President Richard Nixon appointed Associate Dean J. Keith Mann as chairman of the Board of Inquiry to report on the longshore labor management disputes affecting the Nation’s ports on October 4.

Professor Mann and hi three fellow Board members held hearings, two men in Washington and two in San Francisco, and submitted their initial report to the President early on October 6. (The use of facsimile machines enabled the four to transmit drafts across the country to each other.)

Thereafter, at the direction of the President, the Justice Department obtained an injunction in the West Coast strike. East and Gulf Coast strikes were left to further negotiations, assisted by the Federal Government’s top mediators.

On November 24, the President asked the Board of Inquiry to submit a supplemental report on the current status of the disputes on both coasts, and the Board, after enquiry and hearings, submitted its second report on Thanksgiving Day. The Government has since sought injunctive relief against continuance of the stoppage in various East and Gulf Coast ports.

Early in December the Board of Inquiry made a further report to the President on the position of the parties, the effort which have been made for settlement and the employers’ last offer in the West Coast dispute.

“He has the coolest head and most even temper of any human being I know,” a colleague said yesterday of J. Keith Mann. “He manages to keep his perspective on any problem in the heat of the momentsomething that’s beyond most mortals and which is why I assume he’s been chosen for this job.” The job he referred to is one for which President Nixon selected the 47-year-old Professor Mann-as head of a board of inquiry into the extended West Coast dock strike.

For the round-faced, blue-eyed Professor Mann, who holds the title of associate dean of the Stanford Law School, involvement in difficult negotiations constitutes no novelty. Nor does a Presidential appointment. Under President Kennedy he helped settle a controversy between the Southern Pacific Company and railroad clerks and a dispute between airlines and flight engineers. In 1967 President Johnson appointed him chairman of a fact-finding board during a West Coast shipyard strike.

20 Years’ Experience

Professor Mann’s career in labor relations extends back some 20 years to the Korean War, when he served as chairman of the Review and Appeals Committee of Eastern studies program. He studied Japathe Wage Stabilization Board. Since then, he also served as a member of the Secretary of Labor’s committee on labor-management relations at Atomic Energy Commission installations and as chairman of the Wage Board for the California State Industrial Welfare Commission.

“Keith Mann,” said a Stanford law professor yesterday, “is one of those who manages to stay heavily engaged in his own academic work while staying current on all that’s going on in the labor field. He is engaged from time to time in undertakings like this one, and that provides concrete contacts for his academic work. I think what he is doing is an excellent example of the value of outside consulting for professors. He is considered one of the country’s leading experts on labor law.”

Only First Initial

In choosing a law career, Professor Mann, the youngest of three sons of William Young Mann and the former Lillian Myrle Bailey, followed in the footsteps of his eldest brother, W. Howard Mann, now a professor of law at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

It was W. Howard Mann who chose to use only the initial of his first name, William, to avoid being confused with his father, who set the pattern for nomenclature among the brothers. Professor Mann of Stanford is actually John Keith Mann and the third brother, who chose a career in pharmacy, is known as F. Dean Mann.

J. Keith Mann was born on May 28, 1924, on the 400-acre family farm in Alexis, Ill. After two years at Indiana University, he entered the Navy early in World War II as a lieutenant, junior grade, in a Far nese at the University of Colorado and served in Korea and Japan.

He obtained a bachelor of science degree in Far Eastern studies from Indiana University in 1948 and a bachelor of laws degree the following year. After serving as a law clerk for Associate Supreme Court Justices Wiley Rutledge and Sherman Minton, he carried on a private practice in Washington for a year before joining the Wage Stabilization Board in 1951.

The following year, after joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, he came to Stanford, where he was named associate dean in 1961, with responsibility principally for academic affairs relating to the school’s educational and research programs.

Professor Mann, whose fading blond hair is cut short, lives in a modern house on a hill in Stanford that commands views of both Stanford and Palo Alto. He and his wife, the former Virginia McKinnon, have five children-Christopher, 19; Marilyn, 16; Kevin, 15; Susan, 10, and Andrew, 6.

It is a home, said one visitor, that seems characterized as a family abode by the children’s paintings and a profusion of books and by food that always seems to be coming or going.

Professor Mann is fond of cooking on an outdoor grill, and he enjoys an occasional game of tennis and a bout of volleyball. During the summer, he enjoys boating and walking near a house the family rents at Fallen Leaf Lake in California.

He enjoys cigars and cigarettes, but he is careful to shun the latter around the house because his ecology-minded children disapprove.