In the lore, much of the responsibility for U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter's appointment falls to his fellow Granite Stater, then-White House chief of staff John H. Sununu. It ain't so, according to Sununu, who said last week that he was actually pulling for a finalist from Texas, Edith Jones.

In an interview last week with the Monitor editorial board, Sununu, now chairman of the state Republican Party, recounted his role in the Souter nomination to the court in 1990 by George H.W. Bush. As the story goes, Bush was looking for a conservative justice but one without a partisan-ire-raising record a la Robert Bork. He tapped Souter, who went on to vote largely with the liberal wing of the court for nearly two decades until his retirement this year.

Sununu prefaced the story by recounting the scene at a party he held for three new judges he had appointed to the superior court when he was governor in the 1980s. Sununu addresses the crowd about "what it takes to be a judge in New Hampshire: good character, intelligent and all these wonderful little platitudes. And I look over and all three of them are about that high or shorter," he said, bringing his had up to his eyebrow. "So I say, in New Hampshire you can't be any taller than the governor. And everybody laughs, ha-ha-ha-ha, and I go back to my office."

After the party, Sununu said, staffers asked him if he'd noticed what had happened after that joke. He said he had, everybody laughs. "They say 'No! Every lawyer in the room went [bends his knees],' " Sununu said.

"That anecdote is a very, very significant lesson on the perils of appointing judges. Because all their life they

effectively walk around crouched to suit the formula that will achieve their ambition," Sununu said. "So David Souter had very conservative decisions as a (New Hampshire) Supreme Court judge. In his interviews, he knew that George Bush was looking for a conservative judge, and gave everybody that impression. It came down to David Souter versus Edith Jones. I frankly supported Edith Jones, because I thought the president would get great credit for supporting a second woman to the court."

That's a wee bit different than the impression Sununu left in 1990 with the New York Times' R.W. Apple, who reported at the time that Sununu "said he had given 'strong personal support' to Judge Souter at a key moment in the president's decision-making."

(In fact, Apple reported on something of a spat between Sununu and then-New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman over who really pushed Souter. Rudman then told the Times: "John Sununu didn't know David Souter - though he of course knew of him, in a small state like New Hampshire - when the vacancy on the state court came up. I pushed him for that, I told Ronald Reagan about him, I pushed him for the circuit court job, and I urged Bush to choose him this time. He's not Sununu's man.")

Sununu said there's no conflict between what he told Apple then and what he's saying now. "I did indicate to him that I supported all three of the candidates that had made it through the early winnowing on the basis of their judicial philosophy," he said. He had, he said, "strongly confirmed that Souter had served in the New Hampshire Supreme Court as a conservative."

But, he said, he didn't think it was appropriate to share back then, with Souter's nomination pending, that he had supported Jones.

Sununu said he's not telling the whole story now to put a claim on clairvoyance. "I mean, I'm not pretending that I knew something," he said. "I just, I was looking at the politics of a woman versus a man."

A split flight

The New Hampshire delegation in the U.S. Senate split in an unusual way this week on the vote to strip funding from the F-22 program, a vote heralded by the White House as a victory in the fight to cut waste. The measure passed with a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans. (next page »)