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Tavis: Jim Newton is a veteran journalist who's written for 'The New York Times' and the 'Atlanta Journal Constitution.' He now serves as the Los Angeles City County Bureau Chief at the 'L.A. Times.' His new book is called 'Justice for All, Earl Warren and the Nation He Made.' Jim Newton, nice to have you on the program.

Jim Newton: Pleasure to be here, thank you.

Tavis: Glad to have you. I am fascinated, as I have always been, by the life of this Californian Earl Warren. What so fascinates you to write something that is this dense?

Newton: (Laugh) It's not that dense. I became interested in him first as a chief justice, and in Civil Rights and civil liberties, and the great work he did in securing those rights. Then later in my career, I became an editor responsible for coverage of Sacramento and other parts of the state, and so I became interested in learning more about his governorship, which turns out to be a really profoundly important period in California history.

Tavis: It is profoundly important. There are a number of things, so many things we could talk about with regard to his governorship. But I was just saying to you before we came on the air here how fascinated I was to learn something I did not know, and I'll have you explain it. How does a guy who was a Republican, which I think a lot of us forget that. Because you think of the Warren years, as an African American, I certainly think of the Warren years as a time we advanced most aggressively on issues of Civil Rights and human rights.

We'll come back to his court years in just a moment. But juxtaposed against what he accomplished on the court, it's hard to remember that he was a Republican, and you tell the story, a Republican who won when he ran for governor at one point both the Republican and Democratic primaries. Explain this story. (Laugh)

Newton: It's essentially impossible to (unintelligible).

Tavis: Yeah, it is impossible.

Newton: He won first in 1942 in wartime, beat a sitting Democrat, Culbert Olson. And then governed, very quickly moved to his center, governed as a real centrist, or even a liberal. Then in 1946, as you say, the first and presumably and presumably (laugh) last and only time that a candidate for governor in this state was nominated by both parties. So he actually went on to have a fall election that year, but only against a Prohibition candidate. It was a real walk from that point forward.

Tavis: For those who were not political science students, just imagine for the moment that, say, Arnold Schwarzenegger would be nominated by both the Republican party and the Democratic party, and go on to be elected governor. That could never happen today.

Newton: That could never happen.

Tavis: Fascinating piece of - it speaks to what a remarkable guy he was, at least to voters at that time.

Newton: I think that's true.

Tavis: Back in the ay. When you say, through this subtitle, 'Earl Warren and the Nation He Made,' I'm not sure that's an overstatement. Maybe it is. But it's a bold statement, to say that this guy helped make a nation. What do you mean by that?

Newton: I guess what I mean by that is that some of the basic principles and foundational institutions of our society today, the premises upon which our society rests today, in many cases date to the Warren years, specifically the Warren court years. Integrated public facilities, schools and the like. Obviously an outgrowth of Brown vs. Board Of Education.

Rights such as the right to have a lawyer in a state proceeding. Now that's not even a controversial right today. But before Earl Warren, that was not a right that was honored in some states. The right of privacy, which is heavily wrapped up in the question on abortion. Warren was not there for Roe vs. Wade, but he was there for Griswald, Griswald vs. Connecticut, the case that established that there were limits to the government's intrusiveness on a person's personal privacy.

Those are all principles that we now, I think, to some degree take for granted, and that are accepted by liberals and conservatives alike, in most cases. Those are principles that we owe to Earl Warren.

Tavis: Back to Brown vs. Board. Talk to me about Warren's involvement specifically in that Brown vs. Board case, and how it turned out.

Newton: Well, Brown vs. Board had been argued before the court before Warren got there. Fred Vincent was then the chief justice. Vincent died in 1953, and Eisenhower appointed Warren to replace him. Warren's chief - I think it's hard to know exactly how the court would have voted, had it come to a vote under Vincent, but it seems clear that at a minimum there would have been three votes against the plaintiffs, which is to say the Negro plaintiffs from the south and from elsewhere. From Kansas, and elsewhere. It's possible it could have gone five to four against the plaintiffs, and actually upheld the institution of segregation in schools.

Tavis: Separate but equal.

Newton: Separate but equal. Either way, even if the court had ultimately voted to strike segregation in schools, if it had done so, on a split court, I think it would have vastly undermined the moral significance of the ruling. Warren's great contribution to that debate is to deliver a unanimous court in it. And I think that he - I go to some great lengths in the book to describe how he did that - he really very patiently, but with the expertise of a very seasoned politician, worked the court, and brought around the reluctant justices.

The last to go was Stanley Reed, and finally he confronted Reed and said, Stanley, you'd better decide what's best for the country. And Reed, recognizing that he would be a lone vote against segregation, and that much would be made of that, sort of folded his cards.

Tavis: Why did Warren feel, Jim, that on that particular issue of separate but equal, and as you and I both know and everybody else knows, it was a case about education, but it turned out to be the law of the - it challenged every other law in the land. Turned it on its head, this whole notion of separate but equal. But it started, of course, in the genre of education.

Why did he feel, then, it was necessary for him to get a unanimous decision on that particular case? I can't imagine any Supreme Court chief - I can't imagine John Roberts today feeling that on any particular case, he had to work the court because this decision must be unanimous. Why did Warren feel that way?

Newton: I think Warren recognized that this decision would have, was a profoundly important one in the history of social relations in this country, and that any split on the court would be taken advantage of by opponents of desegregation. To capitalize on it, to legitimize delay or obstruction. Now even as it was, as you well know, there was a huge amount of obstruction and delay. So even after -

Tavis: With all deliberate speed, which meant nothing.

Newton: Clearly, that which comes in the second Brown case the following year, that's clearly language the court lived to regret. I think it was again, what Warren was trying to do was sort of reduce the size of the target that the court was putting up to be as small as possible. So rather than order the desegregation of all public facilities, for instance, he limited it to education.

And Brown is written in such a way that it only applies to public schools. Over time, of course, it became, then, the basis for desegregating a whole panoply of other institutions. But they were trying as much as they could - he was trying as much as he could, to limit the resistance to it. Ultimately, that was with mixed success, but I think we can assume that had it been a split court, that that period of resistance would have lasted even longer.

Tavis: Answer for me right quick how you think he juxtaposed being the guy that delivered this unanimous decision that said separate but equal is no longer the law of the land, at least in education, but in that second case, to your point, that language? With all deliberate speed, which again, as students know, meant that you could take your own time, basically.

Newton: A lot of deliberate, and not much speed.

Tavis: I like that, a lot of deliberate, not much speed. (Laugh) One way to put it. Describe those two things for me.

Newton: Well, I think they're only reconcilable by the fact that the court was hoping to persuade moderates to follow it. He was hoping, the court was hoping, that in the south, there would be enough - which is where the segregated school systems for the most part were - that there would be enough sympathetic receivers of the court's decision to push desegregation forward.

As it turned out, in all deliberate speed, the phrase itself was suggested by Felix Frankfurter. In retrospect, all deliberate speed obviously gives sanction to those who would drag their feet, and that was made worse by Eisenhower, who was President at the time, and who never really found the wherewithal to stand up for the court on Brown. Had Eisenhower pushed it more forcefully, I think it's possible that all deliberate speed wouldn't have become the sort of fall-back position that it became for many obstructionists.

Tavis: Let me hit these other two other cases right quick. Griswald vs. Connecticut.

Newton: Monumentally important case in the establishment of a right of privacy. Many people, conservative critics in particular, feel that the court invented a whole new right in that case. I take some issue with that. I think that there is no question whether the Constitution, throughout the Bill of Rights, includes language that suggests that part of what the Bill of Rights is attempting to do is constrain the government from intruding on lives.

Whether it's preventing it from quartering soldiers in homes, or requiring warrants, or allowing speech, the practice of religion. Griswald itself only addressed a case where the Connecticut law that made it illegal for married couples to buy contraceptives. All the justices agreed that the law was sort of ridiculous. Where Griswald becomes very controversial in modern times is that right of privacy becomes the right upon which Roe vs. Wade is based.

As I say, Warren was not there for Roe vs. Wade, although it's also worth remembering that Roe vs. Wade was written by one Republican appointee, Harry Blackman, and joined by the chief justice at the time, Chief Justice Berger, who was also a Republican. So, it has become a much more partisan debate today, but it really wasn't as it unfolded through that period.

Tavis: The last case you mentioned earlier, Miranda vs. Arizona. For those of us who watch any cop show, and there are so many to choose from these days, (laugh) you've heard a thousand times you have the right to remain silent, or put another way, as every brother knows who's been harassed by a cop, you've heard that a thousand and one times. You have the right to remain silent. That happened in the Warren years.

Newton: Very controversial at the time. Police really thought it meant the end of effective policing in America. I will say this, I covered the Los Angeles police department for five years for the 'L.A. Times.' I watched hundreds and hundreds of people get arrested. And I've never had a police officer complain to me about having to read Miranda rights.

Miranda did not destroy policing in this country. In later years, when it was revisited by the court, police associations actually went to bat for Miranda, 'cause it gives some clarity to what an officer's required to say. A lot of the criticism of it at the time, and a lot of the criticism of the Warren court decisions generally are that the Warren court strayed too far into legislating, and didn't just rule as a sort of dispassionate court.

It is true that in Miranda, that they actually wrote in effect the warning that police were to read, and that goes further than your average Supreme Court decision does. That said, I don't think it had the tragic consequences that people thought that it would at the time.

Tavis: He had this uncanny ability to be effective, and yet not tow the GOP line. There are parts of that strategy that Schwarzenegger gets some credit for in his stewardship of the state at the moment, but Schwarzenegger, again, no Earl Warren here. (Laugh) But how did Warren do that so effectively?

Newton: I would say that he governed very much from his gut, and from a sort of personal base of one. He was a Republican, was his whole life, but was never a creature of the Republican Party in the sense that he ran as a nonpartisan and tried to govern as a nonpartisan. He was quite liberal on social issues, as we've talked about. Even before Brown, he was part of striking segregated schools in California.

He was very involved in trying to bring universal healthcare to California. A large highway construction, other kind of construction projects, and was willing to levy taxes to do it. He took advantage. There was one institutional difference, which is that he took advantage of something called the cross file in California, which allowed candidates to file for the nominations of both parties in those days.

So there were some differences structurally, then and now. But I think in the end, it's that he had a personal vision of where he wanted to take the state, and he hewed to it. And he didn't let himself be pushed off by the shrill partisans of either side.

Tavis: You write very forthrightly in the book about the fact that perhaps something he should have apologized for, perhaps, but never did, was his support of the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Newton: He was, among other things, a very stubborn man. And he found it very difficult to apologize for it. He did in his memoirs apologize for it. Unfortunately, they didn't come out until after he died. So never in his lifetime did he issue a forthright apology.

Tavis: And finally, since the court today has its first day back to work for the new session, how do you explain that a court that had nine White guys on it, (laugh) one could argue accomplished more on Civil Rights, on human rights, on moving America forward than the most diverse courts over the last few years in the history of this nation. We've got women and everybody else on the court, but they can't touch the Warren years, with nine White guys.

Newton: The only thing I can say about it - maybe not the only thing. The only thing that comes to mind, the Warren court was distinguished by one other thing, which is that they were not, for the most part, professional judges. Warren had been a governor. Hugo Black had been a Senator. William Douglas came out of the SEC. Robert Jackson was attorney general.

Felix Frankfurter was a Harvard law professor. They were not diverse ethnically or by gender, certainly. It was nine White guys. But they were intellectually diverse, and I think that they pushed each other to be better. They debated each other in ways that were fruitful. And they were leaders. And I think that the Warren court's record stands up to time very well.

Tavis: It's a fascinating book by Jim Newton, 'Justice for All, Earl Warren and the Nation He Made.' Highly recommended by this one person, at least. Jim Newton, nice to - that makes two of us, me and Jim. You recommend this, too?

Newton: I do too. (Laugh)

Tavis: (Laugh) Nice to have you on.

Newton: Tavis, a pleasure.

Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles, thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.