by Jim Newton
That fall, Warren presided over the groundbreaking of a new legal center at his alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley. There were the requisite protests, the “Impeach Earl Warren” placards that now accompanied his every public appearance. But the school where Warren had paid more attention to drinking songs and manly poems than to academic achievement now named the centerpiece of its law school the “Earl Warren Legal Center.” Warren had succeeded beyond any boyhood dream, any imagination of Methias and Chrystal Warren in their little home in their dusty little Western town. He was at the peak of his profession and atop a nation.89
On Warren’s birthday in March, Kennedy had gracefully added his voice to those wishing Warren well, sending along a telegram to the annual clerk dinner that he closed with a touching remark: “Although [it is] not possible for all of us to be your clerks,” Kennedy wrote, “in a very real sense we are all your students.”90 Now, with the anniversary of Warren’s service at hand, Kennedy outdid himself. He marked the occasion with a note that left no doubt about the depth of his admiration and respect. Addressing it to “Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” Kennedy captured Warren’s dignity and significance, alluded to the personal bond between them, and flattered Warren justly:
You have presided over the work of the Supreme Court during ten years of extraordinary difficulty and accomplishment. There have been few decades in our history when the Court calendar has been crowded with so many issues of historic significance. As Chief Justice, you have borne your duties and responsibilities with unusual integrity, fairness, good humor, and courage. At all times your sense of judicial obligation has been unimpaired by criticism or personal attack. During my time as President, I have found our association to be particularly satisfying, and I am personally delighted that during this week you will receive not only the acclaim of Californians, but also the respect and affection of all Americans whose common destiny you have so faithfully helped to shape throughout your public career.91
Warren tucked the president’s good wishes away and returned the next week to Washington to open the new term of the Court, overseeing a docket that brimmed with historic conflicts involving the freedom of the press, the state of civil rights, and the meaning of voting in a modern democracy. Warren and the justices settled in, this time without any changes in personnel, that October. They heard arguments through the month, and Warren settled into his now-established routines—arguments during the week, conferences on Fridays, lunches with his clerks on Saturdays, football on Sundays.
Warren’s life in the early 1960s was as tranquil as his work. He and Nina initially had hoped to buy a home in Washington, but a frustrating search in 1953 and 1954 came up empty. They settled instead at the Sheraton-Park, a residential hotel where they rented a spacious suite.92 The Warrens, who had not owned a home since selling 88 Vernon Street in Oakland, took to the Sheraton-Park and accumulated overlapping circles of friends. The brethren and their wives were, of course, the innermost of those bonds, but there were others as well. Drew and Luvie Pearson, Adlai Stevenson, and Eugene and Agnes Meyer all were part of a close group that included the Warrens. They dined at one another’s homes, took summer trips together, joined for weekends in the country. When Eugene Meyer died in 1959, Earl Warren delivered a eulogy.93 When Phil Graham, Meyer’s son-in-law and heir to the Washington Post, killed himself in 1963, it was Warren, then vacationing with Agnes Meyer and the Pearsons, who helped break the news to her.94 Nina, of course, supplied charm and gifts, and her warm appreciation of her friends helped cut through her husband’s reserve.
Almost entirely separate were Warren’s male friends, with whom he hunted, fished, and took in ball games. Wally Lynn, in California, was a regular duck-hunting companion—he owned land in the state where Warren would often spend a few days during the family’s winter sojourns out West. Bart Cavanaugh made it to most of Warren’s annual trips to the World Series, and he and Warren and generally another companion or two would spend the day at the ballpark and then retire to Toots Shor’s in Manhattan. There they would rub elbows with Joe DiMaggio and Casey Stengel, both of whom became Warren friends. In Washington, Warren followed the Senators but, like so many in that otherwise divided city, was drawn especially to the Redskins. Edward Bennett Williams, the great trial lawyer who worshipped Warren and who was part owner of the football team, made sure that Warren was a regular guest in the owners’ box, and a fair number of Warren clerks made their way from his service into Williams’s firm over the years.95 Although Williams could be a complicated friend—he made regular appearances before the Court—he cherished his relationship with Warren, and Warren admired few lawyers as deeply.96
Williams and Warren bonded around sports, though they appreciated sporting events with notably different styles. Where Warren liked to keep careful score no matter who was up or down, Williams paced and fretted if his team was losing, nearly frantic if his Redskins were underperforming. Still, Williams revered his friend and fellow fan, and he grandly recalled an exchange between Warren and a sportswriter during a slow Saturday game between the Washington Senators and the Chicago White Sox. “Is it true, sir,” the reporter asked Warren, “that you read the sports pages every morning before you read the front page?”
“It is,” Warren replied, explaining: “The sports pages report men’s triumphs and the front page seems always to be reporting their failures. I prefer to read about men’s triumphs rather than their failures.”
After telling that story at a memorial for Warren in 1975, Williams concluded: “Earl Warren was the greatest man I ever knew.”97
Beyond the chummy company of men and the assembling of intimates out of Washington’s social milieu, there was family—and near-family. In 1958, Warren Olney was on the verge of leaving Washington. Olney was just as frustrated as Warren over the Eisenhower administration’s reluctance to enforce civil rights, and Olney finally quit his job at the Justice Department in a huff. His house was sold and his car was packed to leave when the phone rang and Warren offered him an alternative. Rather than return to California, Warren proposed that Olney serve as director of the administrative office of the United States courts. Olney agreed, and their reunion ended the awkwardness of their arm’s-length days when the two could not sustain a friendship while one ruled on the cases developed by the other. Through the early 1960s, the Warrens and Olneys resumed their enduring tie, picking up where they had left off in California.98
In 1960, the Warrens began a tradition that would further knit their family together across distance and generations. Every summer, Earl and Nina would invite a teenaged grandchild to visit, usually for several weeks. Jim Warren, the eldest son of Jim, was the first, arriving that summer on a humid afternoon at Friendship Airport in Baltimore. Nina—Mama Warren, as she was known to the grandchildren—met sixteen-year-old Jim there. She wore gloves and a hat despite the heat, always mindful that there could be a photographer and she would want to look her best. Arriving at the apartment, Jim discovered his grandfather had already prepared a list of activities for them. For the next several weeks, the Chief Justice of the United States visited the monuments, drove out to Gettysburg (where he told Jim the story of his driver spending the night in the car and of his shame at discovering it the next day), and carted his grandson to the Court. Jim did his best to play the role of dignified grandson, but sometimes it was hard. As he squirmed during the oaths administered to newly admitted members of the Supreme Court bar one Monday, a page appeared before him with a note. Jim sat up straight and opened it. “Don’t worry,” it read. “It’ll be over soon.” Jim looked up at the bench, and Justice Tom Clark waved.99
With Thanksgiving approaching, Warren led his Court on an annual trip that November. Together with their wives—Douglas had recently remarried and brought his third wife, twenty-four-year-old Joan Martin—the justices traveled down the hill to the White House, where they had drinks and dinner with the Kennedys. Earl Warren sat next to Jackie that night, charmed by her as so m
any older men were, awash in her coy sophistication, impressed, as usual, by the cool intelligence of her husband. She was just tentatively emerging back in public from a miscarriage, and her effect on Warren undoubtedly was amplified by his sympathy for her. Nina was stately in a royal blue dress, Earl big and broad-shouldered in a dark blue suit. Jackie wore red, her skirt just below the knee, her jacket open and modern. John enjoyed a drink before dinner and carried himself with grace. He looked ahead to later that week, when he was planning an early political foray to Dallas, a city that had voted against him last time.100 Warren knew a thing or two about politics, and offered his friendly advice: “Watch out for those wild Texans, Mr. President,” he called out from the sofa where he was enjoying his drink. “They’re a rough bunch.”101
Chapter 22
THE LONGEST YEAR
It was like losing one of my own sons.
EARL WARREN, ON THE DEATH OF JOHN F. KENNEDY 1
THE UNITED STATES Supreme Court is an orderly place, one where customs are honored across generations of justices. It was only after long deliberation that Warren persuaded the brethren to move the conference from Saturday to Friday. Once he had succeeded, that new routine was steadfastly observed. So it was that on November 22, 1963, a Friday, the justices began their conference at ten A.M. They exchanged their traditional handshake and settled into their deliberations. Having recently heard arguments in a series of legislative apportionment cases, the justices now faced the question they had raised but not completely answered in Baker v. Carr. Where that case had established that voting districts could be challenged as a violation of equal protection, now before the Court were the natural conflicts about how much redistricting was required, how often, and by what criteria—in short, of how much equality of the vote actually was commanded by the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Without Frankfurter there to lead the voices of restraint, Warren pushed against an open door. Goldberg had given Warren his fifth vote, and as the justices announced their positions that Friday to one another, it was clear that a new era in voting rights was taking shape at the long table in the wood-paneled conference room of the nation’s high court.
So sacred is the privacy of the Court’s weekly conference that only the most monumental events are permitted to intrude. When news must be passed to the justices, it comes in the form of a knock on the door. All conversation ceases while the door is opened, a note is handed in, and the door is closed. So rare are those intrusions, so high the threshold for their acceptability, that on that Friday afternoon, Margaret McHugh fretted about whether to interrupt when she heard the news from Dallas. She asked one of Warren’s clerks, Frank Beytagh, whether he believed the justices should be bothered. Beytagh assured her that it was important enough, so she sent in a note with a rap on the door.2 Justice Goldberg, the newest of the brethren, rose from his seat to answer it and took the note without reading it. Goldberg passed it to Warren, who then read it to the justices. Tears welled in Warren’s eyes and the blood drained from his face as he relayed the reports that the president had been shot.3 He then quickly adjourned the conference, and the justices streamed out of the room. Most gravitated to Brennan’s chambers, where they watched the news on his television set. Warren returned to his office alone, turned on the radio, and listened, hoping in vain “until all hope was gone.”4
A stricken Warren wrote a statement for the press, expressing his anguish but also revealing himself in an unintended way. “A great and good President has suffered martyrdom,” Warren wrote, “as a result of the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our Nation by bigots.”5 To Warren, who had been pilloried by racists for nearly a decade, Kennedy’s death appeared naturally to result from its location—Dallas. It had been just two nights since Warren, sitting across a coffee table from the president, had warned him of Dallas’s snarling reputation for hatred. Warren’s warning had been offered in political jest, but now it seemed to have been proven all too true.
Those first hours after the shots in Dallas were terrifying as well as tragic. In Washington, the city’s phone system buckled under the panic. Many callers found busy signals or no dial tones, confirming for some the fear that America was under attack, that the assassination was the first prong of a coordinated strike. Leading members of the Kennedy cabinet were en route to Japan when the shots were fired in Dallas; they had to be recalled, and their distance from shore fueled fears that the assassination was deliberately timed to take advantage of the scattered national leadership. At the Justice Department, headed by the now dead president’s younger brother, aides leapt into motion to respond to Vice President Johnson’s urgent inquiry about how best to formally occupy the presidency. One aide called the Supreme Court asking whether anyone there had a copy of the presidential oath. Told that it was in the Constitution, the tightly wound aide blurted out, “Do you have one there?” Yes, he was told, the Court had a few copies lying around.6
As the hours passed and no attack came, the mood of the nation and its leadership sank from terror to a crushing sadness. The death of the young and vibrant president, the widowing of his elegant bride, and the calamity to his young children moved millions of Americans—though few more profoundly than the nation’s chief justice. The same president who socialized with Warren on Wednesday night now was hurtling home in a casket, his brains splattered across the presidential limousine, his blood staining Jackie’s pink suit and matching pillbox hat, so carefully chosen for that trip, so indelibly marked by its tragedy.7 A new president, Lyndon Johnson, led the entourage that had fled Dallas that afternoon and now droned its way above a nearly hysterical country. Air Force One, carrying the nation’s new president and the body of its fallen one, plowed through the afternoon toward Andrews Air Force Base, outside of Washington.
Warren was determined to be on hand to greet it, to demonstrate the continuity of government and to greet the nation’s widowed First Lady. He called for his driver, Jean Clemencia, but discovered he was stuck in panicked traffic as he tried to drive Nina Warren home from a lunch in suburban Maryland.8 So Warren asked his clerk, Beytagh, to drive him to the base. As Beytagh navigated the busy streets, Warren reminisced about the young man whose presidency he had so appreciated. There were times when Warren enjoyed banter with his clerks—in their Saturday lunches, over an occasional football or baseball game, in the early mornings, or as the day’s work wrapped up. But Beytagh recognized that this was no such time. Warren needed not to discuss but merely to unburden himself, to relieve his sadness and fear, to give voice to his broken heart. They drove together through the fading sunlight, the seventy-two-year-old justice speaking softly of what he and the nation had lost. His young clerk piloted the car in silence.
Arriving at the gate of the air force base, the two were stopped by a pair of tense Marine guards. Beytagh informed them that he was transporting the Chief Justice of the United States. The guard looked across Beytagh at Warren and saw only a white- haired passenger whom he did not recognize. The guard refused to let them pass. Beytagh, a veteran and member of the Navy reserve, was momentarily thrown. Then he reached into his wallet and produced his Navy identification card. The Marine saluted and waved him in. Warren allowed himself a brief grin. Under the peculiar circumstances of that night, Earl Warren’s clerk was more trusted than he.9
Once through the gate, Beytagh shepherded his chief as close as he could to the waiting area, where dignitaries huddled in the lights, awaiting the plane. The clerk asked whether he should wait for Warren, but the chief waved him off, insisting he could find a ride home. Beytagh then departed, and Warren nudged his way into place at the chain-link fence, elbow-to-elbow with Hubert Humphrey and Averell Harriman, when the lights suddenly went out and Air Force One abruptly appeared before them in the darkness.10 The sight of Jackie Kennedy, with her husband’s blood still caked on her dress and jewelry, staggered those who stood beneath the jet. Warren expressed his condolences to Johnson, then
reeled away into the night; Beytagh never knew how the chief justice made it home.11
The next day, as the nation absorbed the body blow of Kennedy’s assassination, Earl and Nina Warren watched with the rest of the country, following the developments from Dallas as police accumulated evidence and pandered to the press corps. Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested soon after the assassination of Kennedy, the wounding of Governor John Connally, and the murder of Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit—shot to death at 1:16 P.M. less than one mile from Oswald’s rooming house in Dallas.12 Shamed that the assassination had taken place in their city and staggering under the scrutiny of the world, police and prosecutors now rushed to demonstrate their investigative competence, trotting out evidence as they gathered it and arranging for displays of their suspect during breaks in his interrogation. Warren was horrified.13 A prosecutor at heart, though one whose insistence on fairness had deepened appreciably from the vantage point of the Supreme Court, Warren was appalled at the unseemly release of information that would not have been allowed before a jury. (Authorities disclosed, for instance, that Marina Oswald had told them her husband owned a rifle, a statement that she could have refused to offer at trial by invoking the spousal privilege; similarly, reporters were informed that Oswald had refused to take a lie detector test, which would not have been admissible in a trial.) Led by District Attorney Henry M. Wade, authorities helped generate a climate of conviction around Oswald, and made a number of mistakes that would give rise both to legitimate questions and to outlandish theories concerning the assassination.
