TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080690/08061011.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.5 KB | 78 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

THE PRESIDENCY

Fire Storm of Babble


By Hugh Sidey


    On most days Washington is far better at dismantling people
and purposes than it is at building them up. So it should have
been no surprise that at the close of David Souter week, the
city seemed on the way to the ultimate absurdity: criticizing
the Supreme Court nominee because there was not much about him
to criticize.

    The fire storm of babble that followed Souter's nomination
was larger than even the White House scouts had predicted, yet
it seemed to singe everybody but the nominee. His handlers
stashed the gray-suited Souter in the shadowy Room 468 of the
Old Executive Office Building, then trotted him around the
Senate for get-acquainted handshakes and dined him in the White
House mess, both stern tests of his stomach.

    The cleanup crew that followed in Souter's wake to glean
cloakroom prattle heard him compared to Calvin Coolidge and
called a "mousy little guy." Bush can live with that. Souter
is a Harvard-Phi Beta Kappa-Rhodes scholar mouse.

    There was a certain exhilaration in the scurry and posturing
of special interests, ringed around the central issue of
abortion, but there was also concern. One of Washington's
talented lawyers, Roemer McPhee, recalled how, as a young
attorney in Dwight Eisenhower's White House, he harbored a mild
doubt when Ike in 1956 nominated Democrat William Brennan, a
practicing liberal. But McPhee, from New Jersey too, knew that
Brennan was a thoughtful and decent man. Brennan was confirmed
with hardly a ripple.

    How far we have come -- or fallen. The struggle over Robert
Bork turned court nominations into a savage political
battleground. "Every faction wants its own little government
in the court," sighed one White House strategist last week. The
Democratic Congress, so long denied Executive power, and the
Republican White House, so long thwarted in Legislative
matters, both seek the balance of power through the Supreme
Court. Washington has 55,000 lawyers, 7,000 lobbyists, 20,000
congressional staff members and some 10,000 journalists. Most
of them are self-appointed experts on the court. They produce
interesting noise, no discernible national harmony.

    One of the invigorating and, in most cases, gratifying
aspects of court history is how appointees, once in their black
robes, see the nation and events independently. Often they have
exasperated or disappointed the Presidents who appointed them.
Earl Warren and Brennan dismayed Ike with their liberalism, but
theirs was the clearer view of the country. Warren Burger, who
wrote the opinion that freed up the Watergate tapes, was
appointed with much fanfare by Richard Nixon himself. Arthur
Goldberg resigned at Lyndon Johnson's urging to become United
Nations ambassador. L.B.J. twisted the arm of his crony Abe
Fortas and put him in Goldberg's place. But when he tried to
move Fortas up to Chief Justice, the fear of cronyism generated
so much opposition that Johnson abandoned the maneuver. Later,
because of financial improprieties, Fortas resigned his court
seat.

    No one knows finally in what direction that remarkable mind
of Souter's might take him. But these nomination struggles may
be evolving a new strain of Justices: bland men and women who
will seldom depart from the familiar ruts worn by the
politicians who elevated them to the court.