Free The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter Page A

qualifications to raise any serious fuss, until the story of the lunches came out. And the background of his luncheon partner. The press immediately swirled into one of its ecstasies of condemnation. Jack Ziegler, a disgraced former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, had somehow managed to become a footnote to half the political scandals in the second half of the twentieth century—or so it often seemed. He testified on some peripheral but quite embarrassing matter before Sam Ervin’s Watergate Committee, his name turned up unflatteringly in an appendix to the Church reporton wrongdoing by the CIA, and a book or two have hinted at his distant involvement with the Iran-Contra mess, although he was, by that time, long out of the Agency; even the Warren Commission supposedly took his statement, behind closed doors, for he had, in his days in the field, filed a report from Mexico City on the peculiar activities of one Lee Harvey Oswald. But Jack Ziegler stayed mostly in the shadows, until the disaster of my father’s nomination to the Supreme Court made him famous. Still, if the carrion-eating journalists who looked into his relationship with the Judge managed to find a sinister allegation or two, nothing was ever proved except the lunches, at least against my father: thus ran my sister’s position. And the position of the Rightpacs and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. And, for a while, mine as well. (Addison, unable to see a way to squeeze any money from the contretemps, kept his cards tightly to his chest.)
    But the daily stream of fresh allegations proved too weighty. Within days of Greg Haramoto’s appearance, the security logs turned up, and my father’s most fervent supporters in the Senate were diving for cover. A few friends urged him to fight, but the Judge, a team player to the end, gamely asked the White House to withdraw his nomination. To his dismay, President Reagan made no effort to dissuade him. And so the seat on the Court for which my father had spent half a lifetime jockeying went instead to a little-known federal judge and former law professor named Antonin Scalia, who was, in the general relief, confirmed unanimously. “And Nino Scalia is doing a hell of a job,” the Judge would sing gleefully in his lectures to the Rightpacs, a remark which, like many of my father’s, always made me wince, especially because whenever he said it—and he said it often—I would be forced to endure the barbs of my liberal colleagues, Theo Mountain very much to the fore, who, unable to hurt my father, decided to prick the son instead.
    That, of course, came later. At the time, my father’s fall seemed impossible, so high had he been raised by the brilliance of his mind and the utility of his politics. “He didn’t do anything!” Mariah would cry during the nightly telephone conversations that marked, in that instant of crisis, a brief truce in our running war.
    “It’s not about what he did,” I would answer patiently, trying to explain for her lay and partisan ear a judge’s duty to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, only half believing it myself, given some of the characters who have managed to hang on to their seats on the federal bench, including the Supreme Court. “It’s about hiding what he did.”
    “That’s ridiculous!” she would shoot back, unable in those days towrap her voice around the rougher forms of dismissal so characteristic of our country’s increasingly vulgar discourse. “They were out to get him all along, and you know it. ” As though having real enemies was a defense against any charge of wrongdoing. Or as though the fact that Jack Ziegler was about to stand trial for a bewildering variety of offenses at the time of what the press called the secret lunches was a triviality; or as though the fact that my father and Uncle Jack were apparently still in touch when his old roommate was a fugitive from justice was beside the point. After all, Uncle Jack