We can curse the ambition and greed that cause men and women to cling to power for too long. At the same time, however, we should also light a candle of gratitude for the men and women who do their duty and then stand aside, content to allow the next generation to take its turn. Justice Souter was one of those men.

 

The Man Who Knew When to Step Down Man Who Knew When to Step Down

By David French

On May 8, an extraordinary American died. He set an example that seemed unremarkable at the time but looms much larger in hindsight. I’m speaking of Justice David Souter, and regardless of what you thought of his jurisprudence, he made one decision that every American should applaud and every American leader should emulate.

He knew when to step aside.

President George H.W. Bush nominated Souter to the Supreme Court in 1990. He was confirmed the same year, served 19 years on the court and retired in 2009. He wasn’t a young man then — he was just shy of his 70th birthday — but it turns out that he had lots of years left to live.

He was still performing at a high level. I didn’t share his judicial philosophy (and frequently disagreed with his rulings), but I never doubted his integrity or his intellectual rigor. Lawyers who argued before him knew that he could be a formidable justice. He routinely exposed and picked apart weak arguments.

After he left the court, he spent the next 16 years as one of America’s quietest public officials. He heard cases at the Court of Appeals (retired Supreme Court justices sometimes hear arguments at the Courts of Appeals), but he rarely spoke publicly, and he made almost no news at all. He served his country, he went back home and we hardly heard from him again.

There was a time when Justice Souter’s decision would be unremarkable. Justices retired all the time, and while some stayed in office well into their 80s (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and John Paul Stevens were 90 when they retired), for most of American history, the average age of retirement for Supreme Court justices hovered between 66 and 73 years old.

I’m talking about retirement for an obvious reason — once again, Americans are embroiled in arguments about the advanced age of all too many of our judges and politicians. And once again, the nation is confronting a profound political and legal transformation that might not have happened if only powerful people (and their powerful enablers) let someone else have a turn.

I don’t want to pile on Joe Biden. He is facing a terrible cancer, and enough ink has been spilled about the consequences of his decision to run for re-election in 2024 in spite of his cognitive decline. Besides, he’s hardly the only politician or judge to hang on too long.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on the bench at age 87, handing her seat to Donald Trump to fill. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, died in office at age 90. Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican, is 91. Senator Mitch McConnell is 83. President Trump would be the oldest serving president in American history but for Biden. Trump turns 79 next month. By this metric the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, is a virtual adolescent — he’s 74.

In fact, since 2022 eight members of Congress have died in office, all of them Democrats. The most recent was 75-year-old Gerry Connolly, who succumbed to esophageal cancer on Wednesday.

What is going on? The simplest answer is probably the most correct. Powerful people like to stay powerful. Or as Mike Donilon, a senior Biden adviser, said, “Nobody walks away from this. No one walks away from the house, the plane, the helicopter.”

And thanks to modern medicine and modern conveniences, members of the laptop class can stay productive deep into old age.

Compounding the problem, the principle that powerful people want to remain powerful isn’t confined to justices, presidents or senators. Every leader is surrounded by a team of people who gain their own power, their own prestige and their own wealth through their association with the leader, like planets orbiting a star.

The story of Joe Biden isn’t a story of an older man desperate to hold on to power as the people around him begged him to step down. It’s the story of the people closest to him asking him to run again and even manipulating him to keep him in the race.

As we know from his son Hunter Biden’s business, Joe Biden’s power was key to the family’s financial success. And the Biden family wasn’t the only family to profit from Joe’s power. As James Kirchick wrote in an excellent Politico article about Biden’s enablers, “Donilon’s niece served on the National Security Council, deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed’s daughter was Biden’s day scheduler, and all four” of the White House counselor Steve Ricchetti’s children “had administration jobs.”

Donilon himself reportedly negotiated a $4 million fee to work on Biden’s 2024 campaign.

But the simple — and human — desire to cling to power isn’t the only reason politicians refuse to step aside. Older politicians remain in office because people keep electing them. An apathetic public often votes for incumbents out of sheer inertia.

It becomes easy, in those circumstances, to see yourself as indispensable. There’s a certain degree of self-confidence inherent in the decision to run for office (or accept a judicial nomination) in the first place, and that self-confidence is amplified not just by the friends, family and colleagues who sing your praises but also by a partisan public that cheers you on.

I distinctly remember the roaring crowd that Biden addressed the day after his dreadful debate performance in June 2024. I also remember the partisan backlash whenever any politician or journalist sounded the alarm about his decline. If Biden wanted reassurance, there was no shortage of people available to tell him that he was the only man for the job.

Yet the problem goes deeper than that. We live in a country that is positively obsessed with career success and thus defines people through their work more than through their family — or even their individual virtue. In many of America’s elite circles, you are your career, and when your career is over, how much of you remains?

Again, this isn’t simply a problem for judges and politicians. The problem isn’t solely how the powerful define themselves; it’s how we define them. It’s how we choose whom to respect and honor. It takes a person of real fortitude and self-respect simply to walk away.

That brings us back to Justice Souter. In the days since he died I’ve had a chance to interact with two of his former clerks, and they both noted that he did not center his existence around the court. As Kevin Newsom, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, told me on the “Advisory Opinions” podcast, “He was the one guy who didn’t think that being on the U.S. Supreme Court was the pinnacle of one’s existence.”

In an email, Matthew Waxman, a law professor at Columbia, told me that Souter “viewed serving on the court as a great honor but also a civic duty, and like other civic duties, its burden should be spread around.” In addition, Waxman observed, “he never saw himself as indispensable or specially endowed for the role, but as one of many who could serve well.”

Judge Newsom said, “He really thought, ‘My life is bigger than this.’ And by ‘bigger,’ he didn’t mean that he’d go on to greater power and fame after the court. Instead, he meant being outside and reading books.”

That sounds like a beautiful life to me.

I’m 56 years old and a father to three kids and already a grandfather to two. I don’t consider myself to be old, but I am old enough to start to think about how to finish well. I also love my job and want to do it as well as I can, as long as I can. But I cannot allow the love of my job to overshadow the deeper things in life.

Even if I could write the most powerful and beautiful columns in the English language, which I certainly can’t, that would still not be as important as loving my family. And at the end of my time on this earth, I want my wife, children and grandchildren to remember me for loving them far more than they remember me for any degree of talent or influence in law or politics.

Perhaps my favorite verse in the Bible is Micah 6:8. I quote it all the time: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Many of our leaders are so confident in their ability to do justice that they forsake kindness and humility, especially humility. Yet, as the old saying goes, “The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”

We can curse the ambition and greed that cause men and women to cling to power for too long. At the same time, however, we should also light a candle of gratitude for the men and women who do their duty and then stand aside, content to allow the next generation to take its turn.

Justice Souter was one of those men.