[3] Aldrich was nominated by President Eisenhower on February 26, 1959, to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit vacated by Judge Calvert Magruder.

In February 1956, McCarthy wrote to complain to President Eisenhower, accusing Judge Aldrich of harboring sympathy toward Communists.

He had learned from the New Bedford Standard-Times that Aldrich had initially refused, on principle, to sign a non-Communist affidavit card upon his appointment as a trustee to the Massachusetts Memorial Hospital.

Massachusetts Governor Christian Herter had nominated him for the trusteeship on August 2, 1955, two months before the Kamin trial.

American philosopher Ralph Barton Perry credits Elizabeth Perkins Aldrich as a de facto co-author of his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Thought and Character of William James.