As Kagan Prepares For Hill Hearings, We Learn More About Her Life, Work

On June 28, Elena Kagan, the president's nominee to replace John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court, will sit in a chair on Capitol Hill, in front of dozens of cameras and the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, to begin her confirmation hearing.

Since the president announced his decision to nominate her, Kagan has been to Capitol Hill many times, to introduce herself to senators.  Yesterday, for instance, she met with Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), David Vitter (R-LA), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Bob Corker (R-TN).

Over the last month, we've learned a lot about Kagan, too — thanks to articles, radio stories, and TV profiles. Most recently, NPR's Nina Totenberg looked at the former Harvard Law School dean's attitude toward the military.  Hendrik Hertzberg, of The New Yorker magazine, analyzed her college thesis.

Today, Ann Gerhart and Philip Rucker add more material to the growing Kagan biography, with a particularly illuminating piece in The Washington Post, "Kagan has many achievements, but her world has been relatively narrow."

"Most of the people in Kagan's life are important people, bound to her in tightly drawn concentric circles," the reporters assert.

Her friends are elite lawyers of a certain set or Democratic operatives with staying power. She cultivates their company, holds their confidences, gives them the best presents and solicits their ideas, said several friends among the four dozen people interviewed for this article.

 

Apparently, Kagan is affable, known for her kindness and deference and flattery.  She is also easily incisive.  But there is another side to Kagan, introduced to us by her friend and colleague, Lawrence Tribe, and confirmed by other close associates, of Kagan as the empathetic confidant.

Interestingly, while she is praised for her trustworthiness and willingness to listen, she rarely leans on them: "The friendship her intimates describe seems curiously one-sided; it is one in which Kagan gives freely of her support but seeks none in return."

In the long article, there is only one anecdote in which we see Kagan emote.  As Harvard Law School's dean, she was a finalist to become Harvard University's president.

Kagan confided a deep disappointment to some friends when she was passed over for the Harvard presidency, and her eyes welled with tears when hundreds of law school students threw her a surprise party to celebrate still having her as their dean.

That job went to her former colleague, Drew Gilpin Faust, previously the head of the Radcliffe Institute.  A person familiar with the search committee deliberation told The Post that many members of the group were concerned that Kagan's interests were too narrow, that "she was quote parochial."