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   From: willy-the-pedo@clintonfoundation.org   
      
   "Trump - Inmate Number P01135809"  wrote in   
   news:uo4ukl$19ls4$7@dont-email.me:   
      
   > Donald Trump, the president of the United States from 2017 to 2021,   
   > is a saint compared to JFK and William O. Douglas.   
      
   On his tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery, William O. Douglas is   
   identified correctly as a former justice of the United States Supreme   
   Court, and incorrectly as a former member of the United States armed   
   forces. The error is significant, not only because Arlington National   
   Cemetery reserves its plots for distinguished veterans but because Douglas   
   himself was willfully responsible for the mistake. For 10 weeks at the end   
   of World War I, the 20-year-old Douglas served in the Whitman College   
   regiment of the Students' Army Training Corps in Walla Walla, Wash., where   
   he and his fellow trainees conducted unarmed predawn marches in their   
   street clothes against imaginary enemies. He later described his wartime   
   experience as a three-month stint in Europe as an Army private, and   
   recorded some of the putative details in an autobiography as well as a   
   Supreme Court opinion.   
      
   How did a prominent public figure manage to lie about such a central fact   
   of his biography? Probably the same way he lied about everything else:   
   flagrantly, easily and in the service of his own rags-to-riches legend. In   
   ''Of Men and Mountains,'' a personalized travel guide to his native state   
   of Washington, Douglas recalled his triumphant bout with polio at the age   
   of 2, though in fact he had suffered from an intestinal colic. He   
   frequently lied about his years as a student at Columbia Law School,   
   falsely boasting, for example, that he had graduated second in his class.   
   In his 1974 autobiography, ''Go East, Young Man,'' he repeated many of   
   these outright lies, introduced new ones and liberally embellished other   
   key details of his life story. His widowed mother, for instance, was not   
   destitute, but middle-class -- though it's true she was miserly and   
   secretive about her money.   
      
   Douglas's unabashed dishonesty is one of two revelations that give life to   
   ''Wild Bill,'' Bruce Allen Murphy's tirelessly researched biography of the   
   liberal judicial icon. The other surprise is what a rotten and   
   unscrupulous person Douglas could be. A habitual womanizer, heavy drinker   
   and uncaring parent, Douglas was married four times, cheating on each of   
   his first three wives with her eventual successor. He so alienated his two   
   children that they chose not to notify him when their mother, his first   
   wife, died of cancer. When pressed for money, which was almost always, he   
   was not above using insider information to make a quick buck in the stock   
   market, or serving as the president of a foundation set up by a   
   businessman with suspected ties to organized crime -- an association for   
   which Douglas narrowly avoided being impeached.   
      
   With these and other sordid discoveries, Murphy, the author of ''Fortas''   
   and ''The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection,'' is well positioned to take   
   Douglas to the mat, yet his portrait of the justice is ultimately a   
   positive one. At one point, a former Supreme Court law clerk is quoted on   
   the matter of Douglas's personal failings: ''You just have to say to   
   yourself, 'You know, enough people are pains in the neck who don't do   
   anything worthwhile in their lives.' '' This seems to be a fair statement   
   of Murphy's own attitude. In his 36 years on the court, Douglas was, in   
   Murphy's telling, a defender of the common good whose opinions on privacy,   
   civil liberties and the environment made him ''the one person who could   
   and did make a real difference in the American judicial system.'' It's   
   refreshing to see a biographer who can keep separate his judgments about   
   his subject's personal and intellectual lives. In this case, however, it's   
   not clear that Murphy should have been so generous.   
      
   No sooner had President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Douglas to the   
   Supreme Court in 1939 than he became bored with the job. He had previously   
   served as the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission,   
   aggressively reforming Wall Street in the aftermath of the nation's   
   financial collapse. The staid court, by contrast, forced one ''to wait for   
   the food to come washing up to your mouth with the high tide,'' as he put   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)