The oral history of renowned D.C. trial attorney Tom Green, conducted by Jeffrey Bauman (2 sessions) and Judith Feigin (eight sessions) between 2017 and 2025, is now available on the Society’s website. His oral history is an invaluable primary source account of an inflection point in American legal culture.
Green talked his way into the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1967 by arguing that serving in a Vietnam artillery battery was the equivalent of a legal clerkship, then required by Department of Justice policy. Green began what he would later describe as “probably the greatest time we ever had, as lawyers and as colleagues” at an office of just 16 AUSAs, including Earl Silbert, Judith Rogers and Oscar Altshuler. They tried cases of every kind before judges including Gesell, Bryant, and Aubrey Robinson — names that loom large in the history of the D.C. federal courts.
When Green left the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1970, the high-profile representations followed almost immediately. The Watergate scandal, combined with the new Independent Counsel Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, was giving birth to an entirely new field of legal practice, and Green was positioned at its center. He describes the early white-collar defense bar as “a very small fraternity of guys”
who “stuck together and traded cases” and “kind of commandeered the field.” The lawyers who built that field alongside Green included Edward Bennett Williams, Bill Hundley, Plato Cacheris, Jake Stein, Bob Bennett, Brendan Sullivan, Chuck Ruff, and John Dowd — a roster that reads like a who’s who of Washington litigation. The cases that followed Watergate — Iran-Contra, the Keating Five, the Manafort prosecution — confirmed Green’s place at the very top of that bar.
Green’s oral history is also a personal portrait of a long marriage to Pam Green, four children, a decade-plus on the board of the National Symphony Orchestra, and a lifelong passion for ham radio. It concludes, remarkably, with his 2025 founding of the Washington Litigation Group, a 501(c)(3) law firm dedicated to promoting the rule of law during the current moment in American governance.
Green’s oral history captures not just a career but the arc of Washington’s federal legal culture across six transformative decades. It is, as Green himself puts it, “a hell of a journey and quite rewarding.” A more extensive summary by Elizabeth Geise, as well as the full oral history, are now available here.