- Tue Jul 10, 2018 2:38 pm
#105389
"On his tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery, William O. Douglas is identified correctly as a former justice of the United States Supreme Court, and incorrectly as a former member of the United States armed forces. The error is significant, not only because Arlington National Cemetery reserves its plots for distinguished veterans but because Douglas himself was willfully responsible for the mistake.
For 10 weeks at the end of World War I, the 20-year-old Douglas served in the Whitman College regiment of the Students' Army Training Corps in Walla Walla, Wash., where he and his fellow trainees conducted unarmed predawn marches in their street clothes against imaginary enemies. He later described his wartime experience as a three-month stint in Europe as an Army private, and recorded some of the putative details in an autobiography as well as a Supreme Court opinion.
How did a prominent public figure manage to lie about such a central fact of his biography? Probably the same way he lied about everything else: flagrantly, easily and in the service of his own rags-to-riches legend. In ''Of Men and Mountains,'' a personalized travel guide to his native state of Washington, Douglas recalled his triumphant bout with polio at the age of 2, though in fact he had suffered from an intestinal colic.
He frequently lied about his years as a student at Columbia Law School, falsely boasting, for example, that he had graduated second in his class. In his 1974 autobiography, ''Go East, Young Man,'' he repeated many of these outright lies, introduced new ones and liberally embellished other key details of his life story. His widowed mother, for instance, was not destitute, but middle-class -- though it's true she was miserly and secretive about her money.