Summing Up

Abstract This chapter takes up some episodes connected with Jackson’s death, his relationship with Elsie Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter’s effort to serve as a custodian of his memory. It also reviews Jackson’s career and discusses his success with and comfort about the several professional roles he occupied. Finally, it attempts an overview of Jackson’s attitudes and temperament. Discussed in the chapter are the circumstances of Jackson’s death, where he succumbed to a heart attack on a Saturday morning Elsie Douglas’s apartment, setting off an effort led by Frankfurter to advance a palatable explanation for the location of his death; additional efforts by Frankfurter to suppress or influence the publication of work about Jackson after his death, including Eugene Gerhart’s biography and other published comments about Jackson that rankled Frankfurter; the probable relationship between Jackson and Elsie Douglas; Jackson’s attitudes toward the respective offices he held, including his private law practice, solicitor general, attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court, and prosecutor at Nuremberg. It concludes that Jackson, despite his great gifts for the position, was not ideally suited, for reasons of temperament, to being on the Supreme Court. It also concludes that of all the positions Jackson held, that of architect and prosecutor at Nuremberg was the one he found most important, despite its frustrations. Finally, it concludes that Jackson was a complicated, somewhat elusive figure, whose career had an element of unfulfilled promise, but whose vicarious company is regularly interesting and engaging.