Justice Thurgood Marshall was sitting in his chambers, spinning yarns.

 The night before, he had been watching former President Jimmy Carter’s speech to the 1988 Democratic National Convention on TV. "I said to my wife, ‘Babe, he sure looks old,’" Marshall (then 80) recalled with a puckish grin. "And she said, ‘Have you looked in the mirror lately?’

"Every once in a while," added the greatest lawyer of the 20th century, "you have to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, ‘Who do you think you are? You aren’t so special.’"

One of the special things about Thurgood Marshall was that-long after his place in history had been secured-he was the least pretentious of men.

At one Supreme Court conference, he told colleagues a story about a little boy who had asked for his autograph and then handed him eight cards to sign. Why eight? "Because," the boy explained, "eight of yours gets me one of Willie Mays’."

Marshall also had a warm appreciation of people as people, their foibles and their virtues. He consented to talk privately with me a few times over the last few years about the Court and other justices, and on those visits I was always struck by his generous reservoir of good will for people with whom he deeply disagreed and his sheer love of fun. I have culled from my notebooks a few examples that I hope Marshall would not mind my quoting now.

The sometimes startlingly gruff exterior that he showed the public seemed to run about a millimeter deep. "What the hell do you want?" Marshall growled as I arrived for one appointment. Within moments, the growl gave way to his trademark, high-pitched "Hee-hee-hee," as he meandered from salty appraisals of public figures to tales of tangling with Gen. Douglas Mac Arthur in Korea.

Kind Words

He did not conceal his dismay with the Rehnquist Court’s jurisprudence. "This Court has gone to pot, that’s for sure," he said once. And another time he asked, with reference to his upper-class colleagues, "How can you understand poor people if you’ve never known any except as servants?" But he manifested respect for the integrity of the Court and its members, and he had kind personal things to say about nearly every justice we discussed.

Of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who stood in stark opposition to almost every cause that Marshall had fought for, Marshall said 4 1/2 years ago: "He is going to be, if he isn’t already, a damn good chief justice."

I asked him four years ago about Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom I was profiling. He called her a "rock conservative," but then expressed admiration for her intelligence, grit, and decency-and anger about some hostile commentary that had been aimed at O’Connor for a controversial letter she had written to an indiscreet acquaintance, who had made it public. "Her problem is, she’s nice," Marshall said. "She doesn’t want to hurt people’s feelings." With a twinkle of mischief, he added, "But if you cross her, she’ll kick you in the [shins, let’s say] as hard as anybody." Marshall clearly liked that about her.

Of Robert Bork, Marshall told me a little over a year ago: "I thought he got a bum deal. I think he’d have been a credit to this Court." On this and other occasions, he said that Bork had been tarred unfairly as an enemy of black people. While praising Bork’s brilliance, Marshall did add, with a chuckle, that Bork had a problem with antitrust law: "He doesn’t think it exists."

Marshall described as a "travesty" the impact of television cameras on the Bork confirmation hearings in 1987. "They all had their pancake makeup on," he said. "I don’t know what happens when they, put a TV camera in front of you. I think it makes you a different person." This, said Marshall, had turned him against allowing cameras in the Supreme Court, lest justices and lawyers play to them.

A few months after Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the Court in 1988, Marshall observed: "I think he is to the right of Rehnquist. A real nice guy, though- seems an honest, decent guy." Where would Kennedy be on affirmative action? "I think we could touch him on that," said Marshall. "But you’d have to talk to him about it the right way."

Talking to colleagues the right way, with the immense, moral stature he brought to that role, was one of Marshall’s greatest contributions during his Court years. He tugged at their consciences to temper hard legalisms with compassion for the downtrodden. Marshall "knew the anguish of the silenced and gave them a voice," as O’Connor wrote in a tribute after his retirement in 1991. She said that she still found herself "hoping to hear, just once more, another story that would, by and by, perhaps change the way I see the world."

I got a feel for what she was talking about when I asked Marshall a question betraying some skepticism about the value of affirmative-action preferences. "I think we need it," he responded. "Can you tell me you never got any advantage from being white?" I said no. "Well," Marshall said, staring into my eyes, "you owe something."

One story Marshall liked to tell involved a late night of revelry many decades ago at the all-white Gibson Island Club, on the Chesapeake Bay, where his father, William, worked as a steward. Among the celebrants was a Baltimore judge named William Stuart Symington. William Marshall escorted him home, only to be confronted at the door by the judge’s angry wife. "Marshall," she exclaimed, "you’ve been drinking." The steward’s reply: "If you think I’ve teen drinking, wait’ll you see the judge."

I then confessed to William Marshall’s son that the tipsy judge had been my father’s great uncle and that Symington was my middle name. Marshall chuckled at the coincidence. It helped make his point about affirmative action.

Storyteller on the Court

Thurgood Marshall the raconteur was a man whose love of fun and mischief transcended and suffused the historic crusade for racial justice that he had led, and the glory of his great victories, and the lingering bitterness of his disappointments.

Lamenting in late 1991 that "we’re standing still"-and maybe going backward-in redressing the legacy of slavery, Marshall said that Lyndon Johnson, his favorite president, had plans that "would have gotten us over the hump" if he had had a second term. Marshall noted with relish how Johnson had put it: He would "make Abraham Lincoln look like a third-rate hooker.

Marshall told such tales with what his great friend, Justice William Brennan Jr., has called "all the tricks of the storyteller’s art: the fluid voice, the mobile eyebrows, the sidelong glance, the pregnant pause, and the wry smile."

Still, Marshall sometimes disappointed those whose ideal of a great Supreme Court decision was the stirring prose and elegant epigrams of a Holmes or a Brandeis. Marshall’s judicial opinions rarely sang. And in private, his homespun anecdotes, wry one-liners, sometimes profound insights, and ribald commentaries- which would have sent the feminist speech police into a rage-did not (in my experience) lead into philosophical explorations or intellectual razzle-dazzle.

The Lawyer Is Coming

Marshall was no Holmes.’ But then Holmes was no Marshall, either. The stuff of his greatness was of a different character. Marshall was a man of action, simple and direct. His glory years came when he was putting his life on the line in racist towns throughout the South-traveling 50,000 miles a year to help criminal defendants and civil-rights plaintiffs-as a trial lawyer fighting an entrenched system of oppression.

He was run out of towns. He was threatened with death. He had clients pursued by lynch mobs. He was arrested on a bogus drunk-driving charge. And he sensed danger from diverse quarters. "When the Black Muslims were out to get me," Marshall once recounted, a friend brought a present to his home in New York-a gift-wrapped gun, with "a permit and everything." Marshall said that his wife made him get rid of it.

Through it all, Marshall had the "heroic imagination" to think he could change the "ruthlessly discriminatory world" in which he had grown up, and "the courage and ability" to do so, in the words of Professor Paul Gewirtz of Yale Law School, a former Marshall clerk (now better known as Zoe Baird’s husband). The culmination, of course, was the brilliantly conceived, multiyear legal assault on state-enforced segregation that led to Marshall’s great victory in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. In more than 20 years as director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later (from 1965 to 1967) as solicitor general, he won 29 of the 32 cases he argued in the Supreme Court.

After joining the Court in 1967, Marshall helped cement his generous vision of freedom and equality into the constitutional framework — and later, helped preserve that vision in dissents. But it was Brennan who contributed the most memorable rhetoric. Marshall knew how he wanted to vote on the issues he cared about and, by and large, left it to his law clerks to devise the detailed legal ratiocinations.

In private, Marshall explained his jurisprudence in simpler terms. Shaking his head about a controversial speech that a colleague had given (“What got into that man?” Marshall wondered), he offered this postscript: “I’m a believer in freedom of speech, better expressed as follows, as my father used to say: ‘Everyone to her own liking, said the old lady as she kissed the cow.” And you cant take taht any way you like it.” I took it to mean, hey, it’s a free country.

He liked to kid Brennan about what Brennan had done to the law of libel in his 1964 opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan. One opportunity for such ribbing was presented by the publication in 1979 of The Brethren, the Bob Woodward-Scott Armstrong book of unflattering, anonymous, often disputed accounts of the Court’s inner workings. Marshall, who hated the books as much as Brennan did, recalled: “We all told him, ‘You can’t sue. You wrote Sullivan.'”

Marshall also enjoyed doing play-by-play commentary for Justice John Marshall Harlan while watching porn flicks. Deciding whether a film was obscene was a tough call for Harlan, who was almost blind in his old age. Marshall remembered with mirth how Harlan once called out, “What are they doing? —?” (Harlan had ended his question with the present participle of an Anglo-Saxon monosyllable the use of which Harlan was later to find constitutionally protected, in Cohen v. California, in 1971.)

For all his passionate devotion to causes, Marshall’s was not the passion of an ideologue; indeed, he manifested deep distrust of them. Referring with a hint of disapproval to a former law clerk given to political radicalism, Marshall said, “I think he’s a little on the left.”

One Marshall-Brennan cause was their losing battle to hold the death penalty unconstitutional. They voted to reverse every death sentence to come before them. But Marshall was no bleeding heart for murderers. Once he mentioned a case in which, as a lawyer, he had saved a vicious killer from execution by raising a due-process objection. “Now I’m sorry I did,” he added ruefully. “You know why? Because after we sent it back for a new trial, New York abolished the death penalty. That man is alive today because of me.”

No such second thoughts found their way into his opinions, and as the Court moved to the right, Marshall doggedly held his ground. Once some visitors had suggested that maybe he should step down to create a vacancy for President Carter to fill, Marshall recalled, and “I told ’em to go to hell.” Early in the Reagan administration, Marshall is reputed to have told clerks, “If I die while that man’s president, just prop me up and keep on voting.”

While Marshall liked people, he didn’t like everybody. He didn’t like Ronald Reagan. He didn’t like MacArthur, who brushed aside (in imperious tones that Marshall mimicked with gusto) Marshall’s complaints about mistreatment of black soldiers in Korea; they were, for example, selectively prosecuted for shunning a suicidal charge up Pork Chop Hill. (When one black soldier got a long prison term after his wife had mailed in a plea for him on some “Commie group’s” stationery, Marshall recalled, he asked the officer in charge, “Why can’t they make his wife serve the time?”)

He didn’t like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, either. Marshall remembered listening in on an extension once when Attorney General Francis Biddle called Roosevelt at Hyde Park about an impending execution. Roosevelt was annoyed. Marshall recalled him saying this: “Francis, what are you calling me about at this time of the morning? I’m just having my morning coffee. . . . You mean that nigger in Virginia? Don’t you ever bother me about that nigger again.” Telling this tale half a century later, Marshall seemed still to be wondering: What kind of a man would talk that way?

Not all great men are good men. Thurgood Marshall was both.