At six feet eight inches and 215 pounds, Charles Ludington, known to his friends as Chad, was an obvious star on the Yale varsity basketball team. During college summers, he’d return home to North Carolina to work at basketball camps at NC State and UNC–Chapel Hill. After graduating, in 1987, he went on to play professional basketball in France for a year.
For the first half of college, Ludington’s social life revolved mostly around basketball players—his fellow varsity teammates as well as a posse that included Brett Kavanaugh.
Thirty-five years later, in mid-September, Ludington, now an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, was contacted by several reporters who wanted to ask about Kavanaugh’s college behavior. Ludington declined to be interviewed, saying that he could not speak to the judge’s professional capacities. After all, his career expertise was in eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland and the history of the wine industry.
But when he listened to his former classmate insist during his Fox interview that there was never a time when he drank so much that he couldn’t remember what had happened the night before, Ludington began to feel “really uneasy,” he later said.
“I felt that he was very clearly misleading people about his experiences in college,” Ludington explained. “This is not someone who has grown up into an adult who says, ‘Yes, I did a lot of stupid things and said things I regret about women and gays in college, but I’m a man now and I’m embarrassed by those things.’ That’s the demeanor I expected from someone who was trying out for the Supreme Court.”
Ludington began to compose an essay in his head, but he didn’t do much about it. Then he watched Kavanaugh testify after Ford.
Kavanaugh’s portrayal of his drinking in college did not square with what Ludington remembered: a college classmate who would drink so much that he was completely “shit-faced” by the end of an evening. The Kavanaugh whom Ludington had known would slur his words and be belligerent. To see Kavanaugh spinning his college drinking in such a misleading way made Ludington decide to speak out. “I simply wanted to say, ‘This is what I do know: the idea that Brett was never blacked out is preposterous,” he later recalled. “Because you don’t get as drunk as he got and remember everything.”
Despite the occasional concessions—“Sometimes I had too many beers,” for example, and the apology to Renate Dolphin—many of Kavanaugh’s classmates from both Yale and Georgetown Prep felt he had shown a lack of candor. Like Ludington, they had observed Kavanaugh drunk and seemingly out of control at times. They had been that drunk themselves and believed they would admit it under the same circumstances. Anything less, these people felt, would be fundamentally dishonest—an unforgivable trait for a Supreme Court candidate.
On September 30, the Sunday after the contentious hearings, Ludington put out a statement. “I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18- or even 21-year-old should condemn a person for the rest of his life. I would be a hypocrite to think so,” Ludington wrote. “However, I have direct and repeated knowledge about his drinking and his disposition while drunk. And I do believe that Brett’s actions as a 53-year-old federal judge matter.”
He continued: “I can unequivocally say that in denying the possibility that he ever blacked out from drinking, and in downplaying the degree and frequency of his drinking, Brett has not told the truth.”
It was important to Ludington—and other Yale classmates of Kavanaugh’s—to emphasize that he was not objecting to the drinking; he was objecting to the dissembling.
Yalies had initially been content to remain on the sidelines regarding Kavanaugh’s nomination—though many of them disagreed with his politics. But after hearing Kavanaugh, in his Fox interview and his Senate testimony, cast himself as a veritable choir boy—who had focused on academics, church, and only “sometimes” had “too many beers”—many of them felt compelled to call foul.
“Brett stood up there and lied about who he was,” said classmate Lynne Brookes on ABC News. “If he’s gonna lie about the little things, what about the big things?”
Similarly, Kavanaugh’s freshman-year roommate James Roche was offended by the notion that a Supreme Court nominee had failed to tell the truth. Since he and the judge had once slept just ten feet apart in a small college double room, Roche maintained that he had firsthand knowledge of Kavanaugh’s level of drunkenness and its aftereffects during his freshman year.
“It wasn’t drunk to the point of having trouble getting up every month or two, it was frequently,” Roche told Anderson Cooper on CNN. “I saw him both what I would consider blackout drunk and also dealing with the repercussions of that in the morning.”
Some of Kavanaugh’s high school contemporaries also said he had lied under oath. Paul Rendón, Sean Hagan, and other classmates from Georgetown Prep attested that the salacious talk about a young Renate had been much more than a simple “show of affection,” as Kavanaugh had put it in the hearing. “Being a stupid teenage boy does not include cruelty,” Hagan wrote on Facebook. “So angry, so disgusted, so sad.”
Kavanaugh tried to suggest that some of these classmates had an ax to grind, namely Roche. Asked in his September 25 telephone interview with the Judiciary Committee why Roche had painted him as a sloppy drunk, Kavanaugh said, “I’m not going to speculate beyond what I have said. It’s the twilight zone.”
This was where the hearings came to feel like Rashomon. Was Kavanaugh a misogynist lush who lied under oath about how much he drank? Or was he simply a brainy frat boy? In the intensely tribal politics of 2018, there was no such thing as somewhere in between; Kavanaugh became a human Rorschach test. Depending on their ideological perspective, people projected onto Kavanaugh what they needed him to be—a tragic casualty of #MeToo run amok, or the consummate symbol of white male privilege, triumphing yet again.
In a furious effort to counter the blackout narrative—that Kavanaugh had often been so drunk that he very possibly did not remember his conduct—the Republican spin machine mobilized. On October 1 the White House put out statements from two of Kavanaugh’s college classmates, Dan Murphy and Chris Dudley, both of whom said they never saw Kavanaugh in a blackout state.
“I not only socialized with Brett, but I was there with him at the end of the night when we came home, and there in the morning when we got up,” said Murphy, one of Kavanaugh’s suitemates, in his statement. “I never saw Brett black out or not be able to remember the prior evening’s events, nor did I ever see Brett act aggressive, hostile, or in a sexually aggressive manner to women.
“Brett was and is a good-natured, kind, and friendly person, to men and women,” Murphy continued. “The behavior I’ve heard other people want to attribute to him, but from people who did not live with Brett and therefore not in the same position to observe, is simply wrong, and such behavior is incompatible with what I know to be true.”
Dudley, a star basketball player in college who went on to a sixteen-year career in the NBA and was the Republican nominee for governor of Oregon in 2010, referred to Kavanaugh as “one of my best friends at Yale,” describing him as a student who put academics first. “His desire to work very hard and make school his number one priority helped me stay focused,” Dudley said. “But like nearly every other college student, we took breaks from school and went out for drinks and to see friends. I will say it again: we drank in college. I was with Brett frequently in college, whether it be in the gym, in class or socializing. I never ever saw Brett black out. Not one time. And in all the years I have known him, I have never seen him to be disrespectful or inappropriate with women.”
Tom Kane, Kavanaugh’s close friend from high school, said on CNN: “To the day I die, I’ll believe that he did not do this.”
There were also dueling verdicts on Kavanaugh’s temperament. Some saw an arrogant white male throwing a tantrum about being denied a position he believed was his birthright. Kavanaugh’s aggressive demeanor, his disrespect toward Democratic senators—especially Amy Klobuchar—and his brazen partisanship in accusing the Democrats of avenging the Clintons, they argued, made him clearly unfit for the court. Others said his demeanor was understandable as the boiling frustration of the wrongly accused.
“His performance at that second set of hearings was disqualifying, not to mention his lies,” said Kathleen Clark, a law school professor at Washington University in St. Louis who went to law school with Kavanaugh and had had him come speak to her class on several occasions.
Kavanaugh’s critics were not all from the political left. Charlie Sykes, a conservative commentator, said on a podcast that Kavanaugh’s performance “was breathtaking as an abandonment of any pretense of having a judicial temperament.
“It’s possible, I think, to have been angry, emotional, and passionate without crossing the lines that he crossed,” Sykes added, “assuming that there are any lines anymore.”
Benjamin Wittes, the editor in chief of the blog Lawfare and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, concurred in The Atlantic: “If I were a senator, I would not vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh.” Wittes added that he wrote those words “with no pleasure, but with deep sadness,” since he had a long relationship with the judge.
“He delivered on Thursday, by way of defense, a howl of rage,” Wittes wrote. “His opening statement was an unprecedentedly partisan outburst of emotion from a would-be justice. I do not begrudge him the emotion, even the anger. He has been through a kind of hell that would leave any person gasping for air. But I cannot condone the partisanship—which was raw, undisguised, naked, and conspiratorial—from someone who asks for public faith as a dispassionate and impartial judicial actor. His performance was wholly inconsistent with the conduct we should expect from a member of the judiciary.”
North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp had been close to announcing her support of Kavanaugh. Then she watched him testify. Like many, she was put off by Kavanaugh’s belligerence toward Senator Klobuchar. “That was very much a concern about his judicial temperament, but also concern about his veracity,” Heitkamp later said.
More than 2,400 law professors—including about a dozen from Yale—signed a letter saying, “The concern for judicial temperament dates back to our founding,” and calling Kavanaugh unfit.
“Judge Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court,” the letter said. “We are united, as professors of law and scholars of judicial institutions, in believing that he did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament requisite to sit on the highest court of our land.”
One of the most stinging critiques came from the elderly justice John Paul Stevens, who had previously supported Kavanaugh’s nomination. At ninety-eight, Stevens was one of only four living retired Supreme Court justices. Kavanaugh, said Stevens, “has demonstrated a potential bias involving enough potential litigants before the court that he would not be able to perform his full responsibilities.”
The political nature of Kavanaugh’s testimony also prompted some former allies to reverse their stances on his fitness for the court. Two Yale Law School classmates, Mark Osler and Michael Proctor, who had signed an August letter of support now issued a retraction.
“The reason for our withdrawal is not the truth or falsity of Dr. Ford’s allegations, which are still being investigated, but rather was the nature of Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony,” they wrote. “In our view that testimony was partisan, and not judicious, and inconsistent with what we expect from a Justice of the Supreme Court, particularly when dealing with a co-equal branch of government.”
Though he did not share Kavanaugh’s political bent, Osler had originally been moved to support him, based on the nominee’s qualifications. “I reached out to friends who practiced in front of him on the D.C. Circuit, who said he was smart, he was fair, and he picked good clerks,” Osler said in an interview.
But during the hearings, Osler, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, in Minneapolis, was “taken aback” by Kavanaugh’s performance. “It was really painful, because this was someone who was a friend, who I really respected,” Osler added. “Then when I saw what I saw during the hearing, it was a gut clench.”
Even Kavanaugh loyalists said his testimony was a serious mistake, though perhaps not one of his own making. Many suspected he was performing for “an audience of one,” meaning President Trump, who was widely known to have been disappointed in Kavanaugh’s muted demeanor during the Fox News interview and who himself adopts more aggressive responses when under attack.
“I was surprised, because I think he was ill-advised,” said George Priest, Kavanaugh’s professor at Yale, of his irascible performance. “That’s really not his way of doing things. I think some of the Trump people got to him.”
While Kavanaugh’s supporters believed the judge was justified in showing some anger, they also bemoaned his critical errors, namely invoking the Clintons and failing to own up to his past as a partier.
“He hurt his credibility a lot by prevaricating over that stuff,” said one former colleague. “I don’t think it amounts to perjury or an impeachable offense, but it was dumb and unnecessary. I gave him sort of a B minus for the overall performance, and I say that as a friend and someone who was really rooting for him.”
Kavanaugh also should have shown more compassion for Ford, the colleague said: “I would have had him watch her testimony. There was a lot of room to be way more gracious than he was, even if you are just being tactical.”
The other camp insisted that Kavanaugh’s demeanor was that of a man fighting for his personal and professional life. “I would defy anyone not to be angry about that, if they believe the allegations against them were completely false,” said Senator Cornyn, adding, “He became very emotional as he choked back tears. But I must say, he wasn’t the only one choking back tears during his defense of his good name and his reputation.”
Just as people empathized with Ford, many argued, so did they need to put themselves in Kavanaugh’s shoes. “How do you want him to respond?” said Randy Berholtz, the Yale Law classmate. “Do you want him to sit there and take it, or do you want him to fight back? Imagine if it were your husband or your father or your brother. People can say anything about anybody and it’s very hard to fight it.
“From what I know of him, this guy was a friggin’ Boy Scout—he wouldn’t strike you as a ‘Hey, baby’ type of guy,” added Berholtz, now general counsel of Innovus Pharmaceuticals. “He struck me as somebody who would be a good dad—somebody who has a sense of service, somebody who has a sense of family, somebody who has a sense of religion and values. Clarence Thomas may have had a creepy side to him, but you’re trying to make a sex fiend out of Brett Kavanaugh? So what? He had a few beers.”
Some conservative pundits suggested that Kavanaugh also showed immeasurable courage in responding to the committee’s questions that day.
“Please, tell us, when falsely accused of gang rape, when your family is facing death threats, and when you know that your political opponents are engineering and timing allegations to inflict maximum damage on you personally,” asked the writer David French in National Review, “what is the proper amount of anger?”
Rebecca Taibleson, a former Kavanaugh clerk who is now an assistant United States attorney in Milwaukee, said the judge’s loss of temper was moving and unfamiliar.
“Yes, I was taken aback by his emotion and anger, but I was also moved by it,” she said in an interview later. “If I was falsely accused, I would be like this, too,” she said. “If I’m looking at this objectively, to me it seemed like everyone who watched the testimony of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh saw in there what they wanted to see.”
There is a compelling argument to be made that—particularly in the age of #MeToo—a more empathic, enlightened response was called for from Kavanaugh. He perhaps could have acknowledged the possibility that he had been involved in the Ford incident but not remembered it. He could have apologized for any harm done to Ford, condemned sexual assault, and encouraged victims to come forward.
But, particularly in the age of Trump, such a nuanced response would likely have doomed Kavanaugh’s nomination. President Trump—whose MO in the face of sexual misconduct charges was to fight them—was looking for a forceful blanket denial. There was no room for ambiguity or nuance; any cracks in the judge’s claims of innocence could allow Democrats to frame his words as an admission of guilt. He couldn’t be a flawed human being, apologize to people he may have hurt in the past, and vow that he’d grown up and perhaps seen the error of his ways. It had worked for George W. Bush in explaining on the campaign trail his decision to stop drinking at age forty. But in the age of Trump, it was no longer an option.
“The only way this guy could survive was to go full Trump,” said Ben Rhodes, Obama’s former deputy national security adviser, who is now a writer and political commentator. “Once the bottom fell out, his only lifeline was to become a full-on Trump Republican. I saw that as a metaphor for what’s happened to the entire Republican Party: they try to keep their dignity, but when push comes to shove, they have to resort to Trump.
“To see the Republicans not care about the damage they were doing to this institution in pursuit of power was one of the few moments in these last years that I was able to be shocked again,” Rhodes continued, referring to the Supreme Court. “It was a pure distillation of the cynicism of their strategy, especially given that they could have just as easily suggested to him that he step aside. They were too far down the track with this guy.”