First: Sandra Day O'Connor

by Evan Thomas

She had long appreciated the simple truth that if people get to know each other in a relaxed setting, they are more likely to find common ground.

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.

Confident but humble, and a born politician, she effectively controlled the Court because she was a moderate who believed in compromise.

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.

She learned how to not let bullying or passive-aggressive males get under her skin. She learned not to take the bait. That may have been the most valuable lesson.

She had your back, but she would never pat you on the back.”

Harry Day may have denounced FDR as a Big Government usurper, but Sandra would remember Mrs. Roosevelt as her first role model of a woman in public service.

“She could be cute, coquettish, but she wasn’t going to marry the fullback,” Cooley recalled. “She was going to save the world.”

Honestly, I hope you stomp on me the minute I’m getting ready to be in a bad mood.”

am now an ‘officer.’ I am not too excited because I think that is the rating I should have had all along.

SENATOR O’CONNOR TOOK to heart Abigail Adams’s request to her husband John in 1776, “Remember the Ladies….Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”

Mrs. John J. O’Connor was no bra burner. “I come to you,” she told the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs, “with my bra and my wedding ring on.”31 “She was not an angry feminist,” recalled newspaper reporter Ned Creighton. Nor did she act like a coquette or a supplicant. “Early on, women had to use their feminine wiles—oh, you’re so big and I’m so small. She wasn’t like that. She didn’t play it that way,” recalled lobbyist Rory Hays. “But she wasn’t a crazy feminist, either.”32

Women’s rights would become a quiet cause for Justice O’Connor—never frontally embraced as an activist on the model of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who came to the Court twelve years after O’Connor), but slowly and surely furthered and fostered in her judicial opinions.

GOODWIN: If you were a man, I’d hit you in the nose. O’CONNOR: If you were a man, you could.

“She was exacting. She wanted to deal in specifics and facts and truth,” said Cunningham. “She did not tolerate fools and she did not like bullshit.”

Sandra O’Connor did not want to do away with government, but she wanted it to be more sensible and less intrusive. She was a Republican, to be sure.

She wanted a sunnier, gentler, more genial standard-bearer.

In her files was a note to herself, written in her careful script sometime in the late 1970s. It read: “Don’t let fate take over. You can influence your destiny.”44

“I promised to have a woman on the Supreme Court. Now, if there are no qualified women, I understand. But I can’t believe there isn’t one.”

“She referred to the fact that she felt courts should construe rather than make laws. She said, however, that in a limited number of cases, it would be appropriate for the Court to reverse old decisions. However, she said this power should be used sparingly.”

He knew that he was about to go from a position as one of the most powerful lawyers in Phoenix to “second fiddle” in Washington, said Jay. “He walked away from a firm he loved, a city he loved, a practice he loved, and never gave it a second thought.”28

adopted by his grandparents, a carpenter and a maid. The day after O’Connor was nominated to the Supreme Court, his grandfather clipped out the news account from the Montgomery Advertiser and taped it to the living room mirror, beneath quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Frederick Douglass. “The message was ‘All things are possible,’

O’Connor’s best defender was herself.

O’Connor’s male clerks knew they were supposed to stay in shape, too. One of them was eating an ice cream cone at his desk. Seeing her coming, he put the cone in a drawer.

but when Sandra Day O’Connor joined the Court in 1981, the justices were still working out whether gays and women enjoyed the same Fourteenth Amendment protection as African Americans did.

In January 1981, Merritt and her fellow clerks had watched Ronald Reagan’s inaugural parade from the window of Judge Ginsburg’s chambers “with an air of mourning,” she recalled. “We knew our judge would not be the first woman justice.”

Two nights later, Ginsburg brought home a copy of Justice O’Connor’s majority opinion in Hogan, announced that day. Her husband, Marty, read the opinion, looked up at his wife, and asked, “Did you write this?”14

Her favorite shot in tennis was a vicious crosscourt forehand.

People who played the victim got the cold shoulder.