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.