Ninth Justice: the Fight for Bork.

BORKING: Perhaps the most galling domestic injustice of the Eighties was the deceptive campaign by which the Left denied Robert Bork a seat on the Supreme Court.

From Ted Kennedy's outrageous "In Robert Bork's America . . ." speech to Joe Biden's shameless manipulation of the approval process, the Bork case is a classic specimen for retrospective examination, a textbook example of what the Senate's role should not be in giving advice and consent on presidential nominations.

Bork's detailed judicial comments, to the press and in the hearings, were muffled by the smear campaigns of People for the American Way, NOW, and others of the left-wing coterie, who (wrongly) characterized Robert Bork as a judicial activist, but the wrong kind of judicial activist.

As important in the Bork story as the Left's distortions was the lackluster effort of conservative groups, which failed to take control of the debate. Some blame, of course, must go to Chief of Staff Howard Baker and to President Reagan himself, who apparently assumed Bork was a shoe-in.

In Ninth Justice: The Fight for Bork (Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, 340 pp., $19.95), Patrick B. McGuigan and Dawn M. Weyrich provide an insider's view of the Bork battle. Intertwined among the events (up to the point of Anthony Kennedy's nomination) are the personal reflections, set off by italics, of Mr. McGuigan himself-mostly expressions of personal frustration. (Mr. McGuigan devoted his summer and fall to working for Bork's nomination on behalf of the Free Congress Foundation's Judicial Reform Project. Confusingly, although a co-author, he is often referred to in the third person.) For instance, McGuigan tells of the time a TV station pleaded with him for an interview, to which he finally agreed, putting off some more pressing work because the station promised a debate about Bork with Ralph Neas, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and outspoken opponent of the nominee.

When the segment was scrapped because of "a time shortage," McGuigan blew up, accusing an innocent station intern of intentionally scrubbing the segment because of McGuigan's conservative views. Not all of this is relevant to the Bork case, and-as that intern would doubtless attest-Mr. McGuigan has an unfortunate way of blaming all misfortunes on politics.

Mr. McGuigan says in the preface that he hopes the book will be a rallying point for those who feel Bork was mistreated. But a rallying point for what? The book is simply an effort by two genuinely earnest Beltway conservatives to inform people that the authors themselves, and a poorly organized conservative movement, were outpoliticked.

Ninth Justice is actually less about the fight for Bork than about the dominance of liberal lobbies in the capital. And it raises one very troubling prospect: If the time comes for a Democratic President to nominate a Justice, will the Right act like the Left, and charge the liberal nominee with being the wrong kind" of judicial activist?