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f C H A P T E R 2 The Tragic Figure of Robert Jackson The distinguishing aspect of Robert Jackson’s career is not that he went from a small, solo law practice in western New York state to become the solicitor general of the United States, the attorney general of the United States, a U.S. Supreme Court justice, and the nation’s lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials following the Second World War. Others reaching the Supreme Court have had equally humble beginnings. No, Jackson is most remembered for ruining his reputation, in one bewildering episode of anger and frustration, with a personal attack in 1946 on fellow Supreme Court justice Hugo Black on the grounds that he thought Black had scuttled his chance at the chief justiceship that he thought was his due. Sadly, Jackson’s experience with Black and the chief justiceship only re›ected Jackson’s fundamental inability to keep in check his ambition, which revealed itself most tellingly in his ‹ght to keep the personal element out of his judging as he struggled with the demons of his ambition, jealousy , and resentment. f Jackson’s beginnings were modest at best.1 He was born on February 13, 1892, at Spring Creek in western Pennsylvania. When he was ‹ve years old, the family moved across the state line to Frewsburg, New York, a small town ‹ve miles south of Jamestown. Jackson graduated from Frewsburg High School in 1919 and then spent a postgraduate year at Jamestown High 19 School. He wanted to study law, but his father, who worked as a lumberman , stockbreeder, and farmer, was adamant that he should pursue medicine and refused to help him ‹nancially. Jackson’s solution was to borrow enough for one year at the Albany Law School, which he left without taking a degree. He immediately returned to Jamestown and began as a solo practitioner sharing space in the law of‹ce of his mother’s cousin, Frank Mott, who schooled him in the practice of law and in politics and who was also, as Jackson noted to an inquiring correspondent, “a brilliant speaker, deeply interested in English literature.”2 Jackson’s was on-the-job training. As he much later put it in a speech at the Stanford Law School, he was a “vestigial remnant of the system which permitted one to come to the bar by way of apprenticeship in a law of‹ce.”3 This was in the nature, he said, of being the country lawyer that he was. He practiced alone for many years in Jamestown and eventually formed successive small partnerships. He sometimes went to the nearest large city, Buffalo , New York, on business, but he remained throughout his career a Jamestown lawyer. As was true of many small city or town practices, his was a general practice with an emphasis on the diversity of clients and work. By the time he left Jamestown for Washington, when he was forty-two years old and had practiced law for half that time, he was earning thirty thousand dollars a year, he proudly noted in the oral history interview he gave for the Columbia University Oral History Project in the last years of his life. He had made enough money to go to Washington, he said, meaning that his wealth would immunize him from the pressure to hold an unwanted job.4 Jackson was proud of his professional roots as a county seat lawyer. In an age before the rise of law ‹rms, in a time of either solo practitioners or small partnerships, he admired the members of the local bar both for their camaraderie and for their sense of independence, going so far as to characterize the niche of the country lawyer within the profession in a deeply felt review essay on the subject.5 He also memorialized this stalwart lawyer’s life when he described his own early days among lawyers in his oral history interview, saying that “in those days, before the automobile, lawyers would go to court, stay all day—sometimes go up for the week—and gather at the tavern in the evening with the judge. There was perhaps a big table where everybody would have supper—as we called it there—together. You were always very quickly taken into the fellowship as a young lawyer if they thought you had anything in you at all.”6 20 The Great Justices 1941–54 Jackson’s own practice intertwined...

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