Eisenhower’s four final Supreme Court appointees were all little-known appellate judges at the time of their selection, not governors, senators or cabinet secretaries. Those selections marked a significant change from the earlier Black-through-Warren roster of nominees, but during the ensuing Kennedy-Johnson years, presidential practice returned to the Roosevelt-Truman norm.

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President Kennedy’s first appointee, Deputy Attorney General Byron R. White, had been an active participant in the president’s 1960 election campaign and before that had won national fame as a college and professional football player. Kennedy’s second nominee, Arthur J. Goldberg, was serving as secretary of labor and later, after leaving the court to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York. As the successor to Justice Frankfurter, Goldberg also represented a political commitment to keeping at least one Jewish justice on the court.

When President Johnson persuaded Goldberg to take the U.N. post, Johnson replaced him with presidential buddy and counselor Abe Fortas, a Washington wheeler-dealer with no prior judicial experience. Johnson’s second and final Supreme Court nomination made his solicitor general, Thurgood Marshall, who previously had sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York following an illustrious two decades as the top lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the first black justice ever. Both men were accomplished litigators, but their selections fell squarely in the Roosevelt-Truman-Kennedy political tradition. Late in Johnson’s presidency, an attempt to promote Fortas to chief justice, and then name another presidential buddy, former Texas Congress-man Homer Thornberry, to Fortas’ seat, failed in the face of widespread Senate opposition.

Johnson’s successor, President Nixon, was able to name four new justices to the court between 1969 and 1972. Warren E. Burger, who took Earl Warren’s place as chief justice, was a little-known judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., who previously had worked in the Eisenhower Justice Department. Nixon’s second successful appointee, Harry A. Blackmun, was a childhood friend of Burger’s who had served for more than a decade as a federal appellate judge. Prior to Blackmun’s nomination, however, Nixon’s two previous choices, Southern federal judges Clement Haynsworth and Harrold Carswell, had each been rejected by the U.S. Senate, the first such Supreme Court confirmation defeats in 40 years.

Neither of Nixon’s two final appointees, Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell Jr., had any prior judicial experience, yet both men were experienced lawyers notwithstanding their relative public obscurity. Powell was a former president of the American Bar Association, and Rehnquist was a top Justice Department attorney.

Chief Justice Rehnquist has now served on the U.S. Supreme Court for more than 32 years, one of the longest periods of service in American history, but those 32 years represent more than just a per-sonal milestone. Rehnquist also was the last Supreme Court nominee who was not an appellate judge to be put forward for the high bench. All eight of Rehnquist’s present colleagues, from Stevens through Breyer, were appellate jurists at the time of their nomination, as were both of the unsuccessful nominees, Robert H. Bork and Douglas Ginsburg, whom President Reagan sent to the U.S. Senate prior to the subsequent successful confirmation of Kennedy.

All the nominees of the entire post-1968 era, from Nixon through Clinton, thus differ measurably from those of the 1937 to 1968 period, excepting only Eisenhower’s four final choices. From Presidents Ford, who selected Stevens; through Reagan, who named O’Connor, Scalia and Kennedy; then George H.W. Bush, who nominated Souter and Thomas; and finally Clinton, who chose Ginsburg and Breyer; all eight new justices were experienced appellate court judges before they joined the U.S. Supreme Court. (No vacancies occurred during either Jimmy Carter’s 1977-81 term or George W. Bush’s 2001-05 term.)

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