Customer Reviews

Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a remarkable books in so many ways. As other reviews have indicated this is not intended to be a complete biography but rather information gleaned from a review of the archives of Justice Blackmun

LInda Greenhouse focused mainly on three topic. The first is the ending of a friendship between Justice Blackmun and Chief Justice Burger. The two men grew up together. Burger was the leader bringing Justice Blackmun with him. When Justice Blackmun arrived at the Supreme Court he slowly became his own man and the friendship falls apart. In her reliance on the Blackmun papers only we can only see one side of the fissure but even that shows when old friends go their own way it often is done by small slights that in each detail is irrelevant but together are significant.

The second theme is the change in Blackmun"s attitude toward the death penalty. In small steps the responsibilities of the Court required Blackmun to more fully understand the implications of the penalty until finally he no longer could support it. Again the change is beautifully detailed and we feel from his writing as portrayed by Ms Greenhouse the depth of the change. In this portion of the book we learn how difficult it is to predict how sitting on the Court will change people. As we see the selection process for a new justices begin we should remember that people do grow with responsibilities and not to be to quick to characterize a nominee.

The last focus and the most detailed portion of the book is the identification of Justice Blackmun with the Roe decision which he wrote. Starting from the beginning of the research at Mayo Clinic the focus of the decision was the protection of doctors. As Blackmun developed his view he became more concerned about the rights of woman. Roe became his legacy and he worked hard and even stayed on the Court longer to be sure the case was not reversed.

The book also provides a wonderful insight on how the Court operates. Justices that have different views are friendly. The letters and the notes between the justices are fascinating.

The theme is the change in Blackmum as he served. The lesson is that as we watch the Court we forget that the justices can change and that there is enormous pride in the institution.

In summary this is a wonderful book by an author who obviously respects her subject

Linda Greenhouse, long-time Supreme Court correspondent for the New York Times, was permitted early access to the papers of Justice Harry Blackmun which became publicly available in 2004, five years after his death. Utilizing this treasure trove of Supreme Court files, enhanced by her more than twenty-six years covering and studying the Court, she has crafted a book of unusual insight and value for students of the Court. Through the use of Blackmun files, and the reproduction in the book of key documents, it is possible to gain an understanding of how the Justices interact with each other, how they reach consensus on opinions, the techniques through which they express disagreement and displeasure with one another, and the various persuasive strategies that they may follow. This is particulary the case with the abortion controversy that Blackmun, the author of Roe v. Wade, faced for much of his Court tenure. While not a conventional biography of Justice Blackmun, we do learn quite a lot about his career and standards from his pre-Court papers. But it is Blackmun on the Court (1970-94) that is the meat of this volume. One of the most valuable aspects of the volume is the insight it affords into Chief Justice Warren Burger, Blackmun's friend from childhood who is instrumental in securing his nomination. Burger has not been the subject of a full-length biography, and Greenhouse's discussion of his interaction with Blackmun (including the deterioration of their relationship) and his leadership of the Court is quite helpful in filling this gap. Aside from the book itself, and its many virtues, the question does arise as to the propriety of Blackmun's papers being made public so soon after his death, especially considering that he served with all members of the present Court with the exception of Justice Breyer. Included in the book are memos from Justice Kennedy for example, as well as Blackmun conference notes relating the positions of Justices Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia and Kennedy on the Webster abortion case in 1989. However it is difficult to argue against such early release given the splendid contributions Greenhouse had made in this truly monumental volume.

This well written book is an admiring study of Harry Blackmun's tenure on the Supreme Court. The author, Linda Greenhouse, is the New York Times reporter assigned to Supreme Court coverage, and is known well for her excellent articles on the Court. This book has the strengths and weaknesses of high quality journalism. Greenhouse developed this book from the extensive personal materials deposited by the Blackmun family in the National Archives after Justice Blackmun's death. Greenhouse's goal is to give a portrait of Blackmun as a working Justice, how his attitudes towards important issues evolved over the course of his tenure on the Supreme Court, to explore the background of some particularly important decisions, especially the Roe v. Wade decision, and to provide some information about the nature of work in the Supreme Court as a whole. This is not a systematic biography or legal history, nor does this book include close analysis of any of the major issues coming before the court during Justice Blackmun's tenure. On its own terms, this is an excellent book. Greenhouse begins with a nice precis of Blackmun's life prior to his appointment to the Court, then covers his initial adjustment to the role of Supreme Court justice. While some of Blackmun's important positions, his opposition to capital punishment for example, have roots early in his career, the evolution of Blackmun's views under the pressure of having to make important decisions about relatively unfamiliar topics emerges very well. Greenhouse presents Blackmun as an intelligent, diligent, and decent man often struggling with issues outside his prior personal and professional experience. His perspective on a number of issues, notably women's rights and capital punishment, changed significantly over the course of his tenure on the Court, often exhibiting a leftward drift as the Court as a whole moved to the right with Reagan era appointees. Greenhouse has an enlightening discussion of Roe v. Wade, emphasizing that the decision was not particularly controversial within the Court but pointing out that Blackmun's rationale, his emphasis on the importance of physician-patient relations, was attacked from both the right and the left. Greenhouse is enlightening also on the nature of decision making within the Court, emphasizing the importance of interaction and collegiality among the Justices. Chief Justice Warren Burger, Blackmun's childhood friend from whom he became estranged during their service on the Supreme Court, comes across as an unsuccessful Chief on the basis of poor leadership of the Court and his inability to separate personal feelings from professional disagreement. With Chief Justice Rehnquist, on the other hand, he enjoyed a cordial relationship despite many juicidial disagreements. It would have been nice to have more context, specifically more technical legal context, as background for the discussion of some of Blackmun's opinions, but then this would have been a considerably longer and less personal book. Blackmun will eventually have a major biography, and given the extensive materials he left behind and the many controversies before the Court during his tenure, this will probably be an enormous book. In the interim, this warm study is a nice introduction to Blackmun and the internal workings of the Court.

Blackmun was clearly a man who maximized the product. Linda Greenhouse doesn't quite explain how this rather unprepossessing figure achieved such high office. He was bright and industrious, to be sure, but so were many others. He was not a strong personality or even particularly personable or outgoing. But in one respect at least, Blackmun seems to have been truly extraordinary--his penchant from an early age for recording the events of his life and collecting almost every note, letter or document which related to it--as if he knew and were determined to become someone of substance. Indeed, Greenhouse tells us that Blackmun's collection comprises more than one and a half million items, is contained in some 1585 boxes, and takes up more than 600 feet of shelf space in the Library of Congress.

Greenhouse makes wonderful use of this massive collection, writing a remarkably spare yet elegant narrative of what she quite rightly calls "a consequential life," one that spanned the twentieth century and left its mark not only on the law but on American society. Blackmun's bookish reticence may not make him very attractive or interesting to the general reader, but for those seeking a better understanding of the modern Supreme Court and some of its Justices, this volume is as invaluable as it is fascinating. We see Blackmun increasingly determined to do justice as much as to apply the law, with Greenhouse focusing on his opinions having to do with abortion, capital punishment, and sex discrimination. We see Blackmun grow totally estranged from Chief Justice Warren Burger, his closest childhood friend at whose wedding he served as best man. We see Blackmun relate more closely to his young law clerks, some of whom seem to have authored the most memorable lines in his opinions.

Someone else will have to research and interview more widely to write the definitive, full-length biography and survey Blackmun's entire judicial career. But we owe much to Greenhouse for this wonderful and most timely introduction.

"Becoming Justice Blackmun," pivots on the argument that Warren Burger's relationship with Harry Blackmun, first as a legal mentor and then as an ideological foil, formed the basis for Blackmun's judicial thought. I felt this position diminished Blackmun's intellectual independence, and so I gave Greenhouse's book three stars.

Being on the Court changed Blackmun, not Burger. When Greenhouse lets Blackmun speak for himself, we chart his personal and professional growth as a Supreme Court Justice who wrote that, "sometimes we overlook the individual's concern, the fact that these are live human beings (who) are so deeply and terribly affected by our decision."

Blackmun's warm-blooded feel for the Constitution, along with his outstanding writing skills, led him to compose some famous Supreme Court opinions (even when his was the losing position), such as his "machinery of death" in a death penalty case, his "Poor Joshua!" opening in a neglect and abuse case and his electrifying "right to privacy" argument in the Roe v. Wade abortion case. In bringing Blackmun's vast writings into sharp focus, Greenhouse captures his respectful understanding of personal liberties and Constitutional boundaries.

At Blackmun's funeral, Justice Breyer observed that "it is not often that a man or woman...in a cloistered office, manages through the years to find, not a narrowing, but a broadening of mind, of outlook, and of spirit." That's the real story of Harry Blackmun and if you read this book with that perspective, you'll find the real story of becoming Justice Blackmun.

First of all I think it's important to note that in the introduction to the book, Linda Greenhouse makes it very clear that her intention was not to write a linear biography of Harry Blackmun. Rather, given early access to the immense Harry Blackmun Papers collection at the Library of Congress, Greenhouse decided to look at four aspects in particular of Justice Blackmun's 24 years of service on the high court: 1) abortion; 2) capital punishment; 3) sex discrimination; 4) his relationship with Chief Justice Warren Burger. With this in mind, Greenhouse is naturally prone to jump forward and backward in her narrative.

The bulk of the book is of course devoted to Roe v. Wade, the opinion that came to define Justice Blackmun's career. Greenhouse shares a fascinating letter that Blackman wrote to a priest shortly after penning the court's opinion, and that reveals how deeply troubled he was over the issue. He found abortion morally reprehensible, he wrote, but as an interpreter of the law, he had no choice. This didn't spare him the ire of the antiabortion movement, and when they scaled up their rhetoric post-Roe and needed a particular enemy to villainize, they chose Blackmun as their target - seemingly ambivalent to the fact that Roe was endorsed by 6 other justices of the court, three of whom were considered conservatives in those days. Worse still for Blackmun, Roe was being attacked from both sides, with liberal legal scholars charging that the opinion was constitutionally unsteady.

If anything, Blackmun's papers reveal him to be a sensitive man, very easily offended by the slightest critique. As such, it seems that the mass amount of criticism leveled against Roe sent the justice into a defensive mode. This, coupled with a steady income of aggressively-worded letters from the far-right public (soon he would become the only justice that required a security escort to the court each morning), appears to have led the justice to drop his hesitancy over becoming the face of abortion rights in America. Post-Roe he would author a position of some sort in every major abortion case. Throughout the 70s this meant writing opinions, but as the court moved further and further to the right throughout the 80s, he soon found himself writing dissents. By the time Clarence Thomas was appointed to the court in 1991, it appeared that Roe's defenders were down to two: Blackmun and the Ford appointee John Paul Stevens. Realizing this troublesome shift in a span of less than 20 years, Blackmun did something radically uncustomary for a Supreme Court justice in his concurrence/dissent to the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (in which the moderate troika of O'Connor-Kennedy-Souter just barely saved Roe, while still upholding abortion restrictions which surely would have been shot down in the 70s): he openly politicked. As the patron of abortion rights in America, he slyly but clearly urged the voters to keep Roe in mind in the 1992 elections. "I am 83 years old," he wrote. "I cannot remain on this court forever..." Clinton won the election as we know, and Blackmun, by this point an icon of the feminist movement, finally felt safe to yield up his seat on the court.

I won't go into the rest of the sections, which are equally as fascinating, but I will add that my favorite part of the book would be the hilarious anecdotes about the terms in the early 1970s. Warren Burger had taken over as Chief Justice for the exceptionally liberal Earl Warren, which didn't square particularly well with the court's liberal core that had become so accustomed to being in power. William O. Douglas, possibly the court's most liberal member ever, and renowned for being somewhat of a nut in his old age (this is the guy that Congress tried to impeach - TWICE), absolutely despised Burger. Blackmun's papers include a string of memos in which Douglas completely belittled the chief over something as banal as an office Christmas party. It reads like a lost scene from Grumpy Old Men and I caught myself laughing out loud - something you don't exactly expect when reading about the Supreme Court.

Greenhouse's book is concise and effortlessly readable. I finished it over the course of about three days in which I was busy, but couldn't stop myself from picking it up every day on the bus or at night before bed. This is a highly recommended inside look at the court, and at the evolving worldview and jurisprudence of one of our most famous and idiosyncratic justices: a shy, reserved Midwesterner who became one of the most essential figures and unlikely liberal icons of American history in the 20th century.

Justice Blackmun is one of multiple justices in the second half of the 20th Century who was nominated by a Republican and developed into a liberal leader on the bench. His company includes Earl Warren, Bill Brennan, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens. Given that Justice Stevens just announced his retirement as I read this book, it was interesting to trace Blackmun's own journey. Like many modern justices, he was a Harvard Law Grad who worked in private practice and was an appeals court judge. He was then brought on to the court by his close friend and confidante Warren Burger. Burger convinced President Nixon to appoint Burger after his first two choices to replace Abe Fortas flopped in the Senate.

Together, Burger and Blackmun were known as the "Minnesota Twins." But their close relationship did not survive working side by side on the court. Their views differed more and more and Blackmun did not think much of Burger's management of the court.

Blackmun's most famous decision was Roe v. Wade, but he was involved in many other important decisions including other abortion cases, gender equity decisions, and those surrounding Nixon's resignation. But none had the impact of Roe v. Wade, which made Blackmun both a national hero and villain.

Greenhouse's telling of Blackmun's story is done entirely through his own writings. She used not only his decisions, but the running chronology he kept of major events, his early life diary, his draft thoughts on cases, and the notes the justices pass one another on the bench. It is an interesting way to follow Blackmun and the court during his twenty-four years on the court.

Harry Blackmun's papers, including his memos, correspondence, and personal notes, were released to the public five years after his death. These papers are the principal source drawn upon by Linda Greenhouse for this book, which is less a biography than it is an account of his tenure as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

The early chapters move quickly through Blackmun's formative years - childhood, college, resident counsel at the Mayo Clinic, and service as federal judge. This section of the book is fascinating and provides valuable context for his career as a Justice, placing special attention on the foundation of his life-long friendship with Warren Burger (which as you may know was eventually strained and broken during their years together on the Court).

The meat of the book deals with his service as Justice of the Supreme Court, and this is where it gets really interesting. Blackmun's papers are apparently quite extensive and they enabled Greenhouse to give play-by-play accounts of the decisions in which he took part. From notes taken during oral arguments, through conference, and then into the process of drafting opinions, the back and forth between the justices, and sometimes within Blackmun's own mind, is riveting. Where else does humanity's attempt to apply rigorous logic to society's messiest problems find such complete expression as in the workings of the Supreme Court?

Although Blackmun is obviously the focus here, the reader is given windows into the thought processes of other justices as well, through memos, correspondence, etc. Each one, possessed of powerful intellect, nonetheless finds himself/herself at the outer edge of the law's definition, where their decisions inevitably reflect their individual experiences as humans.

Fascinating stuff. Very well written. Although I haven't read much about the Supreme Court I think the level of procedural detail afforded to the author through Blackmun's papers probably makes for a unique read.

Tangential side note: while I gained tremendous respect for all of the Justices portrayed, and their clerks, I also found new levels of appreciation for the well-conceived division of powers within our government. Checks and balances!

I also had high hopes for this book, as anyone who knows Linda Greenhouse's work can attest, she is a reliable interpreter of the High Court and supreme in analytic ability. As a biographer I must always defer to the hard evidence, in this case Justice Blackmun's papers, which Ms. Greenhouse drew her information from. But I read in the reviews of her work an expectation that plagues the best writers-their publics want everything in every work they read. There are in this case editors to satisfy and publishers to placate. Linda Greenhouse, like all the rest of us, must dance to the publisher's tune and it is clear that some necessary cuts (i.e., marketing considerations) were made that left her vulernable to the criticism we see here. At any rate, Good Job Linda, I applaud you.

Linda Greenhouse writes a smooth and informative read for anyone interested in how the Court really works. Ms Greenhouse traces the evolution and growth of Justice Blackmun through the development of several key Supreme Court decisions. With a great deal of attention dedicated to Roe vs. Wade, it will help inform you of how that decision was made no matter what side of the argument you come down on. The book also does a good job of covering other important decisions during Blackmun's tenure. We also look at the struggles at the Supreme Court throughout Blackmun's tenure.

The book also deals heavily with the development and ultimate disintegration of the life-long relationship between Justice Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger. The book received excellent reviews upon its release and I concur. A very worthwhile read.