With President Obama announcing Elena Kagan as his next Supreme Court nominee this morning, friends and colleagues are heaping praise on the savvy solicitor general, who grew up as a “cool smart girl” on the Upper West Side.
“She’s done a wonderful job in the Justice Department,” her current boss, Attorney General Eric Holder, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday. “I’ve known her since the Clinton years.”
Obama is making it official at a 10 a.m. press conference, a source told The Associated Press, adding that two factors in Kagan’s favor are her ability to bring together people with competing views and the fact that, at 50 years old, she could be expected to serve decades.
VIDEO: OBAMA ANNOUNCES KAGAN AS SUPREME COURT NOMINEE
Kagan whose current duties include arguing the government’s side before the Supreme Court, has never served as a judge — and her views on many key legal issues are a mystery.
She is single and Jewish. If her nomination is approved and she replaces retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, it would mark the first time in history the US Supreme Court has not had a Protestant member.
Kagan is Obama’s second nomination to the high court. And, like the first time, when he picked Bronx native Sonia Sotomayor, the president turned to a woman from the Big Apple.
The way Kagan tells her story, a pivotal event in her life was getting into elite Hunter College HS.
“It was a very cool thing to be a smart girl, as opposed to some other, different kind,” she said. “And I think that made a great deal of difference to me growing up and in my life afterward.”
Her formative years were spent in Manhattan, where she grew up as the middle child in a well-to-do Upper West Side family.
Her father, Robert Kagan, was chairman of Community Board 7 and a lawyer who specialized in helping tenant groups negotiate with landlords about apartment conversions to co-ops. Her mother, Gloria, was a Hunter College HS teacher, and her brother, Irving, teaches social studies there.
Kagan went on to earn honors at Princeton — where she was a student leader, along with classmate Eliot Spitzer — and won a scholarship that sent her to Oxford for a master’s degree.
Her interest in politics began at 18, when she worked as an intern for Rep. Ted Weiss (D-Manhattan). She also served as a deputy press secretary for Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman (D-Brooklyn).
Kagan got her law degree from Harvard in 1986 and clerked for US Court of Appeals Judge Abner Mikva and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Marshall, a towering figure, gave the 5-foot-3 Kagan a nickname: “Shorty.”
As her résumé grew, Kagan became known as an ambitious individual and a quick learner, someone who could be curt and single-minded — and something of a puzzle.
“Elena is the single most competitive and most inscrutable person I have ever known,” a former Harvard colleague — and admirer — told National Public Radio.
Kagan served as an adviser to Democrat Michael Dukakis’ failed presidential campaign in 1988.
She spent six years teaching at the University of Chicago Law School before then-President Bill Clinton named her associate White House counsel.
In Washington, Kagan developed a reputation for being brusque and highly aggressive in advancing the Clinton agenda. “She was not the most popular person there, in part because of that,” said Jamie Gorelick, an admiring colleague.
After she was named the first female dean of Harvard Law School, Kagan was a pragmatist. “You can buy more student happiness per dollar by giving people free coffee than anything else, I’ve discovered,” she said.
She’s a liberal who has gotten along with conservatives. In 2006, she hosted a dinner at Harvard for Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court’s most tenacious conservative. She also attended a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society.
“You are not my people,” she joked.