Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (October 3, 2011)
Language: English
When he resigned last June, Justice Stevens
was the third longest serving Justice in American history
(1975-2010)--only Justice William O. Douglas, whom Stevens succeeded,
and Stephen Field have served on the Court for a longer time.
In Five Chiefs,
Justice Stevens captures the inner workings of the Supreme Court via
his personal experiences with the five Chief Justices--Fred Vinson, Earl
Warren, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and John Roberts--that he
interacted with. He reminisces of being a law clerk during Vinson's
tenure; a practicing lawyer for Warren; a circuit judge and junior
justice for Burger; a contemporary colleague of Rehnquist; and a
colleague of current Chief Justice John Roberts. Along the way, he will
discuss his views of some the most significant cases that have been
decided by the Court from Vinson, who became Chief Justice in 1946 when
Truman was President, to Roberts, who became Chief Justice in 2005.
Packed
with interesting anecdotes and stories about the Court, Five Chiefs is
an unprecedented and historically significant look at the highest court
in the United States.
Five Chiefs: Justice John Paul Stevens' Rare Look Inside the Supreme Court By Adam Cohen Monday, Oct. 03, 2011
J. Scott Applewhite / AP
Retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, 91, works in his office at the Supreme Court in Washington, Sept. 28, 2011.
On Dec. 8, 2000, when George W. Bush's lawyers were asking the Supreme
Court to intervene in the presidential election and stop the vote
counting in Florida, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer were
at a Christmas party at the National Art Gallery. The two men had a
brief discussion about the request and quickly agreed it was frivolous:
Bush could not meet the legal standard of showing that he would be
"irreparably harmed" if vote counting continued. The court, they
thought, was clearly going to reject Bush's claim.
That, of course, is not what happened. The Supreme Court took the case
and ordered Florida to stop counting votes — and Bush became President.
It's a striking anecdote, not only because it offers a rare look at the
early discussions among Justices on a pivotal moment in U.S. history,
but also because it shows that shock over the Bush v. Gore ruling
was not limited to outraged Al Gore partisans. Two Supreme Court
Justices — one appointed by a Republican President (Stevens) and one by a
Democrat (Breyer) — thought Bush had no case.
Stevens tells this story in Five Chiefs, his informative and very
appealing new memoir of life on the Supreme Court. Rather than write a
straight autobiography, the 91-year-old Stevens — who retired last year
after 34 years on the court — chose to organize the book around the
five Chief Justices he worked with professionally. He begins with Chief
Justice Fred Vinson, whom he got to know as a law clerk on the court in
1947, and ends with the current Chief Justice, John Roberts.
Five Chiefs is hardly an exposé. Stevens shows extraordinary
respect for the court as an institution and does the same for his former
colleagues — even ones with whom he often disagreed. The Supreme
Court, in his eyes, is a vital force for justice, comprising men and
women who make an earnest attempt to get the law right.
That's not to say Stevens tries to hide his feelings about the law or
his colleagues. He takes clear pride in the court's civil rights
rulings, its role in promoting equal rights for women and its insistence
that the rule of law must prevail — as in cases like U.S. v. Nixon,
in which a unanimous court ordered President Richard Nixon to hand over
the Watergate tapes. At the same time, he is clearly pained by the
court's recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,
which recognized the right of corporations to spend money in political
campaigns, and by its whole approach to campaign-finance laws — which he
believes the court has been too quick to strike down.
Still, Stevens is unfailingly courteous toward the five Chief Justices
he writes about, in some cases even generous. Historians often
caricature Warren Burger, who became Chief Justice in 1969, as a
retrograde law-and-order conservative who channeled the views of Nixon,
the President who appointed him. But as Stevens takes pains to note,
Burger not only wrote the Watergate ruling that helped end Nixon's
presidency; he also penned a landmark 1971 opinion that gave women broad
new rights under the equal-protection clause and another opinion that
upheld school busing as a remedy in desegregation cases.
Burger's successors get a similarly illuminating treatment.
Stevens emphasizes how eminently well prepared John Roberts was for the
job of Chief Justice and makes clear his respect for his legal acumen.
William Rehnquist was so highly efficient in running the court that on
oral-argument days he "ensured that we entered the courtroom at
precisely 10:00 every time."
The anecdotes in the book give a rare behind-the-scenes look at life on
the court, and many of them reflect how tradition-bound and
detail-oriented it is — far more so than even the White House or
Congress. Stevens is still exercised about his colleagues' decision to
move a table in the Justices' deliberation room. "Some might consider
the change trivial," he writes, "but I thought that moving the large
oblong table around which the nine justices sit during their conferences
could end up having a subtle and unfortunate impact on deliberations."
(He is light on details about how the move actually mattered. One
effect, it seems, is that it was harder for him to hear the Chief
Justice and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.)
Stevens is not above pointing out some Justices' weaknesses and follies,
and they add a welcome dose of vinegar to the narrative. He suggests
that Burger — attentive to the fact that the press liked it when the
court upheld First Amendment claims — assigned himself the opinions the
media was likely to praise while giving the ones they would attack to
Justice Byron White. He is tartly critical of Rehnquist's decision to
"embellish his robes" by adding four gold stripes to each sleeve — a
decision, the book says, the other Justices unanimously tried to talk
him out of.
One of the biggest issues Five Chiefs raises is one that Stevens
avoids taking on directly — the striking ideological transformation the
court has undergone since he joined it in 1975. Back then, he was a
Republican judge appointed by a Republican President — Gerald Ford — and
Burger was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Three decades later,
Stevens left the court as one its most liberal members — and Burger's
opinions in cases like the one concerning school busing, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, would put him well on the liberal side of the current court.
Stevens doesn't dwell on how his views are currently in retreat on the court or on the battles he did not win. When Bush v. Gore
was handed down, many Supreme Court watchers attacked it as wildly
wrong on the law and as an unprincipled power grab. But after telling
his story about his conversation with Breyer, Stevens says simply,
"What I still regard as a frivolous [appeal] kept the Court extremely
busy for four days." That conclusion is classic John Paul Stevens:
understated and generous toward those he differs with, but absolutely
clear on where he believes justice lies.
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