Court Was Brennan’s Life and He Gave It His Last Energy

The resignation of Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. caught most of Washington by surprise Friday night, but it was not totally unexpected among those who had sufficient personal contact with him to see the increasingly visible signs of his deteriorating health. Among those observers was Times staff writer Jim Mann, who covered the Supreme Court from 1976 through 1984 and who returned three months ago to interview the 84-year-old jurist.

When I walked into Justice William J. Brennan Jr.’s chambers last April, I hadn’t talked to him for more than six years, not since I had left the Supreme Court beat back in 1984.

What I saw, and what he said, took me by surprise. At the age of nearly 84, Justice Brennan, the court’s senior member, was quite evidently failing--and he came very close to admitting it.

“Recently, my doctor told me I’d better not make any speeches or other outside activities,” Brennan told me in one of his last interviews as a member of the court. “I’d better just stick to my work here . . . . I apparently have some of the ills that afflict 84-year-olds, and therefore I’d better pace myself better than I’ve been pacing myself.”

His once-booming, gravelly voice was low and weak. His body was thinner. His mind and mood were good, but he seemed preoccupied with his health--so much so, in fact, that he dwelt on it in the sort of detail Supreme Court justices usually avoid.

“I came back from Israel a couple of years ago with a terrible case of shingles, really a miserable case of shingles,” Brennan said. “Then I had a serious reaction only last fall to antibiotics that I was taking for influenza . . . at about that time. And I’m not out of that yet . . . . It was the reaction to those things that prompted my doctor to say that you just better slow down.”

Confronted by such problems and doctor’s orders, Brennan decided to conserve all his remaining energy for the Supreme Court. He clung to the court as tenaciously as men cling to life itself. For Brennan, that was natural: for 34 years, the Supreme Court was his life.

He canceled 12 scheduled speeches and other public appearances. “Right now, my wife and I are busily trying to figure out what in hell we’re going to do this summer,” he said, the frustration evident in his tired voice.

Others in similar situations have elected to step aside and to spend their precious time with their families, away from the tensions and demanding schedule of a full-time job. On the court over the last decade, Justices Potter Stewart and Lewis F. Powell Jr. and Chief Justice Warren E. Burger all chose to step aside before their health began to fail.

But there was a crucial difference between Brennan and the other three justices. Stewart, Powell and Burger were all moderate-to-conservative justices who knew their replacements would be selected by President Ronald Reagan and his conservative Administration.

Brennan, by contrast, was the acknowledged leader of the liberal wing of the court. His successor was not likely to be as avowedly committed to the causes of individual justice and freedom as was Brennan.

In the interview, Brennan insisted that he never thought of such political considerations. “It’s never for a minute dawned on me that it was important to my decision whether or not to retire who sat in the White House,” he told me. “Never gave it that much thought.”

Yet Brennan knew full well he was by far the most effective remaining advocate of the traditions of former Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Even in his last months on the court, more than two decades after Warren had retired, Brennan was eager as ever to proclaim the values he felt the Warren Court had embodied.

The tradition of the Warren Court was, he said, “an application of the Constitution to enhance and further human dignity and individual rights. Rather than, as was the case for a long while, to have the court put its clout on the protection of interests other than the interests of the individual.”

On the bench, Brennan pressed forward in the Warren Court tradition until the very end. But he also became philosophical about the seemingly inevitable swings in public opinion and changes in the direction of the Supreme Court itself.

“Perhaps that’s the very nature of our democracy, that, as a democracy, we don’t stand still,” he said. “We’re always pushing ahead, to goals that we’ve had from our beginning. And again, in individual rights and individual liberties, we’ll get back to them in time.”

He said “we,” but he was referring to mankind, not himself. Brennan knew that his own time on the court was running out.