The Nine [40]
The ceremony, in the brilliant June sunshine of the Rose Garden, featured Ruth Ginsburg’s tribute to her late mother, “the bravest and strongest person I have known, who was taken from me much too soon. I pray that I may be all that she would have been had she lived in an age when women could aspire and achieve and daughters are cherished as much as sons.” Clinton was weeping as he walked Ginsburg back inside the White House, but Brit Hume, then of ABC News, asked him about “a certain zigzag quality of the decision-making process here”—which was, if anything, an understatement.
Clinton all but snarled a response: “I have long since given up the thought that I could disabuse some of you from turning any substantive decision into anything but a political process. How you could ask a question like that after the statement she just made is beyond me.” The president’s outburst dominated the following day’s news, but Ginsburg’s appointment received good reviews. As Hatch promised, there was no confirmation controversy. Her hearings lasted three quiet days in July, and Ginsburg was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3.
The Ginsburg nomination turned out to be an apt metaphor for the Clinton presidency as a whole. The process that led to her selection was chaotic, but the result was admirable—the selection of a universally respected justice who reflected, with great precision, the moderate-to-liberal politics of the president who chose her. Indeed, more than any recent president since Johnson, Clinton was able to use his appointments to shape the Court in line with his own views. Still, even years later, he seemed embarrassed by the events leading up to Ginsburg’s selection. Clinton devoted less than 2 of the 957 pages of his memoir to her nomination—one of the most consequential acts of his presidency.
As for Mario Cuomo, he gave varying explanations over the years for why he turned down the appointment in 1993. He would have lost his right to speak out; he cared too much about economic issues that wouldn’t come before the Court. Mostly, Cuomo said, he felt that he was the only person who could hold on to the New York governorship for the Democrats. But, of course, he didn’t, losing to George Pataki in 1994. After a failed stint as a radio talk show host, Cuomo returned to law practice in New York City.
6
EXILES RETURN?
On July 20, 1993, the first day of Ginsburg’s confirmation hearing, Vince Foster killed himself. The deputy White House counsel, a close friend of both Clintons from Little Rock and a key figure in the Supreme Court selection process, never acclimated himself to the rough-and-tumble of political Washington. There, for the first time in his life, he had faced public criticism, and the pain of this experience exacerbated an apparently long-standing inclination toward depression. In the White House, the sadness over Foster’s death to some extent overshadowed the triumph of Ginsburg’s nomination.
Clinton’s entire first year was characterized by similarly vertiginous swings of good and bad fortune. Politically and otherwise, this president lived on the edge. In August, Congress passed Clinton’s economic plan—by a 218–216 vote in the House and 50–50 in the Senate, with Vice President Gore breaking the tie. The following month, Clinton hosted the historic handshake between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasir Arafat of the PLO on the South Lawn of the White House. But the Clintons’ health care plan, the ostensible reason George Mitchell turned down the nomination, went nowhere. And the controversy over the Clintons’ 1979 investment in an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater escalated. In January 1994, Clinton asked for an independent counsel to examine his conduct and determine if there were any grounds for prosecution. That investigation, of course, would mutate through the remaining seven years of Clinton’s presidency and