By Theodore B. Olson

When the Senate in 1987 defeated President Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court, it blocked the appointment of one of the most superbly qualified individuals ever advanced for the court. Judge Bork had been a Marine, a distinguished professor at two of the nation’s finest law schools, a partner in a respected law firm, solicitor general of the United States and a judge on a leading federal appeals court. He was the father of three children, a widower remarried to a former nun. He was a widely acclaimed scholar, respected as a brilliant, penetrating thinker and a formidable advocate. In an obituary, The New York Times, one of his archest critics, acknowledged that “no one questioned his integrity or intelligence.”

None of that mattered to the 58 senators who blocked his appointment to the Supreme Court. He was savaged and then rejected in one of the sorriest chapters in American political history.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy launched the attack within an hour of the announcement of his nomination. In a vituperative, slanderous speech, Kennedy characterized “Robert Bork’s America” as a cold, heartless, tyrannical society in which the races would be resegregated, women would be forced to resort to “back-alley abortions,” police would batter down doors in “midnight raids” and courthouse doors would be closed to “millions of Americans.”

Kennedy’s opening salvo... http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/20/remembering-a-great-amer...