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and the contrarian against the abuses of both big corporations and big government. Ben Franklin or Thomas Edison surely would have understood his feisty unorthodoxy. Nobody would have been a better guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition than Douglas. The U.S. Army’s lawyer Joseph Welch eventually embarrassed Joe McCarthy in 1954 by asking whether McCarthy had “no shame” in pursuing supposed communists; but Douglas had attacked McCarthy from the outset, accusing him of trampling on both procedural rights and the First Amendment. “The great danger of this period is not inflation, nor the national debt nor automatic warfare,” Douglas wrote in the New York Times Magazine. “The great, critical danger is that we will so limit or narrow the range of permissible discussion and permissible thought that we will become victims of the orthodox school.”9

Douglas had appropriately titled this article “The Black Silence of Fear.” The narrow thinking of the Republican right annoyed him to no end. Luckily for America, by the early 1950s Douglas’s shoot-from-the-hip voice had become unrestrained. While Douglas held no brief for Marxist-Leninist philosophy, he understood how essential it was for the Supreme Court to defend freedom of thought at all costs. Douglas predicted an Orwellian nightmare if American teachers, for example, were silenced and forced to adhere to official dogma. Yet Douglas, for all his virtues, made a series of bad choices regarding whether Julius and Ethel Rosenberg should be executed—as they were on June 17, 1953. He refused to fight for their lives: in the end, he had no tolerance for spies.

On the other hand, Douglas got the disaster in Vietnam right from start to finish. His 1953 book North from Malaya warned the Eisenhower administration not to get bogged down in Southeast Asia along with the French at Dien Bien Phu. North from Malaya was Douglas’s third book on his “traveling social conscience” (as his biographer James F. Simon put it). Douglas was prophetic about the limits of U.S. intervention in the third world. He would have made a terrific secretary of state. All of his “magic carpet” trips took place while he was on the Supreme Court. Friends used to joke that there must be five William O. Douglas look-alikes because he seemed to be everywhere at once. Journalists and book reviewers often praised Douglas for being the most literary Supreme Court justice since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “The eye-to-ear witness reporting,” the chief White House correspondent for CBS, Eric Sevareid, wrote of Douglas in the Saturday Review, “is magnificent.”

Douglas brought along to the Arctic all his acuity, and his global perspective. While the Muries didn’t know much about the Rosenbergs or Vietnam in 1956, they were keenly aware that Douglas might hold the key to persuading President Eisenhower to sign an executive order creating the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. When Douglas asked, “You want to go for a walk?” power brokers quickly grabbed their hats. Only Woody Guthrie was a more celebrated tramper than Douglas in 1956. Bringing his tackle box with him, using mostly a light rod and dry fly, Douglas had fished Silver Creek in Idaho and the Rio Grande in Texas and everywhere in between. “I would rather hook a one-pound rainbow with a dry fly on a 3½-ounce rod,” Douglas wrote, “than a four-pounder with bait or hardware.”10

Douglas was a crusader for protecting treasured landscapes. Using the New York Times and the Washington Post as his forum, Douglas argued wholeheartedly that conservationists had to battle to save forests, lakes, canyons, and rivers from industrialization. For a CEO, dealing with Douglas on environmental protection laws had all the appeal of shaving with a blowtorch. Scolding, steely-eyed, and intolerant toward polluters, Douglas was always willing to be a lone vote on the Supreme Court when a case involved protecting America’s natural heritage.11 For a long time he dreamed about exploring the tussock tundra, which swept across Arctic Alaska and which reminded him of the Scottish moors. “I had seen