A former prosecutor and moderate Republican governor of California when appointed to the Supreme Court in 1953, Earl Warren (1891-1974) surprised everyone by leading it in an increasingly liberal direction. Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, and other key decisions bolstered the rights of individuals and committed the federal government to acting in support of them. Journalist/historian Ed Cray's detailed account depicts an admirable, self-assured man who arrived slowly at positions, driven not by ideology but by an old-fashioned sense of morality that asked, "Is it fair?"
With this excellent biography, Cray (journalism, Univ. of Southern California) offers new insight into the chief justice, a key American political figure of the 20th century. Warren served as a district attorney, attorney general of California, twice governor of that state, 1948 Republican vice presidential nominee, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and chair of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President Kennedy. Cray carefully analyzes Warren's central role in the development of World War II-era California and the fight for progressive legislation within the Republican Party. He shows how Warren's leadership on the Supreme Court expanded the scope of constitutional civil liberties and how this emerging judicial activism penetrated major Court decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). Highly recommended for all libraries. [BOMC main selection.]?Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ.
-?Steven Puro, St. Louis Univ.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
An exhaustively researched biography, Cray's life of Warren reads like a diary of the subject's activities; every material fact falls into its strict chronological place. Perhaps this technique was the only option in writing about Warren, who erected a wall between his public and private lives as tall as the wall he reinforced between church and state. Since no hint of scandal, public or private, was ever attached to Warren, Cray was limited in the number of personality-revealing crises he could write about; a nigh unique public glimpse was Warren weeping in front of reporters over the brutal murder of his father. Otherwise, the Warren persona was upright and stoical, that of a good government square who started in politics by prosecuting vice and corruption. What a contrast Warren's law-enforcement methods made--countenanced wire taps, coerced confessions, deprivation of counsel--with those the Warren Court mandated in the 1960s! Unusual for a politician, Warren evolved in a liberal rather than a conservative direction, which process Cray indicates in Warren's policies as attorney general and progressive Republican governor of California, policies marred by the big blot in the record, Warren's interning of Japanese Americans in 1942. As for Warren's historic and still-controversial leadership of the Supreme Court, Cray's intensive digging and interviewing have uncovered many telling incidents of the internal balance of attitudes on the court. A quality less apparent in Cray's account--thankfully so, for general readers--is legalistic analysis of the court's landmark decisions from Brown to Miranda to Griswold. Let law libraries handle the technical books about those cases, and let public libraries make accessible a diligently investigated biography of the man to whom, as much as any other, citizens owe the ideals of nondiscrimination in education, nonbrutality in law enforcement, and noninvasion of privacy. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
An informative, comprehensive, easy to read biography of the great and good chief justice who, during the mid-20th century, changed the visage of American law, by Cray (General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman, 1990, etc.). Light on legal analysis, this is a serviceable supplement for those already familiar with the man, and an accessible introduction for those unacquainted with the work of Earl Warren. The imminency of the next century presents a particularly timely hour to remember and reassess the man who, as chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1953 through 1969, led a reform not simply of American law but of American social morality. As Cray aptly notes, ``for millions of Americans, the chief justice had come to embody the promise of a nation of truly equal peoples.'' Cray provides a detailed account of Warren's life as family man, lawyer, politician, reform-minded district attorney, attorney general of California, progressive three-term governor of California, and, finally, chief justice. He does not overlook Warren's flaws: As attorney general of California he supervised the internment of Japanese-Americans in that state during WW II. Appropriately, Cray devotes chapters to the pivotal rulings of the ``Warren Court,'' including the school desegregation decisions, protection against coerced confessions and unreasonable searches by the police, the ban on government-sponsored prayer in public schools, and the right of privacy. The passing of the Warren era brought a new Supreme Court, less sensitive to individual rights and substantially less suspicious of the propensity of government to misuse its power. In contrast, Cray's thorough and respectful account reminds us of how one person's courage, integrity, and vision helped fulfill the Constitution's promise of liberty and dignity. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Those readers in search of a competently told, undemanding, hagiographic story will like this book. Those who want a probing examination of a complex and important life will have to wait. --
The New York Times Book Review, Alonzo L. Hamby
