Brennan, William J. (1906–1997)

Early Years

Brennan was born on April 25th, 1906. The son of Irish immigrants, he grew up in a working class family in Newark, New Jersey. Brennan's father was a leader in the labor movement and an advocate of municipal government reform who passed his sense of social responsibility on to his son. Brennan was an outstanding student in high school, and he went on to graduate with honors from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Finance. He worked his way through Harvard Law School, where he graduated in the top 10% of his class.

After law school, Brennan was hired by a prominent Newark law firm, at which he specialized in labor and employment law. During World War II, Brennan enlisted in the army and served on the staff of the undersecretary of war as a labor relations troubleshooter. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his distinguished service in the military. At the end of the war, Brennan returned to his old law firm. Not completely satisfied with private practice, Brennan branched out and became actively involved in a campaign to reform the New Jersey state court system. Brennan was appointed as a Superior Court judge, and the attention he attracted as part of the judicial reform movement helped lead to his rapid rise from trial court judge to justice on the state supreme court.

On the Bench

During his tenure as a state court judge, Brennan impressed Arthur T. Vanderbilt, chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court and an influential insider in Republican political circles. When Sherman Minton retired from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1956, Vanderbilt and other party leaders recommended to President Dwight Eisenhower that Brennan be nominated to fill the vacancy. During the fall election campaign, Eisenhower nominated Brennan as a “recess” appointment to the Court in what some cynics viewed as an attempt to win the Roman Catholic vote. Brennan was a registered Democrat, but he was not actively involved in party politics. Although he had been an outspoken critic of McCarthyism, Brennan had earned a reputation as a nonpartisan judge. In March 1957, the Senate confirmed his appointment, with Senator Joseph McCarthy casting the sole dissenting vote.

As a new associate justice, Brennan joined the liberal wing of the Warren Court, which for most of the 1950s and 1960s constituted a solid majority. Eisenhower allegedly remarked that the appointments of Earl Warren and William Brennan were two of the biggest mistakes he made as president. However, in many instances, Brennan was more of a centrist than colleagues such as Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, and in his early years, he dissented less than any member of the Court. Chief Justice Warren and Brennan developed a close friendship and working relationship. Some commentators considered Brennan to be Warren's “first lieutenant” and the justice to whom he most often turned to build consensus and maintain a majority in support of the Court's opinions.

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