Whittaker was born on a farm near Troy, Kansas to Charles Edward Whittaker, a farmer, and Ida Eve Miller, a schoolteacher from Hagerstown, Maryland. He attended the nearby one-room Brush Creek School, and then the Troy High School until he dropped out in the ninth grade after his mother died on his sixteenth birthday. He spent the next three years working on a family farm, and also hunting and trapping. Whittaker developed an interest in law by reading newspaper articles about criminal trials. In the summer of 1920, he applied to the part-time evening program at the Kansas City School of Law (currently the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law) and gained admission with the condition that he would finish his high school education after personally pleading with Oliver Dean, the president of the law school. He immediately enrolled at Manual High School in Kansas City, Missouri and spent the next four years working during the day to support himself, while taking high school and law school courses in the evenings. Whittaker's law school classmates included future President Harry S. Truman. Whittaker graduated in the class of 1924 with a Bachelor of Laws having been admitted to the Missouri bar during his senior year.[1][2] Whittaker joined the law firm of Watson, Ess, Marshall & Enggas in Kansas City, Missouri, where he previously worked full-time as an office boy, and built up a practice in corporate law with the Union Pacific Railroad, Montgomery Ward, and the City National Bank and Trust Company among his clients. He was a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon Fraternity and developed close ties to the Republican Party.[3]
Federal judicial service (District Court and Court of Appeals)
Whittaker was nominated by President Eisenhower on March 2, 1957, as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to succeed Stanley Forman Reed. He was confirmed by the Senate on March 19, 1957, by a unanimous vote.[4] Whittaker took the judicial oath of office on March 25, 1957.[5] He thus became the first person to serve as a judge of a United States District Court, a United States Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Samuel Blatchford also served at all three levels of the federal judiciary, but the court system was configured slightly differently at that time. Ketanji Brown Jackson is the most recent justice to have served in all three levels of the federal judiciary. Whittaker served as Circuit Justice of the Eighth Circuit and the Tenth Circuit for his duration of service on the Supreme Court.
On the closely divided Supreme Court, Whittaker was a swing vote. According to Professor Howard Ball, Whittaker was an "extremely weak, vacillating justice" who was "courted by the two cliques on the Court because his vote was generally up in the air and typically went to the group that made the last, but not necessarily the best, argument."[6] Whittaker failed to develop a consistent judicial philosophy and reportedly felt himself not as qualified as some of the other members of the Court. After agonizing deeply for months over his vote in Baker v. Carr, a landmark reapportionment case, Whittaker had a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1962. At the behest of Chief Justice Earl Warren, Whittaker recused himself from the case and retired from the Court effective March 31, 1962 due to a certified disability, citing exhaustion from the heavy workload and stress.[7]
As of 2024, Whittaker remains the only Supreme Court Justice appointed from Missouri. He is also the most recently appointed Justice to have received his legal education from a public law school.
In 1928, Whittaker married Winifred R. Pugh. They had three sons: Dr. Charles Keith Whittaker, a neurosurgeon; Kent E. Whittaker, an attorney; and Gary T. Whittaker, a stockbroker.
^"Former Justice Whittaker of Supreme Court is dead," The New York Times, November 27, 1973.
Further reading
Abraham, Henry J., Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court. 3d. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). ISBN0-19-506557-3.
Frank, John P., The Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Their Lives and Major Opinions (Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, editors) (Chelsea House Publishers: 1995) ISBN0-7910-1377-4, ISBN978-0-7910-1377-9.
Martin, Fenton S. and Goehlert, Robert U., The U.S. Supreme Court: A Bibliography, (Congressional Quarterly Books, 1990). ISBN0-87187-554-3.
Smith, Craig Alan. Failing Justice: Charles Evans Whittaker On The Supreme Court. McFarland & Company, 2005.
