Linda Greenhouse, legendary New York Times reporter looks back on three decades chronicling the Supreme Court—including her run-ins with the journalism ethics police

When Linda Greenhouse started covering the United States Supreme Court for the New York Times Jimmy Carter was president Except for a couple of years in the '80s, she remained on the beat continuously for three decades. No other Times reporter of this era seemed so inseparable for so long from the subject she covered. Greenhouse is a woman of legendary intelligence, focus and seriousness. Right from the start, every story she wrote about the Court had two signature qualities: all of them were easy to understand, and all of them were authoritative. When she announced earlier this year that she had decided to take the buyout and retire, it felt like an indispensable part of the Times was falling away. This week was the first time in more than 20 years that the Court reconvened without Greenhouse there to chronicle its decisions.

In the New York Observer, John Koblin called her "one of the great New York Times institutions," and that is exactly what she is. In January, Greenhouse will become the Knight distinguished journalist in residence and Joseph M. Goldstein senior fellow in law at Yale. Her successor as Supreme Court correspondent is Adam Liptak.

FCP has known Greenhouse since they were reporters together on the Metro Desk of the Times in the 1970s. At the end of the '80s, she was attacked for participating in an equal rights march in Washington. Two years ago she was at the center of another commotion after she stated some obvious truths about the state of the republic in a speech at Radcliffe. Her critics (including the public editor of the Times) said it was inappropriate for a Supreme Court reporter to express sincere opinions in public. These attacks ignored the central fact about her work: nothing in Greenhouse's stories has ever been influenced by one of her personal beliefs. This is what the public editor wasn't smart enough to understand: havingopinions isn't what affects a person's copy; what matters is whether you have the capacity to put them aside when you sit down in front of your computer. That's what determines the shape of your story.

And that is also what makes me saddest about this reporter's retirement: the gold standard for journalistic objectivity will no longer appear regularly in the Times, as an indispensable example for all the rest of us.

FCP called Greenhouse to ask her to remember some of the highlights from her 30 years on the beat:

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How did you decide that you wanted to cover the Supreme Court?
I didn't really decide. I was Albany bureau chief and it seemed to me a good time to transfer to Washington—I assumed to keep covering politics, which is really what drew me into journalism in the first place. The Times had a different idea. The Master's program for journalists at Yale Law School had just started. It was about to go into its second year so Dave Jones [then the National Editor] proposed that I spend a year in that program. I hadn't thought of covering the Court myself —not because I wasn't interested but because it never occurred to me it that it was a possibility

Who are your other favorite reporters on the Court of the last 30 years?
I have a high regard for Nina Totenburg. Somebody who has been amazing on the beat is Lyle Denniston, who is now in his mid 70s. He now writes the scotus blog, which is the major online resource on the Court, and he's really great. It just goes to show you don't necessarily need a specialized degree. NBC's Pete Williams is very good. So is David Savage of the Los Angeles Times and Joan Biskupic of USA Today, who is working on a biography of Justice Scalia.

Generally speaking, do you think the Court is covered better or worse than it was when you started out?
Probably better, because the internet has facilitated a sharing of resources about the Court. There's access that did not exist previously. Everybody posts links to decisions and now transcripts are available the same day, which is really revolutionary. It used to be two weeks; that makes an amazing difference.

Did anybody ask for that before Roberts became chief justice?
Oh yeah—constantly. The first hurdle to cross for years was that the transcript would not identify the individual justice who was asking the question. It was just "the Court." The conceit was that there are no individual differences—it was the Court asking the question. And that changed under Chief Justice Rehnquist; we asked him to change that. I don't know if it was an answer to a request or just Roberts' sense of what should be done. He made the same-day transcripts available on the Court's website.

If they were to allow themselves to be broadcast on TV, would it be Roberts' decision, or the whole Court?
Definitely the whole Court

Is there such a thing as a strict constructionist? Is that a term that has any real meaning?
No, it doesn't have any meaning to me. I think it's just a label that people fling around. Actually, they don't really fling that one around—that sounds like something out of the Nixon era. Presidential candidates will say 'I want justices who interpret the law and don't make the law.' The fact is the Supreme Court is sitting on top of the whole judicial system, and it has an enormous amount of discretion. Typically, the court takes a case because the lower courts are in dispute over the meaning of that constitutional provision in that context, or the meaning of a federal statute. So if the meaning were so clear, it wouldn't be at the Court in the first place. They have to bring personal judgment to it. It's not like an "umpire calling balls and strikes" as John Roberts described the job. It's the exercise of personal and professional judgment on the hardest legal questions of the day. "Hard" defined as those legal questions on which the lower courts have not been able to agree.

Who is the best writer on the Court?
I think Ruth Ginsburg is a really good clean writer. She takes a lot of care in her writing.

When Lawrence v. Texas [the case which invalidated all the remaining state laws criminalizing sodomy] was argued you seemed unusually confident that the Court would rule that those laws were unconstitutional.
There were a couple of things. Lawrence was not an example of a case that was granted because the lower courts were in disarray, because the Court had spoken about it [in Bowers. v. Hardwick] and only the Supreme Court could change the paradigm. So the Lawrence case was very carefully handled in the lower courts by very smart lawyers, and was primed to get up to the Supreme Court. So when they took it, they were accepting an invitation to revisit Bowers. And if there weren't at least five votes to do that, there was no reason to take it. From the get-go, you know something was afoot. And then it was just clear in the argument—they just weren't buying what the Dallas DA was selling. So the only question was, were they going to overturn the law sort of narrowly on equal protection grounds? Or were they going to go all the way, and really overturn Bowers, and say something really profound?

And they did the latter
They did the latter.

It seems to me that the [Robert] Bork confirmation battle and the replacement of Bork by [Anthony] Kennedy had more profound effects than any other political battle I can think of, other than a presidential election. Is that an overstatement?
No, I think that's right. It really was a battle over the meaning of the Constitution, and it was a watershed. That's why it still resonates so strongly today and is still being fought today.

Since there are so many 5 to 4 cases in which Kennedy cast the deciding vote, did that confirmation battle change the outcome of more cases in the last 20 years than any other single political event?
Yes, I think that's fair.

Would you call any of the Justices a friend of yours?
Well, friend is a funny word in Washington. You know what they say in Washington: if you want a friend, get a dog. Now that I'm no longer a reporter, I'll see.

Do Scalia and Thomas vote together 100 percent of the time?
No, it's not 100 percent. It's no more frequent than Ginsburg and Breyer. I don't have the numbers off the top off my hat. To extrapolate from the fact that they vote together a lot —to say what many people say, that Justice Scalia just gives Justice Thomas his marching orders is simply not true.

Because you can see different reasoning in their opinions to reach the same result? Well that, yes. And also I have no reason to think they are particularly close individually. I don't think they hang out together. They're just two people who often see things the same way. Thomas is very much his own man.

There are some ideologically unlikely friendships—Scalia and Ginsburg? That's right. They have a tradition of friendship that goes back to when they both served on the Appeals Court, on the DC circuit, at the same time. And the two couples have a tradition of spending every New Year's Eve together. The menu is usually some wild game bagged by Scalia and cooked by Marty Ginsburg, who is a fabulous chef. The Ginsburgs live in the Watergate and I think that's usually where it is. Justice Breyer and Justice O'Connor were close, and he was very sad when she retired. I think they were kind of soul mates. But there's not a lot of 'hanging out.'

What is your educated guess of how many appointments the next president will make in the next four years?
One or two. My guess is no better than anybody else's.

It seems to me that in presidential politics, Supreme Court appointments may matter to some very conservative voters but it doesn't seem to be an issue that determines many people's votes
Oh I agree; and I think the social science research would bear that out. It's rare for the Democratic candidate to make an issue of the Court—I've never seen it done. And Republicans do. Certainly the liberal interest groups try to raise the saliency of it, but unless the nominee is actually carrying that banner it's very hard to do that alone. I've always been baffled by how invisible the Court turns out to be in every presidential election year.

Why did you cover Congress for a couple of years [1986-1988] in the middle?
I was going to have a baby around the first Monday in October, and I was planning to take the six month leave. So I just thought it was fair to leave the beat, because I didn't want to come back in April and say, 'OK, you've done all the scut work and now I'll clean up.' By that time, I'd done it for seven years. I really wasn't planning at that time to make it my life's work. Stuart Taylor did it. I was always interested in political reporting, which I thought I was pretty good at, and I was interested in Congress. So Stuart and I worked out a package deal, and we went to [Washington Editor] Bill Kovach and I said 'I'm pregnant, I want to leave the Court beat, and Stuart is very happy to take it. And when I come back I'd like to cover Congress.' And Bill said fine.

And what led you back to the Court?
After a couple of years of covering the Court, Stuart decided to leave the paper. So there was a vacancy, and they asked me to take it back, so I did.

Were you eager to go back after a couple of years away?
I hadn't been planning to go back, but Max Frankel announced he was going to conduct a nationwide search to find the best Supreme Court reporter in the country. And I got annoyed: I thought, what am I, chopped liver? I had done it for seven years, I thought I did it pretty well. So that's what got me interested.

Let's talk about the march you were in that got so much attention
It was in 1989. It was a march that was organized by NOW, and its aims were to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which believe it or not was still an issue then, and support abortion rights. And it was a march on Congress.

Before you participated, did you ask any of your bosses if this was a good idea?
Well I didn't ask them, I told them. Howell was the bureau chief. And I made it perfectly clear in the office that I was doing this. Nobody raised an eyebrow. It wasn't a big deal to anybody. And, in fact, during the march there was a party at Howell's house which was a going away party for Steve Roberts. So after the march I went over to the party and said, you all missed a great march, and I told them all about it. I swear to god, nobody turned a hair. It was just obvious to everybody that, as a private citizen, I had a perfect right to do what I was doing. I went with three friends from my college class. You know, it wasn't under a banner that said "New York Times Reporter For Choice." We were just four women in a group of half a million. And so, it was no secret; it was no testing of boundaries, it was not in your face. It was just completely routine as far as I was concerned. It seemed to me, as far as anybody was concerned.

And you know what happened was, Len Downie, over at the Washington Post—who of course believes that you shouldn't even vote —Len learned that some of his reporters had also been at the march and he started railing against this. Some of my friends at the Post said, 'well, what's the big deal? Over at the Times, Linda marched, and it was completely in the open and nobody said anything about it.' At that point Eleanor Randolph, who had the press beat at the Washington Post, called Max Frankel to say, 'Well, what about this?' Because here at the Post, our executive editor takes a dim view of this. Well, Max was not going to be "out-ethiced" by Len Downie. And so he said, 'Well, this is terrible, this violates all kinds of rules.' Which, actually, it didn't. So he came down on me. He made Howell call me in and read me some kind of riot act. [In the Washington Post, Randolph quoted Raines as saying, "As it turns out, it is Max Frankel's strong feeling that this should not be allowed.]

You know, I just realized I was being thrown overboard as a sacrificial lamb for the greater good of journalistic ethics. So I just took it with a grain of salt. [Asked by FCP about this account, Frankel replied: "I don't remember sacrificing any lamb—just trying to protect us from appearing partial about issues we cover. Linda served the Times brilliantly and I was then and have always been her No. 1 fan."]

You were pretty angry, weren't you?
Well, I was quite disappointed. I was disappointed in the fact that I knew some people from the Times, who I won't name—some of whom had editorial responsibilities, who had come down from New York and had also marched. The difference was, they had given themselves the cover of getting press credentials. I, of course, had a chance to get press credentials too, since abortion was something I wrote about it. But I declined press credentials because I said, 'I'm not covering the story, so I'm not going to take press credentials.' So I felt that there was a great deal of hypocrisy, and failure on the part of some to have the courage to speak up. But it is ever thus.

My next little encounter with journalistic ethics was in the fall of 2006. That was about a talk I gave at Radcliffe upon receiving their highest alumni honor that year, the Radcliffe Medal. It was a lunch talk to invited alums. I gave a kind of generational narrative. It wasn't a political rant at all. It wasn't intended by me to be a political speech, nor was it received by the audience that way. It was a generational tale, and the question I asked was, did we, the generation of the '60s, who thought we were going to change the world for the better—have we made a difference? Is it better? I said that there were a few troubling things, like the creation of a law-free zone in Guantanamo by the Bush administration—and P.S., this was two years after the Court had ruled there could not be a law-free zone. It was two years since the Court struck down the administration's notion that federal judges had no business in Guantanamo. It wasn't a new idea coming from me. I said that it's disturbing that the administration has been conducting a war against women's reproductive freedom—which is an obvious statement of fact. Obviously they have by signing the so-called partial birth abortion law—things that any reader of the New York Times would know.

That was in June. In the fall I got a call from the media guy at NPR saying, 'you made this speech at Radcliffe, and I've seen it because my mother went to Radcliffe.' And he said, 'you expressed opinions on things. What do you have to say about that?' I said, 'I don't have to explain myself to you. You obviously have the speech, so read it and do what you want with it.' So he went on the air and said this was a terrible thing. What he did—and this was really disappointing—he called up various people like Jack Nelson and the dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland and read them those little raw meat sentences out of a half hour speech, and said, what do you think about them? And they, without endeavoring to get the full speech or to understand why I would have said these things, said, "Oh, that's terrible." When I asked these individuals later, 'By the way, did you have a chance to look at the whole speech?' No, they hadn't. So he reported this. And again, not to be out-ethiced, Byron Calame, who was the public editor, wrote a column denouncing me for this. The editors failed to stand up for me. My strong belief was that they should have stood up for me. And they didn't do it.

Were you surprised by Bowers v. Hardwick? [the first Supreme Court decision which upheld the law criminalizing sodomy in Georgia in 1986]
That was the year that I wasn't covering the Court. I thought it was really close, because I thought the Court saw it as a surrogate for the abortion debate. I still think that. I actually think it had much more to do with the right to privacy, in the abortion context, than it had anything to do with gay rights. I don't think the Court 'got' gay rights, they weren't thinking gay rights.

So it was really about limiting the right to privacy provided by the Constitution?
It was a doctrinal battle and the gay community became collateral damage. But I don't actually think it was about the gay community.

That was one of the most disgusting opinions I've ever read
Oh, absolutely. I don't think Byron White was necessarily homophobic. I just think gay rights weren't on his screen and he didn't care. That has certainly been one of the great cultural revolutions of our lifetime.

How did you come down overall on whether our generation had made life better or worse?
I talk about gay rights quite a lot as a marker of how much better off we are. I believe that very strongly. I think that was probably the most gripping scene I ever witnessed at the Court—when Kennedy read the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Usually, when you go up to the Court, you don't know what's coming that day. But it was the last day of the term, and Lawrence was the last undecided case. So everybody knew, and the Court was filled with gay and lesbian members of the Supreme Court bar. When Kennedy got to where he said Bowers v. Hardwick was wrong when it was decided, it's wrong today, and we hereby overrule it, all these lawyers in the bar section started crying. It was just a wonderful scene. It was great.

It was an unbelievably important moment
I completely agree.

Well, as the TV reporters say, how do you feel? Will you miss it?
Oh sure I'll miss it. But I was ready after 40 years to try something new. I'm extremely busy with various projects. I'm writing a law review article on the DC Second Amendment gun case. I gave the Jefferson lecture at Berkeley; and I'm running a conference on judicial independence for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I'm also participating in a program in November at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia with Justices Souter and Ginsburg. Later this month, I'm going to South Africa for a conference on improving communication among the courts, the press, and the public. I've taken training from my local county to be an election judge and work at the polls on Nov. 4.

I start at Yale in January. I get to kind of define my role there; and try to be useful to the Yale community and have the great pleasure of playing in one of the most interesting sand boxes in all of academia.

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Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. He has also written for Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, New York, The Washington Post, The New York Observer, Rolling Stone, Details, Interview, The Advocate, Vogue, and Salon. He has taught journalism at Columbia and Princeton. To find out more, visit charleskaiser.com.