Bork Takes Case Against His Opponents to Admiring Audiences

His task, he said, is to wrest “control of our legal culture” from the “ultraliberals, radicals and leftists,” whom he blames for preventing him from taking a seat on the Supreme Court.

So Robert H. Bork crisscrosses the country, talking to students at Boston College, business leaders in Denver, lawyers in California and conservative law students in Charlottesville, Va., arguing that he was the helpless victim of a vicious campaign of lies and distortions that steamrollered the Senate while the White House stood idle and his nomination was defeated.

Bork insists that he is not angry about his defeat. But his speeches are bitter invectives against what he sees as the outrageous tactics of his enemies, who have the potential, he says, to undermine our constitutional system of government. The battle, Bork says, “is not over, and I intend to be in it.”

‘Stuck on Mindanao’

So far, however, it is a one-sided struggle. “There’s not going to be any war,” one Senate Democratic aide said, “because nobody’s going to engage him. He’s stuck on Mindanao thinking the Japanese haven’t surrendered.”

But Bork has found a receptive audience. Since resigning from the federal appeals court here Feb. 5, he has given about a dozen speeches to groups, and is booked--at $12,000 to $15,000 a speech--for another 40 talks this year to trade associations, Chambers of Commerce and college groups.

His agent, who confessed surprise at the high demand, said Bork has turned down another two dozen invitations because of other commitments.

Those speaking engagements, a job with a conservative think tank here, a book advance rumored to be in the low six figures and some lawyering are likely to earn Bork as much this year as perhaps a decade on the court at a justice’s $100,000-a-year salary.

His book, tentatively titled “Dissenting Opinion,” is scheduled to be published next year. Bork has said the book does not deal with his nomination battle.

Declines to Seek Office

Bork was not available for an interview but friends who have spent time with him recently said he is relaxed, at ease with himself and besieged wherever he goes by a constant stream of autograph-seeking admirers. Many have urged him to run for office but he declines, saying: “I’m afraid I might lose. I’m more afraid I might win.”

A polished speaker with an acute sense of timing, Bork is back in a familiar role, much like the one he played as a professor at Yale Law School during the 1960s and 1970s: the lonely conservative, fighting the civilized intellectual battle against what he sees as the unwashed liberal rabble in the majority.

He seems to delight in igniting his audiences with harsh attacks on “radical nihilists” who he says are attempting to undermine democracy by improperly expanding the role of the judiciary.

During a question-and-answer session after a speech at Grove City College in Pennsylvania last month, an elderly woman said she liked his ideology and urged him to run for President. The staunchly conservative crowd cheered and applauded. Bork laughed and declined.

Admirer’s Slap at Kennedy

Another admirer asked whether he would back a federally sponsored plan to “build a memorial highway across Chappaquiddick,” in an apparent reference to the 1969 incident in which a female companion of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) drowned when the car they were in overturned on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass.

“That,” Bork said with a smile as the crowd cheered, “is beyond the scope of my topic this evening.”

In Bork’s view, he was subjected to “the first national political campaign with respect to a judicial nominee in our nation’s history” in which “only one side took part.”

The White House, he argued, left him twisting alone, muzzling conservative groups that wanted to help him and making him an easy target for “a massive coalition of ultraliberal and left groups” that poured “$10 million to $15 million” into a negative advertising campaign of “lies and distortions of his record.”

The news media failed to correct the distortions, he says, and the Senate caved in to the contrived groundswell against him.

‘The Lie Took Hold’

The other key element, “the most effective,” in Bork’s view, was what he calls “Sen. Kennedy’s Southern strategy,” calling influential black leaders in the South to spur them to act because Bork was opposed to civil rights. “The claim that Kennedy made that I am hostile to black civil rights was a lie,” Bork said.

But “the lie took hold,” he said, and that doomed him, costing him the votes of key Southern Democrats.

The issue should have been, he said, “my view of the role of the courts and my philosophy of judging. It was not.” It was, he said, political “electioneering” and distortions of his record.

To Bork, his three-week confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which saw him testify for an extraordinary 32 hours, meant nothing. The hearings were overwhelmed by the multimillion-dollar “blitzkrieg” of negative advertising that set public opinion against him.

His performance was not “the determining factor in any event because I think no matter what I did at the hearings, what the public opinion polls were showing, not because of the hearings but because of what was being said, determined the Southern senators, and that was the ballgame.”

Senators Faulted

He was unable to counter the attack and get his message across to the committee, he said but that was not his fault. He failed because the senators were just not smart enough to understand what he was saying, he said.

Bork cited, by way of example, what he called a distortion of his record in which his opposition to a general constitutional right to privacy was seen as a desire to have “government in the bedroom. It was impossible to straighten that out,” he tells his audiences in a sarcastic reference to the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “with even so powerful an intellect as Joe Biden.”

Several senators who opposed Bork declined comment but leaders of some liberal groups, shown a copy of one of his speeches, dismissed his view of events as wildly out of touch with what happened.

“There are inaccuracies, there are distortions, there are falsehoods,” said Arthur Kropp, executive director of the liberal People for the American Way. The speech “is an effort to try to put the blame on everyone else but Bork,” Kropp said.

Foes Tell of Less Spending

Kropp and others say the notion of a multimillion-dollar media campaign against Bork is nonsense. Kropp, whose organization was the only one to do television advertising, said People for the American Way spent $625,000 on television, radio and newspaper advertising. Planned Parenthood, the only other organization to advertise extensively, said it spent $197,000.

“He attacks everybody and everything in his speech--including the press, the civil-rights community, the Senate and even the White House,” said Ralph Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. “But he ignores the real cause for his defeat, which was, to paraphrase Pogo, Robert Bork’s principal obstacle to his confirmation was Robert Bork.”

Many of Bork’s opponents conceded privately that there were distortions of Bork’s views, citing as an example an implication that Bork favored sterilization of women working in a chemical factory.

Other Possible Actions

They also said the White House probably could have done more, perhaps a speech by President Reagan on prime time, but that likely would not have made a difference. Conservative groups, who generated more pro-Bork mail than was received in opposition, probably could have started earlier, Bork’s opponents said, but that probably would have been counterproductive.