The Nine [158]
Once O’Connor settled in Phoenix, she lived in a happy frenzy, juggling legal work, a growing family, and a passion for politics and raucous fun. Miers found a different route to success—narrow focus and dogged effort. By relentless hard work she overcame the customary condescension shown to women lawyers. She was the first woman lawyer at her firm, and its first woman president. Like most big-firm litigators, she tended to represent corporations in lawsuits that settled before trial; companies like Disney and Microsoft, two of her major clients, generally preferred the certainty of a resolution to the risk of a court verdict. Miers’s long hours left little time for diversion. When she was deposed in a lawsuit in 1989, the opposing lawyer asked if she had read a particular book. “I probably can shorten this line of questioning,” Miers said, “if you just asked me when’s the last time I read a whole book.”
Miers’s existence outside the firm amounted to an extension of her life in it. She belonged to the Democratic Party when virtually all of the state’s power brokers did; she contributed $1,000 to Al Gore’s campaign for president in 1988. She worked her way up the hierarchy in the state bar association, a traditional route for advancement in the profession, until she became the first woman president of the Texas bar in 1992. The previous year, she had quit after serving a single two-year term as a member of the Dallas City Council. She felt ill suited for running for office, because she was far more interested in corporate work than in politics. She didn’t litigate constitutional issues or, it would seem, based on the available evidence, give them much thought either.
Like many other single-minded careerists who had focused on their professional life to the exclusion of most everything else, Miers appears to have undergone a spiritual crisis of sorts. For many years, she had an on-and-off romantic relationship with Nathan Hecht, a combative conservative who was a justice on the Texas Supreme Court. Miers was raised a Catholic, but Hecht invited her to join him at Valley View Christian, one of the biggest evangelical churches in Dallas. She did—and it changed her life. As her minister recalled, “Her purpose for life changed. She has a servant’s mentality, and I think that is a tribute to her personal faith. Jesus told his disciples that he didn’t come to be served but to serve. Harriet epitomizes that.”
Not long after Miers’s religious conversion, George W. Bush, who was then running for his first term as governor, ran into some trouble involving a fishing club in east Texas. The caretaker said he had been unjustly fired, and he was suing the members, including Bush. The future governor hired Miers as his lawyer, and she deftly (and quietly) won the case. The up-and-coming politician kept her on as his personal attorney, and Miers embraced George W. Bush with the same born-again passion that she brought to her new church.
On September 21, 2005, Bush held a meeting with a bipartisan group of senators about his plans for filling O’Connor’s seat. To some extent, such “consultations” with senators were a sham; the Bush White House zealously guarded its prerogatives, and no presidential power was more important than the right to select Supreme Court justices. At the meeting, Arlen Specter set his colleagues’ eyes rolling with a preposterous suggestion—that Bush wait until 2006 to nominate anyone, so as to see how Roberts was faring as chief justice, and then to appoint someone who would preserve the Court’s balance.