Remembering Judge Robert Bork: The Man who the left so despised they made his name into a verb
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, we're back here on the Doug Collins Podcast.
Glad to have you coming in with us today.
We're going to have a continuation of a conversation that we've had with Bob Bork Jr. on antitrust.
We had a lot of great discussions.
You need to download that episode, follow it, and understand what's actually going on in Washington right now, attacking our understanding of antitrust and the consumer protections that are there.
But all throughout that podcast, you heard mention of Bob's father, Justice Robert Bork.
No matter where you fall, everybody now, if you're involved in history, you're involved in politics, you're involved in looking at the Supreme Court watching, his father name comes up almost every time a new justice is actually nominated to the Supreme Court.
Because frankly, from many of our perspective, he was done very wrong.
And it became a terminology of bork.
In other words, he was, I think, he should have been on Supreme Court.
That didn't happen.
And there were some interesting players at the time that are still around right now.
Joe Biden being one of them that contributed to what happened to the justice when he was nominated.
So, Bob, one, glad to have you back on the podcast and glad to talk about this being a very personal issue about your father.
But he impacted a lot of people.
As we get started, talk about how he came about.
He came out, he got his law degree, went to the Army, taught at Yale.
What are some of those memories?
You actually, in our previous podcast, you actually talked about growing up as he was on the Yale faculty.
Yeah.
So, just a quick aside, because it's funny, you called him Justice Bork, and I wanted to say, no, if only he'd been Justice Bork.
Yes, if only.
I mean, we want to judge Bork.
So, yeah.
Anyway, look, he...
He was a pugilist.
He boxed in high school.
He was always striving and fighting and engaging politically.
It's an old story, but when he was in high school, he was a socialist and decided he didn't like that.
I think he was a libertarian.
He didn't like that.
Ultimately, he became a conservative.
He was always trying out ideas.
He went off to the Marine Corps, And then ultimately, University of Chicago, where he was an undergrad there studying the great books.
That's what Chicago was back then.
So he was a voracious reader, consumer of ideas.
And here's an interesting thing that not a lot of people know.
He wanted to be a journalist.
And so he thought...
Wow.
He thought he would apply to journalism school at Columbia because that's where journalists, he thought, had to go to become journalists.
They wouldn't accept him because he had this great books degree from the University of Chicago.
So he went to Chicago Law School instead.
And there's one of those great historical forks in the road.
You know, he went to Chicago and law school, studied from some great conservative minds, like Aaron Director, who was an economist, but who taught at the law school.
Ed Levy, who later went on to be Attorney General, was there.
And it was a baptism of fire there because in those days, they didn't worry about safe spaces.
What is a safe space back then, you know?
Well, a safe space back then, the closest thing to that was Ed Levy in the first day of class saying, I'm not going to talk to you today because you're all too stupid to talk to.
And then when he would ask a question, he'd say, call a name, and the person would give the wrong answer.
And he would say, put pennies on that man's eyes and go on to the next student.
You know, because law was combative.
It was argumentative.
And, you know, you've got to get tough and know how to be ready and prepared.
So Dad went through all that, and it sort of reminded him of the Marines, I guess.
And he went on to practice law, to study with Aaron Director, and then practice law in New York briefly, where I was born.
And then off to Chicago at Kirkland and Ellis, where he was an antitrust associate and then a partner.
But he always had greater ambitions to be an intellectual and decided after completing one seven-year antitrust case to That he wanted to teach.
And he amazingly got a job at Yale Law School, you know, where he was one of ultimately three conservatives, which they thought was three too many, out of a faculty of 40 plus.
And he met great minds like Alex Bickle and others there and developed his thinking in antitrust and then in constitutional law.
Uh, and, and, and, and wrote a lot of stuff.
and ultimately he wrote an article called for the new republic called why i am for nixon and the nixon administration uh was amazed that some bearded law professor would write such a thing and uh they nixon nominated him to be solicitor general and he went to washington in 1973 uh and uh right into the watergate mess with that
and that you know again the watergate issue the you know the quote the famous you know as the press called the saturday night massacre he became involved in that and and i think you know provided an interesting historical perspective there Before we get going with this is Yale days, which I think is so true today.
What you talked about And his education is missing so many times today.
And it's missing so much in our international discourse and our national discourse on the stage of having people with strong opinions actually knowing how to verbally discuss it civilly, you know, and say, look, you know, we're going to get heated in this and I'm going to talk about why I believe this, you talk about, but his learning there, it sharpens the mind before As you said before, I'm going off a little different path here.
Why is it today that it seems like we don't want to, as the old biblical admonition, as iron sharpens iron?
I mean, when I heard you talk about that with the other professors, with going through classes, that's how you get sharp.
That's how you learn things, is being challenged in your beliefs.
And your dad never backed away from that.
That was very obvious.
Why have we gotten away from that in our educational process today?
That's a huge question.
I'm not sure I know fully the answer.
I'll tell you one thing that's interesting was that in the 60s, he had debates with students at Yale Law School, and they were sometimes very heated.
But then in the 70s, He said that when he came back from the government in the late 70s, nobody asked any questions.
The students sat there quietly.
They didn't want to say anything that was going to upset their grade point average or something.
They didn't want to fight.
The 60s classes, although I think sometimes he thought they were out of their minds with their ideologies, at least they wanted to argue.
Later, not so much.
And, you know, he had many famous students.
We talked about that earlier, just in passing.
He had Bill and Hillary Clinton as a student.
Or actually, he used to say they were in the classroom while he was teaching.
I don't think they learned much from him or wanted to, particularly.
I'm not even sure Bill was in class much at all.
But Clarence Thomas was there and so many others that you could think of.
And a lot of them went on to do great things.
Whether or not you agree with what they did, they went on to great success.
And I think at least some of what he taught them rubbed off.
Yeah, and some other names are Robert Rice, Jerry Brown, John Bolton, Anita Hill.
Interestingly enough, you mentioned Clarence Thomas.
Clarence Thomas, and this is why I'm so interested in this podcast.
I'm so glad that we're doing this.
The Bork mentality, that let's fight out the ideas, let's actually engage, led to his, not only in the government with the Nixon administration, but then later on, and we'll jump ahead here just a little bit, and that is when he was nominated by Reagan to go on to the court.
As a family member, a very public spectacle of that.
And we went through a time, and we still do, with conservative justices are always vilified many times by the press, by the others, you know, in believing that they are bad people.
What was that like for you as a fan, for him being nominated?
And I wish, like I said, you know, he was...
He had already served in government.
He was on the District Court of Appeals there, and so his judge title.
But what was that like being in that time when he was nominated?
What do you remember most about that?
The first thing I remember was that one of his clerks was working at the White House and called me.
I mean, I knew it was coming.
He called me and said, OK, they're doing it right now.
So I went running over from my job at U.S. News and World Report.
And we went in the back of the press room, the one you see on TV every day now, and saw Reagan announce him.
And then I went...
And then I went up to Chris Cox's.
You probably know Chris Cox, the former congressman, former SEC chairman, office where he was then associate White House counsel.
And we were drinking champagne.
And then Ted Kennedy.
Got on TV from the floor about 45 minutes after the announcement and gave his famous Robert Bork's America speech.
And my jaw just hit the floor.
I couldn't believe those lies they were saying about him.
You know, Robert Bork's America, we're back alley abortions and rogue police are going to break into your bedroom and all that stuff, which people still believe.
And they think actually the current court...
You know, ruling on Dobbs and Roe v.
Wade is the proof of that, which is awful and stupid.
But I remember that being suddenly very worried and then spending that summer being very worried that we weren't ready.
And I think it pretty proved true we weren't ready.
We had no idea that this group of about 100 left-wing organizations would band together to create this atmosphere of lies and hatred about my father.
On the other hand, he had it easy compared to...
To the current justices.
Oh, yeah.
Pardon me?
Yeah.
You look at what's happening today.
Yeah.
So, you know, no one tried to kill him.
And, you know, Brett Kavanaugh, the accusations made against Brett Kavanaugh just were so over the top and so ridiculous.
So anyway, it was a tough summer.
And I'm looking at a picture over the computer where we're talking of all of us sitting behind him at the table in the Senate caucus room there where they had the hearing.
And the heat of the lights, they tried to It was almost like a police interrogation.
They tried to keep him there under the lights, you know, asking him stupid questions over and over and over again.
It was just a horrible experience.
And then he lost.
But, you know, the more I think about it now, I don't think that the hearing had anything to do with it.
I think it was over in November of 86 when Reagan lost, when we lost the Senate.
That was when he lost the nomination.
But we had to go through that exercise.
And frankly, we probably lost it because Scalia went first.
Scalia probably could have survived A nomination second at that time.
And if dad had gone first, he probably would have gotten through and the both of them would have been on the court.
So there you go.
Now, Biden was chairman of the committee at the time, correct?
Biden was chairman.
Yes.
Yeah.
And Biden had actually said that he would support Bork.
And then Ted Kennedy and the groups got to him and he changed his mind.
Because, you know, Biden doesn't have any principles, so...
Yeah, I mean, you had the People for the American Way, you know, you had actors, Gregory Peck, I mean, you had all these, you know, they're painting him as an extremist.
Looking back on it, is there any frustration with the...
And I'm not, you know, picking up stones or anything else here, but was there a frustration or was it just...
Everybody in the Reagan administration or around the Senate at the time, that there was just this...
Of course, remember, you had to put it in context of what was going on in the Reagan administration.
You had Iran-Contra.
Everything was beginning to bubble up at that point.
It was in his last term.
Were you ever frustrated with the fact that they didn't see this coming?
Yes and no.
Yes, I was.
And I also don't think anybody could have seen it coming.
It never happened before.
Not like that.
But, you know, I think the president was weaker at that point, having lost the Senate.
And the people he, you know, at that point, me, Spaker, and...
What's his name?
The original troika of advisors.
Oh, right.
You had Regan and Baker and...
Yes.
I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember.
Baker.
Yeah, I mean...
Anyway, they were gone, and Howard Baker was in, and his people, they just didn't...
They were creatures of the Senate, really, and they wanted to wheel and deal, and maybe we can massage this, and all that sort of thing.
It didn't work.
It was never going to work.
But here's the upside.
If you don't mind me saying, there is an upside.
One has to try to find them.
They made my father an icon.
They made him a martyr.
And he went on to write books and speak.
And I think he probably had more influence on the public by losing than he would have had.
Well, you know, I don't know.
Being on the court, he wouldn't be able to speak so much.
But he wrote two bestsellers, The Tempting of America, and he wrote his book about the decline of our society called Slotching Toward Gomorrah, you know, and he's written other books.
So they made him, you know, they made borking a verb.
So there you go.
It's still used to this day.
They tried it.
The next big...
Look, you know, do the what ifs and what coulds and should have beens.
I mean, to compare, if your father had had that seat instead of Anthony Kennedy, I mean, looking at where Kennedy traveled in his career, again, I think America...
Bork, you know, your father would have made a complete difference.
They tried it again just a few years later with Clarence Thomas.
And it didn't work as well at that point.
Clarence got on the court.
And one of your things that your father really was, not only we've talked to antitrust about before, but it was this concept of originalism, is looking at the context of the Constitution as the Constitution was written.
And giving it that kind of meaning and not a what I feel interpretation now.
That, I think, was vindicated over the last, especially this last term, when you saw the cases out of New York on guns.
You saw the Dobbs case out of Mississippi on Roe v.
Wade and, you know, Casey, the two overturning there.
You saw it in some of the, you know, basically the lemon test, which was done away with in the Coach Kennedy case.
And I know it's hard looking at it now, but you made the comment that it was sort of a blessing or a different disguise because he was able to do so much after that becoming an icon.
Do you see it that way as his son?
I mean, it's just in looking at it that it's taken almost 30 plus years, but that is now beginning to actually seed hold in the Supreme Court.
Yes, I do.
And it's 35 years this year when he was nominated.
And so it's...
And it's been 10 years since he passed.
So, yeah, I look at it that way.
And that to me is a blessing that he had that kind of influence, that maybe not being on the court allowed him to speak to an audience of lawyers and the public to help create the atmosphere where that could happen.
And I can't discount enough, or I can't discount, I don't want to discount The impact that he had in the creation of the Federalist Society and that organization's growth and, of course, the work of Gene Meyer and Leonard Leo to create this amazing organization that brought conservative and originalist thinking into the law schools And trained generations now
of law students and lawyers so that we have an army, if you will, of conservative and libertarian thinking legal experts out there, many of whom now are on courts and on the court.
So it was a long process.
Maybe dad was...
It wasn't time for him, but his work, his thinking, his sacrifice, I think, all led to where we are today.
Exactly.
When he was going through this, I mean, one of the things that, as being a public official who's been in the spotlight, who's been on the media and all, your family gets to see that side of you that nobody else sees.
That time had to have been tough on your dad.
It was tough.
And, you know, let me just relate one thing.
Story from towards the end of that, which was, it was obvious that pretty early on, but by October, it was very obvious he was not going to get confirmed.
And there was a lot of pressure on him to withdraw to his nomination.
And we were all sitting in his office at the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
My brother and I and my stepmother and my sister and a good friend, Ray Randolph, who's now a judge on that same court.
And Dad got a call from Alan Simpson, who said, I don't think you should quit.
I don't think you should withdraw.
I promise you, if you don't, we will make the case on the floor.
For your nomination.
We will defend you on the floor, you know, at the floor vote.
And Dad thought about it.
And he asked us what we thought.
And we said, no, you shouldn't quit.
You never were a quitter.
Why would you quit now?
So he wrote a statement.
And we went over to the White House.
All of us as a family in a car.
And he went upstairs and met with Reagan and Meese.
And then Vice President George H.W. Bush sat with us in the map room and talked to us.
And he was such a nice guy.
He wrote a wonderful note to my father.
I later worked in his administration when he was president.
Your listeners, your viewers should go find that statement that he gave in the White House It gives me chills even today to hear him give it.
He basically said, I harbor no illusions, but I'm not going to back down to these people.
And Chris Wallace told me later, I think he actually went on TV and said he'd never seen anything like that in Washington, where somebody would stand up against, you know, this onslaught and say, I know you're going to defeat me, but I'm not giving up.
I'm going to make you vote and have your name on that roll call, knowing full well he was going to lose.
So that was one of those great moments.
And it made us all closer as a family, just to be there with him.
That makes, I mean, again, you see that.
And this is one of the things I try to do with this podcast as well, is remind people that what you see the most of us, and I've had a lot of guests on it, and I try to let them have time to talk about who they are, their families, where they came from.
Because for so many people, all they know, because of just the way life is, is of your dad.
is those moments 35 years ago.
They know of maybe some of the books, but now they hear his name.
There's a generation that has no idea what Bork means.
They have to look it up.
But going through that, afterwards, I'm curious here, would Scalia, Thomas, others, did your dad have interaction with him?
Oh, of course.
Well, he and Scalia were friends for years before that.
I don't think he knew Clarence that well.
But later they were very close, good friends.
And, you know, and he knew Kavanaugh a little bit.
I think Kavanaugh may have been even, I don't think Kavanaugh was a student then of his, but anyway, yeah, he knew them all.
And I think they had, even if he didn't know them, they all, he had a great influence on a lot of them, you know, Gorsuch and They know his story, they know his example, his model, and they know his thinking.
They know his views on the law.
And they seem to be practicing them.
Well, it's interesting now.
And coming back, again, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to do this and just his influence through the years and challenging that number.
Because now you're actually getting in, and we throw this term around a lot, but this originalism issue.
But that was the whole purpose as you go back to this court.
In Alito, But to me, Clarence Thomas, I think, couldn't have had a better coming out, if you would.
And for those of us lawyers like myself who've read Thomas' opinions and dissents for years have been always a fan.
He's a Georgia guy.
I've gotten to know him.
He swore me into the Supreme Court bar.
But he's always treated differently because of the way he was nominated.
He's always been...
I mean, they don't have...
To this day, I don't think they still have his picture up at Yale Law School.
I mean, there's a whole kind of deal down here about that.
But now you've got Alito, who seems to be picking up a little bit of that mantle.
You've got Gorsuch, of course.
You've got Kavanaugh, of course.
Amy Comey Barrett, I think it's going to be interesting to watch her in judicial grow in this.
Out of the court now, and I know this is sort of a strange question.
Out of the court now, who do you see, if you would say, would carry that...
I guess not mantle necessarily, but that thought process that your father had on the court now.
Well, without a doubt, Clarence and Alito, I mean, I thought the opinion he wrote in Dobbs was masterful.
I don't know how you take that apart from the other side.
He answered all their questions.
They just, all they can do is lie about him.
But...
And I'd like to see more from Amy Coney Barrett.
I think Kavanaugh is perhaps a little more moderate, but, you know, give him time.
You know, they're all going to grow.
I hope in the right direction.
Exactly.
Well, one of the things we forget so many times is that, and I've watched this in the mainstream media a little bit, and they do it many times.
If a conservative sticks to the, you know, and I say this to the originalist intent, to that letter of the law and saying, look, I'm interpreting this based on the lens of the Constitution.
There are conservatives who look at it and say, wait, wait, that's a liberal opinion.
That's a moderate opinion.
And the reality is, is they're sticking to the law and they're sticking to what is presented before them and either putting it back in the, you know, the legislative branch's hands or not, you know, interfering with, I think this is something we're going to see coming up.
And I think your father exemplified that, especially in his decisions.
Most people forget that he had very liberal positions, would be considered liberal positions on civil rights cases if he was Solicitor General.
I mean, it was not like the Kennedy speech was just a complete...
Malicious attack on a person's character.
And it was picked up by the mainstream media as truth.
Um, One of the things that I think we're going to have to come to conclusion of is that the legislative branch with a court of originalists is going to have to actually do its job now.
And I think that's the one thing that I was, you know, as someone who wants to see the legislative branch actually become the legislative branch again, was glad to see in this.
And I think your father would have been proud of that.
I agree with you.
I think he would have been.
And I'm looking forward to seeing regular order.
Oh, wow.
That'd be a shocker.
And I'm looking forward to seeing them write the laws that tell the independent agencies what they're supposed to do, rather than give them some vague notion of policy that they can then go invent Bob, we're separated by several years and different parents, but we think so much alike in that.
I was so tired of seeing members of Congress come to Washington and basically just slough off whatever they didn't want to talk about.
And antitrust was the one we talked about earlier.
They just didn't want to learn it.
And so they would just let whatever the prevailing wisdom of the administration or whatever determined their political thought.
Your father...
Your father, whether you agreed with him or not, he challenged you.
He made you think.
He made you understand why or not that you believe something.
I think the world...
I agree with you.
Timing.
They always say the right idea at the wrong time is still the wrong idea.
And unfortunately, maybe just the timing was off there.
But what he was able to do past that and his influence in many organizations, I think, has come to fruition today in which you have a court in which originalists thought or actually sticking to the Constitution is not an aberration.
It's actually the real job of the court.
If your father...
He's been gone now 10 years.
If your father...
In your opinion, from what you believe, if he could look at what's going on right now, because he wrote not only just law, but he also cultural interests as well, the Slouch and Dougamora and other things.
Where do you think he would see us right now?
Well, I would hope he would have more optimism about things than he did.
He really, you know, there's a great story about when he was at AEI and he was talking with, um, Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's father, about just how screwed up everything was.
And Irving said, well, at least we can live well.
That was his response.
Look, I think Dad...
It was very pessimistic.
I would hope he'd be more optimistic now.
I hope for one reason, because the Supreme Court now has a majority of justices who believe essentially what he did about the originalism and they're going in the right direction.
I'm worried, of course, about the institution of the court that That there will be attempts to pack it, to apply term limits to it, all of which they can do.
It's all statutory.
It's all not in the Constitution.
I'm worried that they will try to overturn some of these decisions statutorily.
But I think he would be more hopeful than he was towards the end before, when he was ending his life.
I could see that.
And it hit me as we were finishing up here on this class question.
Because I know they'd have had interaction in different ways.
And especially because he was only a few years on the court when your father was alive.
What do you think your father's reaction with John Roberts is?
Um...
He's been a little bit of an anomaly on the court, to be honest.
I think it's a horrible job, being chief.
You know, you are in the middle, and you're trying to guide things.
And...
I think John Roberts was a big fan of my dad's.
At his memorial service, he gave the most beautiful toast about my father.
So I don't want to be critical of him.
And I can't be critical of somebody who's in that job trying to hold, you know, Radical leftists and a bunch of conservatives together, you know, and he's thinking about not just the law, but the larger society, the body politic.
But I think my dad probably would have had a different view of his chief justice ship, as it were, than some people would.
I think he would have I want him to have a little more stiffness of spine, but he's a good man.
And I think, you know, time will tell, and I think that's been the, and it goes back to, you know, a lot of this, the understanding that the Chief Justice role has is not just a regular justice.
It's not an associate.
There is a bigger line there that has to go.
Bob, I have to tell you, this has been one of the more enjoyable podcasts for me.
Looking at a man's life, I mean, again, someone who, as you said, stood up and made that statement, I'm not going anywhere.
You're going to have to vote on this.
We don't have to do that much anymore in this world.
And I think your father's example, the books, you can go back and get those books and look them up.
I think it serves as a great reminder.
It also reminds us that...
You know, great is the man who plants a tree that he'll never sit under the shade of.
And I think in many ways, your father, we're sitting under the shade of trees that he planted many, many years ago.
That's a wonderful thought.
Thank you.
All right.
Folks, this has been a good one.
You want to share this one, the life of Judge Robert Bork, and told from a very wonderful position of his son, Bob.
And it's exciting to have this.
I'm glad to share it with you.
Go out and share it.
Go to the Doug Collins Podcast dot com.
You can get us there.
Send us an email if you want any input or you would like to know more questions or have some questions for me.
We'd love to have you.
Bob, thanks again for being on the podcast.
It's been a great pleasure.
Thank you.
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Go right now, either 800-986-3994, code word Collins, or go to MyPillow.com.
Also use the code word Collins to get this discount.