CHIEF JUSTICE: A BIOGRAPHY OF EARL WARREN
by Ed Cray. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1997. 602 pp. Cloth. $30.00.
ISBN 0-684-80852-8.

Reviewed by Howard Ball, Professor of Political Science. University of Vermont.
 

Ed Cray's biography of Chief Justice Earl Warren is an outstanding contribution to the judicial biography bookshelf. This is simply the best Warren biography I've read, and that takes into account Bernard Schwartz's SUPER CHIEF and Weaver's biography of the Chief Justice. It probably is the best biography I have read, period. Cray's prose is a joy to the eyes, the mind, and to the heart. Cray's research is first-rate; his qualitative methodological strategy would please the most conscientious Ph.D. examiner.

CHIEF JUSTICE is based on an absolutely thorough examination of the letters and papers of Warren, produced while Warren worked in California for over three decades, as elected prosecutor and then Governor. In addition, there is excellent use of Warren's papers in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as well as the papers, case files, and letters of many other men and women, including many of his brethren who worked with Warren on the Supreme Court, who interacted with Warren in his over fifty years of public service. In addition, Cray has tapped into excellent oral histories located in presidential libraries (the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson libraries were visited) and elsewhere (Columbia University's Oral History Research Office and the University of California at Berkeley's Oral History Office). Finally, Cray interviewed almost 200 persons in Warren's life, those who knew and worked with Warren-- from his California prosecutorial and political work, to those who knew and worked with him during his remarkable tenure as the fourteenth Chief Justice of the United States (including most of Warren's law clerks).

There is no doubt that Cray's research and use of these original sources was appropriate; their careful use by Cray has given us a truly remarkable portrait of a very decent, very honest, very down-to-earth public servant. Warren was a man who always was concerned about the presence or absence of "fairness" in a person's interaction with public officials and agencies of the state. (The exception was the treatment of persons, a majority of them American citizens, of Japanese ancestry, during World War Two. Warren played a major role in the internment and incarceration of over 120,000 such persons during the war. Their discriminatory treatment by government, both state and national, was an issue that troubled Warren for many years after the war ended. As Cray notes in the book, there was, eventually, an end to Warren's feelings of guilt due to his behavior.)

For Cray, Earl Warren was a man who exhibited the trait labelled "GRAVITAS." The Chief Justice possessed this quality that moved the nation to a new level of freedom and liberty. Gravitas referred to personal qualities greater than one's mastery of rhetoric and more valuable than the greatest intellect. A Roman concept, gravitas meant "patience, stability, weight of judgment, breadth of shoulders. It means that strength of the few that makes life possible for many. It means manhood." Warren was a MENSCH. and with this characteristic was able to accomplish many great things as prosecutor, as Governor, and as the Chief Justice of the United States.

Cray's telling of the story is quite traditional: chronological from the time Warren was born through his California growing up and work in the public service, to his vice presidential candidacy in 1948 and his subsequent work for the national party through the 1952 Republican convention, and finally to his appointment to the Supreme Court and his years as Chief Justice during the most revolutionary era of Court history. But the product, the story of this man of gravitas, is outstanding.

Cray knows how to explain the inner workings of the Court without lulling the reader into a deep sleep because of extensive employment of orginal sources. His use of the papers of Chief Justice Warren and his colleagues can be exhibited as a model of excellence in such methodological and qualitative exercises. He makes judicious use of the diary notes, the docket sheets, and the memos circulated among the brethren.

The outcome is that Part III, This Honorable Court, is an accurate, lively, to-the-point presentation of the ways the Court, under Warren's astute leadership, moved to reshape America's understanding of the meaning of due process of law and the equal protection of the laws.

But I do not wish to single out only one of the four segments of the book for acclaim. They are all excellent parts that make up an outstanding whole. Cray's book is a must-collect, most read volume for anyone interested in American public law and politics. Bravo!!