What would Ike do?

The president is running for a second term. The Senate is closely divided along partisan lines. In September of election year, a vacancy unexpectedly occurs on the Supreme Court. The Republican president gets a chance to fill a seat formerly held by a Democrat. Thirty-eight days before the election he announces his choice.

But this is 1956. The Republican president is Dwight D. Eisenhower. His response would be almost unimaginable today.

Ike instructed his attorney General, Herbert Brownell, to seek out a Democrat to fill the seat.

"The President believed and acted upon the belief that the Supreme Court's membership should represent diverse political points of view," wrote Brownell. Three weeks later, the president appointed Democrat William Brennan, a justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Susan Eisenhower, Ike's granddaughter, recounts this story in her timely and illuminating book, How Ike Led. I asked her about it in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death.

"He really believed that the Supreme Court had to be ideologically balanced," she told me, "or people would lose confidence in their decisions, thinking that they were actually political, and not based on legal precedent or other legal matters."

The circumstances were not exactly the same as today. The Senate was out of session until January of the following year, something that rarely happens now. So, Eisenhower made a temporary "recess appointment" and put Brennan on the court immediately. Senate hearings on his permanent appointment took place months later in February 1957. Brennan was confirmed with just one dissenting vote. Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, a Republican, thought the New Jersey Supreme Court justice was too soft on Communism.

Political considerations

also came into play. Eisenhower had already appointed two Republicans and wished to appear non-partisan. Brennan was a Roman-Catholic. Some of Ike's advisers thought his