Profile of Charles E. Whittaker on Famous Like Me

Charles Evans Whittaker (February 22, 1901 – November 26, 1973) was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1957 to 1962.

Whittaker was born on a farm near Troy, Kansas and attended school until he dropped out in the ninth grade. He spent the next two years hunting, trapping and farming, but developed an interest in law by reading newspaper articles about criminal trials. He applied to the Kansas City School of Law (currently the University of Missouri - Kansas City School of Law) and gained admission with the condition that he first acquire a high school education. He spent two years working, and taking high school courses from a private tutor before enrolling. While he was a student at the school, from 1922-1924, Harry S. Truman was a classmate of his. He received his law degree in 1924.

Whittaker joined a law firm in Kansas City, Missouri and built up a practice in corporate law. He had close ties to the Republican party. This led to his first appointment as a judge on the US District Court for the western division of Missouri on July 8, 1954. He then was nominated to the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit on June 5, 1956. He developed a good reputation as a judge and less than a year later he was nominated by his fellow Kansan, President Dwight Eisenhower, as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

On the closely-divided Supreme Court, Whittaker was a swing vote, but failed to develop a consistent judicial philosophy. He agonized deeply about his vote in 1962's Baker v. Carr and suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1962. At the behest of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Whittaker retired from the Court in 1962 citing exhaustion from the workload.

After the conclusion of his Supreme Court service, Whittaker became chief counsel to General Motors. He also became a resolute critic of the Warren Court as well as the Civil Rights Movement, decrying the civil disobedience of the type practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers as lawless. Like many conservatives, he criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as unconstitutional.

He died in 1973 at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City of a ruptured abdominal aneurism. He was survived by a wife, Winifred, and three sons, C. Keither, Kent C and Gary T.

Sources

• Former Justice Whittaker of Supreme Court is dead, New York Times, November 27, 1973.

The Warren Court
1957–1958:	H. Black | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | H.H. Burton | T.C. Clark | J.M. Harlan II | Wm. J. Brennan | C.E. Whittaker
1958–1962:	H. Black | F. Frankfurter | Wm. O. Douglas | T.C. Clark | J.M. Harlan II | Wm. J. Brennan | C.E. Whittaker | P. Stewart

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