Robert Jackson was a key figure in mid-twentieth-century American liberalism. He rose rapidly up the cursus honorum of the New Deal. In the period between 1934 and 1941, Roosevelt appointed him Assistant General Counsel to the IRS, then Assistant Attorney General for the IRS. He then worked for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division before becoming Solicitor General, Attorney General, and finally Associate Justice on the Supreme Court, serving from 1941 to 1954. Jackson was the last Supreme Court Justice who never attended college, nor had a law degree (he spent one year in law school and otherwise “read law,” learning the trade as Lincoln had). He took a leave of absence to be the lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trial. A zealous liberal in his political career, he became something of a conservative on the Court. He is usually classed as among the best prose stylists in Court history (with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.). Yet he has had only one biography until now—Eugene C. Gerhart’s America’s Advocate (1958), though John Q. Barrett has made a career collecting and posting material on Jackson. Something enigmatic about Jackson keeps him peripheral.
Now at least he has a heavy-hitting biographer in G. Edward White, whose Robert H. Jackson: A Life in Judgment was just released this October. White is professor of law at the University of Virginia and the foremost judicial biographer of our day, as the author of the classic American Judicial Tradition, a serial biographical overview of two centuries of American jurisprudence. He has also written biographies of John Marshall, Earl Warren (for whom he clerked), and Alger Hiss, as well as the very fine Creating the National Pastime, a history of baseball from 1903 to 1953. But White concedes that “I have been struck by how difficult it is to encapsulate [Jackson] other than in contradictions.” This is probably because White is too much a biographer and not enough of a historian, getting sucked into the psychological and personal, and not analyzing political and constitutional ideas.
The childhood, early-life, and pre-career background is usually the worst chapter in any biography. White’s is probably the strongest part of his book, even though he sometimes falls into the trap of giving too much detail, becoming quotidian and dull. (For instance, we do not need the details of his sister Mary’s experience at Smith College, including her C-minus in Zoology.) Jackson grew up an old-stock Protestant agrarian on the border of Pennsylvania and New York—the US-6 route, still one of the least densely-populated parts of the country east of the Mississippi. He ended up in Jamestown, New York (also home of Lucille Ball). His people were Jeffersonian democrats, with a small-town ethos of individualism as well as familism and community. Jackson came to believe that the twentieth century destroyed this idyllic world, but he seems never to have considered that the progressive and New Deal policies that he did so much to promote may have contributed to this destruction.
When we get to Jackson’s public and political career, White tends to downplay his legal and constitutional controversies. His criminal and civil suits regarding Andrew Mellon’s taxes, for example, are often seen as harassing and vindictive. Early in World War II, Jackson provided Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a legal fig-leaf to cover the apparently illegal “destroyers-for-bases” deal, in which America gave Britain some older-model Naval destroyers in exchange for a rent-free lease on several naval and air bases in several territories in the Atlantic. It was a serious stretch of executive authority; Princeton’s Edward S. Corwin, perhaps the greatest authority on the Constitution in the twentieth century, called the deal “an endorsement of unrestrained autocracy in the field of our foreign relations … no such dangerous opinion was ever before penned by an Attorney General.” Roosevelt himself told Jackson that he needed him to draw the political flak. White mostly skirts this thorny episode.
