Excerpted from the Miller Center’s George H. W. Bush Presidential Oral History Project

Fred McClure was director of legislative affairs under George H. W. Bush and helped guide David Souter through his U.S. Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process. A team of experts assembled by the Miller Center interviewed him on September 20, 2001. McClure is currently a member of the Miller Center's Governing Council.

Fred McClure: Souter had a very prolific writing record from his days as not only Attorney General, but his days as a member of the Court of Appeals and the high court in New Hampshire. David was highly vouched for by not only [Warren] Rudman, but also John Sununu.

Professor Russell Riley: That’s where the name came from? Sununu?

McClure: I think the name came as a result of John and Rudman because David was from New Hampshire. So it was one of those things. Now, don’t get me wrong. That’s not to say that there was not other input into that decision-making process that Boyden Gray and others got involved in. . . . We had input from members, and there was this list that the general counsel or the counsellor to the President keeps and you kind of go back to it. In fact, [Clarence] Thomas’s name was thrown out on the first go-round when David was eventually picked.

In neither of those circumstances did I have any involvement in it until such time as we were on the verge of making the announcement. In that case, I got a phone call, “Fred, this is what we’re about to do, it’s going to happen at X. Get ready.” And my next thing was just make sure they talk to me as soon as they make what little statement they’re going to make, saying how proud they are that the President has chosen them to serve in this capacity and we look forward to confirmation. Because then they’re mine. And that’s the way it worked. Notice they never made any other statements to the press after that, which is one of those rules. We started this process of courtesy calls, which I engaged in, and I went to every single one of them with them.

Other than the paper work filling-out and stuff, as we got closer and closer to the time of the hearing, we spent time preparing them—“wood-shedding” them, if you will—for their two respective nominations. The biggest issue on David’s side was that nobody knew him. He was an older guy who was unmarried and had lived this cabin-like life and existence. So they tried to paint him as some weird hermit that lived out there in the woods and was kind of off his rocker, but he loved his mother. [laughter] And that was the whole thing. Photographers were going to his house when he wasn’t there and taking pictures through his windows.

I’ll never forget. He called me up one day and he says, “Fred, I left so quickly to come down to do this deal that I don’t have the slightest idea what people can see through the window into my house and what magazines and books are there.” Then he says, “Oh, I know one in particular though,” because he was reading it at the time or had read at the time and he knew it was on top of his desk—because he’s a prolific reader. What is it—Drawing With the Left Side of the Brain or something like that. He’s saying, “They’re going to think I’m weird.” [laughter] And I’m saying, “You’re just creative, David, just creative. We can get through that one.” Every time I see that book now, it brings back laughter.

And I think, too, there was one other. I think he had bought a somewhat pornographic magazine at a book store and he couldn’t remember whether it was on the top of his desk or not, and he’s saying, “Oh, my God.” And I said, “Which book was it? It may be good on this side as opposed to on the other.”

So David’s preparation for his confirmation was probably more difficult because he has an uncanny intellectual capacity at recall. It’s almost as though he remembers everything he has ever read and he can almost quote it back to you verbatim. I remember one day I was getting ready to go on a river trip or something. And I went up to the Hill, and we started talking about how much we liked water, and I talked about how much I loved sleeping out under the stars next to a rippling stream and how soothing it was. And all of a sudden, he brings up some opening paragraph of the 15th chapter of some book that he had read and quotes about the soothing nature of rocks and rippling water. I said, “David, you’re unbelievable.”

If you go back and look at the transcript of his hearings, there was also one day where he was engaged in this intellectual discussion with members of the Senate and was going down and quoting footnotes in a dissent where there were more dissents than one in some case that he had read that they were discussing. The majority opinion is the only thing you care about, but there were like four dissents in some Supreme Court decision and he was talking about some footnote within some dissent of several in a major case. I don’t know when he read it last.

David’s a very smart guy and my biggest concern about his confirmation, other than the personal side and how they were trying to portray him, was to keep him from getting into an intellectual discussion that he shouldn’t be getting into with members of the Senate. That was a big challenge with him, but he was smart enough to listen to us and so it worked out well in that regard. What else can I say about him?

Riley: Was he good in the one-on-one visits with the members?

McClure: Oh, yes, he was great. He’s got a great sense of humor. It’s dry and what I perceive to be the wit and charm of people from the Northeast, or New England in particular, that I’ve spent time with. He’s very quick. Not quite as quick as Sununu—No, I didn’t just say that. He’s very quick with his wit and they were very comfortable meetings. David knew more about the law and the questions that he was being asked by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee than the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who were questioning him. Therefore I wasn’t worried about that. The question was: Would he handle it in such a fashion? But David was also smart enough to know where they were going and he knew the areas where we couldn’t go because of where it would ultimately lead him. Therefore David was easy to work with in that regard.

Riley: He knew those areas because you had schooled him in those areas or because he had a native sense about—

McClure: We had schooled him, but he had a native sense about the political sensitivity of—He’d been on the court long enough to know what the hot issues were: where are you going to go on privacy, when are they leading you down the privacy path, which ultimately gets you to Roe v. Wade, but where do you stop off in between with—There’s some case in between, the name of which is escaping me right now. There was Roe and then some case after that which I can’t remember. Then you get into privacy and frankly as a practical matter—It hadn’t happened at the time that David was there, but if you reel forward to when Ashcroft did his deal, who cares whether or not Roe is reversed now? Because the Court has changed all this stuff in between and Roe is really basically no law any more. But it was a hue and cry for groups.

Both individuals, although based on a different set of circumstances, faced the same opposition from outside groups as I faced last January with Ashcroft. You had the People for the American Way; you had folks on the abortion rights movement; you had the Ralph Neas and those guys; and you had the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] or African-American or black-based quarter, like civil rights organizations. Because always the deal was, “This guy’s going to be the guy who is going to turn around affirmative action and this guy’s going to be the dissenting vote. If he ain’t, he’s getting close to being the vote who’s going to take away the right to privacy, or take away the right to an abortion.” That’s it. Nothing else. They didn’t care about anything—

Yes, we could talk about capital punishment. Yes, we could talk about fourth amendment, we could talk about second amendment and gun rights and all that kind of stuff. It was only where they were on civil rights and affirmative action. That’s it. That’s the end of the discussion.