Who's The Bigger Man?

The BFI (Big F-Word-Of-Your-Choice Idiot) snarked in 2006 about U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter:

"He's a girl. Everyone knows that. What’s the big deal? I’m talking about attitudinally here, folks.”

Of course, The BFI is — in his own hero's words — "a major-league asshole." One Souter is worth 100 Scalias or 1000 Thomases. One "girly-man" Souter is worth 10,000 cigar-puffin', pill-poppin' BFIs. In the view of Eags, a man of the Pacific Northwest, Souter was worthy of comparison to U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1939-1975). If this is (fair & balanced) judicial review, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Souter’s Summits
By Timothy Egan

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The accounts of Justice David Souter’s life as he prepares to leave the Supreme Court show that he is slipping away to history’s judgment in the same way he was introduced — a bubble or two off-plumb, as they say in Yankee carpentry circles.

Souter’s been painted as a strange, little man stranded in the wrong century, unsociable in the live-alone-with-your-cat sort of way. He eats a solo lunch at his desk every day, the same lunch, an apple and yogurt. And, talk about New England Gothic — he eats the apple through to the core!

At his 200-year-old family farmhouse — badly in need of a paint job, as numerous observers have noted — he has no e-mail access, no answering machine, a television that’s never been plugged in. And, strangest of all: he’s leaving one of the most powerful positions on earth because he wants more time to hike in his beloved New Hampshire mountains.

To many, this last assertion is proof of his advanced eccentricity. But let’s give him his due: anyone who has climbed every one of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot peaks, as the springy 69-year-old Souter reportedly has done, knows a kind of exhilaration that his black-robed colleagues in the tidal basin will never know.

How strange is it, really, to want another taste of the savage winds atop Mount Washington before the knees go bad?

Earlier this month, Souter showed a flash of regional chauvinism on the issue closest to his heart when he said there was no good hiking south of Massachusetts. He then described a dream he’s had every day since he announced his decision to step down: he is standing atop the highest point of New Hampshire, above timberline and looking down at the path from which he came.

Now consider Souter’s polar opposite on the Court, in manner and philosophy, the ever-combustible Justice Antonin Scalia. A father of nine — talk about a 19th-century man — Nino Scalia’s idea of a fantasy getaway involves Dick Cheney as a bunkmate in a fortress stocked with single-malts.

Scalia, remember, rode with Vice President Cheney on Air Force Two to a hunting excursion in 2004 that had all the trappings of clueless British royalty on holiday, complete with ground travel to prey in armored S.U.V.’s and sycophants at every turn who all but tracked birds by radar. It rained over several days and the ducks were scarce, giving Scalia much time to get to know the central figure in a secrecy case he would soon help to decide.

Little wonder that former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor dismissed stories of Scalia with the kind of shorthand families use for the daft uncle — “That’s just Nino.”

Or how about Clarence Thomas? He gained 100 pounds after getting his life-tenured easy chair on the Court and accepts more gifts than anyone else on the bench, according to Jeffrey Toobin’s book, “The Nine.”

By contrast, the ascetic Souter consistently listed “none” on the court’s annual gift and travel disclaimer form.

But woe to the public man who fails to maintain his own spin, leaving professional character assassins to the job. “David Souter’s a girl,” said Rush Limbaugh in 2006. “Everyone knows that. What’s the big deal? I’m talking about attitudinally here, folks.”

O.K., a show of hands: Who’s the bigger man: the prescription-drug abuser with the cigar stuffed in his mouth, or the buff older gentleman puffing his way up one of the more strenuous climbs in New England?

Souter is not the first Supreme Court Justice to claim love of mountain trails over legal aerobics.

Justice William O. Douglas, no stranger to life outside the bounds of conformity, was never happier than when he was home in Goose Prairie, Wash., near the late-afternoon shadow of Mount Rainier. He once made a visitor, Justice William Rehnquist, hike up an 8,000-foot peak (these are Western mountains, pardner, cloud-scrapers), before he’d give him an evening cocktail.

And in 1970, Douglas was deep in the Cascade Mountain wilderness when he was approached by three lawyers in business suits seeking a temporary restraining order. Douglas sent them away, with advice on proper outdoor wear. He left his decision, the following morning, in a tree trunk. Their request was denied. (That part of the Cascades is now formally called the William O. Douglas Wilderness, a splendid slice of high country.)

President Obama said he wants Souter’s replacement to have some empathy with average people, an observation that sent his critics into a code-deciphering lather. But Souter’s example shows another quality that a justice should have — a sense of balance between the hothouse of Washington and the cooler air of the outdoors.

Souter relies on the New Hampshire wild for restoration, he said, a sentiment shared by Thomas Jefferson. Say what you will about his legal rulings — and his backing of a decision that allows cities to condemn private property in order to get a higher tax base was a clunker that he should regret.

But Souter’s lifestyle, at the least, is close to original intent. ♥

[Timothy Egan writes "Outposts," a column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism, and was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by Whitman College in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan is the author of four other books, in addition to The Worst Hard Time — The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, Breaking Blue, and The Winemaker's Daughter.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves