The War Against Robert H. Bork - Commentary Magazine
To defeat Bork, the Left spent a huge amount of money—$10 to $15 million—on a negative political campaign of a size wholly unprecedented in the history of American judicial selection. They could not have mounted such a Herculean effort had they not hated Bork with a special venom. And indeed they did hate and fear him intensely, because of the special role he had come to play as a conservative in this country’s intellectual politics.
The big anti-Bork TV commercial that PFAW ran was an example of this approach. The spot was narrated by Gregory Peck, whose screen image is one of rectitude and whose voice we all trust. “There’s a special feeling of awe people get,” intones Peck in the commercial, “when they visit the Supreme Court of the United States, the ultimate guardian of our liberties.” As Peck speaks, a traditional four-person nuclear family, with faces of a sort we have rarely seen since
Leave It to Beaver, is walking up the Court steps. Father points the building out to the children. Peck goes on. Bork should not be on the Court, he says: “He defended poll taxes and literacy tests, which kept many Americans from voting. He opposed the civil-rights law that ended ‘whites only’ signs at lunch counters. He doesn’t believe the Constitution protects your right to privacy. And he thinks freedom of speech does not apply to literature and art and music.” The commercial ends with the family in profile, gazing reverently at the Court. A gentle wind blows through their hair. The camera focuses lovingly on the cherubic face of the youngest. The End.
This entire spot was composed of false innuendoes and outright lies. For example, Bork never defended poll taxes or literacy tests. He said the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution was the wrong rationale for the Supreme Court to have used in striking down a $1.50 poll tax in
Harper v.
Virginia Board of Elections.He explicitly indicated that he was able to reach his conclusion only because the case did not involve racial discrimination. He also made it quite clear that he thought the tax might well be unconstitutional on other grounds. To turn all this into a defense of poll taxes was slander.