Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986

By James Rosen

The bestselling historian and journalist James Rosen provides the first comprehensive account of the brilliant and combative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whose philosophy and judicial opinions defined our legal era.

With SCALIA: Rise to Greatness, 1936–1986, the opening installment in a two-volume biography, acclaimed reporter and bestselling historian James Rosen provides the first comprehensive account of the life of Justice Antonin Scalia, whose singular career in government—including three decades on the Supreme Court—shaped American law and society in the twenty-first century.

Decades in the making, Rise to Greatness tells the story of the kid from Queens who became the first Italian American on the Court and one of the most profoundly influential figures of our time. This volume takes us from Scalia’s birth to his ascension to the Court, providing a fresh and probing look at his Catholic upbringing and education; his stints in academia and published works, some of them obscure and long-overlooked; and his service in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when Scalia launched the telecommunications revolution, reformed the U.S. intelligence community, and approved classified covert operations.

Deeply researched and based on unparalleled access to documentary and personal sources, and written with an intellectual rigor and wit befitting its subject, Rosen’s narrative reads like a novel while presenting startling new insight into the life, mind, career, faith, and legacy of the man whom family and friends called “Nino.” The result is a compelling portrait of an American legend with whom the author personally corresponded, broke bread, drank wine, and braved the streets of the capital as a (nervous) passenger in the justice’s famously speedy BMW.

Rosen has unearthed previously unpublished writing from every phase of Scalia’s career, including private Supreme Court emails, and has interviewed Scalia’s family, classmates, students, colleagues from the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan administrations, priests, poker buddies, hunting companions, and fellow judges and justices.

Rise to Greatness is a landmark of modern biography, a rich and moving study, accessible to lay readers, that brings to life a towering figure of American history. It is the book Scalia fans, and all citizens interested in history and the law, have long awaited.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnery
• Release date: Mar 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684512324

James Rosen

James Rosen is a leading reporter, historian, and bestselling author. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Politico, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Review, and the American Bar Association Journal, among other periodicals. He is the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax, following two decades of acclaimed reporting at Fox News. During the Obama administration, Rosen’s exclusive reporting on national security subjects led to his being placed under surveillance by the FBI and censored by the State Department, episodes that triggered headlines, investigations, and reforms. His previous books include The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, hailed by the New York Times Magazine as “Pulitzer-quality biography,” and Cheney One on One, a collection of transcripts from the ten-hour oral history Rosen conducted with former vice president Dick Cheney in 2014. His most recent book, A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, an anthology of essays by the late William F. Buckley Jr., spent five weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. With his wife, two sons, and two cats, he splits his time between Washington and the Chesapeake Bay.

Book preview

Cover: Scalia, by James Rosen

Scalia

Rise to Greatness 1936–1986

James Rosen

Praise for

Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936–1986

James Rosen has written a brilliant first installment in his planned two-volume biography of Justice Antonin Scalia, the most consequential—and compelling—figure in American law in modern times. Here at last, as in no previous biography, is the man I actually knew. In Rosen’s skillful and lively narrative, Antonin Scalia leaps off the page at his brilliant, energetic, and enthusiastic best.

—Lee Liberman Otis, former Scalia student, former Scalia clerk at the court of appeals and the Supreme Court, co-founder and senior vice president of the Federalist Society

Revelatory and original, James Rosen’s rigorously researched biography of Antonin Scalia’s pre-Supreme Court years fills in gaps and reveals new information that had eluded previous biographers of one of the nation’s most consequential justices. With skillful digging in the archives and fresh interviews, Rosen has written a highly readable account that breaks news and challenges the conventional wisdom in almost every chapter.

—Glenn Kessler, editor and chief writer, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker

"Deeply researched and superbly crafted, James Rosen’s Scalia brings to life a compelling and truly likable human being who transcended simple partisan stereotypes. Antonin Scalia was one of the most important and influential jurists in our history, and this immensely original and readable account of his pre-Court life will no doubt prove definitive."

—David J. Garrow, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Bearing the Cross and Rising Star

What made Antonin Scalia tick? James Rosen takes us inside the mind of the late Supreme Court justice in a deeply researched, compelling, and exuberant portrait of one of the most intriguing and larger-than-life figures in American history.

—Evan Thomas, author of First: Sandra Day O’Connor

"Scalia: Rise to Greatness ranks among the finest biographies of a Supreme Court justice, or any judge, that I have ever read. Drawing on a wealth of new archival material and fresh interviews with many of Justice Scalia’s family members, friends, and colleagues, James Rosen brings vividly to life my frequent debate partner and friend, while shedding new light on a singular mind and career that continue to shape American law and society today."

—Nadine Strossen, John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law emerita at New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union

"Few biographers so fully inhabit their subjects as James Rosen, who in Scalia dives deep into the early life and career of one of the most consequential jurists in American history, exploring how he changed as he changed America. Scalia is filled with new documents, new insights, and new details that humanize ‘Nino’ and enrich our understanding of his times."

—Garrett M. Graff, New York Times bestselling author of Watergate: A New History

"With his previous books on Watergate, Dick Cheney, and William F. Buckley, Jr., reporter James Rosen has emerged as a leading historian of contemporary conservatism. Now, in Scalia, an important and impressive volume, Rosen combines deep research and a perceptive eye on character to chart the rise of one of the key figures in the Supreme Court’s rightward march over the past forty years. Countless puzzles are illuminated, including the roots of Antonin Scalia’s friendship across ideological lines with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the paradox that one of the most controversial justices of recent generations was vaulted onto the Supreme Court with a unanimous Senate vote. Rosen’s portrait is admiring without losing sight of Scalia’s human flaws. The result is an absorbing narrative of value to readers across the political spectrum."

—John F. Harris, founding editor, POLITICO

"James Rosen’s Scalia is a judiciously researched and well-written biography of our nation’s first Italian American to serve on the Supreme Court. This is legal history at its absolute finest."

—Douglas Brinkley, Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities, professor of history at Rice University, and editor of The Reagan Diaries

"In Scalia: Rise to Greatness, James Rosen achieves greatness of his own, with a vivid and lively account of Antonin Scalia’s formative years and relationships that shaped him into one of the most influential figures in American law. Through scores of personal interviews and exhaustive research, Rosen delivers new information and fresh details in such an engaging way you feel you’re right there in the room, watching along, as this brilliant and charismatic young man matures into the larger-than-life Justice Scalia. A triumph of reporting and storytelling that adds to our understanding of a legal giant, Scalia does Scalia justice."

—Jan Crawford, CBS News chief legal correspondent and New York Times bestselling author of Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court

"Scalia: Rise to Greatness is triumphant. James Rosen combines deep research, dazzling literary flair, and keen analysis to capture the origin tale and larger-than-life personality of Antonin Scalia as he emerged as a national figure. A brilliant work that matches the brilliance of its subject, Scalia shimmers on every page with surprising revelations, spot-on character sketches of all the major and minor players, and an unerring grasp of the zeitgeist of the Reagan era. Entertaining, dramatic, and compelling, this is biography at its best and, without doubt, the best book about Justice Scalia ever written."

—James L. Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer

Scalia, by James Rosen, Regnery Publishing

For Lorraine and Joe Durkin,

Jenn Barron, Ryan Durkin, and Quinn Durkin

MEG SCALIA BRYCE: After his death, when people described him as larger than life, he was. And he was that way to us.

ROSEN: And he was cognizant that he was that way, right?

MEG SCALIA BRYCE: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, he was putting on a show—but it was a great show.

—Interview by the author, August 2, 2017

Book One

I WILL RISE

CHAPTER I

Little Nino

It is good to know where you came from. It is even better to know where you are going.

—Antonin Scalia, 1999

On the evening of September 17, 1986, Constitution Day, the United States Senate voted unanimously—ninety-eight to zero, with two senators absent—to confirm Antonin Scalia, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit nominated by President Reagan as associate justice of the Supreme Court.

That the nation’s highest court, America’s most powerful symbol of freedoms guaranteed, would soon be seating its first Italian-American justice, a landmark event, was largely overshadowed in the news. For on that same day, despite a ferocious opposition campaign mounted by Senate Democrats, the chamber had also voted to approve the elevation of Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, seated on the Court since 1971, to chief justice. Scalia would assume Rehnquist’s old seat.

The bitter confirmation of the chief justice—by a final vote of sixty-five to thirty-three, the largest opposition tally ever sustained by a confirmed nominee to that point—meant that Rehnquist, a demure, dry-witted Wisconsinite and a poker buddy of Scalia’s, would succeed stately Warren Burger, chief justice since 1969, now retiring. The Democrats’ assaults on Rehnquist—on his veracity, integrity, and racial sensitivity—were accompanied, de rigueur, by the exhumation of documents and witnesses from a quarter-century earlier, most of them familiar from Rehnquist’s 1971 confirmation hearings. Conservatives called it the Rehnquisition.¹

Against this backdrop, Scalia’s swift, effortless confirmation drew little attention; the assessment of the news media was that Scalia’s ascension would not alter the ideological balance of the Court. Some observers, however, understood immediately that Scalia’s personal characteristics—his unique combination of intellect, literary skill, and affability—would make him a major force on the Supreme Court, as the Christian Science Monitor reported.

Through his considerable powers of persuasion… Judge Scalia may wind up altering the balance—and thus the outcome of close decisions. In reaching court decisions he is widely viewed as repeatedly seeking to try to find a middle ground, in the phrase of Judge Abner Mikva, a liberal colleague for four years on the Court of Appeals. He calls Scalia’s approach collegial, and says the appointment is going to be good for the institution of the Supreme Court.²

For the newly minted justice, a self-described Italian boy from Queens, the unanimous Senate confirmation marked a moment few men experience: supreme vindication, unopposed ascendance to the pinnacle of his profession. He would shape American law for the twenty-first century.

The one problem at the moment was: getting ahold of him. Nino, as family and friends called him, was a social beast. On the evening of the vote he was out on the town, attending yet another of the suffocating black-tie events that pass for nightlife in official Washington. This one celebrated the forthcoming bicentennial of the Constitution.

What?

In the White House and the Department of Justice, where Scalia’s nomination was being managed by a small team of Reagan administration officials already frazzled from the Rehnquisition, having to worry about the judge’s whereabouts was enough to stir unease. At the time of the vote, the president’s men liked high-profile nominees to stay close at hand, twiddling their thumbs with their spouses in some designated hotel room or someone’s ceremonial office, ready at any moment to receive, with suitable gratitude to the President of the United States, the call that would change their lives forever.

Scalia blew all that off.

Despite regular jogging and tennis, the judge was stocky. Thinning black hair retreated straight back over his head, leaving behind dark eyebrows and eyes. Despite his forbidding mien, Nino was almost unanimously well-liked in Washington. He was delightful company, often amusing, combining outer-borough Italian-American charm with Ivy League sophistication and self-deprecating wit. At any moment he was liable, with shameless and endearing grandeur, to commandeer a piano in someone’s house and burst into show tunes or Christmas carols.

Now Reagan’s men had to track the judge down on the rubber chicken circuit. The constitutional bicentennial dinner was at the Willard InterContinental Hotel downtown. An idea popped into the head of the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Office of Legislative Affairs, a mustachioed thirty-seven-year-old lawyer and former think tank colleague of Scalia’s named John R. Bolton. In the kitchen at the Willard, Bolton established a dedicated phone line and enlisted hotel staff to corral Scalia at the appointed hour.

Earlier that summer Bolton had been one of the few officials present for Scalia’s murder board sessions: a mock grilling ahead of the Senate confirmation hearings. The murderers peppered Scalia with the toughest, nastiest questions they could devise; he aced the test. No member of the Senate Judiciary Committee could remotely match Scalia’s mastery of the law and debate. He didn’t do anything to prepare for the meetings [with senators] or the murder boards, recalled a law clerk. He didn’t find them very helpful. I think he was doing them mostly to make the White House comfortable, not because he thought he needed them.³

When the vote came Scalia was blithely puffing on his pipe, sipping champagne, mingling, and playing it cool at the Willard. Since 1982 he had been a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, often described as the second-most important court in America. Scalia moved with ease, confidence: the kid from Queens, a self-made man who had vaulted to Harvard Law and the federal bench. His confidence in himself and his own story, in the story of his immigrant father—in the American Dream—created a fierce independence in the man: no one intimidated him.

A Willard employee leaned into his ear—something about a telephone call. The judge followed him to the hotel’s kitchen and a waiting receiver.

Scalia knew. This was it. Bolton’s account of the critical phone call, when Scalia learned he had achieved the dream, is previously unreported:

BOLTON: I said, Nino, congratulations, you’ve been confirmed! Congratulations! Oh, that’s great, he said. That’s great. I said, Yeah, that’s fantastic. The vote was ninety-eight to nothing. And I’m still going, It’s great, it’s fantastic. There’s silence on the other end of the phone. And he said: Who were the two who didn’t vote? And I said, Oh, it was Goldwater and Garn. But it’s fantastic, you were confirmed unanimously. And there’s another long pause, and he said: Do you mean to tell me we didn’t get Goldwater and Garn? And I said finally—at this point, I was a little irritated. Having just gone through Rehnquist with a much closer vote, I thought ninety-eight to nothing looked pretty good. I said, Garn is in the hospital.… Barry we just couldn’t find. Nino, concentrate: We, we just won ninety-eight to nothing. He said, Yeah, you’re right. That’s great. It’s great. He was happy and he left and he went back to his dinner. But that—that was the conversation.

ROSEN: What did you take away from that exchange?

BOLTON: Nino never missed a trick, that he wanted a hundred to nothing.⁴

This uncompromising commitment to perfection was a hallmark of the judge’s since his earliest days. A reporter who profiled Scalia in November 1985, eight months before his nomination to the Supreme Court, wrote: Scalia is seen as a man who has excelled at everything he has tried.

He was gifted, Scalia’s father said. He was good at anything he did.

When Christ said, ‘Be ye perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect,’ Justice Scalia once said, I think he meant perfect in all things, including that very important thing, the practice of one’s life work.⁵

---

Antonin Scalia was born at Mercer Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, on March 11, 1936, the only child of Salvatore Eugene Scalia, an Italian immigrant, and Catherine Panaro Scalia, whose parents had also emigrated from Italy. The future justice was, by his very existence, a miracle: the only child produced by a generation that extended, on both sides, Scalias and Panaros, to a total of nine brothers and sisters.

The boy, named after his grandfather, Antonino Scalia, a mechanical engineer in the sulfur mines of Italy, was called Nino. Antonin was a made-up name, the justice’s son Gene told me. My grandfather decided to Americanize his name; he didn’t want him to have such an Italian name.

Nino was instantly doted upon and endlessly scrutinized by his parents and a large rotating cast of aunts and uncles. Spoiled rotten, he would say. There’s a reason why I am the way I am.

It’s probably a lot easier to raise an only child with high expectations. He always feels he’s the center of the universe and has a good deal of security. I think it must be harder to be with brothers and sisters competing for parental attention. That was never an issue in my life. I was the apple of my parents’ eye.… Which is not to say I wouldn’t have preferred to have brothers and sisters; I very much would have. I have no cousins. My mother was one of five sisters and two brothers… and my father was one of two children. He has a sister and I am the only offspring from that side, too. So I am really the last of the Mohicans.⁶

Scalia’s father, Salvatore Eugene Scalia, was born December 1, 1903, in Sommatino, a province of Caltanissetta, Italy. Salvatore’s mother, Maria, was a seamstress. She and her husband, Antonino, the mine worker, brought Salvatore and his younger sister, Carmela, to America. The family sailed aboard the Duca d’Aosta with nearly 2000 other immigrants, passing through Ellis Island in December 1920. Sam, as the immigration authorities renamed Salvatore, was freshly seventeen and stood, according to immigration documents, four-foot-ten. The family had $400; Sam spoke no English. But he spoke French and Spanish fluently and possessed the four traits the justice later identified as characteristic of Italian Americans of the era: devout Catholicism; love of family; a capacity for hard work; and a taste for the simple physical pleasures of food, wine, and song.⁷

In the existing biographical literature, the reason behind the Scalia family’s emigration—why they set out for America when they did—is nowhere addressed. Yet the justice’s eldest son, Eugene Scalia, named after his grandfather and an accomplished attorney who served as secretary of labor, recalled Justice Scalia’s citing a number of motivations for the move. The family was going anyway, Gene told me, but I remember being told that my grandfather [Sam] was a troublemaker in Sicily, a socialist agitator when he was young, and that actually he might have even spent a night or two in jail.… One of the many good reasons for my grandfather to get out of Sicily was that he was getting in trouble.

Fortunately for Sam, no trace of his socialist fervor followed him to America; at least no such information made it into the secret files of J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime FBI director who compiled data on all suspected socialists in the United States. In later years, when the Scalias’ only child, Nino, would undergo four FBI background checks in fourteen years, the bureau would search data banks for his parents and dispatch agents to Trenton to interview their neighbors. The searches produced no results, and the agents found three families who attested that the Scalias are dedicated, loyal Americans… an elderly quiet couple, of excellent reputation.⁸

Pasquale and Maria Panaro, the justice’s maternal grandparents, had emigrated earlier from Naples. They married in New York in 1904 before moving to Trenton, New Jersey. The state capital was then a thriving industrial town. At the time of the justice’s birth, it was home to 25,000 Italian Americans, more than 20 percent of the city’s population.⁹

Pasquale was a tailor and bon vivant, an ebullient reveler active in L’Ordine Figli d’Italia. Despite his broken English, he loved to watch a lawyer friend perform at the local courthouse. Maria, described by Scalia’s first biographer, Joan Biskupic, as a short, sturdy woman who loved hats and carried herself with poise, presided over a modest two-story home that also served, on occasion, as a saloon. The eldest of the Panaros’ seven children, born in Little Italy, New York, on November 7, 1905, was Catherine: mother-to-be of the justice. The few photographs of her reveal, as Biskupic wrote, a serious and pretty girl who kept her dark hair pinned off her face. From a young age, she played the piano. Newspaper articles from the years before World War I, unmentioned by previous Scalia biographers, reported steadily on the progress of the precocious girl, alternately identified as Catherine and Katie: her performance, at age eight, of How Santa Comes in the Monument School Christmas program; her repeat appearances, the following year, on the honors list.¹⁰

Four sisters and two brothers would follow, including Grace, developmentally disabled, scarcely capable of speech, who spent six decades in the Panaros’ care. Vincent Panaro, Nino’s uncle, became a lawyer and ultimately a local mayor and state assemblyman (as a Democrat). The youngest Panaro child, nicknamed Babe, was Lenora, thirteen at Nino’s birth and the aunt who most frequently looked after him.¹¹

On June 26, 1926, five and a half years after the Scalia family emigrated from Italy, Salvatore entered the New Jersey Court of Common Pleas and became, on his receipt of Certificate No. 2290037M, a naturalized American citizen. His father, Antonino, also became a U.S. citizen. These were landmarks on the family’s journey to the American Dream. Assimilation was not resented; to the contrary, immigrants saw it as essential. It should be noted, the FBI would later record in its background check for Nino’s nomination to the federal bench, that the applicant’s father came into this country with the name Salvatore Scalia but was naturalized as Samuel Eugene Scalia.¹²

Possessed of what his son once described as a nice tenor voice, Salvatore enrolled (as Samuel Scalia) in the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, for the 1926–27 academic year. Family lore records that illness forced him to abandon singing, but he passed on to little Nino a lifelong love of opera, along with a sizable collection of sheet music, and taught the boy to play piano. Sam’s costliest purchase indulged his love for language: he bought, and briefly ran, an Italian-language newspaper in Scranton, Pennsylvania, named Il Minatore (The Miner). By 1931, Sam had earned not only his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers but also a master’s degree and doctorate in romance languages from Columbia University.¹³

Sam married Catherine, a first-generation Italian American who was teaching elementary school in Trenton, in August 1929. In the early days the couple lived with Catherine’s family. Five years into the marriage, Sam, then a teaching assistant at Columbia, secured a study fellowship that took the couple to Rome and Florence; it was in Italy, in the summer of 1935, that they conceived their only child. By 1939, when Nino turned three, Sam joined the faculty of Brooklyn College. His professorship in romance languages employed him—with only one day of recorded absence—until his retirement in 1969. He was a great American success story in his own right, said Gene Scalia. What he did with his life and career—in a certain way it’s even more impressive than what my father did. The justice agreed:

I am sometimes regarded as the son of an immigrant [who] made it to the Supreme Court; what a guy. But in fact… I am not the member of my family who made the family fortune, so to speak. It was really my father.… His father was not illiterate, but [was] essentially a blue-collar worker. And my father, just by dint of his own brains and effort became a doctor of philosophy and professor of romance languages. So, you know, I [was] sort of riding on his accomplishment, and what he wanted and obtained for his child: a good education.¹⁴

My father, Justice Scalia said on another occasion, was committed to the life of the mind—much more of an intellectual than I ever was. Into the twenty-first century, former students from Brooklyn College would approach the justice to say what a terrific teacher his father had been, how he had affected their lives. Yet Sam’s accomplishments came at a cost to those around him, paid in time and mood. As my mother described it, the justice said, he always had a book in front of his face.¹⁵

A classmate of Scalia’s who visited the home recalled Sam as strong willed, with strong opinions. Visitors were instructed that Dante’s Inferno must only be read in Italian. The father spoke with a heavy accent, but he wanted to be completely American, a neighbor recalled. Yes, he was severe, the justice said. He was demanding. Asked once what kind of father Antonin Scalia had been, one of the justice’s sons said that he had been stern and "as needed, the disciplinarian, but not mean or forbidding in the way that I think his father probably was.… [Sam] did not have the sunny side to his personality that my Dad did."

If Nino came home with an A, his father would inquire, with a frown, why it wasn’t an A+. All it took was a look, a raise of the eyebrow, a return to the foreign-language book beneath his nose, for Sam to convey his disappointment. Indeed, Scalia told Biskupic he thought he had disappointed his father: I wasn’t all that I could have been. The justice would term it the shame of my life that, despite a classical education that included six years of Latin and five of Greek, he never learned Italian as his father wished.

Even after Scalia ascended to the federal bench, he would send his published opinions to Sam, only to see them returned, marked up with edits.

Letters from grandchildren got the same working-over. The youngest, Meg Scalia Bryce, remembered her grandfather as incredibly critical of her father. My dad used to read the comics every night before dinner, she told me.

He’d stand at the kitchen counter and read the comics. After getting back from work, he’d kind of unwind before sitting down to dinner. They’d call them the funny pages—and my grandfather would say, like, Look at you—what kind of man reads the funny pages? He said something like that, just criticizing my dad for reading the comics. At this point, he was already on the [appellate] court.… So my grandfather was hard. He was difficult. And from what I understand from others, my grandmother was softer and sweeter.

Father Paul Scalia, another of the justice’s sons, recalled that when he was a boy, the elderly Sam could display kindliness, as when he taught the lad how to twirl pasta with a fork and spoon, a distinctly Sicilian way. But Father Scalia also sensed Sam had been pretty demanding, pretty strict with little Nino. After the old man died, teenaged Paul accompanied his father to Sam’s house to dispose of his effects. In the basement, the future priest was staggered by the enormous library, divided not by subject but by language: Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and English. That sort of sets a tone, I think, in the family, Father Scalia said, the seriousness of his work… this intellectual labor.

Another factor beyond dour perfectionism also contributed to the hard time the old man gave his son, the big-shot federal judge: Sam didn’t like his son’s politics. He was a liberal man, a neighbor from Queens recalled in 1986. The son turned out conservative, but the father wasn’t.¹⁶

---

It was Nino’s mother, a kinder, gentler, and sweeter personality, who was more active in the boy’s life. She was the prototypical Italian mother, Scalia wrote. In 2008, C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, a longtime friend, asked the justice to describe Catherine L. Scalia.

SCALIA: That was my mother, who I only realized later devoted her life to making sure I did the right things, hung out with the right people, joined the right organizations.

LAMB: What do you mean by right?

SCALIA: I mean associated with young people that would not get me into trouble but rather would make me a better person.

LAMB: How did she know that?

SCALIA: Well, she made it her job to know who I was hanging out with. We’d have them over to my house, and she was a den mother for the Cub Scouts, things of that sort. She was a teacher, a grammar school teacher, and a very good one. When they died, I got some of the letters that she had kept [from] parents of children that she had taught.¹⁷

The little family of three was close-knit. They were my only parents, Scalia would joke. Though dour by nature, Sam had many admirable qualities. These included his deep Catholic faith and what his son described as an almost quaint, Old World courtliness.… He spoke softly and almost deferentially, listened attentively, and took an interest (as a good man should) in the lives and the doings of his friends. A good man: moral character was king in Sam’s eyes, prized more than intellect or wealth. Son, he would tell Nino, brains are like muscles. You can rent them by the hour. The only thing that’s not for sale is character.¹⁸

Above all, Salvatore’s life and work represented the essence, the full power, of the American Dream, and the younger Scalia internalized this early on; indeed, it later informed the justice’s jurisprudence. The son’s accomplishments were made possible by the father’s striving and assimilation—hallmarks of the dream that weighed most heavily on Justice Scalia’s contemplation of one particular area of law: affirmative action.

My father came to this country when he was a teenager, Scalia wrote in 1979, when he was still a professor. Not only had he never profited from the sweat of any black man’s brow, I don’t think he had ever seen a black man.

I owe no man anything, nor he me, because of the blood that flows in our veins.… This is not to say that I have no obligation to my fellow citizens who are black. I assuredly do—not because of their race or because of any special debt that my bloodline owes to theirs, but because they have (many of them) special needs, and they are (all of them) my countrymen and (as I believe) my brothers. This means that I am entirely in favor of according the poor inner-city child, who happens to be black, advantages and preferences not given to my own children because they don’t need them. But I am not willing to prefer the son of a prosperous and well-educated black doctor or lawyer—solely because of his race—to the son of a recent refugee from Eastern Europe who is working as a manual laborer to get his family ahead.

Moreover, Scalia sensed hypocrisy in those justices quickest to dabble in the social engineering of affirmative action, with its elaborately constructed racial quota systems. I certainly felt that the Lewis Powells of the world were not going to bear the burden they were creating, Scalia told Biskupic. It wasn’t their kids. It was the Polish factory worker’s kid who was going to be out of a job.¹⁹

Or the Italian immigrant’s kid.

---

At the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, a Gothic fortress of a parish erected on the site of the Battle of Trenton in the Revolutionary War, little Nino was baptized.

He asked me such questions! recalled his Aunt Eva. He’d ask about the universe, about everything.… He floored me many times. He was bull-headed, said his Aunt Lenora. "We call it in Italian a capo tosta.… He knew what he wanted—even when he was little. A neighbor recalled that the boy knew his place… never had a word out of turn."²⁰

The closeness of the Italian family is legendary, Scalia said later. The time he spent with his extended family, Lenora in particular, made a lifelong impression. Invited to lunch by a group of conservative Capitol Hill staffers in the early 1990s, the justice lectured them in the Senate Dining Room, the host recalled, not on the law but on the value of extended family.

He told very important stories about the impact of feeling a sense of confidence… that came from his family… that this was very instrumental [in attaining] all the things that he wanted in his own life. And he stressed that those began for him as a boy with his extended family, that these people were not just figures in his past.… He recognized both from his own Catholicism and just in the formation of his worldview how important these people were, but specifically this aunt [Lenora].… He spent at least a quarter of the luncheon speaking about his aunt.²¹

For two years, Scalia and his mother remained in the Panaros’ home in Trenton while Sam, ensconced at Brooklyn College, took up residence in the Elmhurst section of Queens and visited them on weekends. In 1941, when Nino turned five, he and Catherine moved to Elmhurst to join Sam. The father had purchased a two-story brick row house with a small awning and front garden at 48-22 O’Connell Court, located on an L-shaped street named for the real estate developer who had built the homes the year before. The lot measured twenty-three by ninety-four; the front yard was too small for child’s play. Still, it was theirs: for the first time, the Scalias lived in their own home (Sam’s parents, Antonino and Maria, had earlier moved to Queens to be near Sam’s sister, Carmela, and her family).

Justice Scalia told Biskupic, without elaboration, that he hated Trenton; Queens he loved. It was a wonderful place, he would recall seventy years later. There were Greeks… Irish, German, Jewish, Italian… It was the face of New York City. Unfortunately, New York’s school system required little Nino to complete kindergarten a second time. I’m a two-time loser in kindergarten, the justice later quipped. First grade brought him to the Lower School of Villa Victoria Academy, a private academy in Ewing Township founded by the Religious Teachers Filippini, a Catholic institute.²²

When he looked back on his 1940s youth in Queens, which he did frequently, Scalia marveled at how differently children were being raised in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, with play dates and soccer schedules. "Most of the sports I did were in the neighborhood—and they were not organized! he would say. My mother didn’t drive me anywhere—we didn’t have a car!" Entertainment, to little Nino, was watching the family that had a car, a Packard, wash the thing on weekends. She would say, ‘Go out and play,’ and you had to find a game somewhere.

So long as you did your homework, kept your grades up, stayed out of trouble—and in my case practiced the piano, which was a form of self-discipline and penance—parents did not care how you spent your leisure time. Much less did they feel any obligation to arrange it for you.… Family life did not revolve about the child’s extracurricular activities.… Kids were left pretty much to decide for themselves what games they would play.… Nobody worried about kids carrying knives.… Nobody ever heard of a bicycle helmet.… You would go over to the field on a Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon and choose up sides. No adult supervision. No conceivable financial liability.²³

Baseball, basketball, football, roller hockey, marbles, pen-knife games, War, Ringolevio, and the quintessential game of my youth, stickball: Nino played them all con vigore in the streets, schoolyards, and gymnasia of New York, morning to night on the weekends. His rat pack realized they could play basketball at night if they attached the hoop to the telephone pole, already equipped with a street lamp. He was a little bit short, a little stocky, a classmate recalled when asked about Scalia’s athleticism. He liked to fool around with the basketball… to be one of the guys, somehow. He wasn’t, physically. Nino rooted for the Yankees of DiMaggio and Rizzuto, and his beloved Popeye.

The earliest schooling had been in Trenton but Scalia’s real education, he always said, came in New York: We learned in Queens that the world ain’t always fair. Scalia’s Boy Scout Troop 17 gathered at the First Methodist Church at 91st Place and 50th Avenue—reportedly because the local Catholic pastor, opposed to the admission of Protestants and Jews to his church, refused to host Scout meetings. I knew he was going to be an intellectual, Scalia’s troop leader recalled, because he wasn’t a tree climber.

In sixth grade, a roly-poly, jovial, Italian-American kid, as one neighbor remembered him, Nino developed his first unrequited crush, on a tall brunette named Theresa. (She’s good-looking, the justice mused, reviewing the class photo decades later. I always had good taste.) In the neighborhood’s abundant vacant lots, the boys lit fires and camped out. Winters brought sledding down a cemetery slope called Dead Man’s Hill; summers flew by at Boy Scouts and in rabbit hunts with his grandfather, Antonino, out in the country: Woodbury, Long Island. It was, the justice said, a wonderful way to grow up.²⁴

It never dawned on Nino that he, or the class cut-up, Hugh McGee, belonged to ethnic groups; but it did strike him that being a Catholic, or an observant one, set him apart. Even in areas with large Catholic populations, he told a prayer breakfast in 1992, it was a little bit strange to be a Catholic. That Catholic students were discharged from P.S. 13 an hour early every Wednesday, the release time set aside for religious instruction, was but one manifestation of this apartness. Nino’s devout, disciplined parents inculcated in him that Christ makes some special demands upon Catholics, such as eating fish on Fridays, when other kids enjoyed hot dogs, that occasionally require us to be out of step.

Whenever I wanted to go to a certain movie, or a certain place, that my parents disapproved of, I would say, of course, as children always do, that everybody else was going. My parents’ invariable and unanswerable response was: You’re not everybody else. It is enormously important, I think, for Christians to learn early and remember long that lesson of differentness; to recognize that what is perfectly lawful, and perfectly permissible, for everyone else—even our very close non-Christian friends—is not necessarily lawful and permissible for us.

That Scalia carried these beliefs into adulthood, and impressed them on his own nine children, is evident from the recollection of his youngest, Meg, who said she and her siblings were made to understand they would observe different rules, different standards than other families. You’re not like everybody else, they were told. You’re a Scalia.²⁵

---

Nino graduated from P.S. 13 with straight As.

As a Supreme Court justice he would look back with fondness and admiration for the principal, Lillian Eschenbecker, and the other women who educated him. These memories leapt to mind when he considered gender discrimination. Every cloud has a silver lining, he said. I had really wonderful, accomplished, disciplined women as grade teachers in P.S. 13. Perhaps, maybe the same women today would not be teaching grammar school, they would be on the board, something like that. That was what that particular evil produced.²⁶

His spiritual education also progressed. In the Catholic Church, the sacrament of Confirmation is administered to seal a baptized person with the Holy Spirit, thereby strengthening the young man’s service to the Body of Christ. For his Confirmation name, Nino chose Gregory, after the patron saint of musicians, students, and teachers.

This would lead to Scalia’s being misidentified for the rest of his life as Antonin Gregory Scalia, or Antonin G. Scalia. Nowhere are Scalia’s views on the matter set forth more explicitly than in his FBI files, declassified after his death. Interviewed by agents of the Washington Field Office in April 1982 as part of the vetting process for his nomination to the Court of Appeals, Scalia stated, "He has no middle name, however, at the time of his confirmation in the Catholic Church, he selected the confirmation name of ‘Gregory.’ He has never otherwise used this name, although, it may appear on some school records. He does not considered [sic] it to be part of his legal name."²⁷

It was in Nino’s Catholic education that he encountered, for the first time, a setback: he failed the entrance exam for Regis, the prestigious Catholic high school in Manhattan he was eyeing. A classmate from this period, who had also failed the Regis exam, told me the sting from this episode, this tiny mark of imperfection, stayed with Scalia for years: He was loathe to admit that. About this lapse in his studious son, however, Scalia’s unforgiving father, Sam, proved uncharacteristically gentle; maybe it was best, he allowed, if Nino attended a Catholic school with a more diverse student body.²⁸

Under a full scholarship, Nino enrolled at St. Francis Xavier High School on Manhattan’s West 16th Street. Xavier was a unique hybrid: a Jesuit-run Catholic school that was also a military academy, in which all students, or cadets, wore dress-blue uniforms, saluted upperclassmen and robed faculty, participated in junior ROTC training known as the Regiment, practiced rifle marksmanship, and marched in drills and parades. (Nino commuted twice daily on the subway, rifle slung over his shoulder.) The cadets’ classical education began with morning prayers and included courses in Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and theology. Xavier High School was the most formative institution in my life, Scalia said upon his return to the school in 2011. The Regiment’s most important legacy, of course, was not pageantry; it was discipline, and duty, and sacrifice.²⁹

On his first day at Xavier, in September 1949, Nino navigated a new and tougher environment. A survey of the classroom revealed, as he later put it, a substantially Irish world, starting with his homeroom teacher, Father Thomas Matthews, a crusty no-nonsense New England Jesuit from the era when Jesuits were allowed to be crusty and no-nonsense. Matthews opened the class with roll call. When the white-haired, bushy-browed, bespectacled Irishman came to Antonin, he stumbled and asked Nino in a sharp Boston brogue, Who’s your patron saint?³⁰

Father Robert A. Connor, one of the last surviving graduates from Scalia’s class at Xavier, recalled another incident. Scalia was maybe three seats behind me.… Tom Matthews was going through the names of us in the classroom… and he got to Scalia and he says, ‘Goombah!’ ³¹

Father Matthews was a wonderful man, of considerable influence on me, Scalia said. The venerable Jesuit delivered another zinger that stayed with Scalia forever. The class was reading Hamlet when a smart aleck piped up with sophomoric criticisms. Matthews looked down at the young man and, summoning the brogue, admonished him: Mistah, when you read Shakespeah, Shakespeah’s not on trial; you ah.³²

Reverence for text! Matthews’s comment was not about the passive business of watching a play but about the active engagement inherent in reading a text; the admonition registered with young Nino. He would forever refer to it as the Shakespeare Principle: a solemn reminder that certain texts, unlike their readers, are eternally enduring, immutable, inviolable. Nino was imbibing the same strong stuff at home. An indelible image from his youth in Queens was the sight of his father, Salvatore Eugene, hunched over a desk in the basement, toiling over his work, surrounded by foreign-language books: the almighty texts.

In his master’s thesis, a work of literary criticism focused on Giosuè Carducci, the Italian poet and Nobel laureate, Sam pressed his theory of literalness in translation. Literalness is, for us, one of the chief merits of a translation, Sam wrote. The translator’s highest calling, he argued, was reproducing the lyric vision of a poet… to transfer bodily the image from one language into another without sacrifice of glow or warmth, and not attempt to reconstruct it with dictionary in hand. Or as he put it elsewhere: A poem is a poem, not this plus that. An Italian aphorism the Scalias passed down was: traduttore, traditore, the translator is a traitor.³³

These cues that Nino took from Salvatore and Father Matthews, at home and in school, only reinforced what the young man was absorbing in the Catholic Church. Like all major religions, Catholicism, particularly before the Second Vatican Council, was all about sacred texts: the New Testament, the Old Testament, the catechisms, papal bulls, edicts.… The power of the liturgy rested on the church’s fidelity, across the millennia, to sacred rituals developed from foundational texts. God’s word was enduring, immutable, inviolable—particularly in Latin. As Father Paul Scalia noted in his homily for his father’s funeral in 2016: Scripture says Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.³⁴

Given all the textualist fervor in Scalia’s early life, it is easy to see how he became driven, made it his life’s mission, to restore textualism to prominence in American jurisprudence: the belief that judges, in the business of interpreting the meaning of statutes, should be guided chiefly by fidelity to the text of the law, not expand the meaning beyond what the law was widely understood to have meant at enactment. If you’re growing up in the home of a man who teaches language for a living, said Father Scalia, you’re not going to monkey with the translation quite as much.

But the justice often bristled at the diligent efforts by reporters and scholars to pinpoint the origins of his textualism, to identify the early life experience, or set of experiences, that spawned his unswerving fealty to text. In an oral history he conducted with attorney Judith Richards Hope in Supreme Court chambers in December 1992—unsealed in 2018, its contents reported here for the first time—Justice Scalia was reluctant to ascribe to the Jesuits any particular influence on his legal philosophy.

HOPE: Do you think that the Jesuit training and the classical training had any impact on the way you approach statutory analysis and interpretation?

JUSTICE SCALIA: I don’t