Judge Harry Blackmun: A Craftsman for the Court

MOTHER, if it doesn't come through, it's O.K. I like my work on the appellate court very much." With those words Judge Blackmun sought to reassure his 85-year-old mother about his nomination to the Supreme Court. Mindful that emotional controversy has severely upset the lives of the President's two previous choices, he observes: "I feel like a load of bricks has landed on me." A reserved man who is protective of his privacy, the 61-year-old jurist nevertheless appreciates the appointment: "It's overwhelming and humbling."

Except for an avid interest in major-league baseball and professional football, the judge's life seems devoted solely to his court duties and his family, which includes three grown daughters. Although the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals is headquartered in St. Louis, for most of the year Blackmun prefers to work on his cases in the relative serenity of Rochester, Minn., where he has lived since becoming the chief counsel of the Mayo Clinic in 1950. (He resigned in 1959.) An FBI agent confided to Blackmun's lively wife, Dorothy, that the only criticism they could turn up after checking dozens of lawyers was that "he works too hard."

Blackmun has a dry, self-deprecating wit, but he rarely shows it in public. Even as a boy in St. Paul, he put his school studies ahead of most other interests, and spent much of his spare time helping out in his father's grocery and hardware store. Studious but not shy, he won high school oratorical contests and was active in church plays. At Harvard, he majored in mathematics: "It is much the same as legal thinking--it teaches you to be precise and logical." To meet his expenses, he also worked as a milkman, janitor, driver of a launch for the freshman crew and a painter of handball courts. He made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. In 1932, he got his Harvard law degree, clerked for Federal Judge John Sanborn, then joined a leading Minneapolis law firm. A lifelong Republican, he was appointed a federal judge by President Eisenhower in 1959. His fellow judges all have high respect for Blackmun. As one of his former law clerks explains it: "He's a model--a real craftsman. He spends an enormous amount of time researching, drafting and redrafting his decisions."

Those opinions, many of Blackmun's associates assert, are not doctrinaire enough to permit Blackmun to be tagged with any tidy judicial labels. One jurist on the appeals court admires Blackmun for always keeping an open mind on issues--"He's not predictable." Blackmun himself says: "I've been called liberal and I've been called conservative. I think labels are deceiving. Actually, I've been brought up in the Frankfurter tradition" (Frankfurter was a relatively conservative Justice). As for being a "strict constructionist" of the Constitution, Blackmun says: "I don't know what it means." In that, he expresses a view common to many jurists who abhor such terms, feeling that they decide each case on its own particular merits. He thinks that serving on the court would be "a much more soul-searching, much more wrenching" experience than his current judgeship. Even that, he admits, has involved "the difficult loneliness of decision making." On the Supreme Court, he clearly would not be so conservative as to resist new interpretations of past decisions, especially those that were decided by a single vote. "Who's to say five men ten years ago were right and five men today are wrong?" he asks.

No one seems to feel that Blackmun would be subservient to his lifelong friend, Chief Justice Warren Burger. The two met in a St. Paul Sunday school, attended elementary school together, and have remained close ever since. Blackmun was the best man when Burger married in 1933. Colleagues of both contend that Blackmun is at least Burger's equal in intellect and is too independent to follow any other man's lead automatically. "I've highly respected him all my life," Blackmun says of Burger. If he is confirmed, Blackmun concedes, "there will be some hard going if we disagree, but I'm sure we can do it without any rupture in our relationship."

Unlike her husband, Dottie Blackmun proudly claims to be a "strict constructionist"--in the clothes designing she does as a creative hobby. She and a friend operate a custom dressmaking shop called "The Designing Women," in which they turn out fashionable clothes and teach the art to others. Mrs. Blackmun is excited about the probable move to Washington. "I'm going to have lots of fun because everywhere we go in Washington, I'll have to create a new outfit," she says. None of those who know Judge Blackmun have any fear that the Senate will keep Dottie away from Washington.

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