The good old days?

My ears perked up several weeks ago when I heard that Sen. Chris Dodd’s late father, Thomas, had been a top prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials in 1945-46 and had written more than 300 letters home about it. His son described the letters as long, detailed and often written right after Thomas Dodd interrogated or cross-examined a Nazi big-shot.

I asked the campaign to get me an early copy of the letters, which will be published in book form later this year. It was on my doorstep on Tuesday.

The letters are just as the senator described them. I read them yesterday and began working on my story, which will appear in the Sunday Monitor. The material is so rich I could not possibly get everything I wanted into even a long Sunday story.

So here is one outtake (sorry about the long set-up, but I think it is needed context):

In mid-1946, Harlan Fiske Stone died. A New Hampshire native, Stone was chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The man who led the American legal team at Nuremberg was Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. Thomas Dodd was his chief assistant and confidant. Jackson wanted to be promoted to chief justice, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had suggested he might make such an appointment.

Now FDR was dead and the new chief justice would be Harry Truman’s choice.

But Jackson had squabbled with two other justices, Hugo Black, who was known to have been a member of the Ku Klux Klan before joining the court, and William O. Douglas. Specifically, Jackson had written into a ruling his opinion that Black should have  recused himself from a case that his former law partner had argued before the court.

Later, while Jackson was awaiting Truman’s choice, two newspaper columns reported that Douglas and Black would resign from the court if Jackson became chief justice. Jackson believed the columns contained information that could only have been leaked by one of the two justices.

After Truman appointed Fred Vinson chief justice, Jackson renewed his dispute with Black through a broadside, written from Nuremberg, saying he wanted tougher recusal policies on the bench.

All this background is well-known to historians of the period, but what struck me was Thomas Dodd’s description of a conversation with Jackson on June 7, 1946, the day Jackson learned he would not be named chief justice:

“The Justice is a really great man – he did not flicker an eyelash when he heard that Vinson was appointed. I was with him when he received the news. He said, ‘Vinson is a grand man and he will make a fine Chief Justice.’ Had Jackson been at home – had Roosevelt lived – well, all would be different today. Black and (Justice Frank) Murphy and Douglas – I am told – all worked strenuously to prevent his appointment. The Justice has told me that Black, the former Klansman, has not changed his bigoted mind, but to the public he makes it appear that he has. In the private sessions of the judges he shows it. Murphy is woman crazy and actually emotionally unstable, to put it mildly. Douglas is an opportunist – a trickster. Fine people for the highest court in the land.”

Certainly the split on the current U.S. Supreme Court causes friction. But if this is an example of the good old days, when people acted with decorum and decency, I'll take today’s more public brawl.