Alonzo Hamby on Truman's Crony Picks for the Supreme Court

Is W the first president to want to put a crony on the Supreme Court? No, of course not.

The last president to do so was LBJ, who put his old pal Abe Fortas on the Court.

But the modern record-holder in this regard was probably Harry Truman.

On Richard jensen's conservative list, CNET, Alonzo Hamby, fellow POTUS member, reviewed Truman's lamentable record, starting with the appointment of Chief Justice Vinson:

As for Chief Justice Vinson, he and Truman served in Congress together in the 1930s. Vinson was a widely respected legislator with, as I recall, a special expertise in tax policy. I'm sure he and Truman knew each other and no doubt from time to time sipped bourbon and branch water with their mutual acquaintance, Alben Barkley. Vinson was a Kentuckian, Truman a Missourian with Kentucky ancestry. As Upper South liberal Democrats, they had a lot in common. That said, Vinson was never in Truman's inner circle of close friends, and I'm sure they had little or no contact after Roosevelt made Vinson a federal judge in the late 1930s.

It was Roosevelt who brought Vinson back to Washington in 1943 to take over the Office of Economic Stabilization (replacing Jimmy Byrnes, who took over the newly formed Office of War Mobilization). The appointment was generally praised at the time. He later was named to head OWM after Byrnes quit in early 1945, then Truman appointed him to succeed Henry Morgenthau as Secretary of the Treasury and a year later made him Chief Justice. As I recall, each of these appointments won general approval at the time. And Vinson, of course, became quite close to Truman during his presidency. So in the end he was a friend (or crony), but not in the beginning. Roosevelt, not Truman, was responsible for bringing him back to Washington and making him an important figure.

None of this is to say that Vinson was a great Chief Justice, although we may perhaps take some pity on anyone charged with bringing coherence to a court that included Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, and Robert Jackson. But Vinson got there on what seemed at the time to be his merits.

As for Truman's other Supreme Court appointments, I am not going to accuse any of them of being distinguished. Minton and Burton, I think, were perfectly adequate, Clark was marginal. And, yes, all three were Truman cronies and got there for that reason.