The President's Two Nominees

LEWIS F. POWELL JR. "I have never aspired to the Supreme Court," says Lewis Franklin Powell Jr., 64. Indeed, he so much preferred his own life as a distinguished Virginia lawyer that when his name was proposed for the court, during the Haynsworth-Carswell fracas, he wrote a letter to Attorney General John Mitchell saying he was too old for the job. The passing of time has not made Powell any younger, to be sure, but it has convinced President Nixon that the original proposal was a good one. "Ten years of Powell," he said last week, "is worth 30 years of anyone else."

Powell is indeed sprightly for his age. Slim (6 ft., 155 lbs.) and well-conditioned (smoking only an occasional cigarette and preferring a glass of milk to a cocktail), Powell is an avid hunter of duck and quail and still likes to join his wife Josephine in an energetic game of tennis. Says he: "I used to play golf, but I married a tennis player." At work he is tireless, appearing at his desk around 8 o'clock every morning, including Saturdays and Sundays. Longevity runs in the family: his widowed father remarried seven years ago and is still flourishing at 91.

Powell's family heritage well qualifies him for nomination to the Supreme Court's "Southern seat." The first Powell to land in America arrived in 1607, one of the original Jamestown colonists. Powell himself was born in Suffolk, Va., won undergraduate and law degrees from Washington and Lee (Phi Beta Kappa and first in his class) and Harvard Law School, and now occupies an office overlooking a Richmond landmark, the home of Robert E. Lee.

Partly because of these very traditions, however, Powell stands out against the stereotype of the segregationist. When some Virginians were trying to launch a policy of "interposition" against federally enforced integration of schools, Powell denounced the doctrine as "a lot of rot." As chairman of the Richmond public school board, he presided over the successful, disturbance-free integration of the city's schools in 1959. No sooner had he been nominated to the Supreme Court, in fact, than he won the endorsement of Virginia N.A.A.C.P. leaders.

As a lawyer, Powell has been a partner for 34 years in Virginia's biggest and most powerful firm, Hunton, Williams, Gay, Powell & Gibson. In time, his courtly ways combined with his talent for organization to make him a power in the profession: president of the American Bar Association (1964-65), president of the American College of Trial Lawyers (1969-70), president of the American Bar Foundation (1969-71). As head of the A.B.A., he was credited with efforts to speed courtroom procedures and to provide legal aid to the needy. All in all, says Professor Jon R. Waltz of Northwestern, Powell is "a very fine lawyer, justified to sit in the seat of John Harlan. For the first time in a long, long while, the court will have a new man who has demonstrated he can work with the law, and that he can do it superbly."

But is he, as Nixon has demanded of all his court nominees, a "strict constructionist," a believer in limiting courts to the letter of the law? "I don't categorize myself," says Powell. "I think of myself basically as a lawyer with a wide spectrum of experience. My views may be liberal on one issue and conservative on another. I regard myself as an independent Democrat, but I've felt free to vote my convictions without regard to party."

On the one legal issue that seems to concern Nixon most, Powell is outspokenly conservative. "There are valid reasons for criminals to think that crime does pay, and that slow and fumbling justice can be evaded," he said a few years ago, inferentially blaming this on some decisions of the Warren court. "The pendulum may have swung too far in favor of affording rights which are abused by criminals." The President echoed those lines in his TV remarks.

Powell sees connections between the Soviets and the American left. "The radical left, strongly led and with a growing base of support, is plotting violence and revolution," he wrote recently. "Its leaders visit and collaborate with foreign Communist enemies." To combat such activities the Government should be freely able to tap telephones. These views so pleased J. Edgar Hoover that he had Powell's statement reprinted in the FBI law-enforcement bulletin. Nixon, too, was presumably satisfied. Powell is not only a great Virginian, he said, but "a very great American."

WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST. At a time when President Nixon's nominations for the Supreme Court were still totally unknown, somebody asked Assistant Attorney General William Rehnquist whether he thought he had any chance of getting the job. None at all, Rehnquist said with a smile, "because I'm not from the South, I'm not a woman, and I'm not mediocre."

Rehnquist is an active Goldwater-style Republican who worked as a precinct committeeman during the presidential campaign of his fellow Arizonan. But even those who disagree with his conservative views concede his keen intelligence and professional skill. Born in Milwaukee in 1924, Rehnquist went to college and law school at Stanford, made Phi Beta Kappa, graduated first in his law class, and then won the honor of serving a year as legal clerk to the late Justice Robert H. Jackson.

After marrying a California girl, Natalie Cornell, Rehnquist moved to Phoenix, Ariz., and went into private law practice, engaging in a wide variety of what he calls "cats and dogs" legal work. One of his former partners, James Powers, describes him as "a superb lawyer, a very scholarly guy. He is the ultimate reasonable man, which sets him apart from most people."

From time to time, Rehnquist got lucrative offers from other big-city law firms but he preferred Phoenix as a place to raise his three children, Jim, now 16, Janet, 14, and Nancy. 12. He liked to take his family on camping trips, bought an apple orchard in the Rockies as a place for retirement. He also enjoyed playing the recorder at family song fests.

This peaceful life was interrupted because Rehnquist had made friends with Richard Kleindienst. another Phoenix lawyer and Goldwater enthusiast. When Kleindienst came to Washington as the No. 2 man in John Mitchell's Justice Department, he urged Rehnquist to join the Nixon team. In January of 1969, Rehnquist became head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, which made him, as Nixon put it, "the President's lawyer's lawyer."

Rehnquist's personal style is not quite typical of Nixon's Washington. Alone among all the higher officials of the Justice Department, he sports long sideburns and bright shirts with clashing ties. But as the Attorney General's chief counsel, Rehnquist has been a hardline Nixonian: early on he became noted as an outspoken Government hawk on questions of law-and-order.

He denounced student demonstrators as "the new barbarians"; when swarms of demonstrators tried to "shut down" Washington last May Day, he approved the massive police roundups as a form of "qualified martial law." He also argued that the Government had a perfect right to engage in surveillance of any citizen, adding that "selfdiscipline on the part of the Executive Branch will provide an answer to virtually all of the legitimate complaints against excesses of information gathering." He agreed entirely with those who thought the Warren court had been too indulgent toward suspected criminals.

In all these declarations, of course, Rehnquist was speaking as a Government advocate, which led one prominent law professor to condemn him last week as "President Nixon's hired gunslinger." Herbert Packer of Stanford observed that Rehnquist had done "a prominent job in taking a hard, repressive line." The former N.A.A.C.P. president for the Phoenix area, the Rev. George Brooks, declared that the nominee's views "would preclude him from giving fair judgment" in civil rights cases. "Rehnquist represents the intellectual heart of the right wing in Washington," adds John P. Frank, an attorney who has written a study of the Supreme Court. "He will be able to translate the political philosophy of Goldwater into sophisticated legalisms."

Since Nixon was determined to nominate a conservative, most legal experts considered Rehnquist a good choice. "He has a very strong, logical and powerful mind," says Harvard's distinguished Professor Paul Freund, who remembers him from a class at Stanford. "He's very conservative, but I think the net result is that he will contribute to the deliberations of the court because of his intellect. Somehow, I have more confidence in conservatives who are men of intellect than I do in banal persons."

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