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Perhaps no other Supreme Court justice was as loved and hated as William Orville Douglas. To the left, he was a staunch defender of free speech and the right of "privacy." To the right, he was an arrogant, egotistical bully who bragged that he should create precedents, not follow them. In his admiring new biography, Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas, Bruce Allen Murphy reveals another jarring divide: the distance between the facts of Douglas's life and the legend he created about himself. The Douglas mythology included such fictions as growing up in poverty (actually, he was middleclass); contracting and overcoming polio (he never had it); serving as a soldier in World War I (he never served in the Armed Forces); and graduating second in his law school class at Columbia (he was much farther down). An avid outdoorsman, Douglas was an early and ardent defender of the environment. To the flesh-and-blood humans who populated that environment, however, Douglas must be ranked as one of the nastiest, most irascible people who ever admired a sunset. He was abusive to his hapless law clerks. Married four times to ever-younger women, he was a predator who once tried to assault a wide-eyed airline stewardess whom he had genially invited to his office at the Supreme Court. A voracious drinker, Douglas's alcohol consumption undoubtedly contributed to his later health problems and continuing moral decay. Enthusiasts of alternative history might enjoy pondering what the second half of the twentieth century might have looked like had Douglas been named FDR's running mate in 1944, as he nearly was. In 1948 and even in 1960 he came very close to attaining the nomination for Vice President. The author's descriptions of smoke-filled rooms of Democratic kingmakers like Tommy "The Cork" Corcoran are memorable peeks into the sausage factory of modern politics. Douglas was an incisive thinker and a fast writer who could be charming and persuasive. At the age of 37 he was considered one of the outstanding law professors in the country, and went on to head the Securities Exchange Commission before being elevated to the Supreme Court. But the failure to attain his life's ambition of the Presidency soured him. He was a political animal by nature, and he felt trapped by the institution of which he became its longest-serving, most prolific member (and the one threatened with the most impeachments). As the years passed, he wrote more and more lone dissents that increasingly sounded like the petulant outbursts of a bitter, lazy iconoclast. Like many liberal icons, Douglas showed by his own actions that he believed that rules were for other people. In opinions like Griswold v. Connecticut, which discovered the "privacy" right of married couples to use contraception arising from the Third Amendment's protection against the peacetime quartering of troops in the home, he saddled us with a corrosive legacy of unrestrained judicial activism. Murphy tries to paint an admiring picture of Douglas. But readers, particularly those of a conservative bent, will find that the justice's flaws dominate the portrait. (Random House, 2003, 511 pages, $35) |
In his self-congratulatory autobiography Go East Young Man he deliberately concealed the fact that his wife had supported him through law school.
