(2 of 2)
Clark has been in the thick of the Administration's fight for civil liberties. He was the department's troubleshooter during the 1965 Selma voting-rights drive and headed a presidential fact-finding mission after the Watts riots. Though his father dissented from the 1966 Miranda verdict banning confessions obtained without full warnings to defendants of their rights, Ramsey wholeheartedly endorses the Supreme Court's recent liberal rulings on interrogations and confessions. When Congress passed a stiff crime bill for the District of Columbia that he considered reactionary and unconstitutional, he prevailed on Johnson to veto it. He has ordered the Justice Department to discontinue all wiretaps except those clearly involving national security. Like his father, who was once the department's antitrust chief, he favors tough enforcement of laws against monopoly and price fixing.
Swing Voter. When Clark's nomination reached the Senate, it was unanimously and swiftly confirmed. The only regrets aired on Capitol Hill, in fact, were over the elder Clark's impending departure from the Supreme Court —probably when the current term ends in June. The last of Truman's four appointees, Tom Clark earned a reputation over the years as the author of some of the court's most lucid and precise opinions (including the controversial 1963 school-prayer decision). Though known as a judicial conservative, he shunned the doctrinaire stances of some of his colleagues, served as a "swing voter" in some of the court's 5-to-4 decisions on such issues as race, reapportionment and obscenity.
Clark's retirement (at full pay of $39,500) gives Lyndon Johnson the opportunity of making his second appointment (his first: Abe Fortas, generally pegged as a liberal) and the problem of deciding whether to seek someone with a philosophy similar to Clark's or to reinforce the liberals' slender majority. There was the usual speculation about Government figures (Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz and Congressman Wilbur Mills), academicians (Harvard Law School's Paul Freund), and Texas friends (Houston Attorney Leon Jaworski and Federal Judge Homer Thornberry). Talk was also revived that Johnson would like to be the first President to appoint a woman or a Negro to the court, thus might well settle on either Federal Judge Sarah Hughes, who administered the presidential oath of office to him in Dallas, or Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.
Johnson may well get more than one chance. Before too long, other Justices —most notably Hugo Black, 81, and William Douglas, 68—may follow Tom Clark into retirement.
* For that reason, Charles Evans Hughes Jr. resigned as Solicitor General in 1930 when his father was appointed Chief Justice by Herbert Hoover.