A formidable questioner, Specter holds fate of nominee

(Correction: Because of a researcher's error, a graphic in Saturday's Nation pages about Senator Arlen Specter had wrong dates for his time as counsel on the Warren Commission. He served from 1963 to 1964.)

WASHINGTON -- On a Monday morning in the fall of 1971, with President Richard M. Nixon looking to fill two Supreme Court vacancies, Arlen Specter was summoned to the White House.

Specter, then a 41-year-old Republican district attorney for Philadelphia, assumed that Attorney General John Mitchell wanted to talk to him about one of the justice's posts. If that was the case, the interview was over before it began.

''When I got to Washington, all he wanted to talk about was the weather," Specter recalled in an interview in his Senate office in between a series of evening votes.

Instead of joining the Supreme Court, Specter, 75, now the senior senator from Pennsylvania, has become the nation's leading gatekeeper for the high court, the man who makes or breaks Supreme Court nominees.

He skewered Robert H. Bork, dooming his 1987 nomination. Four years later, his tough questioning of Anita Hill raised enough doubts about her sexual harassment allegations to win confirmation for Clarence Thomas.

Now, with Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s nomination drawing fire from liberals, Specter is right where he wants to be: in the center of the action -- the one indispensable vote for either side.

Specter will preside over Alito's confirmation hearings in January as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Activists on both sides of the judicial battle are waiting to see whether Specter turns on Alito as he did with Bork, or uses his powers of cross examination -- arguably the best in the Senate -- to humble Alito's accusers.

''This is the crowning point of his career, the moment he's savored for 25 years in the Senate," said G. Terry Madonna, a professor of public affairs at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania and an observer of Specter's political career for more than three decades.

''He honestly has reached the pinnacle of his career," Madonna said. ''And he loves being at the center of controversy."

Specter is trim and fit, a daily squash player who hasn't been slowed by recent health scares. His brown hair is growing back after treatment for Hodgkin's disease. He's as quick and engaged as ever, his aides say, prickly in public and demanding in private.

Which side Specter will come down on the Alito nomination is shrouded in mystery. He says he won't make up his mind until after the hearings, in keeping with what he feels is appropriate for the chairman.

''My vote is not committed, and I believe the chairman's job is to be fair," Specter said.

Despite conservatives' fears, he has supported all of President Bush's picks for the federal bench. He won high marks from conservative groups for his handling of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s nomination, which ended with Roberts winning wide bipartisan support.

Yet Specter's vaunted independent streak -- and his strong support for abortion rights -- makes him less than a sure bet to back a nominee who once wrote that the Constitution doesn't guarantee a right to abortion.

When Specter gavels open Alito's confirmation hearings Jan. 9, he'll start by questioning the judge on abortion, just as he did during Roberts's hearings. Roberts used the questioning to defuse a contentious issue and flash his intellect. But Alito has a deeper record on abortion, giving the committee more to probe, Specter said.

Aside from his 1985 statement in a job application that the Constitution doesn't include a right to abortion, Alito dissented in 1991 in a now-famous abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. There, he defended a state requirement that women notify their husbands before getting abortions.

''There's a little more to go on with him than with Roberts, because of his 1985 application for a job and because of Casey v. Planned Parenthood," Specter said. ''I wouldn't want to prejudge what he will say until I hear what he has to say -- not only the words, but the music, his demeanor."

Though he has made his career in the Senate, Specter seems intent on establishing a legacy that extends to the judiciary. For Roberts's hearing, he prepared a poster detailing the 38 times the Supreme Court has voted to uphold the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which established a constitutional right to abortion. He coined a term for cases like Roe that he considers inviolable: a ''super-duper precedent."

Having spent his entire Senate career on the Judiciary Committee, Specter has become a specialist on the Constitution, said Barry Caldwell, a former chief of staff and counsel to Specter who worked with the senator on three Supreme Court nominations during the 1990s.

''He views himself -- and I think there's some validity to it -- as a constitutional scholar," Caldwell said.

Alito will get no shortage of tough questions from Specter. But Specter won't push too far: He said he expects Alito to follow what he now calls the ''Roberts precedent," where he won't offer an opinion on cases that could come before the court in the future -- including Roe.

''I'm pro-choice, but I've also said repeatedly that I don't believe it's appropriate to ask him questions as to how he's going to vote," Specter said. ''But there are a great many different avenues of approach."

One wild card is the judge's personal relationship with the chairman. Alito's circuit court has jurisdiction over Specter's home state. The two once dined together at another judge's home and have had countless other casual interactions over the years.

Though Alito ruled against Specter in a 1992 case where the senator sought to keep open the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, Specter said he developed a positive impression of Alito as a jurist. That's what he told White House officials when they asked him his opinion of Alito when the first vacancy on the court arose, in July.

''I told them what I knew, and everything that I knew about him was good," Specter said.

Conservatives remain unconvinced that he's on their side. Specter's decision to brush aside White House requests that Alito's hearings be held before the end of the year gave liberal groups more time to build a campaign of opposition, said Pat Toomey, a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who narrowly lost a primary challenge to Specter last year.

''There's reason to be a little bit concerned," said Toomey, who is now president of the conservative group Club for Growth. ''The Roberts nomination went just fine, but how could it not? You had just about the world's perfect candidate. The Alito nomination has got to be very troubling for Senator Specter, though. Senator Specter's a liberal. Judge Alito's a conservative."

Specter said he is tuning out the lobbying and advertising campaigns of independent groups. Their efforts are counterproductive since they are as likely as not to turn off senators from their points of view, he said.

''It's not a matter to be decided by groups; it's a matter to be decided by the Constitution," he said. ''There's no liberal or conservative way to be fair and appropriate in presiding at a hearing. It's not that hard -- I've presided at a lot of hearings."

Still, as Specter looks at his legacy, he'd probably rather be known as the man who installed two new justices on the court in a contentious time, according to Professor Madonna.

''Roe isn't really in jeopardy here," Madonna said, because it has five supporters on the high court even if Alito would overturn it. ''He would like to shepherd two nominees through. There's a legacy here that he'd like to leave."

Thinking back to that long-ago conversation in the White House, Specter allowed that he would have enjoyed being a Supreme Court justice. He would have voted with the majority in Roe and would still be defending it as a justice today, he said. But he has not been pining away for the bench.

''The constitutional issues intrigue me, and there's an opportunity to participate in major decisions, which are very important for the life of the country," Specter said of being a justice. ''Kind of like the Senate. It has a lot of similarities."

Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.

Arlen Specter

Born
1930 in Wichita, Kan.

Personal
Married, two sons, four grandchildren.

Education
1951 BA University of Pennsylvania; 1956 LL.B Yale Law School

Military
Air Force 1951-1953

Before the Senate
1965-1973 Philadelphia district attorney

1974-1980 Assistant counsel on the Warren Commission investigation into President John F. Kennedy's assassination

1980-Present US senator, Republican from Pennsylvania

Current Senate committees
Committee on Appropriations
Chairman, Committee on Judiciary
Committee on Veterans' Affairs
Chairman, Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education

Health

1993: Benign brain tumor removed

1998: Double-bypass heart surgery

2005: Diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease.

SOURCE: Almanac of American Politics, US Senate

kathleen hennrikus/globe staff