Word: blackmun
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...Blackmun is confirmed, it will be due mainly to his merits, rather than any lessons the Administration has learned in how to put a nominee across. Once again, the selection was almost solely the work of the President and his battered adviser, Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon and Mitchell did not consult Senators or the American Bar Association in advance, although the selection was announced to a few key Senators shortly before the press was informed. But this time Nixon personally met the nominee and chatted with him for 45 minutes before deciding on him. Despite widespread criticism...
...choice of a Northerner prevents any immediate test of Nixon's claim that the Senate would not have accepted a Southerner who is a "strict constructionist." There seems little doubt that a Southerner of Blackmun's caliber and philosophy could be confirmed. Many Senators were still bitter last week about the President's charge that they had acted out of regional prejudice. The first evidence of the practical impact of these strained relations could possibly come when the Senate takes up Nixon's plan to expand the ABM program. The animosity...
MOTHER, if it doesn't come through, it's O.K. I like my work on the appellate court very much." With those words Judge Blackmun sought to reassure his 85-year-old mother about his nomination to the Supreme Court. Mindful that emotional controversy has severely upset the lives of the President's two previous choices, he observes: "I feel like a load of bricks has landed on me." A reserved man who is protective of his privacy, the 61-year-old jurist nevertheless appreciates the appointment: "It's overwhelming and humbling...
Except for an avid interest in major-league baseball and professional football, the judge's life seems devoted solely to his court duties and his family, which includes three grown daughters. Although the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals is headquartered in St. Louis, for most of the year Blackmun prefers to work on his cases in the relative serenity of Rochester, Minn., where he has lived since becoming the chief counsel of the Mayo Clinic in 1950. (He resigned in 1959.) An FBI agent confided to Blackmun's lively wife, Dorothy, that the only criticism they could turn...
...Blackmun has a dry, self-deprecating wit, but he rarely shows it in public. Even as a boy in St. Paul, he put his school studies ahead of most other interests, and spent much of his spare time helping out in his father's grocery and hardware store. Studious but not shy, he won high school oratorical contests and was active in church plays. At Harvard, he majored in mathematics: "It is much the same as legal thinking-it teaches you to be precise and logical." To meet his expenses, he also worked as a milkman, janitor, driver...