Alexander M. Bickel

...It is rare to have a friend with whom one shares every level of experience, from drinking and joking, to intensely personal concerns, to discussions of law and legal theory, and speculations about the order of things...

...He would say, "Not so good...

...He outlined the intellectual work he had intended to do, identified the themes, and the authors that had to be studied...

...He started from a combined base in law and history that is unmatched...

...But don't worry, I can still take care of you...

...I have never seen such courage in a man or a family...

...The way in which he went to his death will always remain for me and for the others who witnessed it one of the most profoundly moving experiences of our lives...

...Finally, in considerable frustration, I told the class, "Mr...

...And he possessed the genius to bring his vast erudition into focus, being able to move easily between the most technical legal doctrine and the broadest political speculation, to relate, say, the decline of the Article III case-orcontroversy requirement to the discouraging impact of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment upon contemporary American political trends...

...We often taught seminars together...

...And he always helped, with sympathy or advice, often with just the right wisecrack...

...These were the accomplishments for which we honored and stood in awe of him but they were not the reasons we cherished him...

...It is also rare for friendship to extend to both families so completely...

...Often in pain, unable to move much more than his right arm, unable to see much more than shadows, he said, "These are good days, good days...

...But I must because one of the man's great talents was his gift for friendship, and others have had the experience with him that I had...

...To read his New Republic piece on Edmund Burke is to see that his political philosophy had come into alignment with his legal philosophy...

...I once told him that it was the dream of my life to appear against him in the Supreme Court because that was the only place where, by the law of the forum, I would get half of the time for talking...

...Alex insisted that the doctrine could not be constructed and that we must rely instead upon tradition and wisdom...

...At a time of my own personal tragedy I went to Alex and Joanne and cried out my grief...

...Where others saw legal technicalities to be cut through, Alex saw process, order, stability, safety from arbitrary power, a mechanism for change that is gradual and accepted as legitimate by the society...

...For the first and only time in my presence, and then only for a moment, tears ran down Alex's cheek...

...He was a teacher and the impact of his spoken thoughts is impossible to measure...

...In our last one I was groping for hard, sharp doctrine to control judicial review...

...With many friends, one prefers to remember them in full vigor and wipe from mind the memory of the end...

...And he meant it...

...And for once Alex was wrong...

...It don't signify...

...I almost hesitate to speak of Alex as a friend, for that was a relationship so precious that talking may put at risk the full richness of the memory...

...The resources of language are not adequate, in my hands at least, to convey the full man...

...Later, on a night of good fortune, I went to them and celebrated late...

...They supported each other and found support in Francesca and Claudia...

...What came instead was an intensification of every quality that made us love the man and stand in awe of him...

...But there will always be a difference in the things we choose to do and the way we do them because we knew Alex Bickel...

...It came as well from within, in the Supreme Court headed for fifteen years by Earl Warren....More than once, and in some of its most important actions, the Warren Court got over doctrinal difficulties or issues of the allocation of competences among various institutions by asking what it viewed as a decisive practical question: If the Court did not take a certain action which was right and good, would other institutions do so, given political realities...

...We were friends with them individually and not just derivatively through Alex...

...At the time of his death Alex was moving on to a new range of work in political theory...

...In an article for Commentary this year, he argued that: "The assault upon the legal order by moral imperatives wasn't only or perhaps even the most effectively an assault from the outside...

...Joanne knew his wish and helped him to achieve it...

...An obituary spoke of the tension between Alex's judicial conservatism and political liberalism...

...Furthermore, there are two more books coming...

...One is a volume of the Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court...

...The years of his accomplishment that we look upon with amazement were in fact only the prelude to work of a range and profundity that we can only begin to imagine, and whose loss is a national loss...

...Indeed, our children felt that Alex and Joanne and Francesca and Claudia were our extended family and largely made up for the aunts and uncles and cousins they lacked...

...It is true that, as the activity ascended in the intellectual scale, my share tended to shrink, mostly because of Alex's talents but also, it must he stated candidly, because of his flow of words...

...The Burke article was a first probe...

...He was, as his writings amply attest, quite pessimistic about the judiciary's capacity to manage large social reforms, as well as, to put the point mildly, highly dubious about the legitimacy of much asserted judicial authority...

...And I was always relieved to find out, once again, that he could...

...The doctor warned Joanne to expect periods of rage but they never came...

...For years we knew that he was an extraordinary man...

...The other is a collection of some of his shorter pieces, including some that are as beautifuly written, perceptive, and provocative as anything he ever did...

...Alex approved both Burke's principles and "Burke'ssteady sense of their limits," his ability to apply to every question both principle and expediency or prudence, his pragmatism, and his stress upon the importance of place and circumstance...

...I had notrealized until I said it that it was true...

...Upon the occasion of Felix Frankfurter's death Alex told his students that there are men who are far more in person than the written legacy they leave...

...I know it helped us...

...He thought such principles always pernicious, and their joinder to popular movements frightening...

...RET Alex Bickel's gifts were so great and so many that we would have envied him if we had not loved him...

...Bickel had been projessor...

...When the headaches were very bad and the drugs making him drowsy and think-tongued, I would telephone and, before starting a subject, ask, "How is it today, Alex...

...In our frequent telephone conversations and my less frequent visits, it was the same as before, only more concentrated, because now time did not stretch on before us to be squandered...

...He created for us a sense of community, and even in death he does that again, creating a community of those who knew and loved him, who may not know each other but do know a bond of common sorrow and shared memory...

...He moved with distinction into history, journalism, courtroom argument, legislative drafting, appearances before congressional committees, public debates and speeches, and even into political campaigning...

...That tension he resolved in the last several years, though whether the resulting symmetry was liberal or conservative need not trouble us here...

...His intellectual legacy consists also of the things he did not write but said to hundreds and hundreds of students and scores of friends and colleagues...

...and no words ofour own can honor him so well as these delivered by his friend and colleague, Robert II...

...The particular cannot be recaptured—his style, vitality, gaiety, courage, his argumentative drive, the astonishing flow of words, ideas, insights, wit, his rapid sympathy and genuine affections...

...As soon as he learned what his illness was, he made a conscious resolve to die well...

...Expressing a thought central to his philosophy, he said: "It is the premise of our legal order that its own complicated arrangements, although subject to evolutionary change, are more important than any momentary objective...

...I think that helped him...

...Not so good...

...It does signify, and it will signify—to scholarship, to the nation, and to all who knew him for as many years as are left to us...

...He was and, through our memories, he remains much more than his written product, marvellous as it is...

...Our problem," Alex wrote, "has been, and is most acutely now, the tyrannical tendency of ideas and the suicidal emptiness of a politics without ideas...

...On our last visit to New Haven, we talked a long, long time and he spoke about the life he had had and he found it good...

...He retained to the last his enjoyment of sardonic wit...

...Last November 8, Alexander M. Bickel died—as he had lived-- in dignity...

...Alex argued that our problem, like Burke's, is that we cannot govern with abstract theories of rights and values and yet cannot live, let alone govern, without a coherent scheme of values...

...That, Alex thought, was deeply, profoundly wrong...

...Without a pause for thought or choice, I always turned to Alex...

...Bork, during memorial services at the Yale Law School, where Mr...

...It is startling to realize that this man who died at forty-nine, with his powers still developing, had published five books, all of them important, and at least two of them—The Least Dangerous Branch and The Warren Court and the Idea of Progress—major intellectual events in the law...

...In politics, as in law, he believed in the importance of context, of the particular, in weighing, balancing, judging differences in degree, and most certainly in the importance of organic growth and tradition...

...The civilized minority has been making heavy weather of it these last few years, and at such times it is all the more important that we pause to reflect on the passing of a man who was capable of defining the world as it is without ever losing /ES vision of what it should be...

...Bickel's legal philosophy is a cross between Edmund Burke and Fiddler on the Roof...

...That is certainly true of Alex...

...With increasing difficulty in moving, toward the end almost totally paralyzed and blind, he read while he could, listened to reading when he could not, talked of ideas, of people and, unbelievably, tried to comfort his friends...

...Because his life had been happy, he said, he did not mind death...

...Sure of himself, he showed his thoughts and feelings freely...

...That was a remark he liked and repeated, perhaps because it fit much more about him than just his legal philosophy...

...for several of those months he knew it was the inevitable outcome...

...He concluded that "Burke's conservatism, if that is what it was, which at any rate belongs to the liberal tradition, properly understood and translated to our time, is the way...

...I am afraid I never gave him reason to doubt the soundness of his insight...

...It is no mystery that Alex found Burke so congenial, for Alex, too, though deeply and consistently moral, hated the assertion of ultimate and transcendent principles and the apocalyptic rhetoric that so often accompanies them...

...Each of us felt that we were friends with each of the Bickels, except possibly Punch Bickel, their dog, who likes the way I taste...

...Not so with Alex Bickel...

...As long as he could speak, he could be brought out of himself by an idea floated in conversation and he would take it on, dissect it, put it back together, and trace its linkages to other ideas...

...As I left, touched by Alex's unmixed joy for me, I said to him, "In good times and bad times, I come to you first...

...For eleven months he knew that death was the likely outcome...

...He recalled that when Charles James Fox lay dying he told his wife, "It don't signify...

...Alex achieved greatness in the law and he achieved it early...

...He understood that our form of law is a social creation of enormous value but also complex, delicate, and distinctly vulnerable...

...But the warm haze of personal friendship and the diversions of colleagueship obscured at first what gradually became clear—that he can be called, without hesitation or embarrassment, a great man...

...It would be enough perhaps that Alex was a magnificent legal scholar, but his talents ranged much farther...

...And now, at the last, I must speak of the manner of his dying...

...He was glad to have the little extra time the doctors could give him with cortisone to talk with his family and friends...