Miers Broke Through Glass Ceiling

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Friends and colleagues of President Bush’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, described her yesterday as a woman who managed to break barrier after barrier in the Texas legal community while endearing herself to most of the state’s legal establishment.


“She’s more than anything known for being very discreet, but very, very professional,” a Dallas attorney who has known Ms. Miers for more than 25 years, Elizabeth Whitaker, said. “If you look at her history, she’s risen to the top of virtually everything she’s done. She doesn’t flinch from a very tough situation.”


Among the best-known accomplishments of Ms. Miers, 60, is her election to the presidency of the Texas Bar Association in 1992. She was the first woman to hold that post and also the first to head the Dallas Bar Association. In 1996, Ms. Miers became the first woman to head a major Texas law firm. She left her firm, Locke Lidell & Sapp, for the White House in 2001, taking the position of staff secretary. Late last year, Mr. Bush named her as White House counsel.


While Ms. Miers has had close ties to Mr. Bush for more than a decade, friends said she rarely discusses her personal political leanings.


“It’s fair to say that Harriet does not wear her politics on her sleeve,” a colleague at Ms. Miers’s former law firm, Thomas Connop, said. “Her political bent is Republican. As to where within that party structure she fits, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t view her as being on the far right of the spectrum,” he said.


Mr. Connop, who first met Ms. Miers in 1984, said she is a good fit for the Supreme Court vacancy she was nominated to fill. “I see a lot of parallels between her and Justice O’Connor,” he said.


Ms. Miers was born, raised, and educated in Dallas. She received an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Southern Methodist University in 1967 and a law degree from the same school in 1970. Before moving to Washington, she attended a non-denominational Christian church in Dallas.


Friends said Ms. Miers, who has never married, has three brothers and is particularly close to her elderly mother. “Harriet has dated but she has just never, for her own reasons, decided to get married,” a Texas appeals court judge who is a sister-in-law of the nominee, Elizabeth Lang-Miers, said. “She has dated people for long periods of time.”


One of those whom Ms. Miers dated is another judge, Nathan Hecht. “We’re close friends and have seen each other socially over the years,” Judge Hecht said in an interview yesterday.


Judge Hecht said he was baffled by the criticism some conservatives leveled yesterday at the nomination of Ms. Miers. “I don’t understand why you want to just fight to be fighting,” he said. “I think it’s a great appointment.”


Judge Hecht said Mr. Bush was wise to select Ms. Miers, who has no lengthy history of legal decisions or public memoranda for researchers to comb through. “Somebody who comes walking up with a sandwich board of what they believe is just a target,” the judge said. “Every indication is she’ll be a conservative judge.”


In 1993, after assuming the leadership of the Texas Bar, Ms. Miers urged the American Bar Association to hold a mail-in vote of its full membership on the organization’s stance on abortion. She expressed concerns that the lawyers’ group was overreaching “by trying to speak for the entire legal community.” While Ms. Miers encouraged the national association to step out of the abortion debate, she is not believed to have disclosed her personal views on abortion during the controversy.


In the 1980s, Ms. Miers made contributions to Democrats, including Vice President Gore and a former Democratic senator from Texas, Lloyd Bentsen. Asked about the donations, a Democrat and former candidate for mayor of Dallas, Thomas Dunning, said she was probably trying to appease a business contact. “I’m confident she supported Lloyd Bentsen and possibly Al Gore because a client asked her to,” he said.


Ms. Miers dabbled briefly with elective office. She won election to an at large seat of the Dallas City Council in 1989 but did not run for re-election two years later. “She ran for city council as a civic leader,” Mr. Dunning said. The post was nonpartisan. “I never really thought of Harriet as a political animal,” he said.


Judge Hecht said Ms. Miers gave up the city council seat because the city, facing litigation under the Voting Rights Act, chose to do away with the at-large positions. “She bowed to their will, but she didn’t want to be representing a little corner of north Dallas,” he said.


Ms. Miers served on the boards of a variety of community groups, including a Dallas women’s center and the local legal aid society. In 1996, she received an award from the local branch of the Anti-Defamation League.


At the award ceremony, Mr. Bush memorably described Ms. Miers as “a pit-bull in size 6 shoes.”


While the nomination of Ms. Miers may be engineered to avoid controversy, it could dredge up one of the most nettlesome political problems Mr. Bush has ever faced: charges that his family pulled strings to get him into the National Guard during the Vietnam War.


As he announced his nomination of Ms Miers yesterday, Mr. Bush mentioned her service as chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission. While she had that post in the late 1990s, a former director of the lottery, Lawrence Littwin, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that he was fired for aggressively investigating improprieties and possible bribery in connection with the state’s main lottery contract.


In 1999, lawyers for Mr. Littwin sought to question Ms. Miers about an anonymous allegation that the contractor, Gtech Corporation, was treated favorably in order to keep a lobbyist for the company and former lieutenant governor of Texas, Ben Barnes, quiet about his role in getting Mr. Bush a National Guard slot. A federal magistrate declined to allow the questioning.


Mr. Barnes denied wrongdoing, but in an interview with CBS News last year he acknowledged that he procured a National Guard opening for Mr. Bush at the urging of a Bush family friend.


Mr. Littwin declined to comment for this story, citing a confidentiality agreement he signed when he settled the case. However, the pact would not prevent him from telling his story to members of the Senate.


The New York Sun

© 2025 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

or
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use