The Long Reach of the Sixties, Laura Kalman's richly detailed and thoroughly engaging new book, charts the relationship between the Johnson and Nixon administrations and the Supreme Court. The mid-1960s through the early 1970s was a remarkably eventful period for the court. There were ten total Supreme Court nominations, four of them failed (Johnson and Nixon had two each), a resignation under a cloud of scandal (Abe Fortas), and a campaign, quietly urged by Nixon himself, to impeach a justice (William Douglas). It was also a period for which there are unusually thorough records of what was happening inside the White House, thanks to the recording systems that Johnson and Nixon each had installed and that have left historians hours of eavesdropping on the presidents’ meetings and phone conversations. This book thus marks the happy convergence of dramatic subject matter, uniquely rich source material, and, in Kalman, a legal historian with remarkable skills at crafting long-form narrative drama.
As she has done in her previous books, Kalman expertly integrates the texture and details of the past with her mastery of and insights into the broader historical context in which her story plays out. Kalman is also a skilled character portraitist. The protagonists of this book, particularly the two presidents who are always near the center of action, come across as fully formed people: flawed, complex, and conflicted. The Long Reach of the Sixties is a work of scholarship of the highest quality that is also compulsively readable.
Although this is not a thesis-driven book, Kalman frames her narrative with an argument, laid out in the introduction, referenced throughout the book, and then given more sustained analysis in the conclusion. Her argument is that Johnson and Nixon were more creative and ambitious than their predecessors in their efforts to leverage the Supreme Court to bolster presidential power, and the political battles that resulted “had lasting consequences for the court's political significance and the selection and confirmation of Supreme Court justices that still resonate today” (x). Our historical explanations for the current hyperpoliticized confirmation process typically begin with Robert Bork's failed nomination in 1987. Kalman makes a persuasive case for turning our gazes further back in time, to the 1960s.
Before Johnson, presidents gave relatively little attention to their Supreme Court appointments. Franklin Roosevelt wanted justices who would uphold his New Deal program. Beyond this basic requirement, he used appointments to reward friends or pay back political debts, a practice adopted by the three presidents who followed him. Johnson and Nixon, master political strategists, saw greater opportunities in the court. The nomination process for them was a weapon, deployed to advance their own political goals.
Johnson appointed his close friend Abe Fortas so that he would have his own eyes and ears inside the court. He appointed Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court justice, to bolster his relations with the civil rights community. In 1968, he put in motion his final appointment game plan: he would elevate Fortas to Chief Justice and then install the Texan Homer Thornberry to fill Fortas's seat. Johnson's plan was a spectacular failure. Kalman argues that it was also highly consequential. Conservatives used the Fortas hearings to rail against the supposed excesses of the Warren Court, while also drawing attention to the nominee's various ethical improprieties. Fortas was blocked in the Senate (he would be forced to leave the court altogether the following year), and the entire nomination process took on now-familiar characteristics. It became an event in which senators and outside pressure groups would lead a thoroughly politicized national debate over the direction of the court
Nixon used attacks on the Warren Court as a centerpiece of his successful 1968 campaign, and once in office, he used court appointments “to cultivate constituencies and to compensate for disappointments he inflicted on conservatives” (306). He sought nominees who would spur divisive debates over the court's most contentious issues, such as criminal justice and civil rights, because he believed it would win him political points. (Nixon always placed near-term political benefits over any long-term vision of constitutional law in his court appointments.) His first nominee was Warren Burger, a federal appeals court judge who was an outspoken defender of the law-and-order agenda that helped win Nixon the presidency. His next two nominees were Southerners, intended to appease Southern conservatives frustrated with the administration's moderate position on civil rights. The Senate rejected both. The high-stakes political theater of the Fortas nomination became the new normal during the Nixon years.
These events of the Johnson and Nixon years not only set the stage for the modern nomination and confirmation process, they also established a pattern for how the Warren Court has been remembered, Kalman argues. Public perception of the Warren Court as a dangerously “liberal” and “activist” court were forged in the nomination battles of this period. Kalman sees this as an inaccurate portrayal of a court that, as historians have recently emphasized, was largely in line with its times. This “cartoonish image” of the Warren Court, Kalman laments, has skewed discussions of the court ever since (313).
A work of prodigious historical research as well as a page-turner, The Long Reach of the Sixties expertly brings to life and gives meaning to a critical period in the history of the court and the presidency. In the process, Kalman also illuminates our present state of affairs.
