Mention the name Charles Pickering to anyone but the most committed news junkie, and you're apt to get a blank look or, at best, one of dim recognition. In the era of the 24-hour news cycle aimed at the ever-shortening attention span, the bitter Senate battles over the federal judiciary in which Pickering played so dramatic a part a few years back can seem like ancient history.

But with the publication of A Price Too High, Pickering's insider account of the nearly four years he spent in limbo as a nominee to the federal bench, as Democrats and their press enablers trashed his record and reputation, we're reminded of how extraordinarily much is at stake in the ongoing battle for control of the nation's courts; and how far one side, at least, is willing to go to win the battle. Liberals are no longer even coy about using the courts to achieve social engineering ends that they cannot get through democratic means. "Environmentalists, prison reformers and consumer advocates have learned that what can't be won in the legislature or executive may be achievable in a federal district court where a sympathetic judge sits," liberal Wise Man Joe Califano wrote in a 2001 Washington Post editorial. Conservative Wise Man C. Boyden Gray, quoted in Pickering's book, notes that Nan Aron, president of the liberal activist group Alliance for Justice, unapologetically echoed that view during a debate at the Federalist Society. According to Gray, she said that with Republicans at the time in control of Congress "we have to look to the courts to create new rights that we won't be able to get from the legislature."

It's hard to imagine a more direct challenge to Republicans and their professed beliefs than judicial activism. If recent history is any guide, the issue serves Republicans well at the polls. Yet control of the courts has all but disappeared from the party's radar over the past several years, reflecting the GOP's amazing aimlessness and desertion of principle.

That's why it is well worth revisiting the Pickering case in its ugly but highly illuminating particulars. If ever there was a poster boy for the kind of judge that Senate Democrats and their left-of-center, activist allies will fight to the political death to keep off the bench—the better to install judges who share their social agenda—it comes in the unlikely person of this gracious grandfather of 21. More dramatically than any confirmation battle in memory, the Pickering case demonstrates that liberals will seemingly say anything—and tarnish even the most sterling character—to keep control of the nation's courts.

Of course, cynics see this as merely part of the game. Politics, they'll say, ain't beanbag, and weren't many Clinton nominees to the federal bench similarly done in by Republicans? No, not really—never with the same degree of ruthlessness. Indeed, evidence of the campaign of character assassination perpetrated against Charles Pickering is just a click away: search the terms "Pickering" and "racist" in Nexis and you get more than 600 hits. Under any circumstances, a false racism charge, made for obviously political reasons, would be unacceptable. In Pickering's case, it was worse than that. For in civil rights–era Mississippi, when courage among whites was at a premium, he was nothing short of heroic: the sort of person whom, were he not on the wrong side of the political spectrum, liberals would embrace as a moral exemplar.

On January 7, 2001, Pickering learned during a duck-hunting trip that President Bush had nominated him for a seat on the Fifth Court of Appeals. The prospect of a serious fight was the furthest thing from his mind. After all, when the first President Bush had appointed him a decade earlier to a federal district judgeship, the Senate voted unanimously to confirm. "I suppose it sounds naive now," he tells me on my recent visit to Mississippi, "but based on my record, I really did think I was noncontroversial."

Such a view seemed well-founded. Pickering would soon receive the American Bar Association's highest rating of "well qualified." Plus, the GOP controlled the Senate, if only by a single vote.

But the nomination wasn't formally forwarded to the Senate until May 25—the day after Jim Jeffords quit the Republican Party, handing control of the Senate to the Democrats and altering the political equation.

A genial man, with the mellifluous speech and courtly manner that many of us in the North know more from movies than from real life, Pickering hardens slightly when he speaks of some of his senatorial inquisitors. "They just depersonalize you," he says. "They look at you and don't even see a human being." He pauses. "I must tell you, some of these people have basically the same attitude that the Klan used to have—that their ends are so important that any means are justified to accomplish them."

Among the principal heroes in A Price Too High is Pickering's son, Congressman Charles "Chip" Pickering, Jr., who worked tirelessly on his father's behalf, refusing to lose heart at even the bleakest moments. Among the main villains is Senator Charles Schumer, who, after initially pledging to support the nomination, became one of its most aggressive foes, playing the race card with what often seemed like relish. But the book's true bad guys are the activists from the leading left-liberal special-interest groups, who called the shots while prominent Democrats did their bidding with almost comic alacrity. Of these, Ralph Neas of People for the American Way (PFAW) proved the most damaging. "People for the American Way gave the marching orders," says Pickering. "They wrote the script and everyone else followed."

Liberal activists had every right to oppose Pickering based on his judicial philosophy. An outspoken strict constructionist, he's frankly aghast at the eagerness of so many contemporary judges to find rights in the Constitution impossible to discern with the naked eye. In A Price Too High, he mockingly refers to the liberals' "living Constitution" as the "mystery" Constitution, worrying over the long-term consequences of such judicial power grabs.

Perhaps even more alarming was his history of opposition to abortion, expressed, among other places, at the l976 Republican convention. Pickering chaired the subcommittee that recommended a plank opposing Roe v. Wade as an egregious instance of judicial overreach and supported a constitutional amendment to overturn it. As a former president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention, he acknowledges that his pro-life stance is consistent with his faith and with his conviction that the Bible is the literal word of God.

Pickering says that he'd have been pleased to argue these issues and others on the merits. His strong commitment to a nation of laws and not of men, he asserts, dictates that he rely on precedent and not allow his personal beliefs to influence his behavior on the bench. Indeed, Pickering points out that in the past it was judicial activism from the right that was most damaging to core American values, citing the infamous Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions. In an article for the Federalist Society, Pickering noted that Justice Benjamin R. Curtis quit the Court in the wake of the Dred Scott decision—the only person ever to do so as a matter of principle—and quoted from his famous dissent in the case: "When a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we no longer have a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is according to their own views of what it ought to mean."

As for the matter of his faith—so terrifying to his critics—Pickering says, "Ours is a nation where every citizen is free to believe or not believe. Both my Bible and the Constitution say it's wrong to impose religious beliefs on anyone."

As Byron York observed in National Review, liberal activists faced a dilemma: Pickering, like a number of Bush's other conservative nominees, was "without any obvious professional or personal deficiencies." The solution was a time-tested one: pick through the nominee's voluminous records—to be supplied by the victim himself, in one of the crueler ironies of a broken process—and piece together an attack plan. It hardly mattered that this exhaustive search yielded scant ammunition. From the start, arguably the most damning evidence against Pickering was that he had been born in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era.

To liberal elites, Mississippi remains morally backward, and the very mention of the state's name is almost certain to arouse contempt. Having grown up defining themselves in opposition to the draconian land of Jim Crow, they've never lost their sense of superiority.

Yet the truth is remarkably different. Open-minded visitors to Mississippi will discover that race relations there are better than in the urban north. In every public venue, blacks and whites casually mingle on friendly terms. This is nowhere more true than in Laurel, Pickering's hometown. A community of 18,000, it's still turn-of-the-century picturesque, even after Katrina toppled most of its towering oaks. Walk down Fifth Avenue, past the monument to the Confederate war dead, to City Hall, and Mayor Melvin Mack offers everything you need to know about today's Mississippi. A 58-year-old African-American, he sits in the office once occupied by the man who employed his mother as a domestic for "$1.25 a week, plus all the leftovers and hand-me-downs she could carry," he says. "But the same people who used to call you ‘Boy,' now they call you ‘Mister.' My baby brother, he makes more in a week than my father made in a year."

Or go up to Jackson, and talk to Charles Evers, brother of the martyred civil rights leader Medgar Evers and himself the former head of the state NAACP. "Once I couldn't walk down the street with a white woman," he says, and then points to a photo in the office of the radio station he owns. "See that, now I got a white son-in-law and white grandkids. Just like Medgar and I always said, if you could ever stop the hatred and the racism, this would be the greatest state in the nation. A lot of people just haven't caught on to that yet."

Nevertheless, Dixiephobia, as journalist Deroy Murdoch's dubbed it, is so ingrained among the left-leaning provincials of the political class and media that the decision to go after Pickering on race likely seemed a no-brainer.

Looking at several isolated episodes from Pickering's career unearthed by activist groups and presented out of context, PFAW detected a "troubling pattern" of "racial insensitivity"; Marcia Kuntz of the Alliance for Justice went all the way, declaring Pickering "a throwback to the old, segregated South."

Among the evidence cited to support these claims was a law-review note that Pickering wrote as a first-year law student in l959, suggesting that the language of the Mississippi statute banning interracial marriage be altered if the law "is to serve the purpose that the legislature undoubtedly intended it to serve"; his alleged sympathies as a state legislator for the pro-segregation Mississippi Sovereignty Commission; and, most damning of all, the charge that, in a 1994 case in his district courtroom, he'd shown leniency toward a convicted cross burner.

Initially, Pickering's Bush administration allies deemed these charges so weak that they scarcely took them seriously. In the nearly half-century-old law-school note, Pickering had been making a technical point, rather than commenting on the content of the law; in any case, even some liberals conceded that it was unreasonable to apply contemporary racial sensibilities to the Jim Crow South, especially since at the time overwhelming majorities of both whites and blacks, in the North as well as South, frowned on interracial marriage. On the Sovereignty Commission charge, as a Cox News Service reporter who investigated the matter observed, by the time Pickering voted as a state senator to fund the commission—in 1972 and 1973—"Mississippi had generally dismantled legal segregation, and the agency was trying to retool itself as a general investigative organization."

For shock value alone, the cross-burning charge appeared the most disturbing. But an even passing acquaintance with the specifics of the case proved it entirely baseless. Daniel Swan, the defendant in United States v. Swan, was a 20-year-old with no prior arrests or record of hostility to blacks who claimed to have been drunk when he and two others set a makeshift cross aflame in front of the home of an interracial couple. Evidence established that one of the two others was the ringleader—in fact, had earlier fired a shot into the couple's home—but was only 17, so he was allowed to plead guilty without jail time; as was the third man, 25, on the grounds that he was mentally incompetent. Offered an l8-month sentence by Janet Reno's Justice Department, Swan instead chose to go to trial. Once convicted, he faced a possible seven and a half years. Pickering, who had a history of cutting breaks to young defendants with no priors, both black and white, gave him 27 months and a stern tongue-lashing. He had committed "a despicable act," said the judge. "The type of conduct you exhibited cannot and will not be tolerated." He added: "During the time that you're in prison . . . do some reading on race relations and maintaining good race relations and how that can be done."

The racism charge was dramatically at odds with Pickering's established record. "Blacks around here lived in mortal fear," says Mayor Mack, of the era in which Pickering came of age, the son of a struggling local farmer. "Around here, when the Klan marched in the streets, they didn't wear hoods, because they wanted us to know who they were."

"I remember when the Freedom Riders started coming to Laurel," recalls Pickering, who settled in the town as a young lawyer. "It's almost impossible to describe it, the venom was so great. These thugs would take out their blackjacks and start brutally beating these young African-Americans." The most vicious of all Klan organizations was the White Knights of the KKK, under Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, described by Time as "the most dangerous man ever to wear a white hood." Bowers, who was behind innumerable acts of terror, including the infamous murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, lived in Laurel; in fact, as Mayor Mack remembers, "smack in the middle of a black neighborhood, so he could rub it in our faces. They knew they wouldn't be prosecuted—and if they were, they weren't gonna be convicted."

But when he was elected prosecuting attorney for Jones County in l963, Pickering took Bowers on. "Most white people didn't like the Klan, and they certainly didn't approve of the violence," he says. "But it was easier for them to turn away than deal with the problem." So, working with the FBI's local field agent, he moved to shine a spotlight on the appalling extent of Klan violence. "There'd been more than a hundred acts just locally—beatings, fire bombings, shooting into homes—which came as a real shock to a lot of white people. So we had citizens sign a petition taking a stand against the Klan. The idea was to break their power by energizing the silent majority."

When Bowers was at last arrested in 1967, and put on trial for the murder of local black activist Vernon Dahmer, Pickering took the stand against him, an act that hardly went unnoticed locally. "Back then," as one of Pickering's allies in the nomination fight observed, "you weren't just risking your political career; you were risking your life." In spite of overwhelming evidence of Bowers's guilt, the jury was hung and he was released.

Asked today if he ever feared for his personal safety, Pickering says, "There was just one time that really gave me pause. I had prosecuted a Klansman who'd brutally beaten a local businessman, and a little while after that, I learned that the Klan had put out a ‘number two' on me—that was code for a beating. So for a while, I did take special care when I left my office at night. But, you know, when you're young, you really don't spend much time thinking about those things."

Mississippi's public schools integrated in l969, a process that in many districts across the state led white parents to pull out their children in favor of newly created all-white "academies." "That didn't happen in Laurel," says Chip Pickering, who entered first grade that year, "mainly because my father and a handful of other community leaders believed so strongly in public education." In the end, all four of the Pickering kids graduated from the local public high school, with Chip playing quarterback—"second string," points out his friend, Mayor Mack—on the largely black football team.

Charles Pickering made his first appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2001, and while questioning by the majority Democrats was pointed, it was, he says, "civil." It was at a second hearing, called at the behest of PFAW and other opposition groups out to scuttle the nomination, that "all pretext of civility was gone." Brushing aside the testimony of witnesses who'd closely observed the nominee for decades, including a number of black political figures and lawyers who'd appeared in his courtroom, the Democrats went for the jugular. "Judge Pickering's record reflects a hostility to civil rights and a vision of the Republican Party that reminds Americans of a painful time in our nation's history," offered Ted Kennedy, in remarks suggesting the general tenor of Democratic rhetoric. "Those who lack a strong commitment to our nation's fundamental ideals and principles do not belong in our federal judiciary."

Asked now to rank his inquisitors by viciousness, Pickering doesn't hesitate. "Senator Durbin demagogued the racial issue the hardest, though Senator Schumer ran him a close second. Senator Kennedy had some of the harshest things to say. Senator Leahy was extremely thin-skinned; he can dish it out, but can't take it. But I'd have to say that John Edwards was the worst."

What Pickering's supporters hadn't counted on was Edwards's blossoming presidential aspirations and his calculation, as Pickering puts it, "that as a southerner, he felt he had to earn his spurs with the feminists and other far-left activist groups." Focusing on the specious cross-burning charge, Edwards "struck like a viper. He was sarcastic and disrespectful, continually cutting me off. It was like a prosecutor questioning a common criminal."

"You are familiar, are you not, Judge, with the Code of Judicial Ethics that applies to you?" demanded Edwards at one point, about a call Pickering made to a former colleague at the Justice Department, a line of questioning designed to suggest that Pickering had gone to unprecedented lengths on behalf of the cross burner. "You are familiar with that, are you not?"

"I am," replied Pickering.

"And are you familiar with Canon 3(a)(4) of that code, which says, ‘except as authorized by law, a judge should neither initiate nor consider ex parte communications on the merits of a pending or impending proceeding'? Did you make a phone call to a high-ranking Justice Department official on your own initiative?"

"We had had . . ."

"Not ‘we,' " Edwards cut him off sharply. "You. Did you make this phone call?"

"I've indicated I called Mr. Hunger and discussed the fact that I was frustrated I could not get a response back from the Justice Department, and I thought there was a tremendous amount of disparity in this sentence." Continued...