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39 Ottawa L. Rev. 441 (2007-2008)
Book Reviews

handle is hein.journals/ottlr39 and id is 439 raw text is: Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made by Jim Newton New York, Riverhead Books, 2006. Pp. 614 I. NEITHER GENIUS NOR SAINT' Earl Warren was not a man of commanding intellect or compelling style. In many ways, he was no match for the notorious personalities that surrounded him at the United States Supreme Court: forceful men who displayed the elegant brilliance of Robert Jackson, the driving bravado of Felix Frankfurter, the caustic ego of William 0. Douglas, the firebrand spirit of Hugo Black, the patrician intellect of John Harlan, the feisty liberalism of William Brennan. Earl Warren was the colourless member of this cast; avuncular and understated in demeanour, Warren was so lacking in distinc- tion he did not have a middle name.2 Yet he managed the cacophonic clashes which erupted between men who were gifted but impossible. When he retired as Chief Justice of the United States, Senator Edward Kennedy observed in simple but accu- rate terms that[als Earl Warren led the Court, the Court led the Nation.3 One par- adox of his legacy is that a man of such modest ability attained singular achievement; an earlier biographer described it as a case of low gear greatness.4 Warren's genius lay in what he did, not who he was. I. Irving Stone, Earl Varren, A Great American Story (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1948) at 169. Writing of Warren as Governor of California, Stone went on to say that Illike all active men he has made his quota of mistakes, but they are mistakes of the head and never of the heart. He added that one of Warren's toughest Democratic opponents had admitted that Jylou can get Earl Warren in the ring, but at the end of fifteen rounds he comes out with his hair unmussed. 2. Jim Newton,Justicc For All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made (NewYork: Riverhead Books, 2006) at 16. Newspapers dignified this omission by assigning a fictitious middle initial of C or I to his name. See Jack Harrison Pollack, Earl Warren: TheJudgc IWho Changed America (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969) at 17. 3. Senator Edward Kennedy, Tributes to Honorable Earl Il'arren, Chief Justice of the United States: To Commemorate the Occasion of his Retirement from the Supreme Court,. une 23, 1969 (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1970) at 93. 4. Pollack, supra note 2 at 338. In Chapter 1, titled The Warren Paradox, Pollack, at 3, excerpts a passage from John Gunther's Inside USA, which states that Warren has the limitations of all Americans of his type with little intellectual background, little genuine depth or coherent political philosophy. Gunther went on to describe Warren, in 1947, as a man who has probably never bothered with an abstract thought twice in his life and as no more a statesman in the European sense than Typhoid Mary is Einstein.

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