It was the softest of softball questions. The date was Sept. 19, 1987. Judge Robert Bork’s five days of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee were drawing to a close, and the committee had convened an unusual Saturday session for a final round of questions for the Supreme Court nominee.
Last up was Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming. One of the nomination’s strongest supporters on the committee, he engaged in a rambling monologue that included the prediction — accurate, as it turned out — that future Supreme Court nominees would never be as forthcoming about their views as Judge Bork, one of the country’s most prominent conservatives, had been. At the time of his nomination, he was serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He had also been a solicitor general in the Nixon and Ford administrations and a professor at Yale Law School.
Clearly sensing that the nomination was in trouble, Mr. Simpson sought to stiffen the nominee’s resolve in the form of the Rudyard Kipling poem “If.” He read it regularly to himself and to his three children, he explained, and found it ever more relevant. Glancing down occasionally but seeming to recite largely from memory, the senator began with the famous opening lines, “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,” before moving on with particular emphasis to “If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.”
After 15 minutes of one of the more unusual performances to take place in a Senate hearing room, Mr. Simpson turned to the nominee. “And I have one final question,” he said. “Why do you want to be an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court?”
Judge Bork began with a general observation about how much he enjoyed being in a courtroom and how the Supreme Court was the most interesting courtroom of all. And then he said, “I think it would be an intellectual feast just to be there.”
I remember the moment, as a reporter covering the nomination, as I’m sure anyone does who was watching the televised hearing that had held the country spellbound for most of the preceding week. Did he really say that? Was this what the days of grueling constitutional debate, with the Supreme Court’s future hanging in the balance, had really come down to — an opportunity for self-gratification?
I don’t maintain that the answer to Mr. Simpson’s question is what doomed the Bork nomination, which went down to defeat at the hands of a bipartisan majority of 58 senators. That outcome was dictated by substance, not by a poor word choice; the hearing convinced the Senate that Bork’s accession to what was then the court’s swing seat would wrench American law to the right of what the country wanted. But it certainly didn’t help. The vision of a Justice Bork enjoying an intellectual feast while voting to eradicate the right to abortion and rolling back established civil rights protections hung over the nomination until its bitter end more than a month later — and long after.
Judge Bork lived for 25 years after his Supreme Court defeat. When he died in 2012 at the age of 85, “intellectual feast” made its way into his Times obituary. Mr. Simpson outlived the exchange much longer, dying last week at 93. He was often asked about the moment when the recipient of his friendly question turned it into a self-inflicted wound. Mr. Simpson was “not dreaming what the answer would be” when he asked his question, he said in an oral history in 2006. Of course, Justice Bork being Justice Bork, how might he have been expected to answer? I later wrote that if he had been less candid and more politic, he might have said he wanted to be on the court to promote justice.
But that was not Justice Bork. That would hardly have been believable, and besides, it wasn’t true. To his credit, he spoke his truth.
He spent his last quarter-century embittered by his loss and surrounded by acolytes who fed his sense of victimization. Most of his later books were rants that blamed the Supreme Court for all that was wrong in society. In the great Supreme Court in the sky, he must be having the last laugh. The court today is in crucial respects the court that President Ronald Reagan dreamed of when he chose Judge Bork. It just took a few decades longer than intended. History is like that.
Rudyard Kipling’s “If” consists of four eight-line stanzas. In his oral rendition, Mr. Simpson recited most of three of them but omitted one. From the perspective of 38 years, the one he left out is the most pertinent of all:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
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