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Earl Warren and the Nation He Made
Riverhead
October 2006
On Sale: October 10, 2006
Featuring: Earl Warren
624 pages ISBN: 1594489289 EAN: 9781594489280 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
A masterful biography of the legendary chief justice of the
United States and chairman of the Warren Commission by an
award-winning journalist, using previously unavailable
government documents and scores of new interviews that cast
new light on this crucial figure in U.S. history. Earl Warren played a key role in nearly every defining
political moment in American history in the latter half of
the twentieth century. He began as an aggressive county
prosecutor offended by graft and vice, then rose through
California politics. As attorney general and governor, he
led the country's fastest-growing state during a time of
enormous change, his support for the internment of Japanese
Americans during World War II one of the few blemishes on an
otherwise progressive record. From his historic governorship
to his pivotal years as chief justice to his role as
chairman of the commission that investigated the
assassination of John F. Kennedy, Warren traversed the
Depression and the Cold War, the struggles to defend America
against foreign enemies, and the emergence of a muscular
commitment to individual liberty. As chief justice from 1953 to 1969, Warren refashioned the
place of the Supreme Court in American life, overseeing
cases that desegregated schools (Brown v. Board of
Education), established a constitutional right of privacy
(Griswold v. Connecticut), outlawed prayer in public schools
(Engel v. Vitale), created a right to counsel in state
trials (Gideon v. Wainwright), codified voting rights (Baker
v. Carr), and revolutionized police procedure (Miranda v.
Arizona). Through those cases, Warren became a target for
conservative ideologues, but he also carved a place for
himself as one of the Court's most respected justices and
reconstructed American society into the institutions and
values it upholds today. James S. Newton brings readers the first truly complete
consideration of Earl Warren, taking advantage of
unprecedented access to governmental, academic, and private
documents pertaining to Warren's life, as well as the
extensive cooperation of Warren's living children and
associates. Newton illuminates both the public and the
private Warren, the father of six whose own father was
murdered, the stoic leader of the Masons who was touched by
the difficulties of children, the sturdy yet prickly man.
The result is a monumental biography of a complicated and
principled figure that will become a seminal work of
twentieth-century American history.
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