Justice Choice Made in Frenetic Bush Style : Supreme Court: Phone calls, meetings lead to decision. Official Washington had expected President to pick a Latino to replace Marshall.

President Bush’s nomination of conservative black Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court was a surprise to official Washington, which had expected him to name a Latino candidate.

Bush, engaging in the frenetic pace that usually surrounds vacation trips to his home here, refused to let the nomination--the first to the Supreme Court ever announced outside Washington--interfere with his long weekend.

The President traveled last Friday to his summer home with the names of four possible candidates--Judge Edith H. Jones of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Judge Emilio M. Garza, also of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court, and Thomas--packed in his luggage, according to a senior Administration official.

Mixed into his typical hectic schedule here of golf and boating, Bush privately conferred via a conference phone call about 3 p.m. Saturday with Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh, Chief of Staff John H. Sununu and White House counsel C. Boyden Gray, all of whom were in Washington, and settled on Thomas. Earlier in the day, Thornburgh and other Justice Department officials had gathered to talk to Garza, the only other candidate interviewed for the job.

Sunday, Bush invited Thomas to his home here to make the announcement. The secret was so well kept by the President and the White House that even the nominee was in the dark. Thomas arrived at Walkers Point, the Bush family’s oceanfront estate, expecting no more than a second-round conversation about the job, he said.

“I called him (Sunday) and told him I was getting very, very close,” Bush told reporters gathered for the announcement. “But . . . I closed the deal today.

“I guess I could say the final decision was made sitting in our living room but it was pretty well established when I talked to him yesterday afternoon that (Thomas was) what I wanted,” the President said.

According to Administration officials in Kennebunkport and Washington, Thomas was the first choice after the President received Justice Thurgood Marshall’s hand-delivered resignation letter last Thursday.

In an apparent contradiction of Bush’s statement that race did not figure into his decision, a Washington official said that Thomas “was probably the leading candidate from the beginning” because Marshall, the nation’s first and only black on the high court, was the justice stepping down. If another justice had resigned, the official said, Thomas would have been only “a leading candidate.”

Moreover, the source said, Bush stressed to his advisers that their list of a dozen or more prospective nominees should be whittled down to a more manageable number with emphasis on “non-traditional people.”

Asked to clarify the term, the official talked about the eight or so “non-white or non-male” prospects offered for consideration to the President. Examples of the traditional prospects, who were considered briefly, included Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr and Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the source said. Both are white and male.

But “by Friday afternoon or evening, we were focusing on non-traditional candidates,” the official said.

At that point, “Garza was the most serious of the names we didn’t know,” which was the reason he was asked to come in for an interview Saturday, the official said. He added that the biggest question about Garza was that he would be jumping from a district court to the Supreme Court, the source said.

Bush decided on Thomas over Garza, the source said, because of the nominee’s greater experience--”both on the court and his long career in public service.”

Thomas was interviewed at the Justice Department on Thursday, meeting with Thornburgh and Gray for “a couple of hours.”

Thornburgh was “very, very impressed” with Thomas, the source said. But the Administration still spent the “rest of the weekend . . . making sure the President had other prospective nominees to look at.”

In Kennebunkport, meanwhile, Bush was certain after the Saturday talk with his aides that he wanted to offer the job to Thomas. Yet, a senior Administration official said, Bush was not ready to go public with his decision, preferring to have his advisers check out “some final things” about Thomas.

The Washington source said that the Administration concluded there were no issues in Thomas’ personal life that would make his confirmation difficult. “We spent a lot of time. Due diligence was spent.”

Bush said that he did not offer Thomas the nomination until after the two chatted face-to-face. The senior Administration source said that the offer came during a conversation in the Bush bedroom.

“The President made him the formal offer when just the two of them were talking,” the official said. “He accepted privately at that point.”

Staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.

A Sampler of Nominee’s Views

Here are some of the opinions expressed by Clarence Thomas during his term--1982 to 1990--as chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:

* ON RACIAL QUOTAS: “Attributing increased layoffs of black managers (in private business) to (Ronald Reagan) Administration policies completely misses the point. These unfortunate setbacks are the result . . . of the racial engineering of the past undoing itself. During the 1970s, the EEOC urged employers to give blacks a preference in hiring or promotion as a means of increasing the number of minorities in management positions. Departments like community relations became the depository for blacks hired as quota-fillers, even for blacks who were fully qualified to manage departments with bottom-line functions. The unintended, but predictable effect of that policy is . . . layoffs. Traditionally, jobs not essential to a business’ profitability are the first to be cut.”

* ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: “Federal enforcement agencies . . . turned the statutes on their heads by requiring discrimination in the form of hiring and promotion quotas, so-called goals and timetables.”

* ON RACIAL DISCRIMINATION: “(People) cite as evidence of increasing racism a record 72,000 complaints of discrimination filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . . . . These numbers reflect discrimination in all EEOC enforcement areas, based not only on race but also on religion, age, national origin and sex. Age discrimination is the fastest-growing area of complaint.”

* ON BLACK VIEWS: “Just as no one really speaks for white America, no one really speaks for black America. I am certain that many views are shared, but no one, except some politicians who must stand for election or reelection, takes a poll or conducts a referendum before reaching a point of view on a particular issue.”

* ON AGE DISCRIMINATION: “First of all, this (offering employees the choice of resigning with extra severance pay or facing dismissal, while hiring new, younger and lesser-paid employees to fill the same jobs) is a standard practice in industry. I don’t know why Xerox is the only one we are after. If Xerox is on the chopping-block, we have got about 100 other corporations we should be looking at. It’s as simple as that. OK? GM (General Motors) is doing the same thing. I feel strongly that these voluntary reductions in force (are legal), particularly among these top executives, unless someone can show me it is coercion.”

* ON SELF-HELP: “I firmly insist that the Constitution be interpreted in a color-blind fashion. Hence, I emphasize black self-help, as opposed to racial quotas and other race-conscious legal devices that only further and deepen the original problem. Race-conscious remedies in this society are dangerous. You can’t orchestrate society along racial lines.”

* ON SEX-BASED WAGE DISCRIMINATION: “We have consistently attempted to focus attention on the real issue, sex-based wage discrimination, and ignore the rhetorical one, comparable worth. We rejected comparable worth as a theory of discrimination because it would require the commission and the courts to substitute their judgments regarding the worth of jobs for the non-discriminatory decisions of individual employees and employers expressed through the marketplace.