The Supreme Court: The Chief

Few U.S. citizens have led lives unaffected by what the Supreme Court has wrought since Earl Warren became Chief Justice in 1953. The very words "the Warren court" summon in many an instant surge of anger or admiration. Much of that emotion is directed toward Warren personally. "Biggest damfool mistake I ever made," Dwight Eisenhower said privately some years after appointing him. "The greatest Chief Justice of them all," Lyndon Johnson wrote affectionately before Warren's birthday party last year.

Paradoxically, though, the court's spirit, philosophy and thrust have often been credited to Justices Black and Douglas—or to almost anyone but Warren. Little has been said about the Chief Justice's role. Now that Warren, at 76, has begun his 15th term, two new biographies, by former Newspaperman Leo Katcher and Freelance Writer John Weaver, have just been published. Though both are somewhat sprawling and unfocused, they suggest that the Warren court owes much of what it has accomplished to Earl Warren.

Less on Precedents. Under Warren's leadership, the court has left its greatest marks in three areas: 1) civil rights, starting with the 1954 school-desegregation decision; 2) one-man, one-vote reapportionment; and 3) widened protection for the criminal defendant, promulgated most notably in the Mapp, Gideon, Escobedo, Miranda series.

Warren's deep involvement in the court's major cases began almost immediately after he ascended the bench on October 5, 1953. His first big test was Brown v. Board of Education, the school-desegregation case. It was quickly apparent to him that a majority of the court was going to strike down the separate-but-equal rule, which had been challenged in Kansas and three other states. Well aware that an order to desegregate all public schools would be a nation-shaking step, the new Chief was anxious that the decision be unanimous, without any separate concurrences. He set out to write that single opinion himself, and after many conferences, revisions and shifts, he brought it off. Separating Negro children "from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race," said Warren, "generates a feeling of inferiority that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

From that moment, it was apparent that the Chief was to be a judge whose concern and feeling for the individual tended to outweigh his reliance on specific precedents of the law. During oral arguments before the court, it became his custom to break into a lawyer's taut legalistic reasoning and ask: "Yes, but is it fair?" In Reynolds v. Sims, which in 1964 extended "one man, one vote" to both houses of state legislatures, he wrote for the majority: "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests. To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen. The basic principle of representative government remains, and must remain, unchanged—the weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives."