First: Sandra Day O'Connor

by Evan Thomas

She would walk away from fights she deemed unnecessary, while never shying away from the important ones. She knew when to tease, when to flatter, and when to punch the bully in the nose.

Day remained a lifelong anti–New Deal, anti–Big Government conservative, even after the Rural Electrification Administration brought a steady supply of electricity to the ranch. Sandra and her brother, Alan, vividly recalled DA’s tirades against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “Why, that son of a bitch even tells me when to get up in the morning and go to bed at night,” he railed when FDR instituted Daylight Saving Time at the beginning of World War II.

I get it

During World War II, beef prices had risen, and Harry could afford to buy a new car. In September 1946, Harry and Ada Mae drove their daughter to Palo Alto, California, where a new world awaited.

“When I was a child, I had as a pet a cat,” recalled Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. “When Sandra was a child she had as a pet a bobcat.”

At about five thirty in the morning, father and daughter were rinsing off dishes, looking out the kitchen window toward the northeast. There was a little light in the sky as dawn approached. Suddenly they saw an intense flash. There was no sound, but a mushroom cloud rose in the sky. The Days looked at each other. What had they just seen? About a month later, when the news of the bombing of Hiroshima arrived through the weekly mail, they read about the test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, 180 miles distant, and realized they had seen the first blast of an atomic bomb.

Once, as Sandra was bouncing along a dirt road, one of the boys tapped her on the shoulder and informed her that his brother Scott had fallen out of the car. She turned the car around, found and dusted off Scott, and they went on their way. She blamed herself for not properly shutting the car door.

Long after Souter had retired from the Court, in the winter of 2016, he came to Phoenix to toast O’Connor at a prize dinner at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law (Arizona State’s law school had recently been renamed in her honor). Souter found O’Connor, who was in a wheelchair. “Hiya, toots,” he greeted her and held her hand as they entered the ballroom. He described her as his “first friend on the Court.” Through his first twenty-four decisions on the Court, October Term 1990, he voted with O’Connor one hundred percent of the time.

The “welcome news” was that three justices—Kennedy, Souter, and O’Connor—had been meeting secretly to save a woman’s right to abortion. The Troika, as they became known, was cobbling together a joint opinion that, when added to the pro-abortion votes of Blackmun and John Stevens, would effectively negate Rehnquist’s effort to gut Roe v. Wade.