The Nine [151]
Bush remained largely detached from the process until he returned from Europe in the second week in July. He had taken the candidate memos with him to study, but he prided himself on his ability to size people up in person. His aides spoke often of his “intuitive” style of managing, which relied more on gut reactions than detailed research. (After first meeting President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Bush said, “I looked the man in the eye…. I was able to get a sense of his soul.”) On July 14 and 15, several of the candidates were ushered in to see the president through the East Wing of the White House to make sure that they were not seen by the reporters who monitored the west gate. Wilkinson, Clement, Alito, Luttig, and Roberts all spent about an hour with the president. Their conversations, though, were little more than chitchat. Bush asked them all about their families, several about their exercise routines, and Wilkinson about Yale, where the president had been his contemporary. There was little discussion of judicial philosophy, and none at all of individual cases. (Recalling his interview with Bush, Luttig later complained to a friend, “It was totally nonsubstantive”—and thus revealed why he didn’t get the job.)
Still, this was a time of big ambitions, even grandiosity, at the White House. When it came to appointments, Bush’s advisers liked to brag, “We only hit home runs.” In the first summer of his second term, Bush still had a sense that his presidency would bring dramatic changes to the country and the world. Right after his reelection, he had said, “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” In his second inaugural address, Bush had announced, “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” In the domestic sphere, Bush had committed himself to transforming the most venerable and sprawling of all federal programs, Social Security. The appointment of a Supreme Court justice, in Bush’s view, had to represent a similarly large gesture.
That doomed Wilkinson. Bush’s aides condemned the Virginian by calling him “a cautious choice.” At that moment, the Bush presidency was not about caution. The president liked Clement a great deal, but he was troubled by her lack of a substantial judicial record. In addition, an estranged former law clerk of Clement’s was threatening to go public with purported tales of racially and religiously insensitive comments by the judge; the controversy might be disruptive, because there was so little else to say about her. Alito struck Bush as solid, but he had few passionate supporters (or detractors) in the White House or Washington generally. (Alito, who lived outside Newark, was not invited to the Olson soirée.)
In the end, the choice came down to Roberts or Luttig. Roberts had been teaching a summer class in London, and he came back to Washington for his interview with Bush on July 15, then returned overseas. He was blessed with supporters in the right places. Leitch revered Roberts, as did William Kelley, a professor at Notre Dame Law School who was Harriet Miers’s successor as deputy White House counsel. Brett Kavanaugh, who was now Bush’s staff secretary, and Christopher Bartolomucci and Bradford Berenson, who had left the White House, all weighed in