From today’s WSJ book review of Supreme Conflict by Jan Crawford Greenberg:
President George H.W. Bush, she reveals, was planning to nominate Kenneth Starr, then solicitor general, but was talked out of it by Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, who threatened to resign if Mr. Bush did so. The decision to cast aside Mr. Starr for David Souter–a New Hampshire judge who had little sense of the national debates in which the court inevitably participates–ranks as one of the great blunders in the history of Supreme Court nominations.