The Nation: The President's Two Nominees

LEWIS F. POWELL JR. "I have never aspired to the Supreme Court," says Lewis Franklin Powell Jr., 64. Indeed, he so much preferred his own life as a distinguished Virginia lawyer that when his name was proposed for the court, during the Haynsworth-Carswell fracas, he wrote a letter to Attorney General John Mitchell saying he was too old for the job. The passing of time has not made Powell any younger, to be sure, but it has convinced President Nixon that the original proposal was a good one. "Ten years of Powell," he said last week, "is worth 30 years of anyone else."

Powell is indeed sprightly for his age. Slim (6 ft., 155 lbs.) and well-conditioned (smoking only an occasional cigarette and preferring a glass of milk to a cocktail), Powell is an avid hunter of duck and quail and still likes to join his wife Josephine in an energetic game of tennis. Says he: "I used to play golf, but I married a tennis player." At work he is tireless, appearing at his desk around 8 o'clock every morning, including Saturdays and Sundays. Longevity runs in the family: his widowed father remarried seven years ago and is still flourishing at 91.

Powell's family heritage well qualifies him for nomination to the Supreme Court's "Southern seat." The first Powell to land in America arrived in 1607, one of the original Jamestown colonists. Powell himself was born in Suffolk, Va., won undergraduate and law degrees from Washington and Lee (Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class) and Harvard Law School, and now occupies an office overlooking a Richmond landmark, the home of Robert E. Lee.

Partly because of these very traditions, however, Powell stands out against the stereotype of the segregationist. When some Virginians were trying to launch a policy of "interposition" against federally enforced integration of schools, Powell denounced the doctrine as "a lot of rot." As chairman of the Richmond public school board, he presided over the successful, disturbance-free integration of the city's schools in 1959. No sooner had he been nominated to the Supreme Court, in fact, than he won the endorsement of Virginia N.A.A.C.P. leaders.

As a lawyer, Powell has been a partner for 34 years in Virginia's biggest and most powerful firm, Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell & Gibson. In time, his courtly ways combined with his talent for organization to make him a power in the profession: president of the American Bar Association (1964-65), president of the American College of Trial Lawyers (1969-70), president of the American Bar Foundation (1969-71). As head of the A.B.A., he was credited with efforts to speed courtroom procedures and to provide legal aid to the needy. All in all, says Professor Jon R. Waltz of Northwestern, Powell is "a very fine lawyer, justified to sit in the seat of John Harlan. For the first time in a long, long while, the court will have a new man who has demonstrated he can work with the law, and that he can do it superbly."