The entire nation, led by President Johnson, mourned today the death of Justice Felix Frankfurter, who immigrated to the United States from Vienna at the age of 12 and eventually rose to be Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, earning a place in American history as one of the greatest exponents of constitutional law this country ever produced.
Justice Frankfurter died here last evening of heart disease, the illness which caused his retirement from the Supreme Court in 1962. He was 82 years old. A spokesman for the Supreme Court said this afternoon that there will not be a public funeral, nor will there be any announcement of burial. There will be no public service. Members of the Supreme Court and their wives will attend a small, private memorial service tomorrow afternoon at the Frankfurter apartment.
President Johnson, in paying tribute to him, said today: “I am grieved to learn of the passing of my friend, Justice Frankfurter, who did so much to preserve freedom through wise interpretation of the law. He was one of the great figures of legal history, a man who made many contributions to good government and who will be sorely missed.”
Other tributes were voiced by Chief Justice Earl Warren, other members of the Supreme Court, leaders of both houses of Congress, and Zionist and other Jewish leaders in this country and a broad.
The son of a poor Jewish immigrant who descended from six generations of rabbis and scholars, young Felix grew up on the Lower East Side, of New York. While attending public school, he helped the family by selling newspapers and doing odd jobs. He later graduated with honors from City College of New York at the age of 19, and worked for a year as a clerk for the New York Tenement House Commission, saving his income to be able to enroll in the Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1906 as an honor student and editor of the Law Review.
In 1914, he was appointed a member of the faculty of the Harvard Law School on the recommendation of Louis D. Brandeis, then an eminent attorney and later an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Frankfurter’s record as a legal genius and later, as a great teacher, attracted the attention of President Taft and later of President Wilson. He was sent on important missions abroad by Wilson’s Secretary of State Robert Lansing.
WON ARAB SUPPORT FOR ZIONIST AIMS AT VERSAILLES PEACE CONFERENCE
When the Versailles Peace Conference was held in 1919, after World War I, Frankfurter was the legal adviser to the Zionist delegation there. He engaged in correspondence with Emir Feisal, who headed the Arab delegation at that Conference and later became the King of Iraq. This resulted in the writing by Feisal of an important letter to Frankfurter, on March 3, 1919 which became a historic document. The Arab ruler, who fought at the Versailles Peace Conference for Arab independence, said in his letter to Mr. Frankfurter:
“We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist Organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best, in so far as we are concerned, to help them through; we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.
“With the chiefs of your movement, especially with Dr. Weizmann, we have had and continue to have the closest relations. He has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another. The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist. Our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.”
For nearly 45 years, the authenticity of that statement by Emir Feisal was disputed by Arab leaders throughout the Middle East. Two months ago, however, the original of that Feisal letter to Frankfurter was discovered in the files of the Jewish Agency offices in London.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Frankfurter to a seat on the Supreme Court, as successor to another great Jewish-American jurist, Benjamin N. Cardozo. That was in 1938. There was stiff opposition to that nomination.
Franfurter had been with the Brandeis-Mack leadership inside the Zionist Organization of American, although he resigned from that group later when he disagreed with some of the Brandeis-Mack policies.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
