The Nine [18]
The interview came at a time when the justices rarely said anything to the press, much less engaged in soul baring for People magazine. Thomas’s cooperation with the magazine was especially inappropriate because, just a month earlier, he had refused to answer exactly these kinds of questions about his personal life before the Judiciary Committee. The People spread compounded the Court’s sense of bewilderment about him.
Thomas moved into his chambers and heard…nothing from his new colleagues. In part, this was just the style of the Rehnquist Court. The justices did not casually drop by one another’s offices. At the D.C. Circuit and in his other government jobs, Thomas liked to wander the halls, shoot the breeze, or make spur-of-the-moment lunch plans, but that simply wasn’t done at the Court. He met his new colleagues at conference, where they greeted him cordially, but their interaction stopped there. For Thomas, the silence in his chambers was deafening.
So Thomas retreated. Two of the first decorating touches on the bare walls of his office were telling. In the entrance foyer he posted an admonition to respect the confidentiality of all Supreme Court business. On the door to his private office, he put the words “Do Not Disturb.” He used to enjoy taking lunchtime walks around the D.C. Circuit courthouse, but his notoriety made anonymity impossible. He even stopped driving his beloved black Corvette to work. (“REZ IPSA,” the vanity license plate said, a play on the Latin legal phrase that means “The thing speaks for itself.”) The car was too recognizable. “I used to love to walk out with my clerks and walk down to the Old Post Office and have barbecue or something like that or walk over to Union Station and have cheese fries or something,” Thomas told the Docket Sheet, the Supreme Court’s internal newsletter, in the only interview he gave after People. “My total loss of anonymity has been the big change in that regard.” In one respect, it was fortunate that Thomas almost never left the Supreme Court building by foot in his first year, because it meant that he probably never saw the boldly lettered graffito on a Capitol Hill sidewalk across the street. It said, “Anita Told the Truth.”
Unlike most of his fellow justices, Thomas made an effort to learn the names of the people who worked at the Court—the cafeteria workers, clerks, and cops. Despite his friendly demeanor, the Court employees saw how devastated he was by the confirmation battle. Years later, Thomas recalled that one of the Supreme Court police officers who noticed how “battered and beaten” he looked took to welcoming him each day with the words “Don’t let them take your joy.”
Just weeks after joining the Court, Thomas had a chance to strike back at the “them” who had tormented him in the hearings. The question before him: Should Roe v. Wade be overruled?
3
QUESTIONS PRESENTED
There were two kinds of cases before the Supreme Court. There were abortion cases—and there were all the others.
Abortion was (and remains) the central legal issue before the Court. It defined the judicial philosophies of the justices. It dominated the nomination and confirmation process. It nearly delineated the difference between the national Democratic and Republican parties. And in 1992, the issue—and the Court—appeared to be at a turning point.
For the first time since Roe v. Wade was decided nineteen years earlier, eight of the nine justices on the Court had been appointed by Republicans, whose party was publicly and officially committed to ending legalized abortion. (And the single Democratic appointee, Byron White, who was named by John F. Kennedy in 1962, had dissented in Roe and voted against abortion rights in every subsequent case.)