Falls of justice: what happens when a biographer attacks his subject—and gets his facts wrong?

Washington Monthly, April, 2003 by Charles Lane

WILD BILL: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas by Bruce Allen Murphy Random House, $35.00

TODAY, IT SEEMS, NO ONE MAY occupy high office without submitting his or her personal history to ongoing scrutiny of near-proctological thoroughness. (Just ask John Kerry.) And though such investigations are often justified in the name of the public's right to know, they can generate misinformation and myth as often as insight. In the 1990s, for instance, everyone "knew" that Bill and Hillary Clinton must have committed some sort of crime related to the Whitewater real estate deal--until, $70-million worth of independent counsel investigations later, it turned out they hadn't.

The Clintons were at least around to defend themselves. Many long-dead public figures have not been so lucky. They've had their personal lives exposed by gossipy, revisionist biographies that, while often providing illuminating and important information, also traffic in accusations that might or might not be true but become fixed in the public's mind. Everyone "knows," for instance, that former President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a long-term affair with his wartime assistant, Kay Summersby, thanks to accounts repeated in numerous books and articles. Yet there is almost no persuasive evidence that the affair ever took place, and plenty, including Summersby's own memoirs, that it didn't.

Of the overall generalization, Bruce Allen Murphy's biography of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas is a telling case in point. By any measure, Douglas's life is a worthy topic. He was only 40 when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939, after a corruption-busting stint as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and a brilliant rise on the faculty of Yale Law School. Douglas served 36 years on the Court, longer than anyone else in history, and is remembered today as one of the court's more uncompromising advocates of free speech and individual freedom. His opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case guaranteeing married people the right to obtain contraceptives, established the doctrine of privacy rights--those derived from what Douglas called the "penumbras" and "emanations" of more precisely enumerated rights in the Bill of Rights--that paved the way for Roe v. Wade.

Murphy's biography certainly reminds readers of the justice's accomplishments--but his exploration of Douglas's dark side is attracting the most attention. Murphy, the Fred Morgan Kirby professor of civil rights at Lafayette College, describes a jurist who, for all his humanitarian rhetoric on the bench, treated his own friends, family, and colleagues shabbily. His political and ethical judgments were questionable, or worse. He scandalized the capital with his multiple marriages to attractive younger women. His outspokenness on issues beyond the court's purview, such as his early advocacy of recognizing Red China and his opposition to the war in Vietnam, earned criticism from both Republicans and Democrats.

In Murphy's account, the mainspring of Douglas's public career was his aching, but never fulfilled, ambition for the presidency. (Murphy pauses to offer only a sketchy explanation of the origins of Douglas's liberal ideology: Why he became a Democrat at all, given his Western frontier origins, remains somewhat unclear in this account.) Aced out by Harry Truman for the 1944 Democratic vice presidential nomination--a prize even then seen as a ticket to succeed the manifestly ailing FDR--Douglas came to see himself as trapped in the Supreme Court, a "peripheral" institution, as he once described it, to which he devoted less than his best efforts.

Other than political ambition, the other great driving force in Douglas's life, as Murphy tells it, was plain lust. His four marriages were just the tip of a priapic iceberg; according to Murphy, Douglas spent his summers in the Cascade Mountains not only hiking but also drinking heavily and pursuing local women. In 1951, he finally decided to dump his long-suffering first wife, Mildred, for the newly divorced ex-wife of a congressman. The resulting settlement, engineered for Mildred by Douglas's own New Deal chum Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, fully exploited Douglas's personal and political weaknesses, guaranteeing Mildred a huge and escalating share of Douglas's future earnings. This "financial noose," Murphy argues, explains why Douglas churned out so many books while on the court. He needed money desperately.

Douglas's constant scramble for cash set the stage for his closest brush with impeachment, in 1970. The main charges against him involved his receipt of almost $100,000 between 1960 and 1969 from the Las Vegas-linked Alfred Parvin Foundation, of which he was the only paid official. But the impeachment effort, spear-headed by then-House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, ultimately fizzled in the Democratic-controlled House.

Burial Rights

In his poor personal judgment, Douglas is reminiscent of another brilliant Democrat (or two) with a yen for the presidency and a weakness for women. But Murphy wants to do more than simply emphasize Douglas's already well-known character flaws. He also wants to unmask Douglas as a fraud--to show that key aspects of his persona, established in the public mind by Douglas's best-selling memoirs, were fabricated by the justice.