Nominee Search Began Months Ago : Judiciary: The Justice Department had been evaluating the candidates’ writings and backgrounds. Many officials had last-minute suggestions.

As soon as Justice William J. Brennan Jr. announced his resignation, the calls started pouring into the White House and the Justice Department, where about 20 attorneys were sifting through the legal opinions and writings of potential nominees.

In what one Justice Department official recalls as “a classic case,” a GOP congressman called the White House to boost the prospects of a district court judge he had helped put on the bench.

A decision on that candidate didn’t take long, the official said, because the prospect had already been rejected when he sought elevation to a circuit court of appeals.

President Bush’s choice of Judge David H. Souter was made from a final list of 12 to 15 possibilities, two-thirds of them present or former judges. The process of finding a nominee actually began in March or April of 1989 and included a careful look at close to 100 people. Their legal opinions, speeches and other personal data had been under review by about six Justice Department lawyers since then, one participant said.

Some jurists were so prolific that the reviewers had to wade through more than 200 opinions per candidate.

Most of the candidates had gone through full FBI field checks when they ascended to other judicial posts, but none has been checked out by the FBI in connection with the Supreme Court appointment, officials said.

The decision to focus on the final 12 to 15 flowed from a Saturday morning White House meeting Bush had with his counsel, C. Boyden Gray, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, a Justice Department official said.

Despite all the groundwork, which began in early 1989 when Bush requested the work from Gray and Thornburgh, the team of attorneys and aides worked throughout Saturday until well after midnight and then returned to the Justice Department early Sunday, where some remained until 11 p.m.

Operating mainly out of the law library down the corridor from the attorney general’s office on the Justice Department’s fifth floor, lawyers updated the summaries that had been done on the prospects--some untouched since last fall. Other attorneys took to the phones to check on last-minute suggestions.

“The phones were ringing off the hook,” one participant said. “We did take a look at them. But it was hard to add any serious candidates over the weekend.”

Some on the final list--Solicitor Gen. Kenneth W. Starr and Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, for example--did not require any updating. Starr had stepped down from the appellate court here to become the government’s chief advocate before the high court, with his office down the hall from Thornburgh’s.

Higginbotham had been considered for earlier Supreme Court vacancies in the Ronald Reagan Administration, so both men were well known to the evaluators.