The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

On most days Washington is far better at dismantling people and purposes than it is at building them up. So it should have been no surprise that at the close of David Souter week, the city seemed on the way to the ultimate absurdity: criticizing the Supreme Court nominee because there was not much about him to criticize.

The fire storm of babble that followed Souter's nomination was larger than even the White House scouts had predicted, yet it seemed to singe everybody but the nominee. His handlers stashed the gray-suited Souter in the shadowy Room 468 of the Old Executive Office Building, then trotted him around the Senate for get-acquainted handshakes and dined him in the White House mess, both stern tests of his stomach.

The cleanup crew that followed in Souter's wake to glean cloakroom prattle heard him compared to Calvin Coolidge and called a "mousy little guy." Bush can live with that. Souter is a Harvard-Phi Beta Kappa-Rhodes scholar mouse.

There was a certain exhilaration in the scurry and posturing of special interests, ringed around the central issue of abortion, but there was also concern. One of Washington's talented lawyers, Roemer McPhee, recalled how, as a young attorney in Dwight Eisenhower's White House, he harbored a mild doubt when Ike in 1956 nominated Democrat William Brennan, a practicing liberal. But McPhee, from New Jersey too, knew that Brennan was a thoughtful and decent man. Brennan was confirmed with hardly a ripple.

How far we have come -- or fallen. The struggle over Robert Bork turned court nominations into a savage political battleground. "Every faction wants its own little government in the court," sighed one White House strategist last week. The Democratic Congress, so long denied Executive power, and the Republican White House, so long thwarted in Legislative matters, both seek the balance of power through the Supreme Court. Washington has 55,000 lawyers, 7,000 lobbyists, 20,000 congressional staff members and some 10,000 journalists. Most of them are self-appointed experts on the court. They produce interesting noise, no discernible national harmony.

One of the invigorating and, in most cases, gratifying aspects of court history is how appointees, once in their black robes, see the nation and events independently. Often they have exasperated or disappointed the Presidents who appointed them. Earl Warren and Brennan dismayed Ike with their liberalism, but theirs was the clearer view of the country. Warren Burger, who wrote the opinion that freed up the Watergate tapes, was appointed with much fanfare by Richard Nixon himself. Arthur Goldberg resigned at Lyndon Johnson's urging to become United Nations ambassador. L.B.J. twisted the arm of his crony Abe Fortas and put him in Goldberg's place. But when he tried to move Fortas up to Chief Justice, the fear of cronyism generated so much opposition that Johnson abandoned the maneuver. Later, because of financial improprieties, Fortas resigned his court seat.

No one knows finally in what direction that remarkable mind of Souter's might take him. But these nomination struggles may be evolving a new strain of Justices: bland men and women who will seldom depart from the familiar ruts worn by the politicians who elevated them to the court.