THE SUPREME COURT: A Long Way from the Jail

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To Quiet the Clamor. A friendly, folksy Kentuckian who sprinkled his conversation with such expressions as "sure as God made little apples" and "as sound as old wheat in the mill," Vinson had a political knack for charming even those who were opposed to him. It was this talent, and not Vinson's stature as a lawyer or a judge, that prompted Harry Truman to appoint his good friend as Chief Justice in 1946. The High Court was shaking with personal feuds. Associate Justices Hugo Black and Robert Jackson (who was on leave in NÜrnberg prosecuting the Nazi war criminals) were hurling public, personal insults at each other across the Atlantic. Harry Truman wanted easygoing Fred Vinson to quiet the clamor and pull the court together.

By quietly .reasoning with the quarreling Justices, Vinson muffled the unseemly uproar; but he did not pull the court together. There were dissents in 50% of the cases in the term before Vinson became Chief Justice, compared to 62% in his first term and 80% in his last.

Vinson—like the court over which he presided—had no broad legal philosophy. A homely realist, he tended to deal with each case as if it were the first and last of its kind, to be decided only on the immediate circumstances. However, on some issues, his decisions followed a vague pattern. On federal control of private business, he was usually proGovernment, e.g., his dissent supporting Harry Truman's 1952 seizure of the steel industry. On racial questions, he was generally antidiscrimination, e.g., his 1948 majority opinion that restrictive covenants on real estate are unenforceable. He had an immense fund of practical sense, and more knowledge of Government than any Justice of recent years. His value to the court was shown at the end of the Rosenberg case when Justice Douglas, a day after the court recessed, issued a stay of execution. A less decisive Chief Justice might have let the Douglas order stand until October. Vinson called the court back into session and Douglas was quickly reversed.

The agenda for the court's coming term includes the school-segregation cases, which some call the court's most explosive issue since the Dred Scott decision. Vinson's anti-segregation views might have caused him to hand down a decision against his old friend, South Carolina's Governor James Byrnes. On these and other court matters, Chief Justice Vinson was quietly reading and deliberating last week, as he waited in his Washington apartment for the court to go into session on Oct. 5. One night Vinson woke his wife, complained of feeling ill. A few minutes after the doctor arrived he was dead, at 63, of a heart attack.