The late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun kept voluminous notes. 'œCJ picks on me at conference,' he jotted down in 1985. If the syntax sounds a little grade-school, it suited the relationship Blackmun was citing. Chief Justice Warren Burger had been Blackmun's closest friend since kindergarten. Blackmun owed his seat to Burger; in fact, the shy Minnesotan had been living off his buddy's benevolent patronage for 25 years. Yet the friends had been drifting apart ever since Blackmun authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that would define his career. When he wrote Roe, Blackmun was a Nixon moderate. When he retired 20 years later, writes Linda Greenhouse, he was an 'œicon of feminism.'
Becoming Justice Blackmun 'œis no conventional biography,' says Warren Richey in The Christian Science Monitor. Focusing almost exclusively on the papers Blackmun left behind, The New York Times' Pulitzer Prize'“winning Supreme Court reporter has come up with two 'œengaging' stories that reveal how history can be shaped by 'œthe personal beliefs and petty differences' of a handful of high officials. The first of these stories, her account of a friendship's dissolution, is 'œoften riveting' in the glimpses it affords of both Blackmun's and Burger's raw emotions, said Jeffrey Rosen in The New York Times. Neither jurist comes off well, but Burger's hypersensitivity isn't the news here. Though Greenhouse seems to admire Blackmun, her reporting shows him to be as 'œemotionally needy' as a teenager.
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