THE JUDICIARY: Olympian Tussle

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Next to the Supreme Court Justices, the most influential judges in the U.S. are those who sit on famed "CCA-2"—the U.S. court of appeals for the second circuit (New York, Connecticut, Vermont). Last month Chief Judge Thomas Swan retired, at 75, from his $17,500-a-year lifetime seat on that bench. Last week President Eisenhower was getting ready to fill the job—the first important judicial appointment of his Administration. The choice lay between a candidate with top-drawer political credentials and one carrying the blue-ribbon endorsement of leaders of the second circuit's bench and bar.

The leading political candidate is Connecticut's ex-U.S. Senator John A. Danaher, 54, a onetime Taftman, who campaigned last year for Eisenhower. Danaher has the backing of Connecticut's Senators Prescott Bush and William Purtell. Danaher's legal background: left Yale Law School in his final year, took his bar exams after clerking in a lawyer's office; now has a substantial practice in Washington, where he mingles law with lobbying. The other candidate is Connecticut's senior U.S. District Judge Carroll C. Hincks, 63, Republican and Yale Law graduate ('14), appointed to the district court by Herbert Hoover in 1931.

Retired Judge Swan and two other distinguished alumni of CAA-2, Learned and Augustus Hand, first heard officially about Danaher's prospects from FBI agents who were checking Danaher's record. The three judges promptly rendered their opinion by joining 20 other leading New York, Connecticut and Vermont lawyers and ex-judges in a "memorandum" to Attorney General Herbert Brownell. Its thinly veiled message: an endorsement of Hincks and a veto for Danaher. Brownell sent back a noncommittal thanks for a "thoughtful analysis of the problem."

The whole exchange was conducted in the most Olympian of legal tones, but it did not take a lawyer to detect that the President would be walking into a first-class tussle when he made the new appointment.