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Within a year, Warren's career took a sudden, decisive turn. In September 1953 Chief Justice Fred Vinson died. President Eisenhower was under pressure to name a successor before the court convened in October. As Associate Justice William O. Douglas tells it, Vice President Nixon and Senator William Knowland went to Ike and urged him to choose Warren as a means of breaking his grip on California politics. In any case, Warren met basic requirements. He was a Republican and his philosophy and common sense "pleased" Eisenhower. Later, dismayed that Warren turned out to be a controversial participant rather than a bland umpire, Ike described the selection as "the biggest damn fool mistake I ever made."
Eight months after the 63-year-old Chief Justice arrived on the bench, the court disturbed the peace of Ike's first term by handing down its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned rulings going back to 1896 and required an end to de jure segregation in the nation's schools.
The opinion that Warren wrote for the unanimous court characteristically relied less on legal precedent than on sociological analysis, for which the court was much criticized. He argued that "to separate [black children] from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." His conclusion not only made integration an enduring national issue but also helped launch a tumultuous era of minority-rights efforts in many fields.
Curbing Rancor. Although some of his fellow justices carped about Warren's lack of legal scholarship, he transformed the sometimes fractious atmosphere of the Vinson Court by a mixture of charm, tact and candor. One law clerk, quoted in Leo Katcher's Warren biography, said: "What was lacking was a spirit of 'collegiality.' . . . Warren's job was to try to bring personalities together, not beliefs. He couldn't ask anyone to abandon a deeply held belief, but to accept opposition without rancor."
Warren's driving concern was individual rights for individual Americans. After Brown came a number of rulings against racial discrimination in voting, public parks, housing and other areas. The court virtually wrote a new constitutional code of criminal procedure, with the high point coming in Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which accorded a suspect in custody the rights to keep silent and to have an attorney before being interrogated.
The decision of which Warren was most proud was Reynolds v. Sims (1964), which extended the one-man, one-vote principle. His majority opinion on Reynolds, which forced nearly every state to redraw its electoral boundaries, showed Warren at his most eloquent: "Legislators represent people, not trees or acres. Legislators are elected by voters, not farms or cities or economic interests . . . A nation once primarily rural in character becomes predominantly urban. But the basic principle of representative government remains, and must remain, unchanged—the weight of a citizen's vote cannot be made to depend on where he lives."