Judge Cooney answered yes, he was pretty sure he’d seen it, back in grade school.

“Is there anything about that you’d care to… tell the Committee?”

Judge Cooney looked perplexed. Tell? He wasn’t quite sure he understood the question.

Senator Mitchell held up a piece of paper as if mere physical contact with it might forever contaminate his fingers.

“Do you recognize this document?”

Not from this distance, Judge Cooney replied, now thoroughly perplexed.

“Then let me refresh your memory,” Senator Mitchell said. The vast audience watching the proceedings held its breath, wondering what radioactive material Senator Mitchell had unearthed to incriminate this spotless nominee. It turned out to be a review of the movie that the twelve-year-old Cooney had written for The Beaverboard, his elementary school newspaper. “ ‘Though the picture is overall OK,’ ” Senator Mitchell quoted, “ ‘it’s also kind of boring in other parts.’ ”

Senator Mitchell looked up, took off his glasses, paused as if fighting back tears, nodded philosophically, and said, “Tell us, Judge, which parts of To Kill a Mockingbird did you find quote-unquote boring?”

In his concluding statement several grueling days later, Senator Mitchell said in a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone that he could “not in good conscience bring myself to vote for someone who might well show up at the Court on the first Monday of October wearing not black judicial robes but the white uniform of the Ku Klux Klan.”

And that was the end of Judge Cooney. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee issued a statement politely inviting the White House to “send us a nominee we can all agree on.”

PRESIDENT DONALD P. VANDERDAMP repressed the temptation to storm up Pennsylvania Avenue and insert Senator Mitchell’s microphone in an orifice not specifically designed for such purposes, swallowed what was left of his pride, and instructed his staff to find another Supreme Court nominee, preferably one who hadn’t written movie reviews for his elementary school newspaper. In due course, he put forward nomineee number two, a New York State Court of Appeals judge named Burrows.

Judge Burrows had credentials that would entitle him to the E-ZPass lane at the Pearly Gates. Again, the Wraith Riders returned from their exhumations shrieking helplessly. Burrows’s after-hours hobby-his hobby-was providing pro bono legal counseling to inmates at the state penitentiary. He had lost a leg ejecting from his F-4 fighter plane over Vietnam. None of his rulings had been overturned. His wife was a Vietnamese refugee. They had adopted two Rwandan orphans.

Senator Mitchell, studying his dossier, furrowed his brow. No, this would not be easy. The Wraith Riders whinnied forth again and this time did not return with empty claws. A woman had been located who had dated Burrows when he was a midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy. Senator Mitchell smiled and dispensed lumps of sugar to the Riders.

“Judge Burrows,” Senator Mitchell said, “does the name [such and such] mean anything to you?”

Judge Burrows calmly but coolly returned the senator’s gaze and said that he hardly thought that had anything to do with anything.

“Perhaps we should be the-pardon the expression-judges of that,” Senator Mitchell just as coolly replied. After a few more questions he had grudgingly elicited that Judge Burrows had indeed dated Ms. Such-and-Such back then; further, that at one point she thought she might have become pregnant.

Again the room hushed.

“Judge Burrows,” he said, “and I really do hate having to ask these questions, but it is my job… is it true that you tried to talk Ms. Sinclair out of having an abortion?”

No, Judge Burrows replied. Not at all. But he had offered to do the honorable thing and marry her and raise the child. And then it turned out that she wasn’t pregnant after all.

The next day Senator Mitchell announced that he could not, in good conscience, vote to approve someone so “maniacally” opposed to a woman’s right to choose, as enshrined in Roe v. Wade.

And so ended Judge Burrows’s brief Supreme Court career.

That afternoon the normally placid-faced President Donald P. Vanderdamp strode to the helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House looking, as one reporter commented, “like he was ready to bite the head off a live chicken.” He did not throw the crowd his customary wave. Even the presidential golden retriever, Dwight, a friendly, pattable hound, looked eager to sink his fangs into the nearest shin.

MORE THAN SEVERAL HISTORIANS of the Vanderdamp presidency have speculated that the events that followed might very well not have taken place if the President had not chanced to turn on the television late that Friday night at Camp David, the presidential retreat. But turn it on he did. Rarely has channel-surfing been so consequential.

In an oral history on deposit at the Vanderdamp Presidential Library in Wapakoneta, Ohio, President Vanderdamp relates that he was simply trying to find the Bowling Channel that night. He was not a guileful person, so there is no reason not to believe him. Apart from the news shows and the bowling, he was not a big watcher of television, preferring crossword puzzles and murder mysteries. He claims never to have watched Courtroom Six before or ever to have heard of it, though it was one of TV’s top ten-rated shows.

At any rate, that Friday night found the President at his retreat in the Cactoctin Mountains, alone in bed with a bowl of Graeter’s black raspberry chip ice cream-an Ohioan delicacy-and the faithful hound, Dwight. The First Lady was being honored for raising awareness of a disease at a dinner in New York. Fuming over the Burrows fiasco while clicking his way through the cable channels in search of a decent bowling tournament, the President happened upon Courtroom Six. The rest is, as they say, history.

The episode he came upon was the one involving the ex-wife who, seeking revenge on her ex-husband for what she considered an inequitable distribution of assets, had snuck into his wine cellar while he was away and opened hundreds of bottles of prized Bordeaux wines-by hand, one by one-replacing the wine with diet grape juice; then recorking and resealing them. It’s one of Courtroom Six’s more well-known cases. As the wife is being sworn in by the clerk, she raises a hand ostentatiously encased in an orthopedic brace.

“May I ask,” Judge Cartwright, presiding, asks, “what’s the deal with the hand?”

“Carpal tunnel, Your Honor.”

Judge Cartwright, barely suppressing a grin, says, “The jury will disregard the defendant’s remark.”

“Objection,” says the prosecutor. “Grounds, Your Honor?”

“I don’t know.” Judge Cartwright shrugs. “But I’ll think of something.”

President Vanderdamp’s finger, poised on the channel button to keep on flicking, stayed. He found himself, along with millions of other Americans, entertained and captivated. He watched the entire show. He found himself quite taken by the charm and sassy style-to say nothing of the good looks-of Judge Pepper Cartwright.

“Pepper?” the President said aloud to himself, musing. “What sort of name is that for a judge?”

Dwight lifted his head off the pillow next to the President’s and cocked an ear in hopes of discerning syllabic similarity between the words being spoken and “biscuit.”

President Vanderdamp was not an imperious-much less imperial-president, one to summon the staff at late hours with urgent requests. When he walked Dwight on the White House grounds, he cleaned up after him himself. He had once ordered a (richly deserved) B-2 bomb strike in the middle of night, mainly because he did not want to disturb his elderly secretary of defense, who had just had another prostate operation and needed his sleep.

Now he reached for the presidential laptop, a computer of truly dazzling capability, and Googled Judge Pepper Cartwright and Courtroom Six. He stayed up well past his normal bedtime.