A new book tells tales out of chambers
Alone among public institutions, the U.S. Supreme Court has remained an Olympian myth: nine sages in black robes, unelected, unreviewable, pronouncing the last word on the law. Throughout its 190-year existence, the court's decision-making process has enjoyed a special immunity from public scrutiny. Even during the '70s, in the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, its white marble temple stood as a sanctuary, its inner workings Washington's last well-kept secret.
To Watergate Investigative Reporter Bob Woodward, that made the nation's highest tribunal a "sitting target." Together with Washington Post Reporter Scott Armstrong, Woodward set out to do for Chief Justice Warren Burger's Supreme Court what he and Carl Bernstein had done for Richard Nixon's White House in All the President's Men and The Final Days. Fortified by a $350,000 advance from Simon & Schuster, Woodward and Armstrong spent two years reading cases and interviewing Justices and more than 170 former court clerks, top-level law school graduates who serve as confidential aides for a year or two. The sources not only supplied the authors with blow-by-blow descriptions of the court's in camera deliberations during the first seven years (1969-76) of Burger's tenure but also made available a number of confidential court documents. The result is The Brethren, a book that ventures into the Justices' chambers and sets forth their feuds, their jockeying, their horse trading and their personal quirks in relentless and sometimes startling detail.
Of the twelve Justices portrayed in the book, Burger receives the harshest verdict. He is limned as a vain and petty man who consistently tries to bend or ignore the court's rules in order to get his way. His frequent vote switching exasperates his colleagues: after one flipflop, Justice Byron White threw his pencil on the conference table and shouted, "Jesus Christ, here we go again!" The chief is portrayed as a legal lightweight whose opinions are shoddy and poorly thought out. Of one Burger opinion dealing with court-ordered school busing in Detroit, Justice Lewis Powell is quoted as saying, "If an associate in my law firm had done this, I'd fire him." Fickle and unprincipled, the authors claim, Burger is a jurist who can write, a very liberal opinion on race discrimination, just so that his critics cannot easily pigeonhole him as a conservative. He is certainly no leader. "On ocean liners," Justice Potter Stewart reportedly told clerks at one point, "they used to have two captains. One for show, to take the women to dinner. The other to pilot the ship safely. The chief is the show captain. All we need now is a real captain."