Via WaPo, a most amusing glimpse into the mind of the young John G. Roberts: Young Roberts To King of Pop: Request Denied

“The office of presidential correspondence is not yet an adjunct of Michael Jackson’s PR firm,” Roberts wrote in a memo to his boss on June 22, 1984, opposing a request by the singer’s publicist for a presidential letter praising the star’s work against drunken driving.

In opposing the wishes of Jackson, Roberts acknowledged that he was a voice in the wilderness — but being a future Supreme Court nominee, he used the Latin. “I recognize that I am something of a vox clamans in terris in this area,” he wrote, “but enough is enough.”

[…]

The memo Roberts drafted for Fielding denying the request went further. “The visit of the tour to Washington was not an eleemosynary gesture,” Robert wrote, using a fancy word for “charitable.” “It was a calculated commercial decision that does not warrant gratitude from our nation’s chief executive.”

I am really starting to like this guy.

If this is the kind of stuff that document requests are going to generate, the Democrats might be wise to stop asking for more.

Plus, I love how WaPo whines about Robert’s vocab–the author sounds like some of my students: “would you quit using all those big words?”

(Full disclosure: I did not know what “eleemosynary ” meant prior the note from the WaPo author–indeed, I don’t know that I had ever seen it before. My first thought was that it sounds like one of Eeyore’s cousins. However, my next thought was to look the word up, which is what I always tell me students to do when they read a word they don’t know).