Lawyer & Friend

In the heady early days of Franklin Roosevelt's Administration, two young Southern liberals came together in Washington and discovered the first bond of friendship. One went on to carve out a brilliant career in politics; the other rose to the top of the legal profession and successfully argued two landmark cases in U.S, criminal law.

Last week the politician of that pair, Lyndon Johnson, put the presidential seal on the friendship of 30 years by naming the lawyer, Abe Fortas, as his first appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Qualifications. Justice-designate Fortas, 55, has a remarkable set of qualifications for the high office. He helped put himself through Southwestern College in Memphis by playing the violin at dances. From Southwestern he went to Yale Law School,* where he won the coveted editorship of the Yale Law Journal. His record at Yale was so outstanding that he was appointed an assistant professor immediately after graduation in 1933, commuted from New Haven to Washington for four years on New Deal assignments before taking a full-time Government job in 1937. He became Harold Ickes' Under Secretary of the Interior in 1942 when he was only 32.

Fortas left the Government in 1946 to become a law partner of ex-F.D.R. Trustbuster Thurman Arnold. The two were joined by former Federal Communications Commission Chairman

Paul A. Porter, and the firm of Arnold, Fortas & Porter emerged as one of Washington's top legal offices.

Between corporate assignments, Fortas labored with intense dedication on nonremunerative civil-liberties cases. In the early '50s, he successfully defended Johns Hopkins Scholar Owen Lattimore on charges of perjury. (Lattimore, testifying before a Senate committee, denied supporting Communist causes.) In 1954, Fortas persuaded the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to broaden the definition of legal insanity in the light of psychiatric knowledge, a decision that is still reverberating through the courts. In 1962, the Supreme Court picked him to appeal the celebrated Gideon case; he argued brilliantly and induced the court to rule that any citizen, no matter how humble he was, or how guilty he seemed, had the right to legal counsel, even if the state had to pay the fee.

There is even a family side to Abe

Fortas' devotion to the law. His wife Carolyn, who was his student when he was teaching at Yale, is now a member of his firm and is one of Washington's shrewdest tax lawyers. Husband and wife together draw an estimated $200,000 to $225,000 a year, drive a 1953 Rolls-Royce to their office in a converted Victorian mansion, are now moving to a $250,000 house in Washington's Dumbarton Oaks area.

The Friendship. The sinews of friendship between Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson are about as deep and strong as possible. In 1948, when Johnson's election to the U.S. Senate was challenged, it was Fortas who acted as his counsel and held the seat despite charges that the 87 votes by which Johnson won the primary were stolen from the opposition. When Johnson became President, one of the first men he called to his side was Fortas. The new President consulted Fortas on appointments, departmental problems, national and international policy, and the creation of the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He worked out the complex trust to manage the Johnson family's Texas holdings during Lyndon's presidency.

The depth and importance of the friendship was shown in another way last October. When Walter Jenkins, President Johnson's longtime friend and aide, was arrested on a morals charge. it was to Fortas that Jenkins first turned for help. Fortas, along with Fellow Washington Lawyer Clark Clifford, then tried to get Washington newspaper editors to hold off breaking the story of Jenkins' arrest.

It was clear that Fortas preferred to play his role outside public office. Johnson had tried to bring him into a high Government office at least once before. In September 1964, the President offered him the post of Attorney General, to replace Robert F. Kennedy. Fortas turned down the job. But the offer of a seat on the high court was one that Fortas could not turn down; he had said before, in describing his relationship with Lyndon Johnson, "He gives me the honor of having some confidence in my discretion and experience in law and government."

As a New Deal stalwart, a student and longtime friend of liberal Justice Douglas, Fortas is expected to maintain the court's current liberal, activist majority--with a special interest in civil liberties. His approach can be expected to differ only in degree from that of Arthur Goldberg, whose seat--the so-called Jewish seat--he takes on the court. But Fortas will bring with him to the bench a special problem. His long and intimate friendship with the President and his handling of some of the more difficult episodes in the Johnson catalogue will be constantly remembered. That means that both political and nonpolitical eyes will carefully scrutinize his every move on the bench.

* With Fortas' appointment, the Supreme Court will take on a decided Eli tinge. Justices Potter Stewart and Byron White also attended Yale, and Justice William O. Douglas was a member of the faculty before he joined the New Deal. No other law school can claim more than one of the court's nine Justices.

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