Book adds depth about life, career of O’Connor

Bio is revealing account of trailblazing justice

❚ U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, anxious to retire to Arizona, discovered her husband was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease the day of the 2000 presidential election she would effectively settle weeks later.

❚ When President Ronald Reagan considered nominating her in 1981, O’Connor, then a state appeals court judge, quickly knew she was a contender for a seat on the nation’s highest court.

❚ As a law student at Stanford University in 1951, she received several marriage proposals, including one from William Rehnquist, a classmate who later preceded her to the Supreme Court and quietly lobbied for her to join its ranks.

Months after O’Connor, 88, withdrew from public life because of advancing dementia, the first woman on the Supreme Court comes into clearer focus in “First,” her authorized biogra-

phy, by veteran reporter Evan Thomas.

Granted access to her personal journals, correspondence and interviews with O’Connor, other members of the court and her friends, Thomas unearthed a trove of facts that add depth and context to a life story publicly dissected over nearly 40 years.

“People seeing her from the outside thought she was pretty austere in a lot of ways, a little bit unapproachable,” Thomas said in an interview with

“She’s tough. But what’s so important to me, and this is the virtue of having all this access, she became very human. She’s actually a lovely person.”

In lieu of a memoir from O’Connor, Thomas, the author of nine other books, takes readers deeper into O’Connor’s views than previously possible.

The book, which published today, sheds light on many aspects of O’Connor’s life, from deliberations among the justices on Bush v. Gore to the behind-thescenes effort to elevate O’Connor to the nation’s highest court decades earlier.

Thomas interviewed 94 of O’Connor’s 108 law clerks. He pored over her personal papers, talked to her closest friends, her former colleagues at the Arizona Legislature and others to stitch together a nuanced portrait of a historic figure who played a central role for much of her time on the Supreme Court.

In Thomas’ account of her most consequential case, O’Connor and the other eight justices decided the second — and final — round of the Florida recount for Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore quickly and without real debate.

O’Connor played a pivotal role, but not really as the justice in the middle, Thomas found.

The conservative justices in the majority considered different reasons for their decision before settling on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment pushed by O’Connor.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, another moderate conservative on the court at that time, was the only member who considered joining the liberal members of the court in a ruling that would have extended the recount in what might have benefited Gore, Thomas wrote. O’Connor lured him back into the conservative view of the case, Thomas said.

The morning of the ruling’s release, O’Connor made her son Brian a toasted muffin.

He knew not to ask her what was going to happen. “Half this country is going to hate me,” she told him. Brian O’Connor told Thomas, “I could see that she was really bothered that people would despise her.”

The case was politically supercharged, not only because of its impact on the presidency, but because of what it meant for the membership of the Supreme Court moving forward.

The reported at the time that O’Connor’s husband, John, had told friends on election night that a Gore victory would forestall Sandra O’Connor’s retirement.

Thomas goes beyond that by noting she had talked to John O’Connor’s neurologist earlier in the day to confirm his diagnosis with irreversible mental decline.

By that time, both O’Connors had provided significant

Evan Thomas speaks during a book tour event about “First,” his authorized biography of Sandra Day O’Connor. After his comments, he will join a conversation with Alan Day, O’Connor’s brother, and her sons Jay and Scott. The event will be followed by a book signing.

Proceeds from the luncheon will benefit the O’Connor Institute and the Sandra Day O’Connor Scholarship Fund to benefit students at the ASU Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

Arizona Biltmore, 2400 E. Missouri Ave., Phoenix.

oconnorinstitute.org/first/ evidence in their journals and interactions with friends that they did not like then-President Bill Clinton or his would-be Democratic successor, Vice President Gore.

With John O’Connor’s health rapidly failing, Sandra O’Connor announced in 2005 she would retire from the court. Shortly afterward, Rehnquist, who was by then the court’s chief justice, died.

The two vacancies, along with the contentious and failed nomination of Harriet Miers, prolonged O’Connor’s tenure on the court until early 2006. By then, Thomas wrote, John O’Connor required constant care beyond what his wife could offer.

Thomas confirms Sandra O’Connor regretted Bush v. Gore, but not because of who won. Rather, she viewed it as a blot on the Supreme Court, which could not settle the matter without fracturing public support for the institution.

She based her swift decision for Bush on the belief that a protracted recount would push the matter into a battle over which side’s electors to use in the Electoral College.

It pitted a Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court against the Republican governor of Florida, also the brother of the GOP nominee. That, she reasoned, would drag on and lead to a decision no less corrosive to public faith in the election, Thomas wrote.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told him that O’Connor “could look down the road and see the practical consequences of letting the case go on.”

O’Connor did not dwell on the messy case beyond that, Thomas said.

In that way, he said, it continued a rough-edged decisiveness first developed on the Lazy B ranch in southeastern Arizona, where the harsh desert forced many painful reckonings.

“The metaphor I use is important: If the windmill broke, you had 48 hours before the cows started to die,” Thomas said. “Decide, don’t regret, do it and don’t look back. That was a very important thing for her.”

As a justice, she didn’t stray far from the facts of the cases before the court and didn’t wax philosophically.

Thomas said he tried to question her about her “jurisprudential doctrine.” She dismissed it as pondering “kooky ideas,” he said.

She was a pioneer for women but didn’t dwell on that, either.

“One of her clerks said (O’Connor) was a non-feminist feminist,” Thomas said. “She was careful not to alienate men . ... She saw herself as a kind of bridge between generations.”

These days, O’Connor is also lauded in Arizona as the first woman to lead a state legislative body when she headed the state Senate in the early 1970s, but Thomas said that omits the painful battles that sometimes brought her to tears privately.

She left politics to become a Maricopa County Superior Court judge, then joined the state’s Court of Appeals. From that unlikely perch, Reagan made good on a campaign promise and tapped a woman for the Supreme Court.

The truth is, Thomas said, Reagan had few options and O’Connor was especially well connected.

Rehnquist, who attended Stanford’s law school with O’Connor and dated her seriously enough to ask her to marry him in 1952, quietly lobbied the White House to consider O’Connor, Thomas revealed.

The White House sent a pair of lawyers (one of whom was future independent counsel Kenneth Starr) to question O’Connor at her Paradise Valley home. As the lawyers were leaving, they acknowledged to John O’Connor she all but had the nomination sewn up.

Thomas writes that both O’Connors felt confident she would get the nomination, a view that is at odds with her longtime position that Reagan’s decision surprised her, too.

“I had trouble reconciling John’s diary, which says, ‘You’re in there,’ and John writes, ‘Sandra agreed,’ with her writing in her oral histories and in various accounts her saying, ‘I didn’t think I had a chance,’ ” Thomas said.

“How do you reconcile that?” he said. “I think that’s part of the humanness. On one level, she knew that she was in there. On another level, she just couldn’t believe it.”

Thomas covered the Supreme Court for and

during his 33-year career at the newsmagazines but only had faint contact with O’Connor at the time, he said.

He has written 10 books, including “John Jones,” “Sea of Thunder” and “Being Nixon.” Paul