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  “No one wanted to defend it, including Neil, but he volunteered to defend it—and got a 96, the highest grade in the class. In effect, he had to defend ‘the other side,’ and he did that really well. There’s a reason why Neil was a national debate champion.”

  In several places, the long Washington Post article made the point that Neil Gorsuch is not as doctrinaire as many people, especially many Republicans, seem to think, and the article ends by mentioning that back in Boulder, Judge Gorsuch and his wife are members of an Episcopalian church, St. John’s, that is definitely not a conservative parish. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation went so far as to vet Gorsuch’s church because it gets its parishioners from the largely liberal population in Boulder. In fact, it calls itself a liberal congregation, and advertised on its website for the Women’s March on Washington. Nonetheless, the Heritage Foundation decided his attendance there was not a strike against him.

  St. John’s pastor, Reverend Susan W. Springer, told the Post, regarding Neil Gorsuch, “I am privileged to have spent enough time with the family to come to know Neil as a broad-thinking man, one eager to listen and learn, and one thoughtful in speaking. Those foundational qualities are ones I would pray that all public servants in a leadership role in our country might possess.”

  IN 1976, WHEN A group of Republican lawyers came to the Gorsuch home hoping to recruit David to run for the Colorado House, Anne told them, “You’ve got the wrong Gorsuch.” Just weeks later, Neil Gorsuch, all of nine years old, was going door-to-door with his mother as she ran for and won a seat in the Colorado state legislature.

  Before going to Washington, Anne McGill Gorsuch had worked at First National Bank of Denver, and then for three years as an assistant district attorney (for Jefferson County) for the City of Denver, a job she shared with another attorney named Ann, Ann Allott, today an immigration lawyer in Centennial, Colorado. Next, Anne worked for two state regulatory agencies, and then from 1975 to 1981 as a lawyer for Mountain Bell, the telephone company, taking a leave of absence to attend the annual legislative sessions.

  In the Colorado House, Anne was part of a group labeled “the House Crazies,” because of their passionate devotion to states’ rights and their equally passionate opposition to the federal government’s environmental and energy policies, a view that Neil Gorsuch’s most conservative backers hope he shares. In the first of her two terms she was named outstanding freshman legislator.

  David Gorsuch, Neil’s father, joined his father’s law firm upon graduation, and became a well-known labor lawyer, usually representing workers rather than management. According to the couple’s friend Jim Sanderson, a Denver attorney who helped Anne get appointed head of EPA, David was a liberal, unlike his wife, who was becoming increasingly conservative, and these differences intensified as they began their marriage and their work as young lawyers. Mr. Sanderson, who later advised Anne, and who would have gone to work for her as the number-three person at EPA until the media raised what Anne considered a baseless conflict-of-interest issue, continued to advise her.

  NEIL GORSUCH’S IDYLLIC WESTERN childhood ended with his mother’s appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency. She brought him with her to Washington, and, after what Jim Sanderson recalls was a lot of effort on Anne’s part, he became a boarding student at Georgetown Prep, the prestigious Jesuit school in the D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.

  Chapter Two

  * * *

  A FINE EDUCATION

  Founded in 1789, the same year as Georgetown University, and originally located adjacent to it in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C., Georgetown Prep has a well-earned reputation as one of the finest high school–level educational institutions in the country. Among its famous alumni, in addition to Neil Gorsuch, are the poet Allen Tate; American actors John Barrymore (perhaps better known today as the grandfather of Drew Barrymore), Ian Harding, and Dylan Baker; former U.S. senator Chris Dodd; activist Anthony Shriver and his brother Mark; comedian, journalist, and writer Mo Rocca; William Bidwill, owner of the Arizona Cardinals of the NFL, and his son Michael, the team’s president; and Brian Cashman, the general manager of the New York Yankees.

  According to the school’s website, “The highly structured curriculum emphasized study of the classics as a means of disciplining the mind, imbibing the wisdom of the ancients, and developing eloquentia or facility in speaking and writing. Students received a considerable amount of individual attention from their teachers and prefects, whose lives revolved around them . . . .

  “Over the years, Georgetown Prep prospered because of dedicated administrators, teachers, prefects, talented students and great good fortune. Even in the face of adversity or changing currents within American society, it displayed remarkable resilience and adaptability; all the while remaining true to its essential principles—principles grounded in the spiritual insights of St. Ignatius Loyola . . . . As a Catholic school, Georgetown Prep helps young men to grow in their faith and understanding of the teachings of the Church and to learn to put their faith into action in the service of others. We welcome students of all faiths, believing that conscious reflection on one’s faith, whatever it may be, leads to spiritual maturity and a commitment to serve others.”

  NEIL GORSUCH’S MOTHER WAS miffed because Georgetown Prep took its time in deciding to admit him. One night, before Neil was accepted, Anne attended a function at the school. A Jesuit priest was explaining to her, a bit condescendingly, that they might not have room for Neil because they had so many applications from sons of important people, such as ambassadors of foreign countries. Anne took that in for a moment, and then asked, “Father, don’t you think it’s time you buy American?”

  The priest, realizing he had met his match, replied, “Mrs. Burford, we will accept your son.”

  WHEN NEIL GORSUCH ARRIVED at Georgetown Prep in the fall of 1981, it was one of those times of “changing currents within American society.” Ronald Reagan was in the first of his eight years as president, and feelings pro- and con-Reagan ran high. Neil, his mother’s son and political legatee, was a devoted Reaganite, which put him at odds with some of his new classmates who were equally devoted liberals.

  Dr. Steven Ochs recalls, “Today we’re about 490 students, and back then maybe 360. I had known Neil because he was in student government before he was president of the yard, and I was struck by how articulate and bright he was, and how informed he was, politically. Of course, as a history teacher that was a big interest of mine, and so we got along well. He was, as I said, very articulate and someone who could defend a position, but somebody who was very friendly, too, a nice guy. When we worked together on student government matters, he did a very good job of organizing. He’s a very organized person.”

  The longtime history teacher also noticed, even back then, a quality in Gorsuch that others have commented upon over the years: “He’s a good listener, and because he listens to people he’s a very good leader. But he can also be authoritative—not authoritarian, but authoritative. He did a very good job here.”

  Georgetown Prep’s Thomas Conlan, who also teaches history, but mainly economics, and who has been at the school about as long as Steve Ochs, taught religion when Neil Gorsuch was a senior, and was the faculty member who assigned Humanae Vitae as a debate topic. He agrees with Ochs’s recollection that nobody, Gorsuch included, wanted to defend the controversial encyclical.

  “I was trying to get somebody to defend it, and was thinking I’d have to throw in some extra incentives, because it was an unpopular position among everybody at the time, including the clergy. But Neil’s hand rocketed right up.

  “At that time I didn’t know how good he was because I wasn’t the debate moderator, and I didn’t realize that he’d missed a lot of school that year because he was on the team. In fact, he missed graduation because he was at the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which he won.”

  Conlan recalls, “In defending Humanae Vitae, he really did a terrific job,
even though at the time I’m sure I didn’t agree with him. He was just so convincing, and a thorough preparer. His terrific articulation of his views was just so much better than anybody else’s that I gave him the highest grade ever for all the senior classes—a 96. When he puts his mind to an issue he could sell snow to the Eskimos, as we used to say.

  “He got along very well with the other students. There was some antagonism to his conservative views, but he was quite agile in defending them, and the classes were interesting because of that.”

  Tom Conlan remembers that Neil was good friends with both Brian Cashman, today the general manager of the New York Yankees, and also John Caldwell, who was Neil’s running mate for the class presidency. “Caldwell,” says Conlan, “was a good athlete—track and I think soccer, who went on to Notre Dame. As for Neil Gorsuch, he was a big winner here. Everybody loved him.”

  Dr. Ochs recalls being struck by Gorsuch arguing “passionately” with classmates over issues, including political topics, without getting angry. “He has a wonderful ability—and I think this came out in the hearings—to separate his personal feelings and look at things in a very dispassionate and objective way and, as in the case of Humanae Vitae, make the best case for the other side. He always had that wonderful ability to be dispassionate and to look at the other side.

  “He was a big Reagan person, and of course his mom was this formidable Republican, and he made no bones about his political views. Now Prep is a pretty conservative place, but there definitely were also some liberals in Neil’s class, and he would argue with his friends and they would really go at it, and then he’d say, ‘Let’s go get a hamburger.’ He’s stayed in touch with his classmates, and many of them are good friends today, like Billy Healy, who’s a big, big Democrat, and William Hughes, a big contributor to the Democratic Party, who organized the big letter-writing campaign for members of Neil’s class to support his nomination, pointing out how Gorsuch had always been able to maintain these friendships and disagree without being disagreeable.”

  IN THE TIME PERIOD between the nomination and the beginning of the Judiciary Committee hearings, there were media accounts that while he was a student at Georgetown Prep, Neil Gorsuch had founded a “Young Fascists Club.” Dr. Ochs, who was quoted in several articles debunking the charge, explains what really happened: “There was a very liberal religion teacher at the school back then, and he would go at it with Neil in class, but in a friendly, joking way, and one day, after one of these exchanges, he said, ‘Oh, you’re all members of the Young Fascists League.’

  “So, in the senor yearbook, Neil wrote, about himself, ‘President and Founder of the Young Fascists League.’ And when some of the media got hold of that, they started fulminating, and blah, blah, blah. But if you look back at it, a lot of kids made up fictitious organizations for the yearbook—we don’t allow that anymore but we did back then—and the whole thing was a good-humored joke.”

  Even before he got to Georgetown Prep, Neil Gorsuch had shown signs that he took things more seriously than his peers. As the Washington Post reported in its lengthy February 19 front-page story, when Gorsuch was in grade school, the “Roman Catholic teachers drilled into their students the values of character, duty and service. While many students brushed off the moral lessons, Gorsuch seemed to internalize them.”

  Jonathan Brody, one of his closest childhood friends, said one incident in particular has stayed with him. When they were about twelve years old, Gorsuch borrowed a sleeping bag, and it got damaged or dirty in his care. He grew distraught.

  “He was very concerned and upset that his honor and integrity would be questioned,” recalled Brody, now a state district court judge in Idaho. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I’m missing something. Do I not take this sort of thing seriously enough? Maybe I should.’ ”

  NEIL GORSUCH BEGAN PREP school with everything going for him. He’d been accepted at a prestigious institution, and his mother was about to be named to a cabinet-level position in the administration of Ronald Reagan, a man young Neil admired greatly. The future looked bright for both mother and son.

  For him, as he finished his first year and began his second, he knew he was in the right place. He and the Jesuit school were a good fit. For his mother, unfortunately, the story went off script.

  First, her confirmation was held up for months by Democrats who questioned her qualifications to head the twelve-year-old agency that was charged with protecting Americans by protecting their air, water, and land. And then, about a year into her tenure at the Environmental Protection Agency, she got into a major brawl with Congress.

  As was characteristic of Anne McGill Gorsuch Burford, acting out of loyalty to her boss, the president of the United States, she resisted the subpoenas of two House committees, one chaired by Representative Elliott Levitas of Georgia and the other by the powerful John Dingell of Michigan, both Democrats (the House was then under Democratic control). With the great benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that she would have been better off had she worried less about protecting the president and more about protecting herself.

  Burford’s mandate from Reagan had three parts: reduce the number of regulations (and turn much of the watchdog responsibility back to the states); shrink the size of the agency; and cut its budget, a policy view strikingly similar to that of the current administration in 2017. As that approach to governance was what she had favored and fought for as a legislator in Colorado, she went at these tasks happily and agreeably. But fed by a media that was often hostile to Reagan, especially in regard to environmental issues, the perception of what she was doing—on the part of almost all the leading environmental protection groups—was that her real intention was to emasculate the regulations and protect the big polluters.

  With easy access to both of the Washington and all the major East Coast newspapers and media, her oldest child was well aware of the swirling forces.

  For decades since, the prevailing view in the media has been that Anne Burford had messed up at the EPA, and that early reporting was picked up and repeated by some writers at the time of her son’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

  For example, in late February 2017 in an article in Newsweek titled “Neil Gorsuch’s Late Mother Almost Annihilated the EPA. Is History Repeating Itself?” Joanna Brenner wrote that Anne Gorsuch “was seen by some as a dictatorial ‘Ice Queen’ who wants to roll back Federal environmental regulations . . . . In addition to her surly disposition and budget slashing, Gorsuch was involved in a nasty scandal involving political manipulation, fund mismanagement, perjury and destruction of subpoenaed documents, among other things.”

  Despite the implication, the perjury charge was brought against an EPA subordinate, not Burford. In a 2017 Washington Post article titled “Neil Gorsuch’s Mother Once Ran the EPA. It Didn’t Go Well,” Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney wrote:

  While Anne Gorsuch might have suffered from a lack of diplomatic skills, she did not lack in personality and toughness. The Post once described her as “a striking woman with jet-black hair” who had “television star looks and perfect manicures.

  She wore fur coats and smoked two packs of Marlboros a day; her government-issued car got about 15 miles per gallon of gasoline.” The Post once wrote, “She could charm opponents, but she also did not shy away from political combat. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News once said, ‘She could kick a bear to death with her bare feet.’ ” [For a carefully documented view of Anne Burford’s side of this debate, see Are You Tough Enough?, published by McGraw-Hill in 1986.]

  In sync with this dusty opinion is the Washington Post report, also on February 1, 2017, that “her short, tumultuous tenure was marked by sharp budget cuts, rifts with career EPA employees, a steep decline in cases filed against polluters and a scandal over the mismanagement of the Superfund cleanup program.”

  GEORGETOWN PREP CLASSMATE THAD Ficarra remembers asking Neil Gorsuch, “How’s your mom doing?” He said Gorsuch smiled and said, “She’s doing fine
, thank you.” “It wasn’t a brush-off,” Ficarra told a reporter in 2017. “ ‘Just so you know, your mom is in my prayers.’ He said, ‘I really appreciate that.’ He was grateful for the support, but he didn’t wallow in it.”

  As young Neil Gorsuch, who spoke to his mother regularly on the phone, and in person on occasion, was well aware, from the start of the Reagan administration the White House had been sparring with Congress over the concept of executive privilege, and when two House committees began to look into EPA’s Superfund program, the White House and its lawyers, thanks to good soldier Burford, had the confrontation they wanted.

  At the time she was asked to perform this service for the White House, Anne Burford did not know that two other Reagan administration officials who’d previously been asked by White House lawyers to fight this same fight had thought it over and said thanks but no thanks. One of them was Attorney General William French Smith, and the other was Burford’s friend from Colorado, James Watt, the secretary of the interior.

  When the White House lawyers came to Burford in the fall of 1982, they did not tell her their request had already been denied by the two cabinet members. And Watt, like Anne a true conservative soldier for Reagan, had been on the verge of saying yes when White House counsel Fred Fielding revealed something that made Jim Watt change his mind. Fielding said, “I just came from a meeting with Chairman Dingell and we may have reached a compromise that may be of value to us.”

  “What did that relate to?” asked Watt.

  Fielding replied, “The general got into a situation similar to the one you are in, and we didn’t want to create any embarrassment for the general, so we gave them the paperwork.”