In late summer of 1953, Nino Scalia bid farewell to his parents and the ethnic diversity of his Queens neighborhood and traveled to the manicured streets of the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. He carried with him his love of learning and of family, devoutly conservative Catholic beliefs, and strong sense of patriotism. What he would learn in his new school and do in the coming four years would influence his philosophy and behavior for the rest of his life.
For a young man imbued with the conservative, text-oriented Catholicism of his father, Georgetown University, “an American, Catholic, Jesuit Institution of higher learning,” seemed a good fit.1 The school dated back to either 1788 or 1789, depending on whose history one read, and housed seven magnificent chapels with sixteen altars, where one could pray. Daily Mass was celebrated in the 1950s, compulsory classes in the Catholic faith were taught, and Catholic students were required to “attend all the religious exercises of the college,” “approach the Sacraments” at least once a month, and go on a three-day religious retreat at the beginning of the school year.2 Like his high school in Manhattan, Georgetown was a school steeped in the Jesuit educational tradition. He would learn that the mission of the Jesuits was a three-legged stool consisting of “intellectualism, scholarship, and activism.”3
While many of the students, like Scalia, were conservative Catholics, they found that their Jesuit professors often followed a different path. In the mid-1950s, the only Catholics who veered away from the timelessness of their religion were the intellectuals, most of whom could be found in the nation’s Jesuit colleges and universities. Students at Jesuit colleges of that era were struck by the contradiction between the strict, inward-looking, church of their upbringing and the missionary intellectualism of their college education, which preached the need to look beyond their religion to participate in service to mankind.4 The unchanging, rigid teachings of the American Catholic Church were also being challenged by a more liberal, and critical, worldview coming from Europe, where many of these Jesuits had been educated and had served.
As for many other Catholic college students in the 1950s, the challenge for Scalia was how to resolve his traditional religious views with the more liberal, activist views of his Jesuit college teachers. This emerging liberal philosophy did not please the Vatican. In 1957, Egidio Vagnozzi, the apostolic delegate sent by the Vatican to observe the American Church, condemned the “false aestheticism” and “cult of intellect” he observed.5
Scalia joined the History and Government Department, which in his second semester would split into two distinct departments. Scalia stayed in the History Department6 under the leadership of Hungarian Tibor Kerekes. Kerekes, who lost an arm in World War I, was a former tutor for the Hapsburg imperial family and an expert in modern European history.7 Despite the split with the Government Department, some History Department courses still had a distinctly political focus. The initial twenty-five course offerings in the department expanded to forty-four. They were wide-ranging, from histories of Greece, Rome, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and America to English and American constitutional history and American foreign policy. Yet another set of courses investigated the history of the Catholic Church, and “Church and State.”8 The rest of the required curriculum at Georgetown was traditional, with required courses in English composition and literature, foreign languages, mathematics, and science.9 Fellow Georgetown graduate and friend Richard Coleman says that Scalia “had a European education—a classical education.” Coleman thinks “Scalia’s training, which included six years of Latin and five years of Greek, gave him ‘a long-range viewpoint,’ one that allows him to see contemporary issues in a far-reaching historical and philosophical context.”10
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Loving a good argument, Scalia gravitated toward the Philodemic Society, the oldest collegiate debating society in the country.11 The Philodemic Society became Scalia’s new intellectual home, and college debate shaped who he later became. The goal of this society was to produce students with a “faculty for thinking clearly and speaking effectively.” Over the decades, the Philodemic Society produced influential alumni such as Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White and one of the nation’s most prominent attorneys of the late nineteenth century, Richard T. Merrick. The society became a national powerhouse beginning in 1911 under the direction of Father John J. Toohey. The debaters from that team were so skilled that for an eighteen-year period in the 1920s and 1930s, they never lost a single debate.12
Scalia competed in policy debate, where two-person teams argue about the same broad public policy topic for an entire year, alternately taking the affirmative side, supporting the proposition and proposing a policy to address it, and the negative side, disagreeing with the proposition and critiquing the affirmative plan. Each speaker gives a ten-minute opening “constructive” speech, beginning with the affirmative plan to solve the issue, and then each speaker offers a five-minute rebuttal, ending with an affirmative side speaker summarizing the issues. Since each team might have its unique approach to the topic, a successful debater must be able to adapt quickly to new arguments. Indeed, the better teams, like Georgetown, brought several proposals to tournaments, adjusting their strategy according to the teams they faced. Judges decided the winning team, and ranked the four speakers in the round.13
College debaters become a special breed, developing a verbally aggressive, almost narcissistically arrogant personality that helps them survive intellectual battles. To the outside world debaters frequently appeared to be nerdy, intellectually analytical individuals. But to win they had to be highly disciplined and rigorously organized intellectuals who could turn their verbal attack 180 degrees, if need be, to win a point. Debaters are often abrasive, caustic, even at times mean, calling each other by their last names and looking for the perfect insult to weaken their opponents. Done properly, these critical comments might bring a laugh from the judge (often a former debater who appreciates such attacks). The point is not to anger the target of the attack. In the debate world, arguments were not personal; what mattered was who had the unanswerable argument and was able to score points. Success required four skills: a razor-sharp wit to cut through arguments under great pressure, a sharper tongue to deliver penetrating and concise attacks, an unflappable nature to deal with a barrage of attacks, and the ability to organize and deliver swift persuasive extemporaneous orations.
This became the new intellectual world, and persona, of Nino Scalia. He both reveled and excelled in it. His time in the Philodemic Society rewarded him for the ego-centered argumentation skills that he brought with him to Georgetown, and for honing those skills into a dominating and confident personality.
Beyond the historical tradition of the Philodemic Society, the Georgetown team had some advantages over other schools. First, the sheer size of the team, roughly 160 students, allowed it to gather more evidence, participate in more competitions, and share the workload preparing for the cases and arguments they would see on the circuit. The research process proceeded by bringing government officials and experts to the Philodemic Room to explain the nuances of policy topics dealing with economic and foreign policy issues. Finally, there was a nearly unlimited pool of new, skilled policy debaters coming to Georgetown each year from the network of Jesuit high schools, like Xavier. So skilled were Georgetown’s teams, and so respected and feared were its debaters, that others on the national circuit considered it an accomplishment to beat any of their teams.14
The topic for 1953, “Resolved: That the United States should adopt a policy of free trade,” could well have posed problems for a history major not well versed in economics. But it did not seem to bother Scalia in the least. In the annual intramural competition between his freshman Gaston team and the sophomore White team, Scalia debated so skillfully that he won the Edward Douglass White Memorial Medal, awarded to the best debater in the tournament. And in an extraordinary recognition of his talent, Scalia was elected president of the White Debating Society for his sophomore year.15
But Scalia had a rival for leading young debater. One of his classmates, Peter G. Schmidt from New Rochelle, New York, came from a more upscale background.16 Schmidt was also the son of a college professor, but unlike Salvatore Eugene Scalia, an immigrant who taught Romance languages at Brooklyn College, Godfrey Schmidt taught labor and malpractice law at Fordham University, and represented among others the New York Catholic leader, Francis Cardinal Spellman.17 Schmidt attended the Fordham Preparatory School on Fordham University’s campus in the Bronx, won the New York State debate championship, and placed third in the nation in 1953. Owing to these accomplishments, Schmidt was offered a full debate scholarship to Georgetown.18 Beyond his commanding, stentorian voice, argumentative brilliance, highly persuasive oratorical skills, and ability to think creatively, on a personal level Schmidt was so charming and funny that he was later described by one journalist as having a “roguish panache” that enabled him to become everyone’s best friend. Everyone, that is, except for the student who was competing with him for the star position on the Georgetown debating team, Scalia. “There was an aura about him,” said one of Schmidt’s business associates years later. “He made everyone feel you were his closest friend. Peter had 50 ‘closest friends.’ ”19
It surprised no one when the talented and likable Schmidt was elected the president of the Gaston Debating Society for his freshman year, was chosen for a special individual debate against the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, and won the contest.20 By the fall of 1954 the varsity team was able to hire a full-time debate coach, John Fitzmaurice. With the school’s resources at a premium, Fitzmaurice decided to institute a “star” system, allocating travel funds for only twelve elite debaters from among the many hopefuls. Normally, that would mean that the juniors and seniors in the Philodemic Society would get the travel funds, with the sophomores in the White Society and the freshmen in the Gaston Society left to participate in intramural debates on campus.21
But the new debate coach had no favorites, and in this new meritocracy, the most skillful, not necessarily the most senior, competitors would be funded to carry the school’s banner to national tournaments. For Coach Fitzmaurice, Nino Scalia and his new partner, Peter Schmidt, were too good to ignore. So the promising young team of “Scalia and Schmidt” was born. This team of first-term sophomores quickly established itself as one of the top debate teams in the country. The topic that year was much easier for the history major with an interest in political science, “Resolved: That the United States should extend diplomatic recognition to the communist government of China.” Arguing in a practice tournament in Vermont for the affirmative position, certainly not the conservative Scalia’s personal view, he and Schmidt were remarkably successful.22 By the end of the term the Philodemic Society had won over 80 percent of its debates, with the college newspaper reporting that “Nino Scalia and Pete Schmidt head the Philodemic record.”23
In recognition of this fact, Scalia and Schmidt were sent to the prestigious Hall of Fame Tournament at New York University. This was, in the words of the team’s annual report, “one of the nation’s truly important debating events.”24 The Georgetown team tied with two other schools for the top honors. With no final round, it was left to a totaling of the individual speaker points awarded to each competitor after each round to break the tie. Georgetown won. The Philodemic Society had its best start in years.25
Debate was not the only extracurricular activity for Scalia. While “Nino” Scalia was making his reputation in debate, a different Scalia also became very well known to the campus as an actor in the college acting troupe, the Mask and Bauble. Georgetown students became aware of Scalia, billed under the name “Tony,” because of his sterling performance as Max Levene, a boxing manager in Heaven Can Wait.26 Scalia had two personas in the campus press. As “Nino,” the championship Philodemic Society debater, he was ruthlessly competitive and argumentative, interested only in winning, while as “Tony,” in the Mask and Bauble, he was witty, charming, and entertaining, seeking applause and approval.
Owing to his impressive performances and friendly personality in the school’s dramatic society, Scalia was elected the president of the Mask and Bauble club in the middle of his sophomore year. His most important duty was to supervise the preparation for the club’s entry into the Jesuit One-Act Play Contest, which was to be held on the Georgetown campus. The Mask and Bauble decided to perform Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” Scalia’s performance as “The Fiddler” in the play helped the Mask and Bauble take second place in the competition to Loyola of Baltimore.27
Between obligations for the debate team and the acting club on top of his heavy load of classwork, Scalia had much to do. “These extracurricular activities, plus my studies, left me with little time for anything else,” recalled Scalia of those years.28 But during his third year at college, Scalia took a dramatic break for a year of study abroad. He attended a Georgetown program at the Swiss Jesuit University of Fribourg—a program that had just become available to Georgetown students in 1954.29
The sixteen students in Scalia’s group, including his debate partner, Peter Schmidt, took courses taught almost entirely in French at the bilingual French/German school. Beyond the courses, though, this program gave the product of Queens, New York, the opportunity to see Spain, Portugal, and Gibraltar on the Italian ocean liner Conte Biancamano on the way there, and to tour the historic sights of Europe during breaks, with bus trips to Rome, Venice, Genoa, Palermo, and Naples and train trips throughout Europe.30 He toured Spain for Christmas vacation, Austria for Easter vacation, and traveled up the Rhine after school ended. At the end of their year, they toured England before boarding their ship back home. Perhaps the highlight for all of the students was their two general audiences with Pope Pius XII.31
Scalia and Schmidt returned for their senior year to find a new coach at the helm of the Philodemic Society, Father J. William Hunt. The two debaters began the year as part of a four-man team, this time with Schmidt working with another student for the affirmative and Scalia and his new partner working on the negative. They bested forty-four other schools to garner an undefeated record and once again win New York University’s top-flight Hall of Fame Tournament. Scalia and his four-man team were the best collegiate debating team in the nation that fall, winning thirty-six of their forty debates and two other tournaments that semester.32
Everything was going well for the team during the second semester, when disaster struck. With Georgetown’s annual Cherry Blossom tournament approaching, the University Administration changed the date of the capstone oral examinations for the seniors, advancing them by a full five weeks, in order to allow more time for students to prepare for the required written comprehensive exams in each academic department. This change left only a couple of weeks for the seniors on the debate team to prepare for the “graduate-or-not” exams.33 Both Scalia and Schmidt felt compelled to drop out of the Cherry Blossom tournament, leaving a much less experienced, freshman team to compete, and ultimately fail, in their place.
With the full resources of the school and the team behind him, Scalia and Schmidt had helped to bring Georgetown debate back to national prominence. However, Father Hunt’s “star system” in backing his top team had left the school almost bereft of experienced debaters for the following year. And the team paid a price for that decision, winning no tournaments and significantly fewer debates.34
More than fifty years later Scalia would tell television interviewer Tim Russert how little he remembered of his debate experience: “The only advice I remember from my debate coach when I was in college, he taught me to button my jacket. It’s the only thing I took away from it—button your jacket.”35 It was hardly true. His absolute certainty in the merits of his positions, his love of attention, the abrasiveness of his attacks against opponents, his magnetic speaking persona, and more than all of that, his sheer love of winning, are all hallmarks of his background as a championship collegiate debater. By combining this legacy with the influence of the school’s evangelistic Jesuit Catholicism with his traditionalist Catholic upbringing, these four years helped shape Antonin Gregory Scalia.
• • •
Scalia’s college journey ended, along with that for Georgetown’s class of 1957, just before 8:30 P.M. on June 9. The class gathered in a driving rainstorm on that night before graduation for the annual Tropaia Awards ceremony in the Healy Quadrangle, a basketball-floor-sized, parquet-brick outdoor courtyard bordered by a rectangle of the school’s oldest buildings. They were there to see a short class play, hear the class poem, and listen to the university president, but mostly to hear the class’s most decorated student, Antonin Gregory Scalia. He had been selected to give the Cohonguroton Address, regarded as the school’s valedictory speech, although it was not always given by the student with the highest four-year grade-point average. No one questioned the selection of Scalia after all that he had accomplished at Georgetown.
Scalia had drawn the theme for his speech from the lesson he learned at Georgetown during that spring’s senior class final oral exams. After easily acing all the early questions from the panel of three faculty members, Scalia later told journalist and biographer Joan Biskupic, one of the professors closed with: “Very good, Mr. Scalia. I have one last question. If you look back over all the history that you’ve studied here over the last four years, if you had to pick one event that you thought was the most significant, what would it be?” Whatever it was that Scalia offered, the professor shook his head and said, “No, Mr. Scalia. The Incarnation, Mr. Scalia.” From this exchange, Scalia explained: “It was the last lesson I learned at Georgetown: not to separate your religious life from your intellectual life. They’re not separate.” Scalia took that advice to heart. And in his Cohonguroton Address he imparted that advice to his classmates.36
In his speech Scalia told his fellow graduates that their future mission was quite simple: “If we will not be leaders of a real, a true, a Catholic intellectual life, no one will! We cannot shift responsibility to some vague ‘chosen few.’ We are the chosen few. The responsibility rests upon all of us, whatever our future professions. . . . It is our task to carry and advance into all sections of our society this distinctively human life, of reason learned and faith believed.” Failure to fulfill this mission, he argued, would mean that they had “betrayed ourselves, our society, our race.” And, Scalia made clear, the beacon guiding them should be their Catholic faith: “If we really love the truth, we will believe that we have been shown a marvelous pathway, that we must brace ourselves at once to follow it, that life will not be worth living if we do otherwise! The prize is great. The risk is glorious.”37 It was a magnificently eloquent speech. Only twelve minutes in length, it was much shorter than usual, but it made a powerful impact on Scalia’s fellow students. Months afterward, the college newspaper, The Hoya, was still writing about it, describing it as being “widely acclaimed” and “an extremely easily read and meaningful speech.”38
The life mission Scalia laid out for his classmates could not have been clearer. His four years at Georgetown had led him far beyond the individualistic, conservative faith of his father and mother, and layered over it the activism and public service mission of the Jesuits. Scalia in turn charged his classmates to become lay leaders for Christ and lay representatives for their Catholic faith. He, and Scalia hoped they, would spread “the truth” as they understood it, the tenets of their Catholic faith, throughout America.
Decades later, when Scalia was nominated for the Supreme Court, some members of the national press searched for copies of the speech in the university archives only to find that unlike the other Cohonguroton speech and graduation files that were filled with drafts of speeches and other material, the Scalia speech files were empty.39 But a copy of the text survived because it had been reproduced in The Journal, the school’s literary magazine, and remained available on the bookshelves of the college’s Lauinger Library.40
Scalia never forgot what Georgetown University had done for him, and done to him. In 2002, he returned to his alma mater for its annual weeklong religious celebration to sum up what the school had meant to his personal and intellectual development. In a speech to the undergraduates, Scalia said that “protecting one’s Catholic identity” was a key part of what he had learned at the school. Reflecting on the national movement toward nondenominational education in major colleges and universities, Scalia told the group that the movement to separate religion from American public life and government had been “distorted by social beliefs.” It was clear to the audience that this was a movement that Scalia was prepared to resist, partly because of what he had learned at Georgetown. “I would be a different person if not for my years here,” Scalia concluded.41
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At twenty-one years old and graduating from college, Scalia had to choose a career path to fulfill the religious mission that he set for himself and his classmates. He “gave some thought” to the idea of becoming a priest, but then rejected it because “I . . . decided He was not calling me.”42 He considered also becoming a college professor like his father. But Scalia recalled his father’s dissatisfaction with unmotivated students and the administrators who had blocked his career path. His father counseled that if he had a chance to do it all over again and had had other career options, he would have gone in a different direction. The advice had a considerable impact on his son: “I remember him saying to me . . . he wouldn’t want me to be an undergraduate professor. I ended up being a professor at graduate [law] school, where you do have people who [want to be there learning].”43
Scalia acted, he told a group of high school students years later, according to the French phrase “pour l’absence de n’importe quoi mieux,” or “for the absence of anything better.”44 As he recalled: “when I got out of college, I didn’t have the slightest idea of what I wanted to do with my life. And in those days, if you were going to go to graduate school, unlike today, you did it right away. You went right from college to graduate school. You didn’t take off a couple of years to work somewhere to learn who you were. You were considered a goof-off if you did that.” So, wondering where to turn at this pivotal moment in his life, Scalia turned to one of his accomplished relatives. “I had an Uncle Vince. Okay, most Italians have an Uncle Vince. . . . Vince was a lawyer and I used to visit his law offices in downtown Trenton now and then. He seemed to have a good life, so I thought I’d give it a shot. As it turned out, it was what I loved.” But the idea of becoming a Supreme Court justice, the first Italian one at that, never once crossed his mind in those early days.45
In deciding where to attend law school, though, despite his disappointment in applying to Princeton, Scalia sought the best law school he could find to test whether his intellect and skills would allow him to compete and succeed against the best in the country. As he put it years later:
Well, you want to get into the best law school you can, and generally speaking, [Harvard] is the most prestigious law school. Some of them I would pass, but they generally will have the best professors and the professors teach themselves rather than the law. The law is just like chewing gum. It’s what they use to develop your mental jaws, and you spit it out because the law will probably change by the time you’re in practice for 20 years. It’s important to have good teachers. Now some law schools are better teaching law schools than others, and the best thing to get is a school that both has very intelligent professors and professors who place a premium on teaching.46
He decided to apply to Harvard Law, and was accepted. Meanwhile, Scalia’s longtime debate partner, Peter Schmidt, had won the prestigious Elihu Root–Samuel J. Tilden Scholarship underwriting three years of study at the New York University School of Law.47 While Scalia had won no such scholarship, he had earned the right to learn from, and compete against, some of the best legal minds in the country. It was a challenge he would relish facing.
But Scalia’s and Schmidt’s lives would follow different paths after law school. Just sixteen months after Antonin Scalia took his seat on the United States Supreme Court, Peter Schmidt, then a prominent Park Avenue attorney, entrepreneur, and financial adviser, became an international fugitive. On February 29, 1989, he boarded a plane in Miami and vanished, leaving behind a trail of broken promises, forged documents, and missing funds.48 Scalia’s decision to attend Harvard Law School proved to be a very wise choice and set him on a very different path. Langdell Hall was filled not only with many of the best law teachers in the country in the latter part of the 1950s, but because of the fault lines of American Constitutional law at the time, it was also the epicenter of the legal universe. In a legal world dominated on the United States Supreme Court by the battles between former Harvard Law professor Felix Frankfurter on the conservative side, and former Yale Law professor William O. Douglas, as well as former U.S. Senator Hugo Black, on the left, it was the perfect place to study law.