Robert H. Bork, 1927-2012
Judge Robert H. Bork, one of the the greatest jurists this country has ever produced, died early this morning from heart complications in a Virginia hospital near his home. He was 85.
Bork was a national celebrity. Several years ago, my wife and I visited the Borks in Maine where they had taken a summer house off Somes Sound. I cannot count the times that total strangers would approach us at a lobster shack or park asking to shake the Judge’s hand and to assure him of their admiration and support.
Bork’s celebrity was only partly conferred upon him by brilliant legal work and his service as solicitor general and then acting attorney general in the tumultuous Watergate years of the Nixon administration. (Andrew McCarthy wrote an excellent summary of Judge Bork’s work in The New Criterion a few years ago: “Robert H. Bork on Law and Life.”) But by far the most important fuel for fame was the riveting, not to say obscene, attack upon his candidacy for the Supreme Court in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
The vicious campaign waged against Judge Bork set a new low—possibly never exceeded—in the exhibition of unbridled leftist venom, indeed hate. Reporters combed through the Borks trash hoping to find compromising tidbits; they inspected his movie rentals, and were disgusted to find the films of John Wayne liberally represented. So hysterical was the campaign against Judge Bork that a new transitive verb entered our political vocabulary: “To Bork,” scruple at nothing in order to discredit and defeat a political figure. Monsieur Guillotine gave his name to that means of execution; “progressives,” those leftists haters of America who have so disfigured our national life since the 1960s, gave us the this new form of character assassination. The so-called “Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, surely one of the most despicable men ever to hold high public office in the United States (yes, that’s saying something), stood on the Senate floor and emitted a serious of calumnious lies designed not simply to prevent Judge Bork from being appointed to the Supreme Court but to soil his character irretrievably. “Robert Bork’s America,” quoth Kennedy,
is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.
A breathtaking congeries of falsehoods that, were they not protected by the prerogatives of senatorial privilege, would have taken a conspicuous place in the annals of malicious slander and character assassination. In The Tempting of America, Judge Bork recounts his incredulity at this tissue of malign fabrication. “It had simply never occurred to me that anybody could misrepresent my career and views as Kennedy did.” At the time, he notes, many people thought that Kennedy had blundered by emitting so flagrant, and flagrantly untrue, an attack. They were wrong. His “calculated personal assault, . . . more violent than any against a judicial nominee in our country’s history,” did the job (with a little help from Joe Biden and Arlen Specter). Not only was Kennedy instrumental in preventing a great jurist from taking his place on the Supreme Court, he also contributed immeasurably to the cheapening of American political discourse.
In a way, Robert Bork had the last laugh. Ted Kennedy went to his grave a rancid, lumbering, pathetic laughing stock. Bork went from intellectual triumph to intellectual triumph, contributing now-classic studies to the library of legal understanding and penning two of the most important works of social criticism of the last several decades, the aofrementioned Tempting of America and Slouching Toward Gemorrah, wild bestsellers both. I am proud to say that this spring Encounter Books will be publishing a memoir by Judge Bork called Saving Justice: Watergate,. The Saturday Night Massacre, and Other Adventures of a Solicitor General.
Bob Bork was a great American and a dear friend, witty, compassionate, with a laser-like analytical mind and compendious store of cultural reference. (It was he who introduced me to John Buchan’s marvelous memoir Memory, Hold the Door.) I will have more to say about Bob and his achievement in due course. For now, I wish merely to register my gratitude for his friendship, admiration of his work, and sorrow at his passing. Requiescat in pace.
Very sad news. I’ve often wondered lately what horrors he might have prevented if he had made it to the Supreme Court.
R.I.P. Judge Bork
Judge Bork made the mistake of insisting that the SCOTUS make rulings based on LAW, not popular passions. Requiecat in pace, Judge Bork. We need more men and women of your intellectual honesty and moral courage.
“they inspected his movie rentals, and were disgusted to find the films of John Wayne liberally represented.”
It also was an example of something else that still does not have a term. The total lack of sense the left makes. I remember them going through these movie rentals and then turning around and saying ‘see; this proves there is constructional right to privacy’. I actually think there is but that aside / back to them; WHAT? How so?
Anyway; its a not strawman… they were saying that and it stuck out as totally illogical to me.
My condolences to his family. As the author mentioned; he died accomplished and with a good reputation… unlike his accuser/s.
The mask of tolerance the left proclaims to embrace was removed and their true intolerant face revealed during Judge Bork’s confirmation hearings as he did he best to honestly answer questions regarding his take on the Constitution and law. It is a shame the Supreme Court never had the privilege of having him serve with them as there was never a legitimate reason presented that should have prevented him from sitting on the court. RIP and I will always remember him in the highest regard.
Remember, in the end, the “lady-killer”, Teddy Kennedy, was denied a pass from the Pope as he slowly died from brain cancer. Liberalism is certainly a cancer, and the born with silver spoon in mouth Teddy Kennedy certainly espoused all the destructive impulses that result from such an ideology. If you are Catholic, you must be pro-life, and if you are not pro-life, you can repeat any fantasy you choose, but you are not Catholic. (Note to Pelosi, Kerry, etc)
He Dies a MAN and with his HONOR intact.
He outlived the scumbag Kennedy. I hope that as he transcended to Heaven he gave Teddy a spiritual wave and said, “cheer up, Teddy my boy, you’ve got plenty of company down there old friend.”
The Bork hearings were the only congressional hearing I ever watched. Watched them all the way through and then ordered the transcripts. The NYT editors wrote of a serious, sophisticated debate between Specter and Bork. I saw a contest between a Legal Juggernaut and and an ounce of navel lint. As for the Lion of the Senate (a.k.a, the Amphibious Senator from Massachusetts), his contribution was mostly a presentation of moderately comical body language. The whole affair lingers in my mind as the locus classicus for a display of liberal intellectual vacuity.
I watched as much of the Democrat Senate’s kangaroo court grilling of Judge Robert Bork as I could; the local CPB affiliate rebroadcast them late-night and through the wee hours of the morning every day.
Sen. Swimmer (D-Kennedy Compound) showed by his clumsy, staff-scripted performance that he was already tipping into senility. Sen. Biden’s performance as chair of the hearings distinguished himself by how much basic high school civics class education in the fundamentals of the US Constitution he lacked. Every time since then when Biden has been hailed as some sort of constitutional law expert by his fellow Democrat party partisans and their media arm, I knew better. When Biden was later hailed as a foreign policy expert by the same gang of criminals, I was not fooled.
The nation whose people failed to boot those incompetents from the upper house of their federal legislature were later punished by two terms of Clinton and now two of Obama. Libertarians who sneered at Judge Bork deserve a double portion of punishment.
Thank you, Mr. Kimball, for the fine words of homage to a great man. One minor correction; the guillotine was named for a Dr. Guillotin. No need to post this comment.
I’ve wondered if he suffered from the hate. I’m glad you shared your time with them in Maine here, such acknowledgement and honor from fellow Americans is due him. He lived long and will not be forgotten.
Bork, Scalia, it all evened out in the end. This country did not need both on the court creating more strife.
Strife? I think enough was caused WITHOUT these two men on the court at the same time.
Can’t have it both ways! They are the epitome of activist judges!
Constitutionalists, the “epitome of activists.” You are no longer the epitome extremism but typical of the left, demonizing through total perversion.
Good thing we haven’t been living in Robert Bork’s America. Because Bork was kept off the Supreme Court way back when, we don’t have any problems at all today having to do with back-alley abortions, midnight police raids, state agents targeting writers and artists, or Federal courts deliberately ignoring rights violations.
I know Robert Bork has gone to Heaven. By the same token I know that Ted Kennedy, who slandered and smeared the Honorable Judge Bork, is now serving time in a very different place.
As the lefties in Congress misrepresented your views and attacked your good character, they simultaneously attacked our Constitution in order to “transform” its meaning to what lefties wanted our country to be. Look at what we have today. Had you become a Justice on the SC, perhaps we would not be in the mess we are in.
Rest In Peace, Judge Bork.
My favorite anecdote about Judge Bork was related by a physician who was treating his mother in the hospital during the vicious confirmation hearings, some years later. The same man vilified for intolerance and callous disregard of anything humane traveled every weekend to lovingly visit his mother. Not knowing much of his judicial work, it told me all I needed to know about the man.
To understand where we are today, take a look at what people were reading 25 years ago…it’s time to turn this game around. Thank you for leaving your words of wisdom for others to read and follow.
It was the Salem Witch Trial of Robert Bork that turned me from an apolitical young man to a fire breathing, actively involved Conservative. Until that time, I was way too involved in a career and casual life to care much about politics – and by chance I happened to see some of the Bork confirmation hearings.
The treatment of this great man by not only Fat Teddy Kennedy, a drunk and a demon, but a young Democratic Jr. Senator and pathetic liar named Joe Biden and feckless idiot named Arlen Specter was so disgraceful, it actually got me interested in learning something more that voting in Presidential elections, strange as they may sound.
After reading Slouching Toward Gomorrah, I became convinced that Mr. Bork was not only a brilliant legal scholar but a true visionary. What Bork warned of in Slouching has come to pass to the country’s misfortune.
I never had the pleasure to meet Robert Bork. I would liked to have shook his hand and told him how much his wisdom had meant to me. I consider Billy Graham, Pope John Paul, Robert Bork, and to a somewhat lesser degree Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as all heaven sent. My greatest disappointment with Ronald Reagan to this day is that he didn’t go to the mat for Bork.
The world is an emptier place today without Robert Bork – but heaven has gained another great soul wearing a large crown, I’m sure.
Incredibly sad news. His SC hearings were so outrageous it was stomach-turning. And to see Specter try and engage intellectually was laughable.
But Biden’s behavior was what I found to be over the top at that time and led me to revile him ever since. Silly old Joe today? Not quite – his character flaws run deeper and our judicial nomination process was corrupted to a new level because of his involvment.
Maybe this is callous and it is definitely political but maybe it’s a good thing that Robert Bork was not confirmed to the Supreme Court. If he were on the court today we all know who would be able to get a fifth justice on the Supreme Court and you could effectively say hello to gay marriage and goodbye to the “individual rights” interpretation of the 2nd Amendment.
A good man Robert Bork was. His family will sorely miss him and the legal community loses a sharp mind.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS! The man didn’t believe in a right to privacy.
Individual rights? My God, the man did not believe we have a right to privacy!
Perhaps that’s because he read the Constitution correctly in that there is no “right to privacy” in the document. I assume you agree with the tortured logic the Supreme Court came up with to justify a woman being able to abort her baby (funny this “right” doesn’t extend to men which on its face would be a violation of the 14th Amendment). That seems to be a personal problem of the two responders to me, not a personal problem for Robert Bork.
markJ, that was a classless and tacky comment concerning Senator Kennedy. A lot of people could make some very ugly statements about Judge Bork, and have some basis for it, but have had the class not to do so on this site. If they do, they should be ashamed.
Remember the man you admired, and leave the dead who cannot defend themselves alone. Even if most Americans did not agree with his views, we mourn the loss of Judge Bork because he was a human being. He had a family, just like Senator Kennedy, and had inherent value as a human being. Just like Senator Kennedy, whom you disparage.
Mourn the dead…and show some class.
Unfortunately, Kelly, what Ted Kennedy said and did is now part of history. If the man cared about his character upon his death he shouldn’t have slimed an honorable man so publicly and so unabashedly. Of course I’ll wait for comments that Robert Bork made about another person that rises to what Ted Kennedy had done to him.
When did death alleviate someone of their vileness and reputation? Should we not speak ill of Mao, Stalin or Hitler? Should Roger Simon stop with the Walter Duranty prize because Duranty is dead?
This line of mindless PC thinking continues to astound me.
Teddy Kennedy was a miserable human being, a cowardly hack, an accessory to manslaughter of which he never suffered one consequence or accountability and even ran for President more than a decade later. Kennedy was a despicable human being and that is the way he should be remembered, his excesses seared into the memory of generations to come.
Well, Kelly, one of Senator Kennedy’s big political ‘successes’ was the mendacious blackening of Judge Bork for purely partisan advantage – the opposite of an honest citizen’s practice of governance. For the poison he injected into American governance, he deserves remembrance as a cautionary example. And for his abuse of his family privilege to evade responsibility for Chappaquiddick, a second public black mark is appropriate. You may relish his use of political power for whatever reason, but his place in history should not be free of recognition, and indictment, of his pioneering use of abuse of others to ‘get ahead’.
RIP Robert Bork.
“In a way, Robert Bork had the last laugh.”
Great. Another moral victory.
@11: “Bork, Scalia, it all evened out in the end. This country did not need both on the court creating more strife.”
Leftist definition of strife: people disagreeing with them.
@20: Re Senator Kennedy: “leave the dead who cannot defend themselves alone”
Leaving the dead or living alone? How very Ted Kennedy!
There’s more to this story than is presented here. At the time, there were several articles obviously written by people familiar with the applicable law demonstrating that Bork lacked something called “judicial temperament”. I personally told a member of his law firm that those articles must be answered. I saw no follow-up, and when I asked again, he said that Bork had refused their help.
This was the core issue of the confirmation fight.
The articles said there were asides, irrelevancies, ruminations and stray remarks in Judge Bork’s written opinions that would have had severely perverse results if they were injected into Supreme Court documents.
I will give one parallel example from an actual Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education. Brown was the case that was used to justify school districts that had 3-hour daily bus rides for students. How did this happen? A suggestion, that short bus rides of no more that 15 minutes might be included in a school re-districting plan showed up in a footnote. It was a throw-away line. I was shocked when I read the opinion for the first time, to find the origin of that enormous busing controversy. People take mild suggestions in footnotes from Supreme Court opinions, and run with them.
Judge Bork was much better off in a position where he had the freedom to stir the pot in the manner that he loved. He would have been a marvelous match for Ted Kennedy in the Senate, had he run for high public office.
Please do not take this as an endorsement of the nastiness in this confirmation fight, or for any of Ted Kennedy’s rants. Both of those were inexcusable. I’m just saying that, among the people quietly taking all this information in with the responsibility to vote on this confirmation, there were real, legitimate qualms that might have been soothed, had he chosen to take steps to do so.
The Supreme Court confirmation battle was not the end of his life. He was a popular speaker, and he found a broad audience that would have been unavailable to him, had he won. Sometimes we win through losing, and that’s not a bad epitaph for him.
My God people. Look at the vote. Even Republicans voted against him. Why? Because there was ample evidence that he was so….I can’t find the word. But I do know that every point Kennedy made about Bork’s beliefs were proven by his testimony, writings and teachings.
The footnote in the Brown v. Board of Education opinion was not the origin of school busing, nor was such racial busing limited to 15-minute rides. The Brown decision was carefully crafted to permit racial busing for integration but not for segregation.
“Ted Kennedy went to his grave a rancid, lumbering, pathetic laughing stock.” Concisely put Roger.
Excellent piece. Thank-you for this. I was young back then, but old enough to remember watching those hearings on TV. Didn’t appreciate what was happening at the time. I know far better today what that really was. Bork truly was a great American. Sadly, the incredulous and pathetic example of a man, Kennedy, did more to hurt America by slamming Bork, than most people realize today. Bork leaves a void in our culture that will be hard to fill.
Kennedy left a stain. We still see it today, everywhere we look in Washington DC.
Honestly, was there ever a bigger piece of scum in the US Senate than Ted Kennedy?
Only Massachusetts or perhaps Rhode Island could have made him Senator for Life. I too remember the Bork Hearings. Listened to the whole thing on Radio. What a contrast between what happened every day and what ABC/NBC/CBS showed on their Evening news programs. On the network news Kennedy was the passionate liberal keeping the cold-hearted judge with the evil beard off the SCOTUS. In reality, it about Bork, a man of massive intellect and great learning, having to deal with idiotic questions from Ted Kennedy, a mumbling boob reading a script his staff wrote for him.
What stain would that be? A black man in the White House? Yes, most of you do belong in Bork’s corner. I hope when your times come, that you will be lucky enough to spend eternity with him.
You mean the FAILED black man in the White House? The SDS type that Bork warned us of and we were too stupid to listen?
Yes, hopefully most of us will be spending eternity with Bork. You can choose to live eternity with Fat Teddy. We’ll send word to you from Mary Jo Kopechne.
“What stain would that be? A black man in the White House?”
Only in your fevered imagination. Really: you are seeing monsters under the bed if you take a random comment about Ted Kennedy as referring to Obama.
The stain referred to, which everyone old enough to remember saw at the time, is that Bork’s nomination debacle abruptly ended a quaint Washington tradition of collegiality and decorum in nominations. Back then, it was fair to attack an opponent politically but not to impute bad faith on a man personally, barring some extraordinary evidence. Bork’s nomination changed the rules to anything-goes: malice and personal destruction became merely another calculated strategy to apply whenever convenient. The rancor evident in our current politics ‘came of age’ in the Bork nomination.
If Kennedy is to be praised for putting “a black man in the White House,” then he must be blamed for our not having a woman in the White House. Not that he was always against female political leaders. To the contrary.
So! Robert’s Rules allow slander and disgusting comments about Senator Kennedy but my comment is taken down because I questioned what “stain in Washington” others were talking about! Balanced and Fair.
Thank you for returning my comment.
Robert Bork followed Nixon’s orders to fire Archibald Cox during the Saturday Night Massacre. He put Politics above Principle. He was complicit in thwarting Justice. Robert Bork wasn’t good enough for the Supreme Court.
T.M. Johnston. Your work here is done and overdone. Plenty of nice YouTube videos of warm cuddly puppies. An hour of those, a couple of aspirin and plenty or rest and you will feel nothing but gratitude for my benevolent counsel.
I’m curious that in all the discussions I have read on Bork on conservative sites, I have not read an acknowledgement of his hostility towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 nor of his support of Bowers V Hardwick and its upholding of the criminalization of homosexual conduct. Don’t you need to own up to that?
What do you mean by Bork’s “support” for Bowers v Hardwick?
He did not, as you seem to imply, have a judicial view about whether consensual homosexual acts in private ought to be criminalized. He was, however, along with many other distinguished jurists, opposed to the confected doctrine of “substantive due process” in the fourteenth and fifth amendments, which was what formed the basis of his “support” for Bowers v Hardwick.
It hardly needs to be said that if the state of Georgia had legislated to decriminalize consensual homosexual acts, it is inconceivable that Robert Bork would have raised any legal objection to Georgia’s entitlement to do so.
If you we’re to ignore my question, that would be understandable. But why would a simple question about Bork’s published opinions be deleted? Is this blog afrid to addressing honest, challenging questions?
Truganini:
Did you bother to read Johnston’s multiple comments before hyperventilating?
As to your questions, there’s nothing challenging about them at all, nor do they describe anything in need of “owning up” to. Simply put, there is a difference between what is right or good, and what is constitutional. It’s that simple and obvious. Are you disappointed that discussions on Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy did not “acknowledge” that water is wet?
Ted Kennedy’s views about the Constitution are strange indeed. Said he, Bork’s United States’
“is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.”
Did Kennedy mean that it is NOT a violation of the Constitution to prohibit abortions? to have racial segregation?
“As for 31. Truganini: I’m curious that in all the discussions I have read on Bork on conservative sites, I have not read an acknowledgement of his hostility towards the Civil Rights Act of 1964 . . .”
What did Bork object to in the Civil Rights Act of 1964? I object to Title VI, which made government determine employment practices, forbidding employment in private businesses on the basis of race, sex, national origin, etc. and established the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunities Commission). Hubert Humphrey was warned that this would lead to racial quotas, etc. – a clear violation of the 14th Amendment – so he inserted language forbidding the use of quotas, saying that he would “eat my hat” if that happened. Of course, the critics were right, but he didn’t eat his hat. The bureaucrats (President Nixon, actually) instituted “affirmative action” with “goals and timelines” (avoiding the word “quota”), government enforced racial discrimination.