Word: evens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...original $43 million. But tallies of total indebtedness to bondholders and others ran as high as $700 million. There was plenty of blame for everyone, though. Hannon; the mayor, who should have seen the problem coming; and the school board's finance committee, which did not even meet between January 1978 and March 1979, owing to "personality conflict," as one member recalls. Why did the board fail to slam on the spending brakes sooner? Says Board Member Patricia O'Hern: "They also gave financial reports to our auditors. Now if one of the big eight auditing firms couldn...
Alone among public institutions, the U.S. Supreme Court has remained an Olympian myth: nine sages in black robes, unelected, unreviewable, pronouncing the last word on the law. Throughout its 190-year existence, the court's decision-making process has enjoyed a special immunity from public scrutiny. Even during the '70s, in the post-Watergate era of full disclosure, its white marble temple stood as a sanctuary, its inner workings Washington's last well-kept secret...
...Earl Warren Court, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, are embittered and isolated. In his chambers, Brennan calls the chief "dummy" and rails in dissent with an "acid pen." (Brennan is not, however, above letting a life sentence stand in one case in order to cultivate Nixon appointee Blackmun, even though Brennan believes that the convicted man deserves a new trial.) Marshall, the only black Justice, has given up. "I'm going fishing," he tells his clerks. "You kids fight the battles. What difference does it make? Why fight when you can just dissent...
...becoming senile. In one pathetic scene, Justice John Marshall Harlan, once one of the court's leading intellects, was trying to sign a denial for review from his hospital bed. Nearly blind, he signed the bed sheet instead of the document. Justice William Douglas tried to exert influence even after he retired. He attempted to file a dissent in a campaign finance case and asked to have a tenth chair brought into the courtroom when the court heard oral arguments on the death penalty. Brennan, his old liberal ally...
...include the Justices' innermost thoughts. In the book's final pages, Justice Stevens ponders his first year (1976) on the court. He finds himself "accustomed to watching his colleagues make pragmatic rather than principled decisions-shading the facts, twisting the law, warping logic to reconcile the unreconcilable." Even if it was not what Stevens had anticipated, the book says, "it was the reality...