The Long Wait

He was enthusiastically nominated by President Kennedy, certified as "well qualified" by the American Bar Association, endorsed by the overwhelming majority of Senators of both parties. Yet for nearly a year the Senate has dillydallied over the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall as a judge on the Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals (New York, Connecticut and Vermont). Why? Because a handful of Southern Senators object to Marshall as the longtime chief counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the man who successfully argued the 1954 school integration case before the Supreme Court.

Under normal Senate procedure, Marshall's appointment went to the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Mississippi's James O. Eastland. Eastland assigned a three-man subcommittee under South Carolina's Olin Johnston to study the nomination. When the subcommittee finally got down to business in July, Johnston looked on benignly as Subcommittee Counsel Lincoln Lipscomb, a Mississippian, closely questioned Marshall about the propriety of a number of N.A.A.C.P. cases--including many in which Marshall had played no direct part. As the same sort of questioning stretched into August, New York's Republican Senator Kenneth Keating, a member of the Judiciary Committee, felt compelled to interject: "The line of questioning in this case is unprecedented, and, from what I have heard so far, I must say irrelevant."

Last week, asked at his press conference about the holdup on Marshall, President Kennedy said that he had received "assurances" that the Senate would not adjourn without taking action on Marshall's nomination. Whereupon South Carolina's Johnston at last brought the hearings to an end, moving Michigan's Democrat Philip A. Hart to exclaim: "Amen and thank heaven!" Still, Johnston indicated that it might take a while longer before the subcommittee actually got around to taking a formal vote on Marshall. Said Johnston: "I'm not predicting anything yet in regard to the matter. We have to give the other members a chance to read the record. As long as I am chairman, I will do what is right and just."

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