My 10-year-old grandson is a fifth grader at Lakes International Language Academy (LILA) in Forest Lake, Minnesota. LILA, a public elementary school that strongly emphasizes Spanish language immersion, is an International Baccalaureate World School that uses the IB’s Primary Years Programme as its curriculum model.
He recently embarked on an Individualized Learning Program (ILP). In the ILP, the student suggests a topic for investigation to the school’s Enrichment Coordinator, who quizzes the student about what the student already knows about the matter and then determines whether the student appears to be ready to tackle the topic. After approval of the topic, the student conducts research on the topic and then prepares a report on the topic to the student’s class.
My grandson proposed Libya’s current civil war and conflict for his topic. He did so because he regularly follows national and international news in the newspapers and on the radio and knew about the recent uprisings in the Middle East, including Libya, and he wanted to learn more. The Coordinator asked him questions about Libya and concluded that he already knew a lot about the situation and that he could proceed with the ILP on Libya.
His further research about Libya was done by reading the local newspaper and doing Google Internet searches. He also obtained information from “This American Life” on Minnesota Public Radio. He then started preparing a PowerPoint presentation on Google docs that allows the Coordinator to review his progress. My grandson has entitled his presentation “Libyan Civil War and Revolts–NATO Coalition Bombing.”
The ILP has enabled him to learn more about the current situation in Libya, to practice and improve his skills at Google searching and other research, English language writing and oral presentations. Doing all of this independently with modest supervision, he said, “made me happy.”
In March 1966, during my final semester of law school, I was one of 38 national finalists for 16 White House Fellowships. This fellowship program had been started in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson to provide one-year high-level positions in the White House and Executive Branch to future leaders so that afterwards the individuals could take that experience into their regular jobs and be better informed about important public policy issues and the workings of the federal government and, therefore, be better citizen leaders.[1]
East Room, White House
The other finalists and I were brought to a Virginia retreat center for interviews by members of the Fellows Commission, including John Gardner (then U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Department) and C. Douglas Dillon (former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Department). Afterwards on March 29th we all were bused to the White House and mid-afternoon were escorted to the East Room where the winners would be announced.
Before the announcement, however, President Johnson unexpectedly entered the Room. He first joined his daughter Luci Baines Johnson, who was substituting for her ill mother, to greet the finalists. The President then walked around, shaking hands and making individual comments. Johnson then called for everyone’s attention. He said that when he was a young man in Washington, he always wondered what it would be like to come to see the president and what the president would say while the young Johnson knew what he hoped the president would say. Johnson then remarked that perhaps the finalists would like to ask him questions rather than hearing him give a dry lecture.[2]
There was an awkward silence. The other finalists and I were hesitant to ask the first question, and Johnson told a few jokes to loosen up the people in the Room.
Finally one of the finalists asked what previous presidents would have been selected as Fellows if there had been such a program in their day. Johnson laughingly replied that Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy undoubtedly would have been selected, but he did not think that Truman and Johnson himself would have made it. Other finalists asked Johnson questions about the Viet Nam war, the current visit to Washington of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Fellowship program itself.[3]
Lyndon Johnson & Bill Moyers
Word of this impromptu presidential question and answer session got back to the White House Press Room, and journalists belatedly arrived and stood at the back of the Room taking notes. Johnson’s Press Secretary, Bill Moyers, was next to Johnson during the session and kept trying to end it, but Johnson was enjoying himself and continued to respond to questions.
During this session I was standing about 10 feet from President Johnson. There was concern at the time about inflation with the February 1966 Consumer Price Index up 0.5%, the highest increase in that month since 1951, and whether the President would ask Congress for a tax increase to fight inflation. So I asked the President if he would be seeking such a tax increase.
Tugging at his big right ear lobe, Johnson responded in a folksy manner in his Texan drawl. He first said that he was more worried about economists than he was about the economy and that he had not made up his mind on the tax increase idea. He added that he did not want to ask for an increase, especially in a midterm election year, but if he decided a tax increase was necessary to cool off the economy, he would ask Congress for a “modest” rise of 5 to 7 per cent in the taxes paid by individuals and corporations. Johnson also said he had ruled out reductions in federal government spending and wage and price controls as other ways to combat inflation.[4]
The President’s Daily Diary for that day says that this answer and his “mention of the Tax Rise to be proposed” was the headline in many newspapers the next day, as indeed it was.[5]
This news the next morning prompted a sharp decline in the stock market–the largest in two weeks. Reacting to this market decline, the President around noon on March 30th told journalists that he “absolutely” had not made up his mind about the need for a tax increase. The market responded with a momentary uptick, but it closed lower that day.[6] Thereafter I joked that I caused the stock market to fall.
At the conclusion of the meeting the prior day in the State Dining Room, the announcement of the 18 new Fellows was made.[7] I was not one of the lucky ones.
In the summer of 1960 I was an assistant to Donald “Duke” Norberg, the Chairman of the Iowa Democratic Party. I, therefore, witnessed the run-up in Iowa to the national Democratic Party’s July 1960 convention in Los Angeles.
Before the convention Senators John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were the leading contestants for the Party’s presidential nomination.
Lyndon B. Johnson
On June 19th LBJ and his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, came to Des Moines to woo the Iowa convention delegates. At a luncheon at the Hotel Fort Des Moines, LBJ emphasized the need for dynamic national leadership. He said that religion was not an issue whereas it undoubtedly was because Kennedy was Roman Catholic. Johnson then implicitly contradicted his own point by noting that he was accompanied by some of his Texas supporters; one, he said, was a Methodist, one an Episcopalian, one a Jew and one a Roman Catholic who had been knighted by Pope Pius XII. Johnson stressed that the U.S. had lost friends in the world as well as military power and that the president had to make foreign policy decisions. In an implicit criticism of Kennedy who recently had said that at the May 1960 U.S.-U.S.S.R. summit meeting President Eisenhower should have apologized to Khrushchev for the then recent U.S. U-2 spy plane’s flight over the Soviet Union that the Soviets had shot down, LBJ said that the U.S. should not have apologized. Such an apology, Johnson said, was not in line with what America stood for.
Before the luncheon, Mrs. Johnson worked the room. She visited people at different tables and asked if they knew some of the Johnson’s friends from their various home towns. This was a demonstration of the Johnson campaign’s good organization. The following day I drove one of Johnson’s assistants, Cliff Carter, to visit some of the Iowa delegates who could not make the luncheon. Carter asserted that although Kennedy was leading in national delegate support, he would fade on the third ballot after a high of 640 while LBJ would gain strength so that by the third ballot he would have over 800 delegates to win the nomination.
John F. Kennedy
A week later, June 26th, JFK came to Des Moines for a reception at the Hotel Savery. I was not able to be in the room with Kennedy and the Iowa delegates. But I did see him in the hotel lobby and noticed the palpable excitement as he walked to the meeting. I overheard someone say, “Here is another Roosevelt.”
On July 13, 1960, the Los Angeles convention nominated Kennedy for president on the first ballot with 806 votes (or 52.9%). It then nominated Johnson for Vice President. In Kennedy’s July 15th acceptance speech he said, “The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises– it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.”
In the November election, JFK and LBJ won the national popular vote by 113,000 votes over Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge out of a total vote of 68,831,000. In Iowa, however, Nixon/Lodge won with 56.7% of the vote; Kennedy/Johnson only carried six of the 99 counties in the state.
This experience before my senior year at Grinnell College was financed by its Program in Practical Politics.
From June 1966 through April 1970, I was a Wall Street lawyer. I was an associate attorney with the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore.[1] Its offices then were on the 56th through 58th floors of the Chase Manhattan Bank Building one block from the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. From my office window I could see the New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty.
Cravath then was considered a large law firm with approximately 100 lawyers, as I recall. Its system was to hire top graduates of the top law schools and to put them in a “class” of their contemporaries to compete for one of the very few partnership slots after seven or so years.
I decided to join Cravath after a summer clerkship in 1965 that I had enjoyed. The firm was regarded as the crème de la crème of law firms. Its starting salary of $9,000 ($62,235 in current Dollars) was the best. Living in New York City sounded exciting. The practice of some Wall Street lawyers becoming high government officials was an alluring dream that I hoped to fulfill. For example, John Foster Dulles was such a lawyer with another firm who became Secretary of State in the Eisenhower Administration, and Roswell Gilpatric was a Cravath partner when I was there who had been Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration.
While I was at Cravath, it jumped the starting pay of its lawyers to $15,000 ($95,550 in current Dollars). This was such startling news that it was covered by the Wall Street Journal. Those of us who already were associates received a similar bump in pay. My wife and I thought we were rich and moved from our Brooklyn Heights apartment to the first two floors of a row home several blocks away.
I was in Cravath’s litigation department or group. I initially was assigned to Partner John R. Hupper, who was an excellent, careful, kind man and an excellent teacher and mentor for young lawyers. I also worked for other equally capable partners, including Thomas D. Barr, Frederick A. O. “Fritz” Schwarz, Jr. of the toy store family and Albert R. Connelly. The senior partner of the group, Bruce Bromley, who was called “Judge” Bromley because of his service in the New York courts, was another capable lawyer for whom I worked. Much to my subsequent regret I did not know at the time that Bromley was instrumental in the Eisenhower Administration’s selection of Joseph Welch to be the Army’s lawyer in the 1954 McCarthy hearings. Given my personal interest in Welch, which will be discussed in a subsequent post, I would have loved to have talked with Bromley about this important piece of U.S. history.
The more senior associates really did a lot of the supervision of the newer lawyers. I fondly remember some of them: Eugene P. Souther, who later became a partner in another Wall Street law firm; Victor M. Earle, III, who became the first general counsel of one of the big accounting firms (Peat Marwick); Robert E. Bouma, who became a partner in a Chicago law firm; Dorsey D. “Dan” Ellis, Jr., who became a law professor at the University of Iowa and then Dean of the Law School at the University of Washington at St. Louis; George J. Wade, who became a partner in another Wall Street law firm; and Alan J. Hruska, who became a Cravath partner.
I got along with the other young associates in the litigation group even though we all knew we were in competition with one another. Since I was there only four years, however, the real competition started after I left. My best friends and contemporaries were Jay Gerber and Arnold Messing, who later were successful lawyers with other firms in New York City and Boston respectively, along with Howard J. Kristol, who became a partner in a Wilmington, Delaware law firm, and David S. Cupps, a subsequent partner in a Columbus, Ohio law firm.
Another contemporary in the litigation group was David Boies, who later became a famous Cravath partner who defended CBS in a libel case by General Westmoreland regarding the Vietnam War. Some of his other famous cases were as the U.S. Government lawyer who destroyed the credibility of Bill Gates in cross-examination in the Microsoft antitrust case and as the lead lawyer for Al Gore in the litigation against George W. Bush over the 2000 election in Florida. The New York Times Sunday Magazine in June 1986 put David’s photo on its cover for its lead article about him, “The Litigator.” My wife and I were guests of David and his wife in their Washington Square apartment on the night in 1969 that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was always amazed that David was able to combine the stressful life of the young associate with teaching antitrust law at N.Y.U. Law School and having season’s tickets to the Metropolitan Opera. On a trip to Minneapolis for a pretrial conference in the IBM antitrust cases, David, several other associates and I gathered in one of our hotel rooms for cards and room-service dinner. To my surprise, David ordered two dinners; he was never overweight or heavy, and I assumed that his metabolism rate was so high that he needed super quantities of food. David is still going strong. As the lead partner now in his own law firm, he recently was in St. Paul, Minnesota as the lead lawyer for the NFL in litigation over the football teams owners’ work stoppage.[2]
Under the Cravath system, it took a long time for a new lawyer to be able to do anything by himself. My first court argument was on a motion in a small case in the state trial court in Manhattan (New York Supreme Court). I do not remember the case or what my motion was. But I do remember the huge courtroom with hundreds of lawyers milling around and waiting for their cases to be called. While I was waiting, I heard an argument on a defendant’s motion for more definite statement in the complaint that starts a lawsuit. The pro se plaintiff (one without a lawyer) was a rabbi, and the judge said, “Rabbi, please hire a lawyer. You have written a novel, not a complaint.”
There were two notable cases that claimed my attention in New York that will be discussed in subsequent posts. One was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s lawsuit over his 1967 exclusion from the U.S. House of Representatives. The other was the set of antitrust cases against IBM over its System/360 computers.
Being a Wall Street lawyer for four years was challenging and exciting. So too was living in New York City with a wife and two young sons. I value those years, but am still glad that I decided against staying for the competition for partnership at Cravath and instead chose to move to Minneapolis to practice law with Faegre & Benson.
Ecuador and the U.S. are engaged in an unfortunate diplomatic spat.
It started on April 5th, 2011, when Ecuador expelled the U.S. Ambassador and professional diplomat, Heather Hodges. Her sin? Sending a July 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Quito to the U.S. State Department that recently became public by WikiLeaks. The cable recommended the revocation of the U.S. visa of Jaime Aquilino Hurtado, Ecuador’s national police chief. The grounds for this recommendation, said the cable, were multiple reports of his alleged illegal activities, including his possible involvement in schemes to extort bribes from a taxi union, steal public funds and ease trafficking of undocumented Chinese immigrants. The cable also noted that “some [U.S.] Embassy officials believe that [Ecuadorian] President Correa must have been aware of them when he made the appointment” of Mr. Hurtado and that Correa “may have wanted to have . . .[a police] chief whom he could easily manipulate.” Such statements about Correa, said the Ecuadorian government, were “unacceptable, . . . malicious and imprudent.”
Later President Correa said that the leaked cable indicated that the U.S. Embassy has informants in Ecuador’s police and armed forces. “This is espionage,” he said. Not true, I say. Normal diplomatic practice for the U.S. and all other countries, I assume, is to be informed about the activities of the other country and to talk with various officials in its government. The leaked cable, in my opinion, reflects that normal practice. Note too that in the reports from Ecuador there is no claim that the statements in the cable are untrue.
Two days after Ecuador had declared the U.S. Ambassador persona non grata, the U.S. did the same with respect to the Ecuadorian Ambassador to the U.S., Luis Gallegos, who also is a professional diplomat. The only stated ground was to protest what the U.S. saw as the unjustified Ecuadorian expulsion of the U.S. Ambassador.
This U.S. expulsion Of Mr. Gallegos was totally unjustified, in my opinion. Ambassador Gallegos has an impressive record of service to his country and the world community. He chaired the U.N.’s Ad Hoc Committee on a Comprehensive and Integral International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, granting recognition to the struggles and rights of the more than 650 million people with disabilities. In addition to degrees from the Central University of Ecuador, he holds a M.A. degree as a Humphrey Fellow Scholar from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy-Harvard University. An U.S. NGO regarding Latin America said that Ambassador Gallegos capably performed his duties as Ambassador to the U.S. with “a lowered voice, an incisive mind, and an abiding sense of humor, which he needed.”
I recently heard Ambassador Gallegos speak at a meeting in Minneapolis honoring Silvia Ontaneda as the new Consulate General of Ecuador for Minnesota. By his remarks and manner anyone could tell the Ambassador was a wonderful man and honorable diplomat. He indeed exhibited a calm manner, incisive mind and sense of humor.
I hope that this spat will not interfere with improving commercial and other relations between the two countries.
Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997-2002), this week expressed her support of the recent U.N. Security Council’s actions on Libya.[1]
On February 26, 2011, the Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1970, which among other things, referred the Libyan situation since February 15, 2011, to the International Criminal Court’s Prosecutor, directed the Libyan authorities to cooperate fully with the Court and Prosecutor and invited the Prosecutor to make periodic reports about his actions in this matter to the Council.[2] This action, Robinson said, was unusual, but demonstrated the usefulness of having a permanent international criminal court that could be called upon in ongoing situations involving the most serious crimes of international concern and that could help to stop those crimes before they become worse. She also recognized, on the other hand, that the referral might complicate efforts to get Colonel Gadhafi and others to abdicate power by fleeing to another country because of the possibility of criminal charges by the ICC.
Less than three weeks later, the Council, 10 to 0 (with 5 abstentions), approved Resolution 1973, which authorized U.N. members to take all necessary measures to protect civilians under threat of attack in Libya by establishing a no-fly zone, but excluding a foreign occupation force.[3] Robinson asserted that this action was a proper exercise of the emerging international principle of the duty or right to protect or humanitarian intervention because of the imminent threat by the Gadhafi regime to kill many of its own people, especially in Benghazi. She also cautioned against expanding these military measures into intervention on the ground.
In addition, Robinson applauded this year’s “Arab Spring.” The uprisings in the Middle East included many women and demonstrate, she said, that men and women all over the world want human dignity, freedom and human rights as well as a decent living. The desire for human rights is indeed universal. It is not some Western set of values that is imposed on other societies.
Mary Robinson is also the former President of Ireland (1990-97). In 2002 she founded Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative that aimed “to put human rights standards at the heart of global governance and policy-making and to ensure that the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable are addressed on the global stage.”[4] After that organization finished its work in 2010, Robinson founded The Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice for “thought, leadership, education and advocacy on the struggle to secure global justice for those many victims of climate change who are usually forgotten – the poor, the disempowered and the marginalised across the world.”[5]
The U.S. Senate by virtue of the “great compromise” of 1787 is inherently undemocratic with every state having two Senators regardless of population. Given the addition of more states into the Union and the changes of population since then, the Senate is even more undemocratic today.
Piled on top of this institution is an arcane and even more undemocratic set of Senate rules which are not required by the Constitution and which we are hearing more about these days: cloture, reconciliation, the Byrd rule, etc. One of the spectacles in the last Congress was Senator Coburn’s “requiring” that Senator Sanders’ proposed amendment for a single payer system for health care be read aloud and thereby delaying real work by the Senate. Another in the last Congress was Senator Shelby’s “hold” on 90 or so nominees.
In short, the U.S. Senate rules are a major source of Americans’ frustration with our national government. I think they are unconstitutional in that they impose a de facto super majority requirement on nearly everything, far beyond the constitutional imposition of such a requirement. The Senate needs to wake up from its pompous meanderings! Change your rules that make the Senate an abomination!
At the start of this Congress there were modest changes to these Rules. But they were not enough. The Senate should operate by majority rule. The only exceptions should be when the Constitution requires a supermajority (two-thirds) vote for overriding a presidential veto or consenting to the ratification of treaties or for proposing constitutional amendments or for expelling a member.
Ever since my high school days in the 1950’s, U.S. politics, law and history have fascinated me. From the start, I was passionate about civil liberties, especially freedom of speech.
Joe Welch & Joe McCarthy
This interest was sparked by watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on my parents’ new TV set in the spring of 1954. The hearings were high drama, and the lawyer for the Army, Joe Welch, was a charming Bostonian, so I thought. I was appalled by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on civil liberties and free speech and thrilled by Welch’s courageous defense against McCarthyism.
Three years later, in the fall of 1957, my freshman year at Grinnell College, I discovered that Welch in fact was from an even smaller Iowa town (Primghar) than mine (Perry) and that he was a Grinnell graduate, Class of 1914. I learned this when I heard Welch speak at the College’s Convocation “American Culture at Mid-Century.” But I was too timid as a first-semester freshman to speak to Welch directly.
Burling Library Grinnell CollegeEdward B. Burling
In 1959, the College’s new library was being built and was named “the Burling Library.” A substantial amount of the funds for the building was donated by another Grinnell graduate and lawyer from another small Iowa town (Eldora), Edward Burling (Class of 1890). While attending American University that Fall on the Washington Semester Program, I met Mr. Burling at his office to thank him for the new library. After an interesting conversation, he invited me to a Sunday afternoon at his cabin on the Potomac River. Little did I know at the time that such a Sunday afternoon had become a famous Washington institution. I do not recall our conversation that day, but I do remember how Burling, then 89 years old in a wool plaid shirt, vigorously chopped wood on a beautiful fall afternoon.
As I continued my education and started my own career as a lawyer, I had no time to do anything about my interest in these two men. But in the spring of 1982 I took a sabbatical leave from my law firm to teach a course about law at the College. In my spare time I examined materials about Welch and Burling in the College Archives. (See Post: A Sabbatical Leave from Lawyering (May 26, 2011).)
Somehow I learned that the Boston Public Library had a collection of Welch papers, and while on a business trip to Boston in 1985 I had spare time to examine those papers. This was my first digging into original historical documents, and I was thrilled to be touching and reading such documents and attempting to make sense of them. (This was more fun, I thought, than my more common project of reviewing documents produced by an adversary in a civil lawsuit by “A” against “B” to recover a substantial sum of money.) Among the interesting documents in the Welch collection were letters between Welch and Burling after the conclusion of the Army-McCarthy hearings that were discussed in my paper about Burling, which was excerpted in The Grinnell Magazine (Edward Burnham Burling: Grinnell’s Quiet Benefactor (Summer 2009)).
I returned to Boston in the summer of 1986 to attend the Harvard Law School’s Summer Program for Lawyers. While there, I visited the Boston offices of Hale and Dorr, Welch’s former law firm, and interviewed Fred Fisher, the lawyer who had been attacked by Senator McCarthy, and James St. Clair, the lawyer who assisted Welch in the Army-McCarthy hearings and who later represented President Nixon in the litigation over the White House tapes. I also searched the Harvard Law School Library and found references to Welch in some of its collections of papers regarding the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which was discussed in my paper about Welch, which also was excerpted in The Grinnell Magazine (Good Night, and Good Luck: The Movie’s Offstage Hero, Joseph Welch (Summer 2006)).
I also discovered in Harvard’s collection of the papers of Learned Hand, an eminent federal judge and one of my legal heroes, that he and Burling had been law school contemporaries and life-long friends. This spurred my interest in Burling as I read the extensive correspondence between them, another topic of my paper about Burling.
While in the Boston-area that summer I also visited the Kennedy Presidential Library, but failed to find any documents about Welch in the papers of Robert Kennedy, who had been a lawyer for the McCarthy committee in 1954. The time at the Library, however, was not wasted when I found oral history interview transcripts of two men that I knew.
Donald “Duke” Norberg had been the Chairman of Iowa’s Democratic Central Committee, for whom I had worked in the summer of 1960 on a Grinnell Program in Practical Politics grant. I fondly recall seeing then Senators John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in Des Moines to woo the Iowa delegates before the Los Angeles Democratic Party’s presidential nominating convention.
Frank Coffin had been a Democratic Congressman from Maine who was defeated in his run for Governor of Maine in 1960 because of the anti-Catholic vote prompted by JFK’s being the presidential candidate. Coffin recalled President Kennedy’s introducing him to Jackie Kennedy at an inaugural ball as the man whom Kennedy had pulled down to defeat. In the Kennedy Administration Coffin was in charge of the U.S. Agency for International Development and later was appointed as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. (I had met Coffin in the early 1980’s when we both were on the University of Chicago Law School’s Visiting Committee, and in 1984 Judge Coffin participated in a liberal arts seminar for lawyers that I organized at the College.)
When I returned those transcripts to the library desk, I noticed a transcript of an interview of Princess Grace of Monaco (Grace Kelly), and a brief glance revealed an account of her fatalistic view of history.
This research prompted a request to a law school classmate and friend at Covington & Burling, the Washington, D.C. law firm started by Mr. Burling, for additional information about him, and my friend sent me a copy of the firm’s history. I also have been assisted in my research by another Grinnellian, James Burling (Class of 1972), who is not related to “my” Burling, but who is a partner in Welch’s law firm, Hale and Dorr.When I retired from the active practice of law in the summer of 2001, one of my future projects was to review all of the information that I had gathered and write articles about the two gentlemen, and I mentioned this project in an essay about retirement that was posted on the Internet by another law school friend as part of materials for a lawyers’ seminar.
In 2005 I was inspired to finish these papers when I received a totally unexpected call from Professor Roger Newman, the biographer of Hugo Black and a member of the faculty of Columbia University. Newman said that he was the editor of the forthcoming Yale Biographic Dictionary of American Law and asked if I would be interested in writing short biographies of Welch and Burling for that book. Newman said he had discovered my interest in these men from the just mentioned essay on the Internet. I said that I would be glad to do so and retrieved my materials, did additional research and wrote the two 500-word biographies. (This Biographic Dictionary, which was published in 2009 by Yale University Press, was the first single-volume containing concise biographies of the most eminent men and women in the history of American law who have devised, replenished, expounded, and explained law. See Yale University Press, The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law (ISBN 978-0-300-11300-6), http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300113006.)
These sketches, however, barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to say about Welch and Burling. As a result, I did additional research, including examination of several collections of original papers at the Library of Congress. While I was spooling through microfilm of the papers of Felix Frankfurter, I came across his file of correspondence with Albert Einstein. I paused and saw Einstein letters auf Deutsch in small, precise handwriting.
Two other subjects of my history detective adventures are more personal. My maternal great-great grandfather, Charles Edwin Brown, was a Baptist missionary to the Iowa Territory and then the State of Iowa from 1842 until the late 1800’s. One of his sons and my great-uncle, William Carlos or “W.C.” Brown, started working on the railroad as a section hand at age 16 and worked his way up the corporate ladders to become president of the New York Central Railroad in the early 20th century. I have done some research on their lives and written essays about them.
I have not been in a position to even attempt to research all the original and secondary sources and to write complete biographies of these men, but my work on much shorter articles made me realize and appreciate the work that has to be done to produce a major biography of a historical figure such as the one of Andrew Carnegie by my Grinnell History Professor, Joe Wall.
Although I was a history major at the College, I did not do any independent historical research or paper and instead obtained a good background in European and American history. Because I did not do any independent paper, I did not learn historical research methodology at the College, a lacuna I now regret.
Instead, I learned such techniques from being a litigation lawyer. Defining the problem or issue was the first task. You then develop an ever evolving plan to gather relevant evidence or original sources. You start with the documents and interviews of your client. They suggest other possible sources. Library (and now Internet) research provides more information and leads. They are pursued with other research and interviews using publicly available information plus information available through the formal discovery process under the rules of civil procedure. The lawyer also has the right and opportunity to compel witnesses to be examined under oath for further information. (Historians do not have this advantage.) All of the resulting information has to be evaluated for admissibility into evidence and to be synthesized into a hopefully persuasive story as to why your client should win the case.
I enjoy this investigative process, whether as a lawyer or as a history detective. There is the thrill of the hunt for original papers about my subjects and being so easily diverted by coming across things like the Frankfurter-Einstein correspondence and the Grace Kelly oral history interview. I also enjoy the challenge of putting all of the pieces of research into a good story and writing it all down on paper. Through all of this lies an interest in finding out what happened.
My work as a lawyer and as a history detective has made me somewhat nostalgic for one “road not taken:” continuing my work as a history major into graduate school and becoming a historian.
I am a liberal Democrat in the U.S. political context. In the words of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, I believe that our federal government was created and continues to exist so that “We the People of the United States [can] . . . form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty.”
My overall political philosophy also draws sustenance from our 1776 Declaration of Independence: “all men [and women] are created equal: that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Similar language is found in Article 1 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the U.N. General Assembly: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”[1]
Taxes are, as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “what we pay for civilized society.”[2] Yet, according to another great federal judge, Learned Hand,
“Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as
possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the
treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one’s taxes.
Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister
in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone
does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any
public duty to pay more than the law demands.”[3]
In short, every citizen has a patriotic duty to pay the taxes that are imposed by the laws.
This political philosophy recognizes that there always are things that can be and should be improved in our society and that this requires constant attention to the way things are and what they could be. This approach runs the risk of overestimating the benefits of change and underestimating the costs of change.
Genuine conservatives, in my opinion, are skeptical of grandiose theories and applying them to a society. This is an important and legitimate point of view. This approach, however, runs the risk of underestimating the benefits of change and overestimating its costs. At its extreme, this can be a Panglossian “this is the best of all possible worlds.”
