Fortas.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-EIGHT is turning into a vintage year for retrospective character assassination, with Lyndon B. Johnson as Target Number One. The odious Richard Goodwin is on the prowl, accusing LBJ of paranoia-and then paradoxically demonstrating that the President had every justification for suspecting "the Kennedys" were out to get him. A number of yippies, hippies, and other assorted cuckoos-like the ones foregathered at Columbia this spring-have been reliving the years when they almost subverted the Republic. Now comes Bruce Allen Murphy with a tragic tale of how a barefoot country boy, Abe Fortas, was psychologically raped by that monster Lyndon Johnson and left, egoless, inperpetual servitude to his master.

This is, of course, preposterous: Johnson only "devoured" those who, like the Greek women on a besieged island in one of Byron's poems, kept inquiring when the raping would begin. But perhaps 1968-the year of Fortas's failure to achieve the Chief Justiceship of the United States-has contemporary appeal because the Democratic elite is so jejune, the hippies have gone into junk bonds, and twenty years is a good round number.

Murphy comes on with a naive breathlessness-he is virtually overcome by his own brilliance in unearthing the details of 1) Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas's role as close personal advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson, and 2) the rather shabby, though not venal, financial matters that eventually led Fortas to resign his seat on the Court. Murphy is savvy enough to recognize that the doctrine of the separation of powers, which in pure interpretation would keep a federal judge from engaging in partisan politics, has never been rigidly observed (Chief Justice John Jay regularly counseled President George Washington) and was used against Fortas largely as a convenient club. He also concludes that in all probability none of Fortas's fiscal transgressions was an indictable offense, and basically agrees with Bob Shogan's verdict in his 1972 study that the Justice was a political casualty. So why are we facing 598 pages of text?

Largely, I suspect, because Murphy feels obligated to explain the "inner Fortas," to discover what fatal character flaw led this extraordinarily talented man to self-destruct. Hence we go on an extended trip into Fortas's New Deal career, searching for hidden insecurities that, Murphy indicates, led Fortas to funk at crucial points in his life; and above all we learn everything about Fortas's relationship with Johnson, dating back to the legal maneuver that secured "Landslide Lyndon" his Senate seat in 1948. While Murphy eschews the mindless babble of most "psycho-historians," he never stops to ask himself, Do we really need to know "the Real Fortas"?

Having known the man in the flesh in my White House years, I find this great exploration of the Fortas psyche boring. Admittedly I was not very fond of Fortas: he struck me as a cold, arrogant man with all the warmth (Dad would have said) of an Ulster landlord. Fortas had no time for small talk-at least not with the peasantry. When one of us went over to his Georgetown home with some document the President wanted him to evaluate, he would sit down with the manuscript, mark it up, and then give it back virtually without discussion. Meanwhile we had to sit on some of the most uncomfortable antiques I have encountered, probably hand-made by a French torturer's apprentice. It was a chilly house, one with museumlike qualities, and when I met Mrs. Fortas I realized the extent to which art replicates life.

In candor, I never thought Fortas's comments on presidential documents were terribly insightful. What he and the President discussed in private, of course, is another matter.

At this point I want to warn Murphy, as I have others who treat White House telephone logs as holy scripture, that they should be careful. If you were talking to LBJ and Marie Fehmer was on the "dead button," the transcript would emerge perfectly; if Tom Johnson was taking the notes, God knows what would later be deciphered. Also, Presidents Johnson and Kennedy (and others, I'm sure) had unmonitored lines: LBJ had his in the "Green Room," the small office off the big one.

Without doing a detailed critique of Murphy's use of sources, there is one statement that boggles the mind: namely, that LBJ got Arthur Goldberg to resign from the Court in 1965 by promising to put him up for Vice President in 1968, vice Hubert H. Humphrey. I thought I'd heard them all, but this was brand new, so I rushed to check the source: it was an interview, "Bill Moyers, 4/12/86. . . . confirming confidential source, 11/6/82, Austin, Tex." Meditate on the timing: here we have an anonymous source in 1982, a "confirmation"in 1986, but nothing from the years immediately after 1965-and not a peep out of Goldberg, who is still with us.

Also, Murphy vastly overrates Fortas's role as an advisor in foreign policy. He and Clark Clifford were influential, but the key man was Dean Rusk, joined by Robert McNamara until the latter's meltdown in 1967. Fortas's talent was that he could read LBJ's mind and explicate in a highly articulate fashion the President's views -the skill of a crack lawyer. I would submit that he and Clifford were never principals in foreign-policy decisionmaking, although Murphy has fallen hook, line, and sinker for the Townsend Hoopes/Clark Clifford version of LBJ's policy shift in March 1968.

When, in July 1968, President Johnson (in an overly clever alliance with Chief Justice Earl Warren) decided to nominate Fortas to the Chief Justiceship, I thought he was on a Kamikaze mission. Poor Joe Califano and his aide Matt Nimetz were sent to point. When Joe asked me for help I was glad to provide him with a dozen or more instances in which Supreme Court Justices had dabbled in legislative or executive politics, but the sum of my wisdom was that James Eastland, John McClellan, Sam Ervin, and Strom Thurmond--the Southern magnates on the Senate Judiciary Committee-would never let a lame-duck liberal President appoint a liberal Jew to the Chief Justiceship. I was saddened, but not surprised, when the Fortas project went down in flames.

The later revelations about Fortas's financial activities surprised me. Not because they suggested he was a crook, but because-given his wife's standing as a tax lawyer-Fortas hardly needed the money, and because there was a shabbiness about the whole business that seemed incongruous, out of place in the Fortas ambiance. Why would such an intelligent man essentially set himself up? Shortly after Fortas's resignation from the Court, I was at the LBJ Ranch helping to manicure the former President's memoirs, and one evening after dinner I asked Johnson this question.

He meditated a minute (he knew I was no great fan of Fortas's), then fixed me in his sights and said, "Johnny, I recall you collect old stamps. Is that right?" I admitted it. He went on: "Do you need these stamps? Can you mail anything with a stamp from one of those places that don't exist any more? What good are they?" I allowed that collecting stamps gave me pleasure-I simply liked to collect them. He said, "Well look at it this way: maybe Abe just liked to collect checks"; an analysis that seems to me to make more sense than two hundred pages of Murphy's deep-think.