Nation: THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER

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After Lyndon Johnson won his famed 87-vote "landslide" election to the US Senate in 1948, Thornberry succeeded him in the House, thus became "my Congressman' to L.B.J. When Johnson was recuperating from his massive 1955 heart attack, Homer often stopped by to play dominoes; and the President recalled, ten years later: "He let me win every game, and now he is on the Circuit Court." He was with Johnson in Los Angeles during the 1960 fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, and when L.B.J. was offered the vice-presidency by John F. Kennedy, Thornberry was one of the first friends he called for advice. "What do you think I should say?" asked Johnson. Why Lyndon," replied Homer, "I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Minutes later, Thornberry reconsidered, phoned Johnson back. "Lyndon, said "I was wrong. You ought to take the vice-presidency." Three years later he was at Johnson's side in Parkland Memorial Hospital when Kennedy was pronounced dead. The new President turned to Thornberry, declared gravely: "This is a time for prayer if there ever was one, Homer."

Though Thornberry voted against civil rights bills in 1956 and 1957, after Johnson became Vice President, his record grew notably liberal. In the House, he supported John F. Kennedy on 95% of all legislation in 1961 and, as a member of the conservative Rules Committee, helped spring many important Administration measures. Honoring a promise to Rayburn, Kennedy repaid that loyalty in 1963 with a judgeship in the Western Texas Federal District Court. Two years later, Johnson elevated Thornberry to the Circuit Court and had him sworn in on the front porch of the L.B.J. ranch.

Though his stature as a jurist hardly matches that of such colleagues on the Circuit Court as Albert Parr Tuttle and John Minor Wisdom, Thornberry took generally progressive stands on civil rights and free-speech cases. In 1966, he wrote the decision that struck down Texas' poll tax. Last year he sided with an 8-to-4 majority that ordered Southern schools to speed school desegregation. This year he overturned a local Louisiana ordinance restricting picketing with the words: "In an open society there must be the ability to advocate views in the hope of changing existing preconceptions or convictions."

"THAT DEAR MAN!"

Thornberry got the news of his appointment in the midst of a dinner party in Austin, when Johnson phoned him. "Homer," said the President am going to nominate you for the Supreme Court." Replied the overwhelmed Thornberry: "I hope I can deserve this confidence." Homer's wife Eloise was more down to earth. Said she of the President: "That dear man!"

In the view of critics, Johnson was being much too dear. To them the cherubic looking Thornberry, with his wavy white hair, his twinkling blue eyes a his backslapping "How-yew-all? manner, would be better cast as a rural justice of the peace than as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. But the court often has a way of bringing out the most in a man, and Homer's odyssey could well end in triumph.