Bill Barnhart: John Paul Stevens and the U.S. Navy at War
[Bill Barnhart has been a business writer and editor for the Chicago Tribune since 1979. This article appeared on SCOTUSblog.]
Former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, quoting an unnamed predecessor, said that being nominated to the Supreme Court was largely a matter of standing at the right spot “when the bus went by.” Certainly, political, geographical, sexual and even religious characteristics often have determined who is standing at the right spot at the right time. For that reason, the actual qualifications – or lack thereof – of a Supreme Court candidate frequently are overlooked.
Judge John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago was in the right spot for two reasons in 1975 when Justice William O. Douglas retired. First, Stevens was known and respected by President Gerald R. Ford’s attorney general, Edward H. Levi (Stevens had taught Levi’s University of Chicago law school class in monopoly law). Second, he had no political resume and was unknown to the public, facts which fit perfectly with Ford’s nomination strategy.
Stevens’s legitimate qualifications received perfunctory review in the Senate confirmation process, which took less than three weeks from nomination to swearing-in. One crucial factor in Stevens’s background – his top-secret work for the U.S. Navy in Pearl Harbor during World War II – was barely mentioned. Yet in my opinion, Stevens’s work as a twenty-something communications officer interpreting Japanese radio signals was as important to his success as an associate justice as his law school studies, his clerkship for Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, his work as a corporate lawyer, and his service on the federal appeals bench in his hometown.
John Stevens was recruited into naval intelligence work during his senior year by one of the deans of the University of Chicago undergraduate college. Leon Perdue Smith, Jr., a suave and handsome native of Georgia who had received his Ph.D. in French literature at the university in 1930, was what spy novelist John Le Carre calls a talent spotter. “He was the undercover guy,” Stevens told me and my research associate, Gene Schlickman. Smith, an expert on interpreting ancient and rare literary manuscripts, had been a code-breaker for the navy in World War I....
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Former Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, quoting an unnamed predecessor, said that being nominated to the Supreme Court was largely a matter of standing at the right spot “when the bus went by.” Certainly, political, geographical, sexual and even religious characteristics often have determined who is standing at the right spot at the right time. For that reason, the actual qualifications – or lack thereof – of a Supreme Court candidate frequently are overlooked.
Judge John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago was in the right spot for two reasons in 1975 when Justice William O. Douglas retired. First, Stevens was known and respected by President Gerald R. Ford’s attorney general, Edward H. Levi (Stevens had taught Levi’s University of Chicago law school class in monopoly law). Second, he had no political resume and was unknown to the public, facts which fit perfectly with Ford’s nomination strategy.
Stevens’s legitimate qualifications received perfunctory review in the Senate confirmation process, which took less than three weeks from nomination to swearing-in. One crucial factor in Stevens’s background – his top-secret work for the U.S. Navy in Pearl Harbor during World War II – was barely mentioned. Yet in my opinion, Stevens’s work as a twenty-something communications officer interpreting Japanese radio signals was as important to his success as an associate justice as his law school studies, his clerkship for Justice Wiley B. Rutledge, his work as a corporate lawyer, and his service on the federal appeals bench in his hometown.
John Stevens was recruited into naval intelligence work during his senior year by one of the deans of the University of Chicago undergraduate college. Leon Perdue Smith, Jr., a suave and handsome native of Georgia who had received his Ph.D. in French literature at the university in 1930, was what spy novelist John Le Carre calls a talent spotter. “He was the undercover guy,” Stevens told me and my research associate, Gene Schlickman. Smith, an expert on interpreting ancient and rare literary manuscripts, had been a code-breaker for the navy in World War I....