For the Record

As the curtain went up on the Robert Bork confirmation hearings it was the judgment of Washington Post’s political columnist David Broder that had “Bork been appointed in any year between 1981 and 1986, the political case for his confirmation would have been overwhelming.” I.e., at that time Ronald Reagan had brought off two major landslides, but had not yet lost the Senate. . . . George Will pointed out that far from being out of the “mainstream,” as Joe Biden claims, many of Bork’s opinions place him in the company of Hugo Black, John Harlan, Felix Frankfurter, liberal heroes all. . . . Lloyd Cutler, whose liberal credentials are 24-carat—legal counsel to Jimmy Carter, liberal Democrat, civil-rights activist, anti-Vietnam advocate—is in hot water with his peers for writing New York Times Op-Ed piece supporting Bork (a sometime colleague at Yale Law School). He may quit Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, which he helped found, over its attack on Bork signed by former Attorneys General Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark, and former SecState Cyrus Vance, among others. . . . Administration will counter with pro-Bork testimony by former Attorneys General Griffin Bell and Edward Levi, former SecState William P. Rogers, and raise with testimony by former Chief Justice Warren Burger and former President Gerald Ford, who described Bork as “the most qualified candidate for the Supreme Court in the last fifty years.”

. . . William Raspberry, the widely read black syndicated columnist, has come out against Bork but reports that Ronald Davenport, black dean of the Duquesne University Law School, who opposed William Rehnquist’s nomination to the Court in 1971, supports Bork. He quotes Davenport, a student of Bork’s at Yale: “The thing that has Bork in such trouble with women and minorities,” says Davenport, “is his . . . professorial habit of intellectual musings, his penchant for asking hard questions that may not be at all reflective of what he would do on the Court.” … In the “Who said what when?” game that’s going the rounds, latest victim is Sen. Edward Kennedy. This is what Kennedy said in defense of Carter’s controversial nomination of liberal Abner Mikva to the bench in 1977: “If strong political views were a disqualifying factor from serving on the federal bench, then all of us here today—and every man and woman who has ever served in either House of Congress or held a political office— would be disqualified.”

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As the curtain went up on the Robert Bork confirmation hearings it was the judgment of Washington Post’s political columnist David Broder that had “Bork been appointed in any year between 1981 and 1986, the political case for his confirmation would have been overwhelming.” I.e., at that time Ronald Reagan had brought off two major landslides, but had not yet lost the Senate. . . . George Will pointed out that far from being out of the “mainstream,” as Joe Biden claims, many of Bork’s opinions place him in the company of Hugo Black, John Harlan, Felix Frankfurter, liberal heroes all. . . . Lloyd Cutler, whose liberal credentials are 24-carat—legal counsel to Jimmy Carter, liberal Democrat, civil-rights activist, anti-Vietnam advocate—is in hot water with his peers for writing New York Times Op-Ed piece supporting Bork (a sometime colleague at Yale Law School). He may quit Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, which he helped found, over its attack on Bork signed by former Attorneys General Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark, and former SecState Cyrus Vance, among others. . . . Administration will counter with pro-Bork testimony by former Attorneys General Griffin Bell and Edward Levi, former SecState William P. Rogers, and raise with testimony by former Chief Justice Warren Burger and former President Gerald Ford, who described Bork as “the most qualified candidate for the Supreme Court in the last fifty years.”

. . . William Raspberry, the widely read black syndicated columnist, has come out against Bork but reports that Ronald Davenport, black dean of the Duquesne University Law School, who opposed William Rehnquist’s nomination to the Court in 1971, supports Bork. He quotes Davenport, a student of Bork’s at Yale: “The thing that has Bork in such trouble with women and minorities,” says Davenport, “is his . . . professorial habit of intellectual musings, his penchant for asking hard questions that may not be at all reflective of what he would do on the Court.” … In the “Who said what when?” game that’s going the rounds, latest victim is Sen. Edward Kennedy. This is what Kennedy said in defense of Carter’s controversial nomination of liberal Abner Mikva to the bench in 1977: “If strong political views were a disqualifying factor from serving on the federal bench, then all of us here today—and every man and woman who has ever served in either House of Congress or held a political office— would be disqualified.”