The Burgher from Minnesota

LIKE Richard Nixon, Judge Warren Earl Burger has made his way to eminence from modest but upright beginnings. He voraciously read the Horatio Alger stories as a boy growing up in Minnesota. He also acted out the plots. While in high school he scrambled out of bed daily at 4 in the morning to deliver newspapers, and he both edited the school newspaper and served as student council president. After that he worked days in an insurance office while attending, at night, the University of Minnesota and then the St. Paul College of Law, from which he graduated magna cum laude. "We had enough to eat and enough to wear," says a younger brother, Paul. "But I suppose we'd be considered deprived today."

The Chief Justice-designate is a son of the sturdy, stolid Middle West, the fourth of seven children born to parents of Swiss-German descent, Charles and Katharine Burger. The father was a railway cargo inspector who turned occasionally to traveling as a salesman of coffee or candy or patent medicines; the Burger brood was raised largely by the mother, who died only last year at 94. Mrs. Burger insisted that all the children attend Methodist Sunday school. The family moved in and around St. Paul; for a time they had a 20-acre farm, raising tomatoes to supplement the meager family income. Burger and his brothers would splash in the pond of a hot summer's day, or pick ripe tomatoes and wolf them down after licking the skin so that the salt would stick.

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While at John A. Johnson High School, Burger played the cornet and bugle, tried out for football, track, swimming, hockey and tennis. The busy youngster ran the student court as well. In that capacity he tried to bring charges against one teacher suspected of peeping into the girls' locker room. Burger's court was denied jurisdiction.

He spent his summers in a variety of ways. He did chores on a family farm down the Mississippi River in Red Wing, Minn. Another time he used his vacation to work as a lifeguard, track coach, truck driver and general factotum at a Y.M.C.A. camp in Wisconsin. Though he was not a top student, his all-round achievements won him a scholarship to Princeton, which he declined because it did not pay enough.

After two years of college and four of law school, Burger went to work in 1931 for the well-regarded law firm of Boyesen, Otis and Faricy. It was the start of a long legal career. He then married Elvera Stromberg, whom he had met when they were both taking extension courses at Minnesota. They have two children: a son, Wade, now 32 and a real estate man in northern Virginia, and a daughter, Margaret, 22, a Montessori school student teacher.

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Burger took an interest in local bond issues and mayoral elections, but did not get into politics until he helped to manage the successful gubernatorial campaign of another promising young local lawyer--Harold Stassen --in 1938. "They called us the Boy Scout brigade," Stassen recalls. Burger, kept out of World War II by spinal trouble, which still requires him to wear a back brace, became the first president of the St. Paul Council on Human Relations. He brought in outside experts to improve police relations with the city's Negroes and Mexican-Americans after the police chief confided to him: "We treat niggers the same way we treat everyone else."

Burger was Stassen's floor manager at the 1948 Republican Convention in Philadelphia, and in 1952 Stassen named him Minnesota's representative to the convention's Credentials Committee. That committee was the scene of a crucial fight between the Eisenhower and Taft factions over seating rival delegations from Texas and Louisiana; Burger's defense of the Eisenhower position was not lost on Herbert Brownell. When Brownell became Attorney General in the Eisenhower Administration, he offered Burger a job as his assistant in charge of the Justice Department's civil division.

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Burger took it, leaving a lucrative law practice and a handsome house on Summit Avenue, the best street in St. Paul. In the Justice Department he attracted notice by taking over the Government's side in a case that U.S. Solicitor General Simon Sobeloff refused to argue before the Supreme Court. The case: Yale Professor John P. Peters' dismissal, on loyalty grounds, as a consultant to the Public Health Service. Peters appealed, arguing that he had been prevented from confronting his accusers. Burger eventually lost by a 7-to-2 decision. He was more successful when he prosecuted Greek Shipowner Stavros Niarchos, among others, for illegally buying U.S. war surplus vessels; Burger seized more than 40 such ships, 15 of them belonging to Niarchos, and won the nickname "Admiral" from J. Edgar Hoover.

Burger had planned to remain in Washington only three years, then return to practice in St. Paul. His resignation was on President Eisenhower's desk in 1956 when a vacancy occurred on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Eisenhower asked him to take it. Burger hesitated. He had long before told friends: "I never have had a passion to be a judge." One important factor that weighed heavily in favor of Burger accepting the judgeship was his wife's health. She was a cardiac patient, and the Eastern climate had clearly been better for her than the harsh winters and hot summers of the Middle West. Finally, Burger decided to take the judgeship.

For 16 years the Burgers have led a quiet life in Washington, normally limiting their entertaining to small dinner parties at their 140-year-old farmhouse in nearby Arlington. He drives a five-year-old Volkswagen. His avocations are painting and sculpture. He has done bas-reliefs for some of his friends, and tried--without success --to put some life into the dismal school of official portraiture that fills the corridors of his courthouse. Judge Burger is also something of a gourmet. He sometimes runs his wife out of the kitchen in order to experiment with an elaborate recipe a la Julia Child, and he is a connoisseur of wines--particularly the better red Burgundies and the finer clarets. He is even a Chevalier du Tastevin, something undreamed of in the philosophy of Horatio Alger.

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