![]() Warren's only published remark about that grim year was, we had a time of it in our home, getting enough to eat. At one time it was said of the railroad that it owned the best state senators money could buy. The men stayed out for almost a year and then they were beaten by the Southern Pacific, as almost any opponent of the Southern Pacific was beaten a hundred and fewer years ago. His father, a train repairman, was the leader of it. When he was 12 years old, there was a workers' strike on the Southern Pacific Railroad. When Governor Warren came to be nominated and then confirmed, I don't believe anybody considered an item in his boyhood, that later on to a close friend he mentioned as a turning point in his life and his opinions. Not a man's legal history but the history of his working life, the events that gave him is rooted convictions. Warren's case is worth looking at a little longer because it makes plain something that presidents and the Senate Judiciary Committee that searches a nominee's past rarely dig into. Eisenhower said his appointment to Warren was, the biggest damfool mistake I ever made. Towards the end of his life on the court, Warren said, on the court I saw things in a different light. Just the man President Eisenhower thought, to bring a cool head to the liberal hotheads appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. A former district attorney, a conservative Republican, a pillar of the country club, very much for God and mother and baseball and against sin, crime, a national health insurance system, the communists and the Democrats. And there is the even more flagrant case of the late Earl Warren, former Governor of California. Not long after he got on the court, Frankfurter deeply offended his idolaters by turning into one of the most conservative justices of all time. Franklin Roosevelt, in the heyday of his New Deal, a liberal movement as close to a national socialist movement as this country has ever had, named to the court one of the chief architects of that programme. I hope he's not only looking for someone who is as liberal politically as he is, but one who will stay that way. I'm sure that at this moment President Clinton is tossing it back and forth in his mind. So every time a new justice is nominated, somebody in the opposition party, the party not in the White House, raises a hue and cry about the unfairness, the partisan crudity of the president's choice. Now everybody, including the appointing president pretends they they're looking for a judge who will be objective, neutral, disinterested, above the battle, eager at all time to interpret the laws, not to make them, yet every president is really looking for someone after his own heart, politically speaking. Unlike a president or a prime minister, a justice of the Supreme Court is not there for four or five years, he, she, oh dear, out language, is there for life. There has to be a new judge appointed and according to his, her liberal or conservative bent, much of the coming law-making will be decided one way or the other. In this country and this system, it is surpassed in political importance only by the election of a new president, whether the retiring justice is someone of strong opinions or whether he's a mediocre wishy-washy mind. The retirement of a SupremeCourt justice is, I suppose, unlike in political importance, anything in a parliamentary system. That, by the way, was one of the saddest moments in the life of the court and in the life of Justice Holmes, a majestic Yankee, an old Bostonian of absolutely untouchable dignity, who waited too long and had to be begged to retire by his colleagues. And I don't want to be asked to retire like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Well it's good to see and hear that Justice Blackmun is not falling apart, but he said, I don't want to reach a point where my senility is of unacceptable proportions.
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