Demystifier of the Supreme Court

...Thus, despite Washington's having insisted that it would never go to war for Gorazde, the United States already was halfway across the Rubicon—and wading onward...

...In the early years he found them painful...

...Suddenly, the press found itself blamed—and blaming itself—for going overboard...

...Perry was essentially correct, as of the moment, but his speaking so directly raised Administration fears of being blamed for encouraging the Serbs to press their attack...

...In fairness, it should be noted that early signs of White House stonewalling and evasion whetted media appetites like flecks of blood in the water...

...A Time magazine cover headline, "How the President's men tried to hinder the Whitewater investigation," was surprinted on a several-months-old picture of a worried Clinton and Senior White House Adviser George Stephanopoulos...

...Compassion aside, moves to deprive aliens of health and welfare benefits seem not to take into account the danger to public health and safety that may come from sick and destitute people...

...A White House task force on welfare reform is considering cutting benefits to immigrants as one way of reducing welfare costs...

...The Immigration and Nat-uralization Service wants to restrict the right of asylum-seekers to work, and to charge $130 for an asylum application...

...That is why he has ruffled judicial feathers by speaking out in public lectures and interviews, the first of which he gave me for CNN in 1982...

...There was no big decision, only a series of small ones as pressures grew to dispel the impression that the Clinton Administration was condoning the conquest of Gorazde—perhaps even secretly welcoming it as a way of straightening out the lines for a Bosnian peace settlement...

...Until two years ago, the annual briefing concluded on a progressively gloomier note...

...would confirm the death of White House aide Vincent Foster as a suicide...

...The press gambled on a future and, at this writing, the gamble has not paid off...

...Newsweek, misrepresenting what it had been told by a lawyer for the Clintons, suggested incorrectly that Hillary Rodham Clinton had invested none of her own money in commodities trading...

...In the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz focused on the "deepening mistrust of the media establishment at opposite ends of the political spectrum...

...In 1991 he spoke of Roe almost in the past tense, saying that even if it were reversed, it had helped a generation of women...

...Ultimately, a German government proud of its post-Hitler open door changed its constitutional rule, and Asyl no longer works magic...

...This ignores the fact that aliens are consumers, helping to generate employment, and that they fill low-paying jobs many of the native-born unemployed refuse to take...

...Blackmun has quoted from some of the letters full of vilification, calling him a "murderer," "butcher of Dachau," "Pontius Pilate...

...He is Harry to everyone, unpretentious, almost shy...

...The abortion decision generated the greatest volume of mail of any case in the Court's history...

...On another level, they reflected guilt for muffing the BCCI, BNL and S&L banking scandals, not to mention the Iran-contra scandal, and a determination not to be found wanting again...

...On Sunday, April 10, exactly a week after Perry's television appearance, came the air strike against Serbian targets outside Gorazde—the first nato attack on a ground target in its 45-year history...

...When we discussed the scheduling of the television interview in his chambers, he suggested bringing the camera and equipment on Thanksgiving Day...

...Later he learned to take them in stride...

...America had crossed—or, rather, shuffled across—the Rubicon...

...A refugee from Eastern Europe or Asianeeded only to say "asylum" to be assured of entry, pending investigation that usually did not happen before the person had blended into the population...

...One can detect it in the air when politicians find pay dirt in antiforeigner actions and rhetoric...

...But in 1992 Roe was, in effect, reaffirmed in a 5-4 decision...

...He is also a music fan who brought concerts to the Supreme Court and who last summer narrated Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf at the Aspen Music Festival...

...In that interview he said the Court is a "remote institution," excessively feared by Americans...

...That is correct...

...If Perry sounded too dovish on Bosnia, on North Korea he sounded too hawkish...

...His spirits visibly brightened...

...Blackmun is still modest, but no longer unsure of his opinions...

...In Seoul, Ambassador James Laney said in an interview that "we're in a period of watchfulness, firmness and patience," and flatly refused to discuss what might happen if these did not succeed...

...Feeling the Sting of Xenophobia For years the word Asyl worked magic at the West German border...

...In Aspen, where he presides over an annual "Justice and Society" seminar, one can see a more real Blackmun than is evident from the bench...

...The sad truth is that the press can't quite figure out where it went wrong...

...In California, Republican Governor Pete Wilson scores points by claiming the cost of services to illegal aliens is bankrupting the state...

...The Gallup poll says 65 per cent of Americans favor cutting back on legal immigration...

...Riding the Whitewater Waves Maybe April 4 will be remembered as the day the Whitewater tide turned for the Clintons...

...A day later General John M. Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just back from the embattled region, pointed out that whether American air power would be used depended on circumstances, and circumstances could change...

...It was not, mind you, the 65,000 suffering people in this "safe haven" who moved us to act...

...Several times during the NBC program, he spoke of increasing the pressure on North Korea to permit adequate inspection and end its nuclear weapons project, while adding that he did not expect a war...

...counseling conservatives to backwater from Whitewater, lest its collapse enable President Clinton to foist his health reform program on the nation, the controversy does not appear to "have legs," as the saying goes...

...By general consensus, there was nothing wrong with Stephanopoulos having taken partisan umbrage at the naming of anti-Clinton Republican Jay Stephens to handle claims for the Resolution Trust Corporation...

...There had been some egregious mistakes made in the heat of pursuit...

...Months before his April 6 announcement he had told President Bill Clinton of his intention to retire at the end of the present Court term, so he was even less constrained than previously to air his views...

...The investigation is young and something may still turn up...

...Finally, when the question of Somalia was raised on the same program, Perry said, "I cannot imagine the political circumstances that would allow us—motivate us to go back in and [try to rescue] Somalia...

...This ratio has doubled in 30 years...

...The press was going from Clinton-bashing to press-bashing...

...And the State Department said one could conceive of a situation where American air power would be used, as was threatened in Sarajevo...

...Secretary of Defense William J. Perry, a mathematician by training, has a meticulous way of expressing himself that makes things perfectly clear —too perfectly clear for an administration concerned about the impact of its waffling policies...

...It was with a new sense of confidence that Justice Blackmun this past February went on to speak out publicly against the death penalty as unconstitutional...

...He talks about how it came to be and how it has fared since he wrote it...

...and G. Harrold Carswell were rejected in 1970...

...If the Administration wanted a Defense Secretary who could talk around a subject, it should have stuck with Les Aspin...

...But with conservative icons like Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr...

...Senator Feinstein made much of the fact that 1.3 million Califor-nians are out of work, and precisely the same number of undocumented aliens have settled in the state...

...Some have been threatening...

...I'll spare you the quote from Emma Lazarus on the base of the Statue of Liberty...

...As a baseball fan, Justice Blackmun jokes about being President Nixon's "Number 3 pick," after Judges Clement F. Haynsworth Jr...

...Now he is less worried about who will succeed him...

...In the evening he saw the University of Arkansas basketball team win against Duke University in Charlotte, North Carolina...

...Indeed, we didn't know anything much yet, and the press, which abhors a vacuum more than nature does, filled it with surmises and speculation...

...Indeed, not many can imagine America sending troops back to that trouble-plagued African country, and Perry's kind of straight talk makes a hit with the military...

...Misinformation helps to fuel anti-immigrant anger...

...That morning the President launched the Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn...

...But the distinction had become a fiction...

...Neither the President nor any of his senior advisers rules out the use of air power to help stop attacks such as those against Gorazde...

...More than any other Justice, though, he has sought to demystify the Court and bring it closer to the people...

...Although the U.S...

...Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, up for re-election, wants to charge a $1 toll at border crossings to pay for beefing up the border patrol...

...Blackmun pointed to the emergence of a new center in the Court—Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor...

...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Demystifier of the Supreme Court Harry A. Blackmun, who will be retiring this summer after almost a quarter century on the Supreme Court, is a friend, so I may be reflecting a little bias here...

...The Federal government is getting into the act as well...

...Then the magazine gracelessly refused to apologize because "we don't know everything yet...

...He has come a long way since 1970, when he took his seat on the Court content to be known as the Minnesota twin of Justice Burger and feeling totally out of his depth in that august institution...

...The President had said, "The Serbs should cease their attacks on Gorazde and should pull back...

...All he wants, he wrote to President Clinton, is to be remembered as "someone who does the very best he can with such talent as he possesses...

...The next day President Clinton denied that the Serbs had been given any "green light" to overrun the besieged city...

...The State Department emphasized that the United States was looking for a peaceful resolution of the dispute with North Korea...

...To move from nonintervention to intervention, and still maintain its neutral mediator posture, the Administration devised a formula: The United States would not intervene on behalf of the Bosnians in Gorazde, but would respond to a request from UN and nato authorities to provide air cover for United Nations personnel...

...I am not ruling out that option in the future.' Next day the governments of South Korea and Japan expressed concern about the bellicose-sounding words...

...Each year the highlight of the seminar is his off-the-record, hour-long briefing on the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion...

...To some, however, his categorical statement sounded callous...

...He believes it should not defer too much to the Executive and Congress, because he sees it as the ultimate recourse of the citizen against arbitrary action by government...

...The third oldest justice in the Court's history, he resisted retirement as long as he thought his legacy in danger...

...What UN personnel...

...Governor Wilson is calling for a constitutional amendment barring citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born in this country...

...We can no longer allow compassion to overcome reason,' he says, as thousands cheer...

...The Clintons' ratings were up and the media's ratings were down...

...When they said they were threatened by Serbian artillery, that was enough to trigger the fast-track procedure for calling in an American air strike...

...New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis saw "an oncoming crisis of confidence in the press...

...On NBC's Meet the Press on April 3, Perry committed truth three separate times...

...First, he climaxed a long discussion concerning what the United States would do to prevent beleaguered Bosnian cities like Gorazde from falling to the Serbs by declaring, "We will not enter the war to stop that from happening...

...The Washington Post said editorially that Perry is "taking an otherwise commendable devotion to transparency to uncertain lengths...

...In Florida, where Haitians continue to slip through the anti-immigration blockade, Governor Lawton Chiles makes hay by demanding that the Federal government pay for all immigration—legal and illegal...

...Then he and the First Lady threw out baseballs in Cleveland and Chicago, respectively...

...The United States is also feeling the sting of xenophobia—especially in border states like Florida, Texas and California...

...And the best the Wall Street Journal could come up with that day was a report that Special Counsel Robert B. Fiske Jr...

...Never mind where the money is supposed to come from if the applicant is not allowed to earn it...

...A new study by the nonprofit Alexis de Tocqueville Institution notes that the 10 states with the fewest immigrants have, on the average, the highest unemployment rates...

...Bitten by Sound Bites Committing truth—that is, talking straight when the situation calls for double-talk—is one of the greatest sins known to government...

...By the end of that week National Security Adviser Anthony Lake was saying, in a Baltimore speech, "Let me be clear...

...Pressed on whether he was ruling out military action, he uttered the words that made the headlines: "We will not have a preemptive military strike at this time and under these circumstances...

...On one level, the missteps were simply a matter of competitive pressures and deadlines to be met with the best product that could be dished up...

...was trying to have 800 Ukrainian peacekeepers sent to Gorazde, the only UN personnel actually there at the time were 12 French observers...

...Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, he noted mischievously, would not be there to object...

...But with the refugee wave swelling to the hundreds of thousands and the burden of having to absorb East Germany, there was a rash of ugly antiforeigner outbreaks...