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Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and

Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Joanne Freeman. I'm Brian Ballow, and I'm Ed Ayers.

On June 26, 1987, Justice Lewis Powell announced his retirement from the Supreme Court.

The courtly southerner, as one news outlet described him, had been the swing vote for the

nine ideologically divided justices. Given Powell's role on the bench,

Americans were anxious to hear who President Ronald Reagan would tap to fill the empty seat.

Within days, he named conservative judge Robert Bork as his pick for the job,

setting off a contentious nomination battle. Senate Democrats feared Bork would move the court

and the law of the land decisively to the right. Robert Bork's America is a land of which women

would be forced into back alley abortions. Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters.

This is Senator Edward Kennedy speaking out against Bork's nomination less than an hour after it was announced.

And what it did was it froze things. That's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.

Politicians went, I'm not sure I want to get way out in front of this. I think I'll just wait.

In the meantime, Kennedy, who was an incredibly hard worker, started working the phones

to make sure that happened, talking to leading interest group people, talking to moderate Republicans.

And it just was a constitutional drama unlike any we've ever seen before.

Jeffrey Rosen is president of the National Constitution Center. In the summer of 1987,

he interned for Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Joseph Biden. This gave him a front-roes seat

...