WARREN BURGER: THE PRAIRIE WIND

By Hugh Sidey

Those somber judicial robes that cloaked the broad shoulders of Warren Earl Burger for 17 years as Chief Justice of the United States never really disguised the fact that underneath he was an exuberant prairie yeoman--and proud of it. After a few sips of one of his fine clarets, Burger, who died last week at the age of 87, would lean back and reminisce about his rearing in the mold of the Horatio Alger stories, where young boys never rested, tried everything, excelled at much and took joy at each simple turn in a life on the land. He recalled the hot summer workdays near St. Paul, Minnesota, when he would cool off with a splash in the farm pond, then pick ripe, tender tomatoes, lick them so salt would stick and pop them full into his mouth. "There was no better treat on this earth," he claimed.

He got the face of a god from his Swiss-German ancestors, but he topped it with a slightly ridiculous pompadour that he wore as a chip on his brow after Washington Post cartoonist Herblock began to lampoon his hairstyle. He detested the media, yet he knew how to use them. He traveled widely, poking into English law, studying prisons, establishing a judicial-administration school. "I want to make things work right," he said when he was derided for spending too much time on the mechanics and not possessing the intellectual capacity to guide legal doctrine.

Burger did not plan to do what he did, other than being a lawyer. But he came to adulthood in a time when a young man of energy bumped into opportunity around every corner. His pal Harold E. Stassen, another bumptious Minnesota lawyer, became one of the hottest young Governors in the nation, and Burger was floor manager for Stassen's unsuccessful run for the 1948 Republican presidential nomination. Dwight D. Eisenhower's men noticed Burger and brought him to Washington after Ike's election in 1952. Burger was surprised and somewhat mystified when Richard Nixon plucked him off the appeals court to be Chief Justice. "I hardly knew Nixon," Burger marveled at the time. "I had not seen him for months until a few minutes before we went to the announcement of my nomination.'' That Burger was never captured by Nixon was demonstrated five years later when Burger wrote the unanimous opinion forcing Nixon to turn over the tapes to the special prosecutor, the act that doomed Nixon's presidency. "There was never any question from the start," Burger later said. "That was one of the easiest decisions I made."

Burger was in many ways a walking contradiction, a gregarious loner. He showed up at social events all over the capital, but he had few intimates. When Nixon named another Minnesotan, Harry A. Blackmun, to the high court and Blackmun wondered whether he was up to the job, Burger thundered, "Of course you are. Harry, you and I have been preparing all of our lives for these jobs. We are as good as the rest of them."

When Burger decided to leave the court and head the Bicentennial Commission of the U.S. Constitution, court scholars were astounded, still not understanding Burger's romantic realism. Time to go. Besides, his love of history and particularly the Constitution was another field to explore. He became a prairie wind that wheedled money for seminars and celebrations on the great document. And there was even the suspicion that he toned down his pompadour as he strode through the country as a white-maned evangelist for the doctrine of just making things work the way the Founding Fathers wrote it down.