Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court

Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court
Author: Jeff Shesol
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 673
Release: 2011-03-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393079414

"A stunning work of history."—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time and Team of Rivals Beginning in 1935, the Supreme Court's conservative majority left much of FDR's agenda in ruins. The pillars of the New Deal fell in short succession. It was not just the New Deal but democracy itself that stood on trial. In February 1937, Roosevelt struck back with an audacious plan to expand the Court to fifteen justices—and to "pack" the new seats with liberals who shared his belief in a "living" Constitution.

Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War

Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War
Author: Marian Cecilia McKenna
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 654
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780823221547

This important book is a detailed reinterpretation of one of the most explosive events in modern American politics - Franklin Roosevelt's controversial attempt in 1937 to "pack" the Supreme Court by adding justices who supported his New Deal policies. McKenna traces in unprecedented detail theorigins of FDR's plan, its secret history, and the President's final failure. Drawing on a remarkable range of sources McKenna provides the definitive account of a turning point in American political and legal history.

American Default

American Default
Author: Sebastian Edwards
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2019-09-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691196044

The untold story of how FDR did the unthinkable to save the American economy.

Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade

Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud that Defined a Decade
Author: Jeff Shesol
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 630
Release: 1998-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393345971

"Mutual Contempt is at once a fascinating study in character and an illuminating meditation on the role character can play in shaping history."—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy loathed each other. Their antagonism, propelled by clashing personalities, contrasting views, and a deep, abiding animosity, would drive them to a bitterness so deep that even civil conversation was often impossible. Played out against the backdrop of the turbulent 1960s, theirs was a monumental political battle that would shape federal policy, fracture the Democratic party, and have a lasting effect on the politics of our times. Drawing on previously unexamined recordings and documents, as well as memoirs, biographies, and scores of personal interviews, Jeff Shesol weaves the threads of this epic story into a compelling narrative that reflects the impact of LBJ and RFK's tumultuous relationship on politics, civil rights, the war on poverty, and the war in Vietnam. As Publishers Weekly noted, "This is indispensable reading for both experts on the period and newcomers to the history of that decade." "An exhaustive and fascinating history. . . . Shesol's grasp of the era's history is sure, his tale often entertaining, and his research awesome."—Russell Baker, New York Review of Books "Thorough, provocative. . . . The story assumes the dimensions of a great drama played out on a stage too vast to comprehend."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1997 Critic's Choice) "This is the most gripping political book of recent years."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

The Nine

The Nine
Author: Jeffrey Toobin
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2008-09-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0307472892

Acclaimed journalist Jeffrey Toobin takes us into the chambers of the most important—and secret—legal body in our country, the Supreme Court, revealing the complex dynamic among the nine people who decide the law of the land. An institution at a moment of transition, the Court now stands at a crucial point, with major changes in store on such issues as abortion, civil rights, and church-state relations. Based on exclusive interviews with the justices and with a keen sense of the Court’s history and the trajectory of its future, Jeffrey Toobin creates in The Nine a riveting story of one of the most important forces in American life today.

Packing the Court

Packing the Court
Author: James Macgregor Burns
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2009-06-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1101081902

From renowned political theorist James MacGregor Burns, an incisive critique of the overreaching power of an ideological Supreme Court For decades, Pulitzer Prize-winner James MacGregor Burns has been one of the great masters of the study of power and leadership in America. In Packing the Court, he turns his eye to the U.S. Supreme Court, an institution that he believes has become more powerful, and more partisan, than the founding fathers ever intended. In a compelling and provocative narrative, Burns reveals how the Supreme Court has served as a reactionary force in American politics at critical moments throughout the nation's history, and concludes with a bold proposal to rein in the court's power.

Scorpions

Scorpions
Author: Noah Feldman
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
Total Pages: 636
Release: 2011-01-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0446575143

A history of the careers and constitutional visions of four U.S. Supreme Court Justices appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. A tiny, ebullient Jew who started as America’s leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative. A Klansman who became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. A backcountry lawyer who started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. A self-invented, tall-tale Westerner who narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed. Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in common. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of poverty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius. Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, and Robert Jackson began as close allies and friends of FDR. But the quest to shape a new Constitution led them to competition and sometimes outright warfare. Scorpions tells the story of these four great justices: their relationship with Roosevelt, with each other, and with the turbulent world of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. It also serves as a history of the modern Constitution itself. Praise for Scorpions “Smart and engaging.” —New York Times Book Review “Full of high-stakes intellectual drama.” —Washington Post “A first-rate work of narrative history that succeeds in bringing the intellectual and political battles of the post-Roosevelt Court vividly to life.” —Publishers Weekly

Nixon's Court

Nixon's Court
Author: Kevin J. McMahon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2011-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0226561216

Most analysts have deemed Richard Nixon’s challenge to the judicial liberalism of the Warren Supreme Court a failure—“a counterrevolution that wasn’t.” Nixon’s Court offers an alternative assessment. Kevin J. McMahon reveals a Nixon whose public rhetoric was more conservative than his administration’s actions and whose policy towards the Court was more subtle than previously recognized. Viewing Nixon’s judicial strategy as part political and part legal, McMahon argues that Nixon succeeded substantially on both counts. Many of the issues dear to social conservatives, such as abortion and school prayer, were not nearly as important to Nixon. Consequently, his nominations for the Supreme Court were chosen primarily to advance his “law and order” and school desegregation agendas—agendas the Court eventually endorsed. But there were also political motivations to Nixon’s approach: he wanted his judicial policy to be conservative enough to attract white southerners and northern white ethnics disgruntled with the Democratic party but not so conservative as to drive away moderates in his own party. In essence, then, he used his criticisms of the Court to speak to members of his “Silent Majority” in hopes of disrupting the long-dominant New Deal Democratic coalition. For McMahon, Nixon’s judicial strategy succeeded not only in shaping the course of constitutional law in the areas he most desired but also in laying the foundation of an electoral alliance that would dominate presidential politics for a generation.

The Invisible Front

The Invisible Front
Author: Yochi Dreazen
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0385347855

The unforgettable story of a military family that lost two sons—one to suicide and one in combat—and channeled their grief into fighting the armed forces’ suicide epidemic. Major General Mark Graham was a decorated two-star officer whose integrity and patriotism inspired his sons, Jeff and Kevin, to pursue military careers of their own. His wife Carol was a teacher who held the family together while Mark's career took them to bases around the world. When Kevin and Jeff die within nine months of each other—Kevin commits suicide and Jeff is killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq—Mark and Carol are astonished by the drastically different responses their sons’ deaths receive from the Army. While Jeff is lauded as a hero, Kevin’s death is met with silence, evidence of the terrible stigma that surrounds suicide and mental illness in the military. Convinced that their sons died fighting different battles, Mark and Carol commit themselves to transforming the institution that is the cornerstone of their lives. The Invisible Front is the story of how one family tries to set aside their grief and find purpose in almost unimaginable loss. The Grahams work to change how the Army treats those with PTSD and to erase the stigma that prevents suicidal troops from getting the help they need before making the darkest of choices. Their fight offers a window into the military’s institutional shortcomings and its resistance to change – failures that have allowed more than 3,000 troops to take their own lives since 2001. Yochi Dreazen, an award-winning journalist who has covered the military since 2003, has been granted remarkable access to the Graham family and tells their story in the full context of two of America’s longest wars. Dreazen places Mark and Carol’s personal journey, which begins when they fall in love in college and continues through the end of Mark's thirty-four year career in the Army, against the backdrop of the military’s ongoing suicide spike, which shows no signs of slowing. With great sympathy and profound insight, The Invisible Front details America's problematic treatment of the troops who return from war far different than when they'd left and uses the Graham family’s work as a new way of understanding the human cost of war and its lingering effects off the battlefield.

The Long Reach of the Sixties

The Long Reach of the Sixties
Author: Laura Kalman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 019995822X

"Americans often hear that Presidential elections are about "who controls" the Supreme Court. In The Long Reach of the Sixties, eminent legal historian Laura Kalman focuses on the period between 1965 and 1971, when Presidents Johnson and Nixon launched the most ambitious effort to do so since Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack it with additional justices. Those six years-- the apex of the Warren Court, often described as the most liberal in American history, and the dawn of the Burger Court--saw two successful Supreme Court nominations and two failed ones by LBJ, four successful nominations and two failed ones by Nixon, the first resignation of a Supreme Court justice as a result of White House pressure, and the attempted impeachment of another. Using LBJ and Nixon's telephone conversations and a wealth of archival collections, Kalman roots their efforts to mold the Court in their desire to protect their Presidencies, and she sets the contests over it within the broader context of a struggle between the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government. The battles that ensued transformed the meaning of the Warren Court in American memory. Despite the fact that the Court's work generally reflected public opinion, these fights calcified the image of the Warren Court as "activist" and "liberal" in one of the places that image hurts the most--the contemporary Supreme Court appointment process. To this day, the term "activist Warren Court" has totemic power among conservatives. Kalman has a second purpose as well: to explain how the battles of the sixties changed the Court itself as an institution in the long term and to trace the ways in which the 1965-71 period has haunted--indeed scarred--the Supreme Court appointments process"--