Queen of the Center

The Swing Vote: She’s a cowgirl from sagebrush country, a pioneer who defied the odds. The life and legacy of a moderate justice.

FOR AN OLD RANCHING GIRL, YOU turned out pretty good,” President George W. Bush told Sandra Day O’Connor when she spoke to the White House last week to say that she was retiring from the Supreme Court. The image of O’Connor as cowgirl is a powerful one, and she has done as much as anyone to foster it. In her chambers, decorated with Western rugs and paintings and artifacts, she served her clerks homemade TexMex lunches on Saturdays. With her fixed and level gaze, her dry, flat voice cutting like the prairie wind, she came across to nervous Supreme Court petitioners like an Annie Oakley of the Bench, a fast draw with sharp questions and a don’t-mess-with-me manner. Her most memorable writing was not the language of her judicial opinions but her memoir of growing up on a ranch, the Lazy B. In her retirement, she will work on a children’s book about her childhood horse, Chico.

But the image can be misleading. Her real legacy on the Supreme Court is not as a self-reliant throwback to the Old West. Rather, as a justice, she embodied an equally endangered species: the moderate establishment progressive, a centrist in an age of ever-edgier extremes. She has become more High Society than High Noon, more country club than cowgirl. She was profoundly out of place in the modern Washington of “Crossfire,” of ideological posturing and filibusters, of the war