Packing the Court by Burns James MacGregor

Author:Burns, James MacGregor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group

CHAPTER TEN

Leadership: The Warren Court

AFTER THE 1930S collision between the FDR steamroller and the old Republican court ended with the triumph of the New Deal, some expected the Supreme Court to settle back into a stable and even mundane existence. This was not to be. The court swung sharply to the left, then zigzagged, as New Dealers divided and clashed, and some carefully selected appointees turned out to be surprises. Felix Frankfurter, the young Harvard professor and New Dealer who had been a close friend to FDR, turned into one of the most conservative justices, as did FDR’s protégé Robert Jackson.

In the game of judicial roulette, though, such surprises weren’t confined to Democrats. After Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 became the first Republican elected president in a quarter century, he named to the Supreme Court a party stalwart who had run a failed campaign for the GOP’s presidential nomination and had once been its candidate for the vice presidency, Governor Earl Warren of California. Warren had also spearheaded the wartime removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, warning that they could bring a “repetition of Pearl Harbor” to the American mainland. But he would, as chief justice, metamorphose into the most liberal leader of the Supreme Court in American history. Under his leadership, the court would move deeply into such controversial areas as black rights and civil liberties and voting power, and assert itself as the most dynamic branch of American government. By making the Supreme Court a center of progressive reform, Warren would forge a luminous exception to the court’s historic role as the bulwark of anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian conservatism.

Dwight Eisenhower promised to modernize the GOP, to rid it of bitter-enders who still sought to overturn the New Deal, while replacing Democratic liberal crusades with moderate “good government.” His long career in the army had taught him to disdain partisanship and extremes right or left. Both parties had courted the victorious commander of the Allied armies in the years after World War II—Truman had offered to back him for the 1948 Democratic presidential nomination—and it was only months before he began his campaign for the 1952 Republican nomination that he declared his party affiliation. He went on to beat Robert Taft, son of the former president and chief justice and the leader of the Republican right, at the GOP convention, and then, in the general election, he crushed Adlai Stevenson, heir to New Deal liberalism.

When Chief Justice Vinson died suddenly of a heart attack in September 1953, aged only sixty-three, Eisenhower had an unexpected chance to reshape the Supreme Court in his own centrist image. He wanted a nominee of national stature, wide experience in government, and integrity. There was such a man, one who had just days before announced his retirement from politics and, moreover, one to whom Ike had given a hostage to fortune, a “personal promise” made a month after the 1952 election that he would name him to the “first vacancy on the Supreme Court”—Earl Warren.

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