Robert H. Bork 1927-2012, RIP

Pajamas Media ^ | 12/19/12 | Roger Kimball

[cotton1706]

Judge Robert H. Bork, one of the the greatest jurists this country has ever produced, died early this morning from heart complications in a Virginia hospital near his home. He was 84.

Bork was a national celebrity. Several years ago, my wife and I visited the Borks in Maine where they had taken a summer house off Somes Sound. I cannot count the times that total strangers would approach us at a lobster shack or park asking to shake the Judge’s hand and to assure him of their admiration and support.

Bork’s celebrity was only partly conferred upon him by brilliant legal work and his service as Solicitor General and then Acting Attorney General in the tumultuous Watergate years of the Nixon administration. (Andrew McCarthy wrote an excellent summary of Judge Bork’s work in The New Criterion a few years ago: “Robert H. Bork on Law and Life.”) But by far the most important fuel for fame was the riveting, not to say obscene, attack upon his candidacy for the Supreme Court in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.

The vicious campaign waged against Judge Bork set a new low—possibly never exceeded—in the exhibition of unbridled leftist venom, indeed hate. Reporters combed through the Borks trash hoping to find comprising tidbits; they inspected his movie rentals, and were disgusted to find the films of John Wayne liberally represented. So hysterical was the campaign against Judge Bork that a new transitive verb entered our political vocabulary: “To Bork,” scruple at nothing in order to discredit and defeat a political figure. Monsieur Guillotine gave his name to that means of execution; “progressives,” those leftists haters of America who have so disfigured our national life since the 1960s, gave us the this new form of character assassination. The so-called “Lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy, surely one of the most despicable men ever to hold high public office in the United States (yes, that’s saying something), stood on the Senate floor and emitted a serious of calumnious lies designed not simply to prevent Judge Bork from being appointed to the Supreme Court but to soil his character irretrievably. “Robert Bork’s America,” quoth Kennedy,

is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.

A breathtaking congeries of falsehoods that, were they not protected by the prerogatives of senatorial privilege, would have taken a conspicuous place in the annals of malicious slander and character assassination. In The Tempting of America, Judge Bork recounts his incredulity at this tissue of malign fabrication. “It had simply never occurred to me that anybody could misrepresent my career and views as Kennedy did.” At the time, he notes, many people thought that Kennedy had blundered by emitting so flagrant, and flagrantly untrue, an attack. They were wrong. His “calculated personal assault, . . . more violent than any against a judicial nominee in our country’s history,” did the job (with a little help from Joe Biden and Arlen Specter). Not only was Kennedy instrumental in preventing a great jurist from taking his place on the Supreme Court, he also contributed immeasurably to the cheapening of American political discourse.

In a way, Robert Bork had the last laugh. Ted Kennedy went to his grave a rancid, lumbering, pathetic laughing stock. Bork went from intellectual triumph to intellectual triumph, contributing now-classic studies to the library of legal understanding and penning two of the most important works of social criticism of the last several decades, the aofremention Tempting of America and Slouching Toward Gemorrah, wild bestsellers both. I am proud to say that this spring Encounter Books will be publishing a memoir by Judge Bork called Saving Justice: Watergate,. The Saturday Night Massacre, and Other Adventures of a Solicitor General.

Bob Bork was a great American and a dear friend, witty, compassionate, with a laser-like analytical mind and compendious store of cultural reference. (It was he who introduced me to John Buchan’s marvelous memoir Memory, Hold the Door.) I will have more to say about Bob and his achievement in due course. For now, I wish merely to register my gratitude for his friendship, admiration of his work, and sorrow at his passing. Requiescat in pace.

[cherry]

imagine our world would be different if Bork was on the SC.....

imagine having jurists who acutually defended the constitution...

[dowcaet]

It’s a shame that great and honorable men like Judge Bork get slimed, have their reputations destroyed, and are denied great public service positions. Robert Bork was and always will be one hundred times the man Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden wished they were. RIP your honor the Supreme Court and the country would have been far better off had you sat on the high court.

[shhrubbery!]

The Left's attempt to destroy a good and decent man, Robert Bork, was one of the great disillusioning events of my young adulthood.

While Ted Kennedy and his ilk were murdering the truth about Bork, my liberal mother-in-law uttered a few candid words that I will never forget:
"It's a shame --and I know he's a kind man who took good care of his wife when she was dying of cancer-- but it has to be done."

[Albion Wilde]

One of the best books on American law and culture I have read in decades:

Barnes and Noble Overview
"Slouching Towards Gomorrah [orig. 1996] is an insightful expose of a country in crisis at the end of the millennium, where the rise of...radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification), has undermined our culture, our intellect and our morality."
In a new Afterword, the author highlights recent disturbing trends in our laws and society, with special attention to matters of sex and censorship, race relations, and the relentless erosion of American moral values.

[Albion Wilde]

John Warner, then “R” senator from VA, voted against his confirmation after saying he would vote for confirmation... Thereafter, I never voted for Warner but always wrote in “Robert Bork.”

Awesome!

[Albion Wilde]

RIPing...

[Salvation]

May his souls, and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

A true hero in my way of thinking.

[Christian4Bush]

R.I.P. bump

[Democrat_media]

If Bork had been on the court, if the media/democrats hadn’t smeared him America would be a freer, more prosperous place , a totally different place .We wouldn’t have Obamacare for one thing.

[Dajjal]

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Anima eius, et animæ omnium fidelium defunctorum, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen.

[Barnacle]

... Richardson and Ruckelshaus told Bork to "hold the bag," because all three thought they if they resigned at the same time, they'd put the Justice Department's highest-ranking position in the hands of a career diplomat...

What you say might or might not be true. I don't know. The fact that Bork fired Archibald Cox remains a major for me. I will never forget when that news came in that night. I feared for the future of America.

[Gene Eric]

Mark Levin spoke to this yesterday. His shows are recorded and available at marklevinshow.com. See 12/19

http://www.marklevinshow.com/sectional.asp?id=32930

[Lion Den Dan]

Amen.

[Theodore R.]

I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this, but I recall that Judge Bork had both Clintons as “pupils” in a law school class and had no memory whatsoever of either of them. This of course was before the Clintos became celebrities, worshipped by tens of millions of gullible Americans. He didn’t see anything there to remember, or maybe it was such a large class tht no one stood out.

[CORedneck]

That Warner wanted to also reinstate the 55 mph speed limit before he left office. Didn’t have much use for Chaffee either. Basically the East Coast establishment.

> (along with John Warner et al) voted him

[SamuraiScot]

He did? Then why do the lying communist propogandists in the media continue to refer to lying POS scumbag as the "lion of the Senate".

They don't believe their own words. Teddy was all they had. Even liberals joked (in private) that he was the Whale of the Senate.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping; post. Condolences to family and friends of Robert Bork.

[loveliberty2]

On another thread, a writer was quoted as saying, "That he did not [become a Justice] was largely the handiwork of political hacks not fit to judge a man of his caliber. . . ."

What a powerfully accurate summary of the shameful conduct of those "political hacks," many of whom remain in positions of power in the American government!

Judge Bork's view of the Constitution and its protections for individual liberty were consistent with the principles and understanding of those who framed it and of those who participated in ratifying it in the States.

His views were consistent with those of Madison, Hamilton and Jay, as expressed in the 85 essays of THE FEDERALIST.

Further, his views were consistent with the idea expressed by Jefferson:

" "On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed." - Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823, The Complete Jefferson, p. 322.

The descendants of the very men who prevented Judge Bork from serving on the Supreme Court will, for generations, see their liberties diminished because of the shameful actions of their ancestors--men who prevented this staunch defender of liberty from contributing his Creator-endowed gift of understanding and fidelity to his nation's Constitution.

[SuziQ]

Teddy "The Swimmer" Kennedy's treatment of Robert Bork was the beginning of the "politics of personal destruction". Sure the media was ugly about Reagan when he was running, but it was nothing compared to what they did to Robert Bork, and later, to Clarence Thomas.

And yet, in typical Democrat 'projection', they always accuse Republicans, and especially conservatives, of doing this sort of thing. We couldn't do it as effectively, if we tried.