Posner on (Murphy on) Douglas

Perusing Leiter Reports, I came across this remarkable piece by the prolific federal circuit judge, Richard Posner. It's a review of Bruce Murphy's biography (15 years in the making) of William O. Douglas, one of the more colorful Supreme Court justices who reached the height of his judicial career during the tumultuous Warren era. The man was, apparently, something of a sociopath. Fascinating little piece. A sample:

Murphy is right to separate the personal from the judicial. One can be a bad person and a good judge, just as one can be a good person and a bad judge. With biography and reportage becoming ever more candid and penetrating, we now know that a high percentage of successful and creative people are psychologically warped and morally challenged; and anyway, as Machiavelli recognized long ago, personal morality and political morality are not the same thing. Douglas was not a good judge (I will come back to this point), but this was not because he was a woman-chaser, a heavy drinker, a liar, and so on. It was because he did not like the job. In part he did not like it because he wanted another job badly, a job for which he was indeed better suited. Roosevelt may have made a mistake in preferring Truman as his running mate in 1944. Not a political mistake: Douglas had never run for elective office, and the Democratic Party bosses, whose enthusiastic support FDR thought essential to his re-election, were passionate for Truman. If passing over Douglas was an error (which we shall never know), it was an error of statesmanship. With his intelligence, his toughness, his ambition, his leadership skills, his wide acquaintanceship in official Washington, his combination of Western homespun (a favorite trick was lighting a cigarette by striking a match on the seat of his pants) and Eastern sophistication, and his charisma, Douglas might have been a fine Cold War president.
At least a Douglas administration would not have been afflicted by the cronyism that so undermined Truman's presidency. Douglas had his own cronies, many with character flaws similar to his own, like Lyndon Johnson and Abe Fortas, but they were abler and less manifestly corrupt than Truman's cronies. And unlike Henry Wallace, the vice president whom FDR providentially dropped at the end of his third term in favor of Truman, Douglas was not soft on communism. I do not think that he was ideological at all; he was merely ambitious. I doubt even that he was, despite his later judicial record, a genuine liberal. Douglas was just ornery and rebellious and publicity-seeking: "always fame was the spur," as Ronald Dworkin, one of Douglas's liberal critics, put it.
Thus Douglas's hostility to Frankfurter seems to have been based on professional jealousy rather than on political or jurisprudential disagreement. Come the 1950s and the dimming of his presidential prospects, Douglas gave his rebellious instincts full rein and reveled in the role of the iconoclast, the outsider; he became the judicial Thoreau. Later, when he himself had become an icon of the left, he claimed that had he been president he would not have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and would have recognized Red China, and so forth; but these claims cannot be taken very seriously, especially given his complete lack of respect for truthfulness.