Warren v. Frankfurter

The nine Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court have an august, impersonal presence. But beneath those black robes beat the human hearts of men with very human worries, frustrations--and tempers. Chief Justice Earl Warren has a notably thin skin, and waspish Justice Felix Frankfurter can get under an elephant's hide. Last week the two tiffed on the bench.

Warren and Frankfurter had their first notable collision in public one day in 1957, when Frankfurter dared to interrupt Warren and reword some convoluted questions that the Chief Justice was putting to a lawyer. Warren flushed, began to shout: "Let him answer my question! He is confused enough as it is." Frankfurter grew pale behind his eyeglasses and cut back, "Confused by Justice Frankfurter, I presume." In 1958, they were at it again: Warren lashed Frankfurter, charging that one of his dissents made the court out to be "savage." And just six weeks ago the Chief Justice publicly criticized Frankfurter for delivering a long dissent that went beyond his written opinion in a lightweight larceny case.

Last week's spat grew out of a case in which the court ruled, 5-4, that Convicted Murderer Willie Lee Stewart was entitled to a new trial--his fourth--because of a legal error that technically violated the Fifth Amendment's guarantee against forced selfincrimination. The error: when Stewart testified at his third trial, the prosecutor asked him whether it was true that he had not testified at his first two trials. Felix Frankfurter leaned forward to dispute that decision and. as he almost always does, added some pungent remarks to his written dissent. He chided the court for taking "an isolated sentence or two and making it color the whole trial" and for "turning a criminal appeal into a quest for error." On that. Earl Warren issued a rebuttal: "This is a lecture," he snapped. "This is a closing argument by a prosecutor to the jury. The purpose of reporting an opinion is to inform the public and is not for the purpose of degrading this court." Frankfurter, addressing the Chief Justice, made a dry reply: "I'll leave it to the record." Afterward, the nine Justices stiffly stood up and filed out--an august, impersonal presence.

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