An Intimate Portrait of Sandra Day O’Connor, First Woman on the Supreme Court - The New York Times

An Intimate Portrait of Sandra Day O’Connor, First Woman on the Supreme Court - The New York Times: “First: Sandra Day O’Connor,” by Evan Thomas, is a richly detailed life of the pathbreaking justice.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Toobin

• March 18, 2019

FIRST 
Sandra Day O’Connor
By Evan Thomas

For some time now, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been having a moment. Books, documentaries, a major feature film, even a best-selling comic-book-cum-biography have celebrated the feminist litigator and second woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Still, all this attention to No. 2 implicitly raises the question of whatever happened to No. 1.

Evan Thomas answers that question in his fascinating and revelatory biography, “First: Sandra Day O’Connor.” There are many parallels between the lives of R.B.G. and S.D.O. — early confrontations with discrimination, fierce work ethics, supportive and enlightened husbands — but there is one major distinction: power. As a lawyer, Ginsburg won important cases, and as a liberal justice in a conservative time, she has written stirring dissents. But O’Connor was the swing justice on a closely divided Supreme Court, so she — and she alone — determined the outcome of case after case. It was her vote that saved abortion rights, her vote that preserved affirmative action and her vote that delivered the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. She is the most consequential woman in American history. Now that’snotorious.

The book is billed as an “intimate portrait” of O’Connor, and it certainly is. The O’Connor family gave Thomas open access to the justice’s papers, including letters and diaries, and encouraged all who knew her, law clerks as well as colleagues, to speak with him. Thomas makes the most of this bounty, producing a richly detailed picture of her personal and professional life. To cite just one example, we learn that as Sandra tried to cope with her husband’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease, she turned down her doctor’s prescription for antidepressants. That’s how close we get.