Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey.

• Author: Rogers, C.D.
• Position: Book Review

Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey By Linda Greenhouse

Linda Greenhouse has gleaned Justice Blackmun's personal and official papers--all 1,585 boxes in the Library of Congress--to offer us this readable and insightful book. Greenhouse, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the N. Y. Times, focuses Blackmun's biography on abortion, gender discrimination, the death penalty, and his relationship with Chief Justice Warren Burger.

"The Road to Roe," begins with Blackmun's personal note to himself about United States v. Vuitch (1971): "Here we go in the abortion field." His files contain research from the AMA's Journal about a woman infected German measles whose child was born seriously defective after a New York hospital refused her an abortion. His notes on his position on jurisdiction, including his personal comment that "the case is better prepared if it percolates through the normal structure"; questions of right to privacy; definition of "health" and preparatory arguments two days after deciding Vuitch for both Doe v. Bolton and Roe v. Wade (1973). And why did Burger assign these two cases to Blackmun? Greenhouse suggests that Blackmun "never knew exactly why," but she identities variables in his nine years as resident counsel at Mayo Clinic and Burger's faith in his friend's diplomatic talents--needed now both inside and outside the Court on the abortion issue. Greenhouse adds an ironic experience: Blackmun's daughter, pregnant at 19, a college dropout who married and later divorced, "suffered a miscarriage less than three weeks after the wedding." "Saving Roe" begins with changes in his life as a consequence of Roe: from security threats and sacrifice of his blue Volkswagen Beetle for the Court car, to continued challenges and his mantel to defend Roe, to shifts in votes of newly appointed justices, to recognition of evolving jurisprudence through controversy. When asked in his last oral interview "whether writing Roe v. Wade was 'a piece of bad luck or good luck,'" he surmised: "I think one grows in controversy." Blackmun, at 83, predicted that "when I do step down, the confirmation process for my successor may well focus on the issue [abortion] before us today."

By 1992, Blackmun's law clerk told him that he was the justice "American women look to," a feminist icon. This status delighted Blackmun's three daughters more than him, initially. In Roe, he had focused on the doctors more than on the women, but...