In their frequent irritation at Supreme Court decisions, some Senators cannot resist the temptation to make court appointees squirm. Last week Cincinnati's Potter Stewart, 44, youngest justice in 20 years, got the special treatment when the Judiciary Committee took up his interim appointment (to succeed ailing Justice Harold Burton, TIME, Oct. 20).
The committee, as Lawyer Stewart well knew, was run by Mississippian James O. Eastland, a veteran lawyer himself, and was studded with high-seniority Southerners. Still and forevermore rankled by the high court's 1954 school desegregation ruling—a case in which Stewart played no part—Eastland & Co. lost no time putting Stewart...