Transcript: Nixon and the Court

PROTESTORS (Singing): The revolution has come (off the pigs) Time to pick up the gun (off the pigs) The revolution has come (off the pigs) Time to pick up the gun (off the pigs) The revolution has come (off the pigs) Time to pick up the gun (off the pigs) The revolution has come.

RICHARD M. NIXON: Tonight it's time for some honest talk about the problem of order of the United States. I in a sense am in the ring tonight, and I think this is the time and this is the place to take off the gloves and sock it to them.

KOBYLKA: Richard Nixon rides into town and says, we will give you order. We will give you peace. We will give you what you want, which is security. And so Nixon's promise is to end the chaos, to end the disorder, and part of that was, from his perspective, a function of the Court.

KLARMAN: Nixon's committed to appointing justices who will repudiate much of what the Warren Court's done.

KOBYLKA: Nixon gets his chance, and it's an extraordinary chance. This is something that no president since Roosevelt had had. He has four appointments in less than two years. There are nine people on the Court. That's almost half the Court. You wipe out almost half of the Warren Court in one fell swoop. So the stage is set for the "Nixon Revolution."

NARRATOR: Nixon knew what sort of man he wanted: strong conservatives who believed in law and order, nominees from the South and with judicial experience -- and young enough to serve some decades on the Court. He wanted judges who would stick to the letter of the Constitution, and where it was fuzzy, let the government do what it liked. He called them strict constructionists. And to find them, a bright young man searched the rosters, the assistant attorney general, William H. Rehnquist.

POWE: "Strict constructionists" became the code word for "not people like those on the Court."

SIMON: "Strict constructionists" was gonna favor government and law enforcement against individual liberties and certainly those of criminal suspects.

RICHARD M. NIXON: Ladies and gentlemen, I am very proud tonight to nominate as the 15th Chief Justice of the Unites States, Judge Warren Burger.

NARRATOR: It wasn't all easy. Two Southern nominees -- Clement Haynesworth and G. Harold Carswell -- were rejected by the Senate.

Nixon settled for Burger's childhood friend from Minnesota, the little-known federal appeals court judge Harry Blackmun.

And finally, he got one man from the South: Lewis Powell, a Virginian. But by then he'd burned through every name the justice department had collected.

What about that Rehnquist fellow? Only 47 -- perfect! Strong on law and order, critic of the Warren Court since the early '50s, a former clerk for Justice Robert Jackson. Not that Nixon knew all that. "Renchburg?" Nixon asked. "Is he Jewish?"

KOBYLKA: Nixon doesn't know him other than visually, and Rehnquist is something of a flamboyant dresser. He favored pink shirts. Richard Nixon was not a pink shirt kind of guy. Rehnquist had long hair. He wore it over his ears, and he had long mutton chop sideburns.

DELLINGER: He had been number one in his class at Stanford Law School. He had clerked for Justice Robert Jackson. He had written an article decrying the influence of liberal law clerks, making the Court too liberal.