"Between Us and Tyranny" Called to the telephone while dressing for dinner, Harvard Law Professor Felix Frankfurter was still in his B.V.D.s.
At the other end of the line was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. F.D.R.
chatted for a moment, then said, "You know, I told you I don't want to appoint you to the Supreme Court." Frankfurter said yes, he remembered that; Roosevelt went on talking, repeating at least twice more that he did not want to appoint Frankfurter to the court. Finally, F.D.R. got to the point. "But wherever I turn," he said, "and to whomever I talk that matters to me, I am made to realize that you're the only person fit to succeed Holmes and Cardozo." And so, Roosevelt said, he was going to appoint Frankfurter to the Supreme Court anyway.
That was in 1939. Recalling the phone conversation in later years, Frankfurter said: "You know, he was given to teasing. Some people said that it was an innocently sadistic streak in him. He just had to have an outlet for fun." Behind his teasing, Roosevelt had reasons for hesitations about Frankfurter. For geographical balance, Roosevelt had wanted to name a man from the West or Midwest. Roosevelt well knew that he would stir up a storm by naming a foreign-born Jew with a well-deserved reputation as a radical advocate of liberal causes. But Frankfurter's prestige among U.S. men of law was great, and most of them could agree with the Nation's comment that the appointment had a "satisfying inevitability."
∙ In arriving at that pinnacle of inevitability. Frankfurter climbed a long way. Born in Austria, he came to the U.S. with his family at twelve, grew up on New York's seamy Lower East Side.
His path led through the College of the City of New York and on to Harvard Law School. How could a young man from the Lower East Side go to Harvard? The tuition was only $150 a year then, Frankfurter once explained, and "you could live on very little." Frankfurter reached the top of his class, got into a leading New York City law firm after graduation. But he soon gave that up to serve under Henry L.
Stimson, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had just appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Frankfurter followed his boss to Washington in 1911, when President Taft named Stimson Secretary of War, remained in Government service for three years, then went back to Harvard to teach. He remained at Harvard for nearly a quarter of a century, becoming one of the nation's most eminent teachers of law.
During the late 19205 and the 19303, Frankfurter sent to Washington many a bright young Harvard Law graduate.
Collectively, they were nicknamed "happy hot dogs," and their numbers included Dean Acheson, Thomas ("Tommy the Cork") Corcoran, James M.