Judicial Roulette: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Judicial Selection.

• Author: Jacoby, Tamar

Judicial Roulette: Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on Judicial Selection. David M. O'Brien. Priority Press, $9.95. The story is familiar enough by now. In the waning days of his last term, the president nominates a political soulmate for a position on the Supreme Court. The president's men portray the nominee as an unobjectionable centrist. But political opponents are undeterred: they perceive him as a dangerous ideologue whose ascension would radically tilt the Court. The confirmation battle is prolonged and vicious. Finally, when the nomination fails, the disappointed aspirant retires to the lecture circuit, for a while, at least, a hero to the partisans who lost the struggle.

This is the story of Robert Bork, of course, but it is also the story of Abe Fortas, Lyndon Johnson's controversial nominee for chief justice. The 1968 battle over Fortas's elevation (he was already serving as an associate justice) to replace the retiring chief, Earl Warren, was if anything more bitter than the fight over Bork. Questions about his integrity played a part in his downfall (he eventually withdrew his nomination and retired from the Court). But as Murphy argues persuasively, in this instance, too, the principal reason for the Senate's rebuff was ideological.

For most of this century at least, the "advise and consent" process did not involve pitched ideological battles. The struggle over Fortas raised the acceptable political temperature well beyond the norm, paving the way for fierce disputes over Nixon appointees Clement Haynsworth, G. Harrold Carswell, and William Rehnquist. By the time of the Bork fight, all the old restraint was gone.

Fortas was an unlikely candidate to provoke an ideological firestorm. An immigrant's son from Memphis, Tennessee, he struggled out of poverty to attend Yale Law School, where his brilliance caught the eye of Professor William 0. Douglas, whose patronage helped make Fonrtas one of the whiz kids of the New Deal. Inside or out of the government, he was a deal maker, not an ideologue: the kind of man that friends like rising Rep. Lyndon Johnson turned to when they wanted to get something done.

But that, according to Bruce Allen Murphy, was precisely his undoing. Like Bork, Fortas became a symbol of an embattled White House-and like Bork, he was eventually sacrificed in a struggle over the president's beliefs. Murphy's overly detailed and somewhat tendentious book (he doesn't like Fortas very much) comes to...