Wild about Harry.

Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey, by Linda Greenhouse (Times, 288 pp., $25)

AS a theory of political morality and a practical political philosophy, liberalism is nearly exhausted. Despite decades of hegemony in academic political theory, the leading theologians of the liberal faith, including most notably the late John Rawls of Harvard, have failed to produce an intellectually plausible defense of its dogmas. In the world of public affairs, liberalism's self-proclaimed keepers of the flame--from Teddy Kennedy to Michael Moore to Al Sharpton--are shrill and ridiculous. Most Democrats and all Republicans refuse to accept the term "liberal" as a label for their views; those unwilling or unable to be classified as "conservatives" proclaim themselves to be "progressives" or, more commonly, "moderates."

Still, there are true believers in that old-time religion of liberalism. For them the story of Harry Blackmun, as recounted by New York Times Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse, is a wondrous tale of redemption.

Harry, you see, was a boring guy. In fact, he was worse than a boring guy. He was a square. He was a Republican.

He was from the Midwest. He went to Harvard on a scholarship from the Harvard Club of Minnesota. He took summer jobs installing windows and delivering milk. He worried about finances.

He went to Harvard Law School, where he ranked 120th in a class of 451. He returned to Minnesota to clerk for a judge and then practice law with a corporate firm in Minneapolis-St. Paul. He wore dark suits and skinny ties. He worked in the firm's tax department. His first car was a Ford coupe with a rumble seat, for which he paid $702.14. He named it "Mignon." He married a girl he met on the tennis court. They had three children.

Did I mention that Harry was a Republican?

One of Harry's clients was the Mayo Clinic. It was filled with rich doctors. Harry did their tax work and provided estate-planning advice. They liked him so well that the Clinic offered him a position as its resident counsel. He accepted.

Harry's best friend was Warren E. Burger--another square, another Republican. When Burger became a federal appeals-court judge, he worked through his Republican cronies to help engineer a similar appointment for his pal Harry. Harry sat on the bench and followed precedent.

Burger was appointed Chief Justice of the United States by the evil Nixon. Soon Harry would be nominated by "Tricky Dick" to join his boyhood friend on the Supreme Court. Harry was so boring that his nomination was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 94-0. It was 1970.

But the Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform!

In 1972, the Supreme Court took up Roe v. Wade, a case challenging the authority of states to prohibit abortions. The chief justice assigned the case to his friend Harry, who, after all, knew a lot about medical matters since he had represented the Mayo Clinic. And abortion is a medical matter ... sort of ... isn't it?

Harry got in touch with librarians at the Mayo Clinic who helped him gather information on the history of abortion. Before completing his opinion for the Court, he went to the Mayo library to do some research. He asked his wife and daughters what they thought about abortion. He studied the latest Gallup poll on the question.

Harry produced a long opinion, filled with references to history and precedent. He and six of his colleagues had discovered a fundamental right to abortion in the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This right to "terminate a pregnancy," as he delicately described the practice of intentional feticide, was part of a generalized "right to privacy" that the Court a few years earlier (before Harry joined) had found lurking in penumbras formed by emanations.

The reasoning was ... how does one say this politely? ... weak. Harry made a complete hash of the legal history of abortion and the absence in his opinion of anything resembling a constitutional argument was embarrassing. Even some devout liberals in the world of legal scholarship--such as Professors Archibald Cox and John Hart Ely--pronounced Roe v. Wade indefensible. But no matter. The truest of liberal true believers were confident that the law professoriate would somehow supply the deficiency of argument in Roe. The important--and amazing--thing was that boring old Republican Nixon-appointed Harry had delivered the biggest prize of all to the liberal faithful: a virtually unrestricted, constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion! Amens and hallelujahs arose from the congregation.

Of course, Harry would be vilified by conservative Christians and other fuddy-duddies. But this would serve only to confirm his belief in the rightness of what he had done and open his mind more generally to the righteousness of liberal doctrine. From now on, he would no longer be boring old Harry the square Republican. He would be a full-fledged jurist, indeed a lion of liberal jurisprudence, right up there with William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, and Thurgood Marshall. Harry was redeemed! He had become Justice Blackmun.

In telling this tale, Greenhouse does her best--until almost the very end--not to gush. Although no reader will be in doubt as to where her sympathies lie, the book does not descend into hagiography. It is for the most part a straightforward factual account, properly documented, of how Harry Blackmun went from being a square Republican tax lawyer in Minnesota to being what Greenhouse describes as an "improbable icon" of what it pleases her and others in the mainstream press to call "abortion rights." Naturally, the core of the book concerns Roe, since it was that ruling (in 1973) that transformed boring old Harry into Justice Blackmun. But Greenhouse includes discussions of Blackmun's liberal epiphanies in other areas, such as the death penalty. (He eventually discovered that the Constitution prohibits it. Who knew?)

Amid the mass of trivia establishing that Blackmun, prior to his redemption, had been boring, square, and Republican, Greenhouse has managed to produce some rather interesting factoids. For example, after Roe was handed down, Blackmun received a letter from a Catholic priest with whom he had been friends. Fr. Vern Trocinski was on the faculty of St. Teresa College in Winona, Minn. The priest said that, though he "treasured" his friendship with Blackmun, he was having "a very difficult time" with the Roe ruling, and felt an "obligation church-wise and civil-wise to speak out in defense of the unborn." In reply, Blackmun professed his "abhorrence" for abortion. (Yes, you read that right: abhorrence.) He asked Fr. Trocinski to understand, however, that the decision did not address the rightness or wrongness of abortion. "The Court's task," he advised the priest, "is to pass only on the narrow issue of constitutionality."

Blackmun's claim that he and his colleagues were abstaining from moral judgments and merely ruling on a "narrow issue of constitutionality" is risible. As Cox, Ely, and other honorable liberal critics of Roe candidly observed, there is nothing in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution creating a right to take the life of a child in the womb. To establish the proposition that there is such a right, it was necessary for the justices to import into their "legal" reasoning an elaborate set of undeniably moral judgments about, for example, the meaning of liberty and the value of human life.

And then there is that business about Blackmun finding abortion to be "abhorrent." What is abhorrent about it? We ordinarily don't regard medical procedures as abhorrent. There is nothing abhorrent about an appendectomy or tonsillectomy. In the case of abortion, could it be the little matter of hacking off limbs, suctioning out body parts, and reassembling them to make sure that no parts of the baby (oops! I mean fetus) are left inside the mother (oops! I mean woman) to cause infection? I suppose that really is abhorrent in ways that appendectomies and tonsillectomies are not. Then again, perhaps Justice Blackmun and I are just squeamish.

As Greenhouse points out, Blackmun in Roe seemed to vacillate between understanding the abortion right as the right of a woman to exercise a species of personal liberty and seeing it as the right of her doctor to make a decision about her health. His official, quasi-doctrinal statement in the opinion was that it is a right of the woman in consultation with her doctor. The pro-abortion feminists who came to lionize Justice Blackmun didn't much like the bit about the doctor. For them, abortion was a matter of liberty (or "autonomy"), not a medical matter. Eventually, they brought Blackmun round to their way of seeing things. This, too, was part of his redemption. In accepting their applause, he stopped talking about doctors. And he got very quiet indeed about his abhorrence of what is done to a human being developing in utero when women exercise the sacred right he vouchsafed unto them.

Mr. George is a professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton.