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Thursday, June 30, 2005

By Linda Greenhouse ISBN 080507791X Times Books 288 pp. Purchase This Book By Ken Foskett ISBN 0060527226 William Morrow 339 pp. Purchase This Book [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Before writing the majority opinion in Roe vs. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun consulted a variety of sources -- including his wife and three daughters, whom he polled on the issue while sitting around the dinner table.

According to an account from Blackmun's youngest daughter, Susan, after listening to the varied responses, "Dad put down his fork mid-bite and pushed down his chair. 'I think I'll go lie down,' he said. 'I'm getting a headache.'"

Such are the factors that can influence the decision-making process of one of the nation's most secretive institutions. These and related observations are the subject of Linda Greenhouse's new book, "Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey."

In "Becoming," the New York Times' veteran court watcher uses exclusive access to Blackmun's personal and official papers to examine his 24 years on the court. Greenhouse mined Blackmun's papers -- up to and including entries from a childhood diary -- and draws on a large volume of correspondence with his brethren on the court, including childhood friend turned Chief Justice Warren Burger. While, as Greenhouse points out in the prologue, the book is not a comprehensive biography, it does thoroughly illustrate Blackmun's remarkable judicial transformation.

Blackmun is remembered most notably for authoring Roe, and his papers reflect the personal struggle with that decision, as well as others on issues of the death penalty and sex discrimination. Greenhouse notes: "The popular attribution of Roe to Blackmun alone was a distortion of the Court's reality that baffled him at first, and he resisted the notion that he was Roe's only creator. Eventually, though, he yielded; continued resistance would have been futile, in any event. In yielding, he locked Roe in a tight embrace and never let go."

Ken Foskett, meanwhile, had no such archive at his disposal for "Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas." Denied access to Thomas' private papers, Foskett instead relied on interviews with Thomas's friends and former colleagues to study the early influences that came to shape the conservative associate justice's tenure on the bench.

Foskett pens a traditional biography of Thomas, who, in 1991, took the seat held previously by Thurgood Marshall. And unlike Greenhouse, Foskett devotes little attention to his subject's actual time on the court; he doesn't touch on Thomas' contentious confirmation hearings until the latter half of the book. Instead, the author, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, looks back on Thomas' pre-Supreme Court life -- from his childhood rearing by his grandfather, to his studies at Yale Law School, to his work in Ronald Reagan's administration.

These experiences, Foskett argues, shaped the judicial philosophy that Thomas holds today. His early exposure to segregation, in particular, "became the springboard for Thomas's libertarian political philosophy and the basis for his deep, continuing mistrust of government."

Both books shed valuable light on the intellects of Supreme Court justices, and on the idiosyncrasies of the institution itself. Of the two, however, "Becoming" provides the better picture. Greenhouse made the most of the former justice's extensive archive of material. And while primary-source insight into Blackmun's decision-making process is, necessarily, bias in favor of his perspective, similar access to the personal papers of Blackmun's colleagues would provide welcome depth. "Judging," on the other hand, would almost certainly benefit from a more intimate look at Thomas' own notes and commentary on the business of today's court. --Jennifer Koons, NationalJournal.com

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