National Affairs: THE YOUNG JUSTICE

The U.S. Supreme Court’s newest, youngest Justice: Ohio Judge Potter Stewart, 43.

Early Years. Son of gregarious Ohio Republican James Garfield Stewart, sometime mayor of Cincinnati (1938-47), now a state supreme court judge. After prepping at Hotchkiss. young Potter wavered between law and journalism at Yale, was chairman of the Yale Daily News, tried a summertime stint as a cub reporter on the Taft family’s Cincinnati Times-Star before finally deciding on law. Graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa (1937)) ne spent a year studying international law at Cambridge University on a Henry Fellowship (awarded to four U.S. college graduates a year), then graduated from Yale Law School (’41), also cum laude. He saw World War II sea duty as a lieutenant aboard Navy oilers, “floating around on a sea of 100 octane gas, bored to death 99 percent of the time and scared to death one percent.”

Law Career. After three years of grueling work as a freshman in a Wall Street law firm, he headed back to Ohio. As a New York lawyer, he explains, “you work harder and harder to become more and more successful so that you can move further and further away from town and see less and less of your family.” As a rising young Republican lawyer in Cincinnati (who still defends a first vote for Franklin Roosevelt), he dabbled in politics, got elected to two terms (1950-53) as a city councilman. Appointed by President Eisenhower in 1954 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee), he won the respect of lawyers and the U.S. Justice Department for his solid, keenly reasoned opinions, showed a flair for casting opinions in clear and forceful English. Wrote Judge Stewart, upholding the habeas corpus appeal of a prisoner who had been whisked before a judge late at night, convicted of rape on the basis of a forced confession, and sentenced to life without benefit of counsel: “The prompt and vigorous administration of the criminal law is to be commended and encouraged. But swift justice demands more than just swiftness.”

Personality. Still youthful-looking despite dabs of grey at the temples, slender, amiable Potter Stewart says that his only hobbies are “my home and my family.” The family: wife Mary Ann (onetime LIFE researcher), three children aged seven to 13. “We also have a dog named Bingo and an undetermined number of cats,” he adds. When colleagues and friends describe Judge Stewart, two words occur again and again: “brilliant” and “unassuming.” Of his own appointment to the Supreme Court, Stewart unassumingly said: “In my fondest dreams I never thought that such an honor would come to me.”

Outlook. Tagged both “conservative” and “liberal,” Stewart refuses to admit to any simple ideological label. “I’d like to be thought of as a lawyer,” he says. Southerners searching for a clue to his approach to desegregation could find it in a 1956 decision in which he rejected the Hillsboro (Ohio) school board’s contention that, to avoid overcrowding, integration should be postponed until a new school building was completed: “The avoidance alone of somewhat overcrowded classrooms cannot justify segregation of school children solely because of the color of their skins.”. The quality that a judge needs above all, as he sees it, is fairness: “Fairness is really what justice is.”