The good news: Linda Greenhouse, who has been reporting on the Supreme Court for The New York Times for 180 years (more or less) is finally putting out to pasture and will be misinforming a smaller, though no less self-satisfied audience, at the Yale Law School.
The bad news: she marks her departure with a long, emetic essay in the paper’s Week in Review.
There is a lot that could be said about this apopemtic exercise in liberal self-congratulation. I’ll confine myself here to what Greenhouse has to say about the battle over Robert H. Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. She allows that Judge Bork is “an urbane and witty man” who “bore little resemblance” to the malevolent demon conjured up by his enemies. But–pay attention now: here comes a good lesson in how The New York Times subtly twists the facts–Greenhouse speaks not of malicious misrepresentation but of the “instant portrait painted by his opponents,” a characterization fails utterly–and fails deliberately–to capture the furious calumny that liberals heaped upon Bork. She quotes Ted Kennedy’s infamous “In Robert Bork’s America,” tirade–“In Robert Bork’s America,” quoth Kennedy, “there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women”–but she fails to note that what Kennedy said was simply not true–that Kennedy was, in fact, deliberately lying for political gain.
Greenhouse seems surprised that, as the hearings went on and Bork was subjected to ever more surreal attacks on his character and misrepresentations of his opinions, his “sense of humor failed him.” It would be instructive to see how Linda Greenhouse’s sense of humor fared should she be exposed to a tenth of the virulent abuse Bork weathered.
The most repellent part of Greenhouse’s essay, however, came in her summary of the significance of the battle over Bork’s nomination. Bork and his supporters, she writes, “emerged from defeat filled with bitterness,” where she, a repository of forward-looking enlightenment,
thought then and think[s] now that the debate had been both fair and profound. In five days on the witness stand, Judge Bork had a chance to explain himself fully, to describe and defend his view that the Constitution’s text and the intent of its 18th-century framers provided the only legitimate tools for constitutional interpretation. Through televised hearings that engaged the public to a rare degree, the debate became a national referendum on the modern course of constitutional law. Judge Bork’s constitutional vision, anchored in the past, was tested and found wanting, in contrast to the later declaration by Judge Anthony M. Kennedy, the successful nominee, that the Constitution’s framers had “made a covenant with the future.”
On the contrary, Bork’s view was not “tested and found wanting”: it was caricatured, distorted, and pilloried even as Bork himself was subjected to unprecedented public abuse by moral pygmies like Senator “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy. And as for the other Kennedy–Justice Kennedy who ascended to the spot Robert Bork ought to have occupied–his view of the Constitution as a “covenant with the future” is better described as a “covenant with fatuousness.” Consider, for example, the infamous “mystery passage,” which Kennedy wheels out whenever a non-existent Constitutional right needs a bit of new-age rhetoric to be made palatable:
These matters [abortion in 1992, sodomy in 2003], involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
As Bork remarked about this passage, it is
not an argument but a Sixties oration. It has no discernible intellectual content; it does not even tell us why the right to define one’s own concept of “meaning” includes a right to abortion or homosexual sodomy but not a right to incest, prostitution, embezzlement, or anything else a person might regard as central to his dignity and autonomy. Nor are we informed of how we are to know what other rights will one day emerge from some person’s concept of the universe.
Greenhouse ends her essay with to reflection that the Supreme Court “reflects us.” Indeed it does. But what does that tell us? Greenhouse thinks that although “we may not have the Supreme Court we want” or even “the court we need,” we nonetheless “most likely” have “the Supreme Court we deserve.” Does she really think so?
I remember that show well, the only hearing I ever watched and the only one for which I obtained the full transcripts.
The NYT editorialists treated it as a serious intellectual contest, with the mighty Arlen Specter as Bork’s leading contestant.
It was not. It was intellectual infanticide with Judge Bork playing King Herod. The clue to this was the group of Yale law students who were quoted as being upset that the Judge was not being adequately challenged on grounds of sensitivity and compassion rather than the law.
As if our judges should be chosen from the ranks of veterinarians!
Roger,
do you mean ‘apopemtic’, a valedictory farewell?
PS Of course I had to look it up. That’s what is for.
That is what Google is for.
Linda Greenhouse to Yale Law School? Are they this stunningly silly?
Bork really gave his attackers a beating in those hearings. They did not know it. It was as if a gifted playwright had used the “serious intellectual contest” to show the difference between an adult and a gang of children.
She uses the words “I” and “my” so many times in her essay that we can only infer that she must be astonishingly important. It will be a wonder if the Supreme Court can carry on without her.
Actually, it is obvious that she suffers from—if we can modify Mortimer—reporteritis, a disease characterized by “pomposity and self-regard” and the habit of giving pen “to private thoughts far, far better left” unwritten. The main symptom is readily apparent: Those who report on important events come to feel that they themselves are important. It is a sad thing to see and there is no cure.
By the way, did you know she went to—trumpets please—Yale? She might have forgotten to mention her ties to that institution more than half a dozen times.
i recall Linda Greenhouse’s getting the last word one week on Washington Week, when she screeched, voice soaring with upward inflection indicating (supposed) irony: “the REAL problem is the demand from *America*!”
the topic under discussion had been drug cartels south of the border. one wonders if the Solomonic Ms Greenhouse would likewise declare that the “real” problem with the tobacco industry lies with the demand by teenage smokers.
Interesting remark, Gaetano. Makes me wonder if Greenhouse supports the venerable “rape victims are all asking for it” argument. Somehow I suspect not.
This is all infinitely sad, at the same time to witness the triumphalism of the chattering class and to recall the shameful Bork hearings. Judge Bork was – by far – the best and by far most brilliant teacher I studied under at Yale Law, a man of rigorous learning, keen power of analysis, wit and style. To think, moreover, of the opportunities lost in the misfired Republican appointments over the years – Stevens, Souter, Kennedy – is to weep. Get ready (I fear) for even much worse after November.