Robert H. Jackson
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| Robert H. Jackson | |
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| In office July 11, 1941 – October 9, 1954 |
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| Nominated by | Franklin Delano Roosevelt |
| Preceded by | Harlan Fiske Stone |
| Succeeded by | John Marshall Harlan II |
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| Born | February 13, 1892 Spring Creek Township, Pennsylvania |
| Died | October 09 1954 (aged 62) Washington, D.C. |
Robert Houghwout Jackson (February 13, 1892–October 9, 1954) was United States Attorney General (1940–1941) and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941–1954). He was also the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials.
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[edit] Early life
Born in Spring Creek Township, Warren County, Pennsylvania, and raised in Frewsburg, New York, Jackson graduated from Frewsburg High School in 1909 and spent the next year as a post-graduate student attending Jamestown High School in Jamestown, New York. Jackson never attended college. At age 18, he went to work as an apprentice in a Jamestown law office, then attended Albany Law School, in Albany, New York, where he completed one year of the two-year program. During the summer of 1912, Jackson returned to Jamestown and apprenticed for the next year. He passed the New York Bar Exam in 1913 at the age of 21 and set up practice in Jamestown, New York. Over the next twenty years, he became a very successful lawyer in New York State and, through bar association activities, a rising young lawyer nationally.
[edit] U.S. Federal appointments, 1934–1940
Jackson was appointed to federal office by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934. Jackson served initially as general counsel of the U.S. Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue (today's Internal Revenue Service). In 1936, Jackson became Assistant Attorney General heading the Tax Division of the Department of Justice, and in 1937 he became Assistant Attorney General heading the Antitrust Division. In 1938, Jackson became United States Solicitor General, serving until January 1940 as the government's chief advocate before the Supreme Court.
[edit] U.S. Attorney General, 1940–1941
Jackson was appointed Attorney General by Roosevelt in 1940, replacing Frank Murphy. When Harlan Fiske Stone replaced the retiring Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice in 1941, Roosevelt appointed Jackson to the resulting vacant Associate's seat.
[edit] U.S. Supreme Court, 1941–1954
Jackson is widely considered by legal scholars as one of the greatest Supreme Court justices in history, known particularly for his vivid writing style. In 1943, Jackson authored the majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), which overturned a public school regulation making it mandatory to salute the flag and imposing penalties of expulsion and prosecution upon students that failed to comply. Jackson's stirring language in Barnette concerning individual rights is widely quoted. Jackson's concurring opinion in 1952's Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (involving President Harry Truman's seizure of steel mills during the Korean War to avert a strike), where Jackson formulated a three-tier test for evaluating claims of presidential power, remains one of the most widely cited opinions in Supreme Court history (it was quoted repeatedly by Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito during their recent confirmation hearings).
[edit] International Military Tribunal, 1945–c. 1946
In 1945, President Truman appointed Jackson, who took a leave of absence from the Supreme Court, to serve as U.S. chief of counsel for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. He helped draft the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which created the legal basis for the Nuremberg Trials. He then served in Nuremberg, Germany, as United States chief prosecutor at the international Nuremberg trial. Jackson pursued his prosecutorial role with a great deal of vigor (for instance, referring in arguments to Hermann Göring as being "half militarist, half gangster"), and not a little oratorical elegance (his opening and closing arguments before the Nuremberg court are widely considered among the best speeches of the 20th century). However, his management of the American prosecution case lacked clarity and drive and his inexperience of effective use of cross-examination was exposed, in particular, by Göring himself. He resigned his position as prosecutor after the first trial and returned to the U.S. in the midst of controversy.
The following exerpt of the Nuremberg Trials gives a sense of the exchanges:
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Well, those preparations were preparations for armed occupation of the Rhineland, were they not?
GOERING: No, that is altogether wrong. If Germany had become involved in a war, no matter from which side, let us assume from the East, then mobilization measures would have had to be carried out for security reasons throughout the Reich, in this event even in the demilitarized Rhineland; but not for the purpose of occupation, of liberating the Rhineland.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: You mean the preparations were not military preparations?
GOERING: Those were general preparations for mobilization, such as every country makes, and not for the purpose of the occupation of the Rhineland.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: But were of a character which had to be kept entirely secret from foreign powers?
GOERING: I do not think I can recall reading beforehand the publication of the mobilization preparations of the United States.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Well, I respectfully submit to the Tribunal that this witness is not being responsive, and has not been in his examination, and that it is . . .
[The defendant interposed a few words which were not recorded.]
It is perfectly futile to spend our time if we cannot have responsive answers to our questions.
[The defendant interposed a few words which were not recorded.]
We can strike these things out. I do not want to spend time doing that, but this witness, it seems to me, is adopting, and has adopted in the witness box and in the dock, an arrogant and contemptuous attitude toward the Tribunal which is giving him the trial which he never gave a living soul, nor dead ones either. I respectfully submit that the witness be instructed to make notes, if he wishes, of his explanations, but that he be required to answer my questions and reserve his explanations for his counsel to bring out.
THE PRESIDENT: I have already laid down the general rule which is binding upon this defendant as upon other witnesses. Perhaps we had better adjourn now at this state.
[edit] Later life, controversy and internal Supreme Court bickering
Jackson had informally been promised the Chief Justiceship by Roosevelt; however, the seat came open while Jackson was in Germany, and FDR was no longer alive. President Truman was faced with two factions, one recommending Jackson for the seat, the other advocating Hugo Black. In an attempt to avoid controversy, Truman appointed Fred M. Vinson. Jackson blamed machinations by Black for his being passed over for the seat and publicly exposed some of Black's controversial behavior and feuding within the Court. The controversy was heavily covered in the press and cast the New Deal Court in a negative light.
Jackson died in Washington, DC, at the age of 62 and, after funeral services in Washington's National Cathedral and then in Jamestown's St. Luke's Church, was interred near his boyhood home in Frewsburg, New York.
One of Jackson's law clerks during 1952-53, William H. Rehnquist, was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1971 and became Chief Justice in 1986. In December 1971, after Rehnquist's nomination had been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee and was pending before the full Senate, a memorandum came to light that he had written as Jackson's law clerk in connection with the landmark case, Brown v. Board of Education that argued in favor of affirming the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist wrote a brief letter attributing the views to Jackson and was confirmed. In his 1986 hearing he was questioned about the matter. His explanation of the memorandum was disputed in both 1971 and 1986 by Jackson's former secretary, and scholars have questioned its plausibility. See the discussion in the Rehnquist article.
Jackson was played by Alec Baldwin in the 2000 TNT television film Nuremberg.
An extensive collection of Jackson's personal and judicial papers is archived at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress and open for research. Smaller collections are available at several other repositories.
[edit] Quotes
- "The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts. One's right to life, liberty, and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly, and other fundamental rights may not be submitted to vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." - Opinion for the Court in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943)
- "Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard." - from the Barnette opinion
- "We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."
- "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us." - Nuremberg Tribunal
- "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants 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." - Nuremberg Tribunal
- "[T]he effect of the religious freedom Amendment to our Constitution was to take every form of propagation of religion out of the realm of things which could directly or indirectly be made public business, and thereby be supported in whole or in part at taxpayers' expense. That is a difference which the Constitution sets up between religion and almost every other subject matter of legislation, a difference which goes to the very root of religious freedom[...] This freedom was first in the Bill of Rights because it was first in the forefathers' minds; it was set forth in absolute terms, and its strength is its rigidity. It was intended not only to keep the states' hands out of religion, but to keep religion's hands off the state, and, above all, to keep bitter religious controversy out of public life by denying to every denomination any advantage from getting control of public policy or the public purse." - dissent in Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 U.S. 1 (1947)
- "The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact." (paraphrase) - comment in his dissent to Terminello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949).)
- "But when notice is a person's due, process which is a mere gesture is not 'due process.'" Mullane v. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co., 339 U.S. 306 (1950)
- "It is possible to hold a faith with enough confidence to believe that what should be rendered to God does not need to be decided and collected by Caesar." From the dissent in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952)
- "The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion it will cease to be free for religion - except for the sect that can win political power." From the dissent in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952)
- "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final" - on the Supreme Court; opinion concurring in judgement in Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443 (1953).
- "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated." - Excerpt from Opening Statement at the Nuremberg Trials, (1945)
[edit] External links
| Preceded by Stanley Forman Reed |
Solicitor General 1938–1940 |
Succeeded by Francis Biddle |
| Preceded by Frank Murphy |
Attorney General of the United States 1940 – 1941 |
Succeeded by Francis Biddle |
| Preceded by Harlan Fiske Stone |
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States July 11, 1941 – October 9, 1954 |
Succeeded by John Marshall Harlan II |
| United States Solicitors General |  |
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| Bristow • Phillips • Goode • Jenks • Chapman • Taft • Aldrich • Maxwell • Conrad • Richards • Hoyt • Bowers • Lehmann • Bullit • Davis • King • Frierson • Beck • Mitchell • Hughes • Thacher • Biggs • Reed • Jackson • Biddle • Fahy • McGrath • Perlman • Cummings • Sobeloff • Rankin • Cox • Marshall • Griswold • Bork • McCree • Lee • Fried • Starr • Days • Dellinger • Waxman • Olson • Clement |
| United States Attorneys General |  |
|---|---|
| Randolph • Bradford • Lee • Lincoln • R Smith • Breckinridge • Rodney • Pinkney • Rush • Wirt • Berrien • Taney • Butler • Grundy • Gilpin • Crittenden • Legaré • Nelson • Mason • Clifford • Toucey • Johnson • Crittenden • Cushing • Black • Stanton • Bates • Speed • Stanberry • Evarts • Hoar • Akerman • Williams • Pierrepont • Taft • Devens • MacVeagh • Brewster • Garland • Miller • Olney • Harmon • McKenna • Griggs • Knox • Moody • Bonaparte • Wickersham • McReynolds • Gregory • Palmer • Daugherty • Stone • Sargent • W Mitchell • Cummings • Murphy • Jackson • Biddle • T Clark • McGrath • McGranery • Brownell • Rogers • Kennedy • Katzenbach • R Clark • J Mitchell • Kleindienst • Richardson • Saxbe • Levi • Bell • Civiletti • W Smith • Meese • Thornburgh • Barr • Reno • Ashcroft • Gonzales |
| The Stone Court |  |
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| 1941–1942: | O.J. Roberts | H. Black | S.F. Reed | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | F. Murphy | J.F. Byrnes | R.H. Jackson | |
| 1943–1945: | O.J. Roberts | H. Black | S.F. Reed | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | F. Murphy | R.H. Jackson | W.B. Rutledge | |
| 1945–1946: | H. Black | S.F. Reed | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | F. Murphy | R.H. Jackson | W.B. Rutledge | H.H. Burton | |
| The Vinson Court | ||
| 1946–1949: | H. Black | S.F. Reed | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | F. Murphy | R.H. Jackson | W.B. Rutledge | H.H. Burton | |
| 1949–1953: | H. Black | S.F. Reed | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | R.H. Jackson | H.H. Burton | T.C. Clark | S. Minton | |
| The Warren Court | ||
| 1953–1954: | H. Black | S.F. Reed | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | R.H. Jackson | H.H. Burton | T.C. Clark | S. Minton | |
