Category: Reviews

‘Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas’

by Bruce Allen Murphy

Random House, $35

William O. Douglas served on the U.S. Supreme Court for 36 years, longer than any other justice in American history. He wrote the most opinions for the court, issued the most dissents, wrote more books, married more women, endured more divorces and was threatened with impeachment more often than any other justice before or since. Douglas left a legacy that is difficult to imagine, let alone catalog.

Bruce Allen Murphy’s magnificent new biography, “Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas,” rises to the formidable challenge posed to anyone who would attempt the task. Fifteen years in the making, it is the first truly comprehensive biography of the justice – and one well worth waiting for.

Douglas’ life, as he told it, was a stirring victory against the odds. According to Douglas, he suffered polio as a child and regained his ability to walk only through the dedication of his mother and his own steel-eyed grit in hiking the Yakima foothills. He claimed to have been raised in a poor family, to have ridden the rails east to law school at Yale, to have served in World War I, and to have graduated second in his class from law school.

Unfortunately, much of the story isn’t exactly accurate, as Murphy’s biography points out, backed up by hundreds of interviews and a close review of voluminous papers only recently made public.

Douglas did suffer a mysterious illness as a child, but it was never diagnosed as polio then or later. Douglas’ early years in Yakima were challenging, but his widowed mother was hardly destitute. He did ride a “sheep train” to law school, but it was a comfortable passage and hardly counts as riding the rails. Douglas served his country well and long on the court, but he never served in the military, apart from a few weeks of volunteer service in the Students’ Army Training Corps. And, brilliant as he was, he was not second in his class at Yale Law School.

And the sad part is this: None of this myth-making is necessary to recognize Douglas’ extraordinary achievements. Douglas was plainly a brilliant man who succeeded against daunting odds, rising from an obscure (if not entirely poor) upbringing in Yakima. He gained fame teaching at Yale Law School and was appointed by then-President Franklin Roosevelt to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Widely praised by New Deal liberals for his dramatic work in challenging securities fraud, he became an FDR favorite, playing a regular game of poker with the president. Twice he was nearly nominated for the vice presidency. His record hardly needs exaggeration.

He was barely more than 40 years old when he was appointed to the Supreme Court. His service on the court was remarkable by any measure, and his opinions and dissents identified issues that even today continue to resonate – the right to privacy (and later abortion) was founded almost entirely on Douglas’ reasoning in early cases. He broke ground in environmental cases, in free-speech cases, and in search-and-seizure cases. But he chaffed on the court, never entirely happy to be so far from the fray, and frustrated that his hidden presidential ambitions had never been satisfied.

Although Douglas gained fame on the East Coast, he always considered Yakima his true home. He spent his summers at his Goose Prairie cabin, roaming far and wide among his beloved Cascade Mountains. Douglas held hearings in the Yakima County courthouse and once even heard out lawyers with an emergency petition beside a campfire at a high-mountain camp (making them return the following day for the ruling). His spirit still roams the Cascades, with his name often inscribed in trail registers by hikers as an informal tribute to “The Judge.”

Despite his remarkable professional achievements, Douglas’ personal life was a disaster. Douglas had two children to whom he was a cold and distant father. Worse, he relentlessly cheated on his wife and chased women constantly, which ultimately led to his first divorce. He married and divorced two other women before his fourth, and last, marriage to Cathy Douglas. She was 23 and he was 67, leading one Goose Prairie observer to comment that the justice just might have “overstocked his pasture this time.” He was also brutal on his office staff, famous for his harsh criticism of their work.

Douglas was threatened with impeachment four times, most seriously by President Nixon. Informed by the attorney general of the impending impeachment effort, Douglas responded: “Well, Mr. Attorney General, you’d better saddle your horses.” Both efforts ended in failure.

Even trimmed down to a more historically accurate portrait, William O. Douglas’ accomplishments were staggering. “Wild Bill” is an outstanding review of Douglas’ life, legacy, and legend. It’s likely to remain the definitive Douglas biography for years to come and is, indeed, a fitting tribute to Washington’s most famous son.

‘Benjamin Franklin’

by Edmund S. Morgan

Yale University Press, $24.95

Benjamin Franklin is perhaps the best known, and least understood, of the American founding fathers.

To the popular imagination, Franklin is remembered as a portly man who shook the world with a novel electrical experiment and authored numerous witty aphorisms. But his contributions to the political, social and scientific history of America can scarcely be overstated.

Franklin played a pivotal role in our nation’s birth – he represented the colonies in London in the stormy years leading to the American Revolution. He returned to America to sign the Declaration of Independence. He negotiated a critical alliance with the French, and even negotiated the terms of American independence.

Edmund S. Morgan brings Franklin’s larger accomplishments alive in his new biography, “Benjamin Franklin,” a thoughtful and imaginative volume that vividly recounts Franklin’s astonishing achievements.

Morgan, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2000, is chairman of the voluminous Franklin Papers. He describes the book as “a character sketch that got out of control.”

It’s an apt description. Unlike the popular recent biographies of Lyndon Johnson or John Adams, Morgan doesn’t comprehensively catalogue Franklin’s life. He omits almost entirely any examination of Franklin’s personal life, mentioning only in passing Franklin’s illegitimate son (whose mother has never been identified) and his wife who stayed behind in Pennsylvania during the long years that Franklin spent abroad.

Rather, Morgan draws almost entirely from Franklin’s own writings to weave a comparatively brief (314 pages) essay on his most important contributions to his city, nation and world. It’s a refreshing focus on Franklin’s larger contributions. Morgan’s writing, fluid and thoughtful, narrates Franklin’s life in the present tense, which brings a compelling immediacy to the text.

Franklin was a printer by trade. His immense curiosity led him to constantly experiment on the world around him. He experimented with the effect of oil on water, demonstrated how the temperature of the Atlantic revealed the course of the Gulf Stream, mapped the movement of storms and redesigned common stoves.

Franklin’s experiments with electricity, conducted from 1748-50, were his most famous. Begun at age 40, the experiments explained the fundamental nature of lightning and electricity to a world that barely understood it. He proposed an experiment to demonstrate that lightning was actually an electrical charge, similar to static electricity (the only kind known at the time). This one experiment alone brought Franklin worldwide fame.

Sent to England to represent Pennsylvania in 1757, he was later appointed by other colonies and served, for practical purposes, as the “American” ambassador. In London, he earned fast friends, enormous respect and severe British approbation as the point of contact between restless colonies yearning for freedom and an angry imperial government determined to teach the colonials a lesson. Franklin sarcastically published in response a pamphlet entitled “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.”

Franklin was convinced that American growth would lead to power and wealth. A reluctant revolutionary, he argued that the colonies should be allowed to legislate for themselves as a co-equal to the British Parliament, both subject to one sovereign. British Parliamentary rule was futile, in his view, and would lead only to alienation and, ultimately, to the exclusion of England from America’s unlimited potential. But as the tension inexorably ratcheted both countries toward war, Franklin was unable to persuade an unyielding Parliament to compromise.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1775. Resigned to the necessity for war, he signed a Declaration of Independence drafted largely by Thomas Jefferson, and was appointed to negotiate a critical alliance with the French. He playfully wrote to an English friend early in the war to consider that “Britain, at the expense of three million pounds, has killed 150 Yankies this campaign, which is 20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of ground. … During the same time, 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data [you] will easily calculate the time and expence necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.”

In October 1776, Franklin, now 69, returned to the Continent to represent the new American government in France, borrow money and purchase supplies for General Washington’s army. He was treated with awe and respect by the French, courted by intellectuals, royalty and a seemingly endless supply of beautiful French women.

In 1782, Franklin helped negotiate the end of a war. He returned to Philadelphia in 1785, sat in the 1787 convention that framed the U.S. Constitution (replacing the Articles of Confederation), and died three years later in 1790.

From start to finish, he played one of the most central roles in creating modern America of any of the founding fathers. As Morgan concludes “We can know what many of his contemporaries came to recognize, that he did as much as any man ever has to shape the world he and they lived in. We can also know what they must have known, that the world was not quite what he would have liked.

‘Theodore Rex’

by Edmund Morris

Random House, $35

A bit more than one century ago, on Sept. 21, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency after the death of his predecessor, William McKinley, by an assassin’s bullet. At 42, he was – and remains – the youngest president to hold the office.

Over the next eight years, he towered over the political landscape, built an American empire, and through sheer force of personality bent the political world to his will.

The second in a three-volume biography of Roosevelt’s life, “Theodore Rex” begins with Roosevelt’s ascent to office in 1901 and ends with his departure from the White House in 1908.

The title, bestowed by Henry James, pays tribute to Roosevelt’s power during his presidency. Edmund Morris won the Pulitzer Prize for the first volume of the biography and, with this dazzling effort, could easily win another.

Carefully drawing from Roosevelt’s private papers and those of his contemporaries, Morris compiles a vivid portrait of Roosevelt’s ferocious zest for life, keen intelligence and unerring political judgment.

Roosevelt all but leaps from the pages, flashing smiles, snapping off crisp sentences and, above all, commanding attention.

Roosevelt’s achievements can scarcely be overstated – building the Panama Canal, personally negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize), and arm-twisting both labor and railroad tycoons into an improbable settlement of the violent 1902 coal miners’ strike in Pennsylvania that threatened to disrupt the economy and leave millions without heat as winter approached.

Roosevelt built up the Navy (his infamous “big stick”), extending American naval power throughout the world, and introduced conservation to the American public – single-handedly tripling the size of the national forests (including national forests in the Washington Cascades and Olympics) and creating 51 national wildlife refuges, thus preserving the nearly extinct “Roosevelt” elk and laying the groundwork for the creation in 1938 of Olympic National Park.

On race relations, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner, a groundbreaking move, but later unfairly discharged 160 African-American soldiers accused without proof of a murderous rebellion against local racism in Brownsville, Texas.

Roosevelt aggressively challenged the powerful corporate trusts, enacting landmark antitrust legislation and launching trust-busting prosecutions of some of the most infamous trusts and industrialists of the time.

J.P. Morgan, still bitter from Roosevelt’s treatment of him, is said to have once raised his glass at dinner, as Roosevelt left on a post-presidential safari, to the toast: “America expects that every lion will do his duty.”

Roosevelt’s White House crackled with energy, noise and bustling confusion as his six beloved children swarmed throughout the grounds. Adored by his children, he was an honorary member of the White House gang of rebellious boys.

But Roosevelt himself had something of the bumptious boy in him. He adored physical challenge, constantly pushing himself to the limit in climbing, hiking, galloping on horseback through Washington’s Rock Creek Park, or leading puzzled European diplomats through the muddy park.

His infamous “walks” often included waist-high wading through water still half-frozen from winter’s chill, or rock-climbing up dangerous outcroppings, his guests struggling to keep up with Roosevelt as he surged ahead.

He was a committed hunter and often returned from his outings with a limp, hiding huge bruises or pulled muscles. Roosevelt once famously refused to shoot a bear, captured by his hosts during a hunting trip in Mississippi and tied to a tree for his convenience. His sportsmanship was noted in editorial cartoons, and the bear later became a symbol, his name forever attached to millions of “Teddy bears.”

Roosevelt was re-elected in 1904 by a landslide, upon which he promptly announced that he would not seek re-election to another term. He was acutely aware of the dangers of overstaying his welcome and felt that, once made, his promise could not be forsaken. He remained true to his commitment and declined the 1908 nomination in favor of William Howard Taft, his chosen successor.

Morris deftly closes this volume with Roosevelt’s departure from Washington to his cherished New York estate, Sagamore Hills, “the image of his receding grin and wave” fading into history.

Morris’ first volume of this biography was acclaimed as a singular triumph. His more recent fictionalized “biography” of Ronald Reagan (“Dutch”) was far more controversial, derided by many as bizarre and self-indulgent.

In “Theodore Rex,” Morris returns to form and produces a rare blend of superb research, engaging writing and a fascinating portrait of one of America’s most interesting presidents. Roosevelt would surely have declared it “bully.