Changing the Guard at Justice

In 1960, Attorney General Robert Kennedy made up his mind that he wanted a cool lawyer, not a fiery liberal, to run the Justice Department's infant civil rights division. The more Kennedy searched, the more he heard about one man: Burke Marshall, a young antitrust lawyer in Washington's biggest law firm, Covington & Burling. But so laconic was the shy, frail Marshall that his first meeting with Kennedy was a disaster. "I blew it," Marshall later told his wife. She was not surprised. "A very, very quiet man," she once called him. "I wasn't sure he even liked me until he proposed."

Kennedy hired Marshall anyway-relying on his reputation. And Marshall quarterbacked the remarkable Justice Department team that kept one of history's fastest social changes from mushrooming into violent revolution. His own division was set up to fight for Negro voting rights, and in the past 30 months nearly 600,000 Negroes have been added to Southern voting rolls -a 30% rise.

Starting with the Freedom Rides in 1961, Marshall's division also became the command post for the entire federal thrust in civil rights. On its battle flag the division can boast such victories as the 1961 ban on interstate travel discrimination, the 1962 integration of the University of Mississippi, the 1963 pacification of Birmingham, which Marshall personally negotiated. Now the Supreme Court has upheld the 1964 Civil Rights Act's key public accommodations section largely because Marshall and others fought to base it on the Constitution's commerce clause as well as the 14th Amendment.

With that achievement behind him, Marshall has just resigned with a characteristically self-effacing letter to President Johnson. "The job needs a fresh look, a new mind," he said. Johnson knew what he was losing. "In 33 years' service with the Federal Government," he replied, "I have never known any person who rendered a better quality of public service."

Impressive Successor. With the beginning of the end of state-enforced discrimination, the Justice Department's civil rights division still has work aplenty, and no one is better qualified for it than Burke Marshall's equally impressive successor, John Michael Doar, the division's chief combat lawyer for the past four frenzied years. Republican Doar, 43, took over the No. 2 spot in 1960 under the Eisenhower Administration, and Marshall was delighted to keep him. Good-naturedly ignoring the Kennedy needle ("John, are you a Democrat yet?"), Doar soon became the New Frontier's legal Jeb Stuart-a fabled guerrilla who knows the dusty back roads of Mississippi almost as well as the local Klansmen.

A onetime Princeton basketball player who practiced law for ten years in New Richmond, Wis., Doar is a model of raw courage. At Ole Miss with Chief U.S. Marshall McShane, when mobs tried to block the entrance of the university's first Negro student, James Meredith, Doar risked his own life three times to contact the besieged feds in the campus Lyceum. With Deputy (now Acting) Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, he walked past Governor George Wallace in the doorway at the University of Alabama. Doar is best remembered as the hero of a vivid confrontation between rock-tossing Negroes and trigger-itchy cops in Jackson, Miss., in 1963. Walking alone between the combatants, he roared: "My name is John Doar, D-O-A-R! I'm from the Justice Department, and anybody around here knows I stand for what is right." The mob slowly cooled, the cops relaxed and tragedy was averted.

Future Task. Since 1960, John Doar has argued 38 of the Government's 67 voting registration suits. Last year he spent 178 days on the road, far from his wife and four children. To gather evidence, he has interviewed witnesses all over the South, painfully pored over the voting records of this Mississippi county and that Louisiana parish. Quietly he has confronted the likes of Mississippi's U.S. District Judge Harold Cox (ironically, a Kennedy appointee), who last March blasted Doar's "nigger" clients as "a bunch of chimpanzees." Mildly, Doar replied: "There is nothing un-American about registering to vote. I think it is quite proper for people to assemble to do it."

Assistant Attorney General Doar is tailor-made for what Strategist Marshall says is the Justice Department's future civil rights task-"a straightforward matter of litigation, requiring primarily administrative skills, hard work and good lawyers." In short, the job now calls for a man who sounds exactly like John Doar.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.