Call for a Friend

Everyone figured that Harry Truman would take his time selecting a new justice for the Supreme Court. But when newsmen trooped into the President's press conference last week, just five days after the death of Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, the President announced that he had already picked his man. The new justice would be Judge Sherman Minton of the U.S. circuit court of appeals, onetime big voice in New Deal mob scenes, onetime Senator from Indiana, longtime fast friend of Missouri's ex-Senator Harry Truman.

Even in the age of declining Supreme Court prestige, the appointment had its note of irony. In Franklin Roosevelt's vain but tumultuous campaign to pack the nation's highest court with added New Dealing justices, no man raised a louder voice for the White House enterprise than burly, boot-jawed "Shay" Minton. As a result of his signal service, he had been mentioned for just about every vacancy on the court that turned up in the past decade. But until Harry Truman broke the news last week, his name had hardly entered the speculation this time. Battle Cry. A son of poor parents, Shay Minton was born 58 years ago in the southern Indiana hill country called the "Knob" district, went to work when he was eight years old. He put himself through Indiana and Yale law schools at the top of his classes, settled in New Albany, Ind. to practice law and enter politics. He was licked twice trying to get into the House of Representatives, but he rode into the Senate in the somber days of 1934 with a straight New Deal platform and a vote-getting battle cry: "You can't offer a hungry man the Constitution."

Sitting in a rear-row seat, right next to Freshman Senator Truman, Freshman Senator Minton gave his theory of a highly flexible Constitution a bumptious workout. In 1937, after the New Deal had given up its court-packing scheme, he proposed a drastic change in the Supreme Court's procedure--one which would require a two-thirds majority in all decisions dealing with the constitutionality of acts of Congress. Minton later toyed with the Constitution again, when he introduced a bill to gag the press by imposing a $1,000,-to-$10,000 fine on publications which printed a "known untruth."

In the Senate, Minton lasted only one term but as a reward for faithful service President Roosevelt gave him an appointment as one of his six "anonymous assistants." In 1941 Roosevelt appointed him to the seventh U.S. circuit court of appeals. As a judicial interpreter of the Constitution, he seemed to tone down some of his ideas and he established a reputation as a competent and liberal-minded judge, if no legal world-shaker.

The Black Robe. He never lost touch with his old friend in the capital. Last week the telephone call from the White House finally came to the commodious New Albany home where Judge Minton sat nursing a broken leg. (He tripped on a stone outside his home.) "Harry told me he was naming me and asked what I thought about it," said the judge. "I told him I thought it was wonderful."

Not everyone else thought it was quite so wonderful. Critics of the disputatious, unpredictable Supreme Court, who had clamored for the appointment of a justice with judicial experience above the police-court level, could not find much fault with Shay Minton's background on that score. But they could find little else to applaud. In filling the vacancy left by the death of Justice Frank Murphy, the President had put the black robe on Texas' Tom Clark in reward for his politician's services and for no other apparent reason. In appointing his old crony, Shay Minton, he had done little more to raise the distinction of the court.

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