John Wayne, Brett Kavanaugh, my brothers Michael and Kevin, and me.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist (NYTimes.com)
My older brother Michael taught me many things.
He taught me to hold vinyl records gingerly at the edges, so I wouldn’t smudge them, and how to wipe them down with a soft cloth before returning them to their sleeves.
He taught me to love classical music, to conjure 1001 Arabian Nightstales while listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” And he taught me about jazz and the wondrous Fats Waller.
He took me to the American Film Institute to see “Shane” and “An American in Paris,” sparking a lifelong love affair with vintage movies. And he gave me “Dracula,” written by the Dublin-born Bram Stoker, sparking a lifelong love affair with vampires.
Even before I could drink, he taught me never to buy wine that didn’t have the words “Appellation Contrôlée” on the label.
Michael, 17 years older, taught me how to tie my shoes, scrub under my fingernails, parallel park, brew loose tea, play bridge and Scrabble, and how to differentiate between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” He taught me that Dashiell Hammett’s San Francisco and Jelly Roll Morton’s New Orleans were the epitome of cool.
He could not teach me not to be terrified of roller coasters. But in everything else, I was an eager student.
“If there was a hurricane, you’d blame it on W.,” he’d say.
And then there was, and I did.
When Michael died after a bout with pneumonia in 2007, I sat on my couch for days and grappled with how my job had hurt our relationship. I never wanted to go through that again.
And then Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court.
My brother Kevin had been his basketball coach at Georgetown Prep in suburban Maryland. They stayed friends for the next 35 years, and he sometimes referred to Kavanaugh as “half a rung below my own sons.” Kevin gave interviews to The Wall Street Journal and The Times, describing how the teenage Kavanaugh willed himself to be a better shooting guard and showed leadership on the basketball court.
Months before, I had planned a trip for Kevin’s birthday to Monument Valley, the dramatic landscape on the Utah-Arizona border where John Ford made his iconic westerns with John Wayne. Kevin is a huge film buff; at the first sign of an often imaginary sore throat, my mother would pull him out of first grade and take him to the movies.
We were due to fly out there the first weekend in October. Then, just like Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford was dragged into the spotlight after telling her story to Democrats. Her scalding accusations against a man about to ascend to the Supreme Court riveted a rived nation.
The Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep, where Kevin had coached for 25 years and where his three sons had gone to school and where Neil Gorsuch also went, morphed from being heralded as a Supreme Court feeder school to being depicted, as Kevin disgustedly put it, as “a drunken roadhouse overflowing with testosterone.”
Friends of Kavanaugh say they approached Blessed Sacrament, the Chevy Chase church where my sister sometimes sits behind the Kavanaughs at the 5:30 p.m. Mass, to see if they could offer a “show of support” Mass for the beleaguered judge. The Mass didn’t happen; perhaps the church considered it too political.
Kevin was distraught. He went on local TV to defend Kavanaugh, saying, “I used to kid Brett that he was 30 when he was 16.”
My sister told me that if I sided with Blasey, Kevin would cancel our trip west. I disagreed with Democrats who said that women should automatically be believed. Think about Rolling Stone and the “Jackie” story it entirely retracted because it was based on a made-up account of gang rape and some of the later
Kavanaugh accusers whose stories fell apart. But women have an absolute right not to be disbelieved without further examination.