• U.S.

The Administration: All in the Family

5 minute read
TIME

Proud and excited, Ramsey Clark, 39, got on the phone to his father. President Johnson had just appointed him Attorney General of the U.S., and he wanted to pass on the news. “I’m working on something,” his father replied, to Ramsey’s disappointment. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?” What Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, 67, was working on was every bit as big a story as his son’s new job: his decision to resign from the seat he has occupied for 17 years.

The elder Clark stepped down to avoid any hint of impropriety, though no law or precedent obliged him to do so. Actually, most of the Justice Department cases that reach the high court are handled not by the Attorney General but by the Solicitor General.* But without ever formally discussing the matter with either Ramsey or the President, who is an old personal friend, Clark had long since made up his mind to quitthe court if his son became Attorney General. “Mrs. Clark and I,” he said in his statement, “are filled with both pride and joy over Ramsey’s nomination.”

Touch of Coyness. Tom Clark’s paternal pride was all the deeper because he himself spent twelve years in the Justice Department — the last four as Attorney General — before Harry Truman appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1949. With his father at Justice, young Ramsey Clark got his first exposure to the department at the age of nine. The rangy (6 ft. 3 in., 180 Ibs.), easy-mannered Ramsey served a hitch in the Marine Corps at the end of World War II, then studied at the University of Texas and at Chicago. Diligent, if not brilliant, he earned three degrees in four years, in 1951 joined his father’s old Dallas law firm, there lost only one jury case in ten years.

As Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Lands Division, Clark was an efficient administrator with a knack for economy: for three straight years, he ran the division for $300,000 less than its $3,500,000 budget. When Nicholas Katzenbach moved over to the State Department last October, Clark became Acting Attorney General. It had taken Johnson 148 days to publicly remove the “Acting” from Katzenbach’s title in 1965—and Ramsey was kept waiting precisely the same number of days. The President broke the news with that touch of coyness that has become almost a trademark. Having dropped a hint that the appointment might be forthcoming, he summoned newsmen to the White House the following day to watch him sign a document; Ramsey was standing at his shoulder. When one reporter asked if the document on the desk might be Clark’s nomination, Johnson flashed a Cheshire grin, replied: “Yes.” That was it.

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 SolicitorGeneral in 1930 when his father was appointed Chief Justice by Herbert Hoover.

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