One for the G.O.P.

When Presidential Candidate John F. Kennedy promised that he would pick each federal judge not by "his political party but his qualifications for the office," many welcomed his words as a pledge to scrap the ancient prerogative of the President to salt the federal bench heavily with members of his own party. But Kennedy, once in office, found the temptation politically irresistible. He renominated three Eisenhower candidates for the bench, but of the first 95 appointees picked by his own Administration, there was nary a Republican. Last week, Kennedy finally got around to appointing his first G.O.P. judge: Jesse Ernest Eschbach, 41, who was nominated to the U.S. District Court for Indiana.

Small-town Lawyer Eschbach has harbored an ambition to be a federal judge ever since he was in Indiana University's School of Law--but it long looked as if he might not make it. He served a hitch in the wartime Navy between college and law school, later settled down to a general law practice in Warsaw, Ind. (pop. 7,234), but left the law for a couple of years to try his hand as an officer of a furniture-manufacturing company. Though he has dabbled in politics, he has never held elective office, was not widely known in his state. Kennedy cast his lightning at Warsaw on the recommendation of an old law-school associate of Eschbach's, Indiana's Democratic Senator Vance Hartke--even though Eschbach's county gave Richard Nixon 13,539 votes to Kennedy's 5,839 in 1960.

The Administration intends to appoint about ten more Republicans among the 38 judgeships that remain to be filled. Like Eschbach, most of them will probably get appointments in areas that are already solidly Republican (and are thus not likely to be swayed by federal favors) or in populous states (New York, Illinois and California) where several Democrats have already been chosen and the party is satisfied. Once this is done, Kennedy's score on partisanship will be little different from that of his predecessors: Roosevelt named 208 Democrats and 8 Republicans, Truman 129 Democrats and 13 Republicans, Eisenhower 175 Republicans and 11 Democrats. The American Bar Association, which has given Kennedy generally good marks for the quality of his selections to date, feels that he missed an unusual chance to continue the partisan balance left by Eisenhower (161 Republicans, 160 Democrats). But the demands of party loyalty are strong--and no one really expected that Jack Kennedy would ignore them.

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