>> John Haskell: Today,
we have Evan Thomas,
the author of 10 books,
including "The New York Times"
Bestseller "John Paul Jones,"
books on Robert Kennedy, Nixon.
He was a writer, correspondent,
and editor for 33 years
at "Time" and "Newsweek,"
including 10 years
as the Washington bureau
chief for "Newsweek."
He's appeared on Meet the Press,
Washington Week, Morning Joe,
and a lot of other programming.
He's taught writing and
journalism at Harvard
and Princeton, where,
at Princeton, he was,
from 2007 to 2014, Farris
Professor of Journalism.
Osceola Thomas is an alumna
of Stanford and the University
of Virginia Law School.
She was a lawyer with a
litigation firm in New York,
and later a vice
president of AT&T.
And she'll -- they'll
be in conversation
with Colleen Shogan, who's
assistant deputy librarian
for collections and services.
She's also the Library
of Congress's designee
on the women's suffrage
centennial commission,
where she now serves
as vice chair.
Please join me in
welcoming our panel.
[ Applause ]
>> Colleen Shogan: Thanks,
John, and we're honored
to have you both joining
us on stage here today.
We're going to have
a conversation,
and then we're going to turn it
over to Q&A from the audience.
So save up your questions
for the end of the program.
To start out, you've
written a lot --
a really diverse set of books.
You've written books on
Richard Nixon, the CIA,
Robert Kennedy, John Paul Jones.
Why now move to Sandra
Day O'Connor?
Why did you write this book,
at this moment in time?
>> Evan Thomas: Because the
family asked me [laughter].
The background on this is
that Justice O'Connor wrote a
wonderful book called "Lazy B"
about growing up on
a ranch in Arizona,
and it sold pretty well.
So Random House was after her
for years to do her memoirs,
and I was brought in as a Random
House author with a law degree.
I was brought in
about five years ago
to maybe be a ghostwriter for
her, and I spent a day with her.
And I could tell she
wasn't all that eager,
because -- I'm guess at this.
She -- yes, she wanted
to have --
yes, she absolutely wanted
to have -- to be remembered,
and to have all that, but
she's a very private person.
And I could just tell that
she didn't really want
to spill the beans
about her own life.
I'm sensing this.
It's nothing that she said,
and then it went away.
But then, Justice O'Connor got
the early stages of Alzheimer's,
of dementia, and the family
said, "What do we do now?"
And so, they came to me
through Random House, and said,
"Would you do this if we give
you the access to the papers,
and to her, and to those
clerks, and all that?"
And I said, "Sure."
And we had -- Osce and I, my
wife, who worked very closely
on this with me all
the way through,
we just had a wonderful time
getting to know -- she had --
when we first met her,
she had early-stage --
you know, she could still
talk, but you could --
she was repeating herself.
Now, sadly, she's
pretty far gone.
>> Colleen Shogan:
So before we get
into Sandra Day O'Connor's
life, and the book,
tell us a little bit about
how you two worked together
on these books.
How long have you been married?
>> Osceola Thomas:
Forty-four years.
>> Colleen Shogan: Okay,
so obviously, it works.
The collaboration
works on the books,
but tell us how you
worked together
on this particular book.
>> Evan Thomas: Well, you
answer that [laughter].
>> Osceola Thomas: We -- I
worked full-time until 2000,
and then I started helping Evan,
principally editing his books,
and doing some research.
And I got increasingly involved,
but when this project came
up, it was so exciting.
First woman justice on
the Supreme Court --
I'd been a young lawyer
when she was nominated.
I'd gone to Stanford.
I was from the west, and I --
it was a wonderful way for
Evan and me to spend time.
Authors often have a lot of time
to themselves, and when you work
as closely with someone,
it's just more fun.
So he -- we did all of the
interviews, and the research
in this building together,
and we would see Jeff
sitting back there,
who was just absolutely
wonderful --
the head of the manuscript
division, and entered chambers
at the Supreme Court,
and traveling.
And we ended up interviewing
94 clerks,
and 350 people altogether,
and seven justices,
and really having a very
special window into her life.
>> Evan Thomas: I
can't say enough
about the Library of Congress.
I mean, we really
spent days down --
under Jeff's expert tutelage
in the reading room downstairs,
and what a fantastic
national resource Jeff is,
but also the whole Library is.
So we're especially
glad to be here.
The only thing I would add is
that we complement each other
because I write very quickly.
I wrote on deadline for --
I've written 100 "Newsweek"
cover stories, but I'm hasty,
and impulsive, and Osce is
a lawyer, a real lawyer.
I'm -- I graduated from law
school, but she's a real lawyer,
and very logical, and has
that lawyerly analytical mind
that would catch my logical
inconsistencies, and force me
to explain things that
I was writing about.
So we're very complementary
as writers.
>> Colleen Shogan: The
book starts and really ends
with the Lazy B Ranch, which
you referred to earlier.
Describe the Lazy B Ranch in
Arizona for us, and why was it
so influential in Sandra
Day O'Connor's life?
>> Evan Thomas: We
went there together.
Osce, describe the
physical place.
>> Osceola Thomas: We -- the
family sold the ranch, I think,
in the late 1990s, but this
is a ranch of 160,000 acres
of high desert, arid,
bleak, beautiful.
And the family that bought the
ranch allowed Sandra's brother,
Alan, to take us back, and
see what life was like there.
It was still as if time stopped.
The house is there.
The pastures are there.
The windmills are there.
They're actually
not functioning.
They've been electrified,
but they powered
their wells by wind.
And that's significant.
Evan will talk about that
later, but -- so the ranch --
she was -- she was born
in El Paso, but went back
to the ranch, and she had
cowboys for playmates.
She was the first child, another
nine years before another baby
came, and her -- there was no
running water, no electricity.
The house was eight
miles from the main road.
They thought of it as their
own country, she said.
>> Evan Thomas: The dominant
figures were mom and dad.
There wasn't anybody else,
and Mr. Day was a very
dominating, powerful figure.
He was adoring.
He loved his daughter,
but he could be --
he could come on pretty strong.
And the story that she liked to
tell is that when she was 15,
she -- her job was
to take the --
make lunch and take
it to the round-up,
way out on the prairie.
So she gets up at 5:00
a.m. She cooks the roast.
She makes the cake.
She loads up the truck.
She has a flat tire.
She's a slender girl,
and so she has to jump
on the jack to change it.
She gets there, and her
father looks at her,
and he says, "You're late."
She said, "Well, Dad, I
had to change a tire."
And he said, "Next
time, leave earlier."
And she liked to tell that
story to her law clerks.
No excuses.
She learned self-reliance,
but she learned something else
from her mother, which I
think was really the most
critical thing.
Her mom was a very
elegant woman.
It was a dusty ranch, once a --
bath once a week, wore dresses,
perfume, hose, good shoes,
subscribed to "Vogue,"
but much more important
than that, Sandra watched
as her mother dealt
with her father.
Mr. Day could have a drink or
two in the evening, and be a bit
of a bully, and Sandra's
mom had a way
of not -- she was not passive.
She was not rolled.
She was not, you
know, just giving up,
but on the other hand, she
didn't get into stupid fights.
She knew when to stand up to
him and when to walk away.
That was something that Sandra
Day O'Connor really had great --
Sandra Day O'Connor had to deal
with a lot of obnoxious males
in her career, and
she handled them.
And I think she learned a lot
watching her mother and father.
>> Colleen Shogan: When she
was a junior at Stanford,
she decided she wanted
to go to law school,
and she would enter
law school early.
Why did she decide on law
when, at that point in time
in American history,
it was completely a
male-dominated profession?
>> Osceola Thomas: She
went to college at 16,
so she was 19 years old when she
entered law school at Stanford.
And at Stanford, at a number
of schools across the country,
you could do your
fourth undergraduate year
as a first-year law student
if you had a certain grade point
average, and passed a test,
and that's how she became one
of five women entering a class
of 150 people at Stanford.
And she had had an undergraduate
professor named Harry Rathbun
that had had a -- he had
had a big influence on her.
She would actually go with a
number of students to his house
on Sunday nights, and sit
on his Oriental carpets,
and he would talk about how
individuals could make a
difference in the world, and how
women should take their place
in the world.
And he was a faculty in
the law school teaching
in the undergraduate program,
and I think he was the
principal reason --
she later said he was
the principal reason
that she got interested
in the law.
>> Evan Thomas: She also
took a course called western
civilization that
absolutely made her.
We have the feel of
this, because we had --
we had access to her papers,
and we had her final exam,
written as a 17-year-old girl --
>> Osceola Thomas:
On those blue books.
Remember blue books [laughter]?
>> Evan Thomas: --
in the blue book,
and it's a brilliant
exegesis on Jefferson
and Madison, and
the rule of law.
And unfortunately, they
don't teach that course
at Stanford anymore,
because it's considered
to be too hegemonic, and
patriarchal, and all that stuff.
But boy, it sure stood
by Sandra Day O'Connor.
>> Colleen Shogan: When
she was in law school,
she met William Rehnquist,
which I think a lot of people
who read the book were
very surprised about this.
Could you talk about the
nature of their relationship,
and why this was influential
for the rest of her career?
>> Osceola Thomas: She --
she and Bill Rehnquist
were classmates.
They were on the
law review together.
They were moot court partners,
and from April to December
of their first year, they dated.
He was an ardent boyfriend.
He -- when he joined
the Supreme --
well, when he was on the
Supreme Court, and her name came
up as a possible justice, he
allowed as how they'd gone
to the movies together, and
nothing more [laughter].
So in any event, we were in
the Supreme Court building.
We had told the family we
hadn't found any love letters
at the Library of Congress.
Fabulous as the collection is,
the love letters weren't here.
And where were they?
And in a box at the
Supreme Court,
in her personal storage
marked "correspondence,"
we found wonderful love letters
between her and her husband,
John, who had been a year
behind her in law school,
but we found 14 love
letters from Bill Rehnquist
to Sandra Day from 1952.
He's back in Washington.
He's clerking on
the Supreme Court.
She's finishing up her third
year, and letter seven says,
"Sandy, will you marry me?"
So --
>> Evan Thomas: That was
our little scoop [laughter].
I gave off a very undignified
yelp when I read that letter,
and, amazingly, they did not --
she did not, and he did not --
she did not, I'm sure,
tell her own family,
not even her husband,
I'm pretty sure.
The good news is, they
became great friends.
This -- although her answer
was no, but it took --
she strung him along for a
couple months, waiting for John.
But then, they -- we know from
the letters they bonded again,
and they had a -- really
a wonderful friendship
down through the years, in
Phoenix, and then on the Court.
>> Colleen Shogan: So she goes
on to marry John O'Connor.
Tell us a little bit
about their relationship.
It's a good part of the book.
And why did she settle
-- she had many suitors,
actually, as you outlined.
Why did she settle on him?
>> Osceola Thomas:
He made her laugh.
That is one of the great
things in their marriage.
They had a -- she -- and
he was not like her father.
He did not want to dominate her.
He supported her.
She -- because they were on
the law review together --
in fact, they had met when they
were fact-checking a law review
article over a period
of 40 days.
They went out on a date.
He knew how smart she was,
and he respected that.
So he wanted her to shine, and
he would promote her, and then,
he would make her laugh.
And I think that's really much
the heart of their relationship.
>> Evan Thomas: It was a
great and lasting marriage.
>> Colleen Shogan: Why did
President Reagan decide
to nominate Sandra Day
O'Connor to the Court?
Did he decide that he was going
to nominate a female justice?
And how did he learn
about Sandra Day O'Connor?
Because at that moment in time,
she was on the Arizona
Court of Appeals.
>> Evan Thomas: Pure politics.
October 1980, Governor
Reagan running
for president is 10 points
behind in the polls, and --
with women in the state of
Illinois, a swing state.
It's pure -- a political
aide says to him,
"We got to do something about
the gender gap," and so,
what they did, right off the
top of his head, was to promise
to put one of the first --
name as one of his first Supreme
Court appointees a woman.
Just political, but -- and
over the Justice Department,
once he won, at the
attorney general's office,
they thought it wasn't serious.
They thought that
Reagan would nominate --
they were hoping he would
nominate Bob Bourque [assumed
spelling], a strong
conservative, to bring back --
begin the process of rolling
back the liberal excesses
of the Warren Court.
Remember, it's a -- you
know, the Reagan Revolution,
but that's not what happened.
The attorney general came to his
aides and said, "He's serious.
The president's serious.
Unless we can't find a woman,
we're going to nominate one."
Now, that actually was a
little trickier than it seemed,
because in 1980, the
law was still very male.
Of the 600 federal judges,
only eight were women,
and they were almost all
liberal Democrats appointed
by Jimmy Carter.
There just weren't -- there's
one other Republican Federal
Court of Appeals judge, Cornelia
Kennedy, they interviewed,
but they liked Justice
O'Connor much better.
They heard about Justice
O'Connor from a variety
of sources, one of which was
the Chief Justice had got
to know her over one
weekend [laughter].
No, actually, I was
referring to Burger.
Rehnquist --
>> Colleen Shogan: Wasn't
the chief justice yet.
>> Evan Thomas: --
Rehnquist private --
secretly did promote her, yes.
That was -- in fact, Ken Starr,
who was the guy leading
the search,
who was then a special assistant
to the attorney general
leading the search,
said that the most
important voice was Rehnquist,
but also that Chief
Justice Burger knew her,
and he promoted her.
Barry Goldwater -- so she
had some friends in court,
and really, she was
really the only choice.
>> Osceola Thomas: And when
she met President Reagan,
they talked mostly about
ranching, and he was delighted
with her personality,
and her presence.
And he knew she was smart,
so he was -- he was --
and also, Jim Baker told Evan
that you can be sure Nancy
Reagan was for it [laughter].
>> Colleen Shogan: So when
Sandra Day O'Connor arrived
at the court, how
was she received
by the eight sitting justices,
as the first female
Supreme Court justice?
Did they welcome
her with open arms?
Did she find the court to
be an enlightened place,
you know, welcoming of a woman?
>> Evan Thomas: No, no,
no, no, no, no [laughter].
It was literally cold, literally
as well as figuratively.
It's a marvel, and
she would go out,
and she missed the sunshine.
She would step out in
those interior courtyards,
and turn her face up to the sun.
Her first lunch -- you know,
the justices get together
for lunch once or twice a week.
Only four of the
justices even came.
Justices -- you know,
they're appointed for life.
That doesn't mean they
have to like each other,
and they sometimes don't.
And so, the -- we talked to
Justice Stevens, who would --
was behind the movement to
drop the Mister before Justice,
right before they
came on the court.
Talk about a male place -- the
Supreme Court had been all-male
for 200 years, and Stevens
told us they had this dilemma,
because the duties of the junior
justice include taking notes
and getting coffee [laughter].
So they said, "Well,
tradition is --
we should ask her
to get coffee."
But they actually didn't.
Now, she -- she -- she's
a brave, brave woman,
but at her very first
oral argument,
she knows everybody's
watching her.
And after about a half an
hour, she starts to speak
up to ask a question, and the
idiot lawyer arguing the case
talked over her.
You can hear it on tape.
>> Osceola Thomas: He
said, "Let me finish."
>> Evan Thomas: "Let me finish,"
and she wrote in her diary
that night, "I feel put down."
Now, that's very unusual.
Feeling put down is not a
feeling Sandra O'Connor had
for very long, and, well --
>> Osceola Thomas: Well, I
thinks he did have allies.
So Lewis Powell,
a very portly man,
wrote his family letters
fairly frequently.
They're a wonderful resource,
and he said -- wrote him --
them within three weeks saying,
"She is nothing short
of brilliant.
I think she'll make her
mark on this court."
He had befriended her.
He'd seen that her office
was a little disorganized,
and he'd given her a secretary
to organize from his office,
to help organize her office.
And they became friends, and --
but it's still the case that
she had to navigate her way.
But it took a little while, but
by the end of the second term,
her husband was writing on her
in his diary that she feels
like she's in the
catbird's seat.
>> Colleen Shogan:
Talk a little bit
about her work in
gender in the law.
And did Sandra Day O'Connor
consider herself a feminist?
>> Evan Thomas: -- that's
an interesting question,
because she was a feminist,
but she did not use
the word feminist.
She did as much to advance
women's rights as anybody alive.
For one thing, she had preserved
abortion rights for 25 years,
counter what people
expected of her.
She's the decisive voice
and moving thing in Casey,
which is now still
a law, 1992 case.
But she also had a very
significant women's rights case
in her very first term
about whether men could go
to the University of
Mississippi nursing school,
gender rights case.
She worked with Justice
Ginsberg on these cases.
In fact, one of -- Justice
Ginsberg's most famous case is
the Virginia VMI case.
Could you have a
single-sex college?
The opinion was written
by Justice Ginsberg,
but the opinion was actually
assigned to Justice O'Connor,
and she, in the conference
room, said, "No,
I think Ruth should have this."
That never happens, that a
Supreme Court justice said, "No,
no, I don't want to
take this opinion.
Joe should have it."
That -- I mean, that
just doesn't happen,
but she did that for Ruth.
Because she had --
because that's the kind
of person she was.
>> Osceola Thomas: Justice
Ginsberg had just arrived
on the court, and she
really appreciated that.
But Sandra O'Connor was there on
her own for the first 11 years
or so, and so, back in
Arizona, going back to her role
as the first female senate
majority leader in the country
of a state senate, she did not
-- she made it her business,
after it was clear that the
ERA amendment would not --
didn't have the votes
in the legislature,
she made it her business to
inventory and change every law
in the state that
discriminated against women.
So she had her eye on --
>> Evan Thomas: She made a list.
She made a list of them.
We saw it in her
handwriting, all the --
>> Osceola Thomas: -- yeah.
>> Evan Thomas: -- and this
is revealing of her style,
and goes to the question.
She introduced the
Equal Rights Amendment
in the legislature for passage.
It had passed Congress.
It was moving through
the states,
and then she let it
die in committee.
And the feminists were furious.
The activists were
furious at her.
You betrayed us.
You're selling us out.
You must be doing this
for a federal judgeship.
And she kept quiet about that.
Now, why did she do that?
She didn't have the votes.
Why waste your time having
a big show of virtue, and --
when you don't have the votes?
>> Osceola Thomas:
Because Phyllis Schlafly --
>> Evan Thomas: Because Phyllis
-- remember Phyllis Schlafly?
She was in town, campaigning
against the ERA, and she was --
had beaten back -- the ERA
had been non-controversial,
basically, in the late
'60s, but by the early '70s,
every revolution creates
a counterrevolution.
The women's rights movement,
women's lib -- remember that --
produced a counterrevolution,
Phyllis Schlafly, and the right,
and the moral majority.
And so, politically,
she couldn't get it done,
so she didn't do it.
Instead, quietly, she amended
every single law in the state
of Arizona that discriminated
against women,
and there were a lot of them.
You couldn't own property.
You know, you couldn't
get a credit card
without your husband's
permission.
You couldn't own a house.
The laws were incredibly
weighted against women.
Locally, she changed
every single one.
>> Colleen Shogan: So
this dovetails nicely.
You call her -- you describe
her jurisprudence as pragmatic
in the book, and you also call
her a judicial minimalist.
What do you mean by those terms,
and how do you answer
her critics who say
that she was unprincipled
as a jurist?
>> Evan Thomas: She does
have a lot of critics.
The law reviews don't love her.
She did not operate from
sweeping principles,
or doctrines, which made
her a little unpredictable,
and of course, lower courts
and law professors
like predictability.
And so, she was --
and it made it --
it can seem a little arbitrary.
If you don't have any
overriding principle,
then maybe it's just the seat of
your pants that's guiding you.
So that's the criticism.
Her answer to that is that she
believed the law should really
-- the court should
pay attention
to the practical
consequences of their actions.
She worried about
unintentional consequences,
unintended consequences,
and she was --
she believed the law
should move slowly,
and incrementally,
and minimally.
This is why they call
her a minimalist.
Her decisions were very
narrow, very fact-based,
particularly on the
social issues.
She wanted to inch the law,
and never get too far ahead
of the public, or
too far behind,
but be very sensitive to that.
And the other piece of this --
and she didn't articulate this.
Dan Busell -- but
talk about Dan Busell.
>> Osceola Thomas: --
he's one of her clerks.
He's a professor at UCLA,
and he had a wonderful way
of describing her sense that the
Supreme Court was really not the
final word in most cases.
And it was instead in an ongoing
conversation with the Congress,
with the state legislatures,
saying to them --
and with the lower courts,
saying to them, "Try again.
This doesn't pass muster
in a constitutional
level, but try again.
We'll deal with it if
you send it back to us,
but you can do better."
And this was, I think, a very
successful philosophy for her,
because she ended up being
the swing vote in 330 cases
on the court, and in time,
the media was calling
it the O'Connor Court.
>> Evan Thomas: 330 decisive
votes -- that's a lot of power.
The most illustrative -- I
might talk for a little bit
about abortion and affirmative
action, because they go to this.
When she first came on
the court, Harry Blackmun,
who wrote Roe v. Wade, the
court's abortion decision
in 1973 thought, "Oh, my God,
she's a Reagan appointee.
She's going to vote
to overturn abortion."
And in her early cases, she's
a critic of Roe v. Wade.
She ends up saving Roe
v. Wade, because in 1992,
there are actually five votes
to overturn Roe v. Wade,
to end the constitutional
right to abortion.
O'Connor -- and this is all
her brilliant human instinct.
It's a bit of a convoluted
story, but I want to tell it,
because it so goes
to who she is.
On the court by 1992, Justice
Scalia was becoming a force,
and the brand-new justice
was Justice Tony Kennedy.
And people -- and
they were friends.
They were neighbors, fellow
Catholics, and the thought was,
you know, Scalia's going to lead
Kennedy to be the decisive vote
to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Scalia made the classic
mistake of patronizing Kennedy.
The clerks started
joking about little --
little meanie, they
called Kennedy,
and using derisive
terms for him.
Kennedy's a proud guy,
and he didn't like it.
And O'Connor sensed this, and
was able to peel Kennedy away
from Scalia on the
Casey case, secretly.
They had a secret troika
with Justice Souter,
working behind the scenes, very
unusual, cutting the clerks out,
and the effect was to
preserve abortion rights
with a different standard.
This is very typical of her.
The states could
restrict abortion,
but they cannot put what's
called an undue burden
on a woman's right to abortion.
Well, what does that mean?
It took a lot of cases
to sort this out.
The abortion advocates didn't
love this, but it's a lot better
than losing abortion
rights altogether,
which was about to
happen, had O'Connor
and Souter not gotten
Justice Kennedy away
from the majority to do that.
And she did it because she
had great human fingertips.
She was willing to compromise.
Her decision is still
being fought over,
and it's frustrating,
but it's very --
it gives you a sense for
her political fingertips.
>> Colleen Shogan: You
mentioned the law clerks,
and you said you interviewed
over 90 law clerks,
and they play a big
part in this book.
Why did you focus on
her law clerks so much,
and what did they
bring to the story?
What were they able to tell
you about Sandra Day O'Connor
and her time in the court?
>> Osceola Thomas: Every
justice has about --
well, has four law clerks.
That's by custom,
and they have a lot
of work to do on the court.
They often write the
drafts of the opinions.
In her case, they do, and
she -- they work for a year,
and they work 18-hour days,
weekends, every weekend,
no vacation, by -- because
their workload is so great.
It is such an honor to
be a Supreme Court Clerk.
It puts you at the top
of the legal profession,
and she chose them
very carefully,
not for their ideology.
She was very happy to have
conservatives, the liberals.
What she cared about was --
if you don't agree with
the way I decide a case,
can you still write
it the way I decide?
They -- what she cared about
was that they get along
with each other, and
get along with her.
She wanted sort of a
cohesion in her courtroom --
I mean, in her chambers,
and she really got it.
So her clerks --
she cared about --
she knew they were super-smart.
She liked something
different about them.
One of them had swum
the English Channel.
One of them was a
classical pianist.
Another one was a -- had been
a boat person out of Vietnam.
She had something
special about them.
>> Evan Thomas: Her first blind
clerk, first disabled clerk --
>> Osceola Thomas: Right.
And so, she would
take them on outings.
She knew they were going to be
in Washington for only a year,
and even though they have
this tremendous workload,
she wanted them to see
the cherry blossoms.
The cherry blossoms would be at
their height, and she'd come in.
They -- might be raining, and
she'd say, "Put on your jackets.
We're going to go march
down to the tidal basin."
And they'd say, "But -- but
you want this memo by tomorrow,
or shall we go with you?"
And she'll say, "You have
to come with me, and yes,
I want the memo tomorrow
[laughter]."
And sure enough, they'd spend
all night working on it.
She thought that they needed --
she could help them learn how
to live a balanced life,
and she would give them,
one of the clerks
told us, life lessons.
Be kind to others.
Give good dinner parties.
Don't be afraid to
ask questions.
Go out and go to museums,
and broaden your life.
Get exercise.
The women had to go
to an aerobics class,
and I should've said she
always hired two women.
She knew that that was key to
enlarging the number of women
at the top of the legal
profession, and she would say
to them -- she would
take them once
to the arboretum in Washington.
And one of them, Stewart
Bradder [assumed spelling],
also a UCLA professor,
said to us,
"This wasn't stopping
to smell the roses.
It was speeding up to
smell the roses [laughter],
and learning how to be a better
rose-smeller [laughter]."
So she -- she worked
them very hard.
She gave very --
praised very seldom.
They knew they were
doing a good job
if they didn't hear criticism.
They Xeroxed a copy of her
hand, and they put it on a wall.
And they said, "If
you want to" --
it said, "If you want a pat on
the back, lean here [laughter]."
The story I love is, one
of her male clerks --
because they had to
stay in shape, too --
said he was eating an ice
cream cone one day at his desk,
and he saw her coming.
And he opened his drawer
and cone stuck the
cone in [laughter].
>> Colleen Shogan: Did Sandra
Day O'Connor become more liberal
over time as a justice?
And if she did, why?
>> Evan Thomas: Slightly.
We asked Justice
Stevens, "Do you think
that Justice O'Connor
moved to the left?"
And he said, "Yes."
And we said, "Why?"
And his answer was,
"Justice Scalia."
He was half-kidding.
Scalia was annoying to her
[laughter], but interestingly,
she didn't shoot back.
He was -- he said to her about
her abortion decision it, quote,
"can't be taken seriously."
He said that publicly.
She -- when the clerks
would write
in her opinions zingers aimed at
Scalia, she would take them out.
She was always avoiding public
fights, but I think he --
I think she did measurably
move a little bit to the left,
particularly on cases
where women
and children were involved.
You can see it.
The most famous one that comes
to mind is the soccer mom case,
and it's illustrative of her.
The issue was -- a mother's
driving along with her kids.
She gets arrested for not having
her license, I think it was.
>> Osceola Thomas: Seat belts.
>> Evan Thomas: Seat belts.
Seat belts, sorry.
Seat belts.
She gets put in jail
-- a little extreme,
but the issue before
the court is,
can you be jailed
for a misdemeanor?
Yes, under English common-law
and the Constitution, you can,
so there's -- the --
Justice Souter, I think,
wrote the majority opinion.
She dissented, because
she got into the record,
and she saw that the policeman
had humiliated this woman
in front of her children,
and that there was some
cost to that to the kids.
And she saw that if the
cops can put you in jail
for no seat belts, or something
like that, that's going
to be used for racial profiling.
And so, she dissented
in that case.
>> Colleen Shogan:
Why did she side
with the majority
in Bush v. Gore?
>> Evan Thomas: That's a
tangled tale [laughter],
but let me try it here.
You all remember Bush
v. Gore [laughter]?
You know, how could you forget?
So it -- you know, the Supreme
Court, when the case bubbles
up to the Supreme Court, they
-- there's a recount going on,
and the Supreme Court
stops the recount.
The effect is to
elect George Bush.
Now, the five votes to stop the
recount are all conservative
Republicans, every one of
them, and the four votes
who want the recount to continue
are Democrats and liberals.
So it looks nakedly political.
It's a bad moment for the court.
It looks like -- you know, the
court does not like to be seen
as a political institution.
It may be, but it certainly
doesn't want to be seen
that way, and so, this
is just raw and naked.
Now, she's a Republican.
She is, and she wanted
Bush to win.
She did, but I think what's
really driving her here --
and I got this partly
from Justice Ginsberg,
who was on the other side --
was that she's a very
practical person.
I mentioned that, and she's
looking down the road.
And she realizes that if
the recount continues,
you could have a real car
wreck that would work this way.
If the recount continues --
now, you have to remember,
Catherine Harris, the
Florida Secretary of State,
has already certified
the Republican victory,
so there's already
a set of electors
from the state of Florida.
If the recount goes on,
let's say Gore wins.
There are going to be
two sets of electors.
Under other law, 3 U.S. Code
15, if there are two sets
of electors -- believe
it or not, there's a law
for this -- it goes to Congress.
The House has one vote, and
the Senate has one vote.
Now, the House was
going to be Republican.
The Senate was going to
be Democratic -- a tie.
Under the law, in the case
of a tie, the tie is broken
by the governor of the state.
His name was Jeb
Bush [laughter].
And so, she could see
it was going to look
like a banana republic.
The guy's brother got
him elected in January,
and she said, "We're
not going to do that.
Let's stop it now.
Let's take the hit."
And they did take a
hit, and deservedly.
The opinion is not --
the Supreme Court does not like
to do things in three days,
which is how quickly
they did this,
and the opinion's pretty ugly
in the view of many scholars --
the court's procuring opinion,
written by Justice Kennedy
with a lot of input
by Justice O'Connor.
And it's a one-time
precedent, and, you know --
but her view, again,
is very practical,
lets the Supreme Court step in
here, take the hit, and move on.
>> Osceola Thomas: She later
said to "The Chicago Tribune"
in 2013, "Maybe we shouldn't
have taken the case."
That's a long time later.
She did get, for many years,
some comfort, if you will,
that the court had not actually
elected Bush because the --
three different occasions the
media organizations did an
actual recount using
those very ballots,
hiring statistical firms,
accounting firms to do the work.
And one of the consortiums
was "The New York Times,"
"The Washington Post, "
"The Chicago Tribune,"
"The L.A. Times," sort of
unassailable credentials
for these people, and the --
every time, the recount came
out with Bush having fewer votes
than Catherine Harris had
certified, but still winning.
Catherine Harris
had certified 537.
The margin narrowed
to 200 votes.
Imagine this.
So the lesson is, if
you're in a swing state,
go vote, because it matters.
>> Colleen Shogan: O'Connor
left the court in 2005
at a relatively young age.
Why did she leave
the court in '05,
and did she later
regret her decision?
>> Evan Thomas: She left the
court because her husband,
her beloved husband,
John, had Alzheimer's.
He'd gotten it -- the
symptoms started showing
up maybe 10 years before, and
it's a progressive disease.
And he was getting
worse and worse.
She was taking him to
her chambers, and --
but among these symptoms
of Alzheimer's can be
that you can't sleep.
John and Sandra slept
in the same bed,
so if he wasn't sleeping,
she wasn't sleeping.
And it just got harder and
harder, so she finally resigned.
She was explicit about it.
He sacrificed for me.
John had given up a big
law practice in Phoenix,
where he'd been the big man, and
head of the Rotary, and chairman
of a couple of hospitals and
all that to come to Washington,
where his law practice
was not successful.
He sacrificed for me, so now
I'm going to sacrifice for him.
And she resigned.
The tragedy is that, within
six months of her leaving,
he couldn't recognize her, and
tell the rest of the story.
>> Osceola Thomas: He was --
she had to put him in
a memory care home.
She has three sons, and they
were very supportive of her.
And there, he developed what's
called a mistaken attachment
to a woman who also didn't
know who her family was.
So he's sitting on the couch in
the common area holding the hand
of this woman, and
Sandra comes to visit.
And she's -- he --
she sits down,
and she holds his other hand.
And this is how she was
visiting him, and this got --
became public, and she said to
the public, "I'm happy for him.
He was depressed, and
now he's happier."
But to her friends, she
said she was heartbroken,
and of course, she was.
>> Colleen Shogan: Last question
before we go to the audience.
So at a time in which we
have ideological extremes
in the electorate, and
also our institutions,
you've written a book
about an ardent moderate.
What lessons do you hope those
who read the book and read
about the life of
Sandra Day O'Connor --
what do you hope they
will take from the book?
>> Evan Thomas: Well,
her great cause --
you might even say her
religion was civility in civics.
She had a great faith in civil
society and civic society,
and people being involved
in their community,
and working together.
There is no problem that
you can't at least address
if you're civil with each other.
She could be bossy herself.
She once summoned the majority
leader of the U.S. Senate,
Tom Daschle, and the
minority leader, Trent Lott,
to her chambers, and
gave them a lecture
on being more civil [laughter].
But she really believed this.
She was religious.
She was -- you know,
she went to church,
but I would say her
real religion was kind
of a civic religion, of her
faith in if you are civil
to each other, and people
work together, you can --
it's amazing what
you can get done.
She lived her life that way.
She would be brokenhearted
today if she was --
she has Alzheimer's, as I said,
so I don't know how much
she's taking in today.
But the last thing she said,
her last public statement,
was when Merrick Garland
was nominated to the court,
and the Republicans, her
party, were holding him
up because they wanted
to nominate their own guy
if Trump won, if
the Republicans won.
Her last public statement was,
"No, come on, confirm him.
Let's get on with it."
She really did not
like to see the rules
of comity breaking down.
She wanted to move on, but to
move on in a way that was civil.
>> Colleen Shogan: Terrific.
Do we have some questions
from the audience
for Evan and Osce Thomas?
Okay, right here up front,
two questions right here.
One second.
If you could wait
for the microphone,
so everybody can
hear -- thank you.
>> Yeah. Given all the
interviews, the volume,
and habituating here at the
Library of Congress, et cetera,
do -- did you have a storybook?
I mean, how did you -- and how
did you rectify telling the
story that you had to put in
that might not be a major point?
How -- was it a zen journey?
How was this done?
>> Evan Thomas: Well, it's not
our first rodeo [laughter],
and there's no huge magic to it.
I mean, we just spent years
doing it, for one thing,
and you learn the story, or you
are telling yourself the story
as you are learning it.
A lot of interviews -- we
mentioned 350 interviews.
I do keep a running
-- I start --
after a while, I start
a running chronology.
Chronologies are
your friend here,
because it gives you
an organizational --
and in that chronology,
I will --
it's sort of like a finding aid.
I will -- for this
event, or this year,
I will list the source,
and some of the anecdotes,
and some of the points
I want to make.
Now, it's a loose and fluid
thing, because of course,
it evolves, and it changes.
But that does keep you
from the panic you can feel
when you can't remember --
where the hell did I hear that?
And, you know -- because the
amount of information is vast.
You know, there are --
as Jeff will tell you,
there's box after box after
box of papers downstairs here,
and that's just the beginning.
So keeping track of it -- you
really have to be disciplined
about telling yourself
the story.
One thing I had to do, and
Osce and I did this together --
she participated in 2000 cases.
She wrote over 600 opinions.
The reader's not
going to want to read
about all that, nor should they.
We talked about maybe
40 or 50 cases.
So you have to choose, and,
you know, I did the big --
you know, kind of obvious
in a way, abortion,
affirmative action, big cases
where she really
made a difference.
But you had to be -- you
have to be selective.
Now, of course, people would
say you're biasing things
by your selectivity,
but that's --
all authors have to
make those choices.
It really helped to be able
to do this at the dining table
with Osce, because it's not a
-- it's not a lonely business.
We're talking about
this all the time.
What is the story, and
where does it take us?
And of course, it takes you
in different directions.
It's not obvious all
at once, but over time,
with a lot of rewriting,
and revision, and effort,
and also just one last
thing about this --
we really involved --
journalists, when
they write a story,
generally do not show the
story to their sources,
because it's too
complicated, you know.
What happens if the
source objects?
You're on deadline, and there's
sort of a rule against it.
As a journalist, actually,
I violated that rule
on hard stories when
they were controversial,
but I really violated
as an historian.
For instance, with the clerks,
they're under a vow of secrecy
in the court, as well
as to Justice O'Connor.
And so, the deal I made with
them was that if we're going
to quote you on the
record in the book,
you get to see the whole chapter
that you're in before
it appears.
Now, of course, they
would squawk.
They would see it, and
they'd -- I didn't say that,
even if they had said it.
>> Osceola Thomas: Well,
they didn't say that.
>> Evan Thomas: You know, they
-- but [laughter] you end up --
you end up learning
-- it's a net plus,
because even though
they might object
to the particular locution, they
end up telling you more, really,
because they trust you.
They trust you, and they should,
because you're trying
to get at the truth.
That's a very cumbersome
process, you know.
That -- but we -- that's
94 manuscripts going out.
We had the book read by two
federal court of appeals judges,
by the dean of the University
of Virginia Law School,
by legal experts.
>> Osceola Thomas: By her
old Con law professor,
wonderful guy.
>> Evan Thomas: By her
old Con law professor,
J. Harvie Wilkinson.
So there's -- it's a
very elaborate process,
which discloses a
lot of mistakes --
produces a lot of mistakes.
Doesn't catch all of them.
We've caught a few
since publication,
but it catches a lot of them.
And you get closer to the truth.
You never get to the truth.
You get closer to it.
>> Osceola Thomas:
I'll tell you one.
There is going to be a change
in the paperback edition.
Justice Ginsberg
has been wonderful,
telling people it's
a great book.
She said so at the
National Book Festival.
We were thrilled.
But she did write us
a letter and say --
and this is about a
story in the book.
Evan had heard from
Justice O'Connor's messenger
that Justice Ginsberg
had been --
that Justice Ginsberg had
hit Justice O'Connor's car
in the parking lot twice, and --
>> Evan Thomas: The first time
was a hit-and-run [laughter].
>> Osceola Thomas:
-- so we waited.
We talked to Justice
Ginsberg twice, and we waited
in her chambers until
the very last question.
And we said, "Is it true that
you hit Justice O'Connor's car?"
And she said, "Oh, yes,
I've never driven again."
And she said, "I hit her
car because I was trying
to avoid Justice
Scalia's car [laughter]."
So then -- but in the book,
attributed to the messenger is
that she hit the car twice.
So she writes a letter --
no, no, I only hit it once,
and she said, "But it is true
that it took me five times
to get my driver's
license [laughter]."
You can learn more [laughter].
>> Colleen Shogan:
One last question.
Actually, we'll do two,
if we can be quick.
Right here, and then over there.
Mm-hmm.
>> This is an easy one.
I was just curious about her
education prior to landing
at Stanford at 16, and who
supported her intelligence early
on, and if you know
anything about that.
>> Osceola Thomas: We do.
She -- her parents --
her mother, especially,
thought about homeschooling
her, taught her to read,
but she was a bright
little girl.
And the local schools were
far away, and not good,
so they ended up, when
she was six years old,
sending her to her
grandmother's house in El Paso.
And she grew up going
to school in El Paso,
living with her grandmother,
except for one year,
eighth grade, when she decided,
she said, herself, to come back
to the ranch, and try to take
the bus to the local school,
and see if that would work out.
Sort of interestingly, that did
not work out, and she went back
to her grandmother's after that.
>> Colleen Shogan:
Last question.
>> I'm wondering how
is it she came to run
for the state legislature, and
did she or did anyone else talk
about how that experience
affected her legal career?
Because so few justices
these days
in the contemporary era have
that kind of experience.
>> Evan Thomas: She and her
husband were politically active.
He was the head of the Young
Republicans of Maricopa County
when they first got there.
There was a -- kind
of a Republican establishment
in Phoenix.
They quickly joined it.
Barry Goldwater was a neighbor.
She was a, you know,
conservative Republican,
and sort of part of civic
engagement in Phoenix for them
in the early '60s was political
engagement, party engagement.
In Phoenix, the Republican
party kind of ran Phoenix,
and she was part of the
elite that did that.
And so, she was -- when
there was an opening
in the legislature,
actually a rare case --
there was a woman legislator
who got a job in Washington.
She filled the vacancy, and
then ran for office herself.
She was elected majority
leader, first woman ever
of an upper house, because as
one of her aides said there,
she was smarter than
everybody else,
and because she had good
political fingertips.
She had a great ability to
walk away from stupid fights.
There's one story I like to
tell where she had to deal
with Tom Goodwin, who was the
House appropriations committee
chairman and a drunk, a
drunk by 10:00 a.m. drunk,
and she called him
on his drinking.
And he said, "If you were a
man, I'd punch you in the nose."
And she said, "If you were a
man, you could [laughter]."
Now, that's a great story.
I like to tell it, but
actually, the important thing
about -- it's a one-off.
She very rarely had those
kind of confrontations.
The men might get into stupid
fights, but she didn't,
and it gave her a
lot more power.
>> Osceola Thomas: It also
informed her jurisprudence
on the court, because cases
would come from the states.
And while she was a federalist,
and she liked the idea
that the states had some
autonomy, once in a while,
she would say -- and she did
tell one of her clerks --
the clerk said, "Should I assume
that the states passed
this law thinking it would
be constitutional?"
And she said, "Oh, no,
I wouldn't assume
that [laughter]."
>> Evan Thomas: She
actually said --
actually, state legislatures
are venal, and run by money.
Now, she was a federalist.
She did believe in
devolving power to the states.
She was respectful of state
courts and state legislatures,
but she was extremely realistic
about them, having
served in one.
>> Colleen Shogan: I can't
recommend this book enough.
We do have books for sale
outside from our bookstore,
if you'd like to purchase them,
and there will be a
book signing afterwards.
Please join me in thanking
Evan and Osce Thomas.
[ Applause ]