Why David Souter was my favorite Supreme Court justice
Barbara Perry on David Souter, a reluctant member of the 'priestly tribe'
I knew that Justice David Souter—who died last week at 85—was different from the moment I first met him. Federal judges dream of ascending to the highest court in the land, senators picture themselves as presidents, and Roman Catholic cardinals aspire to the papacy, but he seemed a reluctant member of what has been called "The Priestly Tribe."
My first conversation with the reserved New Englander occurred after a 1994 dinner in the Supreme Court's majestic Great Hall. The next morning, I was to be interviewed for a fellowship at the high court, and I expressed some anxiety over the stiff competition. He encouraged me to relax and let fate take its course. Souter recalled that he had been hesitant to interview with President George H. W. Bush for the Supreme Court's 1990 vacancy when Justice William Brennan suddenly retired from the bench.
A new U.S. appellate court judge for the First Circuit in 1990, Souter was skeptical of the nomination process for the highest court, having witnessed the vicious fight over President Ronald Reagan's unsuccessful 1987 appointment of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Souter was perfectly happy with his secluded life in Weare, New Hampshire, living with his elderly mother in a ramshackle cabin in the woods. He was thrilled with the recent move from his state's Supreme Court to the federal bench. Why travel all the way to Washington to interview for a position he did not want and did not think he would get?
But, as Souter told me after the Judicial Fellows dinner, his friends encouraged him to accept the interview request, if for no other reason than it would generate a lifetime's worth of cocktail party anecdotes—not that the introverted intellectual attended many such soirees. His home-state senator, Warren Rudman, had urged Bush to consider Souter as Brennan's replacement. Driving the reluctant interviewee to the Manchester airport for the flight to Washington, Rudman discovered that his famously parsimonious friend had only $3 in his wallet. The senator loaned Souter $100 for spending money.
As Bush's chief of staff, another Granite State native, John Sununu noted in his oral history for UVA's Miller Center, "Souter came in, and as usual [he] in his own New Hampshire dry charm made the president feel very comfortable." Or as Bush's attorney general, Richard Thornburgh, put it, "Souter . . . rode easier in the saddle," a metaphor that may have appealed to a president who had sought his fortune in Texas. Bush and Souter—at heart two gentlemanly, Ivy League-trained, Episcopalian New Englanders—compared notes and philosophies.
The president recognized a perfect nominee for the times: a brilliant jurist who represented the best of American virtues and exhibited no vices or controversial positions on judicial issues (as had Bork three years earlier). Souter's very obscurity became the deciding factor in his favor, in addition to his state judicial experience and impeccable academic credentials—Harvard undergraduate (Phi Beta Kappa) and law degrees, along with one from Oxford, earned as a Rhodes Scholar.
Bush had his man. With a stunned candidate at this side, the president announced Souter's nomination on the same day he met him for the first time, a mere 72 hours after Brennan's resignation.
It all happened so quickly that a worried Souter called the president's legislative affairs director, Fred McClure, who recalled that the new nominee phoned to say, "Fred, I left so quickly to come down to do this deal that I don't have the slightest idea what people can see through the window into my house and what magazines and books are there."
