toned as michelle obama. [laughter] but really, i don't remember anybody talking about or reject a on the bodies of other first ladies the way they have michelle obama coming and i also think that, you know, there's been a lot of complaints about her not in these words but acting uppity, stepping out of her place. have you ever heard first lady's be criticized for meeting with dignitaries? usually we are proud of our first ladies on the go to europe and meet with royalty. but somehow michelle obama caught a lot of heat this summer for doing that, not just because she went on vacation there in spain, but i think that what people were saying is that she was playing the lady and that the was not appropriate for a black woman. ..

>> explicitly right now in rap videos. >> someone asked the question i was about to ask, but based on your insight, i wonder what you think, what you thought of the duke lacrosse case, if you looked into that at all, or if you had a different perspective that -- and if you could touch on it a little bit.

>> yeah, the first time i read it i said, oh, boy, i've heard this story a lot. i'll be honest, my immediate thought was that they were guilty, that they did this, that it was part of a long standing practice especially among fraternity men. i mean, athletes are not immune to objectifying women. so the story smacked of the kind of case studies i'd been working on, so i jumped to conclusions. but the more i read it, the more i thought, there's something nothing right with this story. i replained about -- refrained about talking about it with most people. and it's been many years since it happened now, and it hasn't really been on my mind, but the conclusion i came to at the time was that no matter what happened that night and no matter what

drove those women to be dancers, why were college athletes hiring black women to strip for them? as entertainment? this i just thought it was disgusting, i thought it smacked of white privilege and of the southern history and, you know, american history really. so that's what i thought. i thought that no matter what happened, something really wrong went down. >> with all the reports of war, particularly in the democratic republic of congo, are you seeing some similarities although the racial component might not be the same, are you seeing similarities in the stories? >> certainly not as voracious of attacks as we see around the

world, but i think that, i think that what i've learned from looking at these cases in bosnia-herzegovina and the democratic republican of congress go and south africa is that race has always been used as a weapon of terror, it continues to be, and so, you know, it surprises me even more that we haven't written about it or talked about it in terms of the kind of racial terrorism that was happening in the united states. and i think that we need a truth and reconciliation committee, committees to really cleanse ourselves of this path, be up front and honest about it so that we can move on to a brighter future. if south africa can do it, we can do it. yeah. >> i thought it was really interesting hearing you talk about this kind of militant figure, so i was wondering if, you know, being part of a nonviolent civil rights movement, did that -- was there any tension with her in the leadership of it being nonviolent and her having these

different kind of ideas? >> that's a really good question. i think there's this myth that everyone in the civil rights movement was nonviolent and they adhered to ghandian principles. but the reality, i think, is if you talk to black southerners and read a lot of these history books, you find most people have done -- southerners in general. americans broadly speaking, right, americans like their guns. they're american. so i think that, you know, there's a long history of people having guns and using them to defend themselves, particularly african-americans who lived in rural areas. not only did they use guns to hunt, but to protect themselves when they needed to. so i think that, you know, you could not portray yourself as a gun-toting madman to the public media in the 1950s. you would be sent to mccarthy's committee and blacklisted and maybe, you know, deported somewhere. jailed.

but i think that what happened is that african-americans who participated in things like the monday come ri -- monday come ri boycott and selma, they decided to adhere to nonviolence when they were active, when they were marching. maybe they left the guns in the car, in their back pocket, but they were there. and often times people who we associate with nonviolence like dr. king, you know, he often had armed body guards surrounding his home. glenn smiley from the, i think it's fellowship of reck sill craig, went to -- reconciliation, went to visit king in the early days before he had decided on being ghandian, and he wrote back and said, this place is an arsenal, you know? he had so many guns around the house, and they convinced him not to use guns anymore. so it's a mess, i think. other questions?

>> thank you very much for coming today. please give our speaker a round of applause. >> thank you for coming. thank you. [applause] >> daniel mcyear -- danielle mcguire is an assistant professor at wayne state university. visit at the dark end of the street.com. >> seth stern and steven wermiel recount the career of supreme court justice william brennan. utilizing documents which will not be released until 2017, the authors detailed the negotiations and debates that occurred on the high court during brennan's tenure. they discussed the book at politics and prose bookstore in washington d.c. the program is just under one hour. [applause] >> first of all, we want to thank politics and prose for

hosting us tonight. for book lovers like us, this is the equivalent of two baseball fans being given a chance to play at yankee stadium. [laughter] thank you, also, to all of our family, friends, colleagues and i see a couple of former supreme court clerks in the audience who are here tonight, and i want to take note of one person who isn't here. my father had surgery today in new york, and he wouldn't let me come up to see him until after this event because he knew how much it meant to me, so i just want to say, dad, i love you, and i look forward to watching this with you on c-span very soon. now to the reason you're all here. william j. brennan jr. was a rather obscure new jersey state judge and former corporate labor lawyer when president eisenhower nominated him for the united states supreme court in 1956. over the course of the next 34 terms, brennan emerged as one of

the most influential justices of the entire 20th century, and i can assure you that's not just wikipedia speaking. [laughter] and he was also the court's most forceful liberal voice. justice break man had his hand in every issue of the day from school prayer and school desegregation to abortion and affirmative action to death penalty and the rights of criminal defendants. and for much of his tenure, no one outside of the court knew just how influential a role he played in building coalitions under chief justice earl warren and his two more conservative successors, warren burger and william rend qis. in 1986, the year justice brennan turned 80 and marked his 30th anniversary on the court, he tapped steve as his biographer. as we like to joke, i was in fifth grade at the time worried more about whether the mets were going to win the world series.

he granted steve unprecedented access to all of his papers and began what would prove to be 60 hours of interviews over the course of five years. we thought we'd start tonight with steve telling the fascinating story of how he came to be justice brennan's biographer and what that experience was like. >> thank you, seth. and, david, just for the record, i'm a politics and prose member too. [laughter] and, seth, our thoughts are with your father as well. thank you. thank you all for being here. 1986, as you now have heard, was a remarkable opportunity for me. if you imagined, i had been in washington for quite a while at that point and had been writing about the supreme court first for the boston globe and then "the wall street journal" for maybe about seven or eight years at that point. so you've been doing something and learning about something for eight years, and suddenly you

have the opportunity to go inside and see everything there is to see about this subject that you've been examining for the past eight years. and it was just an astounding opportunity. justice brennan agreed to this because i think in 1986 he turned 80, he was celebrating 30 years on the supreme court, he was thinking about his legacy. he hadn't at that moment decided to retire, but he knew there wasn't that much longer that he would remain on the court, and so how he would be remembered in history, i think, was very much on his mind. and so he looked around for a biographer. i had the good fortune to have a very good friend and mentor who was the chief judge of the u.s. court of appeals here, abner, who had also become very good friends with justice brennan, and he made the introductions, and we took it from there. it astounded me, actually, how easily and smoothly the process

began. i think i was a pretty good newspaper reporter, i kind of went very cautiously. i figured i'll get a tape recorder and start asking him questions and later i can see whether he'll really actually give me access to papers and files, and over time i would say can i see this and can i see that, and then i'd get a little more aggressive and can say, well, can i take that home, and can i copy that? [laughter] then can i get that document that's in your bottom drawer? he had this amazing resource which no, at least to our knowledge, no other justice has ever done. beginning in about 1960, so for 30 years from 1960 to 1990, he had his law clerks prepare narrative accounts of the most interesting cases of the supreme court term. they're not, they're not so much legal documents as they are a

kind of great nonfiction read. i mean, here's how the case got here, here's how the justices voted, here's which justice came to talk to justice brennan about this case, here's who we identified was the critical vote and how he went about trying to figure out how to get that vote. and so there are 30 years worth of those histories, and that was really a treasure-trove and one that i felt i had to approach carefully and slowly and at no t even really ask him to give me access to for quite a while. but again, to my amazement, after while -- i knew where they were, and i also came to know that it wasn't locked. and so after a while i would just knock on the door early in the morning, he got to work at 7 in the morning, so i would go up to the court at 7 in the morning, and the supreme court police would call up to the

chambers and say steve wermiel's here, he wants to come up, and they would escort me up. and i'd knock on the door and say, justice, can i get one of the histories? he'd say, sure. i'd walk in, take one of the histories and go sit down and read them and take notes on it. in any event, it was a remarkable opportunity. he was also very generous with his own time sitting for 60 hours of interviews. the interviews were fascinating but a mixed experience as well. he was always very careful about how he wanted to be depicted and portrayed. not that there aren't many this, many moments of -- many, many moments of candor, but there were things that he just wasn't going to talk about. he wasn't going to talk a lot about sort of deep personal emotions. his first wife had died of

cancer after suffering from are cancer for 12 years, and i could virtually never get him to talk about her. and at one point he actually said i don't know how you're going to do that because at this point he had already married his secretary. and he said i don't know how you're going to do that, mary, his secretary, would have a fit. and so we have on tape where i said, but justice brennan, you were married to this woman for 50 years. surely, you don't think we're going to write a biography about crow and not -- you and not write about your first wife and what she meant in your life, and he would never talk about her. he would say, oh, how she suffered. and that was the end of the conversation. so there were many ways in which the interviews were guarded and cautious. there were ways in which when he was being guarded and cautious, i think we learned a tremendous

amount about him. i would ask him, at first i did it not intentionally, at first it was a general win and -- genuine and sincere questions. there were two things i'd can him that would just drive him nuts. i would ask him how could it be that your religion doesn't affect your decision making? and, again, the couple of times i asked that, it was a sincere question, i really wanted to know what he would say. but he was so, it was almost like i pressed a button that played back a recording. he'd give me this kind of pat, adamant answer. i took the same oath to uphold the constitution that every other judge and justice did, and my religion has nothing to do with it. and then the next time i asked the question, it was remarkable, i got exactly the same answer like i was playing back my own tape. but i kept asking the question because i really wanted to see what would happen. and he got madder than hell. [laughter]

he, you know, six interviews later i would ask again, and he would say, we've talked about that, and i told you it had nothing to do with it, and i don't know why you won't understand that. and, you know, to me that was actually very valuable. i began to get aceps that that was not -- sense that that was not just a prerecorded message, that it really was what he felt. the other question that i asked with some regularity was a variation on that. how can you possibly separate your personal views from your decision making? i mean, it's sort of the thing everybody wants to know about a judge. how do you really do that? can you really do that? can anybody really do that? and he would say the same thing. he would get kind of angry and say, you know, what i think in my personal life is not really what matters when i'm trying to decide a case. we decide the case on the facts and the law and the issues before us, and that's really what makes a difference. i think seth will talk a little bit more about some of the

insights that that led us to in the very, what i think is one of the more interesting aspects of the book. so this went on for a number of years, and as i said, it was like the world's most wonderful tutorial. i didn't really want it to end. and so when it came time to write the book, i didn't really want to write the book. i just wanted to keep being able to ask more questions and learn more about the court. and as many of you know, i didn't write the book for quite a while. [laughter] i put it down for a long time and then picked it pack up and put it down again and after a while concluded that i wasn't going to get it done without somebody to help me do it. and so i was introduced to seth by a good mutual friend, and he joined the effort in 2006 and just did a remarkable job. he wrote most of what remained to be written at that point and organized the material in if a

her call yang fashion -- herculean fashion, and the book would not have been completed without his extraordinary effort. so that's kind of the story behind the book. let me say a couple quick things about justice brennan and then turn it over to you. so what did i see in all of that and what did i learn about him in all of that? a number of, i think, important and interest things. interesting things. first of all, if you've ever read mig anything about him, you've heard what a remarkably kind, unassuming, generous, warm individual he was, and all of that was true. i got to see firsthand the sort of same story that are anybody that ever met him will tell you, that when you walked into a room, he would look you in the eye, shake your hand firmly and genuinely make you feel like you were the most important person in the room even though you were standing in the presence of a

supreme court justice. and he had a remarkable ability to do that that never stopped. i saw a man with an incredibly prodigious memory. the -- and television good for me to -- it was good for me to see this because i don't think i would have believed it otherwise. brennan's law clerks would tell you that they'd be talking about a case sitting around his desk, and suddenly he would swivel in his desk chair and turn to the book shelf behind him where there was an entire wall of the u.s. reports, the reports of supreme court decisions, and he would pull a volume off the shelf and open the page, and it would be the case they were talking about. and, again, if i hadn't seen him do it myself, i would have said, oh, come on, that's ridiculous. nobody could do that when he'd been on the court for so long and had thousands of cases. but i saw him do it, and it was absolutely amazing. he would just turn around, pull the right volume out and turn to

the right page and say, now, what did you want to know about this case, and there it was. one of the most interesting things, and seth made the point in his opening comment that we didn't know if you were following the supreme court in the '60s and even into the '70s, you didn't know about justice brennan. justice brennan was the best-kept secret in washington. it was the warren court, there were towering intellectual figures on the court, hugo black, william o. douglas, earlier on felix frankfurter, john harlan, these were supposed to be the intellectual giants of the court, and william brennan was just this guy from new jersey that nobody had ever really heard of and had no particular reputation. it really wasn't until later that we learned what an incredible influence he had

behind the scenes in the warren court and continued to have in subsequent years. and i think the book documents that, and i hope that's one of the values of the book and certainly was one of the great values of the access to all of the papers and to his being willing to talk about what went on. one of the great revelations he told me and i asked other people around the court for different periods of time about this was that earl warren would come in and have private meetings with brennan to talk about how to decide the cases and to whom to assign opinions and so on. i don't think even other members of the court knew that those meetings were taking place, and i know that the law clerks to other justices didn't know that those meetings were taking place. so there was this remarkable role ha this person -- that this person who helped shape our legal and constitutional

landscape for three and a half decades was playing for maybe the first 15 or 20 years of those three and a half decades, and i don't think anybody knew about it. and and so i think, as i said, that's one of the values of the book. let me let seth have a turn, and then we'll keep going back and forth, i think. >> i'm not going to let steve off the look quite yet because as amazing as this may sound, i think he's understating the degree of access he had to justice brennan's chambers. could you talk a little bit about sitting in on the morning coffees when they were talking about cases, having free reign to photocopy anything you want when pending decisions were sitting there? this. >> i'll take up another two minutes. one of the amazing opportunities that i had -- and this came after a while, this is not something i would have asked to do at first -- but justice brennan would come in at 7 a.m., and the clerks would arrive at

about 7:30 or 8, and they would have coffee every morning for an hour, 45 minutes to an hour, talk about the court, talk about the events of the day. and after time he began to invite me to join them which was a remarkable opportunity, so i would hear what their relationship was, i would hear about what was going on, they would talk candidly about other justices, about the court. that was a great insight. the other thing that really meant a lot to me because the image of the court in the 1980s shaped by other books and other writing about the court was this kind of deeply political institution. if you read what was written about the court in books in the 1980s, you would believe that there really was no difference between the court and congress, it just was a different location. people walked around the halls trading votes, slapping each other on the back, making deals,

and they just happened to have black robes on the back of their doors rather than briefcases to fly home to their districts with. i believed when i started and convinced myself even more through the time that i spent with justice brennan that that was totally a false image of the court and how it worked. and so the other thing i had the opportunity to do was sit in with justice brennan when he met with his law clerks on several occasions and prepared if for oral argument. he would have his law clerks come in and actually go over the case with him, they would present the basics of the case, he would ask questions, they would argue about different positions, different ways of thinking about the case. the short version of this is is what i saw was what you would hope to see which was a process that worked seriously, thoughtfully, deliberatively.

it was not about horse trading and back slapping. it was about, you know, how important is is this aspect of this legal test and where will we find a fifth vote for that test, or could we compromise on this aspect of the this test, and if so, who are we going to compromise with and what's the impact of diminishing the test or increasing the test or whatever the case may be? i mean, it's not such an exciting way to tell the story, but the story was that the court was a serious, thoughtful, direct delib rahtive institution even at the times it was divided and making decisions that are sort ofdivisive in our country. >> well, i joined steve in 2006. the fist thing that he did -- first thing that he did was he handed me a copy of the transcript of their interviews. it was fatter than a phone book.

i read through that, little intimidating. and the next thing i did was went into steve's basement where there is an entire wall lined with file cabinets with all of the materials that steve had accumulated over the course of many years. and i spent a year going through all of those files sort of taking notes, eventually had about 1800 pages of note. i did additional research. some of the justices who had served with justice brennan, the papers became open only after steve had begun his research, and those were particularly fruitful. justice powell, justice blackman kept meticulous papers. they saved in the case of justice blackman, every scrap of paper that he exchanged with another justice on the bench. in the case of justice powell, he saved every internal memo that he shared with his clerks or whatever he wrote in the margins when he would say this

is ridiculous, just extraordinarily insightful little jottings on the side of his memos. and i did additional interviews. i reinterviewed many of the clerks and members of justice brennan's family who were very generous with their time, and people tend to be a little more candid with the passage of time. justice brennan was no longer alive, i think they felt more comfortable sharing their candid opinions. steve and i, i think, were very much in sync on how we were going to approach the writing of the book and in three ways. one, that justice brennan unlike there are some justices who have really fascinating precourt lives and would merit biography regardless such as thurgood marshall, a pioneering civil rights leader, earl warren, the chief justice who had been a three-term governor of california, justice brennan candidly, there'd be no biography of a jersey state judge and corporate lawyer.

so we purposely kind of condensed that part, and the focus really is on his tenure as a supreme court justice. the second aspect is that we really wanted to go down the middle here. we weren't looking to just celebrate him, we weren't looking to condemn him, we were going to take it wherever it went, and i hope it reflects that. there are things about justice brennan that he did that we point out that are, perhaps, worthy of question or criticism. those include his hiring, refusal to hire women clerks long after he had written pioneering women's rights decisions. he decided to withdraw an offer to a clerk in the 1960s because of that clerk's alleged ties to communist groups. it wasn't necessarily a moment of bravery on his part. so, hopefully, what we've done is is really taken a middle of the road approach, that it's, he's called into question when it's merited and he gets the

credit that he deserves. a couple of themes i thought i would talk about a little bit that are in the book and i think are really some of the key insights, one is that there is this notion that a liberal justice or judge such as justice brennan reads his own personal preferences into his decisions. that really isn't the case with justy brennan. the man -- justice brennan. the man that we write about is is a very conservative person. as i mentioned, he refused to hire women clerks in 19 70 when he was recommended the first one by his former clerks. he basically said, send me someone else meaning a man. he then went on to write a pioneering women's rights decisions, the same clerk comes back, suggests another woman, and he says no again. at that point as we reveal the clerk writes him a letter, says with all due respect, justice brennan, you're a hypocrite.

and not only are you a hypocrite, you could be sued under the very precedent that you wrote. [laughter] and to his credit, he relented, and he hired his first woman clerk. there are other areas where we see that. he wrote some of the opinions, the privacy decisions that paved the way to roe, he helped craft the roe v. wade abortion decision, and yet he was personally uncomfortable with abortion. he's a champion of the first amendment and a free press. he disthe trusted reporters, thy infuriated him. we point out how angry he was about the brethren, the insider account of the court by bob woodward and scott armstrong absolutely infuriated him. and it makes it all the more fascinating to me as somewhat of an outsider that here is this justice, an extraordinarily private person who even close prendz and colleagues would say they really didn't feel like

they knew the inner justice brennan who distrusted reporters, had on more than one occasion was very angry about things that appeared in the "wall street journal" whether in the newspapers or on the opinion side, and yet he opened his entire life in a way that perhaps no other justice ever has to a journalist. he gave steve free rein to his entire life. he talked ab his case materials -- about his case materials, he also gave him free rein in all his correspondence. every letter that justice brennan wrote to another justice, a lawyer, any member of his family. there's a letter that steve found in the one of his desk drawers, he kept his most cherished possessions. he kept the wedding ring of his first wife in that drawer after she passed away, and he kept the last letter he got from his brother charlie, the brother he was closest to who was killed in

world war ii in the philippines. and he got that letter just days before the military informed the family that his brother had died, and that letter was in his drawer, and steve got a copy of that. so it's just extraordinary that such a private person who distrusts the press opens his entire life to a reporter. and he knew the consequence of doing so. so it's really a fascinating contrast between some of the decisions he made and who he was as a person. let me just say a couple things, a couple myths that i think we try o counter. they both -- to counter. they both are this notion, justice brennan was an irish catholic, and he was the only catholic until 1986. it seems extraordinary now, a court consisting of six catholics and three jews. he was stereotyped from the beginning in two ways, this

happy leprechaun. he was a small -- he's not a tall guy. and he was a very personal man, very friendly, it was genuine, but you see even the stories from his selection describing the jaunty irishman. it's very much how justice sotomayor who now occupies his seat was sort of charactered and stereotyped as a fiery latina. and, unfortunately, that stereotype of justice brennan, i think, stuck, and it played into a second notion, how he did his job as a justice. there was this notion that he was this irish ward boss, that he was some politician going through the hallway shaking hands, making deals, slapping backs. he deeply resented that idea, and i in many ways rightfully so. his success wasn't due to the fact that somehow he was a politician working the room or working the halls. he was an extraordinary consensus builder.

he had extraordinary skills, but interpersonal was only a piece of it. he also had the extraordinary gift of serving at a time where there were moderates on the court unlike today where it's pretty sharply divided ideologically. throughout his tenure he had people in the middle who he could work with, who he could convince. not on every case, but he could find a way to accommodate their concerns, build a majority, and for justice brennan the bigger the majority, the better. on the other hand, and this is the last thought and then we want to hear some questions. i think justice brennan liked to portray himself as less of a politician than he was. he liked to portray himself as detached, almost in the an identify -- ivory tower and exchanging personal memos, and that's certainly true, but he was a very skilled politician in the sense that he was very good at addressing the needs of his other colleagues.

and he deployed his clerks, particularly in later years after earl warren was no longer chief and he didn't have that behind-the-scenes role, his clerks served as almost diplomats. he set them loose figuring out what the needs in the other chambers were, so i think it's also wrong to suggest he wasn't political at all but not in the sort of crass retail politics of a stereotypical politician. so with that, i thank everyone here for coming, and we'd be happy to answer your questions. [applause] >> while people are coming up to the microphone, please, to ask questions i just want to set the record straight that i did do other things besides rifle through his desk drawers. [laughter] >> roman catholic, did he feel any pressure from the church or

his own conscious on the decision that was rendered with respect to abortion? >> i think his identity as a catholic is a key theme we explore throughout the book. he never made a decision to adhere to what he thought the catholic church might want, but some of his decisions caused him a great deal of anguish due to the reaction of the church. you saw that early in his tenure on school prayer, on on obscenity and certainly later with abortion. i think he certainly had a behind the scenes role on roe v. wade. there were decisions such as the cooper v. aaron school desegregation case where his input wasn't known for decades. but i think in roe v. wade, i think he was happy to have a behind the scenes role. he did feel like the house cat

lick. there was a note -- catholic. there was a note from justice blackman saying can you read a report in this opinion, give it an eye as a catholic. there were calls among some catholics to excommunicate him. i'm going to cough, so you percent take over. >> he never -- better take over. he never actually l wrote an abortion opinion except in the cases where the issue was the funding of abortions for poor women. he never wrote a sub substantive about the right to abortion. the only time he ever wrote a separate opinion was when it involved the funding issue. >> yes. you referred to my question twice this evening that was in

the book regarding women's rights and his, his role in enabling them to be higher than before, but yet he refused to hire a woman. i don't understand that. at all. [laughter] i don't know if you can explain it, but it seems incredible. >> he came from a different era. he, he -- when he arrived at the supreme court, he had never had a woman as a professional colleague. i don't think he'd ever seen a woman lawyer appear before him in the '30s and '40s, '50s. he'd never had a woman colleague as a judge. there were none at the supreme court. there were scarcely any women law clerk at the supreme court. i mean, obviously, not defending it, but it was a different era.

he did not come from a background in which he had exposure to women as professional equals. and so i think he had not a lot of experience with it and sort of. he learned, he grew. his daughter helped educate him about women in the workplace and the need for women to have protection under the constitution. and i think he, to his credit, he learned a lot and grew a lot because he wrote the major decisions that, you know, set the foundation for that. but his personal experience was very different, i think. you want to add something -- >> still, being from washington, i was born in washington, and the supreme court is here. i call this man's paradise

because there's so many women here in every office. i still find it unbelievable. [laughter] >> let me just add this comment. what steve was saying about him being a man of another era wasn't only our answer, it was justice ginsberg. we spoke with her and in the 1970s as we write, she was the key sort of legal strategist of the women's rights movements. she was the one arguing the case that he wrote and, searchly, educating him. and by asked her, did you know at the time? she didn't remember that letter, but she said it doesn't surprise me. he was a man of a generation that justice ginsburg said she had to eliminate. so that's the best way we can do. >> thank you. >> both sandra day o'connor and

ruth ginsberg had problems getting jobs after coming out of college. >> i thought you were saying, you know, there was a length of time, and -- sorry -- i'm basing this on "the new york times" article a lot, but the fact it took so long to get the book published and you had all the access that you did, my first question is how long, what was the last time you spoke to justice brennan before he died? in like, how much was your access after he was off the court? also if you could explain in a little more detail what yours process was and why it took so long. i know you found seth by a mutual acquaintance, and did you try to find anybody else to help you before that, or was this -- how did you get it move anything the right direction to get it published? >> the first part of the question, i interviewed him

probably a half dozen times between his retirement in the july is 19990 and his finish 990 and his death in 1997. we rely less on those interviews in the book. people have tended to forget that the reason he retired in 1990 was because he had a stroke, and so i could see often when i was interviewing him that his memory was not as sharp anymore, and i can look at those transcripts now and say, that's wrong, that's nonsense, i don't think that happened. and so i was less willing to rely on those interviews, but there are probably another ten hours of interviews on top of the 60 after he retired and before he died. the process, seth has nothing to do with the delay in the process. the delay is entirely mine. [laughter] he's the answer to the end of

the delay. so don't blame him. [laughter] i, several things happened. some of which is simply writer's block. but justice brennan had always said that the one condition on the book was that it not be published while he was sitting on the court. still sitting on the court even after he retired. had a conversation had a

substantial amount of research. if you are thinking about retiring, it would be great if you gave me some warning. you know, a year's notice, a couple of years' notice would be wonderful to try to have that opportunity. and so he called me at 7:30 in the morning on july 20th, 1990, and said -- and i can remember vividly the inflection in his voice apropos of this story. and he said, steve, i've decided i am going to retire meaning this was the two years' notice he was giving me except it was about two hours' notice. [laughter] but in his mind he remembered

that he'd promised me he would give me advanced warning, so this was the advanced warning. and that, honestly, knocked me for a loop. i wasn't ready to start writing the book, i wasn't really in a position to start writing the book. i was still working full time at "the wall street journal." i hadn't even thought about writing the book yet. i'd stopped and tried to write a couple of chapters, got 'em done but had to go back to work, and that story sort of continued. i changed jobs, i changed careers, i had a wonderful daughter to help raise, we moved cities several times. and so i kept finding difficulty getting it done and putting it aside until my daughter was going off to college, and it sort of seemed like the opportune moment to say, all right, if it's ever going to happen, it's got to happen now. and it would be great to have

somebody to do it with. that's when i decided to look for a co-author. >> if i could add -- excuse me, steve. if i could add on that point, now, this is going to sound entirely self-serving, but i generally do believe -- genuinely do believe it's a better book for coming out now, and i don't think that's a reflection on me. it's better because of the papers that simply weren't available at the time that steve started working on this and some of the best insights. >> the red bag register, the local paper in red bank, new jersey, where justice brennan sat as a new jersey state supreme court justice is now fully digitized.

digital. >> digitized. >> digitized. and on the internet. so i found every last article referencing justice brennan when he sat and about his life there. so in thatceps it's a better -- sense it's a better book. i guess we'll leave to it the historians to decide whether it's better and what was lost in the sewer rim. >> i guess i would add we have more perspective on what his legal legacy was. when he was still sitting in 1990, the notion that the death penalty was inherently and in every way unconstitutional was something that he really he and thurgood marshall were the only two that subscribed to that view. since he retired, since justice marshall retired, several other justices have at least expressed severe reservations about the death penalty system in this

country and at least a couple have come out and said they probably think it's so bad that it may well be unconstitutional too. that's a helpful perspective to have for the benefit of sort of evaluating justice brennan's contribution and that's just on one issue. there are lots of other things like that i think you could discuss. >> one last follow up, i'm sorry for dominating your time, but justice brennan, you say he was failing, he had the stroke, but did he ever express any frustrations to you? i think he wanted to see the book before he died, i know his family kind of, you know, were anxious to see it. did he will express -- ever express anythingsome. >> no, he let me know that he would like to see it. he did get to read one chapter which he said he liked very much. and, you know, he was too nice to get mad at me. [laughter] i mean, he was unfailingly nice. if i, if i said i'm working on

it and i hope to have another chapter to give you a few months, you know, he would, as i said, make you feel like you were the most important person, he would say, oh, don't you worry about it, you just keep doing what you're doing, and it's marvelous that you're doing this at all, you know, but i knew that he was frustrated, sure. >> okay, thank you. >> when a man comes out on a significant problem, often -- where a man comes i on the on a significant problem often depends on his early upbringing and education. would you talk about justice brennan's early upbringing, his education both through the schools before college, college and law school and how that affected his life on the court and his decision making? >> are absolutely. justy brennan's upbringing, he grew up in newark, new jersey,

that's where he was born in 1906. he was the son of two irish immigrants who grew up about 10 miles apart and they would have never met had they stayed in the ireland. his father was a stationary fireman. he helped operate the boilers at a brewery in newark, and then he rose up through his union and then became a much-beloved city commissioner. he served many years as a politician. his influence on justice brennan cannot be overstated. it was a formative influence, it was his name sake's son. he was someone who believed deeply in economic justice. you saw that in his work as a union leader and what he said as a public official. but you can't say everything came from his dad because his dad as a public official, also, was pretty willing to step on people's civil liberties. he was a public official in the

1920s and participated willingly in crackdowns on communists and subversives. and so that was something that justice brennan really came to later. and i think there a formative experience really was harvard law school. he learned much about civil liberties. his father shaped the course of his career. there's this notion that his father would have rolled over in his grave had he known that the union leader father, his son became a corporate labor lawyer. well, in fact, the truth is he wanted him to go in that direction. he wanted his children to step up the socioeconomic ladder. he put him on a course to warden at the university of pennsylvania and then harvard law school, so it really was his father who set him on this trajectory that people assume would be contrary to his father's wishes. >> the only thing i would add is is about the early education. he was a nerd.

[laughter] he studied all the time and worked hard. he had numerous after school and before school jobs. he talked about, you you know, running a gas pump to make money, to make spending money. his younger brother would milk cows and then he would deliver the milk. they made change for a newark street carr. i mean, he really worked hard in school and worked hard outside of school to have money and be responsible. >> yes. thank you. a couple history things i'm trying to recall. i know he was the only catholic for a while, was he the first catholic justice ever on the court? this no. >> no. i don't remember -- there were about five, i think, before him. the first catholic on the court was actually roger tawny. >> oh, okay. >> and then -- >> that one didn't go so well. [laughter] >> the one immediately before brennan was frank murphy. and there was a gap of a few

years which is an interesting part of the story. cardinal spelman came to see president eisenhower on a couple of different occasions and said, hey, remember the catholic seat after frank murphy had been off the court for a few years, hey, remember the catholic seat? would be nice if you got us another one sometime, mr. president. and when eisenhower heard that sherman minton was retiring and that he was going to have this vacancy to fill, one of the first things he said was, you know, remember the visit from cardinal spelman, let's look for a catholic. >> well, you mentioned -- was it souter who took his spot? >> souter, yes. >> oh, souter. i remembered hearing some folks say that there were statements by eisenhower later that the biggest mistakes he ever made were warren and brennan. was there any -- did he ever --

>> the answer is yes and no. there's substantial evidence that eisenhower thought that. >> uh-huh. >> there is no evidence that he actually ever said the words publicly even though they are attributed to him in dozens of history books. i actually had a bizarre experience early in this process of tracing those words and their, you know, you go from one book to the next and the next book cites another one, and you go to the other one and you go to another one, and eventually i came to the end of the line, and there was no source. it was actually a miscitation, and the words had been said about somebody else. but having done that, i also found that there were several places where privately eisenhower expressed that sentiment, so i think he felt it. although i'm not sure he said the famous words that are attributed to him. >> i would just add that justice

brennan, while certainly more liberal than president eisenhower would have imagined, he wasn't looking for a bedrock conservative. he was, this was 1956, the fall. he was about to -- in the middle of a re-election race that was tighter than anyone expected, his health was at issue, he was looking for a catholic democrat with lower court experience. you added that up, there wasn't a very big pool to choose from. so in the sense that that was the goal, those were the criteria, justice brennan fit the bill. i think, i don't think president eisenhower exactly expected him to become the great liberal champion that he became, but as far as the immediate task, he fit the bill that he wanted. >> and in contrast to today's supreme court nomination process, i don't think anybody in the entire eisenhower administration ever asked brennan a single question about what his impact would be on the

supreme court. where he would fit or how he would decide cases. i mean, they basically asked him if he was a good judge, and he was smart enough to say yes. [laughter] and on the, you know, in the course of the nomination the question about his catholicism as an important part of the nomination, when they introduced him in the white house press room to the press corps, they really only said one thing about him. not, you know, we think he's going to be a practitioner of judicial restraint or an advocate of original intent or something like that. they came out to the press room and said this is the nominee for the supreme court, justice william j. brennan of the new jersey supreme court, and a member in good standing of the holy name society. [laughter] >> and then of all the great legal justices he served with, who did you sense he had the most legal respect for as another justice?

>> he said when he came to the court the one he was most afraid of -- not scared afraid but sort of awed by was hugo black, that hugo black's reputation for sort of constitutional intellect was legendary. so i, maybe i would leave it at that. >> hi. sort of following up on that last question, i was just curious if you could provide any particular insights into his skills as a consensus builder. and you also talk about his frustration with justice marshall, and if you could discuss a little bit of that, that would be great. >> let me address justice marshall first. this was a topic of great sensitivity to justice brennan in his conversations with steve. justice brennan believed that thurgood marshall was, perhaps, the most gifted litigator he had ever heard argue before the court. justice brennan started serving

in 1956 when thurgood marshall was still arguing civil rights cases on the behalf of the naacp, and he later served as solicitor general, so he had tremendous respect for his skills as a lawyer. but as he explained to steve and he said this with great concern about how it might be perceived by the public, he was disappointed with justice marshall's performance once he joined the court. he had a sense that justice marshall had sort of given up in the '70s and '80s as their warren court majority shrank and he felt as if justice marshall wasn't doing his share of the heavy lifting to preserve the gains of the warn court. now, that's his perception. i'm just telling you what he believed. he was extraordinarily reluctant to talk about this publicly. he believed that justice marshall had never gotten his due for his tremendous achievements as a lawyer and judge, and he felt part of it was racism, and he didn't want to say anything that