John D. Bates Interview 1

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Oral History of Honorable John Bates
First Interview
February 12, 2020
This interview is being conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of The Historical
Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewer is John Cooney, and the interviewee
is Honorable John Bates. The interview took place on Wednesday, February 12, 2020. This is
the first interview.
MR. COONEY: Would you give us your full name please and date and place of birth, state,
county, city, et cetera?
JUDGE BATES: Good morning, John, and thank you for doing this. I am John Bates, and I
was born on October 11, 1946, and that took place in Elizabeth,
New Jersey, which is Union County, New Jersey
MR. COONEY: I’m going to ask you one more question before we pause briefly. When
did your ancestors, your parents or grandparents, first arrive in the United
States?
JUDGE BATES: This may take a minute. On my mother’s side, she always described it as
they didn’t come on the Mayflower, but it was one of the boats shortly
thereafter. They were early arrivals in the country before it was a country.
On my father side, it’s a little less certain, but they certainly were
here well before the American Revolution, during the revolution, so they
are, on both sides, long-term in this country.
MR. COONEY: Was your family from New Jersey, at the time of the Revolution, in the
middle of the battles back and forth between New York and Philadelphia?
JUDGE BATES: They were more Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia area, and yes. There
was some New Jersey family.
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MR. COONEY: Give me the full name of your parents and their dates and places of birth.
JUDGE BATES: My mother, Sarah Deacon Bates, her maiden name being Deacon, was
born in December of 1910, and her family was from outside Philadelphia,
Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, specifically.
My father was born in June of 1910. His family, when I knew
them, lived in Cranford, New Jersey. But both my mother and my father,
by the time they were more than toddlers had gravitated to the Elizabeth,
New Jersey area, which is where I grew up but also where they went to
high school.
MR. COONEY: Did they meet in high school?
JUDGE BATES: I’m not sure they actually met in high school. They might have met
before. They were sort of in the same social grouping, and so I’m not sure
whether it was actually high school meeting. They didn’t go to the same
high school. Both my parents went to private local high schools. Not
boarding schools, but private high schools, and they were each gender
limited if you will, a boy’s school and a girl’s school. Not associated, but
not too far from each other.
MR. COONEY: Remind me, did you give me your father’s name?
JUDGE BATES: My father’s name was not provided to you. It was Richard Doane Bates.
And my brother was Richard Doane Bates, Junior.
MR. COONEY: And his date of birth?
JUDGE BATES: I did give that, and that was in June of 1910.
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MR. COONEY: What was their college years’ experience like? They would have been
classic Depression Era babies.
JUDGE BATES: That is true. My mother went to Bradford College up in Massachusetts,
and my father went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and they had
interesting experiences, but I’m not sure that I can tell you much of what
they experienced day-to-day.
MR. COONEY: So what did your parents do when they graduated from college? Were
they married shortly after graduation?
JUDGE BATES: Not too long after. My mother, the job market for women was a little
different then. My mother worked as a secretary doing accounting and
secretarial-type work, but once she was married and had children, she was
a stay-at-home mom.
My father spent most of his professional life working for what was
then Singer Manufacturing, sewing machines and other things, and he
worked for them in a production job. He was supervising, but in the
white-collar sense, supervising some of the production in the plant. Their
main plant was in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in Elizabethport, and he did that
until he retired. It was not his only job but his primary job for his entire
life.
MR. COONEY: How many children did your parents have?
MR. BATES: They had four children. The siblings were, and still are, my older sister,
Susannah, who is eleven years older and sort of had a separate life
growing up because her three siblings, three boys, were all a decade
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younger than she was. My older brother Richard, Junior, two years older
than me, and younger brother Jim was two years younger than me. So
there are three boys packed together with an older sister. When we were
pretty young still, she was riding on the back of motorcycles with
boyfriends.
MR. COONEY: Three baby boomers and one from the quietest generation.
JUDGE BATES: I guess you could say that.
MR. COONEY: Where did your siblings go to college?
JUDGE BATES: Suzannah went to Wheaton College up in Massachusetts, and her
boyfriend went to Cornell, and so she spent a lot of time at Cornell. They
married when Suzannah was still pretty young. They had five children in
quick succession quite frankly. I think by the time she was thirty, she had
five children. Wonderful kids. She and her husband, David Loeser, had a
great life until it sort of fell apart and they got divorced. But she spent
most of her time, I would say, raising those kids.
My older brother Dick, who lives here in Washington, or actually,
Chevy Chase, was a chemist, a chemistry major. As I said, he went to
Cornell and went to Graduate School at Columbia in New York and
ultimately became the head of the Chemistry Department at Georgetown
University. He has been a professor for his personal life, retired a few
years ago, and he lives here in Chevy Chase, he and his wife Ruth Ann.
My younger brother, Jim, who went off to Lafayette College
originally, didn’t finish there. He eventually got his degree from Miami
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University in Ohio. That was interrupted by military service, and he lives
in North Carolina with his wife Pat. I see him less frequently, mainly
because of geography.
MR. COONEY: Going back to your father and mother. What was it like growing up with
them? Were there activities and interests, things that they introduced you
to?
JUDGE BATES: My parents were pretty typical, I think, of that generation. They certainly
were focused on providing for their kids and making sure their children
had what they needed educationally as well as provisions of life that one
needs. And I would say that that was their main focus. Their main focus
was on a solid family and making sure we flourished in that environment.
My father was not overly focused on his work. He came home
pretty regularly. He took the bus to work and back, and he got home
pretty regularly at the same time, and we had dinner together every night,
and they instilled in their children an appreciation for education, reading,
and, probably less so, for politics, government. I don’t remember a lot of
dinner-time conversations about current events of the day in the political
or governmental arena. Unlike today, which does consume a lot, I think,
of dinner-time conversations of my generation and with my children as
well. It was not dominant in my family then.
They instilled good values, morals. We weren’t an overly religious
family, but we were a church-attending family. It was a pretty good
upper-middle-class, I would probably call it, life.
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MR. COONEY: May I ask which denomination your family belonged to?
JUDGE BATES: Episcopal.
MR. COONEY: I’m Catholic, so I’m not certain about how Episcopalian children are
brought up in the church and the way that we were.
JUDGE BATES: Well, not the same way as with the Catholic faith, but certainly Sunday
school was part of our normal routine up to a point. There’s not a rigidity
to it. We didn’t always attend, but we regularly attended, and certainly by
the time each of us were in high school, there was less of a focus on that.
My younger brother probably removed himself from religion faster than I
did for example, but I was involved in some of the youth activities. I was
very active in, and then president of the state youth group. I would say
that that was as much a social undertaking on my part as it was a religious
undertaking on my part looking back at it.
MR. COONEY: You were hosting parties or gatherings of people?
JUDGE BATES: Gatherings of people. It was to some extent, an organizational structure,
that you got involved in doing some good things in the community, but
you also got involved in meeting with each other and having those social
connections.
MR. COONEY: Good things in the community these days that might mean something like
working at food banks. What did that translate to back in that generation?
JUDGE BATES: Similar type of stuff. I would say it was a positive experience for me, and
that I did have that experience, but I don’t want to over-emphasize it
because it’s not as if my primary focus was in the church.
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MR. COONEY: Let me jump back several years here. What was your father’s experience
in World War II?
JUDGE BATES: His experience in World War II was that Singer Manufacturing changed
from producing sewing machines to producing engines and other things
for military equipment, and he was the production manager, and therefore,
he did not go into the service. He basically had a civilian job. He was fit
for the service and otherwise would have gone in, but he had a civilian job
that was viewed as important enough that he stayed in that job.
He had two brothers and a sister. His two brothers both went into
the service and served in the military, although neither of them in World
War II kind of combat.
MR. COONEY: You raise an interesting point. Was your family part of a large family
with your father having any number of siblings? Were you close to your
cousins and your aunts and uncles?
JUDGE BATES: Yes and no to your series of questions. My father’s family was not small,
in that he had three siblings. But his two brothers, one of whom never
married, the other of whom married but had no children, limited the size
of the extended family. His sister did marry and had two children, so the
only cousins I had from my father’s side were those two children and an
aunt. We were not particularly close to them. We saw them basically at
holidays, ending, you know, in teenage years. So a modest extended
family on that side and not that much of a relationship with them.
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On my mother side, my mother had one sister. She died, however,
in early adulthood, her young 20s, so limited family on both sides.
Both of my grandmothers were alive until I was in my teens,
actually not even early teens for one. Younger than that. They both lived
into their 80s. Both of their husbands, my grandfathers, died at much
earlier ages, and I never had any relationship with them.
MR. COONEY: Where did you attend grammar school?
JUDGE BATES: In the neighborhood. Robert Morris Grammar School was just, it wasn’t a
short walk, but I walked to school every day. It was probably half a mile
or so. It was a grammar school that was predominantly white middle
class.
MR. COONEY: Did your family live in the same house the entire time? Did you ever
move, or did you live in the same house all through grammar school?
JUDGE BATES: Almost the same house. I was born on one street, but then by the time I
was, I think, three years old, we moved one block over, and that was the
house that I was in until I went off to college.
MR. COONEY: What can you remember about grammar school? How do you remember
yourself being a student?
JUDGE BATES: As a student, I think grammar school was pretty routine, if I can use that
word. I don’t remember much outstanding in terms of the academic end of
the educational experience. I remember lots of the kids and activities,
both in school and out of school, and I remember it as being basically a
pretty good time and lots of good relationships. I started to get involved in
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a couple of activities in grammar school, like cub scouts or like playing
the saxophone. But in neither of those instances did I stick with it. I left
cub scouts, and there was something probably with the musical
instrument, it was failure of talent.
MR. COONEY: You were in school with your cohort of friends from the neighborhood it
sounds like?
JUDGE BATES: Yes. Pretty much. Now that didn’t remain true, but for grammar school,
yes. Now the way the geography worked, the core of the kids in that
school did not live exactly where I lived. I was sort of on the edge of the
school district for that elementary school, so more of the kids were located
closer to the school than I happened to be. But yes. I was in school with
the kids from the neighborhood. It changed after that.
MR. COONEY: Did it change for junior high school?
JUDGE BATES: It did change for junior high school. I went to the public junior high
school. But the public junior high school serving a larger area was not a
predominantly white school. It was very diverse, racially and
economically, and so it was a much different experience, I guess the years
that I was in that district. It was a little more difficult school to be in
because of the variety of neighborhoods and kids in the school. It was not
as homogeneous, and so there were more tensions. This was still prior to
the 1960s. Still, there were some events that reflected racial and economic
disparities.
MR. COONEY: What were those events?
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JUDGE BATES: What were those events that showed you the disparities? Oh, sometimes
there were physical things in terms of fights, or sometimes one group
picking on another group, cliques forming, and some kids not interrelating
with other kids, and it seemed to be that was happening along racial or
neighborhood or economic lines. So it just, you know, looking back at it,
you could see that that kind of difficult and sometimes tense situation
existed in that educational setting.
Elizabeth, New Jersey, was a little bit unusual because after junior
high school, you went off to the public high school, and the public high
schools in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at that time were segregated by gender.
There was a girls high school and a boys high school, and neither of the
schools were particularly top-notch. I would say the whole public
education system in Elizabeth, New Jersey, at that time was less than
ideal. It extended down from the high schools into the middle schools. I
didn’t see it in the elementary schools.
MR. COONEY: So when you say that there were tensions, what form did the tensions
take? Was it armed force or disgruntled people?
JUDGE BATES: Oh, give me your lunch money, stuff like that.
MR. COONEY: What group did you hang out with, how that would be defined?
JUDGE BATES: I don’t really remember as much having a group and being able to define
it. I think that it was natural to gravitate towards kids more from my
neighborhood because I would walk to and from school with them. So
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that was just a natural thing, like it was for everyone else in terms of
gravitating towards those that they have reason to be with.
I also probably was a little more, and I stress little, academically
inclined and interested, so I was hanging out, if you will, more with that
group.
MR. COONEY: Do you remember what courses or what areas seemed to interest you?
JUDGE BATES: I would say at that time in my life, the interest in science and math-related
courses were more intriguing and more exciting for me.
MR. COONEY: How about sports? Were you active?
JUDGE BATES: I was pretty active in sports. That was my primary focus as a youth, I
would say. I played, it wasn’t the actual Little League as we know the
organization, but I played youth baseball, and that meant that I traveled by
bicycle to one or two parks, either a park that was more in the suburban
areas where there were games, or a park that was more in the urban area
where there were games. I would play baseball as much as I could, and
we played baseball in the neighborhood. We had regular games in the
neighborhood in fields. They weren’t formal baseball fields, but they were
fields that we made into a baseball diamond, if you will. We played
football and basketball and all of that in my high school years.
And then when I went off to high school, I continued to play.
Certainly in terms of my neighborhood and my upbringing, a lot of the
focus was on outdoor activities, and most of those outdoor activities.
MR. COONEY: What was your baseball position?
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JUDGE BATES: Well, most of the time, and certainly this was true when I was in high
school, my position would be either second base or the outfield. I think
that was a reflection of, okay, well, he doesn’t have a good arm, he’s not
the fastest guy, so those were the positions that you wound up in.
MR. COONEY: The rest of us can only dream. What did your family do in summers for
vacations? Did the family travel?
JUDGE BATES: We didn’t travel a lot, but some of the travel we did was family oriented.
We’d go to, certainly in the early years, to the Philadelphia area, to Bryn
Mawr where my mother’s family was and some aunts and uncles. So that
was one typical trip. During the summers, ultimately we went to New
Hampshire quite frequently, in the White Mountains. The lake was where
we rented a cabin. We originally went there because one of my mother’s
uncles had a summer home in the area. We didn’t wind up staying there.
We stayed in a cabin-type area. That was a good family experience. The
three boys had a good time doing that. My sister was old enough that she
pretty much moved out, so she was not there. That was the primary travel
that we did either to my mother’s family or a summer vacation.
MR. COONEY: Were you hikers or boaters?
JUDGE BATES: We were boaters in the sense that we would get on little canoes and the
like and go out and throw a fishing line, but the lake was not a big lake for
a bigger boat, so we didn’t boat that way. We weren’t really much of a
sail boating family. More paddling. Hiking, yes, but an informal walk
into the woods. But I don’t remember my parents, certainly not my
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mother. She was not that interested in it. I don’t remember sort of
organizing the group and going off on a hike.
MR. COONEY: Very much like my childhood years, only we were at Lake
Winnipesaukee. The same general neighborhood.
JUDGE BATES: There you go. But a bigger lake.
MR. COONEY: Yes. Motorboats and more things to watch out for. What was it like when
you came back and went away to school?
JUDGE BATES: When you say when away to school, what do you mean?
MR. COONEY: I thought you said you had gone off when you started high school.
JUDGE BATES: My father had gone to, my uncle had gone to, and my older brother had
gone to a private school. It was sort of a neighborhood private school, if
you will, at that time. The name of the school is the Pingry School, and
it’s a little larger now and is not in the neighborhood anymore, but it was
walking distance actually. I walked to school. But I went off to private
school for my high school years. I didn’t want to. This was a fight with
my parents, but this was what we did, and off I went. Now it probably
made it a little easier in that, as I said, the public high school was dreadful
in Elizabeth, and not being Catholic, parochial school was not really an
option. I had some good friends who did go to parochial school, mainly to
Saint Mary’s. They continued to be good friends of mine during high
school, from the neighborhood. But I went off to Pingry.
MR. COONEY: What was the discussion like with your parents about not wanting to go
off to school?
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JUDGE BATES: I guess a pretty typical discussion. No, I don’t want to do that. Well, we
think it’s best, and you’re going to do it. It didn’t turn into a bloodbath by
any means and was not that prolonged, but certainly I was initially an
unwilling participant.
MR. COONEY: What was the transition like as an entering student?
JUDGE BATES: It was a new setting, a very different setting, perhaps made easier in some
respects by the fact that my older brother was there and made harder in
some respects by the fact that my older brother was there, because my
older brother and I were very different. He was much more academically
oriented than I was, so the expectations were pretty high for me.
Sometimes I did not live up to those expectations. But in any event, the
transition was not a bad one. I settled in pretty quickly. I made friends. I
got involved in things, and I would count my high school experience as a
good experience overall. It was a high-quality school, very demanding,
but still a school that was for me part of the neighborhood. It’s just a
broader neighborhood because the kids came from a much wider
geographical area. You know, I would have a couple of kids who lived
close to me, but not a lot.
MR. COONEY: What was the academic curriculum like?
JUDGE BATES: It was a very good curriculum. I mean the math courses, science courses,
English, very very, good teachers. The school at that time, I guess our
class size was probably 65. All boys. It was a boys’ school. Out of those
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65 kids, we probably had 20 kids going to Ivy League schools. I mean it
was a very rigorous academic environment and challenged you quite a bit.
MR. COONEY: What were your favorite courses?
JUDGE BATES: Initially, I would say I gravitated much more towards math and sciences.
That didn’t stay with me throughout high school, but certainly at first that
was true. Things still depended in large part on who the teacher was and
how interesting the teacher was. Teachers can make courses interesting,
whether the subject is history or biology or calculus.
MR. COONEY: Who were your favorite teachers?
JUDGE BATES: I had one favorite teacher who wasn’t actually someone who taught me.
He was the biology teacher. He was virtually everyone’s favorite teacher.
He is still associated with the school. He doesn’t teach anymore, but he
sort of heads up their alumni stuff. He was a fantastic coach. Again,
didn’t coach me in his primary sport, which was soccer. He’s probably, I
think this is accurate, the winningest soccer coach in high school history in
New Jersey and maybe nationally. He was very very successful.
Miller Bugliari. Very good with the kids and good as a coach, good as a
teacher, good for the school.
Another teacher was a math teacher that I had as a freshman. He
also wound up being the varsity basketball coach when I played
basketball. He was an inspiration, particularly the long shots that he could
make on the basketball court. Yeah, he had a sad life eventually, but
during high school, he was respected and looked up to a lot.
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There was an English teacher who was sort of different, Mr. Hanly.
He was very old school, sort of a white-haired gentleman, as we are now.
He was just sort of a solid, almost grandfather-type teacher figure. He too
was very impressive to all the students.
MR. COONEY: Can you remember any paper or project that you worked on that you’re
proud of looking back?
JUDGE BATES: Papers and projects. I remember some. Part of typical papers dealing
with some of the classics in Dr. Hanly’s course. I remember experiments
in chemistry. But I don’t have a vivid memory of any particular project,
paper or otherwise. There were lots of challenging things in the
curriculum, lots of challenging tasks. It was a rigorous academic
environment. To some extent, I was in awe of some of the kids because
they were very, very talented. Some of my classmates are physics
professors at Harvard for the last 40 years. They had those academic
qualities in high school as well.
MR. COONEY: Did you find that intimidating?
JUDGE BATES: At times. Sure. I would not say that I was academically intimidating for
anyone else, but I did alright, but certainly not top of the class in that
group.
MR. COONEY: You said you were active in sports and active in activities. Why don’t we
start with sports. It sounds like you played basketball. Did you also get to
play varsity baseball?
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JUDGE BATES: I did play. Basketball and baseball were the two varsity sports. I was
playing football in my sophomore year on the JV team, and I tackled a
fellow, an opponent, who went on to be a quarterback at the University of
Michigan. I say I tackled. We brought him down eventually, but I needed
help, and help arrived helmet first into my upper arm and that injury kept
me out of most of basketball season as well, and that was pretty much the
end of my football career, even though I liked football, I was much too
small to be serious about playing it. But I did play basketball and
baseball. A lot of my energy was devoted to those endeavors, and I
enjoyed it a lot. That’s not to say that I had great success as a high school
athlete, but I was on the teams and started on the teams by the time I was a
senior. I was a real participant, but not by any means the star.
MR. COONEY: You must have had a very close group of friends between the two sports
and a relatively small class size.
JUDGE BATES: I did. I think that that’s one of the good things about a small class size is
you get to know a lot of the kids and you get to know them well, and we
shared a lot of different experiences, both in the classroom and on the
athletic field. It was overall a pretty good life.
MR. COONEY: Did they have class officers in the school?
JUDGE BATES: They did. I was not one.
MR. COONEY: What about other activities besides sports, the extracurriculars, at school
or at home?
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JUDGE BATES: I was involved in the church youth organization. That was my primary
formal outside of school activity. I still had my neighborhood friends and
did a lot of things with them, but there was no other formal activity that I
was involved in. It was a little different, at least for me back then, than it
was for my kids or my kids’ kids, where so much is structured nowadays
and even when my children were growing up with all the activities. That
wasn’t really true when I was growing up. It was much more go out and
play than it was – you know, find your own way – than it was all these
activities were arranged by your parents. And parents sometimes
participated in them. I’ll bet that my parents, I can’t remember my parents
attending one of my high school basketball games. They may have. I’m
not saying they didn’t, but I don’t remember that. And I only remember
them once or twice attending any high school baseball game. My father
was working, so he just didn’t have the flexibility to get away from work
for an afternoon game, and our games were all in the afternoon, and it
wasn’t something that my mother tended to do. So it was different than
my experience as an adult where I was very active in my children’s
activities, both school-related and outside of school.
MR. COONEY: Looking back on it, how would you characterize your intellectual and
emotional development at that stage, if it’s possible to even ask that about
a 17- or 18-year old boy.
JUDGE BATES: Stunted. I mean both intellectually and emotionally, obviously. But I
would say in seriousness, I would say that intellectually I was in an
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environment that enabled intellectual development. This was sort of
expected in my home environment, and it was there to take advantage of
whether you wanted to or not in my school environment in high school.
So I would say my intellectual development, while not something that you
can point to particular events, it just was an expectation, and it happened
naturally given the environment at home and the environment at school.
Emotionally, that’s not something that I probably am the best
person to comment on, but I always felt, and I look back and still feel, that
I had a great family environment. That’s not to say it was free from
tension or difficulties with my siblings at times. My older brother and I
didn’t get along perfectly, by any means, but had a pretty good life.
MR. COONEY: Who could ask for more.
JUDGE BATES: Who could ask for more, John. That’s exactly right.
MR. COONEY: Let’s concentrate now on what it was like to transition from home to
college. How did you settle on Wesleyan?
JUDGE BATES: I would say that it was natural for me to gravitate towards small New
England schools, although my safety school, if you could call it that, was
the University of Virginia, but it was pretty natural to gravitate towards
small New England colleges. That’s what my family was used to, and
that’s what my school, Pingry, most of the kids went in that direction. So
that was pretty natural for me.
Wesleyan was someplace that I became familiar with. My father
had gone there, and actually, three of my classmates went there as well,
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one of whom was on the basketball team with me, another of whom was
the president of our class, and a third of whom was someone that I was
pretty good friends with. So it was, you know, a pretty safe environment
as well in terms of going off to college but knowing some people who
were going with you.
MR. COONEY: Do you remember which teachers recommended you?
JUDGE BATES: I’m not sure I ever knew. I’m not sure that the recommendation process
was something that was as public or perhaps even as important as it
eventually became, so I’m not sure what the teacher recommendations
were. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.
MR. COONEY: Did you have summer jobs? Were you doing anything outside the
confines of school and sports?
JUDGE BATES: I had to work during the summers. I had my first summer job I think
when I was 15, and certainly by the time I was 16 and 17, I was working
in a full-time summer job at a sheet metal factory, a small place that would
install air conditioning ducts and things of that sort that used metal
fabrication. I started off working in the office when I was younger, but
eventually, and I did this pretty much all through college as well, but I
eventually was driving a truck. I was never a fabricator. That was a union
job, so I never really got involved in that, but I did a lot of the other stuff,
including driving a delivery truck to job sites and so forth. That was my
primary job all the way until I finished college. I was routinely doing that,
and I needed to because I needed the money. My parents didn’t have a lot
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of money, and they spent most of what they had on educating their kids. I
give my parents a lot of credit for insisting that each of their children had
educational opportunities, both in terms of high school, because those
educational opportunities wound up being private school and therefore
costing a lot of money and sending their kids to college. Both of my
parents’ families had been better off pre-Depression than they were post-
Depression. That was especially true of my father’s family, my father’s
father and mother lost a lot during the Depression. That was true to a
certain extent as well for my mother’s family, although the entire family
didn’t suffer as much. But my mother’s mother, my grandmother, after
her husband had died, had really limited resources. Not such that she was
poor by any means, but such that there wasn’t a lot of family money for
my parents. My mother didn’t work. My father had a good job, but it was
not a high-income job, and so they, to their credit, they really made sure
that their resources were devoted to the educational benefit of their
children, and that meant that for, you know, any excess money, I needed
to work to get it, and that was true in college too because while I was in
college I worked as well. Most of the time I was flipping hamburgers at
one of the places on campus.
MR. COONEY: A classic campus greasy spoon?
JUDGE BATES: Yes. There you go.
MR. COONEY: So you must have known everybody [laughter]. If I count right, you
matriculated to college in 1964?
22
JUDGE BATES: That would be correct.
MR. COONEY: So that was right at the start of the Civil Rights Movement and right after
President Kennedy’s assassination. When you were in your high school
days, did those have an influence on you and your fellow students?
JUDGE BATES: I think the Civil Rights Movement had a subtle influence, not a dramatic
influence. There were changes and developments that we were aware of,
we discussed. There was not a large African American community in my
high school. There were some, but not a large community. There were
one or two foreign students, but again, not a large group. And so, yes,
there was an awareness and more of a neighborhood awareness as well,
but not anything dramatic. The Kennedy assassination, that’s the first, the
President Kennedy assassination, was a dramatic event. I think most
people of your and my generation remember something about that, and I
certainly do. Not just the events and watching things on television,
including Oswald being shot by Ruby, but I remember learning of
President Kennedy being shot. For some reason, and I don’t know why, I
was out of class and was down at the front office where the headmaster
and others had their offices, I was out of chemistry class for some reason
for a short period of time, and while I was down there, the news came of
President Kennedy being shot, and when I went back up to chemistry
class, I think it was a lab, I told the chemistry teacher, Shawcross, who did
not know yet, and the students didn’t know yet, so that was pretty
indelibly impressed on my mind in terms of learning of the shooting and
23
the aftermath took place over hours that day. It was a hugely dramatic
event at school that day and in the succeeding days. I’m not sure that I
can point to any single event that vivid in my recollection with an impact
like the President Kennedy assassination.
MR. COONEY: Life changing, for me, anyway.
JUDGE BATES: Yes it was.
MR. COONEY: An introduction of the harsh realities of life.
JUDGE BATES: That is definitely true, John. It was something that we talked about in the
family setting, in the school setting. It was a pretty traumatic experience.
MR. COONEY: Looking back, did you take anything away from that experience that
influences your approach to things or your understanding of things?
JUDGE BATES: I’m sure, as you just said, that day was an introduction to some of the
realities of the world that might not be as evident until you get that
glimpse through events as they transpire. So yes. I think that that was the
start of an enlightenment, and not in a political sense, but in a world affairs
and a current events sense.
MR. COONEY: You were about to go to college, and as I remember, especially civil rights
was in the background and then in the foreground increasingly.
JUDGE BATES: Absolutely.
MR. COONEY: It seems it would be a natural flow to the extent it was prevalent in one’s
mind.
JUDGE BATES: You have to understand that there were two flows that were taking place,
and they overlapped to some extent. One was civil rights, and one was
24
anti-war. So both of those things were evolving while I was in college,
and they each were very dramatic, emotional, and important trends,
events, what have you. But they were a little different and had different
ways of manifesting and impacting people.
The Civil Rights Movement was different at different schools. I
don’t know how it was for you at Brown, but it was important at
Wesleyan, but it wasn’t quite as dramatic as, I think of Cornell, for
example, where my brother went to school and my wife went to school,
where buildings were taken over. Wesleyan had a little bit of that but not
a lot of that, and I remember a little bit more about the anti-war
atmosphere because, quite frankly, that had more of an immediate impact
on me because graduating from college in 1968, one was facing the
question of what are you doing next, because if you don’t have something
pretty firm lined up that would give you an exemption, you’re going into
the service. So it was much more evident in terms of its impact on my
next steps in life. That’s not to say it was more important than the Civil
Rights Movement, or the Civil Rights Movement didn’t cause a lot of
reflection and thinking and communicating with others, but the anti-war
and reality of the Vietnam War had more of an immediate impact on me
personally.
MR. COONEY: Let’s approach them in the order you rate them out, whatever level of
activity there was at your college, the Civil Rights Movement?
25
JUDGE BATES: Only on the fringes. I was not an active participant in anything. I don’t
remember a lot of, I went to some things, if you call that a participant. I
went to some, you know, both lectures or rallies and so forth, but I wasn’t
an active participant. And, of course, most of, not all, but most of the
participation was by the African American, black community at school as
opposed to the others. So yes. Appreciative of, knowledgeable, but not an
active participant.
MR. COONEY: How about on the anti-war movement?
JUDGE BATES: There it was a more difficult choice for me. I was of the view that I would
not refuse military service, that I felt that I was not willing to avoid my
commitment to the country, and I put that in quotation marks, and so I
wasn’t going to Canada. I wasn’t leaving in any way, so once you
understood that, your feelings about the war could still be, well I don’t
think this is a good idea. I don’t understand what we’re doing, and I don’t
think there is anything worthwhile that is worth the cost, both in terms of
the human cost and less so, the economic cost. But I wasn’t marching in
opposition to the war. I was probably a little more cognizant and involved
in discussions and so forth, but I, there too, would not call myself an
active participant because I had made up my mind that I was not going to
take some step that was demonstrably against the war by refusing service
or whatever. And it looked like, even though I had in the back of my mind
that I might want to go to law school at some point, it looked like I would
26
not be doing that right away, and therefore, there was a pretty good chance
that I would be drafted and wind up in the service.
MR. COONEY: I jumped ahead a little bit there. Let’s come back to sort of the real
business of college, the academic experience.
JUDGE BATES: I thought you were going to say the social experiences. What kinds of
parties were there.
MR. COONEY: That I’m certain will come up naturally. I’ll start with a basic question.
Did you join a fraternity?
JUDGE BATES: I did not join a fraternity. Some of my friends did, but some of my friends
didn’t. Two fraternities that most of my friends were joining, DK and Psi
U, were both good time fraternities with a lot of parties. DK was more a
football fraternity probably than anything else, and I just didn’t gravitate
there, even though I knew a lot of people there and did go to parties there,
that was not what I wanted to do. I was in with a different group for the
most part. We were spread around different places and interests, so I
pretty easily decided that I didn’t want to join a fraternity. As I said, some
of my good friends did not either. My roommate did not either.
MR. COONEY: You mentioned that you were thinking about going to law school at the
time you were contemplating what to do after college. How had your
thinking developed. What was the education like and what were the
courses that caught your attention?
JUDGE BATES: I think that’s an overstatement of my interest. It was an abstract interest,
and it was, as it ultimately turned out, more of the alright, what are you
27
going to do next and what are the alternatives. And back then, law school
from my perspective and the perspective of many others, was a dooropening
experience as opposed to a narrowing experience, and so going to
law school was almost a continuation of, in a professional sense, of almost
a liberal educational track that you could wind up then practicing law in
many different possible environments, and if you didn’t have something
else that you were clearly intent on doing, being a doctor working in a
natural world, being a teacher, then law school was a pretty obvious thing
to do. And that’s the way it appeared to me at that time and pretty much
the way it appeared to me later on when I did go to law school, that this
was a logical good step in furthering both my education and my
professional opportunities but it was less something that I was
academically focused on.
MR. COONEY: What were your favorite courses in college?
JUDGE BATES: I was a history major, American History, and certainly that was the area
that I enjoyed the most, although I think back, and I can think of some
courses. There was a literature course that I really liked and it was
primarily because I thought the teacher was very engaging. The professor
was one who made some of the readings come to life, and I really enjoyed
that course. I started out with a little interest in math because I had
retained that from high school, but I lost that in, you know, differential
calculus and all these abstract math concepts taught by teaching assistants,
who weren’t very good at communicating I didn’t think. So, like many, I
28
was interested in math to a point and then it evaporated. But certainly
history courses and some government were what interested me most.
Now I will say in terms of my educational and academic
experience at Wesleyan, I was not all that academically successful in my
first couple of years at Wesleyan. I spent too much time enjoying myself
and less time really flourishing in the intellectual and academic pursuits.
The latter part of my years in college, that had reversed. I was much more
academically inclined, much more academically interested, and taking
history courses in my major and some other courses was very stimulating,
and I looked back at that second half of my college experience much more
fondly, quite frankly, even though I was less engaged in social endeavors,
I look back at it much more fondly because I was more engaged
academically and intellectually.
MR. COONEY: What do you attribute the change in focus?
JUDGE BATES: Oh, I probably attribute the poor focus early on to a lack of maturity and
not much more than that.
MR. COONEY: Is there one professor or group of professors that you found particularly
stimulating and who taught you how to think?
JUDGE BATES: There were two history professors that I would focus on. Now that’s not
to say that some other courses weren’t enjoyable. I already mentioned one
literature course that I thought was very good. I had an economics course
that I thought the economics professor was very good at. He was pretty
young when he taught me, and economics, I think, can be a difficult
29
subject. It’s a demanding subject, but he was very good. But the two
history professors I remember most fondly, not that I was close to them,
but I was really impressed with them, Buell on American History and
Green, World History. Green had a very broad reputation. He was a very
acknowledged scholar in the area, and so was Buell, and I thought both of
them taught their courses in ways that brought them to life but were very
informative in terms of not just events but trends and really did with
history what made it a meaningful academic pursuit, and I thought that I
benefited from that and that probably has stuck with me some in seeing
the place of history and how important history can be as an academic
pursuit, and that a body of knowledge can be very helpful in helping
inform current decisions, and that certainly is true in this day and age as
you look and think how much we can learn and benefit from thinking
about historical events. They were both pretty hard professors, pretty
demanding, but very well-respected, and their courses well-attended and
appreciated, and I think that I would be in a long line of students thinking
that they were very good and meaningful professors who had a significant
impression on the students. Those are ones that I would probably think of
foremost.
MR. COONEY: The opinions you sent me made an impression. Where did you learn to
write?
JUDGE BATES: Where did I learn to write? I think that’s a slow process, John, for me. I
think that I had good training in many settings. In high school, I was
30
required to write both in English, primarily in English, but in other courses
as well, and so I learned some basics, important basics, there in terms of
being able to communicate clearly. Some of the technical aspects of
writing were very much ingrained in me, and that stayed true in college at
Wesleyan. The writing was a pretty significant demand starting with the
first courses freshman year, and I remember doing a lot of papers at
various times. I had one friend who was married, and his wife, who had
finished only two years at Connecticut College – it was then called
Connecticut College for Women – she made some extra money typing
papers, and she typed a lot of my papers. Heavy demand in terms of
writing in college. So I learned a lot there. That’s not to say that I didn’t
continue to learn a lot. I learned a lot in law school, I’ve learned a lot as a
judge. I would say my writing has evolved in all those platforms and
environments, and I hope I’m still learning today in terms of improving
my writing. A lot of the learning I do today is from my law clerks. Sort
of a reverse situation. But I have exceptional law clerks, both in terms of
their smarts and their abilities and what they do every day and learn from
it.
MR. COONEY: It’s good to have somebody in the office who’s computer savvy.
JUDGE BATES: That too. Absolutely.
MR. COONEY: Did you ever find yourself thinking back to your American History when
you see events that have been the subject of cases you’ve worked on,
habeas corpus, Guantanamo.
31
JUDGE BATES: Yes. I think back to my education, my time in college. I think back to my
time in law school and certain courses and various experiences I’ve had,
but the thing above all that probably keeps that current in my mind and
meaningful in my mind is my wife. She is an exceptional person, and
after being a lawyer for many years, she stopped being a lawyer and began
teaching American History in high school, and she shares with me views
on subjects that keep that American History base firmly in mind, so it’s not
just my education in the formal sense, but it’s my continuing education
within my familial environments.
MR. COONEY: The older I am, the more I realize how much you learn from your friends
and your spouse in particular.
JUDGE BATES: Absolutely.
MR. COONEY: I wonder if you had a group of friends in college that you were able to
learn from and teach yourself.
JUDGE BATES: Well, certainly I did, although, as I said, my college was almost divided in
two, and the first half of it was not as formative in terms of the intellectual
and related developments. The second half was, but quite frankly, I was
more isolated in the second half. I wasn’t in a fraternity. I lived off
campus, so I wasn’t hanging around in a dorm with friends as much, so I
don’t think that I’m someone that you would say, wow, he has a lot of
friends from college that he’s hung onto and continues to see and relate to.
Quite the opposite is true. I don’t see that many people from college.
Occasionally. I’m also not, truth be told, I’m not that much of a joiner, so
32
I don’t go back to alumni events. I haven’t been back to an alumni event
at Wesleyan, and that limits somewhat your continuing relationships.
MR. COONEY: Were there extracurricular activities in college following through on what
you had done?
JUDGE BATES: A little bit early on. I was on the freshman basketball team. Freshmen did
not play varsity sports at that time. And I started to play baseball. I had a
bad experience, some of it directed to me, more of it directed to another
teammate with the basketball coach, and the basketball coach wound up
being the baseball coach as well, and after the first week, I just decided to
quit. So that was the end of my formal athletic career, and I did not
continue to play basketball. Part of the bad experience was I was not first
string, and then we had our Christmas break, and I got very sick and came
back. At the first practice, the coach decided that I should be first string. I
was still very sick and that just turned out to be a terrible day, and that
soured things with the coach, and I never really recovered from that.
That’s not to say that I would have been a basketball star by any means,
but it sort of was the beginning of the end of my formal athletic career.
MR. COONEY: So did you take the energy and enthusiasm and put it in other activities?
Debating? Acting? Any kind of extracurricular activity?
JUDGE BATES: No. I was involved in no real formal activities along those lines. I did a
little bit of club stuff, but most of my non-academic endeavors thereafter
were informal. I was just with friends. As I said, I wasn’t in a fraternity.
So, no. My college life was not a fulsome participatory life in terms of
33
things like debating and so forth. In terms of debating, I don’t even know
if there was a debating society at Wesleyan.
MR. COONEY: During your college career, really culminating at the end, there were a lot
of civil rights, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the
assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Some classmates made a huge name for
him about the uprising in Columbia in the graduating class of 1968 when
things hit a peak.
JUDGE BATES: True enough. The assassination of Martin Luther King, which was in
April I think of 1968, so before I graduated, while I was still on campus,
was sort of, almost all civil rights-oriented, although there were some antiwar
aspects to it a little bit, but that was a meaningful event in my college
life, but it was right at the end of my college life, and it focused, obviously
the assassination and the aftermath, focused the civil rights issues and
difficulties in the country, and that was something that certainly stuck with
me afterwards. I was only in college for a month after that.
I would say when you combine that event with the subsequent
assassination of Robert Kennedy in June of 1968, I was gone from school,
and I know where I was. Those two, building on the earlier assassination
of John Kennedy that you couldn’t escape, did say something about the
country in terms of where we were and where we were going, both in
terms of some political issues, civil rights issues, and even war, and I
would say that those two events combined to make a huge impression on
me.
34
I was drafted, and I knew I was going into the military. By
volunteering to go to officer candidate school, I could delay the date that I
had to start, and so it was delayed until the beginning of September. So I
had the chance to do other things, and I didn’t feel that I had to work all
during the summer. So I didn’t work all during the summer. I did some
traveling, go see friends and so forth. But the first part of the summer,
right at the beginning, I went to a beach in New Jersey by myself and was
there when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, so I was sort of
experiencing it on my own with the remembrance of the Martin Luther
King and the John Kennedy assassinations in mind. I do think they in
combination formed part of my development as a young man. But
immediately after that, in September, or actually maybe the end of August,
I went into the military. So all those things contributed to my thinking,
my anxieties, my development, but they all were funneled pretty soon
thereafter into this new experience of being in the military. I would
certainly say, however, that I was really upset by not just those
assassinations but the civil rights events that were taking place.
That was an interesting transformation for me into a new world
with new experiences and new challenges and was a pretty important step
in my life developmentally I think.
MR. COONEY: I think this is a good place to end our first interview. I hate to break the
chain here for the transcriber, but that person will have to start listening
35
again at the beginning of interview two to find out about your military
experience.
JUDGE BATES: I’m sure with bated breath.
MR. COONEY: Thank you, and this is the end of the first interview in the oral history of
Judge John Bates.