Judge David Tatel’s memoir of blindness and justice

A Rappahannock County resident’s journey in both worlds

Memoirs generally roll out the particularities of an individual’s adventure in the world. But some move to a larger stage, addressing questions of living in a just society, or simply being human.

Judge David S. Tatel’s “Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice” fits the latter category. Neither a manifesto nor an autobiography, the book covers an exceptional legal career, interwoven with a journey into blindness. And from the start, the story seems to outgrow its own chronology. The life is well-described, but the book treats broadly experienced challenges, such as accepting losses, embracing good fortune and expanding justice where possible. 

“Five years ago I would never have written this book,” Tatel said. Today, he can’t imagine not writing it. 

Slated for release June 11, the book spans three decades of civil rights litigation and 29 years on the bench of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Tatel worked in chambers vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she ascended to the U. S. Supreme Court. The book is already generating attention from national media; Tatel analyzes a number of Supreme Court decisions, warning that the justices are veering from the judicial restraint that he considers crucial to the separation of powers within government.

Written in Rappahannock

Tatel’s life has mostly been lived in greater Washington, D.C., but the book came into being in Rappahannock County. “I could never have written this book in Washington, D.C.,” he said, though he and his wife Edie maintain an apartment there. 

“I can’t tell you how many miles I walked on Long Mountain Road, just thinking about the book,” he said. Completely blind, Tatel would travel with Vixen, a majestic German shepherd who has been his guide dog for five years. Gripped by an insight, Tatel would stop and dictate into a recorder. Vixen would wait, then the duo would resume walking.

Vixen, Tatel said, has been about “much more than helping me get around.” Before Tatel would walk with Edie, or a friend, engaged in conversation. But as the book was taking shape, “it was important to be able to be alone,” he said. “The dog freed me to think.” 

Tatel’s friends had long urged him, without success, to compose his memoir. Tatel’s mastery of the legal issues was never in question, nor his recall of myriad details from childhood, education and entry into the world of litigation and justice. Still, there were hurdles, starting with his relationship to his own blindness. Through brilliant compensations and subterfuges, he had made the condition seem almost irrelevant. Writing the memoir, Tatel wrote, led him “to accept my blindness as an essential part of who I am.” 

But Tatel didn’t want the book to be entirely personal or exclusively about being blind; the law, and larger concerns about U.S. society, deserved equal weight. The book’s two themes – blindness and justice – move in what Tatel called “inverse trajectories”: As Tatel’s acceptance of his own blindness deepens, his faith in the nation’s judicial machinery recedes.

Specifically, he worries about “the Supreme Court’s apparent disregard for the principles of judicial restraint.” Tatel – a political progressive who favors judicial restraint – is disturbed by sweeping Supreme Court decisions that have altered the landscape for environmental regulation, voting rights and reproductive choice. 

Maturing into blindness

Losing his eyesight didn’t upend any of Tatel’s core aspirations: He married and raised four children to adulthood; his legal career succeeded brilliantly; he has a wide circle of friends, and has enjoyed hiking, skiing and being outdoors. Nonetheless, it is painful to read the hard facts of retinitis pigmentosa, the rare disease that ushered Tatel from a world clearly seen, to one increasingly indistinct, to one uniformly dark. 

As a boy, Tatel was hit in the face by a flying baseball he didn’t see. In a movie theater with friends, he avoided the dangerous trek through the dark for popcorn. Later, he gave up tennis and driving a car. Entering restaurants he would keep one hand on a waiter’s arm as he approached his table. Day to day, in airports, along sidewalks and in courtrooms, his navigational tactics were ingenious, but exhausting. And, despite his eventual acceptance of living widely and well without eyesight, Tatel conceded in the memoir, “I’d love to see another star, another snowflake.” 

Tatel dreaded and postponed the essential tool for the blind, a white cane, until he was nearly 40. Six years ago, at 76, at the urging of his 11-year-old grandson Reuben, he began the process of acquiring and establishing a life-changing relationship with a trained guide dog. 

Though blind, Tatel occupies the visual world. “When someone gives me walking directions,” he writes, “what appears in my mind is a map.” When scenes are described, the words mutate into mental pictures. Edie drives, but he navigates. 

At Rappahannock’s annual storytelling production, “No Ordinary Person,” Tatel referred to his wife’s “beautiful white hair,” having never actually seen it. Of course, there are limits to Tatel’s special way of seeing: “Things that are not described to me are invisible,” he writes. 

How the book was written

The book was thought through on Long Mountain Road walks, but it was written at a two-person desk at the Tatels’ Castleton home, facing a line of windows from a second-floor loft. Tatel would type into a $7,000 braille-computer at the right side of the desk. He would send the text to Edie, on a laptop at the left side of the desk. A teacher and editor, she would question a sentence or word choice, tighten syntax, then either send it back to David, whose computer would turn the type into spoken words, or read aloud the section she had just edited. David would listen, then respond, and there might be further refinements.

Later, they would relocate to a screened porch overlooking grass and tall trees. Edie would read a chapter out loud. “A sentence would be confusing,” Tatel said. “We’d edit.” There would be another reading, and further consideration. It recalled the final stages of writing an opinion at the U.S. Court of Appeals. “The last 10% of an opinion is like sculpting,” he said. “I loved that part of the process.” 

Mixing lights and shadows

David Tatel is an expert at navigating setbacks and prizes. His book makes clear that he won the lottery with his parents, and in his junior year in high school, his beloved father, Howard E. Tatel, a pioneer in radio astronomy, took him to assist on a scientific expedition in the Peruvian Altiplano.

For the younger Tatel, it was a pinnacle experience, but toward the end of the trip, his father experienced disabling headaches, which he attributed to altitude. Once home, he learned that the cause was a brain tumor. At 43, he died, after an initial surgical procedure failed. Six months later, doctors linked David’s worsening eyesight to an irreversible and progressive disease.

College at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor brought two inspirational experiences: A visit from presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, who told students that if elected, he would launch an international service program, later named the Peace Corps, and that he would create summer jobs in government for thousands of students. 

Tatel landed one of those jobs, and in the second summer, proudly shook hands with the president who had visited Ann Arbor. Four months later Kennedy was assassinated. 

But there was a second inspiration: A course in constitutional law. Already interested in government, Tatel realized that “the law made the whole thing tick.”

After graduation, he enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School, and met Edie Bassichis, another Michigan graduate, who was teaching and working toward a Master of English degree at Northwestern University. A blind date went well, and four months later, the law student and teacher, aged 23 and 22, got married. Both understood there were eyesight problems; neither anticipated blindness. After all, he rode a bike, shopped for groceries and read thick law books. 

Litigating, then judging 

Tatel’s life in litigation centered on civil rights, responding to President Kennedy’s call for lawyers to chip away at the many structures that excluded Black Americans from the country’s political and economic life.

One case stood out, and would itself have become a book had Tatel found a publisher. It involved NAACP-organized boycotts in Port Gibson, Miss., targeting businesses known for blocking Black hires and denigrating Black customers. Local businesses, backed by the White Citizens Council (dubbed by Tatel to be “a country club version of the Klu Klux Klan”), sued, and a Mississippi judge declared the boycott illegal, slapping a $1.25 million award, plus a $1.5 million bond, on the NAACP– an existential threat to the organization. 

Accepting defeats inside Mississippi, Tatel steered the appeal into the federal courts, where he sought emergency relief from the costly bond facing the NAACP. At the hearing, Tatel walked to the lectern in a federal courthouse in Oxford, Miss., holding the sleeve of a colleague. “Readers” back in Washington had reviewed laws and case histories over the phone, and Tatel had memorized his argument, emphasizing the case’s importance for the NAACP, the First Amendment and the legal system at large. The judge signed the relief order, hours before the bond was due to be paid.

The case inched through several more rounds, until 1982 – 13 years after the Port Gibson merchants sued – when the Supreme Court ruled that boycotts in service of social justice and human rights are protected speech under the First Amendment. Tatel assisted with the case, which was argued by Lloyd Cutler, a Washington lawyer who also served as counsel to presidents Carter and Clinton. When the Supreme Court decision went public, 3,000 NAACP delegates had gathered in Boston for a national convention. Delegates began to sing, “We Shall Overcome,” after which an organist filled the space with a celebratory rendition of “Amazing Grace.” 

Tatel later became director of the Office of Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. 

Judge Tatel of Rappahannock 

In 1994, Tatel’s career in litigation and civil rights ended when he was named to a lifetime seat on the country’s second most powerful court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It was also the year the Tatels began a part-time life in Rappahannock County, acquiring property in Castleton. 

Tatel took on some of the country’s most fraught and famous cases, including the handling of detainees at Guantanamo, the jailing of New York Times reporter Judith Miller for her refusal to reveal a source to a grand jury and the Trump administration’s first scheduled execution of a convicted murderer.

As Tatel followed rulings from the Supreme Court, he grew more alarmed by sweeping judgments that contrasted with the minimalist approach of Justice Lewis Powell and others who served in the past. For example, the court ruled that the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency could repeal the Obama’s administration’s Clean Power Plan because a regulatory agency shouldn’t address “major questions” like fuel sources without express instruction from Congress. The ruling, he warns, could effectively limit agencies’ efforts to regulate a range of significant and technically complex issues.

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He was disturbed by the court’s decision to end the Voting Rights Act requirement that states with a history of discrimination seek advance clearance for changes in voting arrangements. 

“The Supreme Court’s evisceration of the VRA was a tragedy for civil rights; its reasoning was a tragedy for the rule of law,” Tatel wrote. He pointed out that states once subject to the clearance requirement rapidly redrew district lines, tightened voter ID requirements and purged voter rolls, “all in ways that made voting more difficult for minority voters.” 

Overruling Roe v. Wade’s right to abortion, he said, “looked like judges doing politics, or worse, judges fulfilling their appointing presidents’ campaign promises.” 

A man at peace, a world in turmoil

Tatel’s memoir recounts a shimmering moment with Edie in a Chicago hospital room following the birth of their first child, Rebecca. He quotes Edie saying, “Once we had our baby in our arms, we both felt our hearts grow.” Outside, the air was acrid and plumes of smoke billowed from nearby Chicago streets, where riots had erupted following the assassination of Martin Luther King. 

At 82, Tatel is adept at balancing the peace of his own life with turmoil in the wider world. The book functioned as a way to make sense of the mix. Through decades without eyesight, Tatel collaborates naturally. True to form, the book emerges as a tripartite undertaking, involving a blind judge, a vigilant and compassionate dog and a wise editor with beautiful white hair.