him on the United States Supreme Court in 1965 to succeed Arthur
Goldberg, who had succumbed to Johnson's blandishments that he
could best serve his country by becoming the United States ambassador
to the United Nations. One of the last acts of Johnson's presidency was
to nominate Fortas in 1968 to succeed Earl Warren as Chief Justice, a
nomination that fell victim to a Republican-led filibuster. Within a year,
Fortas would be forced to resign because of the public reaction, aided
by the new Nixon Administration, to disclosures about his financial re-
lationships with the controversial financier Louis Wolfson.
Most of Murphy's book details the five-year period between John-
son's becoming president and the defeat of Fortas's nomination as
Chief Justice. Fortas continued, even after joining the Court, to advise
the president on all sorts of matters, including the Vietnam War. Mur-
phy demonstrates that Fortas, attempting to minimize his relationship
with Johnson, systematically misled members of the Senate Judiciary
Committee when they were considering his appointment as Chief Jus-
tice in 1968 and questioned Fortas about it.
Some readers will consider the portrait of Fortas drawn by Murphy,
described accurately by the historian David J. Garrow as "devastating,"
to be too hostile. Murphy rarely gives Fortas the benefit of any doubt in
interpreting inevitably complicated events. One looks forward to Laura
Kalman's reportedly more sympathetic biography of Fortas forthcom-
ing from the Yale University Press and her depiction of these episodes.
Nonetheless, Murphy amply fulfills the aim set out in the title of his
book, for he vividly portrays both the rise and then the astonishing fall
of a fascinating and important figure in the politics of the 196os. It is a
book well worth reading and pondering about.
University of Texas Law School SANFORD LEVINSON
Children of Sacred Ground: America's Last Indian War. By Catherine Feher-
Elston. Foreword by Joann Kealiinohomoku. (Flagstaff, Ariz.:
Northland Publishing, 1988. Pp. xxviii+186. Foreword, preface,
acknowledgments, introduction, maps, afterword, bibliography,
In Children of Sacred Ground, author Catherine Feher-Elston makes a
sincere effort to deal with a nearly impossible subject-the Navajo-
Hopi Land Dispute. Despite some interesting material and an ap-
proach that traces the source of the conflict back to the time when the
Navajos first began entering the Southwest, the book provides little new
information. Part of the difficulty is caused by the author's journalistic
approach to the subject. Using such terms as "The Last Indian War"
Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 94, July 1990 - April, 1991. Austin, Texas. The Portal to Texas History. http://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101214/. Accessed September 23, 2014.