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Yet so far at least, Abe Fortas, has remained Johnson's intimate friend. He is even closer to the President than Justice Felix Frankfurter was to F.D.R. Fortas is the true éminence grise of the Johnson Administration. No one outside knows accurately how many times Fortas has come through the back door of the White House but any figure would probably be too low.
To young aides, who speak of him in hushed tones, he is an object of respect—even awe.
The Johnson-Fortas relationship dates back to the late '30s, when Johnson was a Congressman and Fortas was director of the Interior Department's Division of Power, in a position to help Johnson with a Texas dam project. The two men came from different backgrounds. Johnson had worked his way up from the Texas hill country and was immersed in fundamentalist religion. Fortas was the Orthodox Jewish son of an immigrant cabinetmaker from Eneland. His father taught himself to read and write; his mother was always illiterate. Young Fortas was brought up in Memphis, worked later in a shoe store and played the violin in a dance band to help put himself through Southwestern at Memphis. He attended Yale Law School on a scholarship. By the time they met, both Johnson and Fortas were rising fast on the Washington scale of success. Both also shared a profound admiration for Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal.
Second Nature. The friendship bloomed during the war—Fortas at 32, had risen to Under Secretary of the Interior. In 1948, Fortas probably saved L B J 's political career. Victor in the Texas senatorial primary by a margin of 87 votes, Johnson had been ruled off the ballot by a federal district judge pending an investigation for vote fraud. Fortas persuaded Mr. Justice Black, who had general judicial responsibility for the Circuit that includes Texas, when the Supreme Court was in recess, to overturn the ruling—and to put Johnson back on the ballot. "This, said Fortas, "is a political controversy, nothing more nor less."
Relying on Fortas has been second nature to Johnson ever since. When he became Vice President, Fortas helped him devise stringent rules that would prohibit companies doing business with the Government from discriminating against Negroes. After the assassination in Dallas, Fortas quickly persuaded Johnson that he should appoint the Warren Commission in order to inform the nation and the world about the assassin, in lieu of a trial. He was the first man that Walter Jenkins, one of the President's closest aides, called for help when he was arrested on a morals charge, and, together with Clark Clifford, he made the rounds of Washington newspapers, asking editors to look into the story carefully before printing it.