When Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell died in 1998, The New York Times’ obituary hailed him as a judge “who brought a voice of moderation and civility to an increasingly polarized Court during his 15-year tenure.” The newspaper added, “He was the balancer and compromiser, a political moderate with an aversion to heated rhetoric and doctrinal rigidity.”

As so often, the Times was distilling the elite consensus, a view that had an element of truth only if one accepted a very narrow meaning of “moderation.” Powell’s reputation as an avatar of middle-of-the-road sanity rested largely on his social liberalism. Powell joined the Supreme Court in 1972 after a long career as one of the nation’s top corporate lawyers, known particularly for his long association with the tobacco company Philip Morris. Powell’s reputation for moderation rested largely on his personal style as an old-school Southern gentleman and his liberalism on social matters. He was part of the 7-2 majority that affirmed a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v. Wade and helped protect affirmative action in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). Both decisions have been overturned by subsequent right-wing courts.

Powell also benefited from the contrast between his social liberalism and the increasingly strident conservatism of more recent Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. When Powell resigned in 1987, Ronald Reagan tried to replace him with Robert Bork, a rebarbative reactionary who was seen as the antithesis of Powell. Bork’s nomination failed, but subsequent Supreme Court justices such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have made many centrist liberals nostalgic for the age of Lewis Powell.

Yet Powell’s moderation was highly selective, coming into play only on issues where the power of big business was not at stake. On economic matters—which make up the bulk of cases that come before the Supreme Court—Powell was no compromiser but an open partisan of unchecked corporate domination of society.

Part of the strength of the excellent new documentary podcast series Master Plan (created by the journalist David Sirota and his team at The Lever) is that it thoroughly debunks the bland image of Powell as a moderate and instead shows that he was one of the founding fathers of modern American plutocracy. Powell earns particular pride of place in the show because of his authorship of a notorious 1971 memo (prepared for the US Chamber of Commerce) that laid out a strategy for a corporate counterrevolution against the emerging social movements of the 1960s and early ’70s (notably the Black Power movement, environmentalism, and consumer protection). The memo was a call to arms for corporate America to use its economic power to push back against the left, with particular emphasis on the importance of gaining sway over the courts, the academy, and the media.

The Powell Memo was the Project 2025 of the Nixon era—a detailed program for establishing and entrenching right-wing power over the commanding heights of American government and society.

On the left, there’s been much dispute over the actual impact of the Powell Memo: Was it really the blueprint for the conservative counterrevolution against liberalism that has remade America—or just the little-read grousing of an angry corporate lawyer?

Writing in The American Prospect in 2005, policy analyst Mark Schmitt decried the “myth” that the memo was influential. Schmitt claimed: “The memo was circulated within Chamber of Commerce circles and became public after Powell’s confirmation to the court, when journalist Jack Anderson unearthed it to question Powell’s judicial temperament. After that, it seems to have been forgotten.”

To its credit, Master Plan forthrightly addresses Schmitt’s reasonable argument, and uses fresh investigative reporting to document that the Powell Memo, far from having been “forgotten” after Jack Anderson’s reporting, was in fact the seedbed for high-level right-wing organizing that undergirds the conservative counterrevolution.

To illuminate both the Powell Memo and its legacy, Master Plan highlights Powell’s formation during his career as a corporate lawyer. He was no mere legal-gun-for-hire for Philip Morris but a full-fledged wartime consigliere, deeply involved in strategizing the firm’s long campaign of disinformation to discredit the science proving that smoking causes cancer. This campaign included pioneering the creation of astroturf groups that both lied about the science and pretended to be independent grassroots voices—a technique later picked up by fossil fuel firms promoting climate change denial.