Reviews for Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren

The average rating for Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-17 00:00:00 Keith Donoghue Earl Warren was the rare politician, and later jurist, who both practiced and preached that honesty and integrity are the most important parts of a person's character. Ed Cray chronicles Warren's long and extraordinary career of a half-century in public service with objectivity and professionalism. Neither fawning nor overly critical, Cray is able to maintain a fairly personable stance on Warren, taking him to task when he felt that Warren's actions did not line up with his professed ideals. The result is a book that, while not making for riveting reading, carefully examines just who Earl Warren was, what was important to him, how his thinking was molded while growing up in California, and how he managed a relatively seamless major career change: going from Governor of California to Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The book is roughly divided in half, page-wise, between Warren's career as a politician and Warren's career on the bench. As the title of the book hints, Cray's main interest is in the latter. However, this is a full biography and Cray knows that without examining and explaining Warren's pre-Supreme Court career, the reader would not fully be able to understand Warren the Chief Justice. Nothing was given to Warren; he worked for everything that he got, even the Supreme Court appointment (in a way). Warren was interested in the law from an early age and worked hard to make himself - successively - into a lawyer, then a county prosecutor, then California Attorney General, the Governor, and finally culminating in the pinnacle of the judicial profession. Warren was a liberal Republican, even back then in the first half of the 20th century. It is questionable, perhaps even doubtful, if he would be a Republican at all today. Because Warren was scrupulously honest (although sometimes not fully as one might hope) and was guided by his own innate sense of integrity, he was a different kind of politician than most. He refused to engage in quid pro quos and refused to accept bribes. Undoubtedly, this highly moral manner of conducting his life made him many enemies (think of the "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards in the 1960s) and possibly cost him support when he wanted to make a run at the presidency in 1952. His sense of duty to his country that he swore an oath to protect was more important to him than any position that he could gain from it. By far the biggest blemish on Warren's star is his acquiescence in and support of the horrible decision to intern all Japanese (both American citizens and foreign nationals) living in California in 1942 by placing them in armed camps. Warren got caught up in the hysteria following Pearl Harbor and, as California Attorney General, was firmly in support of this stupid policy. It was clear in later years, when he was Chief Justice, that Warren knew he was on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of humanity for playing his role in the internment. While never actually coming out publicly and admitting that he was wrong, in private discussions with friends and family members and even in some of the Supreme Court decisions that he helped to hand down, one could see that Warren's view had changed. For a man who so prided himself on his own sense of fairness and justice for those who were ill-treated by society, this must have disturbed him until he died. Cray tries to mix in Warren's personal life, and does a fairly decent job at it. Although, after going onto the Supreme Court, the book largely revolves around Warren's court management and decisions. Cray does divert for one chapter to discuss the Warren Commission (President Lyndon Johnson basically demanded of Warren that he head a commission to look into the assassination of Preisdent John F. Kennedy). This is quite interesting as Cray documents several things: how hard Warren worked - essentially doing two full-time jobs for most of 1964 when he was already seventy-three years old; how fractured the Commission was (Georgia Senator Richard Russell hated Warren because of the latter's desegregation ruling in the famous 1954 Brown case; Michigan Representative Gerald Ford was largely a partisan thorn even though he belonged to the same party as Warren); how Warren's intense involvement and dedication to doing a thorough job ran him afoul of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover; and how Warren did not believe that anyone else but Lee Harvey Oswald was involved. Cray also provides context behind Warren's relationship with his one real enemy: Richard Nixon. Warren ultimately lost to Nixon twice: first when Nixon finagled him out of any shot at becoming the Republican Presidential nominee in 1952 (ironically this led to Warren's appointment as Chief Justice by a reluctant and later regretful President Dwight Eisenhower), and second at the end of Warren's career. Warren wanted to retire in 1968 and submitted his resignation to President Johnson stating he would retire at the President's pleasure. This set the ball rolling on a fiasco: Johnson nominated Associate Justice Abe Fortas to become Chief Justice, the Senate balked - embarrassing both Fortas and Johnson while attacking Warren, Fortas withdrew his name when he saw the writing on the wall, Nixon then becomes President and is the one to appoint Warren Burger as Warren's successor. This is definitely not what Warren wanted. Nonetheless, despite that episode, Warren was and remains one of the most important and influential Chief Justices in history and helped to redefine and broaden rights for many people who previously had been marginalized by society. While this book is not written poorly, it was a struggle at times to get through. Cray does not provide any breaks once he begins a chapter, so often times the subject switches markedly from one paragraph to the next. Warren lives a long life, and lived through many societal changes and was present for some big moments. But sometimes that sense doesn't make it through the narrative. Cray spends as much time on the 1948 presidential election as he does on Warren's time as a student at the University of California. Warren's personality never really seems to come out here. In someone else's hands, a more vibrant Earl Warren might very well appear.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-30 00:00:00 He Quan I so wanted to enjoy this book, but gosh it's a slog. A real kitchen sink of a biography. The author can't leave out a single, minute detail. In his obsession to cram in every little fact, he loses touch with what made Earl Warren so great. This book needs much less information and much more insight. The first half, to Warren's appointment as chief justice, is worse than the second half, which features explanations of his judicial philosophy, his leadership of the court, and factual back stories of the big cases: Brown v. Board of Education, Baker v. Carr, Mapp v. Ohio, and others. Still, in the second half I wanted to quit reading several times and instead pushed on when the book was pivoting, as when Warren finally buckled under President Johnson's forceful pressure to chair the commission investigating President Kennedy's assassination. Bottom line: Earl Warren deserves a much better biography than this.