That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which examines Senator Kennedy’s effort to make Samuel Alito’s long-ago (and evidently very brief) membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton a major focus of his confirmation hearing. Some excerpts:
Alito joined Army ROTC at Princeton. In May 1970, the spring of his sophomore year, two students firebombed Princeton’s ROTC facility. That same spring, Princeton decided to kick ROTC off campus. During his senior year, Alito had to travel to Trenton State College to finish his ROTC courses.
Princeton had long had a set of elite and exclusive eating clubs for upperclassmen. Those eating clubs remained all-male after women were admitted to Princeton in Alito’s sophomore year. Alito did not seek entry into any of those eating clubs. Instead, he took his meals at a university facility open to all students….
Kennedy wouldn’t accept that Alito’s decision to join CAP could have been motivated by concerns about ROTC. He tried to argue that Princeton had reached a peaceful accord with ROTC by 1985. But a 1985 article on CAP (added to the hearing record by Republican senators) revealed that CAP had concerns about “a campaign to eliminate the Army ROTC program.” And Princeton didn’t re-establish Navy and Air Force ROTC at Princeton until a decade or so ago—thirty years after Alito’s brief membership.
In an attempt to add high drama to the hearing—and to concoct a procedural excuse for delaying the hearing and for pursuing a filibuster—Kennedy called on Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter to allow a vote on issuing a subpoena to obtain CAP records among the William Rusher papers in the Library of Congress….
Kennedy’s notion that Rusher’s Library of Congress papers would undermine or contradict Alito’s responses was a farce. A full six weeks earlier, a New York Times reporter had published an article recounting his review of Rusher’s papers. The papers, he reported, “give no indication” that Alito “was among the group’s major donors.” “He was not an active leader of the group, and two of his classmates who were involved and Mr. Rusher said they did not remember his playing a role.” In short, there was no evidence that Alito’s membership consisted of anything more than a payment of dues….
The hostile questioning by Kennedy and his fellow Democrats did have one consequential effect: When Senator Lindsey Graham repudiated their allegations of bigotry, Alito’s wife Martha-Ann was so overcome with appreciation of Graham’s simple decency that she fled the hearing room in tears.
Republican staffers on the Judiciary Committee tell me that was the moment at which the tide shifted decisively in Alito’s favor. In the words of one staffer, “It’s hard to overstate what a turning point it felt like.”
Another result of Kennedy’s questioning is that he had to end his 50-year membership in the Owl Club, a “final club” at Harvard that refused to admit females as members and that had been evicted from campus twenty years earlier because of its discriminatory policy.
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