"Dear Jim: Thanks for the great job you do pushing the mail cart around the office. You truly are a special person!"

[Charlie Savage signs a copy of his book for Aaron Zitner, politics editor for the Los Angeles Times.]

Earlier this week, we attended a delightful book party for Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy, by Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe. Savage won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, based on his work on presidential signing statements.

Photos and discussion of the star-studded event -- after you win a Pulitzer, everyone is your friend! -- after the jump.

Would you trust this man to write your biography?

If so, you might be waiting a long time. In fact, you might be DEAD before it's finished (or even started).

Professor Stephen Wermiel, of American University’s Washington College of Law, has been working on a biography of the late Justice William J.Brennan Jr. for some TWENTY YEARS. Professor Wermiel "began" the project back in 1987, when he covered the Supreme Court for the Wall Street Journal, and Justice Brennan was still on the SCOTUS.

More background, from the Legal Times:

Brennan, who retired from the Court in 1990 and died in 1997, picked Wermiel as his biographer and had hopes of reading the book in his lifetime.

Brennan’s son William Brennan III, who died in 2004, was openly critical of Wermiel’s delay. In a stinging New Yorker essay that quoted Brennan III before he died, legal writer Jeffrey Toobin said Wermiel was guilty of “dawdling” and lumped Wermiel together with Gerald Gunther and Andrew Kaufman, whose biographies of Learned Hand and Benjamin Cardozo, respectively, took more than 20 years to complete.

If you're thinking that the delay isn't hurting anyone -- obviously Justice Brennan's hope of "reading the book in his lifetime" lies beyond realization -- think again:

Researchers also expressed concern about the delay because Wermiel had been given exclusive access to sought-after portions of Brennan’s Court papers, including his correspondence and his notoriously detailed case histories from the final years of his 34-year tenure.

But now, some good news. From the tireless Tony Mauro:

The long-awaited authorized biography of the late Justice William Brennan Jr. is back on track. Biographer Stephen Wermiel said last week he has recruited a collaborator and co-author to help “jump-start” the completion of the work...

The new co-author is Seth Stern, 31, a reporter for Congressional Quarterly who covers the House and Senate Judiciary committees and is a 2001 Harvard Law School graduate. Stern will keep his day job but is plowing through reams of Brennan material on nights and weekends. “It certainly is daunting, with his three-plus decades on the Court,” says Stern. “There is a good chunk of work to do. . . . It will be done.”

We wish Professor Wermiel and Mr. Stern the best of luck in this endeavor. We just hope their writerly collaboration doesn't turn into the literary version of Waiting for Godot:

STERN: Well? Shall we write?
WERMIEL: Yes, let's write.

They do not move.

Brennan Biography Moving Forward Again [Legal Times]
Professor Stephen Wermiel [American University - Washington College of Law]

Our favorite movie of all time is All About Eve (1950). It's the story of a brilliant but aging stage diva, Margo Channing (Bette Davis), and an aspiring actress, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter). Margo befriends Eve, taking the star-struck youngster under her wing. But then the exceedingly ambitious Eve starts to threaten her mentor's reign as queen of the theater.

The small Supreme Court press corps can be compared to the clubby world of the theater. It's populated by distinguished veterans, like Tony Mauro, and emerging younger talents, like Dahlia Lithwick. (Expressed in Broadway terms, Mauro and Lithwick could be compared to, respectively, Christopher Plummer and Sutton Foster.)

The stage has its great divas -- e.g., Bernadette Peters, Chita Rivera -- and so does the SCOTUS press corps. Nina Totenberg is certainly one of them. But the undoubted queen of Supreme Court correspondents is Linda Greenhouse, of the New York Times.

Greenhouse has been covering the Court for almost three decades, since 1978. She enjoys unmatched access to the justices, especially those in the middle and left wings of the Court. Supreme Court justices are notoriously media-shy. But Linda Greenhouse can magically reach them on their cell phones, at any hour, and get them to spill their deepest and darkest secrets. If you want to know whether there was blood in a justice's stool this morning, ask Linda G.

So here's our question:

If Linda Greenhouse is the Margo Channing of Supreme Court reporters, does that make Jan Crawford Greenburg into Eve Harrington?

Just like Eve Harrington, Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News is a talented and attractive young woman, whose star is on the rise. In the past three months, she has scored coveted in-person interviews with almost half of the Supreme Court:

(1) Chief Justice John Roberts, in Miami;

(2) Justices Antonin Scalia and Stephen Breyer, here in Washington; and

(3) earlier this week, Justice John Paul Stevens (his first network television interview ever).

For all of you non-journalist types, please understand: these are MAJOR COUPS.

And there's more. As Howard Bashman notes, later this month, Greenburg has a "top-secret" new book on the Court coming out. That book, Supreme Conflict, is being touted as drawing upon "unprecedented access to the Supreme Court justices and their inner circles."

(Note to Greenburg's book publicist: We'd love to get a reviewer's copy, if you wouldn't mind sending one our way.)

Call it Greenhouse v. Greenburg. Linda Greenhouse's historic domination of Supreme Court coverage is under siege, as Jan Crawford Greenburg makes some serious inroads at One First Street. And we're not the only ones who have taken notice. Check out Howard Bashman's great interview with La Greenburg, posted just this morning, in which he accurately describes the trajectory of her career as "meteoric."

We will surely piss off some people with this question, but we'll ask it anyway:

Could Greenburg's status as a hottie be contributing in any way, however small, to her journalistic success?

In All About Eve, you will recall, Eve Harrington uses her beauty and charm to seduce theatre critics, writers, and directors.*

Some of you might object: "This whole 'All About Jan' theory is ridiculous. Linda Greenhouse has been covering the Court since Jan Crawford Greenburg was in footsie pajamas. Do you really think LG is about to be supplanted as Empress by some upstart kid?"

We respond by quoting this exchange from All About Eve, between Margo Channing and her lover, Bill Sampson:

BILL: Darling, [to succeed in the theater,] you've got to keep your teeth sharp. All right. But you will not sharpen them on me --- or on Eve...

MARGO: What about her teeth? What about her fangs?

BILL: She hasn't cut them yet, and you know it!

But Jan Crawford Greenburg HAS sharpened her pearly whites (which we've admired up close). And she's ready to sink them into Linda Greenhouse.

* Rumor has it that back in the day, as a young and attractive reporter, Nina Totenberg was not averse to "workin' it." If you can confirm this rumor or shed more light on it, please drop us a line.

N.B. We are NOT suggesting that Nina Totenberg pulled The Full Judith Miller. We've simply heard that Totenberg, back when she was a youthful beauty, was highly skilled at deploying feminine charm in getting her sources to talk.

Update: This comment is one of the best compliments we have ever received in our entire life. Addison DeWitt is our idol. Thanks, Michael Doyle!

Interview of Jan Crawford Greenburg by Howard Bashman [How Appealing]
Jan Crawford Greenburg [NewsHour Extra: The Road Taken]
Linda Greenhouse bio [Wikipedia]
All About Eve [IMDb]
All About Eve screenplay [Screenplays for You]
Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court [Amazon]

We're reading Tony Mauro's super-juicy article as fast as we can. Highlights and discussion will follow shortly.

Okay, we're done. Here are some excerpts:

The late Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s Senate confirmation battles in 1971 and 1986 were more intense and political than previously known, according to a newly released FBI file that also offers dramatic new details about Rehnquist’s 1981 hospitalization and dependence on a painkiller....

In July 1986, when President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist to be chief justice, the Justice Department asked the FBI to interview witnesses who were preparing to testify that Rehnquist had intimidated minority voters as a Republican Party official in Arizona in the early 1960s. According to a memo in the Rehnquist file, an unnamed FBI official cautioned that the department “should be sensitive to the possibility that Democrats could charge the Republicans of misusing the FBI and intimidating the Democrats’ witnesses.” But then-Assistant Attorney General John Bolton — who more recently served as ambassador to the United Nations — signed off on the request and said he would “accept responsibility should concerns be raised about the role of the FBI.” It is unclear whether the FBI ever interviewed the witnesses.

John Bolton? That guy is everywhere! Did he have the walrus moustache back then?

More discussion -- including tales of Rehnquist's "bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts," his paranoia that the CIA was out to get him, and his attempt to escape from a hospital while in pajamas -- after the jump.

Alas, celebrity professor Tim Wu -- who was originally scheduled to appear on the Federalist Society Convention panel we just returned from, addressing net neutrality -- was not there.

We were graced by the presence of Professor Christopher Yoo, however, and his presentation was excellent. Alas, due to the time constraints, he had to cover his material rather quickly.

Earlier today, we attended an address by Solicitor General Paul Clement, the government's chief Supreme Court advocate -- and were able to meet the man himself. We were in the lobby of the Mayflower Hotel, chatting with fantastic Supreme Court correspondent Tony Mauro, when Mr. Clement ("General" Clement?) exited the ballroom in which he had just spoken. Mr. Mauro then introduced us to the Solicitor General, who was most genial. He's a friendly and accessible fellow, despite being a celebrity of the legal profession, with 32 Supreme Court arguments under his belt -- at the tender age of 36 40.

(Thanks to this commenter for the correction. Clement was born in 1966. The statement of his age was made in the remarks introducing him, but we neglected to double-check them before posting.)

(We apologize to the Solicitor General for our rather disheveled state. We were unshaven, sweaty, tie-less -- and, horror of horrors, wearing a button-down shirt. That has got to violate SOME provision in Title 18 of the U.S. Code!)