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Fortas had also continued, during his time as an Associate Justice, to give LBJ political advice on a wide range of matters, including Vietnam. This was viewed as inappropriate for a sitting Supreme Court justice.

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Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) ran for Senator from Texas in 1948. His opponent in the Democratic primary (then a one party state, contested elections occurred in primaries, not the general election), Coke Stevenson, had been a popular governor of Texas. LBJ had appeared to win the primary by 87 votes. Charges of voting fraud in south Texas led Stevenson to obtain an injunction preventing LBJ's name from appearing on the ballot for the general election, pending a hearing. Although a number of lawyers were involved in determining LBJ's strategy, it was Fortas who managed the litigation and succeeded in having the injunction overturned. Thereafter, LBJ viewed Fortas as the best lawyer in America, and the relationship between LBJ and Fortas, which began in 1937, became stronger during the 1950s and 1960s. That relationship would eventually lead to Fortas's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1965. Arthur Goldberg, who had been named to the Court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, found the Court not to his liking. He resigned from the Court to become Ambassador to the United Nations. Fortas initially declined the nomination, apparently because he was concerned about his personal financial situation. But LBJ told Fortas he was going to nominate him, and, rather reluctantly, Fortas accepted the appointment.

During his time on the Court, Fortas continued to advise LBJ on political matters, both foreign and domestic. In foreign affairs, the Vietnam War was becoming a more contentious and divisive issue. In domestic affairs, the treatment of black Americans, including the protection of civil rights of black Americans, was a defining topic of the 1960s.

In June 1968, at the end of the 1967 Term of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren had Fortas arrange an appointment at the White House, at which time Warren announced his retirement, effective upon the confirmation of his successor. On June 26, LBJ nominated Fortas as Chief Justice. To Fortas’s seat, LBJ nominated a friend from Texas, Homer Thornberry. In July, Fortas erred, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee despite the fact that no sitting Justice had ever done so. During those hearings, Fortas lied to the Committee, although he had not yet been caught in that lie. The Senate recessed without voting on the nomination. When Senator Robert Griffin learned in September that Fortas had accepted $15,000 to give some summer school lectures at American University’s law school, money that had been raised by Fortas’s former partners and clients, the nomination was in trouble. In early October, after a vote to end the filibuster on the nomination failed, Fortas asked that his nomination be withdrawn. By 1969, further revelations led Fortas to resign from the Court. A convicted financier named Louis Wolfson had agreed to pay Fortas $20,000 per year for the remainder of his life, an amount that continued until the death of his wife if Fortas died before she did. Fortas received the first check in January 1966, after joining the Court, and though he returned it in December, Fortas's actions were condemned as ethically improper.

After resigning from the Court in May 1969, Fortas was rebuffed in his attempt to rejoin the law firm he had helped create, although his wife remained a partner in the firm. In 1970, he started another law firm. He practiced law until his death in 1982.

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Dishonest Abe; how LBJ's favorite Supreme Court justice became the prototype of Washington's valueless lawyers - Abe Fortas, Lyndon B. Johnson

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1990 by Allan J. Lichtman

Dishonest Abe

Imagine a man with great abilities and strong convictions, but few, if any, principles. He would lack the internal gyroscope to harmonize his disparate beliefs or guide his personal conduct. Ends would always sanction means, and contradictions could be rationalized or simply ignored.

This is the Abe Fortas that emerges from the pages of Laura Kalman's carefully researched and well-written biography of the public man. (*1) It is precisely this kind of man who would falsely believe that he could simultaneously serve the most powerful private interests and promote the public good.

After a brilliant career at Yale Law School, Fortas quickly rose to the top of the New Deal bureaucracy, becoming undersecretary of Interior at age 31. After World War II he fluidly made the transition to power lawyer and LBJ confidant. But he is largely remembered as the first Supreme Court justice to resign under allegations of improper conduct.

Fortas, Kalman shows, was the preeminent moral relativist. For five years he loyally served Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. But just after leaving Interior he had "a convenient lapse of memory" when called upon by Congress to corroborate Ickes's charges taht President Truman's appointee for undersecretary of the Navy had sought to trade political contributions for the leasing of oil rights. Fortas helped Lyndon Johnson steal the senatorial election of 1948 and promoted voting rights for minorities. He advised President Johnson on domestic and foreign issues, drafted speeches, and even helped with legislation while serving on the Supreme Court.

Relativism likewise guided Forta's approach to the law, both as advocate and arbiter. As the managing partner of Arnold, Fortas, and Porter, he felt he could in good conscience represent polluters, chiselers, and cigarette companies, because everyone deserved representation, no matter their character or practices. Never mind that other former New Deal lawyers--Benjamin Cohen, Joseph Rauh, Clifford Durr--had chosen careers that did not focus on aiding the rich and powerful.

As a Supreme Court justice, Fortas tended to reach decisions based on his personal convictions then to search for justification in precedent and social science. His brilliant advocacy made him one of the most influential members of the Warren Court but also earned him the enmity of purists like Justice Hugo Black, who believed that a consistent judicial philosophy should guide decisions of the Court.

Fortas operated and the policy implications of his corporate practice. Prior to World War II, big business came to Washington largely to keep government off its back. During the war, business crowded into the capital for a different purpose: to gain contracts, concessions, and favors from the agencies that now directed the economy. And business stayed after 1945 to reap the enormous profits generated by the creation of a global economic and strategic system dominated by the United States. To cite one example: In 1945 the Export-Import Bank was given lending authority of $3.5 billion (more than one-third of the entire federal budget for 1940) to aid foreign purchases of American goods.

It was Fortas's role as a Johnson adviser while on the Court and his financial arrangements with a businessman who was under federal investigation (and later was convicted of violating securities laws) that ultimately forced him from the Court. These were not lapses but logical extensions of his earlier career.

Kalman accurately links Fortas's problems to his obsessive secrecy, his concern for financial security, and his mistrust of Congress and the public. But his problems are also tied inextricably to his role as lawyer/fixer. Fortas had often used his inside connections to arrange ex parte contracts with government agencies. The value of such contracts was enormous: his clients could plead their cases without formal procedures or opposing views. It was but a small step for him to become the ex parte adviser par excellence to his lod friend Lyndon Johnson. He could remain a back-room power in Washington while in his own mind keeping his Court life segregated. The public simply didn't need to know what it couldn't possibly understand.

In accepting a lifetime yearly retainer of $20,000 (about half his Supreme Court salary) from the family foundation of embattled entrepreneur Louis Wolfson, Fortas was engaging in the same kind of squeeze play that had helped make Washington lawyers rich. Troubled clients were usually willing to work out sweetheart deals...and no one but the lawyer and client needed to know the details.

Transcripts of the wiretap surveillance of Corcoran (conducted by the Truman administration from 1945 to 1947) show how Fortas teamed up with him to work the squeeze play on a financier trying to avoid prosecution for draft evasion. They hoped to extract great sums from the financier, some of which, the conversations suggest, would be diverted to a Selective Service director. But Kalman devotes only one line to that episode. More important, she generally fails to provide an inside account of what goes on behind the scenes at a litigation/lobbying firm like Arnold, Fortas, and Porter.

In assessing Fortas's fall, Kalman shows that he ultimately rejected the retainer from the Wolfson Foundation and returned the only payment he received. But she also notes that he held on to the $20,000 for several months, returning it only after the financier was indicted. By then the damage to Fortas's reputation was done.

Lyndon B. Johnson ran for Senator from Texas in 1948. His main opponent in the Democratic primary (then a one party state, contested elections occurred in primaries, not the general election) was Coke Stevenson. Johnson won by 87 votes but Stevenson accused him of ballot-rigging. Stevenson obtained an injunction preventing Johnson's name from appearing on the ballot for the general election. Fortas represented Johnson in this long-drawn out dispute. The case was investigated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. Johnson was eventually cleared by Hoover of corruption and was allowed to take his seat in the Senate.

Fortas and Johnson now became close friends. Fortas' legal advice became important during the investigation into the activities of Billie Sol Estes and Bobby Baker.

On 22nd November, 1963, Don B. Reynolds appeared before a secret session of the Senate Rules Committee. Reynolds told B. Everett Jordan and his committee that Johnson had demanded that he provided kickbacks in return for him agreeing to a life insurance policy arranged by him in 1957. This included a $585 Magnavox stereo. Reynolds also had to pay for $1,200 worth of advertising on KTBC, Johnson's television station in Austin. Reynolds had paperwork for this transaction including a delivery note that indicated the stereo had been sent to the home of Johnson.

Reynolds also told of seeing a suitcase full of money which Bobby Baker described as a "$100,000 payoff to Johnson for his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract". His testimony came to an end when news arrived that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

As soon as Lyndon B. Johnson became president he contacted B. Everett Jordan to see if there was any chance of stopping this information being published. Jordan replied that he would do what he could but warned Johnson that some members of the committee wanted Reynold's testimony to be released to the public. On 6th December, 1963, Jordan spoke to Johnson on the telephone and said he was doing what he could to suppress the story because " it might spread (to) a place where we don't want it spread."

Fortas, who represented both Lyndon B. Johnson and Bobby Baker, worked behind the scenes in an effort to keep this information from the public. Johnson also arranged for a smear campaign to be organized against Don B. Reynolds. To help him do this J. Edgar Hoover passed to Johnson the FBI file on Reynolds.

On 17th January, 1964, the Senate Rules Committee voted to release to the public Reynolds' secret testimony. Johnson responded by leaking information from Reynolds' FBI file to Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson. On 5th February, 1964, the Washington Post reported that Reynolds had lied about his academic success at West Point. The article also claimed that Reynolds had been a supporter of Joseph McCarthy and had accused business rivals of being secret members of the American Communist Party. It was also revealed that Reynolds had made anti-Semitic remarks while in Berlin in 1953.

A few weeks later the New York Times reported that Lyndon B. Johnson had used information from secret government documents to smear Don B. Reynolds. It also reported that Johnson's officials had been applying pressure on the editors of newspapers not to print information that had been disclosed by Reynolds in front of the Senate Rules Committee.

In 1965 Johnson nominated Fortas as a member of the Supreme Court. During his time on the Court, Fortas continued to advise LBJ on political and legal matters.

In June 1968, Earl Warren retired as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Johnson had no hesitation in appointing Fortas as his replacement. Johnson also appointed another friend from Texas, Homer Thornberry, to replace Fortas. The Senate had doubts about the wisdom of Fortas becoming Chief Justice. It was later discovered that Fortas had lied when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In October, Fortas asked for his nomination to be withdrawn.

It was also revealed that a convicted financier named Louis Wolfson had agreed to pay Fortas $20,000 per year for the remainder of his life. This arrangement was condemned as ethically improper and Fortas was forced to resign from the Supreme Court in May 1969.

Fortas was unsuccessful in his attempt to rejoin Arnold, Fortas and Porter, the law firm he had helped create. In 1970 he started another law firm.

Abe Fortas died on 5th April, 1982.