Bird Was Quixotic, Courageous and a Little Too Naive

At some unknown, transformative moment, long before she died this weekend, even before the 1986 election that stripped off her black robe and booted her from the middle chair as California’s Supreme Court chief justice, Rose Elizabeth Bird ceased to be a person.

Instead she became, in the pidgin of politics, a cause celebre, a litmus test, a hot button.

If it’s only dimwits or dreamers who run for office in California by standing against Proposition 13 or the death penalty, that is in part Rose Bird’s doing. If three strikes approaches the trinity in unassailable sanctity, there too is the shadow of Rose Bird.

The first woman justice was also the court’s first jurist in memory with not a quarter-hour’s experience as a judge, a woman with a social conscience as tender as a hatchling, and a political ear as tin as a can of beets.

It is closing in on 15 years since voters gave her a pink slip, the first Supreme Court justice ever voted out of the job. But her name is still carried down from the attic and dusted off whenever candidates get hooked up to the political polygraph: Do you support the death penalty? Did you oppose Rose Bird?

Dan Lungren raised up the ghost of Rose in last year’s gubernatorial campaign, warning shrilly that Gray Davis, once chief of staff to Jerry Brown--the governor who appointed Bird--could put another such hatchling in the judicial nest. And Davis, whose 1983 marriage service Bird performed, is said to agonize over his appointments precisely because of that specter.

After her 1986 loss, except among groups bold enough or indifferent enough to ignore the weather vane of public sentiment, Bird vanished. There were no big advances for her memoirs. She ornamented no prestigious law school or law firm. She appeared on no talk shows, was never invited to dispense TV justice as “Judge Rose.”

A half-dozen years ago, she volunteered at an East Palo Alto neighborhood law center, and for a long time, they hadn’t a clue who she was. “Rose” was assigned to run the copier.

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If you had to select a feminist lawyer out of a lineup, it would not have been the woman with the old-fashioned name who wore her hair with two little twirls of curl spiraling at her temples and who had all the fashion savvy of Betty Crocker. She looked to me a bit like Phyllis Schlafly, who could not have been further from Bird politically.

She had chauffeured Jerry Brown in his 1974 campaign, and they were not unalike. Both, by all accounts, were possessed of knife-sharp smarts and thin skins, were inclined to be socially maladroit, and frugal; he drove a battered old Plymouth, she sold the court’s Caddy.

After Brown named her agriculture secretary, the state’s first woman cabinet member, she banned the notorious short-handled hoe from the fields of the Golden State. In 1977, he made her chief justice.

She charted her own principled judicial course, but it was not always California’s course. The thinking went: We lost the kids at Berkeley, we lost the war in Vietnam, but by God, we won’t lose the last notch on the discipline belt--the death penalty.

Of all the Bird court’s rulings--workers’ and consumers’ rights, environmental and gender issues--none mattered as much to voters as its five dozen or so death sentence cases. If only Bird’s vote had counted, death row would have hung out a vacancy sign.

It made her box-office poison. Nine recall attempts were launched against Bird, six of them in 1982 alone. On-duty San Diego sheriff’s deputies issued postcards calling for her to resign. “Rosie,” they called her, mocking her looks along with her legal record.

By 1986, millions of dollars were piled up to beat her. Richard Riordan contributed. So did newscaster Jerry Dunphy. “Bye Bye Birdie,” read the bumper stickers, and “Free the Night Stalker--Re-Elect Rose Bird.” The death penalty’s best-known opponent got death threats of her own.

On election day, down she went, taking two fellow justices with her. A few years before, when she considered the swift changes she made on the court, she sensed that “I might not have a lot of years.” She was thinking of her breast cancer, not of politics.

Her defeat awoke a slumbering giant. Until Bird, judges had barely registered on voters’ radar. No longer. Just last year, anti-abortion groups took a run at two GOP-appointed justices who overruled a parental-consent law.

The legacy of Rose Bird, to her undoubted regret, is not outlawing the short-handled hoe or bolstering tenants’ rights, but embodying the warning that henceforth, beneath the robe of a jurist, there had better beat the heart of a politician.

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Columnist Patt Morrison substitutes for George Skelton, who is on vacation. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com