A Long and Winding Odyssey

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His outlook was obviously affected by his wife's deteriorating health. In early 1971, surgeons had operated on Claire Bork, then only 41, and pronounced her hopelessly ill with cancer. They told Bork she had only six months to live and urged him to withhold the news from her. Instead, the Borks retained new doctors and Claire began a prolonged campaign to beat the disease through operations and chemotherapy. Though she was in remission for much of a decade, the battle finally ended in 1980 when the cancer reached her lungs. "She was determined to fight it until her children were grown and her job was done," says her eldest son, Robert Jr. Her death devastated Bork. "Their marriage was more than a partnership. She was an integral part of his personality," says the younger Bork. "Without her he was a colder, unhappy person." Alone in his big New Haven house with his memories, Bork decided in 1981 on a major change, a return to Washington and corporate law practice.

Within months after Bork had acquired a $400,000-a-year partnership with his old Chicago firm and a $500,000 house, Attorney General William French Smith called offering Bork a spot on the D.C. Court of Appeals. The unspoken understanding was that a good performance would merit Bork top consideration for any Supreme Court vacancy.

As an appeals court judge, Bork got involved in a number of controversies. His disdain for the constitutional right to privacy was clear in a strongly worded Bork opinion ruling against a Navy enlistee discharged for homosexual conduct in the barracks. Bork was criticized by more liberal colleagues on the court for what they described as his result oriented tactics. In their view he bent legal principles to achieve the conservative outcome that he reached in almost every case.

For the most part, however, Bork found life on the D.C. Appeals Court, with its heavy diet of technical regulatory issues, unexciting. When his colleague and friend Antonin Scalia was named to fill a 1986 Supreme Court vacancy, Bork was gracious publicly but privately irritated, fearing that Reagan would leave office before another seat opened up. Last spring, shortly before he was nominated to replace Lewis Powell, Bork decided not to hire clerks for the 1988 term, opening the way for his resignation at the end of Reagan's term.

In the meantime, Bork's personal life had brightened. After a period of loneliness in Washington, he met and soon married Mary Ellen Pohl, a former Sacred Heart nun working for a conservative think tank. "He was raised a Protestant, married a Jew and then a Catholic," notes Ward Bowman, a former Yale law professor. "It's pretty hard to say he's bigoted." Not a member of a church, Bork describes himself as a "generic Protestant."