If you're following the narrative on the blog with any regularity over the week, you probably noticed we've been taking a close look at Stephen Kinzer's brilliant new book, The Brothers, an intense look at the two worst and most destructive arch-villains in 20th Century American history. Having a major international airport named after John Foster Dulles is a slap in the face to all Americans who revere democracy and detest the aggressive fascism he espoused his entire miserable life.
Warren, who had served 3 terms as the Republican governor of California (although he was also nominated by the Democrats for reelection), served as Chief Justice from 1953 until 1969. He was one of the three or four most impactful Chief Justices in American History and there isn't a single decision he is best known for-- from Brown v Board of Education in 1954 to Miranda v Arizona in 1966-- that Foster Dulles would have agreed with. Both men were Republicans and elitists but Dulles was the preeminent American reactionary of his time and Warren was a lifelong idealist and progressive.
In fact, Warren turned out to be so unabashedly progressive on the Court-- and so persuasive in terms of forging a liberal activist majority on the Court-- that Eisenhower came to rue the day he ever appointed him. Eisenhower is said to have remarked that appointing him was "the biggest fool mistake I ever made," although this may be a right-wing myth.
Dulles would have never voted to desegregate American schools, the decision Warren is probably most well-known for. And Dulles, a dedicated anti-democracy fanatic certainly would never have championed the two big "one man, one vote" cases by which Warren ended the dominance of rural areas in state legislatures. Although conservatives in Congress frantically tried to pass a Constitutional Amendment to overrule Warren, they failed. "To the extent that a citizen's right to vote is debased, he is that much less a citizen," explained Warren defiantly. "The weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause." Had he been in a position to, John Foster Dulles would have ended universal suffrage entirely and gone back to a system in which only wealthy, white, male, property owners could vote.
In 1963, Warren's progressivism helped shaped the Gideon v Wainwright decision that requires that indigent defendants are entitled to legal counsel paid for by the government. Other Warren Court decisions that Dulles would have never allowed to slip through outlawed mandatory school prayer and enshrined a doctrine of privacy that led to abortion rights (Griswold v Connecticut).
