Word: bork
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...When Bork was appointed by Richard Nixon as Solicitor General in 1973, the Indiana Law Review article prompted widespread fears that the office was about to be hopelessly politicized. After only five weeks on the job, he was called to the White House by Nixon Aide Alexander Haig and asked to run the President's Watergate defense. After some indecision, Bork ultimately maneuvered his way out, in part because Nixon refused to let him listen to the White House tapes. Three months later came the Saturday Night Massacre. Bork's name became a household word overnight when, as acting Attorney...
Ironically, the remainder of Bork's four-year tenure at Justice could prove his biggest asset. Career and political appointees alike credit Bork with helping to restore morale at the shaken department. Despite antibusing sentiment in both the Nixon and Ford administrations, for example, Bork pointedly refused to oppose a controversial Boston school-desegregation order. "He was the epitome of an open-minded, principled lawyer," says A. Raymond Randolph, then a Bork aide, "the exact opposite of a rigid ideologue...
When President Ford was defeated, Bork briefly considered a Washington law practice but ultimately decided to return to Yale. The move was a financial success, but unsatisfying nonetheless. He published his book, The Antitrust Paradox, ten years in the making, debunking the antitrust notion that bigness was badness in corporate America. Businessmen flocked to his New Haven office, willing to pay $250 an hour for his counsel on antitrust and Justice Department matters. His income soared into six figures, and he quickly paid off a small debt left over from his children's schooling and began to build...
...school relationships had soured. Bickel had died while Bork was in Washington. Professors muttered that Bork's onetime freewheeling search for intellectual theories had been replaced by commercial pursuits. Bork, who usually stayed above academic politics, became involved in a losing 1978 campaign against a proposal to forbid law firms that discriminated against homosexuals from recruiting at Yale. "Contrary to assertions made, homosexuality is obviously not an unchangeable condition like race or gender," he wrote...
...outlook was obviously affected by his wife's deteriorating health. In early 1971, surgeons had operated on Claire Bork, then only 41, and pronounced her hopelessly ill with cancer. They told Bork she had only six months to live and urged him to withhold the news from her. Instead, the Borks retained new doctors and Claire began a prolonged campaign to beat the disease through operations and chemotherapy. Though she was in remission for much of a decade, the battle finally ended in 1980 when the cancer reached her lungs. "She was determined to fight it until her children were...