Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality (62 page)

“Good point,” he said Plouffe told him
:
Author interview with Ken Mehlman, May 18, 2012.

Then everyone scrambled
:
Author interview with Kristina Schake, October 10, 2013.

“He was very much at peace”
:
Author interview with David Axelrod, August 9, 2013.

“How can we ring the bipartisan bell”
:
Author interview with Chad Griffin, May 14, 2012.

When Mehlman first came out
:
Author interview with Ken Mehlman, September 9, 2012.

“If you are one of those who care”
:
Adam Nagourney, “A Watershed Move, Both Risky and Inevitable,”
New York Times,
May 10, 2012, A1.

CHAPTER 31: CHAD AND THE CASE ENTER A NEW PHASE

Olson had negotiated
:
AFER contract with Gibson Dunn.

That was still deeply discounted
:
Author interview with Bruce Cohen, March 2012.

“Hiring Chad was like”
:
Author interview with Richard Socarides, December 19, 2012.

“She said, ‘I was listening to a talk show’”
:
Author interview with Sandy Stier, December 8, 2011.

“Well, that’s okay”
:
Author interview with Elliott Perry, August 25, 2012.

“It just crushed me”
:
Author interview with Tom Stier, August 26, 2013.

“My mom was mine”
:
Author interview with Frank Stier, January 20, 2013.

“You wonder what people are going to say”
:
Author interview with Vaughn Walker, November 21, 2012.

“I told him he shouldn’t have given up”
:
Author interview with Vaughn Walker, November 21, 2012.

CHAPTER 32: A STAR WITNESS’S MEA CULPA

“I thought it was pretty lousy”
:
Author interview with Chuck Cooper, June 1, 2013.

“Practically and strategically”
:
Author interviews with Chuck Cooper, June 1, 2013, and November 22, 2013.

“It’s not at all clear”
:
Author interview with Chuck Cooper, June 19, 2013.

“Getting to know them personally”
:
Author interview with David Blankenhorn, October 4, 2012.

“I believe I owe”
:
Benedict Carey, “Psychiatry Giant Sorry for Backing Gay ‘Cure,’”
New York Times,
May 18, 2012, A1.

“Any case has its trying elements”
:
Author interview with Chuck Cooper, May 8, 2013.

“I still think that we were entitled to know”
:
Author interview with Chuck Cooper, December 10, 2013.

CHAPTER 33: CHAD’S BIG TEST

“Ellen DeGeneres has done more”
:
Author interviews with Terry Stewart and other lawyers on the call.

At a recent meeting
:
Author interviews with participants.

Polling showed that support
:
May 11, 2012, memo from Jan R. van Lohuizen, pollster for President Bush, to Project Right Side, http://www.projectrightside.com/contentimages/Same_Sex_Marriage_Memo_5.11.20121.pdf.

The Pew Research Center would soon release data
:
Pew Research Center poll, March 13–17, 2013.

“This is the most significant”
:
Author interview with Alex Lundry, December 2013.

causing some church leaders
:
Author interview with Barrett Duke, director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, December 11, 2013.

Olson’s legal briefs
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, November 7, 2012.

Maine looked solid
:
Author interview with Marc Solomon, January 24, 2012.

By election day
:
Author interview with Marc Solomon, January 24, 2012.

But over lunch earlier that day
:
Author interview with Hilary Rosen, November 8, 2012.

“It was very challenging”
:
Author interview with Maggie Gallagher, November 6, 2012.

Most of the National Organization for Marriage’s budget
:
National Organization for Marriage Form 990 tax returns.

“Wake me up if anything changes”
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, November 7, 2012.

“Society has just changed”
:
Author interview with Dan Pfeiffer, November 14, 2012.

Indeed, it was a net positive
:
Author interview with Ralph Reed, November 22, 2012.

CHAPTER 34: “DON’T THEY HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO ACT?”

At 9:30
A.M.
on the morning of December 7, 2012
:
Author interview with Patricia McCabe Estrada, spokeswoman for the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the wake of the
Brown
decision
:
Peter Wallenstein,
Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law —an American History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 182.

Still, the issue was judicial nitroglycerin
:
Pew Research Center, May 1, 2012, poll on Supreme Court Favorability.

Before he stepped down from the bench
:
Walter Dellinger, “Souter: A Last Lecture on Gay Marriage,”
Slate
,
June 29, 2009, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_breakfast_table/features/2009/the_supreme_court_breakfast_table/souter_a_last_lecture_on_gay_marriage.html.

“This is why I believe in God”
:
Author interview with Edie Windsor and Robbie Kaplan, February 21, 2013.

In San Francisco, all four boys
:
Author interview with Tim McGinnis, November 22, 2012.

Whenever Olson had an argument
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, December 21, 2012.

Olson told Boies
:
Author interview with David Boies, October 5, 2012.

“I don’t have the faintest idea”
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, November 7, 2012.

Entire treatises have been written
:
Author interviews with more than a half dozen former Kennedy clerks, all of whom asked for anonymity in order to speak candidly.

“We must never lose sight”
:
Richard C. Reuben, “Man in the Middle,”
California Lawyer
, October 1992, 35.

“It was a very beautiful statement”
:
Justice Anthony Kennedy, interview by Bryan A. Garner, 2006–7,
LawProse,
http://www.lawprose.org/interviews/supreme-court.php?vid=kennedy_part_1&vidtitle=Associate_Justice_Anthony_Kennedy_Part_1.

“Sometimes you don’t know if you’re Caesar”
:
Richard C. Reuben, “Man in the Middle,”
California Lawyer,
October 1992 issue.

“The only person who should want this case”
:
Author interview with Paul Cappuccio, November 8, 2012.

In a conference room at Robbie Kaplan’s firm
:
Author interview with Edie Windsor and Robbie Kaplan, February 21, 2013.

“Yes!” he thought
:
Author interview with Enrique Monagas, December 7, 2012.

You won, the friend e-mailed
:
Author interviews with Vaughn R. Walker, November 21, 2012, and December 23, 2012.

“There’s only one Supreme Court”
:
Author interview with Bruce Cohen, December 17, 2012.

Nearby, the Reiners were in a theater
:
Author interview with Rob and Michele Reiner, December 8, 2012.

“David,” she said, hugging him
:
Author interview with Dawn Schneider, December 11, 2012, based on her notes.

Boies was less trusting
:
Author interview with Mary Boies, October 14, 2012.

She worried aloud
:
Author interviews with Dawn Schneider, December 11, 2012, and David Boies, March 2, 2013.

When the call was opened
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, December 21, 2012.

“Now,” Boutrous said
:
Author interviews with Ted Boutrous, December 17, 2012, and Ted Olson, December 21, 2012.

CHAPTER 35: SELMA TO STONEWALL

All of those voices were important
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, January 31, 2013.

“It adds institutional impetus and imprimatur”
:
Author interview with Amir Tayrani, February 8, 2013.

Conversely, if the administration failed
:
Author interview with David Boies, March 23, 2013.

What interest, asked one of the lawyers
:
The account of the January 18, 2013, meeting with the solicitor general is based on author interviews with Justice Department officials, Ted Olson, Terry Stewart, and David Boies.

“This,” participants recall
:
Author interview with Justice Department participants, confirmed by Terry Stewart.

Boies, who was sitting with his wife
:
Author interview with David Boies, March 2, 2013.

“On 14 different occasions”
:
Excerpt from an e-mail sent by Ken Mehlman to David Plouffe on January 17, 2013.

“In the contemporary challenge”
:
Author interview with Ken Mehlman, April 16, 2013.

Stress the law
:
Author interview with Kristina Schake, March 26, 2013.

“It’s already being used against us”
:
Author interviews with David Boies, March 2, 2013, and Chad Griffin, February 6, 2013.

“It’s awkward”
:
Author interview with Ted Olson, January 31, 2013.

“And there’s no case”
:
Author interview with David Boies, March 2, 2012, and Chad Griffin, February 6, 2013.

“We said it wouldn’t be like
Brown v. Board of Education”
:
Author interview with Terry Stewart, January 19, 2013, based on her notes of the meetings.

Either way, as Attorney General Eric Holder later put it
:
Author interview with Eric Holder, August 7, 2013.

Verrilli read Martin Luther King Jr.’s
:
Author interviews with Justice Department officials familiar with Verrilli’s deliberation.

President Eisenhower famously read
:
Philip Elman and Norman Silber, “The Solicitor General’s Office, Justice Frankfurter, and Civil Rights Litigation, 1946–1960: An Oral History,”
Harvard Law Review
100, no. 4 (1987): 817–52.

Anticipating what the justices might do
:
Author interview with Kathryn Ruemmler, December 23, 2013.

Obama had seen firsthand
:
Author interview with Kristina Schake, July 30, 2013.

Jarrett called him next
:
Author interview with Chad Griffin, March 7, 2013.

CHAPTER 36: FRAMING THE ARGUMENTS

“What we are focused on”
:
Author interview with Hilary Rosen, March 14, 2013.

“It feels strangely good”
:
Author interview with Olivia Alair, March 24, 2013.

“Of the two components”
:
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, interview by Bryan A. Garner, 2006–2007,
LawProse
, http://www.lawprose.org/interviews/supreme-court.php?vid=ginsburg_part_1&vidtitle=Associate_Justice_Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg_Part_1.

Good briefs are fast-paced and conversational
:
Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Justice Antonin Scalia, interviews by Bryan A. Garner, 2006–2007,
LawProse,
http://lawprose.org/interviews/supreme-court.php?vid=roberts_part_1&vidtitle=Chief_Justice_John_Roberts_Part_1.

The brief filed by Paul Clement
:
Author interview with Paul Clement, January 4, 2013.

“But he felt strongly”
:
Author interview with Ted Boutrous, February 21, 2013.