My life

“Okay, I’ll do it.” I went up to the stage. They gave me a horn, promptly attached a mike to the bell, and the music started. I played as softly as I could until I tuned the horn and figured out the key. Then I joined in and did pretty well. I still keep a picture of Jr. Walker and me doing a riff together. September was a busy month. With the new school year starting, I appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press along with Bill Bennett, who had succeeded Terrel Bell as President Reagan’s secretary of education. I got along well with Bennett, who appreciated my support for accountability and teaching kids basic values in school, and he didn’t disagree when I said the states needed more federal help to pay for earlychildhood programs. When Bennett criticized the National Education Association as an obstacle to accountability, I said I thought the NEA was doing better on that score and reminded him that Al Shanker, leader of the other big teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, supported both accountability and values education.

Unfortunately, my relationship with Bill Bennett didn’t fare well after I became President and he began promoting virtue for a living. Although he had once inscribed a book to me with the words “To Bill Clinton, the Democrat who makes sense,” he apparently came to believe that either he had been wrong or I had lost whatever sense I had when he wrote those words.

Around the time of the Meet the Press interview, Senator Joe Biden, the chairman of the judiciary committee, asked me to testify against Judge Robert Bork, who had been nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Reagan. I knew Joe wanted me because I was a white southern governor; the fact that I had been Bork’s student in Constitutional Law was an added bonus. Before I agreed, I read most of Bork’s articles, important judicial opinions, and published reports of his speeches. I concluded that Judge Bork should not go on the Supreme Court. In an eight-page statement, I said I liked and respected Bork as a teacher and thought President Reagan should have considerable latitude in his appointments, but I still believed the nomination should be rejected by the Senate. I argued that Bork’s own words demonstrated that he was a reactionary, not a mainstream conservative. He had criticized almost every major Supreme Court decision expanding civil rights except Brown v. Board of Education. In fact, Bork had been one of two lawyers, along with William Rehnquist, to advise Barry Goldwater to vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As a southerner, I knew how important it was not to reopen the wounds of race by disturbing those decisions. Bork had the most restrictive view on what the Supreme Court can do to protect individual rights of anyone who had been nominated to the Supreme Court in decades. He thought “dozens” of court decisions needed to be reversed. For example, he said a married couple’s right to use contraceptives was no more deserving of privacy protection from government action than a utility’s right to pollute the air. In fact, as his ruling against Arkansas in the Grand Gulf case showed, he thought utilities and other business interests were entitled to more protection than individual citizens from government actions he disagreed with. However, when it came to protecting business interests, he threw judicial restraint out the window in favor of activism. He even said federal courts shouldn’t enforce antitrust laws because they were based on a flawed economic theory. I asked the Senate not to take the risk that Judge Bork would act on his long-held convictions rather than on the more moderate assurances he was then giving in the confirmation process.

I had to file the testimony rather than give it in person, because the hearings were delayed and I had to leave for a trade mission to Europe. In late October, the Senate rejected the Bork nomination, 58–42. I doubt that my testimony influenced a single vote. President Reagan then nominated Judge Antonin Scalia, who was as conservative as Bork but hadn’t said and written as much to prove it. He sailed through. In December 2000, in the case of Bush v. Gore, he wrote the Saturday opinion of the Supreme Court granting an unprecedented injunction to stop counting votes in Florida. Three days later, by a 5–4

vote, the Supreme Court gave the election to George W. Bush, partly on the ground that the outstanding disputed ballots couldn’t be counted by midnight of that day as Florida law required. Of course not: the Supreme Court had stopped the counting of legal votes three days before. It was an act of judicial activism that might have made even Bob Bork blush.