Re: Dirty Rotten Hero, The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas.

[Bill Clinton Epstein Island Pedo]

"Trump - Inmate Number P01135809" <patr...@protonmail.com> wrote in
news:uo4ukl$19ls4$7...@dont-email.me:

> Donald Trump, the president of the United States from 2017 to 2021,
> is a saint compared to JFK and William O. Douglas.

On his tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery, William O. Douglas is
identified correctly as a former justice of the United States Supreme
Court, and incorrectly as a former member of the United States armed
forces. The error is significant, not only because Arlington National
Cemetery reserves its plots for distinguished veterans but because Douglas
himself was willfully responsible for the mistake. For 10 weeks at the end
of World War I, the 20-year-old Douglas served in the Whitman College
regiment of the Students' Army Training Corps in Walla Walla, Wash., where
he and his fellow trainees conducted unarmed predawn marches in their
street clothes against imaginary enemies. He later described his wartime
experience as a three-month stint in Europe as an Army private, and
recorded some of the putative details in an autobiography as well as a
Supreme Court opinion.

How did a prominent public figure manage to lie about such a central fact
of his biography? Probably the same way he lied about everything else:
flagrantly, easily and in the service of his own rags-to-riches legend. In
''Of Men and Mountains,'' a personalized travel guide to his native state
of Washington, Douglas recalled his triumphant bout with polio at the age
of 2, though in fact he had suffered from an intestinal colic. He
frequently lied about his years as a student at Columbia Law School,
falsely boasting, for example, that he had graduated second in his class.
In his 1974 autobiography, ''Go East, Young Man,'' he repeated many of
these outright lies, introduced new ones and liberally embellished other
key details of his life story. His widowed mother, for instance, was not
destitute, but middle-class -- though it's true she was miserly and
secretive about her money.

Douglas's unabashed dishonesty is one of two revelations that give life to
''Wild Bill,'' Bruce Allen Murphy's tirelessly researched biography of the
liberal judicial icon. The other surprise is what a rotten and
unscrupulous person Douglas could be. A habitual womanizer, heavy drinker
and uncaring parent, Douglas was married four times, cheating on each of
his first three wives with her eventual successor. He so alienated his two
children that they chose not to notify him when their mother, his first
wife, died of cancer. When pressed for money, which was almost always, he
was not above using insider information to make a quick buck in the stock
market, or serving as the president of a foundation set up by a
businessman with suspected ties to organized crime -- an association for
which Douglas narrowly avoided being impeached.

With these and other sordid discoveries, Murphy, the author of ''Fortas''
and ''The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection,'' is well positioned to take
Douglas to the mat, yet his portrait of the justice is ultimately a
positive one. At one point, a former Supreme Court law clerk is quoted on
the matter of Douglas's personal failings: ''You just have to say to
yourself, 'You know, enough people are pains in the neck who don't do
anything worthwhile in their lives.' '' This seems to be a fair statement
of Murphy's own attitude. In his 36 years on the court, Douglas was, in
Murphy's telling, a defender of the common good whose opinions on privacy,
civil liberties and the environment made him ''the one person who could
and did make a real difference in the American judicial system.'' It's
refreshing to see a biographer who can keep separate his judgments about
his subject's personal and intellectual lives. In this case, however, it's
not clear that Murphy should have been so generous.

No sooner had President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Douglas to the
Supreme Court in 1939 than he became bored with the job. He had previously
served as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
aggressively reforming Wall Street in the aftermath of the nation's
financial collapse. The staid court, by contrast, forced one ''to wait for
the food to come washing up to your mouth with the high tide,'' as he put
it, borrowing an image from Oliver Wendell Holmes. Antsy, he spent a great
deal of time angling to leave the court for a political position that
would give him a shot at the presidency.

Douglas's legal opinions during this period, though reliably liberal, were
often highly deferential to the government. In the 1946 case Zap v. United
States, he wrote for the court in ruling that federal contractors
automatically waive their Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights when
contracting with the government. He also sided with the majority in the
notorious 1944 Korematsu opinion affirming the constitutionality of the
wartime internment of Japanese-Americans. If a guiding jurisprudential
philosophy underlay his views, it involved, as Murphy concedes,
''determining which issues were in his own best interests, battling with
his enemies and taking positions with an eye to his political future.''

By the mid-1960's, Douglas had resigned himself to the fact that he would
never escape the court for the White House, and his judicial stance became
increasingly standoffish. This was a strange reaction if Douglas was
indeed ''the one person who could and did make a real difference in the
American judicial system,'' for the court had become solidly liberal, and
Douglas could have assumed an influential leadership role. Instead, he
distanced himself even from Hugo Black, his ally in dissent in the early
1950's, when the court was predominantly conservative. By the end of his
career, Douglas had dissented in almost 40 percent of the decisions he
faced, and in more than half of those dissents he wrote only for himself.
Because the content of these later dissents was increasingly that of a
hard-line civil libertarian, Murphy appears to see in Douglas an
ideological shift for the good.

But was this a principled transformation or just Douglas's preening,
grandstanding and iconoclasm as they manifested themselves in a liberal
environment? Murphy never attempts to explain the change in Douglas's
judicial worldview, other than to suggest that his later opinions
expressed the democratic spirit and the ''desire never to be chained in,''
which were fostered by growing up in the frontier town of Yakima. This
interpretation not only fails to account for Douglas's earlier opinions,
but it risks succumbing to the very pioneer myth that Murphy has otherwise
worked so diligently to dismiss. Absent a compelling ideological
explanation, it's hard to avoid the impression that Douglas was, on the
court as well as off, a showboat and a troublemaker, and -- as his
nickname suggests -- too wild for his own good.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/dirty-rotten-hero.html