars Bernard Schwartz and G. Edward White. But because Warren's personal experiences were so inseparable from his jurisprudence, Newton's comprehensive and balanced political history usefully cuts through the technical details and casts fresh light on Warren's legacy.

Newton ends his book by lamenting that Warren's centrism has little political constituency today: "Too straight and too Establishment to fit a liberal model, too devoted to an expansive civil libertarianism for conservatives to honor him, Warren falls between our modern cracks," he writes. "The nation today -- certainly the Court -- is less fortunate not to have one of him." In fact, Warren may indeed have a modern heir: the centrist activist Anthony M. Kennedy, who played at Warren's feet as a child and shares his fellow Californian's faith in the ability of enlightened judges to run the country by short-circuiting messy political debates. But Kennedy lacks Warren's greatest skill: his ability to build coalitions on the court and to win over ideological opponents by skillful persuasion. That is a talent that Chief Justice Roberts, who has made it a priority to promote unanimity and consensus, seems to have in abundance. And in that sense, despite their very different visions of the role of the court in American life, Warren and Roberts may have more in common than either of them could have imagined.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Rosen
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover (October 5, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594489289
• ISBN-13: 978-1594489280
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #595,390 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent writing and scholarship, November 4, 2006

By	Harve E. Citrin - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

An excellent, readable reminder of the man who put conservative values to the service of all people without regard to their economic, social or ethnic standing. An outstanding tribute to the greatness of America.

My wife says that despite having grown up in the Warren years she had not realized the impact Justice Warren had on all our lives. Jim Newton is telling a story that is so important in today's world.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still drafting in his wake, February 19, 2007

By	Lawrence Meyer (Boston) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Earl Warren's is a biography that pays revisiting, especially now that the political center he represented is so thin and the political virtues he practiced so derided. He was an uncomplicated, direct, and plain-spoken man who nevertheless, as Chief Justice, produced astonishing results. Brown vs. the Board of Education provided the essential legal fulcrum of the Civil Rights movement that transformed America in the last half of the 20th century. Perhaps this simplicity and clear vision was the key to his effectiveness.

How to explain the contradictions in Warren's life? Eisenhower was famously unhappy with his appointee. Warren, as Chief Justice, took positions that contradicted what Warren himself, as a District Attorney and Governor, had in fact practiced. No wonder Ike was pole-axed by the Chief Justice he got. The answer seems to be that Warren focused on using the tools each office provided to advance a consistent philosophy, equal justice for all.

Also interesting is the counterpoint and interplay of the careers of Warren and Richard Nixon. Nixon plainly drafted in Warren's wake and converted to the uses of his ambition political capital Warren had accumulated, especially when he crawled over Warren's presidential ambitions to secure the nomination as Vice-President. Yet two politicians were never more dissimilar than Warren and Nixon, the one open, natural, sociable, and comfortable in his skin, the other so contrived and fabricated as to stand for the least likely politician in recent history. But Nixon feigned the virtues Warren possessed in abundance: another way he drafted in Warren's wake. When Nixon hid lies and inconsistencies behind prefaces that he was about to make things "perfectly clear," he aped only Warren's political prose, not Warren's philosophy.

Jim Newton is a writer Warren would have enjoyed talking to and might have hired as a speechwriter. His prose is direct and his explanations of otherwise thorny and obscure legal issues easily penetrable. Warren deserves a better and grander reputation than he has merited at the hands of the neo-conservatives who have taken over the Court and Court punditry. Newton is an able advocate for a reappraisal. Warren did much more good for the county than serve as the exemplar of evil judicial activism. Absent Warren would Clarence Thomas today be on the Supreme Court? Perhaps the only irony of Warren's career is that so few followed in his footsteps, but so many neo-Nixons are still drafting in his wake.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superlative work, March 16, 2007

By	Schmerguls "schmerguls" (Sioux City, Ia USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Since there is so much I want to read I usually don't read more than one biography of anybody and I had already read two of Earl Warren:
1827 Super Chief: Earl Warren and his Supreme Court A Judicial Biography, by Bernard Schwartz (read 19 Feb 1984)
3114 Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren, by Ed Cray (read 26 Sep 1998)
So I was surprised that I decided to read this book. But not reading it would have been a big mistake This is an extraordinarily well-done work, telling the story of a man whose contributions to our country as we now know it are huge. The author has a sure grasp for the momentous events in which Warren was involved, and I have not read a more interest-holding biography in years. So even if you think you know all there is to know about the man who turned out to be the greatest Chief Justice in our nation's history, you should read this excellent account of a vitally important man.