What do you get when you pick a Supreme Court Justice? The talk, now that John Paul Stevens has announced that he will resign, is about who might succeed him. (The new name today is Sidney Thomas.) It has been widely noted that Stevens, a liberal icon, was named by a Republican, Gerald Ford. In his Profile of Stevens last month, Jeffrey Toobin noted that

In 2005, a year before his death, Ford wrote, in a tribute to Stevens, “For I am prepared to allow history’s judgment of my term in office to rest (if necessary, exclusively) on my nomination thirty years ago of John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

“If necessary, exclusively”—in one sense, that is an appealingly modest sentiment, an acknowledgment that his two-and-a-half-year Presidency would never make it to the top ranks of one of those historians’ polls. (Though he is never gets placed in the bottom, either; he tends to be in the twenties, which must count as a gentleman’s C.) He was never even elected Vice-President.

At the same time, it is either an exceedingly wistful or willfully blind thing to say. It’s not really necessary to focus exclusively on Stevens; there will always be at least one item history could use as a basis for judging Ford: his decision to pardon Nixon. (Though the judgment would not necessarily be negative.) The pardon was in the first sentence of the obituary the Times ran when Ford died, in 2006; in the eight thousand words that followed, Stevens wasn’t mentioned at all.

In a way that is a pity; one thing Toobin found was that Stevens was no mistake on Ford’s part:

“Ford’s purpose was not to make a big splash and change the world,” Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, said. “Ford was still smarting after the pardon of Nixon. He wanted to unite the country. There was no attempt to nominate a strong ideologue. That just wasn’t on the table. They wanted a straight-arrow, middle-of-the-road, normal guy, excellent lawyer—and that’s what they got in Stevens.”

Ford may be best remembered, in some quarters, as the clumsy man in the Chevy Chase skits—which is funny in that he might have been one of the best athletes to serve as President. And he isn’t remembered as vividly as he might be as a President of the Vietnam War, though its closing chapter was during his term; but perhaps, by the time he came into office, that helicopter had already taken off, at least in the American imagination. At the Tulane commencement on April 23, 1975, one week before Saigon fell, Ford, after speaking of the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought two weeks after an armistice had been signed in the War of 1812 (but before the news of it arrived), said,

Thousands died although a peace had been negotiated. The combatants had not gotten the word. Yet, the epic struggle nevertheless restored America’s pride.

Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.

Rhetorically, the speech was a bit of a mish-mash (he throws in the Civil War, too, and makes some football jokes). “Finished” was the word that mattered, though. Ford’s Presidency might have been finished as soon as he pardoned Nixon, as far as many Americans were concerned. But Supreme Court Justices, like vaguely defined wars in faraway countries, can last longer than you think, and move in directions you don’t expect. Obama has two wars to end or continue, and will soon have two Justices to his name. On which basis would he most like to be judged?

Notes:

icon: a very famous person or thing considered as representing a set of beliefs or a way of life. 这里指John Paul Steven可称得上美国呼吁和崇尚自由的代表。

obituary：讣告

ideologue：理论家，空想家

armistice：停战条约

mish-mash：大杂烩

a gentleman's C：美国有这样一句话“C is a gentleman's grade”，原指那些上名校的gentleman或富家子弟往往在学业上不够努力，成绩得C就万事大吉了。这里指Gerald Ford做为总统算不上出色，但还过得去。

以下为原文链接地址：

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/04/gerald-fords-justice.html