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Stephen L. Carter, who teaches law at Yale, begins his new book with a benign trick. “Naturally,” he observes, “the most vicious confirmation fight in our history was waged to keep a black man off the Supreme Court.” Carter then lists the tactics used against the nominee: They questioned his intellect and his veracity and the choices he made in his personal life. They made up stories about his ethics. They lambasted him for refusing to answer questions about controversial cases and called him a liar when he said his mind was open. . . . The man of whom Carter writes, however, is not Clarence Thomas. It is the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall—whom Southern segregationists tried mightily to deny confirmation, and to whom The Confirmation Mess is dedicated.

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