Charles Evans Whittaker

Early years and career

Whittaker was born on a farm near Troy, Kansas to Charles Edward Whittaker, a farmer, and Ida Eve Miller, a schoolteacher from Hagerstown, Maryland. He attended the nearby one-room Brush Creek School, and then the Troy High School until he dropped out in the ninth grade after his mother died on his sixteenth birthday. He spent the next three years working on a family farm, and also hunting and trapping. Whittaker developed an interest in law by reading newspaper articles about criminal trials. In the summer of 1920, he applied to the part-time evening program at the Kansas City School of Law (currently the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law) and gained admission with the condition that he would finish his high school education after personally pleading with Oliver Dean, a president of the law school. Immediately, he enrolled at Manual High School in Kansas City. He spent the next four years working during the day to support himself, and in the evenings was taking high school courses as well as classes at the K. C. School of Law. While Whittaker was a student at the school, future president Harry S. Truman was a classmate. Whittaker was graduated in the class of 1924 having being admitted to the Missouri bar during his senior year.

Whittaker joined the law firm of Watson, Ess, Marshall & Enggas in Kansas City, Missouri, where he previously toiled full-time as an office boy, and built up a practice in corporate law with the Union Pacific Railroad, Montgomery Ward, and the City National Bank and Trust Company among his clients. He developed close ties to the Republican party. He was appointed as a federal judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri on July 8, 1954. He was nominated to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 5, 1956.

Supreme Court

Whittaker developed a good reputation as a judge. Less than a year after being appointed to the court of appeals, he was nominated to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, taking the oath on March 25, 1957. Whittaker thus became the first person to serve as a judge of a federal district court, a federal court of appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court. He was one of the four Republicans appointed to the court by Eisenhower (along with Earl Warren, John M. Harlan II, and Potter Stewart). Eisenhower appointed one Democrat, William J. Brennan, to the Court.

Justice Samuel Blatchford also served at all three levels of the federal judiciary, but the court system was configured slightly differently at that time. Justice Sonia Sotomayor is the most recent Justice to have served in all three levels of the federal judiciary.

On the closely divided Supreme Court, Whittaker was a swing vote. According to Professor Howard Ball, Whittaker was an "extremely weak, vacillating justice" who was "courted by the two cliques on the Court because his vote was generally up in the air and typically went to the group that made the last, but not necessarily the best, argument."

Whittaker failed to develop a consistent judicial philosophy and reportedly felt himself not as qualified as some of the other members of the court. After agonizing deeply for months over his vote in Baker v. Carr, a landmark reapportionment case, Whittaker suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1962. At the behest of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Whittaker recused himself from the case and retired from the Court effective March 31, 1962, citing exhaustion from the heavy workload and stress.

Final years

Effective September 30, 1965, Whittaker resigned his position as a retired Justice in order to become chief counsel to General Motors. He also became a resolute critic of the Warren Court as well as the Civil Rights Movement, characterizing the civil disobedience of the type practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers as lawless. He wrote a piece for the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin that advised protesters to use courts instead of taking to the streets.

Whittaker died in 1973 at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City of a ruptured abdominal aneurysm.

Family

In 1928, Whittaker married Winifred R. Pugh, they had three sons, Dr. Charles Keith Whittaker, a neurosurgeon; Kent E. Whittaker, an attorney; and Gary T. Whittaker, a stockbroker.

Legacy and honors

The federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, which houses the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, is named in memory of Whittaker.