Irwin Goldbloom Interview 1

This oral history was conducted for t.he District of
Col-umbia Federal Court Oral Hist.ory Proj ect on February 1,
L992 at the Law firm of Ross, Dixon & Masback. The subjecL is Irwin Goldbloom (I). The interviewer is Sarah Gere (S) .
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Good morning Mr. Goldbloom.
Good morning.
Let’s begin our inLerview at the beginning
were yciu born?
July 11, l-931 .
Where were you born?
Syracuse, New York.
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TeIl me a lit,tle bit about your family were they
from Syracuse?
My mother was born in Syracuse and she lived there
as a young woman.
My father was born in what was Russia, the part that
eventua11y ended up as the count.ry of Lithuania. He
emigrated to the New World in 1904. He was a 2Lyear oId young man who had an interesting
experience, at least a 1ittle bit differenE from the
typical immigrant from Eastern Europe. He had three
older half brothers. His father had married twice.
My father was the child of his father’s second
marriage. The three older half brothers had much
earl-ier left East.ern Europe to come to the New World
and settled in Canada. They stretched across Canada
from Montreal to Winnipeg to Vancouver. So my
father came to New York, Ellis Island, on a ship and.
immediately got on a train and went to Montreal
where he stayed for a few days and beyond t,hat left
and went to Winnipeg and within a matter of weeks
was in Vancouver, British Columbia. So here was a
young man from Eastern Europe finding himself in the
Pacific Northwest, and working for a brother in the
Pacific Northwest who was a fur trader. My father
worked for him as sort of a salesman and helper in
the fur trade business, Eraveled around all parts of
the Pacific Northwest. He traveled up to Alaska,
traveled into the United States, Montana, Idaho, and
the states of Washington, Oregon. He basically had
no relationship to the eastern part of the United
States at all until much later. He lived in Canada,
became a Canadian citizen. Eventually he had a
falling out, as I recall from hearing about it as a
little boy, with his brother because hj-s brother
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wanted him to go to Alaska for business. It. was at
the time of Lhe year when if you wenL to Alaska in
the winter time you had to stay there for 5 months
because either the roads or the railways were
impassable. He just didn’t want to stay there for 6
whole months. So he had a falling out and
eventually ended up crossing the border and spending
time in Wa11ace, Idaho, and He1ena, Montana. He
eventually gravitated into other parts of the States
and ended up living in Kansas City, Kansas. Somehow
or other I think he, and I don’t know the real
details, but somehow or other he came East and met
my mother, I think through some mutual friends, and
they got married. This is about. 1-92L when they were
married and he took her back to Kansas City, Kansas.
My mother had always lived in Upstate New York and
she was taking off for the Midwest, Lo a strange and
to her a very foreign place.
I have two older siblings, a brother and sister both
of whom were born in Kansas City, Kansas. My
parents’Iived there for about B or 9 years,
Then, one time when my mother was back East
her parents, she had several siblings, in Up
New York, ffiy fat.her happened to be mugged on
He was not seriously hurt, but he was just h
and robbed by someone. When my mother came
Kansas City and she found out about it, she
are going back to Syracuse
Enough of the Midwest
I guess.
visiting
state
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eId up
back to
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there any longer. She convinced my father to pack
up and go back to Syracuse. That was around 2 years
or so before f was born. I was born in Upstate New
York in Syracuse in 1931. So this is the brief
history of my family how I was born in Syracuse.
S: What did your parent.s do in Syracuse?
I: My father was sort of a salesman, he sold clothing
and traveled around a bit. These were hard times
for most people in the r30s. Event.ua11y, my mother
feII i1] and had Parkinsonts Disease. That was the
diagnosis at the time. My father more or less
receded from his work, somewhaL I think he was
sustained by family members, uncles and aunts who
helped support us. My mother was in the situation
where paralysis slow1y took over where she became
almost ent.irely paralyzed from Parkinsonls. She
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died in 1,947, and by that time my father was beyond the age of working. He eventually got i11, he was a
diabetic, and died in l-953, dt the age of 69.
S: Are your siblings
I My siblings I have a brother who stiI1 lives in
Syracuse. He’s a bachelor. My sister is married
and lives in Hudson, New York, which is about,
30 miles south of Albany.
S: f take it then you went to high school- in Syracuse.
I went t,o high school Central High School in
Syracuse.
Have you been back at all for any reunions or do you
keep any ties with Syracuse?
I didnrt keep Loo many ties with Syracuse. I went
to the University and the Law School. I have in a
smal1 measure supported and. sent money to t.he 1aw
school as part of the alumni donation program. f
have a cousin and family and a brother up there. I
get there very rarely, very rarely. I think IIve
been to Syracuse not more than half a dozen times
over the last 15 years.
S: Of course you have to go during that smaIl window of
opportunity when there is a thaw — when you can
actually get there.
f: That’s true.
S: The high school that you went t,o f ‘m somewhat familiar with since, ds we discovered, I went. to
the same high school. When I went there it was a
technical high school that a1so had very specifJ-c
programs for people who were not goj-ng, on to colIege. Was Central High School like that when you
were there?
No. I don’t reca1l it as being a technical high school. There was a technical high school in
Syracuse at the time call-ed Vocational High School
where those who were destined to be in more. technical t14pe work were, I think, directed. Central was a high school which (now I graduated in
1″948) by that tlme, which was right after Worl-d War IT, I’d say the population in Syracuse, at. l-east t.he
demography of Syracuse, was changing somewhat. We
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had a fairly middle class, middle to middle-1ower class population at the school. I ‘ d say roughly
maybe 10-20 percent black at the time, which was
tlpical of my educational experience throughout
el-ementary and secondary schools. There were people
there from good sections of town and people there
from modest. means. f suspect that in my high school
graduating class roughly half would go on to college
and beyond. A number of my high school classmates
are pegple that I know are docLors, lawyers, professional people, businessmen and so forth.
There were also the typical people who would go into jobs like secretarj-es or office people and so forth.
There were children of people who were businessmen in town that. I think went int,o their parentsr
business. There was sort of a mix.
How did you like high school going to a place
that, has what sounds like a fairly diverse
population.
I liked “it. I liked it a lot. One of the things t,hat I recall though about, high school as well as my
years in college was that I supported myself. I
worked for an uncle who had a drugstore where I
worked after school. I thought of school as a
work/school relat,ionship. I never could dj-vorce the idea of having to work after school or working when I wasn’t in school from the school situation. f didn’t have a school/play type relatj-onship or upbringing which a lot of people I thought. from
another part. of the city had. When they weren’L in school they were able to p1ay. When I wasnrt in
school- I was abl-e to work.
Does that mean you had l-imited involvement in school athletics and things like that?
Wel1, I think I tended not to be involved in school athletics because of that or extra-curri-cu1ar activities to any great extent. Although f don’t consider that f was devoid of that f mean I did participate in things f had a 1ot of friends high schooL friends I wasn’t a loner or anything like that. My memory of it is t,hat I was always working. That I think sort of colors my recollection during that period of time.
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By no means was t.hat unique, I mean there were a 1ot of people doing the same during t.hat period.
Is there one particular teacher that you recall as
being influential during high school?
There were a number of teachers. My recollection of
them is dim but now that you mention it there was a
Miss Whipple who taught Latin and I don’t know
whether she was there
No, rro, but that’s funny because we had a Miss Gates
who taught Latin and she’s one of the more memorable
teachers f can recaIl from Central.
Miss Whipple taught Latin. She was a spinster and
very obviousl-y a spinster. She was a very demanding
teacher and somewhat scornful of t.he students who
she thought. were not serious or diletLant.ish about
their studies. I remember she said something to
someone, not Lo me, but to some young man. You
donrt hdve Lo bother with this because you are just
going on to make a lot of money doing something
else. It was sort of a derisive commenL for a
teacher t.o make, buL she made it . But I always
recalI her because, to t,he extent that I
subseguently have developed any discipline about
studying or learning, I think I got something from
her because she was a hard task master and wanted
people to learn things precisely. I always believed
afterwards, to the exLenL that I had any skiI1s as
an editor of people’s writings or as someone who can
writ,e anything, I always harken back to my Latin
teachers. This is much more so than any of my
English teachers because I canlt remember ever
learning anything signifi-cant in grammar from any of
my English teaehers. I can remember a lot of
g’rammar from my l-,atin teachers. I have just lots of
memories about learning parts of speech, how phrases
go together from the Latin. That actually goes back
to junior high school weLl before I got to Central
when I was at Madison Junior High School.
They taught Latin ln junior high school?
Yes. I had a year and a half of Latin. They started L,atin in the 8th grade, the second half of
the 8th grade and I spent the 9th grade in Junior
High School. I had the first year of Latin at
Madison ,]unior High School where f had a good
teacher but not a sLern task masLer. My
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recollection of learning sentence structure and
t.hings of that sort come from my Latin classes much
more so because my recollection is that most of the
English t,eachers that f ever had were very poor. I
don’t know why I think that, iL may have had to do
somewhat with the fact. that there werenrt any good
younger teachers. They had gone off to the War.
They had a 1ot. of older teachers that had come out
of retirement. I have this vague recoll-ection of
havi-ng -English teachers who spent time talking to us
about. cit.izenship, character and things of that sort
but never reaIIy taught us anything about literature
or English. The reason I say t.hat is because when I
got to college in my freshman year I had a young
woman instructor for freshman Eng1ish. She was
bright and fresh and brilliant. She was ful1 of
insights. It was almost as though a whole worl-d had
opened up for me, that I had never ever seen before.
I mean I read a 1ot as a young person. I read
books, notes, papers. f was quite a reader all
those years.
Was that an example that your parents set for you?
It wasnrt a question of setting an example for me.
I was always a reader and I always from a very early
stage, read a lot. fn fact, I was always reading
books far beyond my t.ime. f was reading bestsellers
and t,hings of that sort. f was always in the
library getting library books ouL,.
WelI now if you worked aft.er school and you did all
this reading when did you do your homework?
WeIl, therein lies the rub because in terms of being
a disciplined student, I don’t think I was a very
good student. I didn’t do as well in high school or
even in coll-ege as I could have because I wasnrt
disciplined. I spent. time worki-ng. ‘I worked and I
read and r stayed interested to skip around a bit.
I remember when f was in college I had an assignmenL
to go and read an articl-e in a book that was in the
reserved book room in the library. It was to
prepare for a test that we were going to have in
some course I canrt remember the course and I
can’t remember the subject but I remember going
to the reserved book room that evening and starting
to read the article and finding it very duI1 and boring. I leafed around in the book which had a 1ot.
of different articles. I found two or three other articles t,hat I was much more interested in. I sat
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for two or three hours and read t,hose two or three
ot.her articles very intensively. Then they closed
the library and I left. I hadn’t read the article
that f was supposed to. I didn’t do well on the
test at, all because I hadn’t done the assignment. A
lot of my experiences were like that because I
devoted my time to things I was interested in and
coul-dn’t f ocus or be disciplined about t.he things
that I was supposed to. So I would say I was an
average student and I got by very well. I was a
decent student and teachers would say to me, oh wel-I
you get by because you know a lot,.
S: But you could do a 1ot better if you put your mind
to it,.
WeII, I could do a Iot. better if I put my mind to
it. Right.
a. While you were in high school were you beginning to
think about becoming a lawyer? Did that cross your
horizon’lcy that. point?
No. Not rea1Iy. I don’t think f rea11y thought
about becoming a lawyer until much 1ater. I worked
in t.he drugstore and my uncle wanted me very much to
go off to pharmacy school. He figured that if f
went to pharmacy school, he was married but, he had
no children, he would have someone to take over his
business. f could have gone to pharmacy school but f wasnrt rea11y interested in it. I was always
interested in things like political science, history, things of that sort. World politics, world affairs. Those were the things that interested me. I didn’t think of 1aw as a place to be involved with
the things that I was interested in because lawyers I thought were du11 and dreary and worked with
papers that were dusty and boring.
Were t.here any lawyers in your family?
There were no lawyers in our family. There were a
number of lawyers who were friends of the family,
who were very nice, kind and gentle people.
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But you nonetheless Iooked at them as doing things that werenrt interesting to you.
I looked at them f always thought that they were
very nice people and comforting to be around because
they tended to have very classic personalities.
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They were, I’d say, modestly successful in Upstate
New York. But there was not.hing about them f
always felt that they werenrt real1y involved in the
great. affairs of t.he world or of State or the things
that f was interest.ed in. When f was in college I
was an American Studies major. It was sort of
political science, history and things of that sort.
I never related 1aw t.o the lawyers or the lawyers that f knew to the things that I was int,erest.ed in
except that I knew that there was something out.
there that was law that was probably of a different
variety. As a I think when I was in high school
I read either in high school or j-n college I read
the biography of Oliver Wendell Hol-mes by Katherj-ne
Drinker Bowen which was one of the earl-y biographies of Holmes. It was a fascinating book and r can
sti1l remember much of it. Holmes became a very
fascinating figure for me as a person. But I
related Hol-mes more to the great political ideas
t.han I did to the issues about lawyering because he
was such a great jurist in that sense. So f knew
about Holmes and that leve1 of the practice. But
the lawyers that, I knew bore no relationship to
that. They all seemed t.o be doing real estate
transactions or people who got. in trouble with
speeding or drunken drivj-ng, or problems with wills
and estates, t.hings of that sort. A11 of which
didn’t seem to be very interesting.
But seemed to be, I’m sure very significant for the
insular world of Syracuse.
f: Sure
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Having grown up in that worId, how, as a high school
student,, did you become interested in something that
was beyond what you were accustomed t,o? Where did
that come from?
Well, just from reading. From participat,ing in what f thought was going on in the world. Understanding
what was happening. Our family was very you
asked earlier whether the readj-ng was an important thing. Trm certain, I suppose I was encouraged to
read although I don’t have any recollection of that..
But our family was very much involved in what was
going on in the world. My parents read the
newspapers regularly. We always got the newspaper
and mother and fat.her both read the daily newspaper everyday. Even today f can’t understand why I read
t,he newspaper everyday but my children come in and
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look at the newspaper and maybe look at the headlj-ne
or something but never rea1ly sit. down and attack a
newspaper on a daily basis. This was the day of
radio. We always Iistened to news broadcasts,
constantly listened to the news. I remember every
morning, the CBS B:00 news program would come on in
the morning and we list.ened to the people who
broadcast, Lhe news. Regularly. We were very
familiar with t,hat. I followed the war because my
older brother had gone off to war. I l-istened to
the news broadcasts about t,he war. f was t4 or 15
at the time. I was aware of what was going on from
that vantage point.
I suppose your listening to your father’s travels as
a young man would make you conscious of how much
else there was out there in the world.
Oh sure, sure.
exciting.
It was all very fascinating and very
So t,hen -as you finished up high school, you had an
idea that you did not want to go on to pharmacy
school, but you hadnrt quite come upon this idea of
becoming a lawyer. How did you decide what you
want.ed to do when you finished high school?
We1l, I was determined to go to college. Neither my
brother or sister before me had gone to college
direct.ly from high schooL. My brother graduated
from high school in 1939 and had gone to work again
in my uncle’s drugstore. In L943 he was inducted
into the Service. I went directly from high school
to Syracuse University. One of the things that
occumed at the time was that I had a first, cousi-n
who had lived in Syracuse r remember this very
vividly had written to my parents because he knew
that f was getting ready to go to co11ege. He
strongly recommended to my parents that I try t.o go
to some place like t.he University of Illinois or one
of the Midwestern schools like Wisconsin or Michigan
or places like that. They showed me the let.ter. I
look back upon that and f was adamant that I was
going to go to Syracuse, that f was going to go to
this University right in my home town. I just
couldn’t imagine the i-dea of going away to school
somewhere e1se.
S: Why was t.hat? To be close to your family?
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r No. f don’t know why. f don’t know why. I had I remember that, so the reason I remember that so vividly is t.hat. over the years if I had to if you
were to ask me did you ever make a big mistake that
you recogni-ze I always look upon that event and that perspective, that view point, that f had as a high
school senior as being a grave mj-stake. It ga1ls me
now that I could have made such a mi-stake.
It seems so inconsistent. with your vision of want,ing to learn more of what was in this other world beyond
the bounds of Syracuse and whaL. you knew.
We11, I think that I — I probably figured that I
could get it all- wherever I was. To be sure, no one
reaI1y encourag:ed me to do that,. it’s just that he
suggest,ed it in the l-etter. No one said well that is what you ought to do. I rebelled against it.
Only because I thought Lhat f had everything close at hand. In ret,rospect, if I had it to do all over again, I would have gone away. But I didn’t. So I
stayed and went to Syracuse University.
You said that you supported yourself through
co11ege. How did you do that?
WeII, I worked in my uncle’s drugstore
Cont,inued to work?
Continued to work. Go Lo school. f was basically a
cit,y student. I would go of f to classes and I would
spend time studying, trying to study.
Stil1 living at home?
Stil1 living at home. During that time frame my father got i11. College was a good experience in
many respects. I think the fact that I was working
and that my father was iIl was a distraction to me obviously. He got progressively i11 over a 2-3 year period. But at the same time I didn’t have t.he discipline that f should have. I liked what f was studying. I did well in the things t,hat I wanted to
know about and f did poorly or modestly in other
courses, to the extent that f took science or mathematics courses. I didn’L work at it. I didn’t do weI1.
S: I can identlfy with that.
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science or history, I did fairly weIl. To me, that
was an opening, an awakening, and held insights into
things that I hadn’t reaIly known before.
So what did you major in then in college?
I majored in American SLudies, which was sort. of a
new major. Actually the year f elected it was t,he
first year they offered it. It was something of an
ecLectic program. You could take courses in the
English Department, Political Science, Hist,ory,
Economics, Sociology — that runs the gamut,. The
partj-cu1ar courses that they ear-marked for this
major all had to do somehow or other wit.h Amerj-can
civilization. It is sort of interesting, I don’t.
know whether I mentioned this to you before, but I
ended up taking courses in the I took a course in
sociology and I think a course in t,he Economics
Department without ever having taken the basic
courses in these departments. So T ended up in a
class irr sociology where everyone was using the jargon of sociolog-y majors and r hadn’t the foggiest
notion of what they were talking about. f was
always running hard to catch up because they were
using this jargon. I never had a basic course in
sociology, although I had basic political science
courses. I enjoyed t.hat,. I enjoyed that a 1ot. It
got me interested in political science and the sorts of things that made me think about. what. I wanted to
do eventually. Then I went off to the Service. I
spent al-most 2 years in the Army.
What years would that have been?
From 152-154 I was in the Army.
So now you’d finished
I didnrt quite finish. f was drafted while I was in
college and it was the height of the Korean War. I
went off to the Army and actually had a very
interesting experience from a point of view of being in the Service during that time. f went to basic trainlng in Virginia. Around that time my father
was i11. I went home at the end of ’52, came back
and was sent t.o the Far East and went of f to Korea.
It. was within a short period of time that I was in a
combat. zone for 9 straight months. It, was, in
retrospect, an exhilarating and exciting time fearful and frightening in many respects. But for
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someone who wanted to see the world t.his is the way to do it. In those days they had a rotation system for the people in Korea in the fighting. Korea was
divided up into three dj-fferent zones which had a
so-ca1Ied 4 point zone, a 3 point zone and a 2 point
zone. Four point being the combat. area and you
needed 35 point.s to rotate ouL of the area. So if
you were in, as I was an enlisted man, you needed to
geL 36 point.s. Well I got 36 points in 9 months. I
was lucky I didn’t get wounded or injured in the event. I rotated and I was on a ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean heading back to the United
States on the 18-mont.h anniversary of my induction
into the Army, having served a fuII tour of duty.
In a combat zone. I came back to the States having
been in the Service for L9 months and basically a
veteran of all these events. You got a 30-day
furlough. I was then sent to Camp Kilmer, New
.Tersey in New Brunswick, New .fersey. Basically, I
was marking time there until I got. out of the Service. As it turned out, because of my
circumsEances of having been overseas and rotated,
t.he Army had a policy of letting people like me out
early and I was actually discharged 3 months earIy.
The origi-nal period of time that I inducted for was
2 years and acLually I got out in 21 months.
S: Oh my goodness.
T: So I had a 21- month tour of duty ln the military,
9 months of which were i-n a combat zone in Korea and
then I was out
S: What do you think was the most. significant impact
t.hat that period of time had on you?
It had a great impact on me because the military
experj-ence did somethlng for me that I hadn’t rea11y
had before. It gave me the sense of disciplining in
myself. The military discipline and the maturation
process that goes on as you go through an experience
like this affected me, by convincing me that f could
achieve what I wanted to achieve by my own resolve.
ft gave me the self confidence to know that f could
do what I wanted to do. Before that r didn’t have
the discipline. I didnrt have the motivation
perhaps to do what I wanled to do. I had some
interesting experj-ences and this had, I think some
slight impact upon my decision to go to law school.
I have an interesting anecdote, I expect. When f
was in Camp Kil-mer, New ,fersey I was assigned to Lhe
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hospitat. My military job was as sort of a medical
corpsman but. I never had true service as a medical
corpsman as such. r served act.ually in Korea
running field hospitals for Korean civilian
guerrillas who were fighting behind enemy lines. A
lot of times I was with them and occasj-onal1y behind
enemy lines. So when I got to Camp Kilmer, they
didn’t know what to do with me because I was only a
short timer. I went to the hospital, to the medical
records office, and there was the captain in charge.
He said well what. I am going Lo do with you if you
are only going to be here a couple of months. He
said I know what I’11 do. He said Itve got all of
these medical textbooks that are assigned to me as
the Chief of Medical Records and all the doctors and
dentists around this hospital have taken these
books, checked them out and I don’t know where they
are now. I am responsible for them and I would like
you to be my librarian. f want you to go and get
all these doctors and dentists, these Army officers,
to sign out for these books. I said fine. I was
only a Corporal but I was acting on behalf of the
Chief of Medical Records. Itty job was to search out
these doctors and dentists who had gott,en these
books. I remember vividly having gone to a dentist,
an Army dentj-st at Camp Kilmer, this was the I ‘ 1I
put it in a time f rame this was in 1-954, .Tanuary
or February t54. I found this Army major, Major
Peress, who had several dental textbooks. I had the
hardest time convincing him that he had to sign out
for them. f had several conversations with him. He
was sort of arrogant, with me and he was
condescending. He wouldn’t give me the time of day.
It was a sour experience just dealing with this
major. I was discharged from the Army about a month
or so later. rn the spring of L954, the major event
in American life was the Army-McCarthy hearings.
The focal point of the Army-McCarthy hearings had to
do with the fact that McCarthy, the Sbnator, was
accusj-ng the U.S. Army of having promoted a
Communj-st, who had been an army officer and given a
promotion from a captain to major and this was a
feI1ow by name of Peress.
Oh my gosh oh my!
Thj-s was the watchword. If you ever delve back into
history about the Army-McCarthy hearings, the whole
issue was McCarthyrs aLtack upon the Army for having
promoted this dentist.
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Oh my goodness!
Here f was watching this great event on television
and having had a personal relationship
First. -hand knowledge .
First-hand knowledge of this man just 2 or 3 months earlier. When I got out of the Army, I went back t.o the University and finished up my, I had about. a
year of work t.o finish up, I finished up and I think in t.hat year I decided that. I probably wanted to go
to l-aw school.
Did you approach that 1ast. year markedly differently
from how you had done the previous ones given
your now new-found recogni-t.ion of the importance of discipline and your exposure to a whole other world?
WeII, Lhe answer is yes. I approached it differently because f was a solid A studenL my last
year
So it realIy did make a difference.
It really did make a difference. I think I got As in almost everything f dld. Maybe I was clearly a different person and it, wasnrt hard, it. wasn’t a
grind or anything like that. It was just that if I
was told to read a chapter, f read the chapter. I
didn’t go and read five other chapters in the book,
which was what I had done before that. time. f found that I could do well but it was just a question of
applying myself. It, gave me a lot of self
conf idence because I knew t,hat, this wasn’t
difficult. It was fun.
Were the people that you were in school wit,h in the
same sltuation, having come out of the military?
There were a large number of those people. In facL,
I remember vivj-dIy one class which had a whole group
of Air Force pilots who were just coming out of the
Service and who come back to school, a lot of
veterans of the Korean War.
I would think that that might have an impact, too.
You come back into an atmosphere with people with
some new resolve or having grown up.
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I I *39 getting the G.I. 8i11. So r rea11y wasnrL working in the same sense since f was enlitl_ed to geL G.f. benefits for being a Serviceman. That. paid for schooling.
So then you could reaIly afford to focus on your studies.
Thatrs right. Work was not something that I needed. to do. I may have worked a little bit but not
enough to distract me as I had before.
So during that, year then, that. you returned to school-, was when you made t.he decision to go on to law school?
Yes. I made the decision then to go to law school.
And kind of thought about t.he future. During that.
year also I met and fel1 in love with a woman that I had met in cIass. Actually she graduated in L954 and went to Florida. Her parent.s were separated or divorced. Her mother lived in Florida and she spent
some t.ime in Florida and some time in New york. She
was from New York City. f visited her during that
year occasi-onaI1y in New York. She had relatives in
Syracuse as we11. fn that time frame I thought
about what I was going to do and decided t.hat I
would go to 1aw school and t,ook the LSAT to get into law school. I have to say though that f Lhought at the time that I made a decision to go to law school I was stil1 unaware that as a lawyer I coul-d be involved in the things that interested me. I
t.hought that 1aw school was something that I ought to do because I was not interested in doing the other things. I was resigning myself to the fact that I could have two Iives. f could have a life as
a lawyer and a life of doing t,hings that I was reaIly interested in and somehow or other I woul-d
manage in that respect. So I was opt’ing, I t,hought, for a career that would serve me, but, not. intellectuaIly. I didn’t think of it as an inteLlectual challenge. I thought of it more as in
terms of that I woul-d have to learn this, I would
have to do it, and I would probably be involved with I thought of myself of being l-ike the older
lawyers that I had known as a chiId. That. is what I
thought I was becomj-ng
Well t.hen when you were in the process of making this decision and opting for something that was
secure, but having done your military service,
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something you knew you could do and do relatively weII, were there other things that you contemplaled doing that you rejected or things that seemed beyond
your reach?
No. f Lhought that f remember having gott.en a
flyer or some kind of an approach by an insurance
company someone suggesting well you could go out. and seII insurance. I talked to a few people about t.hat, being an insurance salesman. I dj_dn,t know an awful Iot about it. I mean the insurance salesmen that I had known as a kid were certainly not they werenrt of the kind t.hat they were trying to promot.e they were going after young i:oIIege graduates who would be out marketing j-nsurance to the business wor1d. I menti-oned this to some friends and relatj-ves and a few of them turned their nose up at it, it’s not. a very good life, itrs not a very good fut.ure. In retrospect they didn’t know what they
were talking about.. One, f suspect, could do wellas an insurance salesman in the right area. But, I
didn’L know that they didnrt know, and I didn’t know
enough about it myself . It didn’t reall-y f ascj-nate me. I thought without overdoing it I knew that the l-aw was related to the things that I was interested in but f didn’L think that I would ever be involved at. that level-. So it wasn’t I
thought of the law as being close.
S: At least financially could keep you a1ive.
I: Could keep me alive and to the extent that I had the notion that I might get married at, some time in t.he future, t.his would be a secure future for me.
Now the young woman t.hat you mentioned that you had falIen in love with, did you discuss with her your
decision to go to law school?
Yes, and she was j-nt,erested and fascinated by it.
She was supportive, I think, although she had her
own thing. It Lurned out the year that I started
law school she went t.o graduate school at Co1umbia,
Leacher’s co11ege. We got. engaged just before I
started law school. We got. engaged in the summer of
’55. She lived in New York, and went, to the teacher’s college for that year. She actually went
to graduat.e school in the fall- of t54/155, so we got
engaged the year she finished grraduate school
because she started teaching in New York as an
elementary school teacher.
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You had somewhaL of a commuter relationship?
We had a commuter relationship while I was in law
school.
You talked about, in looking back, t.he decision to
stay in Syracuse for college as being one that you
might noL have made today were you t,o go back. What
about the decision to stay i-n Syracuse for law school.- Do you have the same view on t.hat?
I might at that point, ily horizon was not
anywhere as broad as it is today, of course. I
guess f thought of it in terms of the satisfaction that I had obtained and confidence that I had gotten
from how well I was doing when I had gone back t.o school. That steeled me to the noLion that f could
do it. But I didntt have a broad perspective and
economics playing a part I thought that f could live
in Syracuse and use the G. I. 8i11. This would take
me through the whole 1aw school period. At t.hat point –‘ it is mind boggling the cost of education
today but in those years higher education was not
as expensive as it is now and you could do it. But
if I were t.o have gone off to another community and
had to pay living expenses plus tuition, the G.I.
Bill wouldn’t have covered it and I would have had
an added expense. As it turned out and so I
viewed Syracuse as a logical place to go to Law
school. f have had some frj-ends that had gone there
before me. f never had an experience Ehat suggested
to me that I should go to some other 1aw school
somewhere else. That. seemed fine.
When you made the decisj-on to go there to law
school-, did you anticipate at the conclusion of 1aw
school remainj-ng in the Syracuse community?
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I: Yes.
S: So going to the law school was a logical
I: Going t.o the law school was a logical decision. I
had no thought of practicing law outside of that
communi-ty. Because, a’s f say, when I made the
decision to go to law school I sort of envisioned
that somehow or other I would be like the lawyers I
knew as a young man, as a high school student,
friends of the family so as to speak. Nice people,
very friendly, modestly successful I suspect, but, no
idea what their practice was like –f mean I can’t
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even visualize what their practice was like. But f
probably thought t,hat. I would practice in Syracuse.
Your fiancee who was teaching j-n New York concluded
t,hat she would come back t.o Syracuse when you were
f inished and ready to go int,o practice.
Right, and she had relat,ives in Syracuse. So
Syracuse was not, t,otally out. of her scope. She
graduated from t.he University and she had several
uncles’and aunts and cousi-ns that lived in the
Syracuse area. So it wasn’t a question of this
being a strange place to be. Moving back and living in Syracuse was noL an unhappy idea. She had and, j-n f act, she liked the idea. She did not want to
live in New York.
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WeII, that was going to be my next question. Did it.
ever occur to you that you might move to New York
City and practice there?
I had atways been exposed to New York City. f’d
been exposed to New York City many times before. I
love New York City. But I never thought, of j-t as a
place to practice. When I was in law school- I
mean even the first year I was in law school I
remember the top students from the third year of
class having gone off to Dewey, Ballantine
everybody talked about this, going to Dewey,
Ball-antine. The editor-in-chief of Lhe Law Review
– most of the people in my 1aw school class thought
about and were destined to practice in t.he Central
New York area. The 1aw school basically devised its
program around the notion that people would practice
in that. area. The courses were heavily weighed
toward property and vendor/purchaser type things,
real estate transactions, zoning, things of that
sort.
S: Definitely New York State law.
Definitely New York State l-aw as opposed to any
national concept.
S: What was your law school class like? For examPle,
did you have any women in your law school class?
There were, I think, one or possibly two women in my
c1ass. There was a woman in t,he class ahead of me
and maybe one or two women in the senior class. As
I recal1, Lhere were not more than two women in my
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class and maybe one dropped out after the first
year.
Was the balance of the students men who had also
been in the military?
There were my class had a fairly good cross
sect.ion of people. There were a number of people
who had been in the military, Iike myself , been t.o
Korea or been to Germany, something like t.hat,
because military duty in that period of time
everyone went through it one way or another or had
been in ROTC. I would say I think we had about
1-20 to 125 people t,o start and I would imagine, and
this is a rough guess at this point, 25 percent had
some kind of military experience. I would say about
50 percent were people who had just graduated from
undergraduate schools either at Syracuse or some
other school-. Maybe anoLher 20 to 25 percent were
an odd assortment of people who had come back to Iaw
school from having had a career or having been out
in the world somewhere. There were two or three
people who had been in business or had worked in
some manner and now decided that they wanted to go
to law school. For example, we had half a dozen or
more people who had children and some of them were
more t.han just infants, 4 or 5 year oId kids, 5
year o1d kids. So there was an interesting cross
section of people in the class.
Are there any of them with whom you still stay in
contact?
There is one classmate from Iaw school who is in
Washington and I see him from time to time. We both
came to Washington from law school. He went to work
in the fnLernal Revenue Service. I went to work in
the ,Justice Depart.ment. He stayed there 4 years and
now he practices he is in a sma11 -f irm here. He
is basically a tax and buslness lawyer.
Occasionally, I run across classmates, sometimes
they come to town. On occasion, people have come Lo
town and asked me to move their admissi-on to the
Supreme Court or I would hear from them one way or
another. Occasionally, I get a phone call- out of
the blue. Remember me? We were classmates. ftve
got a IegaI problem with one of your partners in l-,os
Angeles. I mean this happened to me about 6 or
7 years ago when f got a call from the West Coast.
He had a case with one of my partners in Los Angeles
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and was having a hard time dealing wit.h him.
thought he could get to him through me.
S: He thought. he could use you as a intermediary.
Exact ly.
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Syracuse.
Iaw school, f notice from your
, you were on the Law Review aL
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Do you think that that contributed significantly to
your law school experience?
Definitely. I was second in my class j-n 1aw
school from start to finish. It. was very funny.
The young chap who was first in the class was always just that one little reach beyond me. He was a very
bright, hard working young man, Ronald Butterazzi,
young, he graduated from Le Moyne Co11ege, which is
a Jesuit school. There were a 1ot, of Le Molme
graduates in our 1aw school class who very much
proclaimed t,he values of the ,Jesuit training
program. They were good students for the most part.
As Butterazzi was young and somewhat immature, he
always had that just that littl-e bit. more ahead of
me. But. since f was a Iittle bit older and perhaps
a Iittle more mature after I made my mark, I was
given a lot of the benefits of being a top student.
I was on Law Review. I was asked to do this or to
do that. I was the Chief ‘Judge of the Honor Court.
f was into everything and I didnrt work while I was j-n school. Although some people worked, f didn’t
want to work. I was det,ermined that I wasnrt goi-ng
to work at all while I was in school. I mean during
the year. Basically, I had been living at home, and
I moved out of my home. I went to an Aunt, who lived
near the University. She was a widowed Aunt and she
1ived, I’d say 5 blocks from the University. I
asked her if I could live in her house and have her
spare room there. She said sure, she would love it.
I said I can’t pay you but that is what I would like
t.o do. I wanted to move out of my home and I did.
Essentially, my law school experience, living as I
did in t,he room near the campus, was the substit.ut’e
for what might have been an undergraduate experience
because f was j-nto everythiirg. I was a fu11-time
participant in campus 1ife, dt least within the law
school. I studied in the library. I was always
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there. I had lots of friends who were my
cl-assmates. I did things after studying socially with my classmates. I rea1Iy had a great time. f
also found that law school was not that difficult.
The other t.hing that I found after I got going, was
that it was so much more interesting than what I
t.hought it was going t.o be. I had no idea what it
was going to be like until I started. f mean it was
an entire awakening to me.
Is t.here any professor that. was particularly
instrument.al in opening your eyes to the parts of the law that you rea1Iy hadn’t known were out t.here?
They were aII l-ike that.. Several of them were good some great buL for the mosL part t.hey were all good in my experience and judgment because they
opened up to me something that I hadn’t imagined.
Even in retrospect, I have a hard time putting
myself back into the pre-1aw school experience to
imagine what I thought it was going to be like.
Somehow’or other f had convinced myself, BS I said
earlier, that I was opting for something that wasnrt
going to be interesting and it turned out to be fascinating. And, somet.hing that I could do.
As you were going through law school, were you
beginning to question your decision to stay j-n
Syracuse and practice t.his kind of law that real1y
hadn’t excited you?
Yes, very definitely because, I having made
achievements by being second in my c1ass, by getting
on Law Review, by being asked to participate in moot
court if f want.ed to do that , by being in the honor
society and Order of the Coif, I mean all of the
things that all the bonuses and benefits of being a
good student brought to me, it reaIIy opened up
horizons for me. I then realized that there was a
world outside of Syracuse and a world that was going
to be available to me if I wanted it. Obviously
there was a maturation process in my own mind about
what I could do or might wanL to do and I pursued ir.
How did you pursue it? What decisions did you make
t.hen that 1ed you to the ,Justice Department?
Wel1, the Justice Department at the time Syracuse
was still-, I’d say, somewhat of a regional Iaw school wiLh somewhat, of a narrow approach looking
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back on it f can’t think of anybody in my class who
became a law clerk to a federal judge, which is such
a common experience t.oday for good students in those
Iaw schools. fL’s true for Syracuse today but in
those years the opportunities that might come to
you were the Wall Street firms Lhat were beginning
to hire from our school. A few people had
interviews. f had an opportunit.y to have an
i-nt.erview with one of the Wal-I St.reet firms, and I
guess I didn’t envis j-on that that was what I want.ed
to do. The opportunity to get into t.he Honors
Program at the ,.lustice Department was sort. of a neaL
thing. I was intervj-ewed by them. It. was a prett.y
gooq interview. They made me feel that I was going
to get. an offer from them I thought f was
prett.y confident that I was going to get an offer.
I had one other opportunity that. was presented Lo me
to be a clerk for a federal district judge. This judge was in the Southern District of New York in
New York Cit.y which really interested me. f went to
New York and had an interview with the judge down at
Foley Square. f meL him. I had gotten to him
because of my record. I remember sitting in his
chambers and he interviewed me. It was going very
well and he said Lo me what else do you have on your
platter? What other opportunities do you have? I
said well Irve been interviewed by the DeparLment of
,fustice for t.he Honors Program and I feel certain
t.hat I could get an of fer f rom them so that’s
another opportunity. He looked me in the eye and
said, weII, let me t.eIl you something. r would
recommend to you that you take that. offer because I
am going to te1l you a secret nobody knows this
– I am resigning from the bench and I am going t.o
work in the Department of Just.ice myself. And, of
course, he did just that. It was Lawrence Walsh who
was a District ,fudge in the Southern Dist.rict of New
York. He became the Deputy Attorney General under
William Rogers. Today he is t.he Iran-Contra Special
Prosecutor. He had an illustrious career as a
partner with Davis, Po1k. He was a negotiator in
the Vietnam peace t.alks in Paris with Henry Cabot
Lodge during the late 60’s and early 70ts. So that
was my clerkship which didn’L materialize. I took
t.he job at the ,lustice Department when it came
through.
S: By this tj-me, had you gotten married?
We got married after my first. year. She live wit,h me in Syracuse. She worked as
came to
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teacher the first year. We had a child after the first. year and she reaIly didn’t teach beyond that.
S: Was she excited about the prospect of moving to
Washington?
f: Yes.
s Had you been to Washington before you decided this
was where you were going to l-ive?
f had been to Washington two or three times. The
summer of L952 when f was in the Army in basic training, I was at Camp Pickett, Virginia, which is
down near Leesburg and would come here on a weekend
pass for a day or so. I walked around Washington as a tourist j-n an Army uniform. I remember very
litt.le about the city at the time. I do remember
having walked up to the t.op of t.he Washington
Monument in my uniform getting soaking wet in the
middle of the summer.
S: So then
I didn’t rea11y I had not reaI1y travelled much
to Washington and didn’L know much abouL it.
So it was more the job at the Justice Department
than the city that you brought here.
Right. There was a notion that lurked in the back of my mind at. the t.ime. I-,arge1y, I think formed by the fact that I had known one or two people who had
been in this Program and had spent a year or two
years at the Department. and t.hen left and gone on
and done something eIse. There was a vague notion that somehow or other I would stay in the job for
two years. It was sort of a two-year mental
commitment that I would do that for that period.
With any thought of then returning to Syracuse, or
was as far as you had gotten in your plans a
two-year commit,ment, and then a reevaluation?
That’s right a reevaluation. What I would do after
two years, we would think about it. then. WheLher I
would practice in Washington, or go to New York CiLy
or go back to Syracuse it was all very up in t.he air we didnrt have to make a decision about that.
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s So you moved with a young family then to Washington in what year?
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And st,arLed at ‘Justice.
Yes, started at ,Justice.
What. did you do there? What. Divj-sion did you start
in?
f started in the Civil Division, the General Litigation Section. At that time, the Section Chief
was Donald MacGuineas, who was an outstanding lawyer
and a model as someone to work for. He is someone
whose memory f const,antly harken back to.
Hers no longer around?
Hets no longer around. He died in 1953 of Lou
Gehrig’s disease. He had been a very, very able
lawyer, truly a lawyer’s lawyer, a non-bureaucrat..
He was truly a non-bureaucrat, buL a career
government lawyer. He had managed to argue two or
t,hree cases in the Supreme Court, very effectively.
One major case that. he had argued was over the years
a very famous argument that he had, people talked
about it. Act.ua1ly it. had not been much earLier
than when f had arrived. It was either i-n ’55 or
t 57 . But it was an argument that had been writ.ten
about extensively. The case was Harmon against Brucker. Back in those days it was an interesting
case. The Government,, during the t50s, had a policy
in the Army of giving less than honorable discharges to servicemen who had any kind of a left-wing or
Communi-st-related taint to thei-r record. Harmon against Brucker had to do with the fact that (Brucker was the secretary of the Army) Harmon had
been given a general discharge, but not an honorable
discharge even though his military service was in no
way irregular or t.ainted, but somehow or other j-n
his pre-military service he had belonged to a left- wing organization of some sort. He was suing t,o get
an honorable discharge. The Government had been successful all the way up to the Supreme Court.
MacGuineas was the Section Chief that had been given the t.ask of arguing this case before t.he Supreme Court. The right that the GovernmenL wanted t.o
preserve was that the courts could not dictate the type of a discharge that the Army would issue. That
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is simply a non-jusLiciable issue, a procedural
issue, which is not subject t.o judicial review.
There was some authority for having the courts stay
out of what the military did. But times were changing. The fact is that the Government was noL
defending the case on the merits. MacGuineas was
ordered by the Solicitor General to disclose that fact only if he was cornered by the Court, not to
say t.hat the Government was not defending this
decision on the merits but simply to say t.here was a
jurisdict,ional issue. Well the Court badgered him
and badgered him and finally cornered him. He
admitted that the Government was not defending this policy on the merits which, according to t.he lore of the time, caused a major explosion in the courLroom.
It was like dropping a bomb. Several of the
Justices jumped on him and sai-d why are you saying
all of this and then there were some who were trying
to salvage t.he case. Tom Clark, who was a
conservative, and ul-timat.ely dissented in the case,
accused the Solicit.or General of having wrongly
thrown irr the sponge on the issue. In any event,
the case was lost by Lhe Government. But that
argument was always written about, it was the sort
of thing that the newspapers or the Sunday Times
would do a piece about Supreme Court arguments and
this happened to be a famous Supreme Court argument.
And that. was MacGuineas. MacGuineas was the boss.
He was a very able lawyer.
What kind of work was your section assigned to do?
Well we did the General Litigat,ion Section did a
variety of work. If you look at the Federal
Programs Branch today, it is sort of an outgrowth of
the General Litigation Section. It represents a
whole host of federal agenci-es that are sued on many
kinds of attacks upon federal programs or policies.
We did Taft-Hartley injunctions. We blso had a
strange jurisdiction in that a remnant of various
reorganj-zations within the Division brought
renegotiation cases, which were then housed in the
Tax Court. The assist.ant Section Chief was Harland
Leathers who was in charge of the renegotiation
cases. The Renegotlation Board cases were heard de
novo in the Tax Court. We tried these cases
involving excessive profits of defense contractors.
This was an opportunity for the lawyers in the
Department to actually get into court because you
had the first line of responsibility in trying a new
case. When I first went to the Department of
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‘Justice in l-958, Lhe Departmentrs ro1e, &L least
that Sectionrs role in most of work, 98 percent of
t.he cases thaL it had handled, it handled as the
middle man between the federal agencies and the
United States Attorneys Offices. Typically, the
lawyers in the Sectj-on did not get int.o courL unless
there was an opportunity that presented it.self and
that was a rare, rare occasion. We essentially were
communicating between a client agency and U.S.
Attorneys formulating defense st,rategies for the
case, $assing lltigation reports and materj-aIs back
and forth, except in the area of the Renegotiation
Act. cases where we had the primary Jurisdiction. There was interest on the part of some to do the
renegotiation cases because it gave them an
opportunity to stand up in court. And I did that.
Some people shied away from t,hat because it was work
without a body of Iaw, so to speak, there were no
standards that would guide you. You had to be
very you were left to your own creative
imagination of how to try the case, which appealed
to some’and terrified others. Tt was like thaL
during those first years. I would say some t,ime
after I was there for about a year, there was a
major reorganization. Wel1, what had happened i-n
the Department was there had been a group of cases
that. had been handled in the Antitrust Division for
years. They were there essentially because somehow
or other they — whoever made the decision to put
them in the Antitrust Divisj-on, decided that sj-nce
they invol-ved economic regulation of some sort, that
the antitrust lawyers were more involved with
economics and that was a good place to do t.hem. I
think realistically it was because there were one or
two people over there who handled the cases. In any
event, the one or two people who handled t,hose
cases, Lhere were two large groups of cases, cases
involving transportation-ICC regulations. The other
group was the Agriculture Department Regulations
federal milk marketing cases.
I think Mr. Goldbloom that you were talking about
the kinds of cases that were going from the
Antj-trust Division to your shop in the Civil
Division.
Right. I reca1l vividly the day t.hat the Section
Chief came in, Mr. MacGuineas. Actually I think he
probably call-ed. I canrt remember if he came Lo our
office or we went to his office, buL my roommate and
T, who had come to the Department a week after I
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had, he was from Yale Law School and YaIe College
and,
This is because at ,fustice two people shared an
office, is that right?
Two people shared an of f ice. We had t,wo people in
an office and, indeed, sometimes there were three
people in an offj-ce, two attorneys and a secretary
in t.he of f ice. There was a secretary, I don’t know
that th:e secretary was in our office at that particular time, but there were t.imes when there
were three of us in our office.
He came in and he said werre getting a whole bat.ch
of cases from the Antit.rust, Division and there are
two kinds. One is transportation and one is
agriculture, and he looked at my roommate and he
said rrltm going to make you t,he transportation
expert, tr and he looked at me and said Ir I t m going to
make you the agrlculture expert.rr I had no idea
about, agriculture at all, and within a mat,ter of
days f got a ton of cases dumped on my desk. Many
of t.hem were in mid-course because they had been
handled i-n the Antitrust Division. It turned out
that. there was a very senior attorney in the
Antitrust. Division who had essentially monitored
these cases over a period of years and was retiring.
Probably that was why they were transferred to the Civil Division because Lhe Department realized that
there was no sense in havj-ng another att,orney
assigned to them because they had no relationship to the basic work of the Antitrust Division. They truly did belong in the Civil Division. Sometime after the first year that I was there, f start,ed to get Agricult,ure Department cases, but by no means
was that my only assignment, because I had a fuII
docket of cases of al1 sorts. Indeed, during the first year that f was there, I got a case which f
stil1 look upon as being one of the more fascinat.ing
cases that f ever worked on. f was even thinking
about it just the other day because I was trying to
remember whether an attorney that I was planning to call sometime in the next few weeks was the same attorney that had worked on that case with me over the years, that many years ago.
S: What was the case?
The case was United States against the New Haven Railroad. fL involved a fascinating situat,ion.
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Actually the case had been sent to the Antitrust
Division originally. It apparently sat in the
Antitrust. Division for a couple of weeks and somehow
it was decided that the Antitrust, Division shouldn’t
handle the case. It was, I believe, one of these
transport.ation cases because it came out of the ICC
and, for whatever reason, it didn’t go to my
roommate who I t.hink had lef t around t.hat time.
Somehow or oLher it was del-ivered to me. I remember
very vividly the person who came and delivered it,
to deliver it to me. ft was the Chief of the
Appellate Section in the Antit,rust Division. f
remember him introducing himself to me, Lelling me
who he was, and that he was delivering me the case.
His name was Daniel Friedman. Daniel Friedman
eventually moved from t.he Appellate Section of the
Antitrust Division to Lhe Solicitor General’s
Of f ice. He spent. many years j-n Lhe Solicit,or
General’s Of f ice as a Deput.y Solicitor General. He
argued many, many cases in the Supreme Court.
Eventually he was appointed t.o the Court. of Claims
as an atrrpellate judge and then, after the
Reorganization Act, became a member of the Court of
Appeals for the FederaL Circuit where he stiI1 is on
Lhe bench. He was the lawyer who brought. this case
into my office and handed it to me. It turned out
to be a fascj-nating case and I worked on it the
first year that I was in the Department of Justice.
It, involved a situation where the Interstate
Commerce Commissj-on had senL it to t.he Department of
Justice. What had happened was that there had been
a large group of preferred shareholders of the New
Haven Railroad that owned preferred shares, socaIIed “EEdEerr int.erests, and they had a major say in how the New Haven would be run because of the voting power of their preferred shares. And the
t,hen, and f ‘ve forgotten the names of the
individuals involved, but the then management of the
New Haven, this was prior to New Haven’s bankruptcy,
had decided to get rid of this large group of dissident shareholders. They arranged for the
purchase of this big block of preferred shares from this group. This group was happy to seII because the railroad’s fate was loomj-ng on the horizon as not being very favorable. They arranged for the sale of this block of stock for several millions of dollars to a group of investment bankers under a
circumstance where the New Haven Railroad made a
contract with t.he group of j-nvestment, bankers who
had purchased the stock. The group could put t,he
shares back to the New Haven and New Haven would buy
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the shares at a stated price. This deal went
t.hrough, and people at the Interstate Commerce
Commission heard about. it, or knew about it. They
went and looked at a statute which had been enacted
in 1,920. It had never been applied but it said that
anytime a railroad wishes to issue securities or
evidence of indebtedness that they would have to get
Commission approval to issue, under certain
circumstances. The railroad had not asked for
Commission approval and two major bureaus within the
ICC lodked at this deal and said while we donrt like
it, itts not a violation of the statute. It. doesn’t
seem to come under the statute. The General
Counsel’s office looked at it and said we think it’s
a violation of the statute. Letrs send it over to
t,he Depart.ment of ,Justice. ft came over with a
recommendation by the General Counsel of the ICC
that we should look at it and figure out whether it
was a violatj-on. It. ended up on my desk. f was a
first year lawyer. It turned out t,hat, the Assistant
Attorney General at the time had an interest in this
case, George Cochran Dobb. There \^ras a senior
lawyer who was also assigned to the case above me.
But basically it was my job to l-ook at it and to
wrj-te a memo and to figure out whether there was
somethj-ng to do. I looked at it and researched it
and l-ooked at, the materials. I thought iL was a
close guestion but I thought we could make a case
that. it was a violation of a statute that basically
had never been administered in this way before and
there was one or two vague administrative decisj-ons
at the ICC level that didn’t reall-y apply directly
to the problem. I ended up drafting the complaint,
and drafting the motion for summary judgment, which
the Assistant Attorney General- took up to New York City and was filed in the Southern Dj-strict of New
York to chall-enge the transaction. I didn’t, get t,o
go to court. f got to hear about it afterward, but f had drafted the complaint, had drafted the motion
papers. I do not recalI them having been
substantially modified after I drafted them,
obviously t,hey had been edited, but I always felt that it was my complaj-nt and my motion. The District, Court heard cross motions for summary judgment from the other side and ruled against the
Government and said t.hat t.hls was not a violation of the statute. At the time there had been stockholder derivative actions pending against the New Haven in the Southern District and they had, when the
Government had filed its suit, they had amended their complaints to add as a count against the
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managemenL of the railroad. These additional
allegations concerned violations of Lhe Interstate
Commerce Act. It wasn’t the same lawsuit, but it,
was a related case. The GovernmenL then appealed to
the Second Circuit and the case came up before a
panel wit,h Judge Friendly one of the first cases
that Friendly had an opportunity to decide as a
Court. of Appeals Judge. To back up a littIe bit,
there had been, I believe it was the Cravath law
firm that. had advised the invesLment banking
syndicate at the time the orlginal deal was put into
effect that they didnrt. have to seek authorization
from the Interstate Commerce Commission. When the
Government sued, the banking syndicate decided that
they would change law firms because they thought
that they had gotten some bad advice from the law
flrm. I think they hired and I may have this all
wrong because I haven’t really studied it or looked
it up I think they hired Cahill, Gordon to
represent them in the Court of Appeals. The
Government prosecuted the appeal to t,he Court of
Appeals’having gotten Solicitor General approval of
the case, and after the case was argued, then there
was a decision.
Now were you invol-ved at all j-n the briefing in the
Second Circuit?
I was not involved in the briefing in the Second Circuit. alt.hough I believe I talked to the attorneys
who worked on the case because there was an
Appellate Section lawyer and they basical-Iy took
over and handled lt. But I talked to them and related to them, but f was not on the brief in that. I believe the lawyer was Peter Schiff who later on
went to New York to become an attorney with the New
York Public Service Commission. Tn any event, one of the Section Chiefs I believe argued the case in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and 1o
and behold a decision came out in the Second Circuit reversing the District Court saying that this was an
evidence of indebtedness clearly in violati-on of the st.atute. Since they hadn,t sought Commj-ssion approval, the Government’s declaratory action was
sound and we were able to undo this transaction. At that point, the case became even more interesting
because the story that we heard was that Cravath then went to Cahi11, Gordon and said to them, you
know when we originally looked at this deal we
st.udied it from every angle and we found out that if there was a case that the Government was goj-ng to
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bring they woul-d bring it in District Court, buL
Lherers t,his 1903 statut.e that. says Lhat any case of
this sort, Lhe exclusive jurisdiction on appeal is
directly Lo the Supreme Court of the United Stat’es.
We believe that the Government appealed to the wrong
courL. The next thing we knew, Cahill, Gordon had
filed a motion to vacate the court’s opinion and
judgment on t,he grounds that the court of appeals
Iacked jurisdiction because the statute says
exclusive jurisdicti-on is in the Supreme Court.
This is the case that I had worked on. I remember
being called to come in on a weekend. There was a
big library on the fifth floor of t.he Department of
,fustice and it was f i1led with appellate lawyers. I
even had a little bit. of an assignment and we were
a1l- rushing around frantically trying to come up
with an answer Lo this statute t.hat nobody had ever
focused on at the Department of ‘.fustice.
Thatrs pretty heady business for a very young
lawyer.
This was very heady business for a young lawyer, to
be sure. It was exciting. It was thoroughly
exciting. I didn’t participate in the briefing of
it, but I had a little assignment and what.ever I did
I turned over to them. I have no idea today what it
was. But t.hey went baek to the court of appeals and
they made an argument. The court of appeals then
came out with a further opinion in which they said
– and again, r haven’t read this in years but my
recoll-ection is they said something like this. It
is a good question whether or not we had jurisdiction and there was even a suggestion, which
everybody marveled at, that somehow or other the
investment bankers had consenLed to the jurisdiction
of the court of appeals. Everybody said that you
can’t reaIly consent to jurisdict,i-on. But, they
said, after writing this second opinibn, they said
Lhere’s a good question about our jurisdiction and
therefore we think t.hat may be welL taken. But
while there may be question about our jurisdiction,
there is no question about our authority to control
the activities of t.he district courts withi-n our Circuit,. So therefore we are vacating our decision
with instructions t,o the district court to enter a
fresh judgment against the United States from which
they could go the Supreme Court if they see fit..
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I: They directed t.he dlstrict court, because by this
time, of course, the ti-me t.o go directly t.o the
Supreme Court had long since run. They directed the
district court to enter a fresh judgment from which
t.he United States coul-d appeal. And then , of
course, there was an interesting sidelight. The
shareholders in the derivative suit had participat.ed
in the appeal. They were not. part. of the
Governmentrs case. From that appeal they got the
same decision that t.he Government had gotten. From
that appeal the railroad had sought certiorari to
the Unit.ed States Supreme Court and it was denied in
the shareholders cases. The districL judge entered a fresh judgment and the people in the Department of
.Tustice were sitting around getting ready to file an
appeal to the Supreme Court. Some bright person
and I don’t know who it was, it wasnrt me, buL it
was somebody in the group said wait a minute, the
Supreme Court. denied cerL. in the sharehol-ders case
and that, makes it finaI. We don’t have to do
anything.
A decision was made that they woul-dnrt appeal from
the dist.rict court’s decision. We’d hear stories
about every month or so during that t,ime, about the
dist.rict judge calling the United States Attorney in
and demanding to know why they hadnrt. appealed to the Supreme Court because he wanted to be vindicated. The Government said we don’t have to appeal. f was in that case as the person who had drafted t.he complaint. and the original motion for
summary judgment.
S: You had reaIly gotten it moving.
I I had gotten it moving and that was the first big
case I ever worked on.
My goodness.
It was exciting, it, was fun. A thrilling
experience.
So you decided probably even before that that you’d definitely made the right decision then, coming to
Washington and j oining the Depart,ment .
Oh yes. Decidedly. There were ot.her cases like that.. As I say, during those early years
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Now, was Rogers stil-l the Att,orney General at that
point,?
Rogers was the At.torney General up until 7-96L,
January L95L, when Eisenhower left. office and ,.fohn
F. Kennedy became President. His brother became
Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy. When Bobby Kennedy
became the Attorney General there was a rather
substant,ial change in the mind set. of the DepartmenL
of ‘Justice and probably in itself was a major factor
in why’f stayed beyond the two years. I started in
July of ’58 and by ‘6!, of course, Kennedy became
President and Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General.
Bobby Kennedy was a young man. He brought in a lot
of young, vigorous people to the Department. He
started a whole different approach t,o what the
Department was all about. While I canrt say t,hat. I
personally or individually was affected by him on a
direct one-to-one basis, f can say that I benefitted
from what. he did. I saw what he did. I saw the way
he operated and felt the impact of what was felt
throughout the Department. For start,ers, gfenerally,
I mean, he had a major remake of the Criminal
Division in the sense that, the whole organized crime
concept and the task forces that eventually became a
major factor in the Department were started under
his aegis. He brought in a 1ot of young people who
started basically running investigations, running
grand juries, and doing it directly out of t.he
Department rather than having U.S. Attorneys all
over t.he country doing it. Before Kennedy, the
Department, of .fust.lce was essentially a servj-ce
agency servi-ng the U.S. Attorneys around the country
except in those little areas where there had been traditional work done by the Department itself, such
as in the Admiralty Section of the Civil Division.
The specialized efforts
Very specialized aspects of something which U.S. Attorneys had no interest in that had developed over the years. Apart from that, the Department generally was a service agiency, Bobby Kennedy, his influence and the influence of the people that he brought in, attempted to turn it around and make it into something where the people of the Department
themselves not only would have the service role but also would have a front line responsibility t.o do
t.hings directly. I remember at the time , for
example, someone whom I had known in 1aw school at.
Syracuse, who had gone on and come back and gone
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into the Crj-minal Division, and I had seen him and
he said “Oh yes, I’rt running a grand jury in
Kentucky and werre doing this investigation.rr It
was atI very excit.ing, iL was very heady stuff fot
people, and the same sort of attitude permeated into
tfre- Civil Divlsion somewhat. There was the not,ion
thaL somehow or other if you want.ed to get into
court you ought t.o have a chance to do it. There
were a number of oId time section chiefs in the
Civil Division who disdained that notion
substaritially — did everything possible to prevent
their people from getting into court. They were old
t.imers and to them it was strictly a bureaucratic
thing, you would write these memoranda, send them on
t.o the U.S. Attorneys, and keep the paper flowing.
Whereas, the young lawyers desperately wanted to get
experience and along that period of t.ime there was a
fairly subtle but certainly a clear met,hod in the
operations of many lawyers who schemed to geL into
court. They schemed with the U.S. Attorneys’
offj-ces on ways in which they could take over cases
or be called by the U.S. Att.orney. I remember
i-nstances where I would talk to an Assistant U.S.
Attorney in some far off city and say wel-l if you
reaIly want some help you’d better write a letter
and my boss will see it. It would say it would be
good for you to come out and do something. So we
would scheme to do that.
Now who was t.he Assist,ant At.torney General in charge
of t.he Civil Division?
The first, Assistant Attorney General under the
Kennedy admi-nistration, the first one was Bill
Orrick, William Orrick, I believe
Who went on to become a judge.
He went on to become a District ,Judge in San
Francisco, in the Northern District of California.
He had been with the orrick firm. I believe that he
was succeeded by ,John Douglas, who was a partner at
Covington and Burling. I don’t think there was, I’m
not sure whether there was anybody in between them, but I think Douglas succeeded Orrick. Orrick was
t.here for a year or so and went on to become a
judge. Then ,fohn Douglas came in. Douglas was
there right up through the t.ime of the Kennedy assassination. Their atti-tude was if there’s an opportunity f or you t.o get into court, f ine, do it .
I was probably a beneficiary of that and I worked it
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to my advantage. But also it feIl my way by natural
consequences because the agriculture cases that I
started to work on durj-ng that time frame provided
me an opportunity, part.ieularly in t.he milk
marketing area, because the, those cases were
relatively complex administrative 1aw issues,
because of the nature of the regulat.ions, and I
learned t.he subject matter. When the cases came up,
it was not a difficult t.hing to have the U.S.
Attorney say rtcome and handle the case” because they
would iake one look at it and say I’d be happy to
have anybody come in and t.ry to explain this to the judge. So, in that, respect I got, an entr6e to take
cases j-nto court. f was doing more and more of t,he
renegoLiat.ion work because I liked it. T thought it.
was interestitg, fascinating. So I got. an
opportunity to do t,hat and then there was this
general sort of philosophy about, getting people into
court. I think I managed to develop the kind of
experience that I was looking for. That is, trying
cases before judges.
Your work then took you across the country, is that
correct?
Yes. Across the country. I went, by chance, almost
anywhere during t.hat, t.ime f rame. Not, only across
the country, I went to Puerto Rico to handle a
renegotiat.j-on collect.ion well it was a col1ect,1on
case, but it stemmed out of a renegotiation case
that I was also handling in tax court. f tried a
case in Puert,o Rico, in 152 or ‘ 63 .
If you were t.here in ‘ 52, ‘ 53 , you’d gotten beyond
your two-year re-evaluation period plus a couple
more years. As time went on, were you on any
different schedule? Had you made a decision now
that you were going to stay five years or had you’d just st.op thinking about and just started enjoying the work?
I stopped thinking about it and started enjoying the work. The work was exciting. ft was far more exci-ting than anything I had ever imagined it might
be even when f came to the Department, even when I
entered the first time. It got to be far more exciting. It was everything that I had hoped it
would be. f thought. I got good assj-gnmenLs. I
thought the work was fun. I always had the feeling of being swamped, but at the same time f was able to
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get on with it.. I seemed to get regularly promoted
and given opport.unities, given assignments.
Did you compare the work you were doing with that of
your contemporaries to make a decision Lo stay where
you were?
Not rea11y, not reaI1y. I don’L think I mean, I’d had weIl, that’s not fair. I-,et me put it
anoLher way. I had a frj-end who I had known in 1aw
school’who had come to Washington because his wife
was i11. She was at NIH, she had a rare form of
cancer. He had been two years ahead and had had a
smaIl town practice in Syracuse. It was a small
town business practice. He had had a couple of
business clients and he had a couple of partners who
had business activities. We got friendly. We just,
happened t,o meet. We were living rlght in the same
apartmenL complex. At some point we had tal_ked
about. him going back. He did event.ually go back to
Syracuse and he even suggested that I might wanL to
come back and go into practice with him. ,Just hearing about t.he nat,ure of his cl-ients and the nature of his work, f would never give it a
thought a serj-ous thought because doing what I
was doing was so far superior t.o any description of t,hat work that I just wouldntL think of it.. I was
on a high. ft was a period of time when the work that I was getting was exciting and the responsibil-ities that f had were phenomenal, at least from my perspective. I was learning areas. Itrs probably also fair to say that I t.hought that,
you know, there,s always this lingering thought that, well what about private practice. What about going into the private sect,or? At that time people did that. Generally in my experi-ence the people-who did that from t,he Department of ,Justice went back to
some pIace. They had come to Washington. They were there for a couple of years. They then went back to St. L,ouis , or Denver, or some other community because that,s where they wanted to go. t didn,t know very many people who went from the ,Justice
Department to a law firm here in Washington. ft just didn’t seem to be a natural place io go. The firms here weren’t expanding that much there were a few. NoL to say that they didnrt. There were a
few. I have a few friends who came to the Department.. Maybe later on, more in the mid-60’s, *h9 stayed in the Department for a couple of years and then went into practice, into firms here. I
mean f rve got a frj_end, for example, whors j_n a big
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Washington firm. Who’s a senior partner here, who
came to the Department of Justice for t,wo years from
some far off place and then went into practice here.
I remember when he went into the firm there was
eight people, and now therers 150. But more
typically, would be people who would go back home.
As you stayed at the Department, did your work
change over the years?
I’d say it changed only in the sense that I began to
get better cases, more responsibility. The cases
were assi-gned by the Section Chief, ot the Assistant
Section Chief, and more and more I began to get
bigger cases, hj-gher visibility cases, more
responsibility. Whether it was because I was there
or it was because they thought f could handle them,
I don’t know. f suppose it was a combination of
both. The cases got better. The responsibility got
g,reater. The fun continued. The excitement
continued.
How dj-d the change in administrations affect the
work that you did, if at all, as a l-ine attorney?
As a line attorney, the change in adminj-strations,
and I wenL through several, had virtually no effect
at all whatever. I never felt. in the Department in
all the time that f was there that in some way or other my work was governed by political decisions. f can only remember one or two decisions, or
attempted decisj-ons, that had political motivations to them and they were not carrj-ed through. A
suggestion was made that t.he Department might do
something later on in the Watergat,e era, the
Government should take an appeal, or prosecut,e
something, which was motivated by something other
than just the merits of the case. But for the most part, I felt nothing different. Over the years I
did get involved in a 1ot of exciting cases, fascinatj-ng cases, and they were, it was a turn on. It was a cont,i-nual turn on. I felt like I had it
made because the work was just. thrilling. High visibility cases. Fun cases. Even today, in thinking about t.hem, they’re exciting. Post-Kennedy assassination. I handled two. There was a statute that all-owed the government to take the property that had been gathered by the Warren CommisEion Lo
– the Warren Commission had all- thls evidence that
was presented to it the rifl-e, the revolver Ehat had been used to kil1 Officer Tippit, the rifle
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that had been found in the Texas School Book
Depository Building. The Secret Service and the FBI
swooped down on Oswald’s apartment and picked up
everything in sight his clot.hes, his books, his
papers, his diary that he’d kept. in Russia,
photographs, lett.ers. A11 t.hese things were
exhibit.s t.o t.he Warren Commission report. Af ter: the
Warren Commission submitted its report, the interested parties started to demand these documents
back, t.hese materials back. Mrs. Oswald sold her interedt. Texas is a community property state, and
she sold her interest in the rifle and t,he revolver to a Denver oil man by the name of ,fohn King. He pald her to buy her interest in them. And he
demanded the rifle and the revolver because the investigaLion was over and it wasntt the
Governmentrs property. The Government went, the administration went t.o Congress and got a statute
enacted giving the Attorney General the right to take all these properties that had been exhibits to the Warren Commission. The property was taken by an order issued by the Attorney General. The statute also provided jurisdiction in the Federal District Courts for anyone suing for just compensat,ion for the taking of these properties. There were two
cases brought and f handled both of them. I tried both of them.
Where were they brought?
WeIl, the first case was brought in Denver and it
was my first jury trial. I tried the case brought by ,John King. He had originally had a case to replewy t.he rifle and t,he revolver while t.he statute
was being considered by t,he Congress. Once the statute was enacted the GovernmenL moved t.o dismiss the replevin action and he filed a new suit for just
compensat,ion for the takinq of the rifle and revolver. His claims were g5 million’for t,he rifle and the revol-ver. Thi-s was a966-6’l or so. The Montreal World’s Fair, Expo r57 was about to start. His allegation was, if I had this rifle which I am entit,led to, f would open up a stand or a place to show this rifl-e and f would charge a do1lai a head and f would make millions of dollars by just showing the rifle and the revolver here. So thal,s Lhe value of the rifle and revolver. I remember writing, at least, f wroLe a very lengt.hy summary judgment motion which I had done a 1ot of researih
orr, in which I argued that you can,t benefit from a
crime. You cantt geL any vaIue. I cited all the
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cases about people who kiIl someone and then try t,o
coll-ect on the insurance policy, all sorLs of things
like that. r remember working on the brief very,
very intensively and I remember actually going out
and arguing it before the District ‘Judge. The ‘Judge denj-ed the motion and wrote an opinion saying it’s
not clear. We said that they’re entitled to #29.95, plus post.age, whj-ch was the value of the rif1e.
Thatrs what Oswald had paid for it, and some similar
amounL for the revolver because he had bought them
both tlirough the mail- order house. So the Judge
denied the motion and said t.he case has got to go to
trial. So I went out Lo Denver and took with me a
very young new attorney in the Department, David
Anderson. We had a trial in which we defended the
United States in this lawsuit. The lawyers for King
had spent about, well he had spent $l-0,000 to
purchase the interest and then with all the various
motions and cases we just sort of made a rough
estimaLe, it must have been $70,.000-80,000, maybe
$100,000 in 1ega1 fees. In any evenL we had a jury.
We decided that we were going to defend on the basis
that oswald had abandoned the rifle on the sixth
floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building.
Thatts where it was found. Since Oswald had only
paid $30 he had no intention to come back and
retrieve it, and that when Mrs. oswald had sold it,
she had nothing t.o se11 because the thing had been
abandoned. Under Texas 1aw you can abandon property. The revolver we said I don’t know if
we had a real- defense on that. In any event, the jury went out and came back and said nothing for the rifle and $250 for the revolver. That was the end
of the case. The second case was down in Texas. This was brought by Mrs. Oswald, the wife. She sued for all the remaining property which had been taken.
Her claj-m was for, I donrt know, $2,000,000 or
$:,000,000. That case was initially assigned to a
master who came here to Washington and we had a
trial here in the U.S. Distri-ct Courthouse before a
masLer but he was serving as a master for the
Northern District of Texas where the case was pending. I’11 try to put this thing together fast.
We had had a stipulation with the plaintiffs that
t.he value of all this property and all this property was, the intrinsic value of t.his property, just this property, was $3,000 they were suing for $2-3 million as I recall. The only way you
could get the $2-3 million is if you took the value of what you could se1l it for in auction houses,
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Lhings of t.hat sort. And so we had a trial here
before the master.
We were talking about the case before the master Lo
resolve Marina oswald’s claim for some $2-3 million
f or t,he property.
Right. I remember this case very well because there
was sort of an interesting event that t.ook place in
the course of the trial of this case. I think Irve
done scjme pretty good lawyering, but every once in a
while you get a spur of the moment idea about a
lega1 issue and you go with it. I got one here. I
went with it and it was, it worked out fine. The
experts knew one anoLher. They were both experts on
rare books and manuscripts and one ran.a bookstore
in Chicago and one ran one in Boston and these were
experts on handwriting and documents and knew the
value of those. The t,ria1 was scheduled for 2:00 in
Lhe afternoon here in the courthouse. It was
decided earlier that the experts would come,
together with Lhe master, and we woul-d view the
property in t.he morning. Now, the Warren Commission
report had a number of volumes of the exhibits,
photographs of the exhibits. If you ever see the
ful1 Warren Commission report t.hese exhibit volumes
have photographs of vi-rtually all the documents and
all the things that were the subject of the lawsuit
but none of us had ever rea11y looked at it. Itrs
all over here in t,he Archives, across the street.
We assembl-ed in the Archives, went up the elevator
into the caverns of t.hat. building. The Archivist
brought. out the material and we looked at it. Here
it was 11:00 in the morning. Now I have to go back
a littLe bit. My expert had told me that based upon
his revi-ew of the exhibit. volumes of the Warren
Commission that he had looked at the various
letters, the diaries, the photographs and things,
and he had come up with a tentative valuation of
around $135,000-$150,000, if you took item by item
and tried to seII them in an auction house. These things had been sold by Oswaldrs mother had sold
a couple of these letters and so there was a track record. The Oswald case was made up of claims that
they were noL that they had publication rights
and somehow or other the Government had taken by publishing these things Lhey had taken publi-cation rights, and t.hat rs how they had gotten
their claim up into the miIlions. But, in any event,
their own expert, when f examined him, had come up with a number t.hat, was roughly the same as my
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expert ‘ s on the vaIue, absent the publication
rights. His value was al-so in the $135,000-$150,000 rangfe. In any evenL, when we got to the Archives
that morning, w€ puIled out. all the letters and the
documents. Lo and behold we saw that it was al-l
discolored and seriously damaged by brown acidy
looking stuff on virLually all the papers, all the
materials. We all looked at it, and said to the
Archivist, what’s this? He said well that’s the FBI
had done a latent fingerprint analysis by using a
sil-ver’nj-trate solution on all of this paper while
they were looking for fingerprints to see if there
were conspirators or co-conspirators, and whatnot.
While it is possible to neutralize this solution,
they had neglected to do so and it had left all
these brown staj-ns all over the paper. Everybody
looked at it and then we adjourned and went to
Iunch. f went to lunch with the expert. f remember
sitting over lunch with him. I said what is that.
now the issue had to do with the taking of this property and the date of taking was fixed aL the
time the Attorney General actually issued the order
on behalf of the United Stat,es to take the property,
which had been while the property was in that condition. So I said to my expert witness over
Iunch, what does that do to the value of this property? He said well of course it destroys the
va1ue, nobody in his right mind would pay anything for this material t.hat’s been covered wit,h t.his
chemical that’s virtually destroying L.he paper. I
said could you give me a rough estimate as to what the value might be. Oh, he said, probably, if you
discount everything, somewhere between $10, OO0,
$15,000-$l-7,000. I said well rtm groing to ask you,
when we put you on t,he stand this afternoon, what its value is in its conditj-on. He said sure, fine, I ‘ 11 testify to that. So we went back and the trial started that, afternoon. They put their expert on.
He testified about the vaIue. I said did you value it in its present condit,ion. Oh, ro, of course not. f remember the lawyer for Marina Oswald going into a
rage at my even asking the quesLion, and objecting to the quesLion on the ground that, the Government
had done this to the property had destroyed Ehis property and now was trying to take advantage of the destruction of t.he property. So, in any event, he got off the stand. Eventually my witness got on the stand and f asked him and I got out of him the value, we got the value of $135,000-g15O,OOO if it
was in mint condi-tion and what its value in its present condition was, and why it was only valued at
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t.hat. So the trial concluded and then we had to
brief the case before the masLer. Then I went out
and did the Iega1 research having made the spur of
the moment decision at lunch that f was going to put
on this whole line of testimony. Lo and behold, I
did come up with what I t.houghL was a pretty good
argument. That it’s like chopping down a you
know when the fj-remen chop down t.he tenement to
prevent the fire from spreading that thj-s was the
proper exercise by the FBf of its police powers.
They we’re looking for a crime. The property had no
intrinsic value at t.he time and there was nothing
wrong with their doing t.his, and j-f that was t.he
condition of the property when it was taken by the
Government, fine. The master issued a report in
which he found that there were several different
valuations. The intrinsic value was the stipulated
$3,000. The present condition value was $17,000 based upon my wj-tness’ testimony. If it were mint condition it was something like $150,000 and if there were publicatJ-on rights it was into the mil1ions. From there we wenL to t.he District Court.
We went down t.o Texas and briefed the case and
argued it before the District Court in Texas. The Dist.rict ,Judge rul-ed for t.he Government and gave us
a $3,000 judgment. fn other words, he said that the
judgment. was limited to $3,000, t.he int.rj-nsic value of the propert.y. But f need to tel-l you t.he end of the st.ory. Marina Oswald took an appeal. The
appeal went t.o the Fifth Circuit, of course, in New Orleans. I wrote the brief . By that, t.1me, even
though f was a staff attorney in the Civil Division, I got to do the appeals. I was basically an appellate lawyer for that practice and I was given the opportunit.y to do my own appeals on occasion. I
remember having written the brief. I went down to the Fifth Circuit for the argument. The case had
been put on the summary calendar, 15 minutes a side.
The practice at that point was that all the
at.torneys had to show up for the call of the calendar at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning and then
you would wait around until your case was argued.
And they ca11ed the calendar to make sure all the attorneys were in the courtroom. As they called Lhe calendar, f stood up and announced. that i was ready. The judges looked at me and said why are you here? I said I’m here to argue the case. They said, we1l
you know your opponent, the appe11ant., has submitted the case on the briefs, and he’s not showing up for the argument. Do you want to argue the case? As I
was just about to speak the presiding judge said to
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file, oh, you dontt have to answer now, why dontt you
think about it and let us know when your Lurn comes
up. So I went. to the back of t.he courtroom and sat
there while three other cases were argued in the
Court of Appeals. f rehearsed in my mj-nd during all
those three cases, about 88 different ways of saying
f submit the case, f don’t. wish to argue the case.
Sure enough my t.ime came and I got called up. f
l-eft my papers and my briefcase and everything where
I was sitting in the courtroom, way back in the back of the’courtroom. I marched smartly up to the
podium and announced that I wished to submit the
case on the brief s and that I didn’t care t.o argue
it. There was some buzz, buzz, buzzing on the panel
and they said, we1l, counsel, werd like to hear some argument. f then said we1l, if you wouId, if you
don’t mind, I’d like to go back and get my notes.
They said sure, fine. So f went back, got my notes,
and f came back and argued the case. I was on my feet for about an hour in which they questioned me. I argued for about an hour. They analyzed this case
from every — they were very interested in it and they analyzed it from every which wdy, and I had no opponent. I was the last case on the calendar, and
we were up, and finally I 1eft. The decision came out. f giuess f both won and lost the case because
t.hey reversed the Dist,rict Court. The $3,000 was not the right amount but the $17,000 was the right. amount. They upheld the doctrine that the chemical
applicatj-on of the silver nitrate solution was a
perfectly reasonable act by t.he FBI and the
Government would not have to pay for t.hat. But the value of the property in its then present condition
was its proper value, and not the intrinsic $3,OOO value.
And no further appeal from that.
And no further appeal
You have talked about a number of the cases t.hat you
had around the country while you were at the Justice Department. Did you also have occasion while you
were with the Department to practice before the Dj-strj-ct Court and the Court of Appeals here in the District. of Columbia?
I did. one big case that sticks out in my mind from this period which I think is worth mentioning, was the Rickover copyright case which f Lried before t.he District Court for the District of Columbia before
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,Judge John Lewis Smith. There are two aspect.s of
the case that are worth mentioning. I cantL
remember the year that I t.ried t.his case but. I have
a sense that it was around | 57 or ’58. The case had
been tried in the Dlstrict Court on an agreed
st.atement of facts in a suit against Rickover. The
essence of this case is worth mentioning. In fact,
there are a number of things about. the case, now
that I’m thinking about, that are worth ment.ioning,
from the District Court. leveI and the Court of
Appeals 1eve1. Rickover had been sued by Public
Affairs Press. Public Affairs Press was a smalI
publishing house here in t.he Dist.rict. run by a
fellow by the name of Morris Schnapper, whose
regular source of material was public domain
material. He would take material that was
essentially in the public domain and he would dress
it up in sime *ay a-nd then publish it. Sometimes
they were Government reports, sometimes j-t was
Government studies, and t.hings of that sort, whj-ch
are in the public domain. Therets a stat.ute which
says – – ‘which said then t.hat no publication of
the United States sha11 be copyrighted and this
statute had been in ef fect since l-903. The hist.ory of the administration of that statute has been very jaded and fascinating, if you want to spend any time
t.hinking about, it or looking into it. There’s some
interesting stories t,o mention, and f can mention
them, and will menti-on some of t.hem here along the
way. Nevert.heless, whaL happened here is that
Admiral Rickover, who was an Admiral in the United
States Navy, ran the whole nuclear submarine
program. He also was an official of the Atomic
Energy Commission where he ran the Naval nucfear
atomic energy program, so he wore two differenL hats for t.wo different agencies of the United SL.at.es, the U.S. Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission. Of
course, he was the father of the nuclear submarine. fn some lights a great hero, in other lights a
curmudgeon who was very controversial. Rickover regularly gave speeches. He was always around
promoting vari-ous causes of his educatj-on he made
a big thing about education about nuclear energy,
and things of that sort. He was always being invited to various evenLs around t.he country or
elsewhere and he spoke frequently and a lot of the
t.hings he said were cont.roversial. He testif ied before Congress regularly. He was a very well known
person. Every time he had a speech, the Navy
Department issued a press release with a copy of hls speech. One day he got a telephone call from
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Mr. Schnapper who said I’d like a copy of aI1 your
speeches,–of aII your press releases. I don’t know
it nickover got the call or somebody else in the
Nawy got t.he call. But in any event, it got, to
Rickover and Rickover said why do you want them? He
said well I’m going to put out a book of your
speeches because f think they’re very interestingRickover says, weI1, like hefl you’re going to do
that. These are my speeches and if anybody is going
t.o puL.out a book, it’s going to be me. I’m going
to put’out, my speeches. They’re my speeches,
tfrey’re my property. In any event, Pub1ic Affairs preis sued admiral-Rickover, the case was decided in
the District Court, it then went to the Court of
Appeals with a sort of a lengthy decision that was
sort of confusing. Rickover was represented by
private counsel. The Government was not involved in
the case at all. Eventually the case went to the
Supreme Court. after the Court of Appeals decided it.
When it got to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court
decided that there was an important Government issue
involved. They invited the Solicitor General- to
file an amicus brief before they decided the case.
The Solicitor General got the order from the Supreme
Court and he started to assess the Government
interests around the various agencies of
Government the copyright office and here and
there in the various agencies. He got back such a
melange of disparate views about the GovernmenL
copyright stat.ute because it had been so
misundersLood, mismanaged and misapplied over the
years, that the Sol-icitor General threw up his hands
this was Archie Cox, by the way and told the
Supreme Court that he couldn’t fil-e an amicus brief
because he had no views that hg could present to the
Supreme Court. Well the Supreme Court decided the
case. The case is Public Affairs Press v. Rickover
in which they reversed t.he Court of Appeals and sent
the case back for trial. They said the case needs
to be tried on a full-blown record. One of the
reasons why is because t,here are important public
issues involved here and that they had been tried on
some agreed statement of facts in the trial court.
They said this is so particularly since we asked the
Sol-icitor General for his views and he can’t figure
out what. they are. Before we decide this case we
need to know rea11y what’s involved here. And so,
the case was remanded for trial. At that point the
plaintiff added several defendants. He added the
Register of Copyrights, the Atomic Energy
Commissioners, the Secretary of the Nawy and the
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Secretary of Defense and whatnot. So the whole
federal government establishment was now implJ-cated
in the lawsuit and the case had been developed
somewhat by another lawyer who then transferred out.
and it was reassigned to me. I got the case shortly
after it got start.ed and basically had to get it
ready for trial.
I should interrupt myself here because yourve asked
so much about my own personal experiences and how I
felt a6out. things. As I was beginning to work on
this case as I say, at this point in my career, I
had been in the Department maybe seven, eight or
nine years the case was scheduled for trial, I
forget when, but six months away — and I was then
gearing up to work hard on it. r got called into
the Assistant Attorney General’s office and was
presented with an opportunity. I was told that the
DeparLment had an opportunity to send its people off
on a yearrs sabbatical to Princeton to get a
graduate degree at the Woodrow Wilson School,
prepaid -by the Government and that I was someone
that they had selected as being a candidate for
this, and would I like to do that? I woul-d get my
fuII pay but I would also have the opportunity to
get a degree and f’d come back to the Department
after my year. I went back home and talked to my
wife about it and thought about it. The opportunity
to try the Rickover case was so exciting to me that
I went back and t,o1d the boss that f was very
pleased and honored t.hat t,hey had considered me for
this opportunity to go off to Princeton but
S: You rea11y would rather be in court!
I: f’d rather be in court. So I turned down that.
opportunity just so that I could try this case. I
stilI t,hink was a good decision but others might
question it. In any event, we went on and prepared
for trial. The trial of t,he case was fascinating.
The historical issues about. t,he administration of the st.atute were thoroughly fascinat.ing. The
statute had been breached constantly over the years.
To give you the best. example of the we11, Lhere
were a number of examples of its breach but. the
best example of the breach of this st.atut.e had been during World War fI. In WorLd War II, at the
beginning of the war, President Roosevelt had asked
an historian, who was a professor at Harvard, Samuel Elliot Morrison, Lo join the Navy and to be the historian of the U.S. Navy during Worl-d War II.
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Morrison took leave of absence from Harvard and
became a Rear Admira1 in the United SLates Navy and had an office in the Pentagon throughout World War II. He had a staff of Naval officers and Naval enlisted men whose sole job over all this period of
time was to gather t.he history of the U.S. Navy
during World War II. At. the end of the war Morz,ison
wrote a 1″4 volume book called the History of the United St.ates Navy in Wor1d War II. He won t.he Pulitzer Prize for it. ft was published by Little,
Brown & Co. and considered to be his own piopert.y.
He reaped all the benefits from it. Any assessment of the statute would have said that that’s a public
domain document since it was his job to write that thing and he had all these government employees and military personnel, working, whose very job was to
create t.his document. That was just one example.
There were countless others, but itrs probably the best example of the breach of the statute. Anyway, that was the argument the plaintif f was makj-ng. f t
was a lengthy triaI.
S: And this was before ,fudge Smith?
This was before ,fudge Smith. The witnesses were excellent. The subject matter was fascinating. f
learned a lot about witnesses and about various
issues because virtual1y every witness that testified for the Government had his own ax to grind. The burden of t.he trial attorneys in the
case was to keep the witnesses on course, to keep
them from coming out with t,heir own views about what
t.hey f elt was import,ant to present to the court,.
Rickover was represented by private counsel- and by
an excellent t.ria1 lawyer. The plaintiffs were
represented al-so by an excel-lent triaL lawyer.
There was one procedural element that I think is
worth noting because frve always harkened back to it. In context it is sort of interesting, We had
made a decisJ-on, because Rickover was represented by private counsel and we were the Government, that the
Department of ,Justice would undertake to share the
burden of the cost of the defense of this case.
Rickover’s argumenL was that. this was his private property and we sustai-ned that view. f should add
t.hat. by t.he t j-me the case got t,o t.riaI, Rj-ckover had
abandoned any copyright claim to 32 out of the 34
speeches. Now that number may not be right but. there were two that were t,ried and he had abandoned
any claim to the other 30-odd speeches so the plaintiff could have those and use them for
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whatever. And the two speeches that he had given,
one invol-ved a speech that he gave at The Harvard
Club in New York City and other one involved a
speech that he had given at a publlc power
convention in Seattle. The fact is that he had
travel-Ied both to New York and to Seattle on
GovernmenL travel. He had other Government business
in the area, which is Rickoverrs practice, and so
the case basically involved how did he happen to do
this speech? How did he get. t.o the location? What
was the subject matter of his speech? Was it part
of his responsibil-ities as a Naval officer to
deliver this particular speech? The speech at The
Harvard Cl-ub was on education. And, of course, Lhe
problem for Rickover was t.hat Rickover, who
frequently testified before Congress and was a
supreme egotist, would regularly tel1 the commitLees
that rrlrm in the education business, part of my job
is to educate Naval officers and the whoLe nuclear
Navy. t’ Of course, by giving a speech on education
at. The Harvard CIub t.he plaintiff was able to argue,
look by’his own words, he said he was in the
education business so this is part of his offlcial
duties. The plaintiff made a similar argument about
his speech before the public power convention.
Because one of his other functions in t.he Atomic
Energy Commission was to run an experimental nuclear
power plant at Duquesne Power and Light in
Pittsburgh. He was related through an experimental private power operation. But. Lhe thing that. f
remember most vividly about. the case as a tactical
procedural event is a very mundane Littl-e t.opic.
That had to do with the fact that I got a call from
the court reporter a day or two before the trial was
to start. She knew me because there had been a
number of pretrj-al proceedings. She said to me, are
you going to order the transcript? I said, “yes, I’m going to order the transcripL. ” She said I’if
you would like daily copy it ‘ s going to be more
expensive but one thing you might want to do ls get
all three parties to share the cost and that way if
all three of you buy daily it would be the same as
if you were just buying it regular copy, and I ‘ 11 do
daily copy for you. ” So I called my co-counsel at
the time who represent.ed Rickover. As it turned out
there was a greal deal of animosity between plaint.iff’s counsel and Rickover’s counsel. They
scarcely talked to one another civilly outside of
court and r was somewhat of the intermediary and I
would end up talking to both of them. I told him
what the reporter had said and he said why don’t you
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go call plaintiff’s counsel and see what he’s going
to do, how he wants to handle it.. Now, I had
already committed, f ‘d al-ready ordered the
transcript. I caIled up the plaintiff’s lawyer and
I said we can get daily copy if you wanL to pay a
third of the cost.. He said, oh no. I said wel-l
what are you going to use? He said f ‘m not goJ-ng to
order a transcript. I saj-d what are you going to use? He said I’m goj-ng to use the courL’s copy. I
said, gh, okay. r went back and told my co-counsel
who went. int,o a blind rage at the very thought that
he wasn’L going to order t.he Lranscript because he
viewed this whole case as a grave imposition on
Rickover and all t.he rest. of it, and here he wasn’t
even going to order a transcript. It was going to
be a lengthy tria1. We knew it was going to be at
least a couple of weeks. He said I won’t stand for
this, this is outrageous. I looked at him and said
there’s nothing we can do about it. He said, “by
God there is something we can do about it. frm
going to report this to the judge. ” The morning of
the t,rial- either that d”y, or there was a
pret.rial the day before or something like that,
he insist.ed that all t.hree of us go before the judge
in chambers the first thing. He asked me Lo support
him and I t.o1d him t.hat. I rea1Iy couldn’t . He was
going to complain about the fact that t.he plaintiff
was not ordering the transcript. ,Judge Smith very properly, I thought, said weI1, thatrs very interestirg, but f donrt
I can’L make him order it either
f can’t make him order a transcript. So we came out of chambers where the judge had said f’m not going
to order him to order a t.ranscript. Before we got
sLarted, f met with co-counsel and he said welI, by
God, why shoul-d we order a transcript? We decided
and I went back to the court reporter’and I said I
revoke my order. So we revoked the order for the transcript. Wel1, word of that got. to t,he judge, to
‘Judge Smith. He knew that we had originally ordered the transcript and he knew that we now no longer had a transcript.. We then asked I canrt remember the timing but we had an att.orney from the Atomj-c
Energy Commission, or somebody, come down and hj-s job was to sj-t in court throughout the proceedings
and take very copious notes about what was going on. It turned out to be a 16 day trial. As the trial
proceeded, we found out Lhat ,Judge Smith, and I had
never actually tried a case before ,Judge Smith, but
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I t.hink I had argued motions before him. But Judge
Smith, v/e realized aft.er a day or Lwo, was also
taking very, very copj-ous and detailed not,es of all
of the witnessest testimony. ft would turn out that
a witness would say somet,hing, there was an
objection about something he said, and the ,Judge
would Lhen, you could see that he had ye11ow pads
filled with very detailed notes of what the
witnesses had testified to. He made his rulings on
the basis of his own extensive notes. WelI. we came
to the end of the trial and of course we had
extensive notes of all t.he witnesses. We prepared
post-trial findings and conclusj-ons. The judge
issued an opinion ruling for Rickover and the
GovernmenL f inding t.hat, Ehese were Rickover’ s
private speeches and they were his private property
and weren’t in the public domain and refusing to give a declaratory judgment to the plaint,iff. The plaintiff then took an appeal and, of course, the
issue came up that if he wanted to attack the findings of the distrj-ct court he would need a
transcrj-pt. There had never been a transcript made
by the court reporter in this case. The court
reporLer had all of the not.es but they had never
been turned into a printed transcript. At that point, f remember calling over to the court reporter
and asking her how much this would cost if someone
were to get the transcript. f think she gave me an
estimate of $25,000-$30,000 or so, because it had
been a lengt.hy trial. .fust doing it would cost a
lot of money. So we sort of sat back and said wel-l, this is going to have an ef fect on t.he case.
The only other thing that I remember about the case
was that there was a big delay on the plaintiffrs
part in filing his brief and what not. I was
assigned to work on the appeal in the case and t.he plaintiff’s lawyer, a very capable lawyer, a very professional lawyer but also a very vigorous advocate. He ls the sorL of lawyer that he would
make a sLaLement and if you didn’t counter it you
may be heLd responsible for what he said j-n some
manner. Event.ual1y, there was some bi-pIay in the
court. of appeals about what had happened in the
course of preparing for the appeal. The appellant
f iled his brief but it was out. of t.ime. In the
course of the motion for filing it out of time, there were certain statements that were made about
commi-tments that alleged1y either the Governmentts
or Rickoverrs at.torney had made about the appeal.
As I saj-d, the appellant’s brief was attached to the
motion for leave to file out of time, it clearly was
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not timely. I remember, because f was assigned the
appeal and f sat down and immediately prepared a
response to the motion for filing out of t.ime. I
tal-ked to co-counsel who was very adamant that we
had to do this. I took my response into the Section
Chief in the Appellate Sect,ion who was my reviewer
on the appeal. I sent it into him and he sent i-t
back to me saying: No we wonrt file this. I
wenL back to him and said why not? He said, well the brief is here and it. doesn’t make any sense to
f i1e ttiis t.hing. Itrs not going to make any difference. The court is going to take the brief.
I sat there and for a half-hour I argued with the
section chief on why we had to file the opposition
because if you didn’t respond to t.hese statements
you might have to live with t,hem at some point later
on in the case. f don’t even remember what the
statements were but we disputed them. They were
some things that we wanted to dispute. I remember vividly at the very end of this harangue with my
boss, he took t.he opposition paper and kind of threw it acro$s the desk aL me and said oh aL1 right if you want it grudgingly he 1et me file it. I
signed it and filed it. A few days 1ater, the court of appeals dismissed the appeal for failure to file
a t,imely brief. f must say that everyone over the
years always held t.he appellate section lawyers and
t.he appellate section management in awe because they
were the elitist of the el-ite Department of ,Justice
attorneys. Whenever you had to deal- with the appellate section t.hey took a IordIy attitude in
dealing with the commoners around the Division. You
know what I’m talking about. Of course, at thaL point, f was a general litigation section lawyer and
somehow or other I felt that I would no longer feel in awe of people in the appellate section because I
had at least shown them that there was a way to win
a case that was contrary to their views. And that
was the end of it.
And mooted the issue of no transcript.
It mooted the issue of no transcript,.
Do you have any particular recollections about
,fudge Smith’s conduct of the trial?
I thought ,Judge Smith was a very even-handed, respectful, responslble jurist. He was very dignified, he ruled firmly on matters, he showed no
emotion or bi-as about the case, he was respectful to
I;
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I
both sides. I had the feeling that, he expected
everyone of us to be professj-onal. He wasnlt an
emotional man in any respect. He was serious and
hardworking and dignified. I never had a feeling
t.hat he was biased one way or another. There was
talk about the judge generally that he might be
biased toward the GovernmenL in criminal matters and
things of that sorL but. t.his wasnrt a criminal
matter. We had no feeling whatsoever that, he was on
our side. We di-dn’t think we had this case won.
Until the case was decided we thought that the case
was up in the aj-r. We had no way of knowing. It
was a fascinating issue about Rickover and about
Government copyright issues. There were lots and
lots of fascinating f mean f told you one story
about Samuel Elliott Morrison there were
countless ot.her incidents of mismanagement of that
stat.ute so there was just no telling. Of course,
the plaintiff brought. a 1ot of that to the court’s
att,ent,ion in the briefs so there was no telling how
t.he court might decide. I thought ,Judge Smith did a
very good job. I t.hink it is worth not.j-ng that as a
dj-strict judge he was aware of t.his skirmish over
the Lranscript. because I had the feeling t,hat that
skirmish caused him to act on the Bench in the way
that he might not have acted had he thought that all
he had to do was look at the transcript that would
be prepared for him. He knew what was happening and
he was going to have his own set of notes about what
the witness testified. ft came up constantly where
there was some question what the witness had testified to or what objections had been ruled upon.
He would always refer to his own notes and he would
say we11, this is what I think he said. And that
was it.
That f inished t.he Rickover case. IJet me go on f or just a couple of more minutes with a few interesting things from my perspective. As a result. of having
worked on Lhe Rickover case, I became the so-caIIed
“expertrt on copyright 1aw in the Civil Divisj-on.
That. caused me later in my career, when I was a
Deputy Assistant Attorney General a few years 1ater,
t.o be invol-ved with presenting the Department
testimony bef ore congressional commj-ttees. Durj-ng
t.he mj-d-’70s there was a lengthy process by which the entire copyright l-aws were revised. There was a
massive revision of the copyright laws which were held up because there were disputes about some
aspects of the copyright. laws about music, tapes and royalties, things like that.. In any event, I relate
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this to the Rickover case, because in a sense Rickover started me into the area of copyrights. I
hold sorL of a personal feeling about knowing
something about t.his subject,. Some of it is historical too. One of t.he things I didn’t telI you
about was Lhat there was a famous case involving the
not.ebook of Captain Clark of the Lewis & Clark
Expedit.ion, which eventually turned into a case
because his notebook was found in an old house in
Minneapolis many years ago. It became t.he subject of litigaLion as to who owned the notebook since
Captain Clark’s job was to go on this mission, sent by t.he President of the United States and to keep a
record of this expedition. That’s just a Iittle historj-cal aside. The major revision of the copyright laws took place in the mid-r7Os. f became the Government spokesman in testimony on more than
one occasion before congressional committees. There
are two thi-ngs that I remember the stat,ute was
very broad and many areas within the Department of ,fustice had an interest in the statute. There were
Criminal Division interests because t.here were criminal sanctions on copyright infringements; the Antitrust Division had an interesL in various other provisions because of t.he antj-trust laws and some Civil Division j-nterests because of the patent
copyrlght area of Government. contracts. When the statute in its entirety came up for enactment, the statute was farmed-out. to the various Divlsions in the Department. f was the Deputy Assistant Attorney
General who was selected to be the person to give
t,he DeparLmenL’s testimony on the stat.ut.e. A lot of other people testified. There was an awful 1ot of legislative history on this. My own personal
knowledge was only on the fraction of my testimony that I had prepared — maybe 20 percent of the
testimony was personal to me, the ot.her B0 percent
had been prepared by ot.her Divisions — Antitrust
and what.not. Those people came with me to the
committee hearing and were sitting at the tab1e. I
submj-tt.ed a lengthy statement for the record and I
gave a very short presentation. I was questioned by various members of the committ.ee and indeed, I think
even some of the other Department. personnel gave
statements during the course of that t,estimony. The revisions Lo the copyright laws were enacted. There’s just one humorous anecdote that folIows.
Eventual-ly, I l-eft the Government and went to private practice. I was in the firm’s library a few
years back and one of the assocj-at.es in the office
came running over to me with a vol-ume from the
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Federal Reporter. He showed it to me. f read it.
I was somewhat astounded because Lhere was a case in
the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit,
involving a copyright disput.e in which someone was
contesting, I can’t remember the case or the j-ssue
but it, had to do with a design copyright of some
sort. There was an aspecL of the application of the
st.atute about which there was a serj-ous question of
how the statute was t.o be construed. It was a 2 to
1 decision in t.he Second Circuit and my t.estimony
was being quoted by the majority and disputed by the
dissent about how the stat.ute was supposed to be
consLrued. Now as it turned out when I read the
testimony it was in this B0 percent category of
testimony that someone else had prepared and thaL I
didn’t know anything about. Yet when you read the
decision of the Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit t.hey were arguing over what f had said even
though it wasn’t, exaclly me. That is an
interesting comment on legislative history.
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