One rarely gets the opportunity to read a really scathing obituary. Even the most disliked public figures are generally afforded some kind of respect in death – perhaps described as flawed but brilliant, or having achieved great things before losing their way. No such luck for Robert Bork, the former US Solicitor-General who Reagan tried, unsuccessfully, to put on the Supreme Court. The New Yorker has dipped deep into the well of schadenfreude to come up with this one:
Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.
[…]
In 1973, Nixon directed Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson refused and resigned in protest, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. Bork, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, had no such scruples and thus served as executioner in the Saturday Night Massacre, to his enduring shame.
Read the full article at the New Yorker website.
