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THE EDUCATION OF BRETT KAVANAUGH
Investigation
By Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly
Near a year after Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh became martyrs in separate and hostile galaxies – one for the #believeallwomen and the other for those who believe that democrats will use all the means necessary to eliminate good and honorable men. . So there is a strange satisfaction going back over thirty years, at the time when they both lived in the suburbs of Maryland and coexisted within a small social circle of teens who spent their time in the pools of the leisure clubs and who was what parents were out of town for the weekend.
"The Education of Brett Kavanaugh," by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, two experienced New York Times reporters who helped cover the confirmation hearings, expect bombs (the galleys are marked "EMBARGOED On each page). And the authors actually reveal some new revelations about the Kavanaugh assault charges. But their real job is to iron out the main story, to create a more complete picture of Kavanaugh himself, to place it in relation to Blasey Ford and to put the minor actors in motion, so that the confrontation of the confirmations presents a kind of cinematic inevitability.
The book places Blasey Ford in the summer of 1982, when, she says later, Kavanaugh tried to rape her. As a high school girl at Holton-Arms, a great cheerleader with fringes and saddle shoes, she spent her days with friends at the Columbia Country Club pool to exchange the equivalent of the game. emoji ("eat me" and "kill Dick"). Kavanaugh, as we know by his In a sadly meticulous schedule, he spent his time mowing the lawn and determining which of his friends from Georgetown Prep was "popping," a technical term for a holiday when your parents were out of town.
For most of the book, writers adopt an omniscient Woodwardian tone, remaining cautious and balanced and not cluttering every sentence of a newspaper style sourcing. But I could not help but read a lot in the title. On my own copy, I vaguely wrote "Mis" before "Education" because it is clear that academic enrichment is not what the authors have in mind. In high school and college and even a little law, Kavanaugh's main interest is how to blend perfectly into the buzz of jaded misogyny and competitive alcohol.
The picture that emerges from Kavanaugh as a real student is admirable if it is indistinct. He works hard, graduates near or at the top of his class. A college friend remembers him as a pile of books and papers that he would move like a machine. Some people remember him as special but many remember him as "simple and uncomplicated" – or, as some college friends say, "white ham". My favorite observation about his college years is: When writing about sports, Kavanaugh liked to watch them in his spare time. "Really, it could be anybody. In fact, when he was appointed as a clerk to Judge Alex Kozinski, the law professor who recommended him described him as a "good student" and not an "excellent student," but he added, " I knew his basketball character. "
Where Kavanaugh jumps to the bottom of the page is what might euphemistically be called "extracurricular activities". He went to high school with classmates who had private pools, tennis courts and sometimes even private jets. He became major at the time of "Porky's" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High". This combination of extreme privilege and extreme license, which he seemed to take for granted as a teenager, seemed retrospectively mortal. He lived in the athlete's bubble and made fun of the kids outside. He was not known to be a problem advocate, but as a carpenter, adhering to the "100 Keg Club", in the Van Party, singing odious songs about a good layman. His friends ran a clandestine newspaper called The Unknown Hoya, offering useful tips such as "everything you need to have a good time with H.H. (Holton Hosebag)" is a Montgomery County library card.
People who knew Kavanaugh said that he was kind and well mannered except when he drank or hung out with his friends and that he was showing his "disgusting side". During his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh bristled with claiming that his drinking was something other than perfectly normal. And that may have been perfectly normal by the standards of the upper middle-class white teenagers in the 1980s, but the standard sometimes deserves to be examined. In the case of Kavanaugh, this has encouraged proud and proud years of celebration, belligerent public behavior and mistrust of being above the rules. As he told a group of students in 2014 telling his law school years, they had the motto: "What happens in the bus stays in the bus."
Pogrebin and Kelly spend a lot of time pinpointing Blasey Ford's charges as well as Deborah Ramirez, a woman who says Kavanaugh put his penis in his face at a party at Yale. They find all the witnesses and friends willing to talk, go through legal documents and do their best to find the house where Blasey Ford says the aggression took place. They point out critical witnesses that the F.B.I, in his very limited investigation, did not have time to interview. In the end, they do not find a smoking gun, no secret confession, no friend who comes to say that Kavanaugh was lying all this time.
What they do instead is almost too cruel: use his mother's words against him. In an extremely satisfying epilogue, Pogrebin and Kelly invoke as a guide something that Martha Kavanaugh, public prosecutor, often said at dinner: "Use common sense. What's true? What's wrong? With this criterion, they come to a generous but equally overwhelming conclusion, namely that Blasey Ford and Ramirez are credible and have in fact been abused by Kavanaugh in adolescence, but that in the next 35 years he became a better man.
No woman claimed that Kavanaugh had assaulted her after law school (although an unidentified woman claimed that in 1998 her daughter had seen her ยปvery aggressively and sexually "push a friend of the girl with whom Kavanaugh would have frequented at the time.) Many women said that he was a generous mentor and boss.More than half of his employees were women, what he thought after reading an article about the sudden drop in the number of female paralegals, and here and there, Kavanaugh made decisions that support feminist causes, he has two daughters and coaches their teams.
Pogrebin and Kelly's conclusion about Kavanaugh is therefore quite narrow. It was a teenager whose excessive consumption of alcohol had perhaps altered the memory. This is the working theory. And he grew up to become a man skilled enough to evade questions about his teenage drinking to stop just before lying. This is a conclusion as small and frustrating as we had hoped. Now, we can think it with more confidence.
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