THE JUDICIARY: Lawyer to the Court

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As chairman of the Senate's war-contracts investigating committee, Democrat Harry Truman leaned heavily on Republican Harold Hitz Burton. Chairman Truman seldom made a major move without first talking it over with Ohio's husky, square-faced junior Senator. Harry Truman liked Lawyer Burton's insistence on facts and fairness, his conscientious work.

Last week President Truman called Harold Burton to the White House, told him that he was going to appoint him to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Senator Burton, who has had plenty of legislative and administrative experience (he was mayor of Cleveland for six years) but has never sat on a judicial bench, was not the President's first choice. That choice had been Robert Patterson, who became the new U.S. Secretary of War (see below).

But, by official Washington's estimate, Harold Burton was an excellent appointment. He had impressed the Senate, as few first-termers ever have, by his ability and judicial temperament. (The Senate, as is its custom with its own members, gave his appointment immediate, unanimous confirmation.)

Labor did not like the Senator's co-authorship of the B2H1 (Burton-Ball-Hatch) industrial disputes bill. But the nation's press, in general, warmly applauded.

Moderate Man. Conservative by nature and training (Bowdoin College, Harvard Law School), Massachusetts-born Harold Burton has frequently been a nonpartisan, but non-crusading, progressive in action. A cautious, moderate man (no smoking, no swearing, never more than one cocktail), he is reputed to have as much devotion for the letter of the law as Owen Josephus Roberts, the resigned Justice he succeeds. When the right and left divisions of the Court are not turned arsy-versy, as they frequently have been in recent years, the new Justice may find himself (as Roberts frequently did) the scale-tipper.