The Nine [2]
Breyer’s twitchy exuberance posed a contrast to the demeanor of his fellow Clinton nominee, from 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, standing three steps above him. At seventy-two, she was tiny and frail—she clasped Breyer’s arm on the way down. Elegantly and expensively turned out as usual, on this day in widow’s weeds, she was genuinely bereft to see Rehnquist go. Their backgrounds and politics could scarcely have differed more—the Lutheran conservative from the Milwaukee suburbs and the Jewish liberal from Brooklyn—but they shared a love of legal procedure. Always a shy outsider, Ginsburg knew that the chief’s death would send her even farther from the Court’s mainstream.
The casket next passed what was once the most recognizable face among the justices—that of Clarence Thomas. His unforgettable confirmation hearings in 1991 had seared his visage into the national consciousness, but the justice on the steps scarcely resembled the strapping young person who had transfixed the nation. Although only fifty-seven, Thomas had turned into an old man. His hair, jet black and full during the hearings, was now white and wispy. Injuries had taken him off the basketball court for good, and a sedentary life had added as much as a hundred pounds to his frame. The shutter of a photographer or the gaze of a video camera drew a scornful glare. Thomas openly, even fervently, despised the press.
David H. Souter should have been next on the stairs. When Rehnquist died, Souter had been at his home in Weare, New Hampshire, but he hadn’t received word until it was too late to get to the morning’s procession. It was hard to reach him when he was in New Hampshire, because Souter had a telephone and a fountain pen but no answering machine, fax, cell phone, or e-mail. (He was once given a television but never plugged it in.) He was sixty-five years old, but he belonged to a different age altogether, more like the eighteenth century. Souter detested Washington, enjoyed the job less than any of his colleagues, and cared little what others thought of him. He would be back for the funeral the following day.
Anthony M. Kennedy was absent as well, and for equally revealing reasons. He had been in China when Rehnquist died, and he, too, couldn’t make it back until the funeral on Wednesday. Nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987, Kennedy had initially seemed the most conventional, even boring, of men, the Sacramento burgher who still lived in the house where he grew up. But it turned out the prototypical country club Republican possessed a powerful wander-lust, a passion for international travel and law that ultimately wound up transforming his tenure as a justice.
Three steps higher was Antonin Scalia, his famously pugnacious mien softened by grief. He had taken the position on the Court that Rehnquist left in 1986, when Reagan made him chief, and the two men had been judicial soul mates for a generation. An opera lover, Scalia was not afraid of powerful emotions, and he wept openly at the loss of his friend. Scalia had always been the rhetorical force of their counterrevolutionary guard, but Rehnquist had been the leader. At sixty-nine, Scalia too looked lost and lonely.
Sandra Day O’Connor wept as well. O’Connor and Rehnquist had enjoyed one of the more extraordinary friendships in the history of the Court, a relationship that traversed more than fifty years, since she watched the handsome young law student heft trays in the cafeteria at Stanford Law School. (She would later join his class there and graduate in just two years, finishing just behind him, the valedictorian.) They both settled in Phoenix and shared backyard barbecues, even family vacations, until Rehnquist moved