Books in Brief: Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America

Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America, by Jack Harrison Pollack (Prentice-Hall, 386 pp., $14.95).

The 14th Chief Justice of the United States is assured an indelible place in history as one of the most controversial leaders of the Supreme Court. Alternately reviled as an atheistic Communist and revered as a brilliant libertarian, this man’s philosophical credentials were actually far more mundane. His longtime friend Harry Truman pegged him early, snorting, “Earl Warren’s a Democrat and don’t know it.” At his retirement from the Court in 1969 after 16 years of tumultuous rulings that shamelessly advanced the cause of political and social egalitarianism, the entire country knew it. The key to understanding the Warren Court is to appreciate the sublime political acumen of this man who, prior to his appointment by Dwight Eisenhower, had never presided over a court. But as a shrewd governor of California he had longed for the White House, only to be denied the office by the winds of political chance. Those same currents brought him to the Supreme Court during a national era that offered a relative vacuum of Executive leadership. Pollack’s paean to Warren suggests a pilgrim’s progress to the promised land of liberalism. Excusing the Chief Justice’s earlier conservatism as evidence of stunted growth, the author leaps to the assertion that his ideological swing to the left should be viewed less as a political fact than as a moral conversion. Sample this turgid description of the JFK inaugural: “Thus the first Catholic President of the United States was sworn in by a onetime Methodist whose High Court was then battling bigotry in all forms.” The tone of Pollack’s polemic calls into question his reliability as a historical witness. There he had best take the Fifth Amendment.

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Alan L. Miller

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Earl Warren: The Judge Who Changed America, by Jack Harrison Pollack (Prentice-Hall, 386 pp., $14.95).

The 14th Chief Justice of the United States is assured an indelible place in history as one of the most controversial leaders of the Supreme Court. Alternately reviled as an atheistic Communist and revered as a brilliant libertarian, this man’s philosophical credentials were actually far more mundane. His longtime friend Harry Truman pegged him early, snorting, “Earl Warren’s a Democrat and don’t know it.” At his retirement from the Court in 1969 after 16 years of tumultuous rulings that shamelessly advanced the cause of political and social egalitarianism, the entire country knew it. The key to understanding the Warren Court is to appreciate the sublime political acumen of this man who, prior to his appointment by Dwight Eisenhower, had never presided over a court. But as a shrewd governor of California he had longed for the White House, only to be denied the office by the winds of political chance. Those same currents brought him to the Supreme Court during a national era that offered a relative vacuum of Executive leadership. Pollack’s paean to Warren suggests a pilgrim’s progress to the promised land of liberalism. Excusing the Chief Justice’s earlier conservatism as evidence of stunted growth, the author leaps to the assertion that his ideological swing to the left should be viewed less as a political fact than as a moral conversion. Sample this turgid description of the JFK inaugural: “Thus the first Catholic President of the United States was sworn in by a onetime Methodist whose High Court was then battling bigotry in all forms.” The tone of Pollack’s polemic calls into question his reliability as a historical witness. There he had best take the Fifth Amendment.