Justice Byron R. White: the legend and the man.

• Author: Ebel, David M.

This tribute begins with a brief recounting of some of Justice White's prodigious accomplishments during his lifetime. However, I then hope to move beyond what he did to the more meaningful analysis of what kind of man he was.

Byron White grew up in the small farming community of Wellington, Colorado, during the Depression. In the summers, he worked in the sugar beet fields and on a railroad section crew doing hard labor. He graduated as valedictorian of his high school class of six, and played about every sport a school that size could offer. He attended college at the University of Colorado, where he was, or did, just about everything. He was President of the Student Body; valedictorian of his class; athlete of national renown. He received a total of nine varsity letters in three sports, but it was in football where he received his greatest fame as an All-American.

His subsequent academic career included studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and receiving a law degree from Yale, where he (again) graduated at the top of his class. Along the way he also played three seasons of professional football in the National Football League, first with the Pittsburgh Pirates (now the Steelers) and then with the Detroit Lions. He was selected Rookie of the Year and twice led the League in rushing. At the time, he was the highest-paid player in the NFL--receiving $15,000 his first year, which was more than the owner of the team paid for the entire franchise a few years earlier.

Byron White's long career of public service began in World War II when he served in the Pacific Theater as a Naval Intelligence Officer. There, he played a critical intelligence role in locating a previously undetected portion of the Japanese fleet, which resulted in the carrier planes doing great damage to the enemy, and he investigated the sinking of PT Boat 109, the boat captained by a young lieutenant named John F. Kennedy. White served on the Bunker Hill when it was struck by two kamikazes, and he then transferred to the Enterprise, which was also hit within five days and knocked out of action.

Following the war, Byron White married Marion Stearns, daughter of Robert Stearns, who was at the time the President of the University of Colorado. The two of them were an inseparable team for fifty-five years.

After graduating from Yale Law School, Byron White clerked for Chief Justice Fred Vinson on the United States Supreme Court. He then returned to his roots in the West where he had some of his happiest years raising his family and practicing law in Denver for fourteen years with the law firm that ultimately became known as Davis, Graham & Stubbs.

In the 1960 Presidential election, Byron White was selected by Robert Kennedy to head the National Citizens for Kennedy Committee. After the election, he went to Washington as the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. There, he led federal marshals into Montgomery, Alabama to protect the civil rights of the Alabama Freedom Riders.

He managed to accomplish all of this by the youthful age of forty-four, but the best was yet to come. At the age of forty-four, President Kennedy appointed Byron R. White as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. He served in that capacity for thirty-one years, longer than all but a handful of other Justices in our nation's history. During that time, he authored more than 450 opinions of the Court affecting the lives of all Americans. It was during his tenure that the Court addressed such difficult issues as school...