Charles Evans Whittaker

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Charles Evans Whittaker (February 22, 1901 – November 26, 1973) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1957 to 1962.

Whittaker was born on a farm near Troy, Kansas and attended school until he dropped out in the ninth grade. He spent the next two years hunting, trapping and farming, but developed an interest in law by reading newspaper articles about criminal trials. He applied to the Kansas City School of Law (currently the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law) and gained admission with the condition that he first acquire a high school education. He spent two years working, and taking high school courses from a private tutor before enrolling. While he was a student at the school, from 1922-1924, Harry S. Truman was a classmate of his. He received his law degree in 1924.

Whittaker joined a law firm in Kansas City, Missouri and built up a practice in corporate law. He had close ties to the Republican party. This led to his first appointment as a judge on the US District Court for the western division of Missouri on July 8, 1954. He then was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on June 5, 1956. He developed a good reputation as a judge and less than a year later he was nominated by his fellow Kansan, President Dwight Eisenhower, as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Whittaker thus became the first person to serve as a judge of a United States District Court, a United States Court of Appeals, and then the Supreme Court. (Justice Samuel Blatchford also served at all three levels of the federal judiciary, but the court system was configured slightly differently at that time.)

On the closely-divided Supreme Court, Whittaker was a swing vote, but failed to develop a consistent judicial philosophy. He agonized deeply about his vote in 1962's Baker v. Carr and suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1962. At the behest of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Whittaker retired from the Court in 1962 citing exhaustion from the workload.

After the conclusion of his Supreme Court service, Whittaker became chief counsel to General Motors. He also became a resolute critic of the Warren Court as well as the Civil Rights Movement, decrying the civil disobedience of the type practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers as lawless. Like many conservatives, he criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as unconstitutional.

He died in 1973 at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City of a ruptured abdominal aneurism. He was survived by his wife, Winifred, and three sons, C. Keither, Kent C and Gary T.

The federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, which houses the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, is named in memory of Whittaker.

[edit] Sources

• "Former Justice Whittaker of Supreme Court is dead", The New York Times, November 27, 1973.

Preceded by John Caskie Collet	Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit 1956-1957	Succeeded by Marion Charles Matthes
Preceded by Stanley Forman Reed	Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States March 25, 1957 – March 31, 1962	Succeeded by Byron White

The Warren Court
1957–1958:	H. Black | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | H.H. Burton | T.C. Clark | J.M. Harlan II | Wm. J. Brennan | C.E. Whittaker
1958–1962:	H. Black | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | T.C. Clark | J.M. Harlan II | Wm. J. Brennan | C.E. Whittaker | P. Stewart