Felix Frankfurter, a tiny, ebullient Jew, started as America's leading liberal and ended as its most famous judicial conservative.
~ Hugo Black, a Ku Klux Klansman, became an absolutist advocate of free speech and civil rights. Robert Jackson, a back-country lawyer, started off trying cases about cows and went on to conduct the most important international trial ever. William O. Douglas, a self invented, tall-tale Westerner, narrowly missed the presidency but expanded individual freedom beyond what anyone before had dreamed.
Four more different men could hardly be imagined. Yet they had certain things in com-mon. Each was a self-made man who came from humble beginnings on the edge of pov-erty. Each had driving ambition and a will to succeed. Each was, in his own way, a genius.