Feud, Continued

The Supreme Court was closed for the summer, but day after day tourists thronged into the empty marble halls, looking as if they expected to find the justices clubbing each other with baseball bats. The nation's cartoonists gleefully sketched black-robed old gentlemen in the throes of wild pugnacity. Many a citizen muttered "Shame."

It was plain last week that Justice Robert Jackson's Nuernberg attack on Justice Hugo Black (TIME, June 17) was not the sort of thing which would blow over in a few days--or a few weeks. For it was not a gesture of sudden bad temper. It came as the result of a deep-seated feud which had long roiled the court with Internal turmoil and now brought it into public disgrace.

As far back as 1944 the justices--the vigorous "Nine Young Men"--had been taking polite, legalistic pot shots at each other. These stemmed largely from ideological differences: Black headed the left wing and Jackson, along with Justice Frankfurter, the right wing.

But the main cause of the court's disrepute was the justices' continual and active politicking around Washington. Jimmy Byrnes had left the court to go back into the fray. Felix Frankfurter had made no bones about his coziness with the White House in the Roosevelt days. Jackson hoped for a bigger political plum. Black made speeches before the National Citizens Political Action Committee. Justice Murphy was the most indefatigable cocktail-partier in the capital (where cocktails are invariably spiced with political dope).

Justices fought each other by feeding their own accounts of the court's battles to newsmen and columnists, violating the confidences of the court and creating a flood of gossip. In fact, it was a leak to a columnist which had brought on Justice Jackson's blast.

He had sent, his accusations to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, but if he hoped that the committees would order a full public investigation he was disappointed. The committees met and decided there was nothing they could do. In Nuernberg, Justice Jackson announced that he would come home in July.

At the White House, Harry Truman let it be known that he had tried to dissuade Jackson from his unprecedented action, but had failed. The President was hopping mad. For in the long run, even though he had appointed neither Jackson nor Black, Harry Truman's administration, as the inheritor of the New Deal, would get most of the blame for the unseemly judicial scandal.

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