So far as can be determined, Warren’s appointment was the first occasion in our history when a president cited an appointee’s political views as his reason for naming him to the chief justiceship. The President said Mr. Warren was a “middle-of-the-roader.” That was before the term “modern Republicanism” was invented. They both mean the same thing, or, as one sapient observer recently remarked, an elephant trying to make a jackass of himself. It had been generally believed that the appointment would go to the late Arthur F. Vanderbilt of the New Jersey Supreme Court, a past president of the American Bar Association who had an impressive record as a jurist. But one day the then Attorney-General, Herbert Brownell, flew out to Sacramento, came back, and announced the Warren appointment. He probably could have saved himself the trip. Earl Warren had delivered the California vote to Eisenhower at the 1952 Republican Convention. Now he had his reward.

Frank Hanighen (Human Events, Jan. 6, 1958) has since reported that Warren had the President over a barrel. The deal at the convention was that if Warren could cast California’s sixty-eight votes to seat the Eisenhower delegates from five states, instead of the regularly elected Taft delegations, Warren would get the first Supreme Court vacancy if Eisenhower became President. When Vinson died, it was Eisenhower’s intention to move one of the associate justices up to Chief Justice and name Warren an associate justice. Brownell went to Sacramento so to inform Warren. But Governor Warren, despite his jollity, could be extremely cold and calculating where the interests of Earl Warren were concerned. He informed Brownell he had been promised the first vacancy on the Court; the first vacancy was the chief justiceship; that’s what he wanted and that’s what he intended to have. When Brownell returned to Washington and reported this to the President, Eisenhower gave in.

No one who followed closely Earl Warren’s career should have been surprised at his subsequent actions as Chief Justice. The only surprising aspect of the appointment was that it came at the hands of a president whom the people had elected because they wanted a change in Washington. In the light of what we now know, the surprise has worn thin. But there is one group which never selects its pets without thorough familiarity with their views. This is the leftist organization known as Americans for Democratic Action, which is our modern-day equivalent of the old Socialist Party.

Governor Warren’s views, which surely must have been known to the President when he named him to head the Court, were never such as to cause the “liberals” and leftists to love him less. He was quick to take up the cry of “McCarthyism.” He didn’t wait until ’53 and ’54, when this became a term of opprobrium among all the legions of the left. He adopted it earlier, just after the communists had invented the word to smother the efforts of the Senator from Wisconsin in exposing the left-wing elements in the American State Department. The cue was given by the national secretary of the Communist Party in May, 1950, when he issued this call to the forces of the left: “I urge all Communist Party members, and all anti-Fascists to yield second place to none in the fight to rid the country of the fascist poison of McCarthyism.” (Of course, “fascists” in the Red lexicon were all those opposed to communism.) One month later, Earl Warren told a national governors’ conference that he did not like “McCarthyism,” that he thought it was hurting our prestige abroad and suggested it would be a very bad thing for the Republican Party to become saddled with it.

Warren, of course, went right down the line for foreign aid and complete submission of United States foreign policy to the vagaries of the United Nations. He said in 1952, “The United Nations should be the cornerstone of our foreign policy.” And—shades of things to come—he was for a compulsory federal Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), under which the federal bureaucrats could snoop into every big and little business in every state in the land and tell its proprietor whom he could and could not hire. He was also for ever more social security, government housing, government aid to farmers, and “world cooperation through the United Nations.” He thus managed, while he was still in active political life, to be very highly thought of not only by the Republican standard bearer, but by Adlai Stevenson and Harry Truman as well. In fact, Truman once said of him that he was a Democrat and didn’t know it.

Governor Warren also had his doubts about the Taft-Hartley Act. He thought it terribly unfair that union bosses should have to take an anticommunist oath when the heads of corporations weren’t forced to do so too. But perhaps the best comment on Earl Warren’s record, both before and after appointment, was supplied by the very left-wing magazine the Nation. It carried an article in July, 1956, in which it waxed lyrical over “the Warren Court.” In fact, the article was subtitled “Turn to Liberalism,” meaning, of course, the creeping socialism of the Nation. It even box-scored the justices, accordingly as they acted to suit the leftist philosophy of the Nation and its readers. And, lo and behold, Chief Justice Warren appeared with the high score of 73 percent, just below the scores of the Nation’s heroes—Justices Black, Douglas, and Frankfurter.

Although President Eisenhower named Warren to the chief justiceship of the Supreme Court in September, 1953, his appointment was not confirmed by the Senate until the following March. A good many senators were troubled by Warren’s lack of experience for the job and about his seeming agreement on many important issues with the leftists and anti-anticommunists. But those were the halcyon days of the “great change” in Washington, and the appointment went through by a voice vote.