The Unbearable Tokenism Of Joe Biden
July 7th, 1965. President Lyndon B. Johnson places a private call to Thurgood Marshall, then a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and asks him to serve as Solicitor General in the Justice Department. Johnson is candid about his reasons for picking Marshall:
I want you to do it for two or three reasons. One, I want the top lawyer in the United States representing me before the Supreme Court to be a Negro and to be a damn good lawyer that’s done it before. That’s — so you have those peculiar qualifications.
Number two, I think it will do a lot for our image abroad and at home, too, that this is the man that the whole government has to look to, to decide whether it prosecutes a case, or whether it goes up with a case, or whether it doesn’t, and so on, and so forth.
Number three, I want you to have the experience and be in the picture. I’m not discussing anything else, and I don’t want to make any other commitments, and I don’t want to imply or bribe or mislead you, but I want you to have the training and the experience of being there day after day for the next few weeks, anyway. Or maybe the next few months if you could do it.
