Acknowledgments
For unfailing courtesy and helpfulness during research I am indebted to Justices who spoke confidentially but with complete freedom and candor about the ways and personalities of their peculiar institution. I am also grateful to several high-ranking members of the Court’s small and efficient staff whom I could name but who I am sure, in true Court tradition, would prefer to remain anonymous. They know who they are and I thank them for their help. They are a highly competent body of men and women, deeply devoted to their unique employment and their unique employers. The Court’s smooth day-to-day functioning rests in large measure on their dedicated work.
For research in the laws of South Carolina I am indebted to former Rep. John L. Napier of the Sixth District of South Carolina, and to Vinton D. Lide, at time of writing chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Their informed help was most generously and unstintingly given. Many thanks must also go to Robert Barr of U.S. News & World Report, an old friend from freshman reporter days on the Hill who still covers Congress and knows more about it than almost anybody else around the place, for his characteristically generous, tenacious and indefatigable pursuit of facts for me.
To Professor Gerald Gunther of Stanford University, perhaps the nation’s leading constitutional law expert, I am grateful for the list of supplemental reading transmitted via my nephew, Kenneth Killiany; to my sister, Anne E. Killiany, for many helpful editorial suggestions; and to Bill Howard Eichstadt for his usual fine job of manuscript typing and his customary sound and constructive suggestions as first reader.
I am also indebted to my editors at Doubleday, Ken McCormick and Lisa Drew, who are what editors ought to be—intelligent and thoughtful individuals who help a writer better express what he has in mind and do not, like some in publishing, attempt to twist his story out of all sensible shape to suit their own rigid ideological biases.
None of my sources, of course, is responsible for my interpretations of the information they gave me, nor for the uses I have made of it.
Allen Drury
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