Hi there. I'm Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham. Stay tuned after the show to hear about my

latest podcast, Moonrise. It's the dark but true story of why we went to the moon and what we found

there. The full series is available now.

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

When Alexander Hamilton sat down to bang out the Federalist papers in the late 1700s,

there were no antibiotics, no dialysis machines, and certainly no timepieces capable of taking an

electrocardiogram, which, of course, also didn't exist. Well-educated people had average

lifespans of around 40 years. And so, in Federalist Paper No. 78, in which Hamilton argues for lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices,

the future Broadway star probably didn't imagine any justice living past the prime of their mental and physical capabilities.

Take, for instance, Justice Nathan Clifford, appointed at age 54 in 1858.

According to a University of Chicago Law Review article titled Mental Decrepetude on the Supreme Court,

when the then 77-year-old Clifford arrived for the fall term in 1880, a colleague

wrote this. Judge Clifford reached Washington on the 8th of October, a babbling idiot. I saw him

within three hours after his arrival, and he did not know me or anything, and though his tongue-framed

words, there was no sense in them.

Then there's Justice Henry Baldwin, who after being hospitalized for incurable lunacy in 1832,

returned to the court, where he was described by another justice as partially deranged at all

times. And get this, he served another decade. Even Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American

member of the court, suffered similar issues. In his early 80s, Marshall could not pronounce

the word subsidiary from the bench.

In a death penalty case, he became so confused that he voted to uphold the death sentence

even though he was opposed to the death penalty.

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