Slate
by Bruce Reed

11/15/05

Since Halloween, Sam Alito has been dressing up as a mild-mannered civil servant who followed his father into the family business. Unlike the nakedly careerist John Roberts, who bounded from one Reaganite political post to the next, Alito was supposed to have spent his youth as a career bureaucrat in short sleeves and a pocket protector. Newly released papers from the Reagan library show that Alito was as much of a right-wing suck-up as Roberts. In a 1985 job application to become a Deputy Assistant Attorney General under Ed Meese, Alito boasted of his longstanding conservative credentials: 'The greatest influences on my views were the writings of William F. Buckley Jr., the National Review, and Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign' -- when Alito was all of 14...

http://www.slate.com/id/2130356/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp