The Nine [39]
Over the weekend, Foster, Klain, and Jim Hamilton, a private lawyer, went to the Ginsburgs’ apartment at the Watergate. Characteristically, for a tax lawyer and a man dedicated to smoothing his wife’s way to the Court, Marty Ginsburg had their records in meticulous order. (The contrast to the Breyers’ messy accounts was stark.) Typically also, in the meeting at the Watergate, Ruth said almost nothing. If Clinton didn’t like Breyer, it was hard to see how he would bond with an icy character like Ginsburg. Still, she would have her interview the following day, on Sunday morning. On Saturday night, the nomination still looked like an open contest.
That was when Andrew Cuomo called George Stephanopoulos and asked if there was a done deal.
Andrew said that his father’s thinking about the seat on the Court had evolved. The governor believed that Clinton was about to name Breyer, and he thought that there was no chance that Clinton would name two white males in a row. So Cuomo thought his own chances were now or never.
Stephanopoulos was skeptical. “Are you sure your father will accept if the president calls?” he asked Andrew. “We can’t go down this road again. Before the president even thinks about picking up the phone, we have to be absolutely certain that the answer will be nothing but yes.”
“Let me check,” Andrew said, then put Stephanopoulos on hold. “I just asked him. The answer is yes.”
Stephanopoulos called upstairs to Clinton, who was in the White House residence, and asked if he could come up and see him. Clinton gave a bemused smile at Cuomo’s latest peregrination. The idea of a dramatic, transformative choice like Cuomo still appealed to the president. “Mario will sing the song of America,” he told Stephanopoulos. “It’ll be like watching Pavarotti at Christmas-time.” At a party at the British Embassy that night, Clinton told Stephanopoulos that he still wanted to see Ginsburg in the morning, but Cuomo was his first choice. Close to midnight, Andrew and Stephanopoulos spoke again, and they arranged for Cuomo to await a call around six on Sunday evening.
Clinton and Ginsburg met that morning. Earlier, Nussbaum had passed along an observation from Erwin Griswold, the venerable former dean of Harvard Law School and solicitor general. He said that as Thurgood Marshall had been to civil rights, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been to women’s rights. That kind of symbolism appealed to Clinton, and he felt more favorably toward her than ever. In their meeting, Ginsburg talked about the early loss of her mother, followed by the near loss of her husband, and her identification with the underdog throughout her life. What Clinton saw—and his aides missed—was that beneath Ginsburg’s reserved exterior was a heroic American woman. To be sure, this was a woman with a big heart.
Clinton called a final meeting of his selection team for 5:00 p.m. The president was a half hour late, and almost as soon as he arrived, Stephanopoulos was called away to the phone: it was Mario Cuomo. The governor had changed his mind again. “I surrender so many opportunities if I take the Court,” he said, “I feel that I would abandon what I have to do.” Stephanopoulos sheepishly returned to the Oval Office to say that he had been misled once more and Cuomo was definitively out