so i'm very deeply worried about it. and it's another thing i'm hoping president obama will be very stern and supportive of the global warming issue and put into a way to reduce or on necessary production of carbon dioxide and so forth that goes up into the air. >> host: i have enjoyed speaking with you. you've got white house by a result which has hit the best-seller list and has done incredibly well. are you planning on writing another book or are you working on one now? >> guest: my next book is going to be in 2011. it is a collection of my bible lessons. i teach sunday school and my church every sunday i'm home, about 35, 40 times a year and all of them are recorded and the biggest religious book published i think in the world, and i've signed a contract and they have got an editor to take 365 of my

record at sunday school lessons and reduce them down to one page each and that would be my next book out in the fall of 2011. >> host: i look forward to it, and merry christmas to you, b v2 mr. president. .. >> first of all, thank you for

hosting us tonight for book lovers like us. this is two baseball fans being given a chance to play at yankee's baseball stadium. thank you to our friends, family, colleagues, and the supreme court clerks in the add yen tonight. i want to take note of one person who is not here. my father had surgery in new york, and he wouldn't let me come up to see him until after the event because he knew how much it meant to me. dad, i love you, and i look forward to watching this with you on c-span very soon. now, i'm to the reason you're all here. william j. brennan j.r. was a state judge and lawyer when president eisenhower nominated him to the united states supreme court in 1956. over the course of 34 terms, he was the most influential judges

of the 20th century, and that's not just wikipedia speaking. he had his hand in every major issue of the day from school prayer and school segregation to abortion and affirmative action. for much of that, no one outside the cowrpt knew just how influential a role he played in building coalitions under chief justice earl warren and the two success sores -- successors. when he turned 08 and marked his 30th anniversary on the court, he taxed steve as his biographer as we like to joke. i was in 5th grade worried more about the mets winning the world series. he granted access to all of his

papers and began 60 hours of interviews over the course of five years. we thought we'd thought tonight with steve telling the story of how he became justice brennan's biographer and what that experience was like. >> thank you. just for the record, i'm a politics of pros member too. our thoughts are with your father as well. thank you all for being here. 1986 was a remarkable opportunity for me. if you imagine, i had been in washington for quite a while at that point and had been writing for the "boston globe" and then the "wall street journal" for seven to eight years at point. you had 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 08, he was -- 80, he was celebrating years on the supreme court and was thinking of his legacy. he had not at that moment decided to retire, but he knew there wasn't that much longer to remain on the court, and how he would be remembered in history was very much on his mind. he looked around for a biographer. i had a good friend and mentor, the chief judge of the u.s. court of appeals here who had also become good friends with justice brennan, and he made the introductions and it went from

there. it astounded me how smooth the process began. i went very consciously. i figured i'll get a tape recorder and ask him questions and whether i can see if i can get access to papers and files, and over time, i would say can i see this and that and get more aggressive and say, can i take that home and can i copy that and then can i get that documented in your bottom drawer? he had this amazing resource which, at least to our knowledge, no other justice had ever done beginning in about 1960, so for 30 years from 1960 until 1990, he had his law clerks prepare narrative accounts of the most interesting cases of the supreme court term. they are not so much legal documents as they are a kind much great nonfiction read.

i mean, here's how the case got here, here's how the justice the voted, and here's which justice talked to justice brennan about this case, here's who we identified with the critical vote and 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 i felt i had to approach carefully and slowly and didn't really ask him to give me access to for quite a while, but again, to my amazement after awhile, i knew where they were. they were in the bottom right hand drawer of his desk. [laughter] i also came to know it was not locked. [laughter] after awhile i just would knock on the door early in the morning. he was at work by seven o'clock in the morning, and the supreme court police called up to the chambers because his secretary was not there yet and said,

steve is here, they would escort me up, i knocked on the door asking for the history, and he'd say sure. i walked in, pulled open the drawer, pulled a history, and sat down and read it. it was a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous amount of detail and insight about the court, and he was also generous with his own time with 60 hours of interviews. the interviews were fascinating, but a mixed experience as well. he was always very careful about how hementedded to be depicted -- how he wanted to be depicted and portrayed. not that there aren't many, many moments of candor, but there were things that he just wasn't going to talk about. he wasn't going to talk about deep, personal emotions. his first wife had died of

cancer after suffering from 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 remarried his secretary, and he said i don't know how you're going to do that, marry your secretary would have a fit. we have on tape the conversation in which i said, but justice brennan, you married this woman for 50 years, surely you don't think we're not going to write about your first wife, who she was, and what she meant in your life. she never talked about her. every time i brought it up, he said, oh, how she suffered, and that was the end of the conversation. many were guarded and cautious and when he was, we learned a tremendous amount about him.

i would ask him at first i did it not intentionally. at first it was a sincere question. there were two things i asked him that drove him nuts. i would ask him, how can it be that your religion doesn't affect your decision making? again, the first couple of times i asked that, it was a sincere question. i wanted to know what he would say, but he was so, was almost like i pressed a button that played back a recording. he would give me this kind of 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 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'd 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 can't understand that. to me, that was valuable. i began to get a sense that that was not just a prerecorded message, but really what he felt. the other question i asked with regularity was a variation on that. how can you possibly separate your personal views from your decision making? it was the thing everybody wants to know about a judge. how do you really do that? can you really do that? can anyone really do that? he would say the same thing. he got kind of angry and say, you know, what i think in my personal life is not what matters when i'm deciding 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. set will talk about some of the insights that that led us to in

the very, what i think, is the more interesting aspect of the book. this went on for a number of years, and like 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 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 awhile. i put it down for a long time, and then picked it back up and putt it down again, and after awhile concluded i was not going to get it done without somebody to help me do it, and 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 a

great fashion and the book really would not have been completed without his extraordinary effort, so that's the story behind the book. i'll say a couple quick things about justice brennan, and 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 interesting things. first of all, if you ever read anything about him, you 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 anybody that ever met him will tell you that when you walked into the 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 great memory. i don't think i would have believed it otherwise. his law clerks said he would be talking about a case sitting around his desk, and suddenly he would swivel in his desk chair and turn to the 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 can do that when he had 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 the case? 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 war in court. there were towering intellectual figures on the clark, william douglas, felix, john harbert, and brennan was a guy from new jersey that nobody heard of and had no particular reputation. it was not until later that we learned what an incredible influence he had behind the

scenes in the war in court and continued to have in subsequent year, and i think the book documents that, and i hope that's one the val -- values of the book, and certainly was a great value to the access to the papers and he being willing to talk about what went on. one of the great revelation he told me, and i ask other people around the court for different periods of time about this was that earl warren came in and had private mettings 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 a remarkable role 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 so i think, as i said, i think that's one of the values of the book. now, let's let seth have a turn, and we'll go back and forth i think. >> i'm not letting steve off the hook yet. as amazing as this sounds, i think he's understating the drake of access he had to brennan's chambers. can you talk about the morning coffees talking about cases having free reign to photocopy anything you wanted. >> one of the amazing opportunities i had and this came after awhile, this is not something i asked to do at first, but justice brennan would come in at 7 a.m. and the clerks arrived at 7:0 --

7:30 or 8 and they had coffee for 45 minutes to an hour talking about the court and the events of the day, and after time, i was invited to join them which was remarkable. i heard what their relationship was like, what was going on, they talked candidly about other justices and 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 1980 shaped my other books and writings 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 was just 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 in 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 for oral argument. he had the 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 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 this aspect of this legal test, and where will we find the fifth vote for that test, or could we compromise on this aspect of 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, deliberative institution even at times when it was deeply divided and making, you know, decisions that are sort of devicive in our country. >> well, i joined steve in 2006. the 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 go into steve's basement where there is an entire law lined with file cabinets, and all of the materials steve accumulated over the course of many years, and i spent a year going through all of those files, started taking notes, eventually had 1800 pages of notes. i did additional research. some of the justices who served with justice brern nan, their papers became open only after steve began his research, and those were fruitful. justice powell and justice blackman saved papers and every scrap of paper that he exchanged with another justice on the bench. in the case of justice powell, he saved every internal memo he shared with his clerks or whatever he wrote in the margins or this is ridiculous, or who is he calling an activist?

just jottings on his memos, and i reinterviewed many of the clerks and members of justice brennan's family who were very generous with their time, and people tepid to be a little more candid with the passage of time that justice brennan was no longer alive, they felt more comfortable sharing their opinions. steve and i i think were in sync on how to approach the writing of the book. unlike some justices who had really fascinating precourt lives and would be merit biography regardless like pioneering civil rights leaders, earl warren, the chief justice, a three term governor of california. justice brennan, there would be no biography of a new jersey state judge and corporate labor lawyer. we purposely condensed that part

and the focus here really is on his tenure as a sphreement court justice. the second aspect is that we reallimented to go down the -- really wanted to go down the middle here. we didn't want to just celebrate him or 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 of -- refusal to high women clerks long after he pioneered women rights decisions. he decided to withdrawal an offer of a clerk in the 1960s because that clerk's alleged ties to communist groups. it was not a moment of bravery on his part. hopefully what we have done is taken a middle of the road approach, that he's called into question when it's merited, and he gets the credit that he

deserves. a couple themes to 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 liberal justice or judge such as justice brennan reads his own personal preferences into his decisions. that really suspect the case with justice brennan. the man that we write about is a very conservative person. as i mentioned, he refused to hire women clerks in 1970 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 decision. 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 saying with all due respect, justice

brennan, you are a hypocrite, and you could be sued under the very precedence he wrote. he relented and hired his first woman clerk. there's other areas like that. he wrote the privacy decisions that paveed the road to wade, and yet he was personally uncomfortable with abortion. he was the champion of the free press. he distrusted reporters. we point out how angry he was about the brethren, the insider account of the scott arm onstrong, this infuriated him. it makes it fascinating to me is somewhat as an outsider in the project that here is this justice, an extraordinarily private person who even close friends 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 angry about things appearing in the "wall street journal," and yet he opened the entire life in a way perhaps that no other justice had to a journalist. he gave steve free reign to his entire life. steve talked about the case history, his case materials, he also give him free reign in his personal correspondence. every letter that justice brennan ever wrote to another justice, to a lawyer, to any member of his family. there's a letter that he found in one of his drawers, a desk drawer, he kept the most cherished possession. 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 browr charlie, the brother he was closest too who was killed

in world war ii, 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. it's extrord their such a private person opened his life to the reporter. 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 to counter. they both are kind of this notion that justice brennan was an irish catholic, and for 30 years, he was the only catholic on the court from 1956 until 1986 when justice scalia joined. for 30 years he was the only catholic and stereotyped from the beginning in two ways as a happy help con.

-- he was a small guy. you see the stories from his con confirmation from his selection described as the jaunty irishman. he was charactered and stereotyped. unfortunately, that stereotype of justice brennan stuck and played into a second notion on how he did his job as a justice. it 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 think in many ways, rightfully so. his success wasn't 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

all innerpersonal was a piece of it. he had a gift of serving at a time when there was moderates on the court where today it's divided ideologically. throughout his tenure, there were people in the middle he could work with. not on every case, but he could find a way to accommodate their concerns, build a majority, and the bigger the majority for justice brennan, the better. this is the last thought and then we'll hear questions. i think justice brennan liked to portray himself less of a politician than he was. when he talked to steve to portray himself as a detached person sitting in his chambers exchanging written meme lows, -- memos, and that's true, but he was a skilled politician in the sense he was good of addressing the needs of his other

colleagues and deployed his clerks in later years when earl warren was no longer chief, his clerk served as diplomats. he let them lose, finding out what was in the other chambers, finding out what the needs were u how to accommodate them. i think it's wrong to suggest he wasn't political at all, but not in the craft, retail politics of a stereotypical politician, so with that, i thank everyone here for coming, and we'd be happy to answer your questions. >> while people are coming up to the microphone, please -- [applause] i just want to set the record straight, that i did do other things beside rifle through his desk drawers. [laughter] >> may i ask as a roman catholic, did he feel pressure from his church or his own

conscious with the decision with respect to abortion? >> i think his identity as a catholic is a key them explored 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 tiew to -- due to the reaction of the church. you saw that on school prayer, obscenity, and certainly with abortion. i think justice brennan had a behind the scenes role. there were decisions such as the cooper and school case in little rock where his role was not done for decades. in rov vs. wade, he was up front, and he felt like the

church catholic. there was a note saying can you read a portion of the opinion begin an eye as the catholic. he wasn't comfortable in that role, and there was a backlash, and he was subject to it. there were calls among some catholics to excommunicate him. i'm going to could have, you get -- cough, you better take over. >> he never wrote an abortion opinion except in the cases where the issue was the funding of abortions for poor woman. he never wrote a substantive opinion to the right of abortion. the only time he wrote a separate opinion in the abortion case 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 role in -- enabling them to be hire, but yet he refused to hire a woman. i don't understand that at all. i don't know if you can explain it, but it seems incredible. >> he came from a different era. when he arrived at the supreme court, he had never had a woman as a professional colleague. i don't think had had seen a woman lawyer appear before him in the 30s and 40s and 50s. he never had a woman colleague as a judge. there were none at the supreme court. there were scarcely any woman law clerks at the supreme court. i mean, i'm not defending it, but it was a different era.

he did not come from a background in which he 4 expo -- he had exposure to woman as professional equals, and so i think he had not a lot of experience with it and sort of was this old-fashioned guy. there was a certain amount of woman belong in the home quality to his view. 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 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. you want to add something? >> i still, being here in washington, i'm a washington one born here, and the supreme court is here. i call this man's paradise abuse

there's so many women here in every office. it's still unbelievable. >> with him being a man of another era, it was not just our answer, but justice jinsberg. she was the key legal strategist, she was the thurgood marshall of women's rights and educated him essentially. we asked her, did you know at the time? she got a letter about him not hiring women. she said it doesn't surprise me because he was a man of a generation that she had to educate him. she viewed her role as a litigator in the court to think about women in a different way. that's the best we can do. >> i mean, both sandraday o'connor had trouble gets jobs when they graduated from law

school. that's the world justice brennan came from. >> hello. i sort of have a multiprong question, and i apologize for that. there's a length of time, and i'm basing this on the "new york times" article a lot, but the fact it took so long to get the look published and you had all this access that you did, my first question is how long -- when was the last time you spoke to justice brennan before he died? how much was your access after he was off the court? also, if you could explain in more detail what your process was and why it took so long and i know you found seth by mutual acquaintance and did you try to find someone before that, or how did it come together to get things moving in the right direction to get this published? >> the first part of the

question, i interviewed him a half dozen times between his retirement in july of 1990 and his death in 1997. we rely less on those interviews in the book, people have tended to forget the reason he retired in 1990 was because he had a stroke, and so i could see when i interviewed him, his memory was not as sharp anymore, and i can look at the 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 before he died. the process -- seth has nothing to do with the delay in the process. the delay is entirely mine. he's the answer to the end of the delay.

[laughter] don't blame him. 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 it not be published while he was sitting on the court. he never made clear a sort of additional concern which was that there might be some questions about his comfort level if i were publishing it when many of the people with whom he'd served were still sitting on the court after he retired. he always said he was going to go out with his boots, dying on the bench, and so frankly i was caught totally off guard when he retired. in fact, i said that to him. i had had a conversation with him several months before he

retired in which i said, you know, i've done a substantial amount of research. five years, four and a half years of research, if you are thinking about retiring at any point and you have the notion i should be writing the book because you're going to retire, it would be great if you gave me some warning. you know, a year's notice, a couple of year's notice would be wonderful -- [laughter] to try to have that opportunity, and so he called me at 7:30 in the morning on july 20, 1990, and said, and i can remember vividly the infliction in his voice app proproof the story and he said steve, i'm going to retire. this was the two year's notice, but it was just two hours notice, not two years notice. in his mind, he remembered he

would give me an advanced warning, and this was the advanced warning, and that, honestly knocked me for a loop. i was not ready to start writing the book or in a position to write the book. i was still working full time at the "wall street journal". i had not thought about writing the book yet. i stopped, tried to write chapters, got them done, but had to go back to work, and that story continued. i changed jobs. i changed careers. i had a wonderful daughter to help raise. he moved cities several times, and so i kept finding difficulty ray getting it -- difficulty getting it done and putting it aside until my daughter was going off to college, and then it seemed like the opportunity moment to say if it's going to happen, it's got to happen now, and it would be great to have somebody to do it

with, and that's when i decided to look for a co.-author -- coauthor. >> this is going to sound self-serving, but i generally 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 were not available at the time steve started working on this and some of the best insights we found about the internal workings of the court were from those. it was better because clerks and family members were more willing to be cab did about their -- candid about their views and personal issues and it's a better back because technology change, the ability to do quick searches in every paper of the country. the red bank register, the local paper in red bank, new jersey, where he sat as a supreme court justice is completely digital

and on the internet. i found every last article when he had his life there. we'll leave it to the reviewers and historians to decide what was better or lost in the interim. >> i mean, i guess i would also add it's a better book because we have more perspective on what his legal legacy was. when he was still sitting in 1990, the notion that the death penalty was in every way unconstitutional was something that he really, he and thurgood marshall were the only ones two subscribed to that view. since he retired and justice marshall retired, several justices expressed severe reservations about the death

penalty system in the country and some have come out and said they probably think it's so bad, it might as well be unconstitutional too. that's a healthy perspective to have on evaluating justice brennan's contribution, and that's just on one issue. there are lots of other things like that that i think we could discuss. >> okay. one last thought. sorry for taking your time. justice brennan had a stroke, but did he express frustrations that he wanted to see the book before he died himself? i know his family was anxious to see it. did he express anything about that or how did that turn out? >> no, he let me know that he'd 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. i mean, he was unfailingly nice. [laughter] if i said i'm working on it and

i hope to have another chapter to give you in a few months, you know, he would, as i said, make you feel like you were the most important person and say, oh, don't you worry about it. just keep doing what you're doing, and it's marvelous that you are doing this at all. you know, i knew he was frustrated, sure. >> okay. thank you. >> where a man comes out 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? >> absolutely. justice brennan's upbringing was in newark, new jersey, born in 1906, the son of two irish

immigrants growing up in county ross common, 10 miles apart there, and they would have never met if they had stayed in ireland. his father was a stationary fireman help operated the boilers in a brewery in newark, and rose up in the union, and became a much belowed 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 was pretty willing to step on people's civil liberties. he was a public official in the 1920s, and he participated

willingly on crackdowns an communists and subversives, and that was something that justice brennan really came to later, and i think the formative experience was harvard law school. he learned much about civil liberties. his father shaped the course of his career and the notion that his father would have rolled over in his grave had he known the union leader father, his son became a corporate labor lawyer. the truth is he wanted him to go in that direction. he wanted his children to step up the the economic ladder. he put him on a course at the university ever pennsylvania and then harvard law school. it was really his father setting him on the path that people would assume would be contrary to his father's wishes. >> the only thing i add is about the early education. he was a nerd. [laughter] he studied all the time and

worked hard. he had numerous afterschool and before school jobs. he talked about, you know, running a gas pump to make money to make spending money, and his younger brother would milk cows and then he would deliver the milk. they made change for a newark streetcar. i mean, he worked hard in school and outside of school to have money and be responsible. >> yes. thank you. a couple history things to recall. i know he was the only catholic, but was he the first ever on the court? >> no. i don't remember, i think there were five before him. the first catholic was roger tauney. >> 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 was an interesting part of

the story that cardinal spellman name to see president eisenhower on a couple different occasions and say, hey, remember the catholic seat after frank murphy was off the court for a few years. it would be nice if you got us another one, mr. president, and when eisenhower heard that sureman mitten was retiring and was going to have a vacancy to fill, one of the first things he said, you know, was remember the visit from cardinal spellman, let's look for a catholic. >> was it sauter who took his place after he retired? >> yes. >> i remembered hearing some folks say there were statements by eisenhower later that the biggest mistake he ever made were warn and brennan. is there -- warren and brennan.

is there any -- >> the answer is yes and no. there is substantial evidence that eisenhower thought that. 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 the process of tracing those words and their, you know, from one book to the next and the next book cites another one and you go to another one and another one, and eventually yourself at the end of the line, and there's no source. it's miscitations and the words were said about something 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 attributed to it. >> 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. this was 1956, the fall, he was about to run in the middle of a reelection race tighter than anyone expected, his health was at issue, he was looking for a catholic democrat with lower court experience, and you added that up, there's note a big pool to choose from. in the sense that that was the goal, that was the criteria, justice brennan fit the bill. i think the -- i don't think president eisenhower 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. >> 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, and basically they asked if he was a good judge, and he was smart enough to say yes. [laughter] on the, you know, in the course of the nomination, the question about his con thole schism as an important part of the nomination, when they introduced him in the white house pressroom to the press corp., they really only said one thing about him. not, you know, we think he's going to be a practitioner of judicial restraint or judicial intent, but they came to the pressroom saying this is the president's nominee for the supreme court, justice william j. brennan of the new jersey supreme court and a member and good standing of the holy name society. [laughter] >> of all the great legal justices he serves, 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 constitutional intellect was revolutionary. maybe i'd leave it at that. >> sort of following up on the last question. i was curious if you can provide particular up sights into his skills as a consensus builder, and you talk about his frustration with justice mar shall, and if you can discuss that, that would be great. >> justice marshall first. this was a topic of great sensitivity with his conversations with steve. justice brennan believed that thurgood marshall was the most gifted litigator argued before the court. justice brennan started serving in 1956 when he was arguing

civil rights cases on behalf of the naacp and 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 since that justice marshall had begin up in the 70s and 80s as the war in court of the majority shrank and felt marshall was not doing his share of the heavy lifting. that's his perception. he was extraordinarily reluctant to talk about this publicly. he believe of -- he believed justice marshall never got his due for his achievements, and he felt it was racism, and he didn't want to

take anything away from what was justice marshall's due. he didn't like to talk publicly or give speeches. he became more reclusive, but justice brennan would constantly when invited, give talks to honor the legacy of justice marshall because he believed so strongly in that. i think he was reluctant to talk about it, and it was a matter of great sensitivity, and i hope we handled it with the sense icht it deserves. >> this is a moment of true confession, and i have many present and former law students in the room, so i'll deny saying any of this. [laughter] but, you know, law professors are obsessed with teaching students about three-part tests and four-party tests, and two-prong analysis and things that the supreme court has focused on over the years, and i think part of justice brennan's skill in consensus building was

he cared more about what the end result was going to be than what the test was. if the issue is that women need protection under the equal protection clause because they are discriminated against in our society, the important point is not whether it's the most rigorous test or only a slightly rigorous test, the point is can you do something to bring women under the equal protection clause and to recognize the harm of gender discrimination? that was the basis of much of his negotiation was i'll give away the fourth prong and settle for a three-prong test if that means that we can advance the interest of civil liberties and civil rightings and constitutional law and why would you be obsessed with the test rather than with the civil liberties goal you're trying to

achieve. >> we have time for one more question. >> while he was on the court, and you were interviewing him, there were two efforts to impeach justices of the court. flores and douglas. did you talk with him about those justices and what were his views if he expressed about the efforts to impeach his colleagues? >> i didn't talk to him that much specifically about the impreachment. i don't think that he thought the effort to impeach douglas was really all that serious or a malter of -- matter of great concern. he was very perturbed by the whole episode with the elevation the fortees to be chief justice, the failure of that, the impact of that on the court because

that meant richard nixon got to pick the next chief justice instead of lyndon johnson. the ethical issued raised after the chief justice nomination died and they found themself exposed in writing about financial scandal payment he had take that was deemed inappropriate, i mean, brennan was very concerned about that so much so that that contributed to his decision then in 1969 to basically withdrawal. if you watch the court in the 70s, unless you were actually in the supreme court chamber, you never laid eyes on william brennan for 13 years. he disappeared from the public. he withdrew from all speaking engagements. he withdrew from financial investments. he resigned from the american

bar association. he basically disappeared from the public eye in part because his wife was suffering from cancer, and he spent a lot of time with her, but also because of the scandal. he was not going to take a chance that he had any finger in anything that might involve any kind of problem. >> i wanted to close tonight reading one paragraph. i don't want you to feel cheated we didn't do any book reading. this is actually the last paragraph of the entire book, and i assure you, we are not ruining the ending. [laughter] "brennan may have offered his best insight on how he would like to be remembered before he joined the supreme court. it came at the end of the february 1954 st. patrick's day speech in boston recalled later for its vailed attack on mccarthyism. it was told by a comedian sitting at his window before the

advent of electricity. he watched the lamp lighter going down the street lighting each lamp. eventually, the lamp lighter was no longer visible, and the story teller could only see the lamps lit. brennan concluded the speech by saying, so it is my friends of you and me of irish blood going through life may we be found lighting the lamps of truth as those before us so that as time passes and we move from the scene of action, our own children and their children after them though we be lost to view maw tell the way -- may tell the way we went by the lamps well lighted along life's pathway. thank you very much. >> for more information go to