“Nino and Me” — and Me?
Bryan Garner’s fascinating memoir of his friendship with
Justice Antonin Scalia, out today, recounts the ups and downs of the last years of his life, as
we report in this story.
One anecdote tells how Scalia overcame his disdain for journalists—or at least one journalist—to help promote the book he and Garner wrote in 2008 titled "Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges."
That journalist was me, Tony Mauro.
I had heard that the book project was underway in 2007, and wanted to talk to Scalia about it. I made the request through Garner, and Garner asked his co-author.
“I don’t want to talk with that man. I won’t talk to him!” Scalia told Garner.
Garner chalked up Scalia’s resistance to Scalia’s bad experiences with the media generally, but Scalia and I had
had a falling out that led him, in 2001, to write a letter to the editor of Legal Times calling a story I had written “mauronic.”
Garner told Scalia that if he is “nice to the media, they’ll generally be nice to you,” but Scalia was adamant. “I’m not talking to the guy.”
Scalia did give me a written statement, and
the story I wrote about the book was positive.
Scalia wrote to Garner, “The Mauro piece was fine. Whets the appetite.”
But that is not the end of the story. Once the book was published in 2008, Scalia and Garner made numerous public appearances to promote the book, including a major event at the Kennedy Center. I told Garner I wanted to
cover it, and he invited me to come backstage during intermission to chat with Scalia.
Again, Scalia balked. “I don’t want to talk to Mauro! … He won’t be fair to us.” Garner pressed the point. “If you want good press, you have to cooperate with the press.” He urged Scalia to express interest in me, ask me questions, and the like. “It’s pure Dale Carnegie.”
Scalia relented, and we did meet. I was as wary as he was, and his eyebrow arched as we shook hands. He was the courtly Old World gentleman I had heard about but not experienced. Sure enough, he asked me about my family. Soon I was telling him about my daughter, and he was giving me parental advice.
“I could barely break them apart,” Garner wrote.
If flattery was the goal, I guess it worked—though I continued to write articles in the years since that Scalia and his colleagues were unlikely to put in their scrapbooks. One more thing: My daughter Emily got married two days ago.
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