WASHINGTON — Early yesterday morning, Judge Robert H. Bork died in an Arlington, Va., hospital of complications from heart disease.
A renowned legal scholar and former professor at Yale, Bork served as U.S. solicitor general and U.S. attorney general, as well as sat as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1982-1988, where he was succeeded by Clarence Thomas.
Today, he is probably best remembered for the contentious Senate confirmation battle that followed his nomination to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan.
The acrimony of that confirmation, which included Sen. Edward Kennedy’s now-infamous description of “Robert Bork’s America” and featured a denunciation by Bill Clinton (a former student of Bork’s from his years of teaching at Yale), has cast a long shadow over subsequent Supreme Court nominations.
It also gave the English language a new verb, “to bork,” defined by the 2002 Oxford English Dictionary as “to defame or vilify (a person) systematically, esp. in the mass media, usually with the aim of preventing his or her appointment to public office; to obstruct or thwart (a person) in this way.”
Bork was no stranger to political controversy. He had already been criticized for his involvement in the Watergate-era “Saturday Night Massacre,” when he fulfilled President Nixon’s order to fire Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had displeased Nixon by requesting tapes of conversations the president had held in the Oval Office.
But despite this experience of partisan politics, Bork was unprepared for the viciousness of his landmark nomination battle. As he put it in his 1990 book The Tempting of America, “It had simply never occurred to me that anybody could misrepresent my career and views as Kennedy did.”
Bork resigned his seat on the D.C. Circuit in the aftermath of the hearings, leading some commentators to suggest that he had been embittered by the process. However, Opus Dei Father C. John McCloskey III, who was instrumental in Bork’s conversion to Catholicism in 2003, offered a description of his friend that counters this dark portrait.
“[Bork] could play the curmudgeon. He was hirsute; he had the beard — he was also a big smoker. He could have been a jazz musician in the 1950s. He had an ironic sense of humor. … [But] he was fun to be with. One of the things he was famous for was the Bork martini,” said Father McCloskey, referring to a special recipe the judge concocted to serve to guests at his house. “I wouldn’t call him a slap-your-back kind of fellow, but he was fun to be around.”
Mary Ellen Bork’s Influence
Bork was greatly influenced in his conversion by his second wife, Mary Ellen Pohl, a former Catholic nun. Former National Review editor Kate O’Beirne, a friend of the Borks who also acted as Judge Bork’s godmother, described Mrs. Bork as a key influence on his decision to enter the Church.
“Through his towering intellect, Bob Bork reasoned his way to the faith with his beloved wife, Mary Ellen, as his indispensable guide and example,” O’Beirne told the Register.
Bork himself repeated the same tale from a different angle, when he paraphrased a congratulatory note sent by the late Father Richard John Neuhaus, the editor of First Things, shortly after his reception into the Church: “[N]ow all of the saints [can] get some rest from Mary Ellen’s importuning.”
Mrs. Bork gave a similar story when she spoke of her husband’s conversion during an interview earlier this year. “When we told people about this, a friend of ours said, ‘Well, now Mary Ellen can give St. Monica and St. Jude a rest’ — St. Monica being the mother of St. Augustine, who prayed for his conversion for many years, and St. Jude being the patron saint of impossible cases.”
Over the past 10 years, Mary Ellen Bork continued to take care of her husband physically, as she had done spiritually, supervising his care as he battled a number of serious health problems.
Two Men for All Seasons
Four years before Bork’s conversion, there were already indications of his deepening attraction to Catholicism, when he penned an article on St. Thomas More for First Things.
Bork’s admiration for More was apparent, even as he critiqued the accuracy of Robert Bolt’s portrayal of the saint in the play A Man for All Seasons. While admitting that Bolt’s play “got More remarkably right,” Bork disputed the playwright’s interpretation of the English saint’s motive for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy.
“Bolt writes that More seemed to him ‘a man with an adamantine sense of his own self.’ … Yet it seems wrong, or at least potentially misleading, to attribute More’s behavior to ‘selfhood,’” Bork suggested.
“It is a symptom of our disorder that we glorify, practically deify, the individual conscience. It was not always so. It must have been well into this century before ‘civil disobedience’ and ‘heresy’ became terms of praise. To the contrary, More’s behavior may be seen as submission to external authority, a conscious and difficult denial of self.”
From that statement, Bork moves into a reflection on law in modern America as compared with law in More’s Tudor-era England, reaching at length a remarkable conclusion on the dangers inherent in the failure to submit to religious authority.
“Liberty of conscience, insofar as it means the freedom of the individual to construct his own norms, moves from religion to morality, from morality to law, and hence to religious, moral and legal anarchy,” he concluded.
Bork’s affinity for More was based not only on an admiration for his thought, but also on certain coincidences of life.
Father McCloskey observes that “Robert Bork was one of the greatest jurists in United States history and one of the greatest public servants and a judge also; and More was all those things as well. … Bob, in his own way, was a man for all seasons.”
Austin Ruse, writing for The Catholic Thing in 2008, suggested another connection between the two men.
“At the time of his Senate hearings, according to Bork himself, he was an atheist. And here is what I wonder. Would Bork have journeyed to Rome had he served on the Supreme Court? While Mary Ellen’s example and influence would have remained present either way, other influences certainly would have been brought to bear, namely, power and our tendency to attach ourselves to it. The rich young man went away because he was too attached to his things. … Is it possible that Robert Bork lost the whole world — the court and all that meant — but gained his soul?”
Bork himself, speaking in an interview with Register senior writer Tim Drake, put a humble and typically witty spin on his conversion: “There is an advantage in waiting until you’re 76 to be baptized, because you’re forgiven all of your prior sins. Plus, at that age you’re not likely to commit any really interesting or serious sins.”
Legal Legacy
With Bork’s death, constitutional experts will revive their speculative meditation on what his legacy on the Supreme Court might have been. Certainly the jurisprudence of the last 25 years would have had a different flavor with Bork on the bench instead of Reagan’s substitute nominee, Anthony Kennedy.
Mark Steyn has pointed to Bork’s “terrific comic timing” as one reason why he “would have made a great Supreme Court justice. … If you were on a panel with him, he was lethally economical: He gave the shortest answers and got the biggest laughs.”
But the legacy Bork did leave behind — discounting a single verb as rustic in sound as his beard was in shape — is remarkable enough. In the words of former Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, “There is no one who has articulated the conservative viewpoint on the Constitution more or better than Judge Bork.”
Judge Bork’s legacy also includes three bestselling books, including Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996) and Coercing Virtue (2003). They offer his penetrating insights into the social problems facing modern America and how they are manifested in legal and political dysfunction.
As Father McCloskey put it: Bork “basically saw where we are today, 10 to 15 years ago — he saw the relativism; he saw the government playing too big a part in society.
“He was a prophet.”
Sophia Mason is a graduate student at The Catholic University of America.
She blogs at The Girl Who Was Saturday and lives in Arlington, Virginia.
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Terrific article. Being both a lawyer and recently confirmed (just prior to my 50th birthday), I read this article with great interest. For so long I felt I was never coming back to the Church. God had other plans for me and Judge Bork. God bless and rest in peace, your Honor.
Dear Register, Why are you always in such thrall to conservative reactionaries as Bork? I appreciate he became Catholic, but honestly—how does that whitewash a career of oppressing the poor? I notice you deleted any reference to the fact that Bork was President Nixon’s hatchet man, firing special prosecutor Archibald Cox who was investigating Watergate. (Nixon’s attorney general had refused Nixon’s request to fire Cox). Apart from abortion, Bork was always on the wrong side of everything, from capitalism to unions to the economy to states’ rights.
Dear Andy,
Re Watergate: You must have forgotten to finish reading the article. Please do see my sixth paragraph.
Most sincerely,
The Author.
Why is it that any political figure who takes issue with this country’s steady shifting from a federalist republic to a European social democracy with ever increasing federal power and spending is somehow labeled as “oppressing the poor.”
Andy, please name one instance to substantiate the claim that Judge Bork engaged in a “career of oppressing the poor?”
Arguing against unlimited federal power and spending in favor of subsidiarity, allowing local organizations and local governments to function independently, is entirely consistent with Catholic social teaching.
Bork was a true hero of the people. He was one of our foremost Legal Intellectuals and Moral Leader in our Culture of Death. We can thank the late great Reprobate Ted Kennedy and the Marxist Media Complex ruthlessly savaging this man and his character. God bless Judge Bork.
Bill, Bork opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964; he opposed the one-man one-vote decision of the Supreme Court the same year. He insisted that the First Amendment applies only to political speech, not literature or works of art or scientific expression—not to mention the political spending of which conservatives are so enamored. He felt that under “states rights” – which is not the same thing as subsidiarity – blacks should sit at segregated lunch counters. Under the banner of “states rights”, all manner of gross injustice against the poor and disenfranchised has been advanced or advocated, from the Civil War to defunding Head Start. (BTW, Subsidiarity is a practical notion; “states rights” is conservative ideology. The two ideas are bound to coincide at points, just as subsidiarity and large federal government coinicide at points—such as health care. The U.S. Bishops have been advocating for a large federal government role in health care since the mid-70s, recognizing that universal health care—a Catholic concern—was unworkable without federal involvement). Once again: why are orthodox Catholics so quick to embrace people like Bork, who have worked their entire professional careers to hurt people and further empower the already powerful? I’m glad he came into the Church, and may he rest in peace. But that doesn’t make his earthly life particularly praise-worthy.
Judge Robert Bork would have been the best Supreme Court Justice in my 85 years, and I respected him highly. If he had been confirmed, our nation might have found its way back to the Republic our forefathers intended instead of the socialist pagan nation we have now become. Senator Edward Kennedy was a political disgrace his entire career. I was so glad when Judge Bork converted to Catholicism. Thank you Sofia,for your great analysis on his life.
To this day I still cringe when I hear the replay of Ted Kennedy’s diatribe against this man when he was in consideration for the Supreme Court. I just hope that Judge Bork had charity for Kennedy, because he certainly didn’t deserve it.
Excellent article, my family totally left the democratic party after what they did to that man…......... Andy sounds like a typical liberal, wild accusation’s with no proof….....
Andy,
“[S]tates rights” is conservative ideology.” Really? Then apparently the 10th amendment and the Bill of Rights is conservative propaganda: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
You know, all that other conservative ideology found in the 1st amendment about religion - “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” (via Obamacare and HHS mandates); the 2nd - “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” (via radical gun control, except in the case of Fast and Furious); the 5th - “nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” (via Chrysler/GM government takeover), to name a few that “progressives” have either ignored or opposed all or portions of, and would love to amend in part or repeal in entirety. There’s so much to debunk about what you’ve written there isn’t the time or space. Besides that your class warfare and liberation theology like Catholicism makes a sane man’s head spin.
Compared to Ku Klux Klaner Hugo Black and Roe v. Wade Harry Blackmun, two justices revered by liberals, a Justice Robert Bork would have elevated the court to the level of a Chief Justice Earl Warren again, and made it likely his decisions would have surpassed in jurisprudence the craven ones made by those two men.
EJ, I think Roe was a terrible decision, on both constitutional and moral grounds. Blackmun—along with five Republican-appointed justices and one Democratic—generated one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in history, right up there with Dred Scott. Southern democrats like Hugo Black were just as racist as southern Republicans—remember, LBJ said the Democrats would lose the South for a generation, and he was right. Political conservatives are free to take extreme positions on the 10th and 2nd Amendments, but I sincerely doubt that Jesus is for armor-piercing bullets in the hands of civilians and high-round magazines. As Catholics, we are called to be Catholic first. I break with the Democratic party on abortion and gay marriage. Where do you break with the GOP? Do you find anything wrong with the GOP? As far as class warfare goes, the GOP has already declared war on the middle class: why is the GOP so protective of the 1%? Is that Catholic? What about the preferential option for the poor?
Andy,
No need to question where you stand, it’s blatantly obvious. So please forgo the sanctimony on your part and the gross exaggerations you entertain to justify your liberation-esq theology. The issue isn’t what would Jesus say that you and so many others so tritely say in his stead. Jesus spoke nary a word against the brutal Roman Empire, except to say “Give to Caesar . . . “, and to praise a Roman centurion for his faith. At the foot of the cross a second centurion recognized Him for who He is. He saved most of his ire for ones like yourself with this “I know what God (or Jesus) would do sophistic elitism.
EJ, Take a deep breath. It’s Christmas Eve! I assume you are Roman Catholic and are therefore seeking God’s will through the direction of the Church. If you only knew me you would know I am light years from being a liberation theologian! I ask you again, however: do you break with the GOP at any point? Do you think the GOP errs anywhere? If you don’t—and I get the impression you think the GOP is largely tracking God’s will in all areas of its platform and practice—then I think you need to ask yourself if you are captive to a human ideology. If it makes you feel better to call me sanctimonious, then by all means level the charge—you may be more right than I think. But still, ask yourself: are you a Republican first or a Catholic first? Hopefully, you will answer Catholic. If so, then you are as required as I am to submit yourself to the magisterium—on all issues, not the ones that are appeal to us. Peace, brother.
Andy,
I guess now that its coming up on the New Year, I need to take an even deeper breath. Of course, that I posted on December 23 and you on Christmas Eve would suggest, by your own standard, you should have postponed your reply.
What makes you assume the extent of my political party affiliation at all. I quite comfortably vote Republican now, and did vote Democrat many years ago. My affiliation with the pro-abortion, euthanasia, unreal “gay marriage”, and socialist medicine party ended when the Liar-in-Chief, William Jefferson Clinton, was first chosen the presidential candidate despite the Gennifer Flowers affair, and my disapproval of the party cemented when he was renominated in the wake of Troopergate, and was defended to the hilt on the Kathleen Willey rape allegations, and his Paula Jones case perjury via, at minimum, Monica Lewinsky. What did you so like about the man that you never saw fit to change affiliation?
Again, it’s your quasi-libertarian theology, 1 percent-er language (which by the way if you haven’t heard, Axlerod and Obama have since revised it to the “top 2%”) and the fact that you think I might for one minute believe the “GOP is largely tracking God’s will in all areas of its platform and practice” is what I find most distasteful, if not repulsive. And all just so beautifully wrapped in the pretty paper and ribbon of “I’m a social justice Catholic” in essence approved by the Magisterium venere. On which you think the Democrat party has substantially cornered the market. I don’t part with the Magisterium in matters to which we are bound, but can find some level of disagreement in matters prudential, and is thus considered the use of one’s faith and reason. So too in a similar fashion, I can part with the Republican party but fail to see the need entirely since the issues I noted above, of which three are intrinsic evils, have not been engraved into the GOP platform as they are in their counterpart’s. I suppose come hell or high water you’ll vote the straight ticket.
As a Catholic I am, pardon me we are asked, if not fundamentally required, to love the sinner and hate the sin. Andy, you seem to think it’s appropriate at least to hate 1% of the people, and probably Tea Partiers, NRA members, and so on and so on too, sinner or not.
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