Anthony Kennedy Interview (page: 5 / 6) Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court	Print Interview

You have a reputation as someone who can build bridges, who can build majorities, who can achieve compromise. How important is compromise in this system of ours?

Anthony Kennedy: It's essential.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Sometimes people think compromise means squishy, centrist. It doesn't. The whole idea of a democratic society is that there must be a consensus, and it's a consensus that should be based on rational dialogue. I'm not sure that mass politics with modern communications has yet found a way to have a quiet, rational dialogue. I'm not quite sure we've found the key to that. But, we not only have to do that in our own society, we must not become a hostile, factious, divisive society. We must be a society that has a broad consensus on certain very fundamental values, and we must do that because after we build bridges of understanding with ourselves, we have to build bridges of understanding with the rest of the world. I was talking to some students around the turn of the century. I guess it would be 1999, I think, and some student raised his hand and said, "What are the great issues of the next millennium?" Or the next 100 years. It was something I should have had an answer for, after dinner table conversation or something, in reflection, but I didn't. It caught me by surprise. So, I came up with an answer. I said, "We have the great challenge and the first duty to build bridges of understanding with the world of Islam." And I got more letters from that comment -- it was on C-Span -- than anything I've ever said. Thousands of letters saying, "Why?" People saying -- and it struck me that there's a void there. We're in a struggle in which our security will depend on ideas. The idea of freedom, if accepted by most of the rest of the world, is our best security. And, we must build bridges of understanding to explain the principles of freedom. And, I'm not sure that we're doing a very good job at the moment.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

Are some decisions harder to make than others? What are the most difficult decisions to make?

Anthony Kennedy: I'll tell you first the easiest.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The easiest are the technical ones, the things I was trained to do in law school: how to read a statute, how to apply the rules of evidence. I have a lot of help in the history of the law for that. The most difficult ones are defining the components of human liberty because if you insist that the individual has a particular right, that means the legislature cannot infringe on that right. And, sometimes your own values and your own morals really would disapprove of the conduct that you're ratifying, but you do so because there's an area of morality. But, morality really should have an underpinning of rational choice, and each citizen must make a rational choice to determine what is good and what is evil, and those are hard.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

Do you ever second-guess yourself?

Anthony Kennedy: Not often. You can't be effective if you're always worrying about the last decision. You sometimes wonder how your decisions will play out, but I think the major decisions that I've made are correct over the course of time. We must give reasons for what we do. That's another part of judicial tradition. We will be judged by those reasons.

What do you think are the most important qualities for achievement in your field?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Anthony Kennedy: I think that maybe the qualities for achievement in my field are not different -- much different -- than any others. Number one: Knowing yourself, and being honest about your own failings and your own weakness. Number two: To have an understanding that you have the opportunity to shape the destiny of this country. The framers wanted you to shape the destiny of the country. They didn't want to frame it for you. And you, I think, have to remind yourself that you can achieve something now, but that it's going to be measured in the long term. And I worry about a society in which five percent of the people use 45 percent of the nation's resources. I think that's selfish, not only for the rest of the world, but for our own grandchildren.

I think you are happiest if you find a profession or a business or an occupation where you manipulate symbols that have an intrinsic ethical content. Tom Wolfe wrote a book called Bonfire of the Vanities. It's a parody or a portrayal of New York. No one comes out well in this book. The lawyers never come out very well, newspaper people don't come out very well, clergy doesn't come out well. He has a hero or protagonist, Sherman McCoy, and he's some sort of a businessman. He goes to the beach with his daughter when she's nine or ten. He takes the day off and takes her to the beach for her birthday, and she looks up and she says, "Daddy, what do you do?" He realizes, and the reader realizes, that what he does doesn't make any difference. He manipulates symbols with no ethical content. If you're going to achieve, you have to achieve by manipulating symbols and working with systems that have an ethical content.

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