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1998 Silver Gavel Award Winners: Books

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Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren Simon & Schuster, New York, New York Ed Cray, Author

Chief Justice: A Biography of Earl Warren is the first complete portrait of the complex man who led a legal revolution whose effects are still being felt in American law and society. Drawing on extensive interviews with more than 150 of Warren's relatives and colleagues, archival papers, and legal and historical studies, Chief Justice shows how Warren's formative experiences in California shaped his work on the Court. It examines his controversial role in the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II-an action in which he had a direct hand. Cray, nevertheless, views Warren as a man of unshakeable personal and professional integrity. He looks at his entire career, from hard-driving district attorney to popular governor of California to Chief Justice from 1953 to 1969. He points out that Warren was an unlikely judicial activist. A career politician, he was neither a legal scholar nor a theorist. Yet the Court he headed revolutionized American law and government. Using his skills in compromise and conciliation, Warren first helped to heal a fractured Court. Under his leadership, the Justices could speak with one voice in striking down de jure segregation in Brown v. Board of Education). In addition, the Warren court constitutionalized the principle of "one person, one vote" (Baker v. Carr) and guaranteed rights of the accused (Gideon v. Wainwright, Miranda v. Arizona and Mapp v. Ohio). Warren's tenure was marked by controversy. The man who nominated him to the Court, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, found him too liberal and regretted the appointment. Warren was subjected to public cries for his impeachment. Through it all, he remained steadfast to his vision of fairness and impartiality in law and in the administration of justice.

Availability: call Simon & Schuster, Inc. at 212/698-7541 or visit your local bookstore, $30.00 hardcover.

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COMMITTEE COMMENTARY

Chief Justice is a compelling story of the life of Earl Warren, perhaps the most influential jurist of our time. It is a very readable, interesting book that should have a very broad audience. Ed Cray's masterful biography demonstrates that the roots of greatness are not always obvious. Remembering "the less fortunate, the people in our society who suffer, the disadvantaged," as chief justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Warren, a former politician and prosecutor, sought to institutionalize a sense of fairness and justice. Chief Justice is a monumental achievement that establishes decisively that, for Warren, the life of the law was experience-a personal history that shaped his views of the Constitution in a changing world.

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A   B I O G R A P H Y   O F    E A R L   W A R R E N

How [Earl Warren] came to be this larger-than-life figure is an American story, his evolution a reflection of the American nation in the first seven decades of the century…. A bluff, outgoing politician, he appealed to millions-at the same time hiding a private, inner man revealed to only a very few.... This former prosecutor fashioned majorities in case after case to protect the rights of the accused. A former governor who believed in states rights, he personally wrote a Supreme Court decision that would permanently alter the shape of state government. One of the first local officials secretly to amass files on suspected subversives, he later led the high court to a series of decisions that curtailed the Red Scare of the 1950s.

In case after case, Earl Warren helped to reshape the very meaning of the Bill of Rights, and to insist that states too honor the rights assured every citizen.

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As chief justice, Warren ranks among the smallest handful of men to have served on the Supreme Court, "second in greatness only to John Marshall himself in the eyes of most impartial students of the Court as well as the Court's critics."

His achievements are all the more remarkable. Earl Warren was neither a student of government nor a judicial craftsman. Neither was he a legal scholar. He lacked an articulated judicial philosophy beyond the penetrating and constant query, "Is it fair?"

He had only an abiding sense of the public good-that, and a respect for personal values considered old-fashioned or even irrelevant to the business of governing.

Those two qualities, coupled with his own sense of purpose, made him a great leader.

They left the nation, in the words of the Torah passage proclaimed at his funeral, "the memory of the great and the righteous which shall live as an everlasting blessing."

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