My Interview with Peter Canellos, Author Of “Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement”

I am very excited to announce the release of Peter Canellos’s new book on Justice Alito, titled “Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement.” Peter previously wrote a readable and insightful biography of Justice John Marshall Harlan I, “The Great Dissenter.”

I interviewed Peter Canellos and posed eleven questions on YLS, OSG, OLC, DNJ, CA3, GWB, and SCOTUS. Extra credit if you get all the acronym references. The interview is published at Civitas Outlook.

One of the more fascinating insights is how the Alito family was affected by the Warren Court:

JB: Let’s jump back to the beginning. In the 1950s, Trenton, New Jersey, was a conservative blue collar suburb of Philadelphia with a large Catholic population, many of whom were Italian. One of the defining features of being a conservative is trying to conserve that which was. Or, as President Trump might say, America was great, became less than great, and that greatness must be restored. What values did Trenton instill in a young Sam Alito that Justice Alito values today? Relatedly, could you discuss how the decisions of the Warren Court impacted the Alito family? This was one of the more fascinating tidbits from Alito’s early life in your book.

PC: Justice Alito strongly identifies with a story of struggle that is familiar to many children and grandchildren of European immigrants, including myself. His father and grandparents came to America seeking opportunity, faced hardships and prejudice (a daily reality for Italian Americans in the Chambersburg section of Trenton, where his parents grew up), and then overcame them by dint of hard work and sacrifice. This is a narrative that spans generations. His parents worked extra jobs to put themselves through college and graduate school. Alito and his sister had it much easier, but were intensely aware that they were carrying the hopes and dreams of their parents and grandparents. And Alito fulfilled his family’s expectations to a spectacular degree: top of his high-school class, editor of the school newspaper, winner of multiple citizenship prizes.

But this is not, in my opinion, a MAGA story about lost greatness. The Alitos believed in upward mobility. Despite their very devout Catholicism, his parents preferred public education. Each, at various points, worked in public schools. So did Alito’s uncle. Moving beyond Chambersburg was a goal to be strived for, not an occasion for sadness or regret. Nonetheless, Justice Alito has spoken in interviews of his disappointment at what he sees as the run-down condition of Trenton, and even as far back as high school, he was faced with the destruction of a large swath of the city in the race riots that followed Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Now, when Alito bemoans the fate of Chambersburg, he does so with a tone of nostalgia. It was the place where Italians put down roots, created an ethnic enclave, and established businesses like the Italian Peoples Bakery & Deli. It’s widely noted that Alito, as a jurist, has a strong sense of tradition. He believes traditions should be enshrined in the Constitution, as long as they were in place at the time of the framing. It’s a deeply sentimental, atavistic vision that grew out of his identification with his family’s immigrant tale.

A later part of that tale is his parents feeling buffeted by the demands of the Warren Court. His mother, Rose, used Bible passages in her classes as a public-school teacher in Hamilton Township. But the Warren Court ruled such teachings unconstitutional, on the grounds that they alienated non-believers. His father, as the research chief for the New Jersey legislature, was handed the politically freighted task of equalizing the populations of state House and Senate districts, the result of another Warren Court decision demanding equal apportionment. Alito recalled lying in bed listening to the clicking of his father’s slide rule as he struggled with the Herculean task.

I was also intrigued by the parallel paths that young John Roberts and Samuel Alito took through the Reagan Justice Department–yet the both wound up on the Supreme Court:

JB: Both a young John Roberts and a young Samuel Alito served in the Reagan Justice Department. But Roberts entered as a political appointee, climbing the ranks from Special Assistant to the Attorney General to Associate White House Counsel. By contrast, Alito entered the government as a civil servant. Between 1977 and 1981, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in New Jersey. His boss was the Chief of Appeals, Mary Anne Barry Trump, the sister of the future President. But in 1981, he joined the Solicitor General’s Office. How did a civil servant come to the attention of the Solicitor General Rex Lee? In 1986, Alito moved over to the Office of Legal Counsel under Chuck Cooper. How did he get that position? How did Attorney General Meese influence Alito?

PC: Rex Lee didn’t view himself as a conservative activist. His greatest pride as solicitor general was his strong record of winning cases before the Supreme Court. During his years in the U.S. Attorney’s office of New Jersey, Alito proved to be an adept appellate lawyer. He had the kind of pure legal acumen that Lee wanted in his office.

During the second Reagan Administration, however, the tide turned significantly. The new Attorney General, Ed Meese, wanted only conservatives in his inner circle. Alito lacked the political bona fides of other Meese aides. Chuck Cooper, who had served in the more activist Civil Rights Division, earned Meese’s trust as a conservative. And Cooper had found Alito to be a rare ally in the solicitor general’s office; the two men agreed on the need to push civil rights law in a more conservative direction. So when Cooper became the head of Meese’s Office of Legal Counsel, he decided that he needed Alito as his top deputy. But he had to prove to Meese that Alito was really a conservative. Cooper coached Alito through a letter explaining the roots of his conservatism, which Cooper then shared with Meese’s team as evidence of Alito’s ideological correctness. In the letter, Alito made some startling assertions, including that he was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which opposed admitting women. The letter helped Alito get the job in the Office of Legal Counsel, but later it would almost derail his Supreme Court nomination.

You will learn a lot about Justice Alito.