Witness

By John Stacks

Working from a leak from the Supreme Court, the magazine published an account of the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision just as the court announced it. Warren Burger, who was then Chief Justice, was infuriated and demanded a meeting with TIME's editors. A group of them, including editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan, came down from New York to the Washington bureau, where I was then news editor, and we arranged a dinner in the bureau's offices on 16th Street.

Throughout the meal, Burger argued that it was unconscionable to scoop the court, that using information from clerks, whom he assumed were the source of our story, was tantamount to wiretapping the Supreme Court. Each time he launched into a new argument, he would consult a loose-leaf binder he had brought with him. In order to hide this from his dinner partners, he would rock his chair back and put his foot on the edge of our dining room table. And each time he rocked back, the Chief Justice of the United States of America advertised that he had neglected to zip up his fly.

We heard him out until Donovan said that he did not consider the scoop a breach and that we would continue to cover the court aggressively, good night. What Burger didn't know was that our source was one of his fellow Justices, who was angry with Burger for having held the decision from the previous fall to spare Richard Nixon political embarrassment.

--John Stacks