A Hard Man to Pigeonhole

Shortly before noon one day last week, Justice Robert H. Jackson made his final purchase in a Washington department store, got into his car and headed for the Supreme Court Building. On the way he suffered a heart attack. He drove to the nearby home of his secretary and, within minutes, Robert Houghwout Jackson was dead. In his 62 years he rose to eminence among lawyers, served with ability as U.S. Solicitor General and Attorney General, as Supreme Court Justice and as U.S. prosecutor at Nuernberg. When Jackson was named Attorney General, New Dealing Columnist Marquis Childs wrote: "If there is any single individual who represents all the qualities that commonly inhere in the term [New Dealer], it is the man who has just been made Attorney General of the U.S." But Robert Jackson could not be so easily defined; he was a hard man to pigeonhole.

Born in Spring Creek, Pa., a town his great-grandfather had helped found, he was reared as an Andrew Jacksonian Democrat. He began practicing law in Jamestown, N.Y., after taking a two-year Albany Law School course in one year. His first clients were union men arrested in a violent transit strike. He got them acquitted. Before long he was vice president and general counsel of the Jamestown transit company. By the time he went to Washington, at 42, Jackson's abilities were widely recognized. His cases had included a $1,700,000 judgment, a hearing by lantern before a backwoods justice of the peace, and the defense of a Communist arrested for selling the Daily Worker on a public square. (Years later he wrote in a Supreme Court opinion that to disregard Communists' legal rights would be to "cast aside protection for the liberties of more worthy critics who may be in opposition to the Government of some future day.")

The $200 Million Credo. Franklin Roosevelt had an eye for such promising young men; Jackson was brought to Washington as counsel for the Bureau of Internal Revenue. He landed right in the middle of a tremendously complicated tax suit against former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon. Cried Jackson, during the trial: "It is Mr. Mellon's credo that $200 million can do no wrong. Our offense consists in doubting it." Mellon's estate was forced to pay $700,000 in back taxes--and Bob Jackson took a big step upward in the New Deal hierarchy.

His way led to the position of Assistant Attorney General (while in that job, Jackson ardently supported President Roosevelt's effort to pack the Supreme Court), thence to Solicitor General and, in 1940, to Attorney General.

Defending his role in the court-packing plan (in a book published just before Jackson himself was named an Associate Justice), he pleaded eloquently for new blood in the court. There are, said he, "certain sustained and procedural pressures toward conservatism which only the most alert Justices will sense and only the most hardy will overcome."

Jackson was to become one of the more conservative-minded members of the court. More often than not, he found himself in vigorous dissent from the liberal opinions of Justices Hugo Black, William Douglas and Frank Murphy.

Outside the Law. On May 2, 1945, President Truman selected Jackson to serve as the chief U.S. prosecutor for the Nuernberg trials of Nazi war criminals. Jackson was lawyer enough to realize that the Nazi leaders were being tried on ex post facto grounds. He excused this by saying that the war criminals had been so wicked, so inhumane, that they "cannot bring themselves within the reason of the rule which in some systems of jurisprudence prohibits ex post facto laws." In his opening statement, Jackson said: "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well." History already has come to make a wry face on tasting the wine from Nuernberg's chalice. That the U.S. fought a war with Communist allies is completely justifiable, but that U.S. representatives then sat with Communist judges to try others on charges of "crimes against humanity" (of which the U.S. knew the Communists to be as guilty as the Nazis) is now recognized as a mockery of justice.

Simmering Feud. For Jackson, too, Nuernberg ended sourly. Nearing the completion of his work there, he sent a bitter cable to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, accusing Justice Black of heading an anti-Jackson cabal within the Supreme Court. Headline writers had a field day before the Jackson-Black feud was returned to the privacy of the Supreme Court chambers. Even then it simmered on.

In his postwar years on the court, Jackson carried on as he always had--ably, and with a lucid pen. But clearheaded and forceful as he was, he never quite succeeded in expressing what it was that he stood for.

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