SlothSlayer

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On a clear October morning in 1987, the Senate chamber filled with the low murmur of a body that already knew how the day would end. At a little past eleven o’clock, the clerk began the roll call that would decide the fate of Robert Heron Bork. The nominee was not in the chamber. He remained in his chambers on the District of Columbia Circuit, a man of sixty who had spent a lifetime arguing that the Constitution meant what it said when it was written and that judges were bound by that meaning. He had been a Marine, a professor at Yale, Solicitor General of the United States, and a judge of formidable intellect. President Reagan had chosen him to replace Justice Lewis Powell, the Court’s quiet center, believing the appointment would restore a measure of restraint to a bench that had grown accustomed to reshaping the law. What followed was not a quiet debate over qualifications. Within minutes of the nomination’s announcement in July, Senator Edward Kennedy had risen on the Senate floor and painted a picture of “Robert Bork’s America”—a place of back-alley abortions, segregated lunch counters, and police battering down doors at midnight. The words traveled fast. They framed the months that followed. Hearings before the Judiciary Committee, under the gavel of Senator Joseph Biden, stretched across twelve days of televised testimony. Bork sat for five of them, answering with the dry precision of a scholar who treated the Constitution as a text rather than a mood. He spoke of original understanding, of the limits of judicial power, of the danger of courts inventing rights the framers had not placed there. Critics heard only the absences—what he would not protect, what he would not expand. Supporters heard a man defending the idea that the law is not whatever five justices say it is on a given morning. When the vote came, it was decisive: fifty-eight against, forty-two for. Fifty-two Democrats and six Republicans stood against him; only two Democrats joined the forty Republicans who supported him. It was the largest margin by which the Senate had ever rejected a Supreme Court nominee. President Reagan, in a statement from the White House, said he was saddened that the Senate had bowed to a campaign of political pressure. Bork himself issued a short reply from his chambers. He was, he said, glad the debate had taken place. There was now a full and permanent record by which the future could judge both the man and the nature of the confirmation process itself. The day did more than settle one vacancy. It changed the way the country filled the Court. From that October forward, a nomination became less a judgment of learning and character and more a contest over what the justice might do once seated. The word “Bork” entered the language as a verb. The seat went eventually to Anthony Kennedy. Bork returned to writing and to the argument he had always made: that the temptation of America was to treat the Constitution as clay in the hands of judges rather than as a fixed inheritance. On the Senate floor that morning, the tally simply recorded the choice the chamber had made. America 250 🇺🇸

Good morning from Virginia. 🇺🇸 On the morning of October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy was still in his pajamas, reading the newspapers in his bedroom at the White House, when National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy entered with news that would alter the course of the Cold War. High-altitude photographs taken two days earlier by a U-2 reconnaissance plane had revealed something the Soviets had repeatedly denied: the construction of offensive missile sites in Cuba. Medium-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads more than a thousand nautical miles were being installed only ninety miles from the American mainland. They could reach Washington, D.C., Cape Canaveral, and much of the southeastern United States in minutes. For the next six days the crisis remained a closely held secret. In the Cabinet Room and the Oval Office, Kennedy and a small circle of advisers met almost continuously. Photographs were spread across the table. Military options were argued with precision and urgency. Some favored a sudden air strike to destroy the sites before they became operational. Attorney General Robert Kennedy opposed it; such an attack, he said, would be “a Pearl Harbor in reverse.” Others pressed for a naval quarantine that would stop further shipments while giving the Soviets time to reconsider. Secretary of State Dean Rusk suggested the word “quarantine” rather than “blockade,” to avoid the echoes of the Soviet action against Berlin in 1948. Kennedy accepted the distinction. Every sentence of the speech being drafted was weighed for its effect on allies, adversaries, and the American people who still knew nothing of the danger. On the evening of October 22, at seven o’clock, Kennedy sat before the cameras in the Oval Office and told the nation what he had learned. His voice was measured, his expression grave. “This Government, as promised,” he began, “has maintained the closest surveillance of the Soviet military buildup on the island of Cuba.” He described the sites, the range of the missiles, the jet bombers being uncrated, and the deliberate deception by Soviet leaders. Then he announced the course the United States would take: a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment bound for Cuba. Ships carrying such cargoes would be turned back. Surveillance would intensify. The armed forces would prepare for any eventuality. And he stated a policy that left no ambiguity: any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere would be regarded as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, “requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.” Roughly fifty million Americans watched. In homes across the country, families sat in silence or rose to begin quiet preparations. The next morning the White House was flooded with telegrams—thousands of them, the great majority expressing support. At the same time the machinery of national defense moved with speed and discipline. Forces worldwide shifted to a higher state of alert. Dependents were ordered evacuated from Guantánamo. Ships of the Atlantic Fleet steamed toward the quarantine line. Strategic Air Command bombers and missiles stood ready. For the next six days the world watched Soviet freighters approach the line while diplomats and the two leaders searched for a way back from the brink. The crisis that began with a U-2 photograph and a presidential address ended without the exchange of nuclear fire. On October 28 Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. In return the United States pledged not to invade Cuba and, quietly, withdrew its own Jupiter missiles from Turkey. The thirteen days remain the closest the two superpowers came to nuclear war. What stayed with those who lived through them was the memory of a president who chose to level with the American people at the decisive hour, to combine firmness with restraint, and to keep open every possible path short of catastrophe. America 250 🇺🇸