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Abe Fortas was born on June 9, 1910 in Memphis, Tennessee to William and Ray (Berson) Fortas, Orthodox Jews who emigrated to the United States from England in the early 1900's. A cabinetmaker by training, Fortas’ father operated a small shop with his wife in one of the poorer sections of Memphis. The youngest of five children, Fortas attended the local public schools and by thirteen years of age was contributing to the family finances by working in a shoe store at night. After graduating from high school, Fortas attended Southwestern College in Memphis on an academic scholarship, graduating first in his class of 1930.
From Southwestern, Fortas went to Yale University Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. An excellent student, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and stood first in his class when he graduated with the LL.B. degree in 1933. At Yale , Fortas’ record was so impressive that immediately upon graduation he was appointed an assistant professor of law under William O. Douglas, then a Yale Professor, who later became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Fortas remained at Yale until 1937 and during his four years there often commuted to Washington, D.C., where he undertook part-time assignments in the New Deal administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His positions included those of assistant chief of the legal division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1933-1934 and assistant director of corporate reorganization study for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from 1934 to 1937.
Accepting an appointment as full-time consultant to the SEC, Fortas moved to Washington in 1937 and the following year became assistant director of the SEC public utilities division. He served as general counsel to the Public Works Administration from 1939 to 1941, when he was named director of the Department of the Interior’s division of power. In 1942 the thirty-two year old Fortas was appointed Under Secretary of the Interior.
As Under Secretary, Fortas earned the reputation as a tough, able sidekick of the abrasive Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, but he could also be generously liberal in defense of the underdog. He made great efforts, in vain, to stop the removal and incarceration of persons of Japanese descent from the West Coast. And with Ickes, he was responsible in easing the harsh martial law that the military had imposed on Hawaii.
During the greater part of World War II, Fortas served as Ickes assistant, but in 1945 he took a leave of absence to join the armed forces. After a month, he received a medical discharge because of an arrested case of eye tuberculosis. Upon his discharge, Fortas was named by President Harry Truman as advisor to the United States delegation at the organizational meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and at the meeting of the General Assembly in London in 1946. Soon after he resumed his duties at the Interior Department, Fortas decided to leave government service.
In 1946, Fortas joined two other well-known, successful New Deal figures, Thurman Arnold and Paul Porter, in establishing what quickly became one of Washington’s most prestigious and lucrative corporate law firms, Arnold, Fortas & Porter. Although the bulk of the firm’s revenue came from representing large corporations, Fortas also won wide renown for championing civil liberties and the rights of the individual.
In 1954, Fortas defended Owen Lattimore, a policy expert on China and Mongolia, who had been charged with perjury after testifying before the Senate internal security subcommittee. During the 1950's Fortas also defended several State Department employees who were fired as security risks after being accused of subversive activities by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
One of Fortas’ notable contributions to criminal law resulted from his appointment by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals in 1954 to handle the defense of Monte Durham, a convicted housebreaker. Fortas won for his client a new trial and his arguments were responsible for a broadened criminal insanity rule, making the accused “not criminally responsible if his unlawful act was the product of mental disease or defect.” The case influenced many states in breaking away from the old “right from wrong” test and in adopting a broader definition of legal insanity in light of psychiatric knowledge. Fortas was chosen by the Supreme Court in 1962 to handle the appeal of Clarence Earl Gideon, an indigent Florida prisoner who had been convicted without the benefit of counsel. His brilliant arguments helped to determine the high court’s unanimous ruling that states must assure free legal counsel to the poor in every criminal trial.
It was during his early years in Washington that Fortas first met Lyndon B. Johnson, then an obscure member of Congress from Texas. Johnson solicited Fortas’s help on a dam project of considerable importance to his constituents and was impressed by Fortas’ talents. In 1948, when Johnson won the Democratic senatorial primary in Texas by less than 100 votes, his opponents accused him of stuffing the ballot box in one of the precincts and persuaded a federal judge to take Johnson’s name off the ballot. Called in again to perform a favor for his friend, Fortas won a stay from Justice Hugo Black. Johnson’s name was restored to the ballot, giving him the Democratic nomination, and , inevitably, the Senate seat.
Although Johnson and Fortas had known each other since the 1930's, it was not until after the 1948 incident that their relationship blossomed. Fortas became not just Johnson’s personal troubleshooter in legal matters, but also his close friend and confident. After President Kennedy was shot in 1963, Fortas acted as the private liaison man between the newly sworn President and Jacqueline Kennedy, and he later helped to handle many of the funeral arrangements for the slain president’s widow.
Fortas remained at the President’s side, soon becoming know as one of Johnson’s most trusted unofficial advisers. He helped to organize the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination. He aided the President in replacing members of the “Kennedy team” with men more attuned to Johnson. When the scandal over the business activities of Bobby Baker first broke, Fortas represented him in a civil suit, but later withdrew because of his advisory role in the Johnson administration.
When Associate Justice Arthur J. Goldberg resigned from the Supreme Court to become United States representative to the United Nations, President Johnson offered the seat to Fortas, who at first refused. Fortas had already turned down Johnson’s offer a year earlier to become attorney general. Nevertheless, an insistent president nominated Fortas, without securing his acceptance, on July 28, 1965. The Senate confirmed Fortas’s appointment by voice vote August 11, and Fortas, without ever giving his formal consent to the president, joined the Court October 4, 1965.
While on the Court, Fortas remained a close adviser to President Johnson, counseling him on such important and delicate issues as race, urban unrest and the Vietnam War. Reportedly, neither Johnson nor Fortas saw anything wrong in continuing their close, personal relationship, but their friendship became a source of controversy when Fortas was nominated for the chief justiceship.
When Chief Justice Earl Warren resigned in 1968, President Johnson nominated Fortas as chief justice, but the nomination was doomed because of Johnson’s growing unpopularity. Amid charges of “cronyism” and political manipulation, Republicans and conservative southern Democrats criticized the president who had announced he would not seek reelection for attempting to “pack” the Court before he left office. Eighteen Republican senators, led by Robert P. Griffin (R, Mich.), declared that they would block confirmation of the appointment. In addition, a disclosure that Fortas had been paid $15,000 for teaching a seminar at a local law school brought charges of extrajudicial impropriety and further fanned the flames of opposition. In the face of mounting opposition, Johnson was prepared to withdraw the nomination after a Senate vote failed to end a filibuster that had prevented the nomination from reaching the floor. On October 3, at Fortas’s request, the nomination was withdrawn and he remained on the Court as an associate justice.
The following May, Life magazine published an article about Fortas’s involvement with Louis E. Wolfson, the multimillionaire industrialist who had since been imprisoned for stock manipulations. The article revealed that in 1966 Fortas had received a $20,000 fee from the family foundation of Wolfson, after he had joined the Court, but that the fee had been returned eleven months later. Initially based on an arrangement that was intended to be a lifelong association in an advisory capacity with the foundation, the canceled agreement had provided for an annual stipend of $20,000, which would devolve on Mrs. Fortas in the event of the Justice’s demise. After initially denying the relationship, Fortas resigned from the Court on May 14, 1969, in the face of public condemnation and talk of impeachment. In a letter to Chief Justice Warren, Fortas recounted in close detail the history of his involvement with Wolfson and denied any wrongdoing but explained that he was resigning for the good of the court.
Fortas returned to the private practice of law in partnership with another attorney in Washington and thirteen years later returned to the Supreme Court to present oral argument in a case involving Puerto Rico. It was his last appearance. He died two weeks later, on April 5, 1982, of a hear attack in his Georgetown home.
Among the other government posts that Fortas held were acting general counsel of the National Power Policy Committee, 1941; member of the board of legal examiners of the Civil Service Commission, 1941-1943; and member of the President’s Committee to Study Changes in Organic Law of Puerto Rico, 1943. He served on the President’s committee on rules of practice and procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States and the District of Columbia Circuit; the National Citizen’s Committee for Community Relations; and the advisory committee on free press-fair trial of the American Bar Association.
Fortas’ interest in education is reflected in his work as overseer of the College of the Virgin Islands and as a member of the visiting committee on the law school of the University of Chicago and of the advisory council of the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He belonged to the Order of the Coif and Omicron Delta Kappa and is a trustee of the American Judicature Society.
Before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Fortas served as vice-president and general counsel of the Great America Corporation and vice-president of Federated Department Stores. He was also a director of the two companies and of SuCrest Corporation; Madison National Bank, Washington, D.C.; Franklin Life Insurance Company, Springfield, Illinois; and Braniff Airlines. He was a trustee of the Carnegie Hall Corporation, Carnegie Hall International, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Festival Casals, Inc., and the Russell Sage Foundation.
Abe Fortas married Carolyn Eugenia Agger on July 9, 1935. The daughter of Eugene E. Agger, a former professor of money and banking at Rutgers University, she was an economist at the Agriculture Department in Washington when she met Fortas, a part-time member of the department’s legal staff. After their marriage, they returned to Yale, where he was teaching, and Mrs. Fortas entered Yale Law School. She received her LL.B. degree cum laude in 1938. A former partner of Adlai E. Stevenson in the Washington branch of his law firm, in 1960 Mrs. Fortas became head of the tax division of Arnold, Fortas & Porter. |
