I'm not a big fan of Alan Dershowitz, but he has a good
piece on HuffPost today about Rehnquist's legacy.
Here on DKos, when the news broke about Rehnquist's death there was quite a bit of debate in the comments - criticism of Rehnquist, some of it in very harsh language, was met by requests to be respectful and consider his family etc.
When Reagan died, the media went into overdrive to whitewash his awful legacy. I think we are seeing the same with Rehnquist, and Dershowitz thoroughly debunks this nonsense by recounting some of the lowlights of Rehnquist's career.
My mother always told me that when a person dies, one should not say anything bad about him. My mother was wrong. History requires truth, not puffery or silence, especially about powerful governmental figures. And obituaries are a first draft of history.
So here's the truth about Chief Justice Rehnquist you won't hear on Fox News or from politicians. Chief Justice William Rehnquist set back liberty, equality, and human rights perhaps more than any American judge of this generation. His rise to power speaks volumes about the current state of American values.
According to Dershowitz, when Rehnquist was a student at Stanford University,
he had outraged Jewish classmates by goose-stepping and heil-Hitlering with brown-shirted friends in front of a dormitory that housed the school's few Jewish students. He also was infamous for telling racist and anti-Semitic jokes.
As a law clerk,
Rehnquist's memo, entitled "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases," defended the separate-but-equal doctrine embodied in the 1896 Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. Rehnquist concluded the Plessy "was right and should be reaffirmed." When questioned about the memos by the Senate Judiciary Committee in both 1971 and 1986, Rehnquist blamed his defense of segregation on the dead Justice, stating - under oath - that his memo was meant to reflect the views of Justice Jackson. But Justice Jackson voted in Brown, along with a unanimous Court, to strike down school segregation.
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Is such criticism of the recently deceased Justice appropriate because it is fact-based rather than just an angry attack? Is it inappropriate to criticize the dead, no matter what?
Do we need to take the high road so we do not undermine the credibility of our cause? Or can we also respect the powerful emotion of some of our allies who just feel passionate hatred for such a man as Rehnquist?
Personally, I'm not sure we will ever win the respect of our enemies on the right, or in the media, no matter how politely we phrase our criticism. Should we bend over backwards to not offend? What do you think?