In my new Confirmation Tales post, I recount the extraordinary collapse of Bill Clinton’s nomination of federal district judge James Ware to a Ninth Circuit seat. An excerpt:
Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, Ware had long recounted (as this New York Times article put it) the “tragedy that made him ‘hungry for justice’: the murder of his teen-age brother, Virgil, in a racist shooting in Birmingham . . . at the height of the civil rights struggle in 1963.” James was pedaling his bicycle, with 13-year-old Virgil on the handlebars, when two white teenagers shot and killed Virgil, on “the same day that four little black girls were killed in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church across town.”
In the years since his appointment to the federal bench, Ware had told the story “over and over at judicial conferences and in newspaper interviews” and had “held audiences . . . spellbound with his account.”
Except it turned out that Ware’s story was a fiction. More precisely, the horrific incident that Ware described did occur, but it was a different James Ware who was Virgil’s brother and who was riding the bicycle. Judge Ware was pretending to be that other James Ware.
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