In its search for a replacement for retiring Law Dean Carl B. Spaeth, Stanford University managed to main tain its record as a ferocious raider of Ivy League faculties. Yale's bright, articulate Bayless Manning, 41, rolled into Palo Alto last summer completely equipped with wife, four children, a black Porsche sports car, a worn set of Shakespeare, an Egyptian statue, a dagger that had been used in a Philip pine murder and a rapidly expanding reputation as one of the busiest young legal scholars in the business. Manning's former boss, Yale Law Dean Eugene V. Rostow, had already given warning of the prodigy he was sending west: "Manning is one of the shiniest fish ever to come out of the sea. He has the drive, charm and quickness to do anything."
Bay Manning has been what Rostow calls "a phenomenon" ever since he hurtled out of Fall River (Mass.) High School in 1940 with a scholarship and the intellectual agility to race through Yale at the head of his class only two years later. At 19, having learned Japanese with no visible effort, he became one of the Army cryptanalysts who helped to break the Japanese naval code, which cleared the decks for U.S. victory at Midway. When he graduated from Yale Law School in 1949, he was again No. 1 in his class and editor in chief of the Law Journal. After he clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed, even that usually restrained jurist marked Manning as "exceptionally brilliant."
No Sulking. What admirers call his "orderly intellect" persuaded Manning to spurn Wall Street for faster progress with a big Cleveland law firm. In six years, he became not only a formidable young corporation lawyer, but also a part-time political scientist at Western Reserve University and a leading spirit of the Cleveland Metropolitan Service Commission. When Yale made him a law professor at 33, the Cleveland Plain Dealer lamented the departure of "a young man with an admirable civic conscience."
At Yale, Manning churned out pioneering articles on corporation law, organized lively seminars on everything from state governments to Latin American jurisprudence. He rebuilt a Connecticut farmhouse with his own hands, found time to draft the state's new corporation law and persuade the state legislature to enact it. Fluent in Spanish, to say nothing of Norwegian and Japanese, Manning helped to organize the Peace Corps program in Latin America, did research for the CIA, helped to draft the 1962 Trade Extension Act, toiled for NATO on the problems of a multinational nuclear force and hit the banquet trail as the Yale law faculty's most zealous rustler of alumni cash. Through it all, Manning stayed as cool and witty as ever. "He never bristles or sulks," says Rostow, "and he needs no soothing."