Biography tells story of O’connor’s rise
At a party at her Arizona home in 1981, Sandra Day O’connor, ever the consummate hostess, served enchiladas poolside with good cheer. But when she greeted a friend of her son who was soon to begin a clerkship for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, her mood shifted.
As Evan Thomas describes the scene in “First,” his illuminating and eminently readable biography of the Supreme Court’s first female justice, O’connor “conveyed an almost palpable sense of longing” for past opportunities denied her because of gender. With her appointment to the court weeks away, she launched into a stream-of-consciousness monologue about her envy decades earlier when Rehnquist, her Stanford Law School classmate (and former beau), had started his clerkship at the court, a steppingstone at that time
reserved almost exclusively for men.
Intelligent, ambitious women of O’connor’s vintage were thwarted at every turn. A Stanford Law Review editor in the top 10 percent of her class, she couldn’t even get an interview with the big firms that recruited on campus in the 1950s. When she wangled a meeting in the Los Angeles offices of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Thomas writes, a partner told her “our clients won’t stand for” being represented by a woman and suggested a secretarial job instead.
By the time of the poolside chat, O’connor had racked up an impressive series of achievements against the odds. She’d been the majority leader of the Republican-controlled Arizona state Senate and a state judge at the trial appellate level. And only a few weeks later, President Ronald Reagan made good on a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.
That O’connor found herself the highest-ranking woman ever in American government was no accident. Thomas vividly sketches the attributes she used to clear the high barriers to female ascendancy: a • “First” (Random House, 476 pages, $32) by Evan Thomas
knack for brushing past insults, relentlessness belied by a pretty smile, an almost superhuman level of energy and, not least, a heroically supportive husband. John O’connor was a successful lawyer in his own right but willing to take a back seat if it meant helping his wife achieve her lofty goals.
Sandra Day O’connor was no flaming feminist. As a politician anxious to distance herself from women’s libbers, she addressed a Rotary Club with the evocative line: “I come to you with my bra and my wedding ring on.”
Still, it was with a style of compromise that O’connor came to the Supreme Court. Some legal scholars have criticized her for seeking to decide cases on narrow grounds, leaving larger constitutional issues unresolved.
O’connor was temperate on abortionrights cases, resisting numerous attempts by her conservative colleagues to strike down Roe v. Wade but not issuing the ringing endorsement of reproductive freedom that liberals might have favored. Her split-thedifference standard: States can regulate reproductive rights so long as their rules don’t place an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion.
“First” gives us a real sense of Sandra Day O’connor the human being, too. Scenes from her upbringing on the family ranch find young Sandra changing a tire by herself as she struggles to get the chuck wagon to the cowboys before cattle-branding time. Thomas shows how well her flintiness served O’connor in adulthood. She faces down Stage 2 cancer and a mastectomy with minimal self-pity, doing chemo on Fridays so she could be back on the bench for Monday oral arguments.
Thomas also reveals O’connor to be likable, a woman who yells “Hot diggity dog!” when she hooks a trout. The scenes of O’connor retiring early to help care for her husband as he struggles with Alzheimer’s are poignant; the news of her own diagnosis with that same brutal disease even more so.
Ultimately, “First” gives O’connor the credit she deserves, not the least of which was paving the way for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and the others who will follow.