Justice for All (82 page)

Thus, by the time King marched in Birmingham, Warren and the Court had been doing what they could to protect King's movement from extinction for nearly a decade. In the White House, meanwhile, Kennedy resisted King's early entreaties to take leadership on the issue, worried about its consequences for his political standing among Southern Democrats. After Birmingham, Kennedy chose to go a different way. On June 11, he spoke to the nation about civil rights in terms that King had long urged. For the first time, Kennedy framed the quest for civil rights as a “moral issue” and placed himself and his office squarely behind a civil rights bill that would force integration of public accommodations. With the exception of Bobby Kennedy, the president's advisers were opposed to the speech, which they worried would commit the administration to a doomed bill.
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Kennedy spoke anyway, and the speech marked a historic moment for his administration and for the cause of racial equality, the same cause that had occupied so much of Earl Warren's life for the past ten years. The issue, said Kennedy, “is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” Continuing, he added,

 

Hours after Kennedy finished speaking, an NAACP worker in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was shot in the back. Evers's murder, so soon after the elation of Kennedy's speech, was a terrorizing reminder of the space between a promise and its fulfillment. And yet with Kennedy's moral and political pledge, the civil rights leadership now could count as allies both the president and the Chief Justice of the United States.

Kennedy's address to the nation on June 11 was close to his best, but in that summer of great American rhetoric, Kennedy finished second. For despite the pleadings of Kennedy's administration, King and other civil rights leaders pressed forward with their plans for a March on Washington, and it was there, in the heat and humidity of Washington in August, that Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, at the feet of the man who had freed America's slaves, and there riveted the nation. King had written most of his speech, poring over it the night before at the Willard Hotel, where he and Young and others were staying. It evoked, in the language of the pulpit and Scripture, the same message that Earl Warren had delivered in constitutional terms: the demand that America fulfill the promise of its Declaration. To Warren, that promise was one of fairness, and the Constitution was the vessel for its ultimate fulfillment. To King, that promise seemed sadly like “a bad check.”

“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on the promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” he said to the hundreds of thousands, black and white, who lined the Washington Mall. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.' ” Waves of applause and shouts of endorsement wafted up the Mall to where King stood, then approving laughter as he added, “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” Now, King insisted, was the time for democracy to make good on its promises. “Now is the time,” he repeated. As King reached the end of his prepared text, he departed from it to ask those who heard him that day to take their “creative suffering” back home, “knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.” Then, the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who stood behind him on the stage, shouted out, “Tell 'em about the dream, Martin.”
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King took flight, and his soaring imagery that afternoon established him as America's poet of freedom. With Scripture and spirituals, with majesty, King described the America of his dream. Its words and cadences were all his own, but in its evocation of the Declaration of Independence, it spoke to Warren's dream as well. “I have a dream,” King rumbled, “that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' ”

Warren was vacationing in Greece when King summoned the Declaration with such power. Even from that distance, he was impressed, and he passed along news of the peaceful demonstration to his fellow travelers “with a note of thrill in his voice. . . . He felt it was a great triumph for them [the demonstrators] and for civil rights.”
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At the White House, Kennedy watched on television. He knew something about speech-making. As King spoke, the president turned to an aide and remarked, “He's damn good.”
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That summer of rising American passions coincided with the tenth anniversary of Warren's nomination to the Court. No honest observer could deny that the nation was a changed one because of Warren's tenure. In 1953, segregation was legal and the accepted practice of much of the nation. Exposing Communists for the sake of degradation was a popular pastime in Washington and elsewhere, its wreckage strewn across ruined careers and lives. Police routinely violated the Constitution's order that they respect the security of home and papers. Five states sent poor defendants to jail without ever giving them the chance to speak with a lawyer. Schools opened their days with prayers and dared children who did not believe to separate themselves from classmates. By 1963, all of that had ended—and without an act of Congress or a presidential decree. It had changed because Warren and his colleagues had determined that a just country required more. The Supreme Court had been pilloried, and Warren had come under particularly personal attack. He had been ignored by the president who put him on the Court. Fanatics wanted him impeached or worse. But by 1963, the crises and isolation of the Eisenhower years had passed and the embrace of the Kennedy administration provided cover and support.

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.
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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.”
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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:

 

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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