The Old Order Changeth

Seated at his desk one day last April, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, 79, suffered a mild stroke. A few days later, a second stroke left him partially paralyzed on his left side. His mind remained keen, and he clung to hopes of returning to the bench at the start of the new Supreme Court session in October. But last week, on the advice of doctors, Frankfurter sent a letter of resignation to President Kennedy. "I need hardly tell you, Mr. President.'' he wrote, "of the reluctance with which I leave the institution whose concerns have been the absorbing interest of my life."

Fast Action. When a Supreme Court Justice retires or dies, the President usually takes a while to name a successor. Franklin Roosevelt waited six months, for example, before naming Frankfurter to succeed Benjamin Cardozo. But Kennedy had made up his mind in advance, announced Frankfurter's replacement right away: Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg (TIME cover, Sept. 22. 1961). Longtime general counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., Goldberg, 54, qualified as an eminent and successful lawyer, as a liberal of the activist New Frontier type, and as a Jew (Frankfurter was the court's only Jewish member, and political doctrine demanded that his successor be a Jew). Besides, as one knowledgeable New Frontiersman candidly put it, "Goldberg wanted the job badly.'' It is always risky to predict the ideological direction a man may take when he dons the robe. Old New Dealer Frankfurter, for one. came to stand as a judicial conservative, in the sense that he tended to interpret the Supreme Court's powers narrowly (see box). But on his record, Goldberg would seem likely to make the court lopsidedly liberal. Only a few months ago, New Frontiersman Byron White succeeded Charles Evans Whittaker, a Republican of conservative leanings, tipping the wobbly balance between liberal and conservative blocs. With Frankfurter gone, the old conservative bloc is now reduced to a chip: Tom Clark and John Marshall Harlan, occasionally joined by Potter Stewart.

Beyond Wirtz. In nominating a man to succeed Goldberg as Labor Secretary.

Kennedy again acted swiftly: he tapped Goldberg's No. 2 man, Under Secretary W. (for William) Willard Wirtz. Lawyer Wirtz, 50, is a veteran Washington hand who became a member of the War Labor Board at 31. As a law professor at North western University from 1946 to 1954 and a law partner of Adlai Stevenson's from 1955 to 1961, he specialized in labor law, served as an arbitrator in many labor-management disagreements.

When the President announced his nomination, Wirtz was in Chicago with Goldberg, helping in a last unsuccessful effort to avert a strike against the Chicago & North Western, the U.S.'s third biggest railroad in track mileage. When Goldberg and Wirtz got back to Washington, they hurriedly washed up to get ready for a joint press conference. Goldberg asked Wirtz if he wanted to borrow a clean shirt. "No thanks," cracked Wirtz. "I'd rather try on your shoes."

Wirtz has a reputation as a wit, and he tried hard to live up to it at the press conference. After Goldberg made a speech saying he was "delighted beyond words" that Wirtz was going to succeed him, Wirtz opened up his own little speech with: "If it was a pun the Secretary was intending, and he was saying he was delighted beyond Wirtz, he was wrong." At one point, Wirtz quoted from Tennyson's Idylls of the King:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,

And God fulfils himself in many ways,

Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And then Wirtz added: "Or, if you will, the Department of Labor."

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