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Reviews in American History 31.3 (2003) 471-478



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A Unique Kind of Justice

L. A. Powe, Jr.


Bruce Allen Murphy. Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas. New York: Random House, 2003. xvii + 716 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

The Supreme Court is now filled with judicial technocrats, but it wasn't always this way. A half-century ago the Court was filled with men who had broad experience in and exposure to American politics. One of those men was William O. Douglas, the subject of Bruce Allen Murphy's aptly titled biography, Wild Bill. I served as Justice Douglas's law clerk in 1970-71 and have written several articles about him, but never felt that I fully understood him. I was a very willing source for Wild Bill, as I hoped that Murphy could accomplish the task of capturing the totality of the man (in part so that I could better understand someone who has had such an influence on my career). Maybe my expectations were too high, but, with few exceptions, Wild Bill leaves me where I was a decade ago.

Married four times (the last two to women forty years younger than himself), facing impeachment threats four times, Douglas wrote two autobiographies, thirty-two books, and over twelve hundred opinions as the longest serving justice in the Court's history. The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park is dedicated to him. A Wilderness Area in two national forests bears his name, as does a waterfall within it. So does the hearing room of the Securities and Exchange Commission (where he was a spectacularly successful chairman in the late 1930s). He may have been FDR's first choice for running mate in 1944, and Harry Truman unsuccessfully implored him to take the vice-presidency four years later.

Until now, James Simon's Independent Journey (1980) had been the fullest biography of Douglas. Wild Bill extends it, with the dominant themes of Douglas's ambition, especially for the presidency, his financial worries, womanizing, and mythmakingfrom cradle to grave. Half Douglas's life was spent on the Court, yet Murphy finds the rest more interesting. Wild Bill is a personal and political, not a judicial, biography, and consistent with the penchant for exposé displayed in Murphy's previous biographies, the portrait is relentlessly unflattering. [End Page 471]

Douglas reached the Court at age 40 (the youngest in well over a century), already a presidential advisor, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, and well-publicized chairman of the SEC. He was not yet satisfied because he wanted the presidency. His widowed mother, who informed all her children that no matter how good they were they never could match their father, told Douglas that he would grow up to be president, and he acted is if it were to be given to him. Yet despite his ambition, he never ran for elective office.

When FDR decided to replace John Nance Garner in 1940, his final two choices were Henry Wallace and Douglas (who he had just appointed to the Court a year earlier). After rumors of Wallace's "guru letters" surfaced, Douglas even tried (unsuccessfully through Harold Ickes) to publicize them in order to force Wallace off the ticket. Once FDR decided to dump Wallace in 1944, Douglas saw his main chance because the vice president would surely replace the dying Roosevelt. Although the record is ambiguous, it appears Roosevelt preferred Douglas to Truman, but not enough to fight hard (perhaps because he could not). In the fullest discussion of the Douglas side of the Truman-Douglas contest, Murphy shows that Douglas, in the mountains of eastern Oregon, expected to get the nod right until the dumbfounding call came saying it was Truman. Party bosses, especially Democratic National Chairman Bob Hannegan, sabotaged him.

In 1948 Douglas and New Deal liberals wanted an open convention despite Truman's message (through Paul Porter to Joe Rauh) that "any shithead behind this desk can get renominated, so you guys are crazy" (p. 252).But the same bosses who...

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