THE SUPREME COURT: Ohio Exchange

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While poring over briefs in his Cincinnati office last week, youthful (43) Federal Judge Potter Stewart got a terse telephone call from Attorney General William P. Rogers. Could Stewart catch a plane for Washington right away? Judge Stewart said that his duties on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals were pressing him, asked whether the matter was really important. Rogers assured him that it was.

Later that afternoon Stewart's wife Mary Ann drove him to the airport. "He was jittery," she recalls. "He kept wondering what had gone wrong." While sitting in his room in Washington's Statler Hilton Hotel that evening, waiting for Rogers to call, Stewart flicked on the TV set and heard, for the first time, that Associate Justice Harold Hitz Burton was retiring from the Supreme Court. "I said to myself, 'My golly, I wonder whether this is it?' " It was.

Next morning, a little haggard after a sleepless night, Stewart went with Rogers to the White House for a 20-minute talk with the President, emerged youngest man to be named to the Supreme Court since Franklin Roosevelt tabbed 40-year-old William O. Douglas in 1939.

Ohio Republican Stewart, already the possessor of a distinguished judicial reputation (see box), succeeds another distinguished Ohio Republican. Harvard-trained Lawyer Harold Burton, Truman-appointed, was mildly conservative in outlook, served on the adventuresome Warren court not as a guiding rudder but as a valuable anchor to windward. Last year, in one of the most important Supreme Court minority opinions of the decade, Burton powerfully dissented from the ruling that Du Font's 23% stock ownership of General Motors violated antitrust laws (TIME, June 17, 1957). He authored last May's conservative-leaning opinion that a worker kept out of his place of employment by a union picket line may sue the union for damages in a state court (Warren and Douglas dissented).

Ailing with the tremors of Parkinson's disease, Harold Burton decided that since he had reached the full-pay-retirement age of 70, he would step down. In his $35,000-a-year retirement, he plans to do some writing on Supreme Court history, hopes that "the Chief Justice may have jobs for me where I can help."