On the morning of August 2, 1973, from his summer cottage in Goose Prairie, Washington, Justice William O. Douglas set in motion one of the strangest proceedings in the history of the United States Supreme Court.1 At the urging of lawyers who had flown across the country the day before and driven through the night to reach him, Douglas agreed to convene a hearing by himself the next day at the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse in nearby Yakima. The federal building was 41 miles from Douglas’s shack in the woods, and 2700 miles away from his chambers in Washington, D.C., where such arguments would usually be held. On his own authority, from the middle of nowhere, Douglas had decided to halt President Nixon’s highly controversial, and quite possibly unlawful, bombing of Cambodia. By far the Court’s harshest critic on all things related to the war in Southeast Asia, the never-lacking-for-confidence Douglas finally had the perfect opportunity to speak his mind.
The last American troops had left Vietnam four months earlier. But amidst mounting pressure from the ongoing Watergate hearings, President Nixon had continued to bomb Communist strongholds in neighboring Cambodia. And although Congress, having long-since soured on U.S. operations in that part of the world, attempted to cut off all funding for the Cambodia operations, Nixon vetoed its first attempt to do so. Lacking the votes to override Nixon’s veto, Congress instead enacted the “Fulbright Proviso,” which again terminated funding for any military operations “in or over . . . Cambodia.” This time, though, in a bid to secure the President’s approval, Congress specified that the cut-off would apply only “on or after August 15, 1973.”
On July 1, a besieged Nixon signed the revised bill into law—and continued the bombing. After all, as government lawyers would claim, by prohibiting the bombing only as of August 15, Congress had arguably authorized it until then. Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman and a group of active-duty Air Force officers stationed in nearby Thailand disagreed. They quickly filed a lawsuit in federal court against Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, arguing that even before the August 15 cutoff, the bombing was still unlawful because it had not been specifically approved by Congress.
The lawsuit, filed in Brooklyn and assigned to Judge Orrin Judd, asked the court to enter an injunction against Schlesinger to bar the federal government from continuing with the bombing. On July 25, Judd sided with Holtzman and agreed to temporarily halt the government’s aerial campaign. His ruling was the first example in American history of a judicial injunction against an ongoing military operation.