But any realist would have said, once you’ve gotten your tax cuts, a lot of the pressure on people to give you the spending cuts is gone. Tax cuts are comparatively easy. Spending cuts are harder.
Some of the big deficits of the 1980s and up until today date back to Reagan’s presidency. The national debt doubled in real terms. The amount of debt that had been run up since George Washington’s presidency to 1980—that much again was accumulated during Reagan’s presidency.
DR: There was an assassination attempt on Reagan in March of the first year of his administration. How close did he come to death?
HWB: If we measure it, probably half an inch or so. That’s basically how far the bullet was from his heart. It might have been even closer than that, because Reagan didn’t realize initially that he had been hit.
He heard the shots. He was shoved into the back of the presidential limousine and his Secret Service agent came in on top of him to shield him. Reagan felt this pain, and he thought that he had broken a rib by hitting it on the hump of the car.
They first head toward the White House to get him safe there, but he coughs up blood, so they turn and go to George Washington University Hospital. He still has no idea that he has been badly wounded. He insists on walking from the limousine into the hospital.
He gets inside the double door of the hospital and passes out. He nearly collapses on the floor, but he’s surrounded by Secret Service and hospital personnel, so they prevent him from whacking his head on the floor. And they realize he has been hit.
It took the surgeons a while to figure out exactly where the slug was. It took them even longer to figure out how they could get it out. They worried that they might actually cause more damage, because the bullet had ricocheted off the limousine and had flattened out, so it was this almost ninja-like disk with sharp edges. Every time it moved, it risked doing more damage to Reagan’s internal organs.
The surgeons were finally able to get it out. But it was a very close call, a closer call than the public knew at the time.
DR: He survives, and later in his first term he tries to get other legislation through. What was the most significant thing he accomplished in his first term other than spending cuts?
HWB: That was the most important. The next thing, in terms of legislation, was the bolstering of Social Security in 1983.
DR: Some people say the assassination attempt on Reagan affected him mentally and that he never was quite as sharp afterward. Do you agree with that?
HWB: Perhaps out of delicacy, you declined to mention Bill O’Reilly’s book Killing Reagan. Its basic thesis is that the shooting in 1981 eventually led to Reagan’s death in 2004. My thinking on this is that if something happens to you when you are seventy years old that kills you over two decades later, that’s a lethality we can all live with.
There are those who claim—O’Reilly is one, along with his coauthor—that somehow this triggered Reagan’s failing memory. Now, his memory quite clearly did fail after he left the White House. The question of whether he was becoming forgetful while he was president was one that I had to deal with. Everybody who’s looking at the Reagan presidency closely has to look at the possibility.
There were certain moments when it was an issue that became quite public. When Reagan was running for reelection in 1984, he had two debates with Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate. In the first debate, Reagan was uncharacteristically clumsy and flummoxed.
This is a trained actor, a guy who knows how to memorize his lines. He tripped over his opening statement, which everybody memorizes. He tripped over his closing statement, repeated himself. People who watched this became kind of embarrassed for him.
The next day, the Wall Street Journal—the Reagan-friendly, Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal—had a masthead headline that asked, “Is Reagan Too Old to Be President?” This was the first time the issue was raised in a serious way.
The usually polished Reagan’s clumsy performance in a 1984 debate with Democratic challenger Walter Mondale raised questions about his ability to be president.
Ron Reagan, Reagan’s youngest child, said in a memoir he wrote after his father died that he watched this debate and became convinced this was the first public sign of what would eventually be diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Ron Reagan was pilloried for this, and he was sort of forced to retract it. But it’s an issue that did come up.
Reagan didn’t really address the issue at all. He just made people laugh about it. People could say, “He’s got a sense of humor. If he’s laughing it off, we can laugh it off too.”
There were various people who observed Reagan during his second term and said that he was clearly slowing down. John Poindexter, who was his national security advisor at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal, told me in an interview that he thought Reagan’s failing memory was part of the Iran-Contra stuff.
DR: What about Reagan’s children? He had four children, but he seemed to have no relationship with them while he was president. What was that about?
HWB: This goes back to what I was saying earlier: that Reagan seemed to have an emotional universe that could encompass Nancy but almost no one else. Reagan was friendly but had no real friends.
I have thought that if he had not been politically important, if he hadn’t been famous in that way, nobody would have come to his funeral. There was nobody outside of Nancy he confided in. He didn’t reveal much of himself to anyone, and the kids often felt on the outside of this.
When they were young, sometimes they attributed it to the fact that their father and Reagan’s first wife, Jane Wyman, the mother of his first two kids, were both Hollywood actors and they were busy. But it was more than that. Reagan just didn’t have room in his emotional world for the kids.
There’s a very telling moment when his son Michael is about to graduate from high school, except that he doesn’t have enough credits and he’s been bouncing from one school to another. The boarding school he’s attending says, “We will allow you to graduate if you can get your father to give the commencement address.”
Michael calls up his dad: “Dad, can you come down and give the commencement address?” Reagan is thrilled, because he was not sure that Mike was ever going to graduate from high school. He goes down there and he’s in politician mode, working the room with the graduates. He says, “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan. What’s your name?” “Johnnie Smith.” “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan. What’s your name?” “Mary Jones.” “Hi, I’m Ronald Reagan. What’s your name?” “Dad!!!”
He didn’t even recognize his own son. Michael tells this story in his memoirs.
DR: One last question. Is that hair really his? No dye?
HWB: Was his hair really that black his whole life? Reagan claimed it was, and I never found evidence to the contrary. Being a responsible historian, if I don’t have evidence, I can’t say.
16 CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN G. ROBERTS JR.
on the U.S. Supreme Court
“I get to do the kind of work I enjoy, in service of the country that I love, with eight wonderful people. And I can do it for as long as I want. That’s a pretty good combination.”
The legal world has produced, in every generation, a few individuals who seem destined to rise to the top of the profession. John G. Roberts Jr. is one of those individuals: an honors graduate of Harvard College (he made it through in three years), an honors graduate of Harvard Law School (where he was the managing editor of the Harvard Law Review), a clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist, a special assistant to the attorney general of the United States, an associate White House counsel, the principal deputy solicitor general, and one of the finest Supreme Court advocates in recent decades.
But life rarely goes forward without setbacks. John Roberts had one in 1992 when he was nominated to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit by President George H. W. Bush. The end of the first Bush
presidency arrived before the U.S. Senate acted on the nomination, and Roberts remained in private practice for another eleven years.
He might well have stayed there for the rest of his career. A lawyer who wants to be a judge rarely gets a second bite at the apple.
But in 2001, President George W. Bush, recognizing the obvious legal talent of John Roberts, nominated him again to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Senate confirmed him in 2003. Two years later, with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement, Bush nominated Roberts to be her successor.
However, before the Senate could consider the nomination, Chief Justice William Rehnquist passed away, and President Bush then nominated Roberts to be chief justice. He was confirmed in September 2005 by the Senate. With that he became, at the age of fifty, the youngest chief justice in two hundred years.
The new chief was not only young by the standard of his predecessors, he was young compared to me. (I am five years older.) Perhaps it is a sign of aging when you first realize that the high position of chief justice of the Supreme Court is held by someone younger than you.
The chief justice’s main responsibilities obviously revolve around leadership of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. But one of his other duties is to serve as the chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution, the government-supported organization, created in 1846, that now operates nineteen museums and nine research centers. I was appointed to the Smithsonian’s board of regents in 2012, and now serve as chair of the board’s executive committee. In that capacity, I have worked with Chief Justice Roberts on Smithsonian matters and have come to know him reasonably well, and to admire him a great deal (because of his accomplishments, legal acumen, intellect, wit, and work ethic).
Although Chief Justice Roberts is not a professional historian, I thought a departure in the Congressional Dialogues series from a historian interviewee would certainly be warranted if he would agree to let me interview him in this setting. To my delight, he did, and the result was a quite interesting look at his career and at the Supreme Court. The chief justice’s self-deprecating humor and wit, perhaps not widely known, are apparent in the interview.
Of all of the interviews held in the Dialogues series, this one probably attracted the greatest number of members of Congress. While they work in buildings only a few hundred yards away from the Supreme Court, most have little regular contact with the justices. This was therefore an opportunity for them not only to meet the chief justice but to hear his views on so many matters relating to the court.
It is not considered appropriate to ask a sitting justice about the reasoning behind a particular decision or the possible outcomes of future cases. So the discussion does not include those kinds of subjects. But it does nonetheless offer interesting, even rare, insights into the court and its current (still quite young) chief justice.
Chief Justice Roberts provided an inside look at how the Supreme Court operates—how cases are selected to be considered, how oral arguments are used, how the cases are voted upon and assigned for opinion-writing, how the opinions are drafted and announced (without leaks—a Washington rarity), and how the collegiality among the justices is generally maintained, despite wide ideological differences in many areas.
The chief justice might never have had the chance to lead the court, he reveals in the interview, but for a chance encounter while he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He expected to be a historian, and was a history major. But during a cab ride in Boston, the driver mentioned that he too had gone to Harvard and majored in history. That prompted John Roberts to expand his academic interests and to pursue a career—the law—less likely to force him to be driving cabs after graduation.
* * *
MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): We’re very honored tonight to have the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Thank you very much for coming. We won’t take it as a comment on anything he says if some people get up and leave between nine and nine-thirty, because we understand there might be a Senate vote.
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN G. ROBERTS JR. (CJR): Or a World Series game, one or the other.
DR: You labor very hard on your opinions, obviously. But you got the most attention I’ve seen recently for a speech you gave at the ninth-grade commencement of your son. Why did that speech go viral? What did you say that got so much attention from everybody?
CJR: I didn’t even know it was being filmed. What may have caught some eyes is that it was ninth grade, so it was different than most commencement speeches. You can’t tell the students that they have reached a great milestone or that they are about to go out into the world. I had to think about what was suitable for them.
It occurred to me that the start of high school is an important time. For a lot of people, character is really shaped in high school. College will test your character, of course. But in high school you have to go through a few rough things, and it shapes what you’re going to be like.
DR: You told the ninth-graders you hoped that they failed—that you hoped they weren’t successful because they would learn more from that.
CJR: If you fail at things in high school, it is usually not that dramatic. I wished them bad luck—because if you experience that, you come to realize that chance plays an important role in life, and you can decide to be bitter about it or you can decide to understand that success is not entirely due to one’s own efforts, and neither is failure.
DR: At least from the outside, it doesn’t seem like there have been a lot of failures in your life. You were a superstar student. You’re the chief justice of the United States. Let’s talk about your background. You’re from Indiana?
CJR: I was born in Buffalo but grew up in Indiana.
DR: Were you a good student in high school? I assume you were pretty good.
CJR: The eighth-grade class from my elementary school comes and visits the court every year, and one year they brought my permanent record. I mean, it is a permanent record.
To be honest, I expected it to be pretty good. It was mixed. There was one year when I had good grades except for one D from what I figure must have been a conduct issue.
DR: You must have done well in high school. You got into Harvard. When you got there, did you realize that either everybody there was smarter than you or that you were smarter than most of the other people there?
CJR: There were some very smart people there. People like Yo-Yo Ma were in my graduating class.
DR: Wow! Did you know him then?
CJR: No, no. Bill Gates was also in my entering class. He didn’t graduate, of course. Think how well he could have done if he had stayed in school.
DR: You graduated in three years. How do you graduate from Harvard in three years?
CJR: It is not that dramatic. If you took enough Advanced Placement tests and did well enough on them, you could skip your first year.
DR: When you graduated, did you decide to do a gap year, or did you want to go right to law school?
CJR: I went straight to law school. The idea of gap years wasn’t very common, and my father wasn’t that sympathetic to it.
DR: Were there lawyers in your family?
CJR: No.
DR: What propelled you to go to law school? Did you know when you went to Harvard you wanted to go to law school?
CJR: No. I didn’t want to go to law school. I wanted to be an historian. I enjoyed history and thought I could make a career out of it.
I was driving back to school from Logan Airport in Boston one day and I talked to the cabdriver. I said, “I’m a history major at Harvard.” And he said, “I was a history major at Harvard.”
DR: So you decided to go to law school.
CJR: I thought I would move to law.
DR: I went to law school. In the first year of law school—really in the first month or two—you realize certain people have the ability to quickly do legal reasoning. They have the knack of it, and some people don’t. You must have realized that it wasn’t as hard as you had thought it would
be.
CJR: It was as hard as I thought it would be. It was pretty hard throughout.
DR: But you made the Harvard Law Review, which meant you were near the top of your class, and so you got a clerkship. Did you know when you were in law school that you wanted to be a judge?
CJR: I thought I would practice law. The idea of being a judge did not cross my mind.
DR: You clerked for a very famous judge named Judge Friendly, who was probably the most famous federal court of appeals judge. How was that experience?
CJR: It was transformational. It really was. Harvard Law School, at the time, the late seventies, was a pretty cynical place. I think it’s changed somewhat. But then, it left students with the sense that the law was either the means by which the upper class oppressed the lower class, or it was a tool that could be manipulated to promote particular causes. So I left law school not thinking it was a particularly noble calling.
That changed with Judge Friendly. He was somebody who did think that the law had stature of its own, independent from the uses to which it could be put; that the law was something very noble, that laws were the wise restraints that make men free.
To see him not only believe that but also practice it at the highest level changed my view of the whole profession.
DR: After that you got a clerkship with Justice William Rehnquist. Was he the chief justice at the time?
The American Story Page 37