2 comments about Snake's Daughter: The Roads in and Out of War (Singular Lives).

1. Without self-pity nor malice Gilberg writes of a challenging childhood with two dysfunctional parents. This is far more than a retelling of this family's painful history; it's a book that encourages any reader to look into the deeper reality of the events in their family's life enabling reconciliation and healing to result. Gilberg's honest sharing, laced with love and respect for her father, left this reader glad to have "met" this
   man. I like him. And it's a book that will bring some understanding and peace regarding our involvement in Vietnam which I also found helpful.



2. This is a terrific book, one that works into the memory from a series of photos and a set of fixed memories of a difficult man and a difficult childhood. it's so much more than a tale of dysfunction though. Its the elegant tale of a survivor, of a little girl and a nation.

   This book is not getting the attention it deserves!

1 comments about Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum.

1. This book gives a great overview of the life and times of P.T. Barnum. It doesn't go too in-depth about any particular parts of his life but does touch on just about everything he did. It's a great entry level book into the world of P.T. Barnum.

5 comments about General George Washington: A Military Life.

1. General George Washington: A Military Life by Edward G. Lengel. 2005. 450 pages.
   
   This book covers the military career of George Washington from his days as a youth watching the adventures of his brother through the Seven Years War/French and Indian War, the Revolution, The whisky Rebellion and ends with the former President of the United States (POTUS) Washington still on duty at the end of his life.
   
   This book is primarily concerned with Washington the military man. It provides a good history of his military career and some historical evaluation. The author is not a military man or military scholar; rather he is involved with the George Washington Papers Project. The author's lack of military experience however does not impact his selection of material or his evaluation of Washington the soldier.
   
   While Washington's exploits during the Seven Years War and the Revolution are fairly well known some of the details and the scope of these exploits are often not understood. This lack of understanding is partly the result of our distance from the way things were in the 18th century and partly because Washington was a unique and extraordinary leader and man. In many ways he was much more akin to our modern sensibilities than he was to those of the military establishments of his time. Though he himself operated firmly in an 18th century frame of reference.
   
   Washington was a one man staff system who directed his logistics both on the practical side and on the political side, always wary to avoid burdening the populace and maintaining civilian control and a sense of proper order in the army. Washington was heavily involved in conducting his own intelligence and agitory propaganda work to a degree which modern commanders do not do because much of these functions are delegated to dedicated and specially trained staff.
   
   Peeling back the aspects of Washington's organization and activities which today are handled by a staff we come to the issue of Washington in the traditional sense of a military man as we commonly think of them. Washington was by all accounts of friend and foe a very physically brave man on par even with Hernando Cortez. Washington's ability to lead men was remarkable for a man with little education. He was, compared to his 18th century peers, a very modern leader reinforcing the positive and challenging his men to meet his expectation rather then the blunt bully who used the vine stave.
   
   At a tactical level Washington's forces failed more often than they succeeded. Too often the failure was a result of an overly complicated plan. Though Washington was seemingly always itching for a fight he tended towards plans of such intricate timing and advance that they were often doomed. On the operational and strategic level Washington's talents were much more evident. Though he maintained a fixed obsession with New York City he quickly understood the tie between the revolution and its promise to the country and world and the need to keep his army in the field defying the British.
   
   The notion that Washington was a Fabian in his tactics does not strictly hold water. Washington though recognizing the need to maintain the army as a whole in the field in order to preserve the revolution routinely risked the entire main army in battle. The campaigns in New York City, Brandywine, Germantown, even Monmouth showed a desire for that one decisive action which would decide the issue. The author does understand this.
   
   Washington is so far the only sitting POTUS to, as Commander in Chief, command troops in the field, in uniform as President. This occurred during the Whiskey Rebellion though the mere presence of Washington contributed to the end of the rebellion with out a full scale national conflagration. Washington, in a little known tidbit, also returned to military service after his final term as POTUS. He, at the behest of POTUS John Adams, accepted a commission to ready the American military for potential conflict with France. When Washington died he did so under commission and therefore still technically as a serving military officer in the armed forces of the United States.
   
   This book reads quickly, the prose not being a millstone to the material, and does a fine job of presenting this aspect of Washington to the reader.



2. Well written and researched, the writing style a little difficult at times. I felt the author was over critical of Washington, especially since he spends 99% of the narrative criticizing him and, in the last chapter, alots only a few pages to defending him. Overall a good read, but I would pickup His Excellency by J. Ellis, 1776 by Mccollough, or Washington's Crossing by Fischer first.



3. Bravo Dr. Edward Lenge! This book is a fascinating account of the military career of the Father of our Country! George Washington (1732-1799) was the first US President; a planter at
   Mt. Vernon and is solidly planted as the indispensable man during the American Revolution. Without Washington's grit and
   daring, perseverance and leadership there is a real possibility that the American experiment would have died an early death.
   Washington with a band of rag-tag, often hungry and ill-trained troops defeated the greatest military machine in the eighteeth century in the shape of the British regulars led by General
   William Howe.
   1776 saw Washington victorious in Boston recapturing the city for the patriot cause. 1777 was a bitter year which began brightly with victories at Trenton and Princeton only to founder in the defeats suffered at Brandywine Creek and Germantown.
   The harsh winter of Valley Forge in late 1777-1778 led to a reformulation of the army which pressed ahead to victory over
   Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
   All of the major battles led by Washington are chronicled in
   depth from Boston to Monmouth to final victory. Washington had
   great flaws as a military man; he was sometimes indecisive; overly bold; poor in topographical placing of troops and could
   be harsh. Nevertheless, it was because of his inimitable courage
   and grit which led the army to victory over loyalists, a hard to
   work with Congress and the mighty British army .
   The American Revolution was hardfought, bloody and our freedom was bathed in the blood of brave men and women. This story needs to be told.
   Lengel's book begins with Washington's career in the French and Indian War which culminated in Braddock's defeat; covers the years from 1759-1776 when his acquisition of land, slaves and
   the formation of the Virginia Regiment won him colonial fame to
   the culminating crown of his career; victory in the War of Independence. Washington was a great man who accomplished much with what he had to work with in men, materials and his strong
   willpower never allowing him to quit in tough situations.
   Lengel's book is well illustrated with helpful maps and an impressive bibliography of first person accounts and letters and correspondence from Washington's fertile pen. This is one of the
   best books I have ever read on Washington's military career.
   Well done!



4. This book didn't capture and articulate the struggle of the Continentals in the manner in which "1776" by David McCullough did. It merely laid out facts in a straightforward manner which wasn't that inspiring and quite aseptic. I usually judge the greatness of a book by how often I highlight passages by the author. The cap stayed on my highlighter for most of the book. For students of the era it's a book worth reading, I simply wouldn't put it at the top of my must-read list.



5. I was enjoying this book for the first sixty-seventy pages until I read Mr. Lengel's description of Ft. Ticonderoga. He places the Fort on the Hudson River. (????) Ft. Ticonderoga, so important a location in the French/Indian and Revolutionary wars is, in fact, on Lake Champlain. Mr. Lengel also incorrectly writes that Henry Knox, after retrieving the cannons from Ft. Ticonderoga takes them down the Hudson. This too is incorrect. Knox and his men took the cannons across land to Lake George (which was frozen in winter), down to Lake George village and south to Albany before turning east to Boston. I'm totally shocked that no review of this book mentions these inaccurate statements. Anyway, after about 100 pages I took the book back to the library. I couldn't depend on the rest of his facts-so what's the point of reading it?

No comments about Copper Country Journal: The Diary of Schoolmaster Henry Hobart, 1863-1864 (Great Lakes Books).

3 comments about Out of the Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa and the Remaking of the American Working Class.

1. Walk up to a group of twenty-five Americans on any street corner and throw out some names. Try Al Gore, Dick Cheney, Bill Frist, or the Governor of the state you happen to be in and see how many in the group recognize the name. Then try the name Jimmy Hoffa. Most of the group may not really know who Hoffa was but they will be familiar with the name. For better or worse, just like Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa has become an American icon. Just before he began his term in prison, Hoffa was even compared to Christ by a local leader of the NAACP.

   Thaddeus Russell has taken on the task of telling the story of Hoffa the Teamster. This is not really a biography of Hoffa the man for his family is barely mentioned nor is his daily life dealt with. This is the story of Hoffa and his Union and the history of the man and the organization are so deeply intertwined that this almost becomes a biography of the IBT. Russell really begins his story with Hoffa's early employment and his entry into the Union. From that point the author takes the reader along for the ride as the unknown Hoffa and his tiny Detroit local move into the big time. It is a fascinating story.

   As the reader travels this sometimes-bumpy road he or she will gain several insights into the current state of American Labor. Hoffa gained the unswerving loyalty of his members by providing them with what they cared about. They wanted higher wages, shorter hours, and better benefits and Hoffa delivered. In contrast to Hoffa, after WWII many Union leaders adopted a corporatist outlook. Many Labor leaders had held this view before the war but it became dominant during the conflict. Their view was that Labor should give up many of it's best tools in order to become an equal partner in the decision making process of government. Russell never uses the term but their views were basically fascist in nature. Not Hitler's version, but true fascism which has never been practiced anywhere but went through a time of great popularity among intellectuals. The power given up by these corporatists still handicaps Labor to this day. Hoffa refused to surrender any tool he had at his disposal and fell out of favor with the rest of Labor.

   Russell also covers Hoffa's relationship with the crime world. It appears that while Hoffa did indeed profit by some of his connections, his main reason for reaching out to the Mob in the first place was to gain needed muscle. Had that muscle been used exclusively against goons hired by management it would have been somewhat excusable. Many times however, that brute force was used against other unions. The odd thing is that after his release from prison Hoffa was seen by these underworld figures as a threat to their position in the IBT and that seems to have caused his disappearance. One wonders what would have happened if Hoffa had regained control of the Teamsters.

   For someone who has studied the labor movement or a novice in this subject matter, this is a very good book. It is very well written and informative. Russell sheds new light on Hoffa and the IBT and does so in a very clear and easy to read manner. This story is sometimes very complicated but the author has done a remarkable job of explaining the whole story. This book is a welcome addition to the study of American Labor.




2. Strongly recommended reading, Out Of The Jungle: Jimmy Hoffa And The Remaking Of The American Working Class by Thaddeus Russell (Assistant Professor of History, Barnard College) is an informed and informative biography of the famous labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. The reader is provided with his checkered life story and the murderous tragedy that ultimately befell him at the hands of organized crime figures. A detailed and in-depth study, Out Of The Jungle is unflinching in its close attention to Hoffa's diverse virtues and follies alike.



3. This book upsets the pieties of the left without serving the agenda of the right. No wonder some reviewers have accused Russell of pardoning Hoffa post-humously, while others have accused him of undue vilification. They're confused, because Out of the Jungle is not warped by the ideological orthodoxies that have made so many other books of labor history so boring, predictable, sanctimonious and sometimes even dishonest. Out of the Jungle is a breakthrough, a meticulous, clear-headed analysis of what made Hoffa an effective leader. One can only hope more labor historians will follow Russell's lead in the future

No comments about Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman, both volumes in a single file.

1 comments about The Great Chief Justice: John Marshall and the Rule of Law (Modern War Studies).

1. John Marshall [1755-1835] was Chief Justice of the United States for the last 34 years of his life. During his long tenure, he turned the Supreme Court from an afterthought into a primary tool for the centralization of federal power; he defined America, though we can still debate whether he got the definition right. This book details how Marshall went about his task.....
   
   This is NOT a biography of John Marshall [see my other reviews]; it is a series of case studies which trace the expanding power of the Federal Judiciary...Marbury v. Madison established the principle of Judicial review of legislative decisions...Virginia v. Cohens asserted federal authority in state affairs...the National Bank...land titles...Indian treaties......there is still disagreement over some of Marshall's decisions, and there was hell to pay over some of them at the time. "John Marshall has made his decision; now let's see him enforce it"...the various ramifications of that statement {which Andrew Jackson MAY not have ever made} are mind boggling....
   
   Charles Hobson is editor of The John Marshall Papers, one of the 2 or 3 greatest living Marshall scholars, and a nice guy [as was Marshall]; he has written a five star book. Do I actually recommend it? Maybe. If you are an attorney or historian with an interest in the topic, it is an absolutely essential volume. Well written, well organized; for me, it was a page turner. For the casual reader, don't waste your money, or insult Mr. Hobson. You will need a good background in either Law [not me], or history [me] to understand it.

No comments about Of Love and War: The Civil War Letters and Medicinal Book of Augustus V. Ball.

5 comments about Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Heart of a New Nation.

1. After finishing Joseph Ellis' Washington and Jefferson books in the past week, I was in the mood for something from a different time period. From the moment I began, I was hooked. I began it late last night, finishing two thirds of it before I finally went to bed. Then picked it up this morning and finished it. It was excellent and well written. I highly recommend it.



2. This is now the third book on the subject I've had the pleasure to read and I am more confused than ever regarding some aspects of the Pocahontas myths. Price's book is very well written and although some criticize him for explaining things we should be expected to know, in this day and age of kids growing up with a severely foreshortened awareness of history and general knowledge, I do not fault him for adding the information. It should be seen in the overall context of providing depth to a complicated set of histories and I think it works well.
   
   The strength of the book is in its rich bounty of facts, figures and explanations of events. The one "potential" weakness is his overly ambitious empathy for Smith, who is taken at face value in almost every single case. A careful reading of other fine historians shows that even today, in 2007, the debate about how much Smith embellished or even invented rages on. Price feels with the strength of a single book, mentioned in his last chapter "Marginalia", he can accept the Pocahontas/Smith rescue stories (at the very least) as true. The book he refers to is J.A. Leo Lemay's "Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith (1992). That Price is so impressed with professor Lemay's argument means to me that I will probably have to read it as well.
   
   Price says, in note 3 to his Marginalia chapter, "A modern skeptic with regard to the rescue story has downplayed the significance of Purchas's publication, on the ground that Purchas merely quoted Smith "verbatim without comment". The skeptic he refers to is renowned historian Helen C Rountree, in her book "Pocahontas's People: The Powhatten Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (1990). The problem is, that Price is open and has been criticized for precisely the same error, that of accepting Smith without (enough) commentary. There lies my confusion. Who to believe?
   
   Even worse, I read Price's book after reading "Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma" by Camilla Townsend (2004). She takes Smith apart this way and that and certainly does not believe half of Smith's stories on just about any topic. I think it safe to say that Townsend is just as sympathetic to Pocahontas and overly critical of Smith as Price is enamored of Smith. It becomes confusing for layman like me to read such persuasive arguments, all steeped in deep levels of text and source and too often arriving at diametrically opposed conclusions. No wonder the topic rages on!
   
   Nonetheless I still regard Price's book very highly. He told me many things that Townsend did not and the two books together will add much needed dimension to the story. The two authors see entirely different Pocahontas's and I cannot tell where the truth is. Smith comes across in Price's book as a visionary, whose well represented ideas, self published in several books, seem to presage so many aspects of the great Republic founded in 1776.
   
   I enjoyed seeing other historical personalities on the same time line. For example, one of my favorite poets, John Donne, wrote a sermon to his flock on the subject of Jamestown. For someone like me who has read Donne's poetry all these years, I was amazed to see this fact. The context of Jamestown as the real starting point of European conquest of America and the founding of a white nation is clearly laid out. The name of "the Mayflower" and Plymouth Rock pales into insignificance when compared to Jamestown. Here is where America started. Here is where archaeologists are still digging up the past and historians argue over facts. Price's book is much needed in the debate. However, what is "known" is still up for grabs. The essence of the myths is more distinct in my mind but I am as unsure of where to draw the lines than ever. I need to read more. This is a great book for those who are just starting out; it should not be the only one read.



3. I really enjoyed this work and enjoyed its pacing and the way the author weaved the historical narrative with the characters and the sense of timeline. A great overview of the period and I would recommend this one. A well balanced book to help the reader understand the period and how things were viewed. In fact I was anxious to see if I could get other books by this author!



4. Easy read. Couldn't imagine how I missed some of these details in US History, but nonetheless so glad I picked it up - could not put it down.



5. Love and Hate in Jamestown is a very enjoyable and very readable antidote to the usual Pocahontas nonsense cooked up by disney and more recently presented in the new world. Chock full of well researched facts and anecdotes about this remarkable chapter in America's history. Price's accounts about John Smith's life before he came to Virginia sounds at least as fascinating as what he achieved once he was in Virginia. He stands as one of the archetypes of the early Americans, combining all of those qualities good and bad, which have ultimately defined us as a people.

5 comments about The MAN WHO ONCE WAS WHIZZER WHITE: A PORTRAIT OF JUSTICE BYRON R WHITE.

1. I first read this biography when it was published in 1998; because I am working with a former White clerk on a matter, I recently took another look--it has held up very well. The author, Dennis J. Hutchinson, long affiliated with the University of Chicago and its law school, had the advantage of having clerked for White. But this is no hagiography, and is quite critical in spots. Because White (1917-2002) has become all but invisible to current generations of Court watchers, and this is the major biography available on him, it is an important book. One measure of the author's thoroughness is that White does not make it onto the Court until page 335 (he served between 1962 and 1993)--the previous pages are devoted to a meticulous account of his prior life, and what a life it was: football All-American; Rhodes Scholar; graduate work at Oxford; then onto Yale Law School while playing in the NFL; valuable work during the war in Naval Intelligence; then clerking on the Court; followed up with a successful law practice and politics in Denver, including work on the JFK campaign in 1960; a stint as Deputy Attorney General under RFK and then appointment to the Court.
   
   Hutchinson does not follow the frequent practice of reviewing every major decision a subject made while on the Court; rather the picks out three terms (1971, 1981, and 1991) for extended analysis. He looks at such topics as White's opinion style, including his dissent format; his incremental approach; the problems some had with White's opinion style; his interaction with fellow Justices; and his views on such topics as affirmative action, abortion and finding "new" constitutional rights. Always central to the discussion is White's independence, as manifested for example in being the only Justice against taking away (in effect) Justice Douglas's vote due to his incapacity. The author also speculates as to the forces that did and did not shape (such as Yale legal realism) White's view. White's reputation for being a difficult and distant individual to deal with certainly is borne out by the book, although White clerks will tell you he was great to work for. Whatever, White is a fading figure, and it falls largely to this fine biography to keep his memory and accomplishments alive.



2. Byron White intentionally did not leave much of a paper trail, as a man distrustful of the press, which is why this book has nowhere near the depth of Jeffries' Powell biography. White may well be most vilified and castigated justice in his own time, a fact which Hutchinson recounts in great detail, because he frequently ruled against the interests of the intelligensia-- frivolous First Amendment rights claimed by the media, and, of course, homosexuals, in Bowers, which won him the most profane attacks of all, from gay rights activists imbued with more passion than respect for the deliberative function of the Courts.
   
   White, though he is accused of "moving right" over the course of his career, was in fact remarkably consistent. The problem was that he was guided by a considerably more complex set of principles than most justices, another fact which Hutchinson brings out quite well. He had an extremely uptight view of electoral politics, disliked formalism in all of its forms, was always against categorically forclosing judicial review, and absolutely despised substantive due process, especially Roe v. Wade. Yet White was an extraordinarily fair-minded and scrupled man. He was the only justice to object to the Court's attempt to retire the debilitated Justice William O. Douglas on its own accord, was an aritculate opponent of formalistic separation-of-powers and federalism doctrine, and frequently came out on the side of the downtrodden (see his role in Jacobson v. U.S.). History should view White more kindly than most of his contemporaries-- he was a man totally without an sort of a political agenda, the type of fair-minded and intelligent person so lacking from our Courts today.
   
   There are some faults here: Hutchinson's forays into Constitutional commentary in the text are very opaque and inappropriate for the book. This book is generally well-written and well-researched, but its appeal will generally be to hardcore watchers of the Warren, Burger, and early Rehnquist courts or fans of White himself-- evidently a small group, as this book is now nearly out of print.



3. Byron White began his long judicial career in dissent, resisting the rising tide of criminal procedure liberalism of the Warren Court, and ended it as the balance wheel of Rehnquist Court. In his 31 years on the Supreme Court, from 1962 to 1993, he was in the majority in 807 five-to-four decisions, more than any other justice in history, except for the wily William Brennan who served on the court for 34 years. White also has the signal distinction of being the only Democratic appointee to the Supreme Court since the end of World War II who profoundly disappointed his erstwhile partisan allies. Beyond the fact that White refused to "grow" his jurisprudence from its New Deal origins to accommodate the latest cultural avant-garde enthusiasms of the juridical left, little is known about White and his jurisprudence is widely misunderstood.

   The litany of White's accomplishments and his early rise to the court serve to obscure the lines of his jurisprudence, which he never made an attempt to clarify. Hutchinson's principal accomplishment is to discern from the mass of White's opinions a sound jurisprudential framework obscured by bulk of White's output (1,275 opinions in 31 years), and in doing so refute the assertion that White was unpredictable.

   Although White was popularly described as a conservative jurist, this confounds the term as it is used to describe a specific interpretive philosophy with the judicial tradition which White came to exemplify. Today judicial conservatism is virtually synonymous with "original meaning," the method of constitutional interpretation that holds that the Constitution means only what it was understood to mean by those whose assent made it law. This has certain implications, among them that the Congress's powers are limited to those enumerated, that the three branches of federal government and their powers are strictly separated, and that the states retain inviolable spheres of sovereignty. In this sense, White was not a conservative at all. Where, say, Justice Antonin Scalia would subscribe to these general notions, White would not. For instance, while Scalia believes that the law permitting the appointment of Independent Counsels violates the separation of powers doctrine (Morrison v. Olson), White sees it as a permissible experimentation with the form of government. And though Scalia believes that the powers of Congress are, however tangentially, limited (Lopez v. United States) and that the states retain areas of discretion where the Congress may not intrude (Printz v. United States), White views the powers of the Congress as essentially unlimited (Katzenbach v. McClung) and the states as retaining no sovereignty that the Congress is obliged to respect (Garcia v. San Antonio Metro. Transit Authority). Although Hutchinson views "New Deal liberal" and "pragmatist" as imperfect labels, his carefully wrought and insightful analysis of White's jurisprudence nonetheless establishes that they are fair and roughly approximate descriptions of Justice White.

   In it's judicial aspect the New Deal generally sought to eliminate restrictions on the exercise of federal power. These breaks on government power were exemplified early in this century by an activist libertarian Supreme Court's invocation of natural rights and non-textual notions of substantive due process to strike economic regulation. Lochner v. New York, where the court struck down regulations on the working hours of bakers as a violation of their liberty to contract their labor, is perhaps the most famous bugbear of New Dealers. But restrictions also came in the form of the enumerated powers doctrine and in the form of early criminal procedure cases which, as Professor Akhil Reed Amar of Yale has noted, invoked natural law and private property rights, and thus restricted the government's policing powers. All of these, in one way or another, restricted federal action. Judges of New Deal era, then, had a distinctly negative ambition: To remove the restrictions on the exercise of federal power so that the Congress, acting with the Executive, could enact social reform.

   The ambition of liberal judges changed, of course, with the rise of "the real Warren Court," which historian David P. Currie of the University of Chicago dates to the replacement of Justice Frankfurter by Arthur Goldberg late in 1962. "Willful judges," as Justice Scalia describes them, were no longer content with deferring to the overtly political branches, but were now eager to enact social reform themselves. The criminal procedure cases of the Warren Court were animated by the ideas that policing by the states was institutionally racist and that crime was a manifestation of disease, not evil, and should be addressed as a public health concern. Steeped in the New Deal idea of the judicial function, however, White largely dissented from Warren Court's innovations. He dissented from Miranda v Arizona, which mandated the now famous warnings to criminal suspects; prefiguring contemporary arguments, he wrote "there will not be a gain, but a loss, in human dignity" because under Miranda some criminals will be returned to the street to repeat their crimes.. White would also labor to limit the scope of rule excluding from trial illegally obtained evidence, and would dissent from Robinson v. California, where the court struck down a California statute criminalizing narcotics addiction. The court said that the state could not punish a person's "status" as an addict, only his conduct; White, sensibly enough, pointed out that addiction accrues through continuous willful behavior.

   White was a pragmatist. He didn't believe that the provisions of the Bill of Rights had a "single meaning" or that constitutional provisions could be measured like the provisions of a deed, in "metes and bounds," but he was insistent that constitutional innovations be small and slow, and linked in a rational process. His father taught him that "You can't just stand on your rights all the time in a small town," and White had a lifetime aversion to "the angels of fashionable opinion," as Hutchinson memorably calls ideologues of various stripe. But White's contempt for philosophy could lead him astray. In Reitman v. Mulkey, White wrote the opinion of the court holding that California could not repeal a fair housing law because the repeal was motivated by animus toward minorities. In time, the case was precedent for the current Supreme Court's invalidation, in Romer v. Evans, of Colorado's attempt to deny homosexuals privileged legal status, and for a lower federal court to stay the implementation of California's Proposition 209, barring racial and sexual discrimination in state services. Pragmatism unguided by a philosophy lead White to judgments the long-term ill consequences of which he was not equipped to foresee.

   However, White's small-step pragmatism and disdain for ideological enthusiasms kept him from joining most of the Warren and Burger Court's radical social agenda. Although he was willing to recognize, in Griswold v. Connecticut, a non-textual right to privacy permitting married couples access to contraception and even was willing to extend the right to non-married couples in Eisenstadt v. Baird, White famously and vigorously dissented from Roe v. Wade, privately telling people that he thought it was the only illegitimate decision the court made during his tenure. Perhaps just as upsetting to the votaries of judicial activism was White's majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, which held that Georgia could constitutionally prohibit homosexual sodomy. White briskly dismissed the argument that homosexual activity was constitutionally protected: "[T]o claim that a right to engage in such conduct is `deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition' or `implicit in the concept of ordered liberty' is, at best, facetious."

   In an sense, White was precisely the type of conservative -- one who slows progress, but does not reverse it; one who ratifies the past, whatever its content -- that liberals claim they want. Except for Roe, White would later vote to reaffirm precedent, on the basis of stare decisis, with which he had earlier disagreed. And yet, few modern justices -- except, perhaps, Justice Clarence Thomas -- have been the object of so much vitriol as White. When White retired in 1993, Jeffrey Rosen of the New Republic called White "a perfect cipher" and a "mediocrity," Bruce Ackerman of Yale said he was "out of his depth," and the New York Times' Tom Wicker called him the "bitterest legacy of the Kennedy Administration." The best Calvin Trillin, writing in The Nation, could say of White was "We count his loyalty to team a boon/The other side might well select a loon" -- this in backhanded praise that White retired during a Democratic administration. These facile slurs betray the mercurial enthusiasms of the age more than they carefully trace the lineaments of Justice White's jurisprudence and are therefore more reflective of their authors than White's jurisprudence.

   In many ways White is entirely alien to today's culture, popular and lega




4. Hutchinson has written a fascinating contemporary biography of Justice White who is almost unique in his continued insistence on his privacy and personal dignity. Although the author eschews speculation as to White's family or personal life, one still gets a good sense of the man--his intelligence, tenacity, and just plain decency. At least as interesting are the times he lived in, and few lawyers or judges have shared the action and passion of their times more fully than Justice White--first on the gridiron, then in the classroom, in the world of affairs, and on the court. White had his shortcomings as a communicator and legal theorist, as Hutchinson aptly illustrates with the oral and written record. But would that our society had more such self-effacing, dedicated and excellent lawyers and public servants!



5. This book was a disappointment. I think that with the recent comprehensive late 20th Century biographies, such as the recent ones about Rockefeller and Lindbergh and Nigel Hamilton's Reckless Youth, we have come to expect the biographer to do a thorough investigation and analysis of the circumstances that impacted the subject. While I do not expect a Freudian approach in every case (and would probably object to it if done expressly), I welcome gentle suggestions that link early events in the subject's life with the later, more well known, events. This analysis was missing from Whizzer (with the exception of the origins of his hatred for the press). The book reads as if it is a collection of on-line newspapers searches, ones that I could have done myself if NEXIS had newspapers dating back to the 30s. Didn't anybody keep a diary? Didn't anybody write letters? Didn't anybody have any introspective thoughts? To those who say that this type of analysis is not necessary for a judicial biography, I direct them to John Jeffrey's book about Powell, which I thought was very well done, and a good model for what a judicial biography can be.