The Nine [37]
So Foster, Klain, and Seidman flew up to Massachusetts. Unfortunately, just a few days earlier, Breyer had taken a bad spill from his bicycle near his home in Cambridge, and he was still a patient at Mount Auburn Hospital. (In keeping with the quasi-public nature of the search, local reporters learned that the vetting team was in the hospital, and the White House aides had to slip out a side door to avoid them.) But the interview had gone well. Breyer was told to come to Washington for a talk with Clinton and then, probably, a formal announcement.
Breyer had broken ribs and punctured a lung in his accident. He wasn’t allowed to fly, so the judge took a bone-jarring train ride to Washington, where Foster met him at the station and took him to the Oval Office. The meeting between Breyer and Clinton went badly. Normally a friendly, almost garrulous man, Breyer was short of breath from his injury and still in pain. Afterward, Clinton told his staff Breyer seemed “heartless”—when a big heart seemed to be the president’s main criterion. Breyer’s background in administrative law suggested an unduly conservative bent. “I don’t see enough humanity,” Clinton said. “I want a judge with a soul.” (Breyer, who was told none of this, had been instructed to wait by the phone.)
The annual picnic for members of Congress on the South Lawn of the White House happened to be scheduled the night of Breyer’s interview with Clinton. The president called a meeting for 11:00 p.m. to hash out a decision. The meeting featured all of the flaws for which Clinton’s early decision-making process was known. There were too many people (twelve staffers) talking for too long (ninety minutes) at a time of day more suited for a college bull session. Rather than make a decision, Clinton concluded by asking everyone in the room for their votes on Breyer, which revealed a majority, but not unanimity, in his favor. “Let’s get him over here tomorrow,” Clinton said at the end. “I’m going to do it. We’ll announce it tomorrow.”
But first thing the following morning, Foster and Klain were back in the Oval Office. Foster had been going over the Breyer family records for household help and the like, and the papers were a mess. Maybe it was fixable, but maybe it wasn’t. Clinton sagged into his chair. Searching as ever for more options, he said no one had asked Janet Reno for her ideas. (It might seem obvious to include the attorney general in deliberations about a Supreme Court nomination, but Clinton barely knew Reno. She was newly installed in office after a different nomination debacle, which saw Baird and then Kimba Wood rise and fall as candidates.)
Clinton told Klain to go to the desk of his personal assistant Nancy Hernreich, who sat with Betty Currie outside the Oval Office, and call Reno for her suggestions.
Reno came right to the phone, and the first thing she said was, “Why aren’t you people looking at Ruth Bader Ginsburg?”
For one of the most accomplished lawyers and judges of her generation, Ruth Ginsburg had an astonishing ability to disappear in a crowd. She was tiny, for one thing, barely five feet tall and a hundred pounds, with the bearing of a little bird. But Ginsburg’s presence was small, too. She had a shy, almost timid smile, and her eyes were hidden behind enormous glasses. Ginsburg’s conversations were famous for long silences that sometimes left admirers (or clerkship applicants) babbling incoherently to fill the vacuum. She was sixty years old in 1993, older than most recent Supreme Court nominees, and the