[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 34 (Thursday, March 4, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Page S2351]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   TRIBUTE TO JUSTICE HARRY BLACKMUN

  Mr. DASCHLE. Mr. President, for 24 years Justice Harry Blackmun gave 
voice on the highest court in this land to ordinary Americans. He gave 
voice--in his own words--to ``the little guy.'' Early this morning, 
that voice was silenced. Harry Blackmun died at the age of 90.
  He was an extraordinary man and a quintessential American. His tenure 
on the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court extended through the 
terms of nine Presidents.
  Years ago, Justice Blackmun predicted the first thing obituary 
writers would say of him today is that he was the man who wrote Roe v. 
Wade, and that clearly was the best known and most controversial 
decision in Justice Blackmun's career. But Harry Blackmun stood for 
much more than that. He was regarded by many as the Justice most 
insistent that the Court confront the reality of the problems it 
considered and the real-world consequences of those decisions.
  In a dissenting opinion, he once challenged what he called ``the 
comfortable perspective'' from which his fellow Justices ruled that a 
$40 fee did not limit a poor woman's right to choose. The reason he saw 
that matter differently from his fellow Justices was due--at least in 
part--to the fact that Harry Blackmun had been raised differently.
  He was born in Nashville in 1908 but grew up in St. Paul, MN. His 
father owned a hardware store and a grocery store. His family did not 
have a lot of money. When Harry Blackmun was 17 years old, he was 
chosen by the Harvard Club of Minnesota to receive a scholarship. At 
Harvard, he majored in mathematics. To cover living expenses, he worked 
as a janitor and a milkman, painted handball courts, and graded math 
papers.
  He considered seriously going to medical school but chose Harvard 
instead. He worked that same string of odd jobs to pay for his room and 
board all the way through law school. After law school, he spent 16 
years in private law practice in St. Paul.
  In 1950, Harry Blackmun became the first resident counsel at the 
world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. He later called this ``the 
happiest decade'' in his life, because it gave him ``a foot in both 
camps--law and medicine.''
  A lifelong Republican, Justice Blackmun was nominated in November of 
1959 by President Eisenhower to the U.S. Court of Appeals' Eighth 
Circuit. At the time, he was labeled a conservative.

  In April of 1970, he was nominated by President Nixon to the Supreme 
Court. He had been recommended to President Nixon by a man with whom he 
had been friends since they attended kindergarten together: Chief 
Justice Warren Burger. Justice Blackmun was, in fact, the third choice 
to fill the seat vacated by Abe Fortas. Typical of his self-effacing 
wit, he often referred to himself as ``Old No. 3.''
  When the FBI conducted its prenomination investigation of Harry 
Blackmun, they turned up only one complaint: He works too hard.
  In his early days on the Court, Justice Blackmun tended to vote with 
his old friend, the Chief Justice. In fact, their records were so 
similar they were called by some ``the Minnesota Twins.''
  As he began his second decade on the Court, Justice Blackmun found 
his own voice. He began to use that voice more frequently and more 
forcefully to speak for those he thought too often went unnoticed by 
the Court. He emerged as one of the Court's most courageous champions 
of individual liberty. His overriding concern was balancing and 
protecting the rights of individuals against the authority of the 
government.
  He was a staunch defender of free speech and what he called ``the 
most valued'' of all rights: the right to be left alone.
  He was criticized by some and praised by others for what many people 
perceived as a change in his political beliefs. He always insisted to 
friends that he had not moved to the left; rather the Court had moved 
to the right. ``I've been called liberal and conservative; labels are 
deceiving. I call them as I see them,'' he said.
  Roe v. Wade combined Justice Blackmun's two most enduring interests: 
the right to privacy, and the relationship between medical and legal 
issues. For weeks before writing the majority opinion, he immersed 
himself in historical and medical research at the Mayo Clinic.
  Over the years, he would receive 60,000 pieces of hate mail as a 
result of his decision. He read every one of them. Once when he was 
asked why, he replied, simply, ``I want to know what the people who 
wrote are thinking.''
  He understood why Roe v. Wade produced such strong passions in 
people--because it had elicited strong feelings in him.
  In 1983, he gave a long interview to a reporter--something that 
remains nearly unprecedented for a Supreme Court Justice. In that 
interview, he recalled what it was like to write the opinion in that 
landmark case.

       I believe everything I said in the second paragraph of that 
     opinion, where I agonized, initially not only for myself, but 
     for the Court.
       Parenthetically, in doing so publicly, I disobeyed one 
     suggestion Hugo Black made to me when I first came here. He 
     said, ``Harry, never display agony in public, in an opinion. 
     Never display agony. Never say `This is an agonizing, 
     difficult decision.' Always write it as though it's clear as 
     crystal.''

  Justice Blackmun wrote an agonized opinion because for him--and, he 
understood, for most people--abortion is an agonizing decision. It was 
then, and it remains so today.
  I, for one, am grateful to Justice Blackmun that he did not try to 
minimize the difficulty of that decision. To do so would have been 
disrespectful, I believe, to the vast majority of Americans who are 
truly torn, intellectually and emotionally, by the question of 
abortion.
  In 1994, when Justice Blackmun announced his retirement, he told 
President Clinton, ``I'm indebted to the Nation . . . for putting up 
with the likes of me.''
  Today, as we bid farewell to Harry Blackmun, it is we who are 
indebted to him. He was the champion of liberty, and ``we are not 
likely to see the likes of him'' for a long time.
  Our thoughts and prayers are with Justice Blackmun's friends and 
family, especially his wife and partner of 58 years, Dottie, and their 
three daughters, Nancy, Sally and Susan. Our Nation will miss Harry 
Blackmun.

                          ____________________