It was no accident that John F. Kennedy appointed more federal judges than any other President. For years, congressional Democrats had refused to expand the overworked federal bench—saving for a Democratic Administration a bumper crop of 73 judicial nominations.
But all that judicial patronage was liberally sprinkled with problems.
Because they deal largely with the law of the state in which they sit, and they understandably reflect the dominant social patterns of that state, district judges are drawn from their own localities. The judges were approved by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but he knew that all candidates, and especially those for the Southern bench, would have to be "traded out" with the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Mississippi's Segregationist James O.
Eastland.
Even so, Kennedy may have thought he was doing well. His first district judge, for instance, Mississippi's William Harold Cox, took office in 1961 with the American Bar Association's highest endorsement of "exceptionally well-qualified." The tall, stern son of a County sheriff, Cox was a stickler for detail and had been a first-rate trial lawyer in Jackson. Other Kennedy appointees seemed equally qualified, and the Administration heaved a sigh of relief.
Rearguard Justice. Unhappily, some of those promising district judges have turned out to be so devoted to segregation that they may be the greatest obstacle to equal rights in the South today.
Now entrenched for life on Southern benches are such men as Louisiana's Judge E. Gordon West, who has upheld the Supreme Court's 1954 school ruling while calling it "one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time," and Georgia's Judge J. Robert Elliott, who once said, "I don't want those pinks, radicals and black voters to outvote those who are trying to preserve our segregation laws and traditions." Armed with tight control over their calendars, certain Southern district judges have delayed civil rights cases for months and years, played cat and mouse with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and mocked the Supreme Court. Where possible, they remand cases for endless adjudication by state courts. When reversed, they take back the same case and start all over. Little can be done short of impeachment—a tactic successfully used only four times since 1789.
One measure of the result is that last week Mississippi's Judge Cox coolly tried to jail not only U.S. Attorney Robert E. Hauberg in Jackson but also his boss, Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.