His father was a Jewish immigrant from Czarist Russia and also a wounded World War I veteran. The father wanted the bonus that sent the Bonus Marchers to Washington during the Depression, and Specter cites this event as one of the on going influences on him. When specter was only 8 years out of Yale Law School, he became a staffer on the Warren Commission, and another staffer recalls him as "extremely competent" and "well organized." At that time, Specter developed up with the so-called single bullet theory, holding that the bullet that passed through President Kennedy's throat and the bullet that wounded Governor Connally were the same and that there was thus no second gunman. It was two years after that when Specter ran for District Attorney of Philadelphia. At the time he was a Democrat, but since the only openings were in the Republican party, he changed his affiliation (Brookhiser 42-43).
During the Reagan Administration, Specter was on the Judiciary Committee, and one of the great battlegrounds then was over judicial nominations. Patrick McGuigan, then director of the Judicial reform Project of the Free Congress Foundation, states of Specter,
He was always repeat, always a question mark . . . He was not even a square liberal. You could have dealt with that. But he had to invent a moral dimension to fit his own complex political situation (Brookhiser 43).
He voted against the Reagan Administration in two losing battles, one to make William Bradford Reynolds associate attorney general, and the other to make Jefferson Sessions III a federal district court judge. both battles were bitter, and even more bitter was the battle over the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Specter did not view Bork's opinions favorably, and he announced that he would vote against Bork. this ended the battle and doomed the bork nomination. When Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Court by George Bush, ...