What difference do these revelations make? At minimum they shed new light on Pickering's repeated evasions and misrepresentations, in sworn testimony before the Senate, about his activities and Gartin's political views. It wasn't entirely clear why Pickering gave so much incorrect or misleading testimony about Gartin and about the Sovereignty Commission in which Gartin was such a powerful force. The newly discovered evidence sheds light on the matter: Clearly Gartin was a far more important influence on Pickering's political thinking and decision-making in 1964 than Pickering has ever publicly divulged.

In 2002, Pickering attempted to portray Gartin as a progressive who was not a racist. What we know now is that, in trying to cover up Gartin's past, Pickering wasn't just covering up for his late law partner: He was covering up for the man who, more than any other, was responsible for his bolting the Democratic Party in 1964, a major event in Pickering's career. That is, he was covering up for himself. But it's worth looking closely at how evasive Pickering was about his own reasons for leaving the party.

There were several recurring themes in Pickering's 2002 Senate testimony. He repeatedly insisted that remarks from 1964 should not be judged from today's perspective. Yet he also repeatedly airbrushed the historical record to make it seem far more benign than it was. In his opening statement, for example, he cited former Mississippi Gov. Paul Winter saying that Gartin was not a racist. Only under intense questioning by Sen. Richard Durbin did Pickering partially back off from that claim. When Durbin provided a sheaf of evidence showing Gartin loudly proclaiming his segregationist views, Pickering admitted that "those were racist statements, without a doubt." But he insisted that no state leader could have been elected in Mississippi at that time without supporting segregation -- implying that Gartin was an otherwise decent and progressive political leader.

Pickering was even more evasive and misleading in his testimony about his own racial reasons for leaving the Democratic Party. During Pickering's single day of testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Feb. 7, 2002, Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin asked him to discuss that decision in detail. Pickering dodged every effort to get him to say whether he understood at the time that the Mississippi Regular Democrats were "humiliated" by President Johnson -- the supposed reason he left the party -- for a defensible reason: They systematically excluded and discriminated against blacks.

At first, Pickering simply ignored Feingold's question. He talked about Gartin, calling him "a progressive leader of that time" -- without ever mentioning Gartin's direct influence on his decision to switch parties. He also talked vaguely about "the difference between political decisions and political statements and judicial decisions." But the issue wasn't the connection between judicial and political decisions, it was how truthful Pickering had been in his sworn testimony about his own past.

Feingold did not let up. Twice more, in different formulations, he raised the logical question: How could Pickering have been so passionate in supporting the Regular Democrats at Atlantic City and not known that they were a racist delegation, representing a party that systematically kept blacks from voting in its precinct, county and state party gatherings?

Pickering replied that he had long felt that African-Americans should have been allowed to vote and that he had never participated in preventing blacks from voting. But no one had ever charged Pickering with personally barring blacks from precinct meetings or polling places. And he offered no explanation to square his alleged support of black voting "even before" 1964 with his die-hard support for the Regular Democrats. Amazingly, he again dodged Feingold's question.

The senator tried one last time, asking Pickering whether he recognized that the activities of the Mississippi Democratic Party in 1964 were discriminatory and unconstitutional.

And Pickering again ignored the question, saying again he now regretted his statements of 40 years ago and would not make them today, but evading Feingold's specific query entirely.

Senators may have another chance, perhaps as early as this week, to follow up -- although the White House offensive to speed the process along seems geared specifically to preventing any such follow-up. That is all the more reason for senators to resist the administration's speed-up -- a speed-up that in the case of Charles Pickering, like the case of Bush court nominee Miguel Estrada, now amounts to forcing a judgment before all the relevant documentation has been carefully examined and debated by the Senate.

The latest evidence from the Carroll Gartin papers confirms that Pickering and his supporters are attempting to deceive the Senate and the nation about Pickering's past. Instead of making a clean breast of his personal history and explaining how his views on race and segregation have evolved, the judge and his supporters have resorted to obfuscation, euphemism and false testimony. They have stressed -- and, as others have shown, exaggerated -- Pickering's meager testimony against a Ku Klux Klan leader in 1967, in an attempt to make Pickering a beacon of moral courage. They have featured the testimony of black Mississippians who support the Judge Pickering they know today.

But the events of nearly 40 years ago, and Pickering's attempt to obscure them, have a direct bearing on how we judge the truth of Pickering's Senate testimony -- and thus on his fitness to serve on the federal court of appeals. It's true, as Pickering and his supporters say, that we can't judge people today by what they believed in another, less enlightened era, two generations ago. Had Pickering come completely clean about his past, explaining honestly when and why his views had changed, these issues would not likely have lingered. But as we've known since Watergate, the coverup is often worse than the crime.

It is clear that Pickering and his supporters have suppressed some facts, misstated others, and otherwise twisted the record to make it appear as if Pickering was someone he was not in the 1960s. His law partner's papers tell the real story. But these papers have only recently been discovered. Senators should be entitled to ask Pickering to explain the difference between his testimony and what Gartin's records reveal, before they decide his fate.

Additional reporting by Laura McClure.

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