Jimmy Carter named four N.J. District Court Judges and a U.S. Attorney. Here’s how the process went

During his four years in the White House, Jimmy Carter nominated four U.S. District Court Judges and a U.S. Attorney in New Jersey.

Carters’ judicial nominations came in 1979, following the retirement of Lawrence Whipple, who was named by Lyndon Johnson, and Geroge Barlow, a Richard Nixon nominee, who died in office.  The third judgeship was a new seat for New Jersey.

New Jersey’s two U.S. Senators, Harrison Williams and Bill Bradley, formed a Judicial Selection Committee to make recommendations to Carter.

About seventy candidates were interviewed by the panel, with fourteen finalists:  former State Sen. Jerry Fitzgerald English, Gov. Brendan Byrne’s chief counsel; Mercer County Prosecutor Anne Thompson; Newark attorney Dickinson Debevoise; New Jersey Bar Association president and former State Commission of Investigation chairman Joseph Rodrigues; U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Vincent Cammissa, Superior Court Judges Harold Ackerman, William Walls, Marilyn Loftus, Geoffrey Gaulkin, and Thomas Shebell;  Camden Municipal Court Presiding Judge Theodore Davis; former State Board of Bar Examiners Chairman Donald Rapson; Richard Newman, the former chief of the New Jersey Public Defender’s Office appellate section; and Lee Sarokin, who was finance chairman of Bradley’s 1978 Senate campaign.

There was speculation at the time that Williams, the state’s senior senator, had agreed to back English after Byrne picked Robert Wilentz to serve as chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court; Wilentz’s father, former Middlesex County Democratic Chairman and former Attorney General David Wilentz, was a close ally of Williams.

Two other Democrats critical to President Jimmy Carter also weighed in: House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino (D-Newark) pushed hard for Cammissa, and Newark Mayor Kenneth Gibson advocated for Walls, a former Newark municipal court judge and business administrator.

The Carter administration had asked William and Bradley to agree on at least one woman and one Black candidate as part of the four-judge package.   The two senators could nominate three white men by checking two boxes and recommending Thompson as the first woman and first Black federal judge in New Jersey.

In addition to Thompson, the senators picked Sarokin, Ackerman, and Debevoise.

The nominations defused the notion of a deal on Wilentz but created a rift between the two senators and Rodino; Williams and Bradley went to Rodino’s home to inform him of their decision.

While Williams and Bradley agreed on the four candidates in April, Carter only made nominations once Rodino decided to lift his objections.  That didn’t happen until September 29.

The U.S. Senate confirmed all four without objection on Halloween Day 1979.

Thompson, now 90, is an inactive senior judge of the U.S. District Court.

U.S. Attorney

From 1959 to 1979, one Democrat (Harrison Williams) and one Republican (Clifford Case) held New Jersey’s U.S. Senate seats.  The two had a good working relationship and agreed to support each other’s picks for judges and federal prosecutors, depending on which party occupied the White House.

Carter’s narrow victory over Ford in 1976 meant that Democrats would reclaim the U.S. Attorney’s office for the first time in eight years.  Nixon had named three heavyweight federal prosecutors – all handpicked by Case: Frederick Lacey, who served from 1969 to 1971, when he was nominated to serve as a federal judge; Herbert Stern, Lacey’s first assistant, who served from 1971 to 1974, when Nixon sent him to the U.S. District Court, and 32-year-old Jonathan Goldstein, who worked for Lacey and Stern and was U.S. Attorney from 1974 to 1977.

Among the trio’s prosecutions and convictions were Newark Mayor Hugh Addonizio, Hudson County Democratic boss John V. Kenny, Rep. Cornelius Gallagher (D-Bayonne), and former Republican State Chairman Nelson Gross.

Goldstein fought to keep his job through the end of his term in June 1978, and he held on for the first nine months of Carter’s presidency.  At Williams’ urging, Carter finally forced Goldstein to resign.

Williams’ first choice for U.S. Attorney was Joseph M. Nolan, a politically active Newark bankruptcy attorney and past New Jersey Bar Association president.  Nolan had faced criticism after the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals forced him to rebate money after finding that his fees in a bankruptcy case were usurious.

Among the obstacles for Williams was his opposition to Carter’s nomination, and he ran his own slate of uncommitted delegates in the 1976 Democratic primary.  Gov. Brendan Byrne, a former judge and prosecutor with some of his own ideas for U.S. Attorney, had endorsed Carter.

In what could have been a history-altering move, one of the contenders for U.S. Attorney was Robert Wilentz, who instead succeeded Richard Hughes, as chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Williams wound up submitting Nolan and five other names to the White House: Robert Del Tufo, the first assistant New Jersey Attorney General and director of the state Division of Criminal Justice; James Zazzali, an assistant Essex County prosecutor and Byrne ally; Roger Lowenstein, a 32-year-old public defender who had been part of the Chicago Seven defense team (and later founder of the Lowenstein Sandler law firm); Howard Rosen, the finance chairman of the New Jersey Democratic State Committee (and later an Ambassador and U.S. Senate candidate); and George Koelzer, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who later was Williams’ defense attorney during the Abscam scandal.

Also other consideration were: Matthew P. Boylan, a former director of the state Division of Criminal Justice and ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney; Paul Giblin, a Bergen County labor lawyer who worked for Hughes when he was governor; and Debevoise.

Eventually, Nolan and Del Tufo emerged as the finalists, with Del Tufo getting the job.

Del Tufo resigned in 1980, which was too late for Carter to pick a replacement during his re-election campaign.   He unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 1985 and was attorney general from 1990 to 1993 under Gov. Jim Florio.  Del Tufo’s late brother, Raymond, was U.S. Attorney under Dwight Eisenhower.