A Freight Train to Optimism

His years are finally beginning to show. The onetime 25-mile hikes have been cut to 15. He often drives where he once would have walked. But the startling blue eyes are as keen and alert as ever. So, too, is the intellect of William O. Douglas, 75, who last week became the longest-sitting Justice in the Supreme Court's history, surpassing the 34 years and 195 days served by Stephen J. Field.

To Douglas' many critics, the milestone was a misfortune that they had tried to head off several times with impeachment (most recently in 1970). To his long roster of admirers, it was a cause for celebration. More than 450 of them, including his colleagues on the court, gathered in Washington for a conference and dinner to honor his career.

Long after the celebrating stops, Douglas will continue to be remembered as one of the nation's greatest law professors (at both Columbia and Yale) and as a combative chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under the New Deal. (When stock-exchange representatives once argued long and repetitively in favor of self-regulation, Douglas closed them off with an explosive "Hooey!") He will also be remembered as a prescient conservationist and, of course, as the court's most activist liberal judge from the beginning in 1939.

Yet Douglas' attitudes are not the predictable batch of anti-Establishment dissents that many might suppose. In a long interview with TIME's David Beckwith, Douglas reviewed his passage from Yakima, Wash., to Washington, D.C., and offered his own report on the current state of the nation. Excerpts:

This country is in far better shape now than when I was growing up. Conditions are not nearly as bad for the poor and the underprivileged. I remember in a town north of Yakima when a coal-mine union organizer came in one day. They grabbed him, tied him up and dragged him out of town behind a motorcycle. It was a bare-knuckles town, and that was the law. There's nothing like that any more today. America is much more integrated, integrated in the psychiatric sense, more mature, more tolerant. We face problems with a more adult point of view.

The great contribution of the Warren Court was making principles of equality and harmony a reality rather than a theory. But the court has never been comprised of stereotyped people. Now there are different men on the court, all of them honest and dedicated, but dedicated to different parts of the Constitution. That sort of shifting attention has been true from the beginning of the court, and it will always be true. The shift has been overemphasized anyway. Those who really study the cases will realize that lately there is no solid bloc, no phalanx, no automatic lineup of certain people against others. It shifts on every type of case. We're all independent, we all got here under our own steam, and we're not subject to political or presidential pressure. And that's the way it works.

My greatest disappointment here lately was Rodriguez, the Texas school-financing case. There it was proved that the Chicanos of San Antonio, because they were poor, received a very inferior school system. For as long as I've been here, religion, color and poverty have been lines that you couldn't cross and discriminate against without a grave risk to the equal-protection clause.

The most alarming trend in Government is the unimpeded growth of the President's war powers. Some people have the rather naive view that the court should never enjoin a war. But that's not the issue. The question is whether an individual, having passed the physical and shown ability to shoulder a gun, should be sent overseas to fight in a war that Congress hasn't declared. I believe that any time an individual is coerced by his Government, then he has an action. If my position were sustained, the undeclared war would not be enjoined; the only people sent to fight in it would be those who want to fight.

The First Amendment isn't in bad shape. It hasn't entered the shadows yet. It's still being forcefully applied. I'm disturbed by some actions, of course, but it's far better than it used to be. I do wish the news media were more interested in doing in-depth stories on the court and justice. They're interested in one Justice throwing an inkwell at another one, but they don't always help the court educate as it should.

The court's great power is its ability to educate, to provide moral leadership. Occasionally, we do quite well with it. So you can see I've grown to be much more of an optimist than I was when I got off the freight train that brought me to law school. There's a fine group of people in this country, people who badly want to do the right thing. That's the strength of the United States.

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