The Judge Next Door

By Amy Wilentz

It was high noon on Sunday in Edwin Meese's small, elegant office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department. In armchairs that faced one another sat Meese, Howard Baker and a clutch of lieutenants. In their midst was Anthony Kennedy, a potential Supreme Court nominee, who had been flown to Washington on an Air Force jet from Sacramento the evening before, carrying only a small overnight bag. The interrogation ran through 21 pages of single-spaced questions. Was your wife pregnant when you married? No. Have you ever visited a massage parlor? No. Have you seen other women since you were married? No. Have you ever participated in group sex? No. Have you ever used cocaine? No. Hashish? No. Acid? No. Marijuana? No. Heroin? No. Have you ever bought pornography? Yes. His startled questioners were silent. "I bought several hard-core books and magazines for use in my constitutional-law class," Kennedy explained. Everyone laughed.

After almost four hours, Kennedy had proved what he told his questioners at the outset: "You're going to have a boring afternoon." So delightfully boring, in fact, that they decided not to repeat the process with anyone else. After Kennedy left, said one participant, "everybody looked at each other and said, 'Why go any further?' "

In Anthony McLeod Kennedy, 51, the Administration seems to have found a nominee with no lurking quirky qualities. "When we were growing up, if any of us were going to do something naughty, Tony would go home," recalls Lawyer John Hamlyn, a childhood friend who now lives four doors away. Indeed, the beardless and bespectacled Kennedy has a life story that sounds as if it were directed by Frank Capra. Married in 1963 to Mary Davis, an elementary schoolteacher with whom he has three children, Kennedy has stuck to his roots. He was born and raised in Sacramento, and he lives in the same white colonial house on a curving, tree-shaded street that his lawyer father built half a century ago. He graduated from Stanford University, spent a year at the London School of Economics and earned his law degree from Harvard in 1961. He has remained particularly loyal to Stanford: all three of his children -- Justin, 23, Gregory, 21, and Kristin, 19 -- have attended.

His father was one of Sacramento's most colorful lobbyists, a glad-handing, shoulder-rubbing wheeler-dealer. Upon his father's death in 1963, Kennedy left a lucrative San Francisco practice and returned to Sacramento to straighten out affairs and eventually take over the practice. Though the younger Kennedy kept clients like Schenley liquor distillers and the state's association of opticians, he mainly provided legal advice and drafted legislation. In testifying before the legislature on constitutional issues, Kennedy came to the attention of California Governor Ronald Reagan and his executive assistant Ed Meese. In 1973 they asked him to write a tax-limitation referendum, Proposition 1, which was a complicated and unsuccessful precursor of the controversial Proposition 13.

Since Gerald Ford appointed him to the Ninth Circuit in 1975, Kennedy has made a habit of lunching two or three times a week with his clerks, which makes him unusually accessible for a judge of his standing. Moreover, they all seem to like him. For 22 years, he has spent one evening a week teaching at the McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento. A former student, now an A.C.L.U. lobbyist, notes, "I was impressed that he took the time to teach night students. I considered it something of a public service." This past September, to celebrate the Constitution's bicentennial, he walked into class wearing a long coat and powdered wig. Gordon Schaber, the school's dean, cites Kennedy's self-deprecating wit and calls him the "judge next door."

His office is next door too, only about three miles from his house in Sacramento, where he feels most comfortable, and he has been known to describe the Ninth Circuit's vast San Francisco office as a "baroque, Victorian, neoclassic, Renaissance, modern structure near the Greyhound station." Reagan's new appointee says he is pleased with his nomination. If Kennedy is confirmed, however, it will mean disruption in an orderly life. He'll have to leave Sacramento.

With reporting by David Beckwith and Anne Constable/Washington