by Peter Huber
On June 17, 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor glanced at the front page of her local newspaper, then read it with increasing interest. According to the Arizona Republic, Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart had just announced his retirement. Arizona senator Dennis De Concini, said the Republic, had suggested that President Ronald Reagan replace Justice Stewart with a 51-year-old judge on the Arizona Court of Appeals. Her name: Sandra Day O'Connor.
O'Connor knew that senators often proposed people from their own states to fill court vacancies. She also knew that presidents rarely heeded such advice, particularly when it concerned a rare and all-important appointment to the United States Supreme Court. During his 1980 campaign for the presidency, Reagan had promised to appoint a woman to the Court, a move that would shatter an almost 200-year-old tradition. Still, O'Connor later recalled, she regarded De Concini's suggestion as no more than a friendly gesture from a fellow Arizonan. Eight days later, she would find she had been mistaken.
In April, when he learned of Stewart's plan to retire, the president had asked aides to compile a list of the nation's most prominent female lawyers and judges. Topping the completed list was the name of Sandra Day O'Connor. Reagan then ordered the Justice Department to begin a secret investigation of the Arizona judge's past and present activities. Receiving a positive report, he told Attorney General William French Smith to call O'Connor. Smith telephoned her on June 25 and, two days later, sent his top deputies to interview her in Phoenix.
O'Connor held several lengthy conversations with Smith's chief counselor and his staff. They returned with glowing accounts. "She really made it easy," said one official later. "She was the right age, had the right philosophy, the right combination of experience, the right political affiliation, the right backing." On July 1, O'Connor quietly met with Reagan in the Oval Office of the White House. After a 45-minute talk with her, Reagan reportedly told aides he would interview no further candidates for the Supreme Court vacancy: O'Connor, he said, was the right woman for the job.
Getting wind of her possible nomination, reporters besieged O'Connor with calls, but the judge remained politely silent. Both O'Connor and the now real possibility of a historic break with tradition were suddenly hot topics among the nation's columnists, television commentators, government officials, and private citizens. Reagan ended days of public speculation with a televised press conference on July 7.
"Without doubt," said the president, "the most awesome appointment a president can make is to the United States Supreme Court." Recalling his campaign promise to appoint a woman, he added, "That is not to say I would appoint a woman merely to do so. That would not be fair to women, nor to future generations of all Americans whose lives are so deeply affected by decisions of the Court. Rather, I pledged to appoint a woman who meets the very high standards I demand of all court appointees."
Reagan then introduced O'Connor, whom he described as "truly a 'person for all seasons,' possessing those unique qualities of temperament, fairness, intellectual capacity and devotion to the public good which have characterized the 101 'brethren' who have preceded her." (The term brethren, or "brothers," had been traditionally applied to the Court's exclusively male justices.)
The official nomination sparked a noisy public debate. Most of Reagan's deeply conservative supporters opposed O'Connor; her record, said right-wing Republicans, showed an alarmingly liberal tinge. And because she had taken a moderate view of abortion when she served as an Arizona state legislator, antiabortion activists vowed to fight her confirmation. "We feel we've been betrayed," asserted a spokesman for the Life Amendment Political Action Committee. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of the fundamentalist Moral Majority, said all "good Christians" should think twice about Sandra Day O'Connor.
Most of the nation's prominent women's groups, however, approved of the Arizona judge. Eleanor Smeal of the National Organization for Women called the nomination "a major victory for women's rights." And Massachusetts's liberal Democratic senator, Edward Kennedy, expressed admiration for the Republican nominee:
"Every American," said Kennedy, "can take pride in the president's commitment to select such a woman for this critical office." Both sides- pro- and anti-O'Connor- staged Washington demonstrations, and both appeared at her confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Although the Constitution empowers the president to nominate federal judges, candidates must be approved by the Senate before taking office. O'Connor's three-day confirmation hearings attracted a record number of journalists, witnesses, and spectators. All listened attentively as she read her opening statement. "As the first woman to be nominated as a Supreme Court justice, I am particularly honored," she said, "but I happily share the honor with millions of American women of yesterday and today whose abilities and conduct have given me this opportunity for service." Expressing her lifelong "reverence and respect" for the Court, O'Connor said, "It is to the United States Supreme Court that we all turn when we seek that which we want most from our government: equal justice under law."
Sessions with the Senate Judiciary Committee can be harrowing. Faced with blunt, sometimes hostile questions, federal nominees have been known to lose their temper, to contradict themselves, or to misstate their own positions. O'Connor did none of these things. She calmly discussed her beliefs about the law, stating that, in her opinion, "judges should avoid substituting their own views . . . for those of the legislature." Elected legislators, she maintained, are more "attuned to the public will" and more "politically accountable" than appointed judges. She also discussed her own experiences and recounted some of the prejudices she had encountered as a newly graduated female lawyer in the 1950s.
But O'Connor steadfastly refused to predict how she would vote as a Supreme Court justice, particularly on the politically sensitive issue of abortion. Despite her firm stand, and despite the vehement protests of the political Right, O'Connor won the approval of 17 of the committee's 18 members. A few days later, the full Senate confirmed her as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. The vote was 99-0.
On the afternoon of September 25, 1981, every spectator's seat in the United States Supreme Court was filled. At 2:04, the doors at either side of the chamber swung open, sending an expectant murmur through the crowd. The president of the United States emerged from one door. From the other strode Sandra Day O'Connor, ready to take her oath as the 102nd member of the Supreme Court- and the first woman in its 191-year history.
After Reagan and O'Connor had taken their place, the Court clerk issued his traditional order: "All rise!" Everyone in the courtroom, including O'Connor and Reagan, stood as the Court's eight black-robed justices approached their imposing mahogany bench. Seated at its center, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger accepted the presidential document that commissioned Sandra Day O'Connor an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
O'Connor placed her hand on a Bible and repeated the time-honored words of fidelity to country and Court: "I, Sandra Day O'Connor, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."
Completing the oath, O'Connor donned a black robe. Then, as her family, friends, and hundreds of Washington officials watched, she walked to the far-right side of the bench-the position traditionally reserved for the Court's newest justice- and joined the highest court in the land.