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JUSTICE DEPRAVED IS JUSTICE DENIED
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I solemnly swear that this is the last installment of my character studies of the late William O. Douglas that you will see in this space. I am presently undergoing exorcism by a Jesuit to cure me of my obsession. Soon he’ll no longer be a presence in my life, robbing me of sleep, haunting my dreams, ruining my digestion and in general souring the milk of my existence.
These are harsh words about a fellow who after all rose to the height of a Justice of the Supreme Court. But when it comes to Douglas, there are no other words. I go through the 150 pages of notes in the biography “Wild Bill” written by an admirer, Professor Bruce Murphy of Lafayette College, and find the following descriptions on almost every page “The reliability of Douglas’s tale here is suspect”; “Douglas …claimed he knew Justice Louis D. Brandeis well…but it does not appear to be true”; “Douglas’s version [of another story] is wholly unreliable”; “Only a small part of this answer was even remotely true”; “Years later Douglas was still trying to cover his tracks [in another matter]”; “Douglas later falsely claimed…”; “Could William O. Douglas in fact have had polio as a youngster?” The biographer’s answer to this is that he couldn’t, but he also may have gotten to the point “where he felt he could say and do anything.”
If you didn’t know you were reading about one of the great statesmen of the Twentieth Century, the longest-ever serving justice of the Supreme Court, you would be inclined to believe you were hearing about a pathological liar who should have been put away for his own good.
He wasn’t, unfortunately. (By the way, my mention last week of the combination formed by Douglas and Lyndon Johnson to make themselves the Democratic ticket for 1960 would have meant the first time two molesters of women would have teamed up to get control of the government of a major country. Would they have made the harem an American institution like the Army Reserve? They certainly would have tried. Douglas’s record is spread out for all to see in “Wild Bill”, pp. 92, 198, 269, 270-71, oh hell, throughout the book. Look in the index under “womanizing”. It comes after “drunken binge” and “paranoia”. Really.)
Douglas’s technique with women wasn’t of the candy and flowers variety. Consistent with his image of himself as a virile cowboy type, he went in for rough stuff. He made his Supreme Court office into a trap. If he enticed a good-looking girl into it, her clothes were sure to be ripped by the time she left, screaming. (p. 428).
Johnson was cut from the same cloth. He waited until bedtime, though. Then a female guest of his would be likely to find him sneaking into her bedroom late at night and slipping into bed beside her. Saying “No” was just a way of stimulating him. Carl Rowan, the late columnist and Cabinet member, wrote of how one of the rape victims came to him in tears for help and was passed on by him to Bill Moyers for pacification. Barbara Howar, the writer, wrote that she was one of those who successfully resisted. The mind boggles at the idea of a UN meeting, or a summit conference or a Big Eight gathering where both of the leaders of the USA would attend. Would they bump into each other in the corridors late at night? No doubt LBJ would have pulled rank on his Veep and sent him back to his own bedroom.
Johnson and Douglas differed in one respect however. No record exists of LBJ ever taking a poke at Ladybird. Douglas was less inhibited. He had no hesitation at all when it came to belting out a female. His first two wives escaped this, but the second pair caught got it good and heavy. (pp. 176, et seq.). This didn’t hurt him with feminists however, even those who knew about it, because hadn’t he come through like a hero in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, nullifying the state’s law against selling contraceptives, an old WASP enactment left standing, though not enforced, by Catholics?
Douglas seized on this as a chance to vent his rage at Catholics, who didn’t approve of his multiple marriages, and at constitutionalists, who didn’t see any right under the Constitution to override state’s rights in this case, while ingratiating himself with the kind of WASP, like the Griswold woman who brought the case, who had abandoned Protestantism in favor of trendier new causes. To demonstrate his contempt for the common people who had no choice but to accept the rulings of his court, he didn’t even try to justify his opinion on constitutional grounds, but instead said it was based on “emanations” from the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights. So much for the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and others about the use of plain English in the courts.
But it was the kind of thing to put the Catholics and their grubby ethnic adherents among the Irish, Italians and Portuguese in their place and taught them a good lesson, at least according to historians of the birth control movement. Not mentioned was the fact that it was also the kind of thing best calculated to teach such people not to trust the Douglasses and the Griswolds when they testified to their love of tolerance and non-discrimination.
Douglas could go into spasms over such things, acknowledging no limit to his rhetoric when he was out to denounce some outrage against the civil rights of people he liked. Consider this opinion in a case where New York tried to prevent Communists from teaching school. “The law turns the school system into a spying project. Regular loyalty reports…must be made. The principals become detectives; [all others] become informers. Fear stalks the classroom”, and so on ad lunaticum.
He went on ranting and raving in this way until November 1975 when he finally yielded to the opinion of his colleagues that he was no longer fit to hear cases or even understand them. Old age and heavy drinking had reduced him to a pathetic state where the Court would not consider equally divided cases in which he would cast the deciding vote. They were waiting for him to go. He finally did.
Douglas’s career is worth considering because it’s unique to the United States. There is no other country in the world whose destiny rests on its choice of judges, as ours does right at this moment. In the rest of the world judges simply don’t loom that large. They have a job to do and they do it and they go home to bed. Nobody dreams of letting them rule the land. How in hell have we gone so wrong?
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