When you first got to the Senate, what was the meaning, in your mind, of advice and consent? What did it mean as to the Supreme Court nominations? Well, it was so important. But the leaders guided us, Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). When I got to the Senate, how could you have more appropriate leaders who led and guided you than Robert Byrd and Howard Baker, who were not closely ideologically combined, but they wanted to make the Senate work? So we never talked about judicial confirmations when I got there. But in my 18 years there, I put eight—I put seven of those people on the court, and I voted for every one of them. And why? Well, because I thought they had good credentials, I thought they had remarkable records, I thought they had a judicial temperament, and I thought they were the kind of people that should go on the court. So it didn’t matter to me at all whether they were Democrat or Republican. And it didn’t matter to most of us. Because don’t forget—and you’ll get to all of this in your time—Bork was approved 100 to nothing in the lower court system. This thing turned into madness. And I can tell you why: because the venom came from the House. Once the House members, who had been either slaves or masters for 40 years, said, “We’re getting the hell out of here, and we’ll go to the Senate,” and they brought the venom with them. Like, “Don’t let the Republicans screw you over here,” and the Democrats saying, “Let’s go screw the Republicans like we did in the House,” and the Republicans saying, “Don’t let them do that to us again,” and the schism really sprung from the abyss with that. So let’s talk a little bit about Bork. Bork is announced by President Reagan. Reagan has already put Sandra Day O’Connor and [William] Rehnquist on the court. What is it about Bork that seemed to light the fire? He was too conservative to people. Finally they had come to the fact that, I mean, as I say, he had been approved, I think, 100 to nothing, or 99 to nothing, in his lower court through the federal system. But he had written some very controversial decisions. … OK. So within 45 minutes of Reagan announcing Bork’s nomination, Sen. [Ted] Kennedy (D-Mass.) goes on the floor and just opens up. Describe your thoughts when you heard that speech. Well, all of us, I think, in our staff said, “Hey, go hear what Kennedy is saying.” So I flipped on, and I went over to the floor. I was not—I was working my—I did become the assistant leader. I don’t remember; it wasn’t then. And he was talking about this was a return to back-alley abortion, poll taxing, invasion of your bedroom. I can almost remember everything he ticked off. And his face was florid. He was pissed to the core. And when he finished, there was just silence. There weren’t a lot of people on the floor. But I went over to him, maybe that day, I said: “What the hell are you doing? I never heard you rant like that. What is all this shit? What are you doing? [Bork] was a Yale professor. He had students who were on this floor who said he was a great teacher. What is this?” He said: “We've got to—We've got to get rid of him. We cannot have him.” I said: “What for? What is it?” He said, “Just know that we’ll have to destroy him.” And I said, “Well, I'm sure you’ll have fun doing that,” and they did. Gregory Peck did this ad. Tell me about that. They created all these ads. And tell me about that. Well, if you think the one about [Barry] Goldwater with the little kid playing with daisies and an atomic bomb was bad, in the background, then look at what Gregory Peck—and everybody loved him. I mean, who wouldn’t? I did. He just was—he got on, and there were these shots of the Supreme Court, and he said: “This is—this could…”—I can't remember—“will crumble, this edifice. This is America. This will be gone because of this man.” They had their machinery in place. It’s like they had all the guns on the ship were loaded, and they were waiting for whoever it might have been. But they got Exhibit A. And that’s what they were waiting for, Exhibit A, with his decisions. That’s the key…. Well, I'm sure that anyone with a brain wouldn’t write any more of those if they wanted to get on any court. So they just dug and just deeply dug. And they didn’t know quite to go with his personal life, because his wife, Mary Ellen, had been an officiate or something in a religious order. Very sensitive woman. I remember her. She cried in my office more than once. And she was just stunned at the [savaging] of her husband. Nobody thinks of that in Washington. They don’t think about humans. Forget humans. They're just a bunch of toadies. You asked Bork the question that becomes the rallying cry for a lot of Democrats as a justification for why they didn’t want to vote for him, which was—the answer was “an intellectual feast.” Do you remember this? I do. Very much. Tell me the story, what you ask, and what your reaction was. Just through the regular line of questioning. It’s like when they asked Ted Kennedy, when [CBS journalist Roger] Mudd said, “Why do you want to be president?,” he kind of flunked that one, and flunked—Ted and I flunked a lot more than that when we were in school. But no, I just, in the course of it, I could see that he was—he really wanted the job. The president wanted him on the job. And I remember in my—there were lots of questions over how many days, and you can remember why you asked some and why you asked another. I just said, “Well, why do you want this?” And he used the phrase, “An intellectual feast” …That seemed to be a big thing: “Oh, intellectual feast.” Well, what the hell, you know? But that’s Washington and America these days. Tribe testified against Bork, and he helped the Democrats and murder boards prepare. What did you think of Tribe’s testimony and the importance of it? …The job was to cut this guy down. And it didn’t matter who was to do it, or how you were to do it, or what you were to use to do it. Get Bork. It’s now in the dictionaries of the United States and the world; it’s called “getting borked.” So how can you define it any better? That was Laurence’s job. That would have been my job if that was the assignment. So that was his job. The point is, if you had gone back through all of Laurence Tribe’s stuff, you would have found the same controversial decisions, pinpointing controversial issues, which would have then been used by the Republicans to rip his shorts off. Great game. So in the end, Bork is not confirmed. What has happened to the process as a result of that, at that moment, before we've done [Clarence] Thomas? Where is the process in your mind? Well, it was revenge was the process then, which is a beautiful thing now. We’re getting into the sandbox and saying: “You stole my toys. I want my toy back.” But I just have to give you this, and you can cut all this. But this is just a couple minutes. We knew we couldn’t save him, [Robert] Dole (R-Kan.) and I, and the leadership knew that we couldn’t save Bork. So he came to my office…—with Mary Ellen, and he said—I said: “We can't get there. We can get you about 38 votes. We can't get you 51.” That’s all you needed then and now. And he said, “Well, what would you do?” I said, “You know, that’s a terrible burden on a poor old cowboy from Wyoming.” And she began to cry. He said, “Should I withdraw right now, or should I go to the floor and get a vote and lose?” And I said: “That’s an easy answer for me. You go to the floor and get a vote, because there are about 38 or 39”—I don’t remember how many there were—“who are going to talk about you as being one of the finest professors they ever had, and they're going to be Democrats and Republicans speaking. So you can take that Congressional Record when you're sitting by the fire and show that people really did care about you; people of the other faith did care about you.” And she cried, and she said, “Oh, I like that.” And I said: “Well, you asked me. I like it, too.” So we went to the floor, and I can't remember how many Democrats spoke on his behalf, but you can look at the Congressional Record. And all of them said, “This is an outstanding professor, and this was character assassination.” So now go to your next one. When Thomas’ name is now being discussed over at the H. W. White House, Baker’s there; [Reagan’s Chief of Staff] Kenny Duberstein’s around. You get a call from the president asking you to help to usher the Thomas nomination through. Would you talk to us about that? What happened? What did he ask you to do? Oh, I think it was not only a call. He said: “Al, I've appointed this guy. He’s going to be terribly controversial.” I can see that now. In fact, they were beginning to call him an Uncle Tom, which is an odd thing to call a black kid who grew up in Pin Point, Ga., as a nothing. And George says it will be tough because they're comparing him to Thurgood Marshall. Well, I knew Thurgood Marshall. He was a friend. We had some interesting times together. His son then became a liaison with the Senate. … So Bush called several people in. He said: “Here they come. They're going to do the same thing. This is it.” This is Bork again. Oh, yeah. This is, you know, Bork again, and personal destruction; you know, finding out what he read, what books he took out of the library. I mean, this is America, for God’s sake… And then it began, and it just went on. And so all I remember he said, “It’s going to be tough, but I want you to help me get this guy.” He said, “I think he’s good.” And we said: “OK. Well, you vetted him.” And then [John] Danforth (R-Mo.) circled through all of us, and Danforth had tremendous respect in the Senate from both parties. And Danforth said, “This is just cruel what they're doing here.” “Well, Jack, what do you know about this guy?” “Well, when I was attorney general, he was my assistant attorney general in Missouri, and he’s a terrific guy.” Well, he must have been, because we approved him two or three times in the U.S. Senate by votes of 99, 98 to nothing. Don’t forget how this works… …. So he’s good. He’s good. He’s going to happen. People tell me that if you're in the chair, it’s 90 percent chance pretty good you're going to get across. But there was another group. And Kennedy and [Joe] Biden (D-Del.) were sort of neutralized in lots of ways. He’s a black guy. It’s Thurgood Marshall’s seat. They're not going to attack a black guy the way they attacked Bob Bork. They're not going to do it, right? So some other force had to come into play. The organization now is something you’ve talked about before, a women’s rights organization, that does step up and encourage Anita Hill to step forward, as I read the story. What are your memories about that, about how Hill finds her way into that committee that night, when she walked in? Well, you know, Nina Totenberg, who, again, became a lovely friend at Harvard, and we were invited to their wedding, lovely fellow—she’s a great gal. I don’t agree with her. We did a profane tap dance out one night after Nightline with [Ted] Koppel, and Koppel nearly fainted. But we were out in the alley, then, calling each other every name in the book. It was a cleansing experience— You know what— —for her and for me. You know, I talked to her about this. She brought it up when we were interviewing her, and she said you stood in front of the limo so it couldn’t leave. And she came out, and you had it out with each other. It was—I had in my wallet “The Code of Professional Responsibility of Journalists,” and I said: “You ever read this? You ever see it? You probably never did, did you? Read it?” “No. Get out of here, you son”—well, Paul Simon (D-Ill.) had been on the show, and he was standing there. Suddenly we both looked around. Simon has disappeared like squash vines in the wintertime, because that’s not Paul—Paul just wasn’t that—he just—the next day he said, “For God’s sake, what happened?” I said: “Well, you should have stuck around. It got worse.” Anyway— Did she ever tell you what her limousine driver said when she finally got in the car? He turned around, and he looked at her, and he said, “You need a gun.” This is a great memory, but it was—anyway, there's lots of stuff patching life back together. So just get to the nub of it. People would ask me during this, “What is the similarity between [Brett] Kavanaugh and Thomas?” And the answer is, nothing, not a thing, because the issue with the professor was abortion. They knew—they, oh, we know who “they” are out there—they knew that Clarence Thomas would overturn Roe v. Wade, and they said: “How the hell are we going to destroy him? We have to find someone, somewhere to be the idol of keeping us—” Didn’t have anything to do with sexual harassment. It didn’t have anything to do with the #MeToo movement. That came out of it, which was good. I had a sexual harassment division in my Senate office 10 years before these bastards ever had a hearing on Thomas. It was critical. You were watching for it. The result, the lessons learned, Bork and Thomas, what does it tell you, Senator, about the process? Totally, totally broken. I’ll tell you, it was—if Kennedy had been alive, and Metz and I—and I can't speak for them, but I knew them well; we didn’t always agree; we hammered each other—or Heflin, or [then-Republican of Pennsylvania Arlen] Specter had been in the room watching the Kavanaugh hearings, we would have puked. To see grown men and women just shelling each other, no decorum, no addressing of the chair, you know, just jumping all over each other, with innuendo and hostility and flashpoints so you could run for president—forget the party. It was the epitome of a totally broken system and just an epicenter of what's happened in America today, and happening this very day. It’s “Screw your adversaries.” Winning is a marvelous thing. Losing is not good. But you’d better learn how to lose with grace and get the smile off your face. I think some good lawyer taught me once, never let your face show how hard they're kicking your ass. And that’s a very important thing in life, especially in the Senate. But now people don’t want to win; they want to win, and then they want to rub the other guy’s nose in the shit. That’s what they want to do. They're not going to let them up off the floor. You can stand over the defeated one, the gladiator, and instead of just raising your sword and saying, “That’s it,” no, you want to jab him about 82 times, you know, for the cheers of the crowd. That’s where we are today. Don’t just win; rub their nose in it. And that ain't a good thing. And hatred, hatred, hatred, corroding the container it’s carried in—look at their faces when they're talking like that, all snarled up. They look like dogs’ fangs, you know, all the rest of them. Anyway, if you practice real law in human life, now if you just sat in a corporation, practicing law, just looking out through glass windows and having lunch at 21, you’ve missed the world. Let’s go, for just a moment, to— Thomas is over; Obama gets elected president. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is first the minority leader and then the majority leader. [Antonin] Scalia dies. McConnell— Who was approved 99 to nothing. Don’t forget, Scalia—you know, don’t forget: I voted for [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, and I voted for Steve [Breyer]—go ahead. So McConnell, who has slow-walked a lot of the judicial appointments for appeals courts and other things, through the Obama administration, now you're in the last months of the Obama administration. Scalia dies, and Leader McConnell says: “Hold it. You can't nominate Merrick Garland or anybody. We’re going to wait for the new president of the United States.” First my question is, what did you think of that as a strategy? I don’t ever question McConnell. I mean, I worked with him. You don’t want to mess with McConnell. Dole and I messed with him, and we’d mess with each other. But he is—he is a student of the history of the Senate. He’s the best student of procedures since Byrd. Byrd was the master of the piece. So I—you know, I'm not in the Senate. I'm working on another thing to irritate the American people with the Simpson-Bowles debt limit and so on, cutting Social Security and what happened to the old people and the AARP, you know. That’s just ghastly work. Well, enough of that. What do you think about McConnell holding off Merrick Garland and saying, “Let’s wait for the election in the fall”? Well, he was playing the biggest crapshoot outside of Las Vegas, because everybody out here in this wondrous area of the world, this 36 square miles, knew it would be Hillary Clinton. So they thought, well, we’ll just keep scratching this old record, you know, and playing it backward, see what a cacophony of sound we get out. And then, when the crap hit the fan, and Trump got elected, then they thought, wow, now we’ve really—now. But McConnell won. And he often does win. And if he doesn’t win, he doesn’t go stick his thumb in his mouth and go get into a fetal position and squirrel up with his bankie over his head. He just gets ready for the next combat. And that’s the way he is—tough. And so— So he wins the biggest bet there is, in lots of ways. He’s going to—if he would have lost the bet, we know what would have happened. Hillary Clinton would have put somebody in Kennedy’s—eventually Kennedy’s seat. And that would have been that for the court being where the court is. Oh, the whole deck would have fallen. The dominos would have fallen. They would have put—some of them would have voluntarily retired. I think that Justice Ginsburg, at that point, if she knew that Hillary Clinton was to make her appointment, might have stepped away. When Kavanaugh comes out after Dr. [Christine Blasey] Ford testifies— After? After Ford testifies. Yes, yes. So he comes out. He’s breathing coals. He’s hot. Your thoughts about that? Yes. Had that been me, you could have added about 52 degrees of Fahrenheit… You have to learn, in politics, an attack unanswered is an attack believed. OK? Number one, an attack unanswered is an attack agreed to. Try that one. So you are entitled, as a public figure, to be called a boob, fool, idiot, asshole, bonehead, shithead, all the works. But never let them distort who you are. And when I was dealing with immigration and somebody called me a bigot, I tore their ass off. If I'm dealing with veterans, and I said: “Look, I'm a veteran. There's only 5 percent of us ever heard a live shot go fired past their head by an enemy. And do you mean to tell me that a guy served six months and never left Camp Beetle Bailey and doesn’t know a mortar tube from either end, he gets the same benefit as a combat veteran?” I said, “Not on my watch.” So I get called an anti-veteran. I said, “That’s bullshit.” …So if they ever distorted who I was—and that’s what they were doing with Kavanaugh, in my mind, and if they had done that to me on something with no due process, no corroboration, nobody in the room except, you know, a bunch of whatever the hell is going on, if you think he was on fire, my bald head would have been on fire without hair. At that point of his life, he said, “If I'm going to go down, it’s not going to be by a bunch of crap or innuendo or guesswork or whatever, whatever. And I'm going to fight for my life. And I may not look judicial.” I've heard all that crap. Judges, you know, they get up and go to the bathroom, and they put their—you know, they do the same stuff the rest of us do. So don’t think they don’t have feelings or that you should—“I wonder why he did that. Didn’t show very much judge-like, did it?,” after sitting and listening to something totally out of space… …. I meant to ask you about Thomas. When he says it’s a “high-tech lynching,” when he said those words, where did that come from, and what did you think when he said it? Well, I don’t know. But let me tell you how it may have come about. Here we are, getting hammered by the professor about what he had done, and there's no response from him. Go back to my ancient litany, which is etched in my DNA: An attack unanswered is an attack believed. And the people who are telling you not to respond are the people who love you the most. Your wife, your mother, your father, your brother, they're saying: “Al, wait a minute, Al. Aren’t you a little thin-skinned? Aren’t you going to reduce yourself to—you know, you're going to lessen yourself by responding.” And you say: “Look, I got a thought for you. At 2:00 in the morning you wake up, and you hit—you had the distortion of who you are. And you think, that’s my name. That's my name. That’s not who I am, and I'm not going to allow that to occur.” That’s not your name, honey, or brother Pete or the son or the daughter or two, three beautiful people that I raised. It’s me, and I'm not taking that shit from anybody. So that is—we sat with Thomas. He, with Jack Danforth, Thomas. There weren’t very many people in the room. And I just looked over, and I said: “Did this happen? Did this happen? I mean, I've been listening right here.” Well, he said: “I'm sick to my stomach. I can't even talk.” He said: “I'm torn to bits. This didn’t happen. We saw each other afterward. We were friends.” Well, anyway. And I said, “Well, pal, if it didn’t happen, and you're not going to say anything about it, then I'm not going to support you. Because if you can't tell the American people of where your gut is all wrapped around the axle, then how the hell can I help you?” And I told him my theory of political life: An attack unanswered is an attack believed—not only that, but agreed to. And he was teary. Jack was kind of alarmed. But I said, “I just—you know, you must have something to say.” He said, “I do.” He said, “I really do have something to say.” And that was—not me. And then everybody said, “Well, you’d better tell it, or you're gone.” And that was the night, I guess, where he took the legal-size paper, and he wrote it all out. I never heard anything about where he got any of the words. But that was pretty heavy words, especially for old Metz to hear. Metz didn’t like that at all. He came to me; he said, “What's this ‘high-tech lynching’?” I said: “That’s his feeling, Metz, not yours. I mean, it’s a human thing with him, not you, one of the human-being things, you know, distorting who you are.” So that was a pretty powerful rebuttal. … The only other thing I would ask is, so you know, and you’ve talked about how Washington has changed, and it’s much more partisan these days and such. There's a great fear that this partisanship of Washington institutions and the legislature and the executive is sifting over to the courts. And the worry, of course, including with Justice [John] Roberts, is that this will taint the courts in the way that people see it, the public sees it. What's your sort of overview of where we are now? And what's your concerns, or if you have concerns, over the importance of the courts and all this bullshit going on in the hearings, and everything else that we keep seeing, will taint the way people see it? Well, there's—there's nobody— So talk to me Senator. There's nobody at the helm who knows any history like Jack Kennedy or Harry Truman or Nixon. They knew some history. The history of the United States was that people were in the streets while Roosevelt was packing the court with his people. What the hell do you think? Whatever happened to that section of history? So now I suppose you can say that, instead of Trump selecting people, he’s packing the court. That’s our history. I mean, I really think that the country will be destroyed by political correctness. That’s where we are now. You don’t dare get into any kind of discussion or you might look like a racist or a homophobe or a bigot or a xenophobe. And so you pretend that you're just sweetness and light and that your objectives in life are pure and wholesome and progressive. Forget—I don’t mean Democrat progressive or Republican progressive, as I say it. So that flies in the face of the whole history of America. This was a country on fire. This was where 2.5 percent of the male population of America died in a war against brother against brother. We going to do any of that? Forget it. That ain’t happening. We don’t use bullets; we use ballots. We had child labor, robber barons, corruption, Haymarket riots, union killings…. Yeah, I could sing you the whole song of “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” and that’s not bad for a Republican. So somehow we've forgotten that this is a cauldron. This country is a cauldron of hate, racism, bigotry, fighting, violence. That’s the way this country is. The Japanese war relocation center, I mean, that was—America is, “How did it happen?” Well, I said: “Roosevelt signed the order. It went to the Supreme Court, and William O. Douglas upheld it.” And they go, “Oh, how could that happen?” It was called the time when it happened. You can't rewrite history. Now, now you’ve got something going on: Get rid of statues. Get rid of John Harvard’s statue in Harvard Yard, and they do it. That’s bullshit. That’s part of our history. Get rid of Robert E. Lee? I didn’t—I mean he was—he was a tremendous man. That doesn’t make me a racist. I don’t want to hear any of that shit, not a bit of it. Who was Martin Luther King? There are people who hate him. They're saying, “Wait until we get his whole record” after they released it, after 50 years. “We’ll find out about him.” And they probably will… … And if my wife were here, she’d come in right now and slap me about the head and shoulders, because I'm going to give you the definition of political correctness. It’s not mine. It was a lieutenant commander in the navy, and he won an award for this. Political correctness is a doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it’s entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end. Well, say no more. And then let me give you the definition of politics, because you need to hear this. Yeah. I tell my students—this is all mine—in politics, there are no right answers, only a continual flow of compromises among groups, resulting in a changing, cloudy and ambiguous series of public decisions, where appetite and ambition compete openly with knowledge and wisdom. That’s all there is.
