AS SOBER AS A JUDGE. HAH! More excuses. Computer resistance movement delayed this installment. Sorry. My last essay in this space was cut short by my attempts to do some fancy typography which didn’t work out too well and ended things prematurely. Even if I’d had twice the space I used, though, it wouldn’t have been enough to do justice to my subject and I still would have been back here this week still struggling to capture him in print in all his improbability. I don’t feel bad however because the biography I’ve been mining for material runs to 716 pages and doesn’t take everything in either. The subject of course is the late William O. Douglas, Justice of the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1980. He was forty years old when appointed to the Court, and up to that time he had not gotten himself involved in any scandals, but instead had made a name as the chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission cleaning up Wall Street, and before that as a law professor at Columbia University. But he was an exception to the general run of bureaucrats and law professors in his Pacific Northwest background and his image as a hard-riding plainspoken frontier type who dressed casually in a sombrero and jeans even if he didn’t carry a six-shooter. All of this made him stand out from the crowd and figure in the media as a possible Vice Presidential candidate on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection ticket in 1940. Douglas was more than willing to take this job on, but was too raw to get it at the time. However, as a boy wonder in an old man’s Court he had plenty of eligibility left. 1944, in fact, almost was his year, but Harry Truman slipped in ahead of him as the dying Roosevelt’s VP, and Douglas was left standing at the altar again. In 1948 he antagonized Truman, now the President, by refusing to run with him to a sure loss (Truman won). He had already refused an offer to be Secretary of the Interior. He was to refuse it again in 1949, after the accident described below. All these refusals finally convinced Truman that as badly as Douglas wanted the presidency, he lacked the nerve to give up his safe seat on the Court and pursue his dream. Douglas stayed out f politics during the Eisenhower era, but hope rose up in his breast once again in 1960 when he and Lyndon Johnson concocted a plan to be running mates in that year’s election. In the convention they were run over by the Kennedy machine and Johnson, to get anything out of their effort, had to take the VP nomination Douglas didn’t get. Douglas went on a three-day drunk as a result. Douglas couldn’t stay out of trouble. In 1949 his cowboy image of himself demanded that he ride a horse up a steep slope in the Cascade Mountains. The horse refused to carry him up and threw him, then rolled over on top of him, breaking fourteen of his ribs. He blamed the horse, but the mountain people who knew him said otherwise. It went on. Boozing was the least of Douglas’ problems. For a Supreme Court justice that could be covered up. His satyriasis couldn’t be completely hidden however. It only revealed itself in its legitimate aspect when he divorced his wife of thirty years and five months later married a “blonde bombshell” eighteen years younger than himself. This marriage lasted an exciting nine years. Finally a split came over his drinking and his habit of flaunting his girl friends under his wife’s nose. Five days after this divorce Douglas, now sixty-three, married a girl forty years younger than him. It wasn’t his last marriage. . Douglas’ first wife soaked him good in their divorce settlement, forcing him to accept an elevator clause that raised her alimony in step with his pay increases and the growth of his outside income. I find this part of his career to be more repulsive than some of his grosser activities. This is not because his “books” were written on government time for the most part, using Court employees to do the writing, and then marketed by intimidated publishers who might have free-speech cases before him at any time. It’s the books themselves that bother me. How does a grown man put out something called “Strange Lands and Friendly People” and expect anyone but third-graders to read it? How does a Supreme Court Justice write adventure books about his expeditions in the Himalayas or other mountains? Does he think anyone will believe he was allowed to take real risks on these capers? Please. Then there’s the nasty streak he reveals, never far from the surface with him. He told people that Bobby Kennedy, his companion in Russia, “would whimper and quiver on the floor [of any church]” in fear of the KGB. You don’t have to be a Kennedy fan to find that incredible. Incredibility was a Douglas trademark. He began early with the invention of a poverty-stricken boyhood; his family was comfortable. Next he told the world about his struggle to work his way through college; he had a scholarship. He claimed army service in World War I; he’d never had any except some time in something called the Students Army Training Corps. He became famous for the story he wrote about overcoming poliomyelitis as a boy; he never had it. Growing up in the state of Washington was his greatest asset as a storyteller. It was too remote for anybody ever to check on his tall tales. In spite of his total moral meltdown, lushing, wife-beating, groping, usually of unsuspecting women coaxed into his Court office, corrupt financial deals, and serial marriages, Douglas continued to be a spotless hero to the left wing enthusiasts of the country. He had always been a radical, but his frustration at not reaching the Presidency now fed his increasing animosity toward the institutions and acts of his country. He now meant to make it pay for rejecting him. He put himself at the service of every species of riff raff who shared his grudge against America. He dissented in full from his colleagues’ decisions 486 times. Every time it was another attempt to cripple the government of the country and enable the acts of its enemies. His megalomania led him even to an attempt to end the Vietnam War by a court order, as if the US Army was an abusive husband intent on beating up his helpless Vietnamese wife. This was only more proof of his genius to his “progressive” rooting section. Even his biographer, after hundred of pages documenting the squalid facts of his life, hails him as a prophet, maybe a little soiled but with a great soul, pointing the way to a glorious future where…what? There’ll be no William O. Douglasses? Or there’ll be nothing but? The last is too awful to contemplate, but how can we attain glory without Douglasses leading on? May I suggest that no more Douglasses would be all the glory we’d ever need?
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