Chief Justice, by Ed Gray (Simon & Schuster, 603 pp., $30)
EARL Warren has found a biographer worthy of his intellect and temperament: in Chief Justice, Ed Gray has written a shallow book celebrating a shallow man. Gray records with little more analysis than a daily newspaper the deeds of a politician whose only principle was to increase the power of the offices he held. Just as Warren could not understand that the essence of law in a republic was to constrain its rulers, including the judges themselves, his biographer cannot understand that to assess what was at stake in the cases Warren decided one must actually refer to the text and history of the Constitution. Still, the book does provide some interesting new data on the extent of Warren’s lust for power, including his scheming to be Eisenhower’s successor at the time of the latter’s heart attack. It also quotes excerpts from L. Brent Bozell’s essays for NATIONAL REVIEW which show that this magazine was prescient in warning of the devastation wrought by the Chief Justice’s substitution of pop sociology for legal principle. Even today the nation has not fully exorcised the spirit of legal lawlessness Warren unleashed.
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