Left, Righteous, Left

By Jos

GO EAST, YOUNG MAN

THE EARLY YEARS

by WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS

493 pages. Random House. $10.

Scarcely seven pages into this autobiography, a reader wonders briefly why William Orville Douglas cannot leave well enough alone. He has just related his Republican mother's belief that "if the rich are disenchanted, then we are all unemployed." Immediately the distinguished jurist adds, "Even at the age of 14, I did not buy that theory." He seems compelled to explain that he leaped practically from the womb as a full-blown liberal and has never since been sullied by the errors of complacent conservatism. And as he inveighs his way along the road of life--chumming up with every hobo or sheepherder he encounters and detesting most churchmen, policemen and lawyers--a sad conclusion grows. It is all very well to be down on the sanctimonious likes of John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover and Francis Cardinal Spellman (his top three detestees). But Douglas, the longest-sitting Justice in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court (1939 through the present), has grown disconcertingly righteous about his lifelong anti-Establishment views.

Still his autobiography, even up to the time of his appointment to the court where this volume stops, often seems extraordinary enough to match many of the stories that surround the forging of America's great men. In 1904 Douglas' minister father died after having moved the family to a tiny wilderness parish in the state of Washington. At the graveside, the grieving five-year-old lad felt drawn to the towering Mount Adams--"a friend, a force for me to tie to, a symbol of stability and strength." Afflicted with puny legs as a result of polio, he resolutely hiked and climbed until he had built up his limbs--and a lifelong commitment to the environment. His first teen-age encounter with the law made a lasting impression too; Orville (as he was then unhappily known) was hired by a local bluenose to solicit offers from prostitutes so he could turn them in to the police. He wound up sympathizing with the ladies, and detesting the minions of the law. In later years, Douglas became a fervent supporter of the Warren Court decisions limiting police powers and protecting individual privacy.

After working his way through Whitman College, Douglas determined to enter Columbia Law School and rode freight trains east, arriving in New York City with a properly legendary 6-c- in his pocket. A brilliant student who was anguished at finishing second in his class, he briefly tried a job as a Wall Street lawyer, then moved on to Columbia and Yale, teaching law. Professor Douglas thought most of his students were "spoiled brats." His legal articles on high finance prompted Joseph P. Kennedy to bring him to Washington, D.C., in 1934. He soon succeeded Kennedy as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Franklin Roosevelt. The professor turned bureaucrat quickly became a regular at F.D.R.'s "command performance" poker games. He also became the President's favorite martini mixer (chilled glasses with lemon rubbed on the rim, and just a taint of vermouth).

Douglas seems to have spent a great deal of his spare time struggling with deep-seated fears. At Yale in his late 20s he put in months with Coach Bob Kipmuth, overcoming a terror of the water gained in childhood when he almost drowned. After a horse fell on him during a trip and broke 23 of his 24 ribs, Douglas capped three months of convalescence by painfully mounting and remounting a horse for weeks.

While such anecdotes are moderately revealing, the book is essentially reticent. Douglas' four marriages and a full-scale psychoanalysis are only fleetingly alluded to. The second volume, which Douglas is still writing, will cover his court years and can hardly avoid being fascinating. Meanwhile, though, what the Justice believes and what he has done are all there. Douglas the man has slipped by. And that is precisely what Douglas the author seems to have intended.

Jose M. Ferrer III

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