Brett Kavanaugh, who has been nominated by President Bush to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, is a native Washingtonian with deep roots in the area.
The aspiring judge is the only child of Ed and Martha Kavanaugh, who have their own long histories in Washington.
Martha grew up in the District and was a white schoolteacher in the city’s predominately black high schools in the late 1960s and early ’70s, a period of significant racial tensions. She later became a state prosecutor and a state trial judge in Rockville, retiring two years ago.
Ed graduated from Georgetown University in 1963 and later attended the business school at George Washington University and the law school at American University. He was president of the Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association before retiring last year.
Brett was born in Washington in 1965 and later moved to Bethesda, where he attended Mater Dei, an all-boys Catholic elementary school.
He went on to attend another all-boys Catholic high school, Georgetown Prep in Rockville, where he started as cornerback and wide receiver on the football team. He was also captain and point guard of the basketball team before graduating in 1983.
Kavanaugh’s interest in basketball continued when he enrolled at Yale, where he played for two years on the junior varsity squad.
He also wrote for the Yale Daily News and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon, the same fraternity of which George W. Bush had been president two decades earlier.
Kavanaugh also shared Bush’s major — history —and graduated cum laude in 1987. He then attended Yale Law School, from which he graduated in 1990.
He spent the next four years clerking for various judges, including Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. He gradually became a protégé of Kenneth Starr, working for him both in private practice and when Starr was the independent counsel conducting the probe that led to President Clinton’s impeachment.
In 2001, Kavanaugh was named associate White House counsel, a post he held until 2003, when he became assistant to President Bush and staff secretary.
In 2004, Kavanaugh married presidential assistant Ashley Estes, who gave birth to their daughter, Margaret, 13 months later. The family lives in Chevy Chase, directly across the street from White House Counsel Dan Bartlett.
