A Long Way from the Jail

As a shortstop in Kentucky's semi-pro Blue Grass League in 1911, Fred Vinson was fast of foot and sure of hand, and the local sportswriters used to say that he "covered the whole infield." Later, in the big league of U.S. Government, Frederick Moore Vinson covered the whole infield and quite a bit of the outfield, too. Few men in U.S. history served as widely as he did in the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the Government. During World War II, many important questions of U.S. domestic policy were tested for what "Fred thinks." For seven years he presided over the Supreme Court. He played poker well enough to sit in Harry Truman's game, and he was sufficiently expert at bridge to play west against Dwight Eisenhower's south.

Checking off his-record of conscientious public service, Kentucky friends of the 13th Chief Justice of the U.S. liked to say that "Fred sure has gone a long way for a feller who was born in jail." Vinson himself often recalled that his father was the county jailer in Louisa, Ky. (pop. 2,000) and that he was born in the building that housed the jail. When he was four, he took a liking to a prisoner, decided to help the man escape, filched his father's hatchet and slipped it through the bars. The startled prisoner, who had not asked for such service, promptly turned the hatchet over to Jailer Vinson. Said Chief Justice Vinson, looking back: "I'm afraid that respect for the law hadn't quite affected me as it should."

$5 for Every Fine. After he graduated from Kentucky's Centre College, with the highest average in the school's history, Vinson began practicing law in 1911, got his first public job in 1913 as Louisa's city attorney. Salary: $5 for every fine he collected. Democrat Vinson went to Congress in 1924. From then on, he spent all but two years in Washington. The lapse came in 1929-30. Vinson, loyal to Al Smith, was beaten in the 1928 Republican landslide.

Vinson supported almost every New Deal proposal (including Franklin Roosevelt's court-packing plan), and he became a recognized tax expert. In 1938, when F.D.R. offered him a place on the circuit court of appeals bench in the District of Columbia, he accepted chiefly because the job paid $2,500 a year more than his $10,000 salary as a Congressman.

When the President asked him to leave the bench in 1943 to help run the domestic front, Vinson stepped into the executive branch. In rapid succession he was Director of Economic Stabilization, Federal Loan Administrator (for one month), Director of War Mobilization and Reconversion and Secretary of the Treasury. With each shift he won unanimous confirmation by the Senate and praise from such opposing political leaders as Robert A. Taft and Henry A. Wallace.

To Quiet the Clamor. A friendly, folksy Kentuckian who sprinkled his conversation with such expressions as "sure as God made little apples" and "as sound as old wheat in the mill," Vinson had a political knack for charming even those who were opposed to him. It was this talent, and not Vinson's stature as a lawyer or a judge, that prompted Harry Truman to appoint his good friend as Chief Justice in 1946. The High Court was shaking with personal feuds. Associate Justices Hugo Black and Robert Jackson (who was on leave in NUernberg prosecuting the Nazi war criminals) were hurling public, personal insults at each other across the Atlantic. Harry Truman wanted easygoing Fred Vinson to quiet the clamor and pull the court together.

By quietly .reasoning with the quarreling Justices, Vinson muffled the unseemly uproar; but he did not pull the court together. There were dissents in 50% of the cases in the term before Vinson became Chief Justice, compared to 62% in his first term and 80% in his last.

Vinson--like the court over which he presided--had no broad legal philosophy. A homely realist, he tended to deal with each case as if it were the first and last of its kind, to be decided only on the immediate circumstances. However, on some issues, his decisions followed a vague pattern. On federal control of private business, he was usually proGovernment, e.g., his dissent supporting Harry Truman's 1952 seizure of the steel industry. On racial questions, he was generally antidiscrimination, e.g., his 1948 majority opinion that restrictive covenants on real estate are unenforceable. He had an immense fund of practical sense, and more knowledge of Government than any Justice of recent years. His value to the court was shown at the end of the Rosenberg case when Justice Douglas, a day after the court recessed, issued a stay of execution. A less decisive Chief Justice might have let the Douglas order stand until October. Vinson called the court back into session and Douglas was quickly reversed.

The agenda for the court's coming term includes the school-segregation cases, which some call the court's most explosive issue since the Dred Scott decision. Vinson's anti-segregation views might have caused him to hand down a decision against his old friend, South Carolina's Governor James Byrnes. On these and other court matters, Chief Justice Vinson was quietly reading and deliberating last week, as he waited in his Washington apartment for the court to go into session on Oct. 5. One night Vinson woke his wife, complained of feeling ill. A few minutes after the doctor arrived he was dead, at 63, of a heart attack.

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