[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 106 (Tuesday, June 27, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9189-S9192]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE DEATH OF FORMER CHIEF JUSTICE BURGER
Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, yesterday's newspapers reported
that former Chief Justice Warren E. Burger died on Sunday here in
Washington. He was 87 years old.
Twenty-six years ago, President Nixon nominated Warren Burger to be
Chief Justice with the hope of reversing the activism of the Warren
Court. Yet history was not entirely cooperative: Chief Justice Burger
presided over a 17-year period in which many of the era's most profound
controversies had to be decided by the High Court. A number of those
issues, including school busing to achieve desegregation: Swann versus
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971; the separation of
church and state as applicable to government aid to parochial schools,
Lemon versus Kurtzman, 1971; and Executive privilege, United States
versus Nixon, 1974, were decided in opinions written by Chief Justice
Burger himself.
The Chief was somehow able to take all of this and more in stride. He
relished his additional statutory duties as chancellor of the Board of
Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, and as chairman of the board of
trustees of the National Gallery of Art. Although my service as a
regent of the Smithsonian Institution began just after Chief Justice
Burger's tenure as chancellor ended in 1986, I did have the
exhilarating honor, in September of 1985, to be presented the Joseph
Henry Award by then-Chancellor Burger on one memorable evening at the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Following his retirement from the Court in 1986, Chief Justice Burger
devoted himself on a full-time basis to his work as Chairman of the
Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution, to which
President Reagan had appointed him the previous year.
Characteristically, the Chief threw himself into that effort with the
great energy and enthusiasm he applied to all of his pursuits. I recall
corresponding with him about the Commission's progress and his many
ideas for increasing public appreciation for the Constitution in its
bicentennial year. Among its good works, the Commission produced the
excellent pocket-sized Constitutions that are available in Senate
offices. I have taken to carrying a copy with me, and I know the
distinguished Senator from West Virginia has as well.
In his Foreword to the pocket Constitution, Chief Justice Burger
wrote that our constitutional system:
[D]oes not always provide tidy results; it depends on a
clash of views in debate and on bargain and compromise. For
200 years this Constitution's ordered liberty has unleashed
the energies and talents of people to create a good life.
Warren Burger created just such a good life through his own
indomitable energies and talents. He came from humble roots in St.
Paul, MN, attended college and law school at night, and ultimately rose
to become Chief Justice of the United States.
Chief Justice Burger was a distinguished jurist and a patriot in the
finest sense of the word. He was also a wonderful husband and father
and, although it is not much in fashion to say so today, he was a
gentleman. He was my friend for more than a quarter century, and he
will be greatly missed.
Mr. President, I ask that the obituary by Linda Greenhouse from the
New York Times of June 26th be printed in the Record.
The obituary follows:
[From the New York Times, June 26, 1995]
Warren E. Burger Is Dead at 87; Was Chief Justice for 17 Years
(By Linda Greenhouse)
Washington, June 25--Warren E. Burger, who retired in 1986
after 17 years as the 15th Chief Justice of the United
States, died here today at age 87. The cause was congestive
heart failure, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court said.
An energetic court administrator, Chief Justice Burger was
in some respects a transitional figure despite his long
tenure. He presided over a Court that, while it grew steadily
more conservative with subsequent appointments, nonetheless
remained strongly influenced by the legacy of his liberal
predecessor, Chief Justice Earl Warren. The constitutional
right to abortion and the validity of busing as a remedy for
school segregation were both established during Chief Justice
Burger's tenure, and with his support.
The country knew Chief Justice Burger as a symbol before it
knew much about him as a man or a judge.
He was President Richard M. Nixon's first Supreme Court
nominee, and Mr. Nixon had campaigned on a pledge to find
``strict constructionists'' and ``practitioners of judicial
restraint'' who would turn back the activist tide that the
Court had built under Chief Justice Warren, its leader since
1953.
The nomination on May 21, 1969, immediately made Mr.
Burger, a white-haired, 61-year-old Federal appeals court
judge, lightening rod for those who welcomed as well as
[[Page S 9190]]
those who feared the end of an era of judicial activism.
It was a central contradiction of Mr. Burger's tenure as
Chief Justice that long after he became one of the most
visible and, in many ways, innovative Chief Justices in
history he remained, for many people, the symbol of
retrenchment that Mr. Nixon had presented to the public on
nominating him.
In fact, the Supreme Court in the Burger years was in its
way as activist as the Court that preceded it, creating new
constitutional doctrine in areas like the right to privacy,
due process and sexual equality that the Warren Court had
only hinted at.
``All in all,'' one Supreme Court scholar, A. E. Dick
Howard, wrote in the Wilson Quarterly in 1981, ``the Court is
today more of a center for the resolution of social issues
than it has ever been before.''
While there were some substantial changes of emphasis, the
Burger Court--a label liberals tended to apply like an
epithet--overruled no major decisions from the Warren era.
It was a further incongruity that despite Chief Justice
Burger's high visibility and the evident relish with which he
used his office to expound his views on everything from legal
education to prison management, scholars and Supreme Court
commentators continued to question the degree to which he
actually led the institution over which he so energetically
presided.
His important opinions for the Court included the decision
that validated busing as a tool for school desegregation, the
one that struck down the ``legislative veto'' used by
Congress for 50 years to block executive branch actions, and
the one that spurred President Nixon's resignation in 1974 by
forcing him to turn over White House tape recordings for use
in the Watergate investigations. Yet Chief Justice Burger was
just as often in dissent on major decisions. In that, he
differed from Chief Justice Warren, who voted with the
majority in nearly all important cases.
Those seeking to identify the sources of intellectual
leadership on the Court usually pointed to William H.
Rehnquist, another Nixon appointee to whom Chief Justice
Burger assigned many important opinions, and to William J.
Brennan Jr., the Court's most senior and, with Thurgood
Marshall, most liberal member.
As the senior Associate Justice, Justice Brennan had the
right to assign the opinion in any case in which he was in
the majority and the Chief Justice was in dissent, and he
often exercised that prerogative by assigning major opinions
to himself, particularly in the area of individual rights.
As the years passed, Chief Justice Burger seemed to assign
himself the opinions in relatively straightforward and
uncontroversial cases, avoiding those in which the Court was
deeply split and in which it would have required considerable
effort to marshal or hold a fragile majority. As a result,
his personal imprint on the Court's jurisprudence was not
always readily identifiable.
an innovator in administration
But his imprint was distinct in the area to which he gave
his most sustained attention, judicial administration.
Mr. Burger liked to say that he took his title seriously.
He was Chief Justice of the United States, not just of the
Supreme Court, and he took as his mandate the stewardship of
the entire judicial system, state as well as Federal.
An array of institutions were created under his aegis,
including the National Center for State Courts, the Institute
for Court Management and the National Institute of
Corrections. The common purpose of those organizations was to
improve the education and training of participants in nearly
all phases of the judicial process, whether judges, court
clerks or prison guards.
The Chief Justice turned the small Federal Judicial Center,
for which he served by statute as chairman of the board, into
a major center for research and publishing about the courts.
He believed that judges could be helped to be more
efficient if professional management techniques were imported
to the courts, from clerks' offices to judges' chambers. The
Institute for Court Management set up a six-month program for
training court managers and administrators.
The Supreme Court itself became one of the first fully
computerized courts in the country; in 1981, the Justices all
received computer terminals on which to compose their
opinions.
The Chief Justice campaigned tirelessly for better pay for
judges, better education for lawyers and help for the Court's
evergrowing caseload. From his earliest years in office, he
warned that the Federal courts and the Supreme Court in
particular were becoming dangerously overworked.
In 1983, he asked Congress to create an appellate panel
that could relieve some of the Supreme Court's caseload by
resolving conflicting opinions among the Federal appeals
courts.
Many Admirers, But Detractors as Well
Judges and others interested in these long-ignored
administrative issues responded with gratitude. One of the
Chief Justice's warmest admirers on the Federal bench was
Frank M. Johnson Jr., a Federal appeals court judge from
Alabama who won praise from civil rights advocates for his
orders on prison issues and other rulings.
``Warren Burger has redefined the nature of his office,''
Judge Johnson wrote in the early 1980's. ``He has
concentrated his energy not simply on exploring the
subtleties of constitutional doctrine but on reforming the
mechanics of American justice. More than any of his 14
predecessors, he has invested the prestige of the Chief
Justiceship in efforts to make the American judicial system
function more efficiently. He has used his position not as an
excuse to withdraw from public affairs but as an opportunity
to furnish public leadership.''
But the priority that Chief Justice Burger assigned to
administration also had its detractors, who complained that
he trivialized his office by emphasizing the mechanics of
justice at the expense of its substance.
Occasionally, too, his enthusiastic lobbying was seen as
overbearing by those at whom it was directed. In 1978, for
example, he became deeply involved in the effort in Congress
to overhaul the bankruptcy system.
One Democratic Senator, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, whose
subcommittee had jurisdiction over the bill, complained
publicly that a ``very, very irate and rude'' Chief Justice
had telephoned him to object to a legislative development and
``not only lobbied but pressured and attempted to be
intimidating.''
The Chief Justice could also be rather intimidating from
the bench, particularly when a relatively inexperienced
lawyer was arguing a position with which Mr. Burger
disagreed. While Chief Justice Warren's favorite question
from the bench was, ``Yes, but was it fair?'' Chief Justice
Burger often asked: ``Yes, but why is this case in the
courts? Isn't this a matter for the Legislature to address?''
working to limit the judiciary's scope
Chief Justice Burger believed in a limited role for the
courts and reserved some of his sharpest criticism for those
who looked to them to resolve social and political problems
that, in his view, were not the province of judges. ``If we
get the notion that courts can cure all injustices, we're
barking up the wrong tree,'' he liked to say.
A speech he gave while he was still a judge on the Court of
Appeals for the District of Columbia provided a useful
summary of the view he held throughout his career: ``That
courts encounter some problems for which they can supply no
solution is not invariably an occasion for regret or concern.
This is an essential limitation in a system of divided
power.''
Some of the more important decisions while he was Chief
Justice were those that limited litigants' access to Federal
court by using the doctrines of standing, mootness and
deference to state courts.
He seemed to regard suits for small monetary stakes as a
waste of judges' time, and many of his speeches complained
about the disproportionate cost to the system of trying the
lawsuits brought by prisoners or consumers over modest losses
of money or property.
His questioning of one lawyer, who argued in 1982 on behalf
of 168,000 consumers, each with a claim for $7.98 against the
Gillette Company, was the talk of the Court for weeks, ``What
is the economic justification for this kind of lawsuit in the
Federal courts under any circumstances?'' the Chief Justice
demanded.
``We are in state court, judge, in this case,'' the lawyer,
Robert S. Atkins, replied.
``In state or Federal court?'' the Chief Justice persisted.
``The problem,'' Mr. Atkins said, ``is that if you cheat
people a little bit but do it a lot, you can go free----''
The Chief Justice interrupted to interrogate him about the
proportion of the recovery that would go for legal fees.
inviting attention, some of the time
Chief Justice Burger's effort to police the moral character
of lawyers who sought to become eligible to argue before the
Court rankled some of the other Justices and in 1982 provided
a rare public glimpse of internal disagreements over the
Chief Justice's administrative approach.
He singled out several applicants by name and accused them
of seeking membership in the Supreme Court bar to ``launder''
tarnished credentials. But he failed to persuade a majority
of the Court to block the admissions and provoked one
Justice, John Paul Stevens, to write that the Court should
grant applicants with questionable credentials a ``fair
hearing'' before publicly labeling them as unworthy.
There were contradictory strains in Chief Justice Burger's
attitude toward the public, including the press. At times he
seemed to welcome and even invite public attention. He took
pride in having made the Supreme Court a more attractive
place for tourists to visit, transforming the cold marble
ground floor into an area for historical exhibits.
Yet he alone of all the Justice refused, when announcing
one of his opinion from the bench, to provide tourists and
lawyers in the audience with a brief oral description of the
case and the decision.
The other Justices either read aloud from a memorandum
explaining the case or gave a more casual oral account. When
the Chief Justice's turn came, he would simply announce that
in a case with a particular name, the judgement of the lower
court was affirmed, or reversed. When asked why he refused to
join the others in explaining his opinions, he once said,
``It's a waste of time.''
He was adamant about preserving the secrecy of the Court's
internal operations,
[[Page S 9191]]
even to the extent of refusing to make public the names of his four law
clerks. A law firm recruiter or other member of the public
who called the Court's public information office seeking a
list of the current law clerks would receive the names of all
the clerks except the Chief Justice's.
He mailed copies of his speeches to hundreds of journalists
around the country and would telephone particular columnists
to make sure his message was clear.
defining the limits of speech and press
Occasionally, usually in connection with his annual ``State
of the Judiciary'' address to the American Bar Association, a
tradition that he inaugurated, he would invite journalists
for informal ``deep background'' briefings, sessions that
were often relaxed and informative.
But he seemed to hold much of the press corps in low
repute. Asked by a lawyer at a Smithsonian Institution
symposium what he thought of the reporters who covered the
Court, he replied, as he often did: ``I admire those who do a
good job, and I have sympathy for the rest, who are in the
majority.''
His special scorn was reserved for television, which he
regarded as an intrusive annoyance. He once knocked a
television camera out of the hand of a network cameraman who
followed him into an elevator. He vowed that he would never
allow oral arguments at the Supreme Court to be televised.
Yet he wrote the opinion for the Court in the 1981 case
Chandler v. Florida, holding that a state could permit a
criminal trial to be televised, even over the defendant's
objection, without depriving the defendant of the
constitutional right to a fair trial.
Chief Justice Burger wrote several of the Court's most
important opinions interpreting the free speech and free
press guarantees of the First Amendment.
His opinion in a 1976 case, Nebraska Press v. Stuart,
effectively prohibited judges from ordering the press not to
publish information in its possession about the crime, a
confession or the like. The opinion said that judges could
take less drastic steps to protect criminal defendants from
negative pretrial publicity, like sequestering the jury or
changing the site of the trial.
A 1973 opinion by the Chief Justice ended roughly 15 years
of turmoil over the legal definition of obscenity by changing
the focus to local communities, rather than the entire
country.
That opinion, in Miller v. California, said obscene
materials were ``works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the
prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a
patently offensive way and which, taken as a whole, do not
have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific
value.'' The Chief Justice added that it was up to local
juries applying ``contemporary community standards'' to
decide whether a particular work fit that definition.
``It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to
read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of
Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found
tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City,'' he wrote. ``People
in different states vary in their tastes and attitudes, and
this diversity is not to be strangled by the absolutism of
imposed uniformity.''
religion, rights and veto power
Chief Justice Burger was also one of the Court's most
prolific writers on another aspect of the First Amendment,
the clause prohibiting an establishment of an official
national religion. In a 1971 opinion, Lemon v. Kurtzman, he
set forth the test for deciding whether a given law or
government program that conferred some benefit on religion
nonetheless passed muster under the First Amendment.
``First,'' he wrote, ``the statute must have a secular
legislative purpose; second, its principal or primary effect
must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion;
finally, the statute must not foster an excessive government
entanglement with religion.'' This ``three-part test,'' as it
came to be known through later refinements and elaborations,
defined the Court's approach to the establishment clause in a
variety of contexts.
The 1983 decision that struck down the legislative veto,
Immigration Service v. Chadna, altered the balance of power
between the executive and legislative branches.
It invalidated a procedure, which Congress had incorporated
into some 200 laws, permitting one or both Houses to block
executive branch action. The procedure, Chief Justice Burger
wrote, was not within Congress' constitutional authority
because it did not follow the rules the Constitution set out
for ``legislation'': passage by both Houses and presentment
to the President for his signature.
The Chadna opinion in many ways summarized the Chief
Justice's view of American Government. He wrote, ``With all
the obvious flaws of delay, untidiness and potential for
abuse, we have not yet found a better way to preserve freedom
than by making the exercise of power subject to the carefully
crafted restraints spelled out in the Constitution.''
Chief Justice Burger wrote relatively few of the Court's
criminal law decisions, and some of the more important
decisions on the rights of criminal suspects found him in
bitter dissent.
For example, in the 1977 case Brewer v. Williams the Court
ruled, in a 5-to-4 opinion by Justice Potter Stewart, that
the police had violated a murder suspect's constitutional
right to counsel. The police officers, knowing that the
suspect was deeply religious, delivered what came to be
called the Christian burial speech, musing aloud on the wish
of the victim's parents to give their daughter a Christian
burial. The suspect, who had previously said he would talk
only after seeing a lawyer, then led the officers to the
victim's body.
The majority's decision overturning the murder conviction
was ``bizarre,'' the Chief Justice wrote in a dissent that
was a stinging attack on the so-called exclusionary rule
barring the use at trial of illegally seized evidence.
``The result reached by the Court in this case ought to be
intolerable in any society which purports to call itself an
organized society,'' he said. ``Failure to have counsel in a
pretrial setting should not lead to the `knee-jerk'
suppression of relevant and reliable evidence.''
a conservative on crime issues
Although Chief Justice Burger's views on criminal law did
not always garner a majority on the Supreme Court, those
views had probably been more responsible for his being
nominated to the High Court than any other factor.
He dissented from the Court's 1972 decision that
invalidated all death penalty laws then in force. After the
Court permitted executions to resume four years later, the
Chief Justice grew increasingly impatient with the legal
obstacles that lawyers and judges continued to place in the
way of executions.
When the Court refused to block the execution of a murderer
whose appeals had lasted 10 years, Chief Justice Burger wrote
a concurring opinion excoriating lawyers for condemned
inmates. He said the lawyers sought to turn the
administration of justice into a ``sporting contest.''
In 13 years on the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia Circuit, he was known as a conservative,
law-and-order judge. He enhanced that reputation with
speeches and articles. A speech in 1967 at Ripon College in
Wisconsin came to Richard Nixon's attention after it was
reprinted in U.S. News & World Report.
The White House distributed copies of the speech at the
time of Judge Burger's nomination, and the Supreme Court
press office handed it out for years when asked for
information about his views. In the speech, he compared the
American system of justice with the systems of Norway,
Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
``I assume that no one will take issue with me when I say
that these North European countries are as enlightened as the
United States in the value they place on the individual and
on human dignity,'' he said.
Yet, he continued, those countries ``do not consider it
necessary to use a device like our Fifth Amendment, under
which an accused person may not be required to testify.''
``They go swiftly, efficiently and directly to the question
of whether the accused is guilty,'' he added.
``No nation on earth,'' he said, ``goes to such lengths or
takes such pains to provide safeguards as we do, once an
accused person is called before the bar of justice and until
his case is completed.''
a modest start in minnesota
Chief Justice Burger's speechmaking style changed little in
subsequent years. He often returned to the theme and imagery
of the Ripon speech and often used the Scandinavian
countries, which he visited frequently, as benchmarks against
which to compare the American system.
Warren Earl Burger was born Sept. 17, 1907, in St. Paul.
His parents, of Swiss-German descent, were Charles Joseph
Burger and the former Katharine Schnittger. His paternal
grandfather, Joseph Burger, emigrated from Switzerland and
joined the Union Army at the start of the Civil War, when he
was 14. He was severely wounded in combat and received both a
battlefield commission and the Medal of Honor.
Warren Burger was one of seven children. The family lived
on a 20-acre truck farm on the outskirts of St. Paul. In
addition to farming, his father sold weighing scales; the
family's financial circumstances were modest.
At John A. Johnson High School, from which Warren Burger
graduated in 1925, he edited the school newspaper, was
president of the student council and earned letters in
hockey, football, track and swimming. He earned extra money
by selling articles on high school sports and other news to
the St. Paul newspapers.
The rest of his formal education took place in night school
while he worked days selling insurance for the Mutual Life
Insurance Company of New York. He attended the night school
division of the University of Minnesota for two years, then
began night law classes at the St. Paul College of Law, now
known as the William Mitchell College of Law. He received his
degree with high honors in 1931.
He joined the faculty of the law school and taught for 12
years while practicing law with the firm of Boyesen, Otis &
Faricy. He remained with the firm, one of the oldest in the
state, for 22 years; after he became a partner, the firm was
known as Faricy, Burger, Moore & Costello. He handled
probate, trial and appellate cases, arguing more than a dozen
before the United States Supreme Court and many more in the
Minnesota Supreme Court.
He married Elvera Stromberg in 1933. They had a son, Wade
Allen, and a daughter, Margaret Elizabeth.
[[Page S 9192]]
As a young lawyer, Mr. Burger became active in community
affairs. He was president of the Junior Chamber of Commerce
and the first president of the St. Paul Council on Human
Relations. That group, which he helped to organize, sponsored
training programs for the police to improve relations with
minority groups. For many years, he was a member of the
Governor's Interracial Commission.
He also became involved in state politics, working on
Harold E. Stassen's successful campaign for governor. He went
to the 1948 Republican National Convention to help Governor
Stassen's unsuccessful bid for the Presidential nomination.
making the move to washington
In 1952, he was at the Republican convention again, still a
Stassen supporter. But he helped Dwight D. Eisenhower's
forces win a crucial credentials fight against Senator Robert
A. Taft of Ohio. On the final day, with General Eisenhower
lacking nine votes for the nomination, Mr. Burger helped
swing the Minnesota delegation and gave Eisenhower the votes
that put him over the top. Cheers broke out on the convention
floor as an organ played the University of Minnesota fight
song.
His reward was a job in Washington, as Assistant Attorney
General in charge of the Civil Division of the Justice
Department. He supervised all the Federal Government's civil
and international litigation. He told a young Justice
Department lawyer years later that he would have been content
to continue running the Civil Division for the rest of his
career.
One of his assignments was somewhat unusual for the Civil
Division chief. He agreed to argue a case in the Supreme
Court, usually the task of the Solicitor General's Office.
The case involved a Yale University professor of medicine,
John F. Peters, who had been discharged on loyalty grounds
from his job as a part-time Federal health consultant.
The Solicitor General, Somin E. Soboloff, disagreed with
the Government's position that the action by the Civil
Service Commission's Loyalty Review Board was valid and
refused to sign the brief or argue the case. Mr. Burger
argued on behalf of the board and lost. Among the lawyers who
filed briefs on the professor's behalf were two who would
precede Mr. Burger on the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas and
Arthur J. Goldberg.
After two years, Mr. Burger resigned from the Justice
Department and was preparing to return to private practice in
St. Paul when Judge Harold Stephens of the United States
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit died.
President Eisenhower nominated him for the vacancy, and he
joined the court in 1956.
His elevation to the Supreme Court 13 years later was made
possible by President Lyndon B. Johnson's failure to persuade
the Senate to accept Abe Fortas as Chief Justice.
a beneficiary of '68 election
On June 13, 1968, Earl Warren had announced his intention
to resign after 15 years as Chief Justice. President Johnson
nominated Mr. Fortas, then an Associate Justice, as Chief
Justice. But the nomination became a victim of the 1968
Presidential election campaign and was withdrawn on Oct. 2,
the fourth day of a Senate filibuster that followed
acrimonious confirmation hearings.
Chief Justice Warren agreed to delay his retirement, and it
was clear that whoever won the Presidential election would
choose the next Chief Justice. Justice Fortas remained on the
Court until May 1969, when he resigned after the disclosure
that he had accepted a $20,000 fee from a foundation
controlled by Louis E. Wolfson, a friend and former client
who was under Federal investigation for violating securities
laws.
On May 21, a week after the Fortas resignation, President
Nixon nominated Warren Burger to be Chief Justice. The
nomination went smoothly in the Senate, and he was sworn in
as Chief Justice on June 23, 1969.
The Chief Justice and his wife lived in a renovated pre-
Civil War farmhouse on several acres in McLean, Va. According
to the annual financial disclosure statements required of all
Federal judges, he had assets of more than $1 million. His
largest investment was the common stock of the Minnesota
Mining and Manufacturing Company.
He was a gardener and a serious wine enthusiast who took
pride in his wine cellar and occasionally sponsored wine-
tasting dinners at the Supreme Court.
By statute, the Chief Justice is Chancellor of the
Smithsonian Institution and chairman of the board of trustees
of the National Gallery of Art, duties that, as an art and
history buff, he enjoyed. He visited antiques stores to look
for good pieces for the Court and took an active role in the
Supreme Court Historical Society.
He and his wife led an active social life in Washington and
spent part of nearly every summer in Europe, usually in
connection with a conference or other official appearance.
Chief Justice Burger cut an imposing figure, and it was
often said that he looked like Hollywood's image of a Chief
Justice. He was nearly 6 feet tall, stocky but not heavy,
with regular features, a square jaw and silvery hair.
Proper appearance was important to him. He once sent a note
to the Solicitor General's Office complaining that a Deputy
Solicitor General had worn a vest the wrong shade of gray
with the formal morning attire required of Government lawyers
who argue before the Court.
In 1976, he appeared at a Bicentennial commemoration in a
billowing robe with scarlet trim, a reproduction of the robe
worn by the first Chief Justice, John Jay. He later put the
robe on display in the Court's exhibit area.
A book by Chief Justice Burger, ``It Is So Ordered''
(William Morrow), was published earlier this year. It is an
account of 14 cases that, in his judgment, helped shaped the
Constitution.
Mr. Burger's wife died in May 1994. He is survived by his
son, of Arlington, Va.; his daughter, of Washington, and two
grandchildren. Funeral arrangements were incomplete
today.
____________________