evidence that was obtained improperly. In general, Senator Kennedy confused Bork’s legal arguments with policy positions and then further mischaracterized the outcomes of the cases at issue. Supporting the right of Nazis to march in public, as the Supreme Court did in National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, does not suggest support for Nazi beliefs.48 It does, however, indicate support for free speech and the right to assemble.
Kennedy’s speech was a pivot from evaluating a nominee’s qualifications to judging his politics. Liberal activists approved, and they noticed that it worked. As the legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin observed, “It was crude and exaggerated, but it galvanized the opposition as nothing else, and no one else, could.”49
Four hundred special interest groups, an unprecedented number, weighed in on Bork’s nomination, three hundred of them in opposition. A few groups had campaigned for or against Supreme Court nominations intermittently prior to that, but Bork’s hearing was the first time that sophisticated marketing techniques were deployed against a Supreme Court nomination. Arguments were tailored to specific audiences for radio ads and newspaper op-eds.
People for the American Way ran a national television ad, likely the first of its kind, featuring the actor Gregory Peck, whose association in the popular imagination with the fictional lawyer Atticus Finch made him a symbol of integrity. Peck asserted that Bork had “defended poll taxes and literacy tests, which kept many Americans from voting. He opposed the civil rights law that ended ‘Whites Only’ signs at lunch counters. He doesn’t believe the Constitution protects your right to privacy. And he thinks freedom of speech does not apply to literature and art and music.” Ending on an ominous note, Peck reminded viewers that “if Robert Bork wins a seat on the Supreme Court, it will be for life—his life and yours.”50
Bork’s Senate testimony dragged on for five days, and the published record stretched to 6,511 pages. The hearings lasted twelve days and included testimony from twenty special interest groups. Reagan made more than thirty public statements on Bork’s behalf, and the White House launched a public relations offensive, but it was too little and too late.51 “We thought it was going to be a coast job, to tell you the truth—that it was going to be easy,” recalled Reagan’s communications director, Tom Griscom. “[We had] never seen somebody run the type of effort they ran [against Bork], and we let it get away from us.”52
Yet the Reagan team ought not to have been surprised after the warm-up campaign against Rehnquist a few years earlier, when Senator Kennedy had even given his “Robert Bork’s America” speech a dry run:
Imagine what America would be like if Mr. Rehnquist had been the Chief Justice and his cramped and narrow view of the Constitution had prevailed in the critical years since World War II. The schools of America would still be segregated. Millions of citizens would be denied the right to vote under scandalous malapportionment laws. Women would be condemned to second class status as second class Americans. Courthouses would be closed to individual challenges against police brutality and executive abuse—closed even to the press. Government would embrace religion, and the walls of separation between church and state would be in ruins. State and local majorities would tell us what we can read, how to lead our private lives, whether to bear children, how to bring them up, what kind of people we may become.53
Despite Democrats’ efforts, Rehnquist was elevated to chief justice, and held the position for nineteen years. None of Kennedy’s apocalyptic predictions came true.
The intellectual leader of the opposition to Bork was Professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School, a prominent proponent of judicial activism whose book God Save This Honorable Court influenced many Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and was the “primer used by Judge Bork’s opponents to defeat his nomination.”54 Tribe urged senators to break with tradition: a qualified candidate should be rejected if he would change the ideological balance of the court, which conveniently leaned left. Senators should not shrink from evaluating the social, political, and legal views of the nominee. For two hundred years, the judicial ideal had been political impartiality, but Tribe wanted senators to think of judges as political forces. And he was right. Time after time, a liberal Supreme Court majority has shown itself to be the nuclear bomb of political warfare.
The offensive against Bork’s nomination was so devastating that it spawned a new word. To “bork” means “to attack or defeat (a