The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White: A Portrait of Justice Byron R. White Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White: A Portrait of Justice Byron R. White Book

Justice Byron White had a life that could fill two biographies. As a young man, he was a national celebrity as a student athlete who excelled on both fronts. On the gridiron, he led Colorado to its first bowl game and finished second in the Heisman Trophy voting; in the classroom, he earned himself a Rhodes scholarship. But he put off going to Oxford to lead the National Football League in rushing, garnering a record salary along the way. He served in World War II in the Pacific, and returned to earn another degree from Yale Law and clerk for the Supreme Court. After a year in the Kennedy administration, he was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he served three decades. White's reputation with the press as a Supreme Court justice suffered because, despite his personal pro-choice views and desire for privacy, he dissented in Roe v. Wade and, 13 years later, wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick, determining that "the Constitution does not confer a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy," even behind closed doors. Hutchinson argues persuasively that these opinions were the result of a consistent judicial philosophy that refused to view the judiciary as a legislature. In his dissenting opinion in Roe v. Wade, for example, White wrote, "This issue, for the most part, should be left with the people and to the political processes the people have devised to govern their affairs." And in Bowers v. Hardwick, he commented, "The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution." Dennis Hutchinson, a former clerk for White and a University of Chicago Law professor, has written a smooth-reading biography of White, although it suffers from some gaps in coverage caused by his subject's passive lack of cooperation. Although clearly sympathetic to his subject, he writes in a neutral tone that provides a thorough overview of the justice's press coverage and Supreme Court work, helped in the latter by interviews with several dozen clerks (and, no doubt, Hutchinson's own experience). A remarkable book about a remarkable man. --Ted FrankRead More

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  • Product Description

    Before he became one of the longest-serving Supreme Court justices in American history, Byron R. White was Whizzer White: one of the last of the great scholar-athletes and an authentic American hero. Born to near-poverty, he became a college football sensation at the University of Colorado, carrying his obscure team to the Cotton Bowl and earning the nickname that he always detested but could never quite shake. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, one of the most accomplished students in the history of Yale Law School, and then a pro football star. In 1938, still the ragtag days of football, he was the highest-paid player in the sport's history.

    A World War II hero, he served with John E Kennedy and wrote the official naval intelligence report on the sinking of Kennedy's PT-109. Seventeen years later he helped run Kennedy's campaign for the presidency and in 1961 was named deputy attorney general. He was Robert Kennedy's right-hand man, providing on-the-spot management of protection for the Freedom Riders in Alabama in the spring of 1961, running the Justice Department when the attorney general was needed at the White House, and overseeing the appointment of more than one hundred federal judges. In 1962 President Kennedy nominated White to the Supreme Court, calling him "the ideal New Frontier judge."

    White's early years of fame had left their mark. He had tasted celebrity and knew both its emptiness and its distraction. As a judge, he avoided publicity and wrote opinions unsympathetic to the media, which guaranteed unfavorable reviews in the press. He even shunned displays of virtuosity in his legal writing. Yet his impact on the Court and American law has been enormous.

    He resisted tides of fashionable opinion, dissenting from much of the activism of the Warren Court, dissenting famously in Miranda v. Arizona and later in Roe v. Wade, and consistently holding to a model of judging that decided cases narrowly and avoided doctrinaire opinions.

    The Man Who Once Was Whizzer White is based on dozens of archives and nearly two hundred interviews, including those with approximately half of White's former law clerks and with all of his principal colleagues in the Kennedy administration. For White's Court years, the book uses three key terms -- 1971, 1981, and 1991 -- to reveal detailed operations of the Supreme Court and White's often publicly invisible impact on the institution. The result is a biography that is fast-paced and rich, an achievement that brings both of Byron White's identities into a single, fascinating whole.

  • 0684827948
  • 9780684827940
  • Dennis J. Hutchinson
  • 27 July 1998
  • Simon & Schuster
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 592
  • illustrated edition
  • Illustrated
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