It was, as James Ware told it, the tragedy that made him "hungry for justice": the murder of his teenage brother, Virgil, in a racist shooting in Birmingham, Ala., at the height of the civil-rights struggle in 1963.
That moment inspired Ware to earn a law degree at Stanford University and, eventually, an appointment from George Bush as a federal judge in San Jose, Calif.The tragedy happened, all right, but not to Ware or his family. On Thursday, the judge confessed that his account was "not the truth," and asked President Clinton to withdraw his nomination to become the only active black judge on the prestigious 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers nine Western states from its base in San Francisco.
"I am sorry that my misstatements about my background have caused such unintended consequences," the 51-year-old Ware said in a letter faxed to the president. "I am deeply committed to the cause of civil rights and do not wish to be seen, as is being suggested, as using the unfortunate tragedy which befell Virgil Ware as trying to better myself at someone else's expense."
Ware's withdrawal came after The Birmingham News published a story Thursday reporting that the real family of Virgil Lamar Ware, including the dead man's brother, also named James, a worker for a coke-processing company in Birmingham, disputed the judge's claims.
An earlier story in the newspaper, in August, detailed the story of the Ware family and its three decades of grief since two white teenagers shot 13-year-old Virgil off the handlebars of a bicycle pedaled by James on Sept. 15, 1963, the same day that four little black girls were killed in the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church across town.
"Why would he do something like that?" the other James Ware, now 50, asked quietly in a telephone interview from Birmingham. "I have no idea. I'd like to talk to him and ask him why. I didn't think it was true. I couldn't picture a man being that hard up, doing that."
Judge Ware, who recalled being so disgusted at the Democratic Party's control of the Jim Crow South that he became a Republican in protest, had drawn no noticeable controversy when Clinton nominated him in June.
White House and administration officials, and staffers of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on Ware's nomination last week, were equally stunned by his admission. A full-field background investigation by the FBI failed to disclose the discrepancies in the judge's story.
"His admission did come as a surprise to us," said a Justice Department spokesman, Michael Gordon.
A senior Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the purpose of an FBI background check was to "search for instances of wrongdoing and lawbreaking, and not to fact-check every anecdote at a dinner party."
Administration officials and Senate aides said that when they first learned of the possible discrepancy on Wednesday and questioned Ware about it, he gave evasive, indirect answers.