Bakke to school
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Race relations have taken over the news here. First came the announcement that the Mormon leader in his Salt Lake City Vatican had received a direct message from God telling him that black people are no longer to be considered devils and are to be admitted to full membership in the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Before this, one of the few advantages of being born black in the United States was that you couldn't become a Mormon.
Blacks had scarcely recovered from this bit of bad news, when the Supreme Court finally ruled on the Bakke case. Bakke is a white engineer who was refused admission to the University of California Medical School. At the same time, a number of black and chicano applicants with poorer academic qualifications gained entrance, because the school had set aside a certain number of places exclusively for minority students. Claiming reverse discrimination, Bakke sued. A succession of courts ruled in his favour but, supported by any number of civil rights and liberal groups, the University kept appealing the decision until now, five years after he first applied, the court of last resort has ruled. The nine Supreme Court judges ordered Bakke to be admitted. In the course of a five to four split decision, every one of the Justices put pen to paper and proceeded to make so many rulings, comments and opinions, that absolutely no one is able with much confidence to say what a school may legally do to encourage blacks and other minority groups in a nation where blacks make up more than 10 per cent of the population but comprise fewer than I of 1 per cent of the doctors. Indeed the decision was so muddy and so fudgy that Perrin Mitchel, the Chairman of the Black Caucus in the House of Representatives, had to conduct an informal telephone poll of civil rights and black leaders around the country to determine
whether his side had won or lost. The outcome was an announcement that he had won — sort of.
The Court had no choice but to wrap itself in fog, and go delphic on the litigants. No political base exists for the kind of clear policy which the leaders of the many contesting parties and interests would accept. A comprehensible decision would have touched off civil strife of a non-violent but nasty kind. While blacks, liberals, corporate management interests and the upper class in general are united in their commitment to minorities gaining full and easy access to all occupations and employment (not to be confused with the ownership of capital), the masses of white working Americans, in office, field and factories, are not so sure. White men are especially concerned. At a moment when incomes and economic activity are perceived to be levelling off, or even slightly declining, equal opportunity for the black man appears to mean no opportunity for the white man. In that context, a number of suits regarding reverse discrimination of one kind or another in employment are making their way upward toward the marble temple at the back of the Capitol where the nine Supremes hang their robes.
In America's secular society, the Court is as close as we get to an institution through which God speaks to Man. The White House and Congress are too familiar to most Americans to instil any sense of awesome respect. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has become so open and accessible that the copulatory practices of its inhabitants are publicly speculated on. In this culture, which adores sex early, often and in positions that would send an Olympic athlete to the chiropodist, talk about the bed-time practices of our Presidents has made them too human for genuflection. And certainly the escapades of Congressmen by day and by night have not made it easy for the public to take them seriously. They, like the Pres
ident, appear too often on television to strike fear into American hearts.
The Supreme Court, on the other hand, remains magical and magisterial in the imagination of its fellow citizens. To date, it has refused all the demands by the zealots of open government that its proceedings be broadcast; its members never permit themselves to be interviewed, and refuse to allow those demeaning 'human interest' stories which show the Justice at home in his plus fours, about to hit a croquet ball as his cat and his wife look on. The Court is also the only institution in Washington which has escaped the tattered, undisciplined look which comes from having its employees leak stories to the Press. In recent years only two Justices have got themselves involved in financially tacky situations, and only one (Abe Fortas) so compromised himself he had to quit the bench. Not exactly fleecy white but, as records go in Washington, far better than most.
This God-on-Earth aspect of the Court was never more useful than in the Bakke case. It enables the Court to look as though it's rendering a decision when, of course, it dare not. Moreover this role is particularly congenial to the court of Chief Justice Warren Berger, a white-haired man of suitable pomposity and self-importance to be typecast for the role of God the Father. The Justice, who does have some non-divine weirdnesses — he once greeted a reporter at the door in front of his home with a revolver — has made the smudged decision his hallmark. People seldom disagree with the Court and shake their fingers at it as they did in the days of ChiefJustice Earl Warren (he of the momentous civil rights decision) because nobody can understand what the Court says the law is, much less obey it. The result is the law business is booming as the Court chums out new legal ambiguities and enlarges old ones.
The Bakke case has briefly eclipsed Mr Carter, for which he may feel grateful. Everybody has been asking him what his foreign policy is, and who it is in his administration that speaks for it. For a while it appeared that the country had two different and contrary ones, the Brzezinski tough line and the Vance softly tempered one. The confusion got so great that the President had to invite the Congressional leadership to a White House seance at which Brzezinski and the mumbling Secretary of State assured one and all they were in perfect concert with each other. That held for a few days and then the babble of voices returned. So the White House put out a formal announcement to the effect that the Secretary of State is the spokesman for foreign affairs.
The trouble is that, when Vance talks, nobody can hear him. He got where he is by a lifetime of congenially soft affability and by always volunteering to take the notes at any meeting. After years of service in both the Johnson and Carter administrations, his opinions are as squashed as that battered Fedora he always wears.
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