SUNDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2010
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B5 He championed rights but wouldn’t hire women brennan from B1 While Brennan emerged at work as the
nation’s most important jurist, at home he struggled with his wife’s alcoholism, trou- bles with two of his three children and long-term personal debts that left him “at my wits end” and kept his family in rental homes throughout the 1960s and ’70s. Stern and Wermiel describe Brennan as “an intensely conflict-averse person” with “a strong desire to be liked by everyone.” Though he became a crusading liberal strategist, Stern and Wermiel show that his private conduct, especially his long- standing refusal to appoint female clerks, sometimes stood in stark contradiction to his constitutional principles. “While I am for equal rights for women,
ASSOCIATED PRESS
William J. Brennan sits in a Senate hearing room during his 1957 confirmation to the Supreme Court.
I think my prejudices are still for the male,” Brennan wrote one law school dean who sought to recommend clerks. In 1970, when a former clerk nominated a highly accomplished young woman, Brennan
brusquely instructed, “Send me someone else.” Only when that former clerk, Ste- phen Barnett, bluntly told Brennan in an early 1974 letter that his behavior was “both unconstitutional and simply wrong” did the justice relent and hire his first female clerk. Seven years passed be- fore he took on a second. Stern and Wermiel conclude that “the profound disconnect” that allowed Bren- nan to “condemn gender discrimination while continuing to practice it” reflected how “he strictly compartmentalized his Court opinions and his life, often taking positions in opinions that were far more liberal than his own personal views.” The denouement of the Warren court
left Brennan leading a diminished liberal bloc under two very conservative chief justices, Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist; his dissenting opinions often featured “overwrought language” that re- sulted from “Brennan and his clerks egg- ing each other on, rather than the justice
moderating his clerks’ impulses toward excess.” Upset by the conservative major- ity in a 1971 case, for instance, an angry Brennan told his clerk, “Let’s blow them out of the water.” By 1979, at age 73, Brennan was frail and pondering retirement. Then his wife died in late 1982, and three months later he suddenly married his longtime secre- tary. Court colleagues were astounded, but with his new spouse, “Brennan un- derwent a sudden and dramatic trans- formation,” exhibiting a fresh youthful- ness and passion for public appearances that belied his age.
Brennan had long believed that “the Constitution is not a static document whose meaning on every detail is fixed for all time by the life experience of the Fram- ers,” and the Reagan administration’s mid-1980s attacks on “judicial activism” gave him prominent opportunities to re- spond. The “facile historicism” champi- oned by conservatives was really “little
more than arrogance cloaked in humility,” he declared in 1985, saying that “the gen- ius of the Constitution” lay in “the adapt- ability of its great principles to cope with current problems.” By 1988, at age 82, Brennan was “no- ticeably less engaged” with the court’s work and providing so little direction about the writing of opinions “that it made some of his clerks nervous.” Two years later he retired after injuring him- self in a fall, but he lived until 1997, when he died at age 91.
Scrupulously honest and consistently fair-minded, “Justice Brennan” is a su- premely impressive work that will long be prized as perhaps the best judicial biogra- phy ever written.
bookworld@washpost.com
David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of “Bearing the Cross,”a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.
In Abyei, a town on the border between northern and southern Sudan, actor George Clooney listens as tribal elders tell their stories. Two years ago, Abyei was burned by the Sudanese army.
Soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, a southern force, ride through Abyei. Along with southern Sudan, the disputed region, coveted for its oil, is set to vote on self-rule in January.
Students attend class in the southern town of Marial Bai. Their school was founded by Valentino Achak Deng, a former refugee whose story was told in Dave Eggers’s book “What Is the What.”
Enough Project co-founder John Prendergast greets students in the streets of Juba, in southern Sudan. The students were lined up to welcome U.N. officials, there on a fact-finding mission.
We can prevent another Darfur by George Clooney and John Prendergast photos by Tim Freccia I
f you had had the opportunity three months ahead of time to prevent Darfur’s genocide, what would you have done? The world faces such an opportu-
nity today. On Jan. 9, just 84 days from now, the people of southern Sudan and of the disputed region of Abyei — which straddles northern and southern Sudan — will vote in referendums on self-determi- nation. If held freely and fairly, these votes will result in an independent, oil-rich Southern Sudan. If not, the catastrophic war between the north and the south that ended in 2005, after 2.5 million deaths, could resume. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the man responsible for prosecuting both that war and the Darfur genocide, which has resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths since 2003, doesn’t want to be the one who lost the south. We just returned from a fact-finding mission to Abyei and various points along Sudan’s north-south border, where we found that Bashir’s regime in Khartoum is doing all it can to undermine the coming referendums in the hopes that they will be postponed or cancelled. The United States and the international community were too late to prevent the conflagration in Darfur, just as they were too late in Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Congo and Sierra Leone. Usually, the world responds only after wars begin, spending billions of dollars to mop up hu- manitarian catastrophes. In southern Sudan, however, the United
States has a unique chance to avert war and atrocities. We talked last week to a number of Democratic and Republican
leaders, and even in this polarized political environment, all of them strongly agree that more must be done to prevent further conflict in Sudan. It’s time now to follow through and to pull the Europeans and America’s other partners along with us. Most Americans have never heard of Abyei. We hope the region does not follow in Darfur’s footsteps to become a house- hold name, but it could. An area about the size of Connecticut, Abyei is inhabited mostly by the Dinka, southern Sudan’s largest ethnic group. With war again looming, it could become a flashpoint for the world’s next genocide. U.S. intelligence officials have already said that southern Sudan is the region of the globe most at risk of mass killing or genocide in the com- ing year. Two years ago, the Sudanese army and its allied militias attacked Abyei town and burned it to the ground. When we visited this month, a blind Dinka chief told us about that day. Unlike the straw huts where many of his fellow townspeople lived, his house was made of concrete and bricks, so it didn’t burn down. Because he was blind, he stayed behind while most people fled for safety. Four of his nephews huddled with him in his house, hoping to remain unde- tected. They were not so lucky. The army came and took the four boys away. No more than 30 seconds after they left the house, their uncle heard shots. The boys’ bodies were never recovered. Later in our trip, when we visited a mass grave where hundreds of Abyei’s dead were buried, we wondered if those boys were among them.
Over the past 20 years, the regime in
Khartoum has armed and politicized the northern communities that border Abyei, using them as a battering ram to drive out residents and ensure control of the area’s valuable oilfields. Bashir is reactivating these militias to destabilize the area if things don’t go his way in January. This is the same sort of divide-and-destroy tactic he used in deploying the Janjaweed mili- tias to ravage Darfur. Also worrying, the governor of Abyei’s neighboring region to the north is Ahmed Harun. Like Bashir, Harun has been indicted by the Interna- tional Criminal Court for orchestrating war crimes in Darfur. Will the international community allow Abyei to burn again?Next time, the fire will not be contained to the town we visited. It will ignite a national war, with repercus- sions throughout the country, including in Darfur, which remains rife with conflict, human rights abuses and insecurity. The Dinka residents of Abyei whomwe spoke to were clear about their views. “They better come and kill me in front of my house,” one chief told us, “so I can be buried there with honor. We are ready to die for our land.” And, we must note, for what’s under-
neath that land, for what grows on it and for the river that runs through it. As another older Dinka man told us: “We have suffered so much for so long. The oil is a gift for our suffering. We cannot give it away. We just want to feel the winds of freedom.” We met with President Obama last week and found him in command of the facts and seized with the urgency of the moment. Over the past month, his admin- istration has enhanced its diplomatic ef- forts in support of peace. U.S. proposals on
Abyei, however, have led the southern Su- danese to worry that the longtime Dinka residents of Abyei could have their votes drowned out by northern groups being suddenly resettled in the area by the Khar- toum government. The United States needs to take a principled stand in sup- port of the Abyei referendum, and it should further step up its diplomacy in pursuit of a grand bargain that would fi- nally address all the issues dividing the north and the south, including the ques- tion of who will get to vote in the two refer- endums, post-referendum arrangements between the north and south (including oil-wealth sharing), border demarcation,
The regime in Khartoum is not like the
one in Tehran or, for that matter, the one in Pyongyang: It wants acceptance and le- gitimacy. The United States and its diplo- matic partners can influence Bashir and his administration’s calculations over whether to go to war in the south by creat- ing bigger benefits for peace (in both the south and Darfur) and bigger consequenc- es for war than are currently on the table. Diplomatic opportunities like this one
don’t come along very often. Right now, the United States has the opportunity to avoid spending billions of taxpayers’ dol- lars on a humanitarian clean-up operation down the road — and the opportunity to
With war again looming, Abyei could become a flashpoint for the world’s next genocide.
citizenship and future relationships with the United States, a matter of great con- cern to Khartoum. Sudan presents a Rubik’s Cube of in- terlocking interests, but robust U.S. diplo- macy — including cooperation with the African Union and other partners — and the right U.S. leverage promise a solution. Bashir and his colleagues want normal re- lations with the United States, continued access to some of the oil revenues from the south, an end to sanctions against Sudan and some measure of protection from ex- isting and future indictments from the International Criminal Court.
potentially save millions of lives. “President Bush helped bring peace to southern Sudan five years ago,” one south- ern Sudanese high school student told us at a border point we visited. “It is up to President Obama to help keep that peace.”
George Clooney is an actor and a co-founder of Not on Our Watch. John Prendergast is a co-founder of the Enough Project and a co-author of “The Enough Moment: Fighting to End Africa’s Worst Human Rights Crimes.” Tim Freccia is a Nairobi-based photojournalist and documentary filmmaker who covers conflict and crisis.
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