"Superbly well written . . . a wonderfully informative guide to the Supreme Court both past and present."―David J. Garrow, American History Jeffrey Rosen recounts the history of the Supreme Court through the personal and philosophical rivalries that have transformed the law―and by extension, our lives. With studies of four crucial conflicts―Chief Justice John Marshall and President Thomas Jefferson; post–Civil War justices John Marshall Harlan and Oliver Wendell Holmes; liberal icons Hugo Black and William O. Douglas; and conservative stalwarts William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia―Rosen brings vividly to life the perennial rivalry between those justices guided by strong ideology and those who cared more about the court as an institution, forging coalitions and adjusting to new realities. He ends with a revealing conversation with Chief Justice John Roberts, who is attempting to change the court in unexpected ways. The stakes, he shows, are nothing less than the future of American jurisprudence. "Authoritative analysis of how the justices’ “quirks of personality and temperament” have shaped American law and made the Court one of our strongest institutions … An illuminating look at the human side of the highest court." - Kirkus Reviews Jeffrey Rosen is the author of nonfiction books, including the recent Louis D. Brandeis and William Howard Taft . He is the president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center, a law professor at George Washington University, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic . He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for The New Yorker . WNET , channel 13, is a non-commercial television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey. With its signal covering the three-state New York metropolitan area, WNET is a flagship station of the Public Broadcasting Service, and a primary provider of PBS programming. The Supreme Court The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America By Rosen, Jeffrey Holt Paperbacks Copyright © 2007 Rosen, Jeffrey All right reserved. ISBN: 9780805086850 Introduction On April 8, 1952, to prevent an imminent steelworkers’ strike that he thought would cut off the flow of guns to U.S. troops in the middle of the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman decided to use his authority as commander in chief to seize the nation’s steel mills. His decision would provoke more criticism than any other in his presidency. But Truman had been emboldened to act in part because of confidential advice from Chief Justice Fred Vinson, whom Truman had appointed to the Supreme Court in 1946. When Truman informed Vinson in advance of his intention to seize the steel mills, the chief justice assured his friend the president that the seizure would be legal under his executive powers and that a majority of the Court would support it. Vinson’s advice turned out to be wrong. In June, two months after the president issued his executive order, the Supreme Court declared in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer that Truman had acted unconstitutionally. Writing for a 6–3 majority, Justice Hugo Black declared that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to make laws, and Congress had refused to authorize this heavy-handed approach to settling labor disputes. Black read his opinion for the Court from the bench. “Even though ‘theater of war’ be an expanding concept,” he drawled in his calm and deliberate southern accent, “we cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production.” Although an ardent Democrat as well as a former senator, Black revered the institution of the Supreme Court as something larger than the individual justices who composed it, and masterfully persuaded a majority of his colleagues to enforce the limits that the Constitution places on the president’s power. Vinson filed a sputtering dissent insisting that any president worthy of the office should be free to take emergency measures necessary to ensure the “survival of the nation.” Truman was understandably livid at his rebuke by a Court that had been appointed entirely by him or by his Democratic predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt. But Black soon made amends by inviting the aggrieved president and the entire Court over to his house in Alexandria, Virginia, for bourbon and a barbecue. As the canapés were passed around, the mollified Truman declared, “Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.”1 Fifty-four years later, a similar drama unfolded at the Supreme Court. President George W. Bush, seeking to protect the nation after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, issued an executive order creating special military commissions to try suspected enemy combatants who were being held at Guantánamo Bay