THE SUPREME COURT

Now, Douglas' Dealings

Abe Fortas was gone from the Supreme Court, and Associate Justice William O. Douglas had severed his questionable connection with the Albert B. Parvin Foundation, but the court remained enmeshed in controversy over ethics. This time Douglas provided the target.

Anticipating a full-blown judicial-ethics hearing on Capitol Hill, which might further denigrate the court, Chief Justice Earl Warren had called for the Judicial Conference of the U.S. to formulate a code of ethics and require disclosure of all federal judges' financial affairs. But Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield was not satisfied. He said that he would use the Fortas and Douglas affairs to press for an identical code of conduct for all three branches of the Government.

Upheld Obscenity. Two conservative Republican Senators, Paul Fannin of Arizona and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, launched their own attacks last week on the liberal maverick who has sat on the high bench for 30 of his 70 years. Fannin noted solemnly that Douglas had written an article on folk singing for Avant Garde magazine after the Supreme Court upheld an obscenity conviction against its publisher, Ralph Ginzburg. Douglas, who collected only $350 for the piece, was one of four dissenters to the decision. Declared Thurmond: "Justice Douglas is the next one who must go."

It was ludicrous to suggest that the Associate Justice would risk compromising his integrity for a $350 magazine article. Douglas' probity was more seriously challenged on the Parvin connection, after Albert Parvin inexplicably made public a file of his personal papers and financial dealings. Among other things, it included a May 12 letter from Douglas dismissing charges that he had been indiscreet in counseling the foundation. "The strategy is to get me off the court," he wrote Parvin, a Los Angeles multimillionaire businessman. The Justice's bitterness was aimed at the Internal Revenue Service, which has been investigating the Parvin Foundation's finances for the past three years. Apparently Douglas believed that IRS agents were more intent on embarrassing him than on checking into the foundation's tax-exempt status.

Unanswered Questions. Certainly Douglas' ties with Parvin were not comparable to Fortas' involvement with the Wolfson Family Foundation and its founder, jailed Financier Louis Wolfson. Yet there were some curious links between the two cases. For one thing, Parvin had been named a co-conspirator --but was never tried--in a securities-law violation case along with Louis Wolfson. Moreover, the Parvin Foundation derived its income from Albert Parvin's ties with Las Vegas gambling operations. This raised a question similar to the central issue of the Fortas affair: Should a Supreme Court Justice be judged by the company he keeps? Adding to the intrigue was the fact that until last week the Parvin Foundation retained Carolyn Agger--Abe Fortas' wife and a top Washington lawyer--as its tax consultant.

By week's end, the muddled involvement of Douglas with Parvin, Parvin with Wolfson and Parvin with the IRS remained to be unscrambled. It was generally agreed that Douglas, as the $12,000-a-year president of the foundation, had only carried out the foundation's stated function: doling out funds for meetings of jurists and politicians and providing scholarships for foreign students at U.C.L.A. and Princeton University. Unanswered, however, was the question of why Douglas ever got involved in any questionable dealings.

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