Justice Kennedy asks: Where is civil discourse?

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy with Kate Meeks at the Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., Oct. 21, 2025/By Patricia Leslie

At the Aspen Institute Washington's office Tuesday night, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy looked out at the audience and said he was “astonished" by public leaders who "use filthy words" and the lack of "respectful discourse" heard on public airways.

(Aren't we all, Justice Kennedy? The name of the chief bad mouth was never uttered in the session nor were any other names, not associated with cases.)

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy at the Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., Oct. 21, 2025/By Patricia Leslie

Appearing before a "sold out" crowd at the Klein Book Series sponsored by Susan and John Klein, both in attendance, Justice Kennedy came to promote his new book, Life, Law & Liberty, which contains, upon first hearing, more humor than one might suspect.

The interviewer, his former law clerk and Fox News Media's General Counsel, Kate Meeks threw him softball questions, mostly about his growing up years allowing Justice Kennedy to tell about some funny parts.

Just before he took a tax exam he and a buddy took their tax books to a baseball game (the last one Ted Williams played!) to study... (to what?) and lo and behold, the sound of a familiar voice, that of their tax professor, piped up behind them. For years, this professor (who later became the U.S. Solicitor General) kidded Mr. Kennedy about the encounter.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy with Kate Meeks at the Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., Oct. 21, 2025/By Patricia Leslie

In these forums, the best always comes last and Tuesday evening's session was no exception, with questions from the audience. (Written questions were accepted beforehand.)  

Nothing but polite questions came from the genteel group, most questions devoted to past Supreme Court decisions with no justice names included. (Sigh)

And if you ever wondered if the justices are affected by public opinion, wonder no more since Justice Kennedy cited public opinion at least twice in the hourlong session. 

When asked about Citizens v. United, Justice Kennedy said (paraphrasing) if you don't like it, then change it!  It's up to the voters to get down and effect change at the ballot box!  Please!

Vote for the other candidate who's not receiving Big Money, he said.

That decision was 5-4 and he wrote the majority opinion, that Congress cannot prohibit corporations from giving money to campaigns.  

But, vast amounts of money going into campaigns is very troubling, he said. Billionaires who don't even live in the state pour money into campaigns (omitting the name of Elon Musk and his disastrous results in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race).

Kennedy went on: If we say corporations can't give money, the New York Times is a corporation.  Are they to be limited?  What about a chamber of commerce in a small town?  A bakery shop?

Are we going to have limits on big corporations v. small ones?  

Voters can demand disclosure.  If voters are unhappy with money going to one candidate, they can vote for the other candidate, he said.

About the 1989 flag burning case when the Court ruled 5-4 in favor of freedom of speech by the flag burner, it was a decision, Justice Kennedy said, which the public quickly grew to accept, after initial criticism and rebukes from 80 U.S. Senators. (Editor's note: One can hazard a guess on the case outcome by today's Supreme Court.) 

In Bush v. Gore: "We had 48 hours, I think to write the opinion," and seven justices agreed to take the case. He was unsure a couple of times whether it was seven or six justices, but they agreed there was a Constitutional violation.

"The question was:  What should be the remedy?"

Gore wanted a recount of the votes only in the districts that he lost and "we said, no you can't do that. He wanted to extend the time for more argument and we said no.

"It seems to me, the opinion was quite right," citing surveys that Bush "would have won, but I'm not sure those were correct." 

He said the framers of the U.S. promised (in the Preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence) that "'all men are created equal'" with "certain unalienable Rights" which include "the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" but "judges cannot enforce happiness." 

He holds a "fundamental concern about human dignity," not found in the Constitution. "Freedom means respect for each person," he said.

Kennedy frequently referenced President Ronald Reagan who nominated him to the Ninth Circuit for the U.S. Court of Appeals and later, the U.S. Supreme Court, Kennedy, quite adept at mimicking his old boss.

Kennedy got to know Reagan when Reagan was California's governor, and Kennedy performed legal work for him.

As for moving back to the East Coast for the Supreme Court,

"aw, shucks," Kennedy seemed to say: He and Mrs. Kennedy were not so fond of moving back East from California and they didn't really know anyone, he told Reagan.

"'Well, you know me,'" Kennedy quoted Reagan in his drawl.

"What?" said Kennedy to audience laughter: "Was I supposed to go and have lunch with him every day?" 

Reagan "would be most concerned about the state of our civic discourse, and he would be a wonderful person to try to restore civility that we need so badly." (Since Reagan speaks from the grave about tariffs, will someone bring up his remarks, please, about civility?)

Kennedy's guidance for new members of the Supreme Court:  "The cases are much harder and much more difficult than you think when you sit down to write them."

One questioner asked if it's become "a meaningless ritual when you take the oath of office and the words don't mean anything?"

Kennedy praised the questioner's wording framing the question and answered that every public official has the duty to ensure that what he or she is doing is consistent with the Constitution.

The most important qualities for a judge are "you must be honest with yourself. You must ask yourself every day what is it that is making me do this? Is there some hidden motive, some bias that I have that I can't see?  

"All of us have to ask this in our lives every day. Judges have a sworn duty to ask this question."

Kennedy's "greatest job in the world is a U.S. District Judge.  He or she is all by himself or herself.  That single judge gets to see real people, jurors, witnesses." 

He emphasized that the Constitution doesn't just apply to cases that come before the Supreme Court: It applies even more importantly to those that don't come to the Court.  

"The Constitution requires equal treatment for all."

He said, if our democracy is going to survive, we must have an informed electorate. Our citizens must take an interest in current affairs, they must participate, and if they don't like what they see, they can show it at the ballot box. 

Internet usage is mostly only communicating with those who agree with you, he said.

Answering another question from the audience, he said, the Supreme Court encounters "difficulties" with so many emergency decisions. 

"We would get phone calls in the middle of the night - death cases - these are quite complex and it does seem to me that we have to find ways so the courts have more time.

"The district courts sometimes have just a couple of hours.  We usually just stay it. In some instances, some ongoing wrongs continue."

A reception followed.

patricialesli@gmail.com

Oppenheimer's biographer Kai Bird at the Aspen

Kai Bird and Marie Arana at the Aspen Institute, May 6, 2024/By Patricia Leslie

At a talk at the Aspen Institute earlier this month with Kai Bird, the co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, moderator Marie Arana revealed a story she had heard that day after talking with her brother George.

When he was a student at Princeton University, George was sometimes called upon to read to Oppenheimer (1904-1967) during the last weeks of the scientist's life as the "father of the atomic bomb" lay bedridden.

The readings were selected by "Kitty," Oppenheimer's wife who chose selections on ancient history.

Here! Here! The audience cried: There's a book there! We want a book! (Another one.)

But we came to hear Bird talk about his book he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin (1937-2021) and Arana interviewed Bird as part of the Klein Book series.

She said the film "does a good job, but doesn’t do the thorough job of the book."

Kai Bird and Marie Arana at the Aspen Institute, May 6, 2024/By Patricia Leslie

Bird FOIAed the FBI about Oppenheimer and received 8,000 pages in return while Sherwin received 50,000 pages.

For a long time, he resisted writing the book with Sherwin because “co-authoring is notoriously filled with pitfalls“ but "Marty" kept pushing. 

He was "very nice and very funny," Bird said and Sherwin told him that if Kai didn’t help, Sherwin's gravestone would read: "He took it with him."

It was a “wonderful collaboration" and the book came out in 2005, winning some prizes but never making it to the bestseller lists until the movie came out. 

It's an "amazing miracle" what’s happening to this 19-year-old book now, Bird said. It's become an international bestseller.

 Kai Bird and Marie Arana at the Aspen Institute, May 6, 2024/By Patricia Leslie

Bird and Arana have been friends for 30 years, both raised overseas and both, familiar with “”global spin."

Bird said he was a “fugitive" in his own country, ignorant about America but biographies led him to knowledge about the U.S.

The book took him and Sherwin 10 years to write, "a really long time," because "I couldn't stop researching....You get obsessed" with resources. (While he was working on Oppenheimer, he also was working on other books.)

He gave important details about Oppenheimer's life when the scientist was growing up, but he reserved most of his talk to the "tragedy" that belonged to Oppenheimer.

The "father of the atomic bomb" was a mysterious young man, “very bright" who gave a lecture to the New York Minerals Society at age 10, an age unknown to the group when it invited him but which kept its invitation after learning of his age.  The audience laughed.

Oppenheimer was “nerdy," "endlessly mysterious," “awkward with women," and "painfully conflicted" about his achievements.

The McCarthy era did its dirty deeds, stripping him of his security clearance as a suspected spy and accused him of being unfaithful to his wife. He became a broken man, disinvited by universities to speak. The FBI tapped his attorney's phone.

“They destroyed him" who "became the chief victim of the McCarthy era."

The McCarthy legacy has endured, Kai said, because we are still suffering the effects in the person of Donald Trump, an observation which brought approval from most in the audience.


He mentioned Trump's relationship with Joseph McCarthy‘s chief attorney Roy Cohn which haunts us today. Perhaps he was joking when, to audience laughter, he said his next biography would be about Cohn.

To ensure the science in the book was accurate, the authors sought the guidance of Jeremy Bernstein, a quantum physicist and New Yorker writer who corrected language.

Oppenheimer was "quite handsome in a magnetic way" who attracted women.

His met his wife "Kitty" when she was 27 and married for the third time but horsewomanship on a trip sealed their relationship.

Their son Peter is now in his 80s, "traumatized by the events of 1964." He never went to college but became a carpenter. Peter has three children and lives in Santa Fe.

Their daughter Tori, born in 1944, is "portrayed very well in the movie," according to Bird. She spoke Russian, French, and Spanish and wanted to become a translator at the UN but the FBI would not give her clearance. She moved back to the family's home on St. John Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands where she built a cabin and committed suicide at age 32 after a fight with her ex-husband.

In his homespur and down to earth style, Bird answered a few questions after his talk with Arana.

Years were spent trying to clear Oppenheimer's name from the tainted roster of the McCarthy era, and finally, President Joe Biden's secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm achieved the almost impossible in December 2022 seven months before the movie was released, when she vacated the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance.

Oppenheimer admired the poetry of T.S. Eliot, a few lines from his poem Gerontion which Arana spoke to close the event:

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,

Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.....

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

How should I use it for your closer contact?


I must confess I have neither read the book nor seen the movie and now, can't wait to do both.

patricialesli@gmail.com

 

At the think tanks, scientists talk coronavirus

From left, Ron Klain, Nancy Messonnier, Anthony Fauci, and Helen Branswell at the Aspen Institute, Feb. 11, 2020/Photo by Patricia Leslie

Last month at the Washington offices of the Aspen Institute, scientists, journalists, and members of the medical establishment got together to talk coronavirus which that day had received an official name for the disease from the World Health Organization, COVID-19.

On the panel was Anthony Fauci, MD, man-about-town, omnipresent television personality, and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said the development of a vaccine for the virus would take approximately 18 months (not "very close" or "soon" as President Trump said Feb. 25, 2020).

At the time the animal which was suspected of starting it all (supposedly at an illegal "wet market" in Wuhan, China) had not been identified other than online and at the WHO website as a possible snake (a word left unsaid publicly at the Aspen that day), or a pangolin, an endangered species the Chinese like to eat and value for its supposedly medicinal qualities.

In the Q and A after the presentation, an audience member asked if the virus came from an animal, and Dr. Fauci said "likely." The animal most often now linked to the disease is the bat.

The virus, Dr. Fauci said, may have "jumped" from a bat to a cat to a human (calling Dr. Seuss), an example of a zoonotic disease originating in an animal and transferred to a human (or, vice-versa). (Wash your hands after touching animals!)

On the panel with Dr. Fauci were Ron Klain, JD, former White House ebola response coordinator; Nancy Messonnier, MD, director, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Helen Branswell, infectious disease and public health reporter, STAT News, who served as moderator.
 
The scientists said studies are underway to determine the best disinfectants for surfaces to combat the disease, and on March 12, the Environmental Protection Agency (whose budget Trump proposes to slash by 26 percent), published a list of them.

Dr. Messonnier praised the military for housing the quarantine victims from cruise ships docking in California.

A panel member reported seeing on the news a group of Metro riders shunning a person of Asian descent, a practice which will lead to more discrimination in schools and other places, Mr. Klain said, speculating these incidents are likely to escalate.

John Bolton (yes that John Bolton whose book was due this month but has been delayed until May pending White House review) was Trump's ax man who, about 18 months after Trump took office, shut down the White House National Security Council's liaison for disease control, Mr. Klain said.
 
The panel seemed in a hurry to broadcast the scientific community's assessment of coronavirus and its dangers to the world.

Dr. Fauci said staff from the Centers for Disease Control, Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Security Council, scientists, and doctors talk daily and sometimes more than once a day.

Said Dr. Fauci: Multiple generations have coronavirus, and people need to be warned about the risks. "It's relatively likely it will come here."


"It's not a feasible policy to quarantine, " said Mr. Klain, urging that responses to the outbreak come from the scientific and medical communities rather than policy wonks. "It's a bit of a mixed bag to prepare the U.S." for the disease. "Public leaders need to get on top of this," he said.  Getting Congress to allocate money to prepare hospitals will be "a challenge."
 
Dr. Fauci said more information from China was urgently needed, but the Chinese then were not cooperating: "We really need to know the scope of this," Dr. Fauci said.

Dr. Messonnier said the scientific and medical communities wanted to slow the spreading illness and to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic (which according to Merriam-Webster, occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population, and one month later, here we are).

She issued the usual admonitions to avoid disease: Wash hands (to the tune of "Happy Birthday"), etc., and to scattered laughter, said: "There's only so much worrying we can do, right?"

"We live in a connected world," Mr. Klain said, with people and goods arriving daily from outside the U.S. According to Dr. Fauci, It's "an impossibility" to keep out all the Chinese who want to come here since 22,000 of them enter the U.S. every day.

Dr. Fauci said travel bans will "never" exclude all Chinese from entering the U.S., and bans make no sense if the illness is already here, which it most certainly is.

Travel bans only "buy a window of time" for delay. 
 
Dr. Messonnier said it will take a year to develop a vaccine which, Dr. Fauci added, usually takes six to eight years.
 
Coronavirus can be "really serious" for the older population and those with underlying illnesses, Dr. Messonnier said.
 
"We are taking this very, very seriously. The situation can change," Dr. Fauci said.

Mr. Klain: "If it gets worse, it will reflect on health care.'

The pharmaceutical companies take big risks that the vaccines they develop won't work, noted Dr. Fauci, but lest anyone forget, "big pharma" makes big money, reminded a member of the audience.

Except in the cases of ill persons and health care workers, panel members said face masks were almost totally unnecessary, and no one In the packed Aspen house of attorneys, physicians, journalists, and interested onlookers wore one.

It was not until the beginning of this year that the panelists were aware of the disease which, for some victims, begins with pneumonia.
 
At the time of the panel presentation, 43,000 had been struck by the disease, with 13 of them in the U.S. Today the worldwide number is 169,610 with 3,782 in the U.S. Deaths number 6,518.

In testimony before the U.S. Congress last week, Dr. Fauci said the coronavirus was ten times as lethal as the seasonal flu.

Last month Trump proposed cutting the NIH budget by seven percent and the National Science Foundation by six percent, which includes a reduced number of grants for research. Also, he wants to cut the CDC budget by 16 percent and HHS, almost 10 percent. At the same time he proposes to increase money for "wall" construction by $2 billion for 82 miles to make it the most expensive wall in the world.

Is it safe to conclude that Trump values things more than he values people?

Maybe, the bats have come home to bite Mr. Trump.

patricialesli@gmail.com