JOHN MARSHALL

Before he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Marshall played at quoits, served in the Revolutionary army (where he discovered that ""War is not high spirits and passionate speeches. It's killing and dying!"") and defended the Constitution before the Virginia Assembly. John also represented the new nation in France, and took the measure of that ""sly fellow"" Talleyrand -- confronting that misshapen villain, John ""wished he could have told the Foreign Minister that the United States did not live under a dictatorship that only pretended to be a democracy."" Thinking bold thoughts such as these and having exposed the XYZ bribe, John returned home to find that ""everyone was proud of the way John and the other ambassadors had acted,"" and he soon was chosen to lead the Supreme Court where his shabby dress and wise decisions inspired universal reverence -- but exactly what went into those decisions besides a lot of heart and a, mostly inferred, faith in Federalist principles is difficult to tell from this crudely novelized, heavily cliched glorification.