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When Felix Frankfurter retired for health reasons in 1962, his seat on the Supreme Court was considered the "Jewish seat" (it had previously been held by Benjamin Cardozo). Two of the leading contenders to succeed Frankfurter were the two Jewish members of JFK's Cabinet: Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg and Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff. (Frankfurter himself, as might be expected, wanted Paul Freund to succeed him; Freund was a legal scholar very much in the Brandeis-Frankfurter tradition--indeed, it was Frankfurter who persuaded Justice Brandeis to hire Freund as his law clerk. https://books.google.com/books?id=C364VLeAo8gC&pg=PA207 But JFK had indicated to Ben Bradlee--according to the latter's Conversations with Kennedy--at the time of the Byron White appointment that the Court "did not necessarily need another legal scholar at this time in history." https://books.google.com/books?id=QSTtAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT43 According to Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel in their Justice Brennan: Liberal Champion (2010), Brennan's friend Judge David Bazelon also hoped for Frankfurter's seat, but Bazelon was much too liberal and controversial to be seriously considered. https://books.google.com/books?id=pCpA_Z_IUDMC&pg=PA196)

Anyway, as we all know, JFK went with Goldberg, while Ribicoff proceeded to run for the Senate from Connecticut, narrowly winning in November. (It was not until August that the ailing Frankfurter had finally announced his retirement, but since his April stroke, it was obvious that he could not remain a Justice. I am not sure exactly when the choice of Goldberg was made, but it was definitely well before the formal announcement.) What if JFK had chosen Ribicoff instead?

For evidence that Ribicoff was--at least at one time--interested in getting appointed to the Court, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times, p. 227, quoting RFK as saying that Ribicoff had turned down JFK's offer of the attorney generalship, partly because he didn't think it would look good for a Catholic President and a Jewish Attorney General to force racial integration on the white, Protestant South, but also because "I think...he wants to be Justice of the Supreme Court, and he felt that by being Attorney General of the United States that he would incur the wrath of the Southerners who would have to vote on it." http://books.google.com/books?id=0xqrU5lnD7AC&pg=PA227

It is possible that Ribicoff may have lost his interest in being appointed to the Court by 1962. Ben Bradlee wrote that at the time of the White appointment, JFK told him that Ribicoff "no longer wanted to be on the Supreme Court and in fact had called him earlier in the week to take himself out of the running." https://books.google.com/books?id=QSTtAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT44 But according to other sources, White was the only person JFK seriously considered as Whittaker's successor, and if Ribicoff did withdraw his own name from consideration it may simply have been to bow gracefully to the inevitable. Anyway, let's assume that Ribicoff would at least have accepted the Frankfurter seat if JFK had offered to him. According to Henry J. Abraham's history of Supreme Court appointments, Justices, Presidents, and Senators, pp. 220-21, JFK did at least briefly consider Ribicoff, "because of the president's reluctance to lose so close a personal and political adviser and so skillful a cabinet member [as Goldberg], one who had long been one of the country's most successful and most respected labor-management negotiators." http://books.google.com/books?id=NWJRemDnx2kC&pg=PA220 http://books.google.com/books?id=NWJRemDnx2kC&pg=PA221

For the moment, let's set aside the consequences of having Horace Seely-Brown, Jr. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Seely-Brown,_Jr. elected Senator from Connecticut; if even the popular ex-Governor Ribicoff could only narrowly defeat Seely-Brown in OTL, I'm not sure that any other Democrat could have won. We can also set aside the consequences of the absence of a Daley-Ribicoff confrontation at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968--a confrontation which very likely cost Humphrey votes in November, though probably not enough to change the results. I am here interested in the consequences of having Ribicoff instead of Goldberg on the Court.

Ribicoff would presumably have a liberal voting record on the Court similar to Goldberg's in OTL. But Goldberg didn't stay on the Court very long; in 1965, LBJ, who desperately wanted Abe Fortas on the Court (for one thing, he wanted someone who could warn him in advance if any Great Society laws were in danger of being declared unconstitutional) somehow persuaded Goldberg to resign from the Court to become US Ambassador to the UN. Goldberg later claimed that he thought that as UN Ambassador he could bring peace to Vietnam, and that afterwards, LBJ would reappoint him to the Court. It is really hard for me to imagine Ribicoff being that delusional. (Goldberg, for all his skills as a labor lawyer and labor-management negotiator, could be very naive when it came to politics, as his 1970 candidacy for Governor of New York would show.) An alternative explanation is that LBJ "had something" on Goldberg--presumably concerning Assistant Secretary of Labor (under Goldberg) Holleman's soliciting money from Billy Sol Estes for a party in 1962, which Goldberg swore he had paid for personally. See David Stebenne, Arthur J. Goldberg: New Deal Liberal, pp. 349-351 for details:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ICxFAulJN44C&pg=PA349 By contrast, there is no evidence AFAIK that LBJ had anything on Ribicoff.

Of course, maybe Ribicoff would get bored with the Court (as Goldberg had been reported to be in 1965) and agree to leave it anyway, but I think the odds are that he would stay on the Court much longer than Goldberg did. Judging from this New York Times article,
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/28/n...ind-two-finalists-for-supreme-court-seat.html Ribicoff was in possession of his faculties as late as 1993, so he could have stayed on until the Clinton administration. Certainly he might have waited until the Carter administration, at the earliest, to retire.

But of course that assumes that a more liberal Supreme Court--and it would certainly be more liberal after 1968 if Ribicoff were to stay on--would have no effect on who won presidential elections. This is by no means sure. A more liberal Court might mean, for example that Ford would win the presidential election in 1976--certainly a Court more enthusiastic about cross-district busing in Milliken v. Bradley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milliken_v._Bradley would hurt the Democrats. And if Ford did poorly enough in office from 1977 to 1980, the GOP brand might be so tarnished that even Ronald Reagan could not save it in 1980, as I have frequently argued here, e.g., https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ve-likely-beaten-carter.436301/#post-16461801 So we simply have no idea who would be president when Justice Ribicoff retired...
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