Wednesday, July 6, 2005

To almost everyone, just 'Sandra'

Commentary by Pat Murphy


By PAT MURPHY

Pat Murphy

Not even the U.S. Supreme Court's majesty could change Sandra Day O'Connor's gritty character: behind the serious, scholarly façade of associate justice, she retained the down-home sociability bred by her Arizona ranch upbringing.

Since meeting her in 1972 in Phoenix, working with her over the years and despite titles she's accumulated, she preferred being called just Sandra.

Therefore, it wasn't odd to receive a note in late June. She took time to write notes. However, this one was different. Her husband John couldn't answer a letter I'd written him: his Alzheimer's had worsened.

It was a hint Sandra might leave the high court.

Few couples are as devoted, as inseparable as John and Sandra, college sweethearts at Stanford University law school, where she graduated third in her class (Chief Justice William Rehnquist, also an Arizonan, was first.)

My reaction was that Sandra, 24 years as associate justice and now 75, probably would choose to devote her life to caring for John, whose infectious wit and fetching laugh has been tragically muted and would need her in the awful days ahead.

(About John's wacky humor: After I'd left as publisher of the newspapers in Phoenix, John post scripted a letter: "Do you know why they bury all the ex-publishers at least 40 inches below the surface? Because 'deep down' they're really nice guys.")

Unlike most other justices, Sandra has infuriated the political left as well as the political right, suggesting she was more inclined to justice in her thinking than a rigid ideology.

There's an explanation. Sandra is the only current Supreme Court justice with a grassroots political background—Arizona state Senate majority leader, lower court state judge and then state appellate judge before President Reagan named her a justice in 1981.

She suffered job discrimination: despite academic excellence, law offices wouldn't hire her. She opened her own office. The Phoenix course where she golfed gave preference to men. She also is a breast cancer survivor.

With such earthy preparation, Sandra looked on issues with a far broader, human perspective, something President Bush should remember while picking a successor to Sandra.

A few years after her precedent-setting appointment as the court's first woman justice, she was kind enough to give me a tour of the court building and spring for lunch in the court's dining room.

Another proud, precedent-setting achievement, she explained while climbing stairs to enter an uncommonly plain room, was a primitive gym she created for female court workers and her to meet in mornings to exercise.




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