Abe Fortas, for all the good that he did and all the brilliance he possessed, was not pristine. He was shamelessly greedy and even more shamelessly solicitous of power.

FROM his first days as a young member of the Yale law faculty, his lust for fame was in evidence. He belonged to an elite club of profs there who played a game which amounted to counting the number of times each participant was mentioned in the press on a given week. While serving on the Court, he spent much of his time at the White House, advising Johnson just as he had done before becoming a justice. Fortas knew deep down that such a bending of the doctrine of separation of powers was not right, and though he never made such an admission, his omissions on the subject before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings show his own doubts.

He told the committee members that he had made "full disclosure" to them on the subject, when he had not, for had they known of his extent of involvement in formulating Administration policy--including everything from the Detroit riots, to suggesting appointments, to crafting our policy in Vietnam--the Senate and the public would have been shocked.

In short, Fortas was the ultimate creature of Washington, who wanted to be in on everything and accountable to no one. His ruin is thus not surprising, because there is a limit quite simply to what one can get away with. And if it is true that others got away with more or just as much and were never caught, that by no means implies that Fortas was a victim of ineptitude and not, in the lexicon of today, his own sleaze.

Murphy is most convincing when he tries to put the Fortas affair into a historical context, rather than a crassly political one. He notes that Fortas fell victim to what amounted to a swing of the pendulum in American politics, when the "whales" of the Senate saw their power pass away to a younger generation and when the liberalism of LBJ and JFK was replaced by a conservatism of which we may only now be seeing the last vestiges.

THE fate of Robert Bork, who himself fell victim to the Senate after a similarly brusing confirmation battle in which his conservative views were treated with the same contempt that once met Fortas' liberal ideas, lingers in the background of this biography. Murphy makes the connection explicit in his preface and his epilogue. But a crucial difference remains.

If the Bork episode was purely the result of clashing political ideologies and a shift in the direction of American politics, such was not the case for Fortas. In the end, even liberal senators would call for his resignation from the Court, and then-Sen. Walter Mondale (D-Minn.) was the first of them to deliver the request.

Fortas had betrayed his own ideals, and in the process made the myth of Camelot and the Great Society seem a cruel hoax. One could fight for truth and justice and make a pretty good buck while doing it, was the lesson he taught. One could also cozy up to power, find for himself a comfortable niche in the White House power structure and never fear that he would be accountable.

The murder of Abe Fortas was in many ways simply more testimony to the reality that no matter how corrupt our government, how illusory our democracy, the myth is too strong to be discarded and accountability will ulitmately catch up with fugitives from it.

So far from foreshadowing the Bork hearings, the Fortas affair is a prelude to Watergate, another time when democracy caught up with its defilers. What nags at the end of this book, though, is that had Fortas not accepted Johnson's appointment to the Court as he had tried to do, he would never had been held accountable. His power would have been unchecked, his wealth would have been increased.

One knows today that the number of Abe Fortases who roam the White House halls and never get caught simply because they never officially become a part of the government is large. And so long as their ranks remain large, the lesson of the rise and ruin of Abe Fortas will never be fully learned.