Reed Steps Down

"A steadying influence," one of his old associates once called Supreme Court Justice Stanley Forman Reed. "He isn't the most brilliant member of the court, but he has good judgment." Other lawyers talked about Mr. Justice Reed's prodigious seven-day workweeks, his methodical and careful briefs, his success in keeping an even legal keel through 19 Supreme Court years. "No one could say," a former law clerk summed up, "that anybody was mad at Stanley Reed."

So quiet and unobtrusive was Justice Reed that it took his request for retirement last week, at the age of 72, to win him headlines and a measure of public recognition. A small-town Kentucky lawyer. Reed served Herbert Hoover as counsel for the Federal Farm Board (1929-32) and the RFC (1932-35). As Franklin Roosevelt's Solicitor General (1935-38), he studiously defended such New Deal staples as NRA (he lost the case) and the Wagner-Connery Labor Relations Act (he won) before the Supreme Court. Once, in a rare dramatic moment, he collapsed from exhaustion in the middle of his argument.

Reed was appointed by Franklin Roosevelt to the seat vacated by rock-ribbed conservative George Sutherland just after the downfall of F.D.R.'s court-packing plan. Through the years he seemed to swing from New Deal-type liberalism to the middle-of-the-road to a form of conservatism, but he insisted that the country was swinging, not he. Once the late Justice Robert H. Jackson twitted Reed on growing more conservative. "Either that," said Jackson, "or you're changing your law clerks, Stanley." Reed answered: "It must be the law clerks, because I haven't changed a bit." He now wants to retire, he explained privately to President Eisenhower last week, because he fears that he will soon become too far removed from the realities and practicalities of the issues that come before the court to be able to decide them adequately.

As he prepared self-effacingly to leave the court, Reed was not even sure that he rated as the leading citizen of his own native Maysville, Ky. (pop. 8,000). That honor rightly belonged, he once said, to Maysville's Rosemary Clooney. "There used to be a street in town called Cow Lane and they changed it to Rosemary Lane. But there's no street in town named after-me."

Reed's retirement symbolizes the twilight of the famed Roosevelt court and the rising sun of an Eisenhower court. In 1937 F.D.R. tried and failed to get Congress to raise the number of Justices from nine to 15. But he got the New Deal sympathy he wanted within three years by naming Liberal Democrats Hugo Black, Reed, Felix Frankfurter and William O. Douglas to succeed Justices Van Devanter, Sutherland, Cardozo and Brandeis--key figures on the court that New Dealers scornfully called "The Nine Old Men." Since 1953 Ike has named three--Republicans Chief Justice Earl Warren and John Marshall Harlan, Democrat William J. Brennan Jr. Of the F.D.R. holdovers, Justice Black is now 70, Justice Frankfurter 74. Only hard clues as to whom Ike might choose to replace Reed: 1) Ike prefers to appoint lawyers with experience on the bench rather than deserving politicians, and 2) he might heed the quaint geographic fact that no Supreme Court Justice now hails from anywhere between Cleveland (Burton) and Puget Sound (Douglas).

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