Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made
By Jim Newton
Riverhead, 2006

Review by Joseph C. Goulden

In my teen years in the South, the nasty billboards were as ubiquitous as the kudzu vines that sprawled over the countryside. IMPEACH EARL WARREN! they screamed in bold black letters framed by United States flags. Such was the message that the John Birch Society shouted at Americans.

The Birchers have slipped into a well-deserved obscurity, although a few shopworn survivors can be glimpsed on occasion manning booths at right-wing gatherings. And the chief justice whose scalp they demanded? How does he rank when one does a tally sheet on his place in American history?

Forgive my hyperbole, but I stand ready to nominate Justice Warren as the outstanding public conscience of the 20th century—a man whose impact on our society was as significant as Franklin Roosevelt’s. Such is my conclusion after several evenings with a superb new biography by Jim Newton, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made. A longtime reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times, Newton mined archival and other material on Warren with the same thoroughness that the Forty-Niners once devoted to California gold fields.

In highly readable prose (that nonetheless needed some pruning) Newton relates a remarkable career that ranged from small-town prosecutor to the highest judicial post in the land—and unsuccessful tries for the vice presidency and presidency en route. Warren was arguably the most popular politician to come out of California until Ronald Reagan, serving two terms each as attorney general and governor.

But more important, Warren was a man of innate decency. He was imbued with a keen sense of right and wrong. To be sure, state-sanctioned segregation of public school was on wobbly last legs when he became chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren is the person who gave it the final shove into oblivion, to the betterment of us all. And the changes his court brought to criminal procedure jibed with some ober dicta uttered by a long-ago Texas appeals judge: “Every man is entitled to one tolerably fair trial.” Mapp. Gideon. Miranda. The Warren court delivered a series of hammer blows to police and prosecutors who skirted the Constitution in criminal cases.

Most contemporary Americans remember Warren as a casting-office chief justice: a strapping man of Scandinavian descent with a photogenic family, without a trace of the stuffiness and pomposity of a couple of later-day chief justices. He left the Court in 1969 and died in 1974.

But behind this dignified public persona, Warren was an extraordinarily shrewd politician. Indeed, one of the more fascinating sections of Newton’s book is how a bitter feud with another Californian, Richard Nixon, very likely led to his elevation to the Supreme Court. The story developed as follows.

After his bid for vice president (with Thomas Dewey) in 1948, Warren put his eyes on the presidency itself, realizing that he had run his string in California politics. His hopes for the Republican nomination rested on hopes of a deadlocked convention where no candidate controlled enough delegates for a first-ballot victory. He lacked the resources to stage a national preconvention campaign, as was being done by General Dwight Eisenhower and Senator Robert Taft, the two main contenders. Warren entered only two primaries, finishing second twice. Nonetheless, his longtime friend, columnist Drew Pearson, proclaimed him “the surest shot to win for the GOP in November.”

Although the California delegates were formally pledged to the governor, one of them, Senator Nixon, covertly worked to steer them into supporting Ike. Disgusted at Nixon’s devious behavior, Warren had a trusted intermediary take a message to Eisenhower. The memo read: “We have a traitor in our delegation. It’s Nixon.” As Warren instructed the intermediary, “I wish you could tell General Eisenhower that we resent his people infiltrating, through Nixon, into our delegation, and ask him to have it stopped.” If Ike did not act, “we’re going to take measures that will be harmful to his candidacy.”

Nixon’s efforts resulted in the Californians voting 62–7 to seat disputed pro-Ike delegates from Texas and Georgia, thus tipping the balance to Eisenhower, and dashing Warren’s hopes of a hung convention. Although Warren never fully vented his anger at Nixon, Newton writes that the episode “rankled him as few other events in his life did.”

But Warren would reap a significant consolation prize. In a postelection meeting President Eisenhower, in an obvious move to soothe the governor of the nation’s most populous state, talked with Warren about a slot in his administration. Eisenhower “proposed finding a place for him on the Court—the first vacancy. . . .” Warren remembered Eisenhower making this offer as “my personal commitment to you.”

When Chief Justice Fred Vinson died in September 1953, Ike hedged, telling Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. that his pledge was for an associate justice’s seat, not the chief justice’s slot. When Brownell brought this message to Warren, the governor stared him down—a promise was a promise, and he expected Ike to keep it. “We’re stuck with him, I guess,” Brownell ruefully told the president. Ike chose not to give further offense to Warren and nominated him.

The Court that Warren joined was deeply cleaved. Although the eight sitting justices all had been placed there by Democratic presidents (Roosevelt and Truman), Newton writes that “the surface commonality of the bench . . . belied deep doctrinal and personal disagreements. These had been nursed over time, and flared occasionally in public, more often in the weekly conference of the justices.” And almost immediately, Warren was plunged into the Court’s deliberations over school desegregation, in the case that became Brown v. Board of Education.

That story is an oft-told one, and especially in Richard Kluger’s magisterial Simple Justice (1975), to which Newton acknowledges a special debt. But persons too young to have read Kluger’s account will relish Newton’s detailing of how Warren guided a sorely divided court to unanimity on ending school segregation—essential to assure maximum public support of a decision that was sure to enrage the South (as it did).

At the Court’s initial conference, Warren was careful not to have justices commit themselves one way or another. Shrewd politics: once endorsed, a position is extremely difficult to abandon. (Further, the Senate had yet to confirm his nomination.) Newton writes, “When the conference ended . . . Warren set out to do what he did best—work the room.” He spent days conferring individually with justices, assuring a 9–0 vote.

To Warren’s disgust, President Eisenhower did some nasty meddling. In February 1954, when the case was still under review, Ike invited him to a stag dinner at the White House. Warren went reluctantly, because he was “not a man to say no to a president, much less the president who had appointed him. . . .” Warren was surprised to find himself seated within speaking distance of John Davis, who represented South Carolina in Brown. “That alone was enough to offend Warren’s sense of propriety,” Newton notes. (Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP team arguing against segregation, was nowhere in sight, to be sure.)

Worse came after dinner, when the president took Warren aside and told him, man to man, that the South was “full of good will and good intentions.” He continued, “These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”

I do not argue with Newton’s conclusion that for all of his many strengths, “Eisenhower was a dunce on matters of race.”

Warren in the end persuaded the Court majority to issue a relatively terse opinion, short enough to be printed in full by major newspapers. Ike was to fire one further shot in 1957 at a press conference when asked about enforcement of Brown. “I can’t imagine any set of circumstances that would ever induce me to send federal troops into any area to enforce the orders of a federal judge.” Predictably, Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas took Ike at his word and had a complaisant legislature block local attempts to integrate Little Rock schools. Public opinion forced Ike to reverse field and send troops to the city to deal with mobs and escort black children into Central High School.

Sadly, Warren remains a controversial figure in American history because the commission he headed to investigate the murder of President John Kennedy suffered many flaws. Most grievously, the Warren Commission did not breach the tight secrecy imposed on anti-Castro activities directed by the slain president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Warren permitted the younger Kennedy to be “interviewed” via written questions, rather than a direct examination. Hence any chance of exploring activities that conceivably could have triggered JFK’s murder were nil.

Nonetheless, Newton argues (and I agree) that the commission’s findings that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone “are beyond reasonable doubt.” But for “those inclined to see conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, the commission’s report had marked Warren as a dupe or even a fraud.” That judgment is grossly unfair, and I hope (but do not expect) that the critics will be silenced in a forthcoming book on the Warren Commission by Washington writer Max Holland.

Newton concludes that Warren led a court that was “faithful to its principles but also . . . effective in action, that it serves society and does not merely bind it, that it delivers not just abstract justice but actual fairness.” And I found myself nodding agreement with his closing sentences: “In the decades since Warren left the Court, America has never suffered from too many men or women like him. It is equally true that the nation today—certainly the Court—is less fortunate not to have one of him.”

Joseph C. Goulden is the author of 18 nonfiction books, including The Superlawyers (1972) and The Money Lawyers (2006).

***

Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq
By T. Christian Miller
Little, Brown, 2006

Review by Ronald Goldfarb

Read Blood Money by Los Angeles Times investigative reporter T. Christian Miller, but not after you have just eaten. The details about the overarching greed that characterizes the plundering of America’s budget, supposedly to repair Iraq, will make you sick.

The “wasted billions” and “lost lives” and “corporate greed” mentioned in the subtitle and spelled out in disturbing detail ought to lead to investigations and indictments. So far, though most of the facts are known and many have been complained about, those government officials who could have done something about them have not. Miller’s book demands attention.

Miller begins with the congressional testimony of Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, predicting that Iraq would “finance its own reconstruction”—a notion that turned out to be a mirage. In fact, three years after his testimony the United States had “committed more than $30 billion to rebuilding Iraq. . . . No other country had received as much foreign aid in the history of the United States.”

It gets worse.

The plan was to make Iraq an exemplary democratic state in the Middle East, a model in the Arab world. Using the suspected presence of weapons of mass destruction as an excuse, and ignoring Secretary of State Colin Powell’s prescient warning that if we wreck a country we are responsible for fixing it, the administration planners received congressional approval to invade Iraq. As Miller describes, the absence of a plan for reconstruction led to the haphazard outsourcing of huge contracts to manage the occupation and rebuilding (much of the damage caused by our invasion). Vice President Dick Cheney’s prior employer, Halliburton, received the first of what would be many major contracts, to manage the country’s petroleum industry.

Powell’s fears were realized. Our invasion was quick and relatively clean. But what followed was chaos, riots, looting, violence, collapse of government services, food shortages, failure of infrastructure, death and destruction. Our first ambassador, L. Paul Bremer III, complained, “Nobody had given me a sense of how utterly broken this country was.”

As the administration began a furious process of recruiting personnel to solve these problems, parochial politics came into play. Job applicants were asked their views on Roe v. Wade, conservative think tanks provided databases, and naive and inexperienced recruits were employed. They were joined by patriotic citizens who thought they should do something to aid their country and its soldiers, by those who saw the high salaries as a way to help their families and lessen their debts, and by scoundrels who circled Iraq like vultures.

America’s money spigots were opened full gauge. The cost for all this, originally predicted by the president to be $2.4 billion, rose in three years to $30 billion, and continues to rise. The reconstruction—hardly complete to this day— has already cost more than the post–World War II Marshall Plan provided any single country.

Worse still—and this is the heart of Miller’s book—was the use of Iraq reconstruction funds “to benefit friends, constituents, and occasionally business partners” of the administration. More money went “to aid American corporations than impoverished Iraqis,” and much of this boondoggle was accomplished “behind closed doors, between lobbyists and politicians” with few fingerprints. It was “a remarkable program of domestic handouts and corporate welfare.”

Secret and sole-source contracts were made, like the $7 billion Halliburton subsidiary KBR received to put out oil fires. Other scandalous shenanigans are described in Blood Money, such as the use of sham grantees and no-bid contracts to shift huge grants to establish a mobile phone system, in one instance leading to one senator profiting $822,000. The patriotic and the plunderers fought over the money and the contracts, corruption was rampant, and those few who tried to correct things were squashed. One hard-working, highly motivated, conscientious manager was so despondent about the corruption, he committed suicide. It was, says Miller, “a shameful victory of narrow business interests over a vital strategic policy.”

By no means the only culprit, but clearly the champion, Halliburton was the omnipresent beneficiary of this questionable contracting program. “No company in American history has ever been as tied to a war as Halliburton Company was to Iraq,” says Miller. Vice President Cheney’s stock in the company for which he had been chief executive officer rose as a result of Halliburton’s multi-billion-dollar contracts. This despite congressional hearings that pointed out Halliburton’s overcharging and waste, and charges by whistleblowers who came forward with complaints that were ignored.

In what was now a war zone, reconstruction had to be done under siege, in effect through paramilitary operations, as contractors began the arduous and dangerous process of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. Private security companies served essentially military roles because of the lack of military personnel needed to provide security for the rebuilding process. These companies, motivated by money and answerable to no effective authority, were, according to Miller, “the most notorious scandals of the reconstruction.” They made fortunes, while their employees endured dangers they never anticipated.

An interesting surprise is the role of Stuart Bowen, a longtime ally of President George W. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who was made special inspector general of the Coalition Provisional Authority, to the cynical complaints of Democrats. Bowen was tough and critical, demanded audits, financial transparency, and contractual accountability. For his forceful efficiency and integrity in overseeing the reconstruction process, Bowen was given a pink slip, as the press recently reported. His investigations led to bribery and conspiracy charges; exposure of poor work by Halliburton and Parsons, the two largest corporate participants; and other embarrassing disclosures. His sponsors deserted Bowen, leading one congressman to remark that the administration had silenced the messenger for informing the government, as he was supposed to, about waste and fraud in Iraq.

It wasn’t only the behemoth companies like Halliburton that profited excessively from the reconstruction orgy. A Polish Iraqi used car dealer became a chief procurement official. Two near bankrupt and inexperienced hustlers-turned-entrepreneurs made fortunes, and avoided responsibility for their excesses when their greed came to light. Their revenue rose from $200,000 in six months to $32 million within a year; in the following year they had $100 million worth of contracts, and planned to double that in the next year—all, Miller reports, despite official complaints of incompetence, ineptness, and criminality.

Contractors used laborers (secured from an illegal labor trafficking network) from faraway places, such as Nepal, to cut costs while they made huge profits. Half to two-thirds of Halliburton’s 50,000 employees in Iraq were third-country nationals, Miller reports. And all the 160,000-plus American, third-country, and Iraqi employees required insurance. How the big insurance companies were cut into the marketplace and at what extravagant costs is another of Miller’s shocking stories. Taxpayer money flowed “out of Iraq and back into the pockets of the insurance industry with virtually no oversight.”

Despite the billions of dollars spent to rebuild Iraq, oil production, electricity, and water and sanitation remained below prewar levels, according to Miller. Iraqis pointed out they were better off in many respects under tyrant Saddam Hussein. There were achievements, such as in education, but “these bright spots were the exception.” We failed miserably, Miller concludes, “to do what was most important: turn Iraq into a thriving democracy that would reduce the threat of terrorism against America.”

Wartime profiteering isn’t something the current administration and corporate world invented. The late president (then a senator) Harry Truman came to national prominence when he held hearings in 1941 into the waste and mismanagement that characterized government contracting for military bases. The Truman Commission found that big business profited excessively, while a heavy price was borne by the whole nation, David McCullough reported in his 1992 prize-winning biography, Truman. Historically, flies surround the honey pot. But in Iraq this greedy temptation was taken to extraordinary degrees while the government watched, and only the few well-motivated whistleblowers paid any personal price.

The pathetic bill of particulars is laid out in detail in Blood Money. One hopes it will be read, and acted on, by people with the integrity and fortitude to demand an accounting. The American public, and those young men and women who sacrificed life and limb, deserve that much.

Ronald Goldfarb is a Washington, D.C., attorney, author, and literary agent whose reviews appear regularly in Washington Lawyer.