The most striking final scene in American politics occurred on July 9, 1974. Former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren has only a few hours left on earth after a legendary life advancing civil rights and freedoms. Yet as Warren prepared for his end, his dying wish was to land one final blow in his unrelenting three-decade feud with Richard Nixon.

Two of Warren's former colleagues, Justices William Douglas and William Brennan, stood by the dying man's bedside. Warren grabbed Douglas's hand. He told two justices that the Supreme Court must rule for the Watergate special prosecutor in the legal battle over the Nixon White House tapes. The president refused to obey the lower court's order. "If Nixon had gotten away with it, then Nixon would have made the law, not Congress and the courts," Warren said. "If Nixon can twist, twist, and change the law, then the old court that you and I have served for so long is not worthy of its legacy."

The two men nodded solemnly. They have followed the Warren-Nixon feud over the years as it evolved from a feud between Californians to politically poisoning and polarizing the Supreme Court, both on and off the court. They promised not to let Warren down. Richard Nixon: A Life

Richard Nixon is a captivating tour-de-force biography of our darkest president, one that critics will hail as a defining portrait that readers of The Whole Life of Richard Nixon will Waiting. 'Democrats' Buy 'Democrats' Just as President Donald Trump names Judge Neil Gore as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Carla, chief counsel and policy director of the conservative Judicial Crisis Network Carla Severino railed to NPR about the dispiriting state of confirmation politics and the factional configuration of the nation's highest court, expressing concern for Democrats during Judge Robert Bork's confirmation hearings. behavior,

is a forgivable mistake. Senator Edward Kennedy was abrasive to Bork, who lost his bid to be nominated to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987. “Bock’s America,” the senator famously said, is “a place where women are forced to have abortions in back alleys, where black men sit at segregated lunch counters,” and “where rogue police can break down doors in midnight raids. A new verb appears in the dictionary: for Bork, or “to obstruct by systematic slander or slander,” “KDSPE,” “KDSPs,” but the toxicity of today’s nominating politics goes back to Bork’s past, and with Warren and Nixon Two twentieth-century California Republicans and partisans came to an agreement. The feud lasted for decades, setting a precedent for the nasty quarrels that followed. It begins with Nixon's first political campaign and continues to that scene at Warren's bedside. It still echoes today.

Their animosity dates back to 1946, when Warren was governor of California, Lieutenant Colonel Nixon, serving in the Navy, ended the war, and Warren was a progressive* **A Republican, he won by appealing to Democrats and independents in a state that embraced nonpartisan politics. He had good things to say about Voshear, who helped represent California's interests in Congress. When Nixon tried to get Republican presidential candidate Harold Stassen to come to California to campaign for him, Warren, with her own national ambitions, convinced Stassen to stay away from him.

Nixon defeated Warhill but never forgot what Warren had done. "It was then that a slow-burning flame was ignited by Richard Nixon," recalled campaign aide Bill Arnold, who in 1950 launched a successful red-baiting campaign for the U.S. Senate. , against his Democratic opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas, whom Warren refused to support. Nixon and his friends were outraged.

“Unless a man is a liar,” said Nixon’s mentor, “he is entitled to the combined support of the party he represents.” Banker Herman Perry wrote that Warren’s behavior “had a profound impact on me and the 80’s real *** It's not good for Republicans."

When Warren stumbled in the 1952 Republican presidential primary, Nixon's wife, Pat, gloated in a letter to a friend. "Warren's show in Oregon was sad," she wrote. "I didn't cry."

Nixon himself went further. He boarded the Warren campaign train from Sacramento to the Republican convention in Chicago, quietly urging California delegates to support the governor's rival, General Dwight Eisenhower. The incident became known in national political lore as the "Great Train Robbery." At the convention, Nixon worked tirelessly to win the delegation's support for Ike in key procedural votes that decided the nomination.

Warren angrily sent an envoy to Eisenhower. "We have a traitor in our delegation," he charged. "It's Nixon." But Ike refused to take action. In fact, he told the envoy that Nixon was likely to be the general's running mate. Eisenhower's campaign manager later confirmed that Nixon had been moved to the top of the short list to "preserve the consistency of the California delegation," and the dispute reached a fever pitch. At the California delegation caucus, Warren thanked his supporters for their help and publicly snubbed Nixon. One of Nixon's friends wrote in his diary: "It is very obvious that it was intended." Warren believed "Dick was trying to sabotage him."

From that day on, "Warren hated Nixon," Asa, a longtime political activist and party fundraiser, recalled in an oral history. Over the years, Warren would tell people "how Nixon slit my throat from here to here," gesturing with his fingers around his neck.

So as reporters headed to California to write profiles of the new vice presidential nominee, they found Warren loyalists eager to chatter. They revealed how Nixon's friends arranged for wealthy donors to pay for his personal and political obligations.

"Nothing is good," Perry warned a friend. "Some Warrens will be scratched to death seeing Dick lose."

In late September, the then-liberal New York Post reported that "Secret Rich Trust Funds Make Nixon Style Well beyond his salary." The story was widely publicized, but it sparked an election-year scandal that grew with alarming speed and impact. Only Nixon's convincing appearance on national television—where he famously spoke snidely about his family's Cocker Spaniel, Checkers—saved his career.

The feud subsided once Eisenhower appointed Warren to lead the Supreme Court in 1953. Almost nothing the new Chief Justice and Vice President can do to each other is unseemly. But then Nixon lost the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy and tried to make a comeback by running for Warren's old job as governor of California in 1962. He traveled to California and posed for photos with Democratic incumbent Gov. Edmund Pat Brown, smiling and posing affectionately, and telling the media what a great job Brown was doing. He sent his son, Earl Warren Jr., to campaign for Brown against Nixon. Brown recalled in an oral history that the chief justice "felt like Nixon had a double cross" with him in 1952 and that "when Earl hated people, he hated them." When Nixon lost, Brown remembered, Warren "went back to him again." Laughing and laughing."

"Tricky," Warren liked to call Nixon, then embarrassed himself at his "last press conference," when he told reporters they wouldn't let him "kick around anymore. Kick” that week, on Air Force One, flying back from Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral, President Kennedy and Chief Justice Warren giggled like schoolchildren as they traded news reports of Nixon’s downfall.

*****

The quarrel continued until 1968, when Nixon once again launched a comeback to run for president.

The smoldering flashpoint sparked a stir that changed the Supreme Court nomination process.

Warren was ready to retire but didn't want Nixon to name his successor. He approached President Lyndon Johnson and struck a deal that elevated Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, LBJ's good friend and adviser, to chief justice after only a few years on the court.

Nixon won't get anywhere. Applying the same reasoning today's Republicans used when they blocked Judge Merrick Garland's nomination to the court last year, Nixon argued that "a new president" should fill the vacancy. /p>

Senate Republicans went to work to block and block Fortas' nomination. Warren was forced to stay in office, an unpleasant duty as Nixon was sworn in as the 37th president in January 1969.

Senate Democrats, however, are furious about Fortas' treatment. Their outrage became outright when a Nixon Justice Department report confirmed that Fortas had received a $20,000-a-year retainer from a convicted financier. Fortas resigned in May, and Warren didn't get any younger, eventually resigning from his post in June. Nixon will now have two seats to fill.

To replace Earl Warren, the President selected Judge Wallenberg as the court's new chief judge. Hamburger was approved by the Senate, but the Communist Party's tactics at the Battle of the Fortress left deep scars. Historian Stephen Ambrose wrote: "Democrats would have to be saints not to want to pay for the Democrats to first turn Fortas into chief justice, then expose him and remove him from the court. Drive away with vengeance, and no one will consider the Democrats to be saints,” suggested presidential adviser John Ehrlichman: “The liberals, the Ivy League clique, think the courts are their own private playground.” . He did just that, appointing Judge Clement Haynesworth of South Carolina to fill Fortas' seat.

Nixon now fell into the same trap twice.

Taking a page from the Fortas battle, Democrats plundered Haynesworth for financial impropriety. Nixon railed against the "vicious character assassination" Haynesworth had endured, but the president was blinded by his own rhetoric.

When Republicans complained that for a hundred years the Senate's practice had been to ignore a nominee's philosophy and judge him solely on technical suitability, Democrats replied, Fortas's liberal decision was condemned by Senate conservatives," Ambrose pointed out. "It was the Republicans who broke with tradition. "

The cycle began. The Senate rejected Haynesworth. The stubborn president then appointed another Southern judge, G. Harold Caswell of Georgia, Democrats also encountered the same bruising tactics they took from Nixon's book

Carswell's nomination was frustrating; he was more of a segregationist than anything else. A jurist, not Haynesworth. Today, Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska said there is a lot of mediocrity in America. people who are also entitled to some representation on the Supreme Court, the argument remains fresh in the memory of the conflict over Warren and Fortas's seats, which was a lot like the Spanish Civil War—an outside enemy. The era also presented an issue that would consume the nomination process for the moderates who were ultimately approved to fill Fortas' seat. Justice Harry Blackmun, who ended up writing the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion case that has haunted the Supreme Court ever since.

The conflict over the Fortas seat was one of several vicious squabbles, like the invasion of Cambodia and the publication of the Pentagon Papers that exposed Nixon's dark side in revenge for the failures of Haynesworth and Carswell , he tried unsuccessfully to impeach liberal Justice Douglas. After a failed Supreme Court ruling seeking to halt the release of secrets leaked in the Pentagon Papers case, Nixon created an internal gang nicknamed "The Plumbers" to investigate, intimidate and smear leakers. This eventually led him to Watergate.

Nixon looked like he had survived the scandal until revelations of the White House recording system led Special Counsel Leon Jaworski to subpoena the potentially incriminating tapes. Nixon claimed "executive privilege" to keep his tapes and documents secret.

So in July 1974, Justices Douglas and Brennan appeared at Warren's deathbed, and Warren said to them: "If Nixon is not forced to hand over the people he talks about their illegal behavior, tape of the conversation, then freedom will soon die in this country." They told him that the Supreme Court was meeting to discuss the case that very day. They assured him they would rule on Nixon.

Warren died that night. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in United States v. Nixon that the president must turn over his White House tapes to prosecutors. Two weeks later, the tapes were released to the public, the consequences of which forced Nixon to resign.

, but Nixon, who lived another 20 years, may have had the last laugh. All told, he appointed four judges to the court. After Hamburg and Blackmun, he chose William Rehnquist and Lewis Powell, two conservatives who helped move the court away from Warren's progressive lines. This has exacerbated the divide between left and right on the bench and off the field.

By the time Edward Kennedy led the attack on Bork in 1987, he was simply following political precedent, much of it set in Warren Nixon's Battle Royal