John D. Bates Interview 2

36
Oral History of Honorable John Bates
Second Interview
February 19, 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 19, 2020. This is
the second interview.
MR. COONEY: Good morning, Your Honor.
JUDGE BATES: Good morning, John. Good to see you again.
MR. COONEY: When we left the first interview, you had just graduated from college, and
you were going to be reporting for basic training in the military in
September. What did you do in the summer between your graduation and
the start of military service?
JUDGE BATES: Nothing special, John. I did a little bit of traveling to see some friends.
Maybe I thought it would be the last time I would see them. But I went
out to Wisconsin to see one friend. I went down to North Carolina and
South Carolina to see a couple of friends. These were high school and
college friends. So I just spent a pretty leisurely two months or a little
over two months between graduating from Wesleyan and going off into
the military.
MR. COONEY: What was your mindset as you contemplated reporting for duty in the days
getting closer and closer?
JUDGE BATES: I don’t remember having any particular memorable mindset. I’m sure
there was some apprehension, as I think anyone going into the military at
that time would have, and that time was pretty immediately following the
37
Tet offensive in Vietnam. I had some apprehension about what the next
stage would be like for them, but I don’t remember being particularly
looking forward to it or anything memorable.
MR. COONEY: Where did you report for duty?
JUDGE BATES: I went briefly to Fort Dix, but then I had basic training at Fort Sill in
Missouri. No. Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, and it was a very cold
experience because even though this was during the November timeframe,
so you wouldn’t think it would be that cold, it’s in the open out on the
plains, if you will, in Missouri, and it can get quite windy and cold, and I
remember it being so.
MR. COONEY: What was basic training like? What did they train you in?
JUDGE BATES: They trained you in getting used to being in the Army, but they also
trained you in the basic skill sets. You had weapons training and physical
training. You had a bit of hand-to-hand combat. Those kinds of things.
But you also had just the indoctrination of being in the military, the
military structure.
Now, I was tracked to go to officer candidate school. The reason
that I had the summer off before going in the military was basically
because, even though I had been drafted, I was assigned to go to OCS, and
that enabled me to postpone for two months my entry into the military.
MR. COONEY: When did you graduate from basic training or whatever one does?
JUDGE BATES: It would have been in the November period. I don’t remember the exact
date.
38
MR. COONEY: You were just another one of the people who reported for duty, with the
rank of private?
JUDGE BATES: The rank of nothing, basically. I just finished my basic training and then
was off to what they called advanced individual training, AIT, which was
more in a particular, I’ll call it specialty. You may go for advanced
individual training in the Army in infantry or in artillery or some other
discipline. Just a couple. I was slated to go to advanced individual
training, AIT, they called it, for artillery, and that was at Fort Sill in
Oklahoma, which was one of the artillery bases, but that didn’t really
didn’t have a basic training or advanced individual training. This was still
pretty rudimentary training in some ways, but a little more specialized in a
particular sense.
MR. COONEY: What was artillery training like? Exciting to a degree to be shooting off
large weapons.
JUDGE BATES: It was a little bit exciting, I suppose, although it was also deafening, and it
was the same basic structural composition in terms of large group of men
who had no rank but were just there for training, but they were getting
specialized training. We spent time, some of it in classroom, but most of
it field training on basics of firing large weapons, and it was not training
that was focused on science, although a little of that, or focused on the
leadership necessities in terms of running an artillery outfit. You were
there as a basic grunt, someone to just do the work and getting trained in
the niceties of firing high-caliber weapons, ammunition that you have to
39
heft and load into weapons. So it was interesting, and I don’t remember it
badly. I don’t think it was an unpleasant experience, other than the fact
that I was in Oklahoma in the middle of winter and doing something that I
didn’t think would be my life’s avocation, but it wasn’t a bad experience,
and we did learn a little bit of the science, physics, I will call it, of
carrying those kinds of weapons and having them targeted correctly and so
forth.
MR. COONEY: Picking up in helicopters?
JUDGE BATES: I do not remember much in the way of being transported by helicopter
during basic training. That’s a pretty expensive proposition, so I’m not
sure that it was a built-in part of the training at that time. I’m not saying
that we didn’t go in a helicopter once or twice, but I don’t remember it as
being frequent, whereas at later times in the Army, I do remember
helicopter flights generally favorably but sometimes with fright.
MR. COONEY: What was the transition like from AIT to Officer Candidate School?
JUDGE BATES: It was a little bit of an interesting story there. In the artillery AIT, there
were, unlike basic training, a lot of the people in the artillery AIT class
that I was in were actually slated to go on to OCS, to Officer Candidate
School, and they were slated to go on to Officer Candidate School in
artillery at Fort Sill. Near the conclusion of the training, and again, this
was a little over two months of training, near the conclusion of that
training, they announced that the entire class, and this would have been
less than a hundred people, but more than fifty I think. I think it was in
40
the sixty or seventy range, the entire class would go to OCS in infantry. I
will say that many, including myself, were not looking forward
particularly, to being artillery officers, and then being stationed in
Vietnam because the job basically of a young artillery officer, a second
Lieutenant or even first Lieutenant in Vietnam, was basically as a forward
observer. So you would be going out in advance of the artillery unit and
the weaponry in order to position yourself to spot targets, and that would
put you in pretty dangerous circumstances. That was one of the officer
positions, young officer positions, in Vietnam that certainly was more
dangerous than some others.
When the entire unit or group was instead designated for infantry
OCS, other apprehensions sunk in with the group, including myself.
Obviously, an infantry officer was much more on a daily basis likely to be
engaged, if you will, with active combat, so that was what I had to look
forward to. But they then decided that the first two people in the alphabet
in that class would go to fill another OCS class, not artillery but
engineering. So David Baueris and myself, the first two in the alphabet,
there were no A’s apparently, were instead designated for engineering
OCS, and I caught a ride with him. He had a car. I didn’t have a car. He
had a car and we drove back. He was from Delaware. We drove back to
the East Coast for the couple of days we had before reporting to Fort
Belvoir in Virginia for Officer Candidate School in engineering. It just
41
was serendipitous. I was slated for artillery, then instead for infantry, but
by a quirk of the alphabet, was assigned to engineering OCS.
MR. COONEY: The rest is history.
JUDGE BATES: The rest is whatever history deems worthy of consideration. It’s not of
much importance, but it certainly affected my life.
MR. COONEY: So you report to Fort Belvoir.
JUDGE BATES: I reported to Fort Belvoir for OCS training. OCS, I’m not sure I have the
dates exactly right, but OCS is about a six-month maybe a little over sixmonth
training at that time in the Army, and it’s pretty rigorous and
demanding. It may be different depending what branch you’re in, whether
you’re in infantry or artillery or engineering, which were the three
categories for OCS at that time. But training, there was a lot of leadership
training and evaluation. There was some physical training, if you will,
and evaluation, and then some academic as well. I don’t remember how
they were weighted other than to say that the physical was the least
heavily weighted of the three. I think it was academic, leadership,
physical – I don’t know exactly what the percentages were. You were in
the barracks with your group and you had drill sergeants and everything
that you imagine in that kind of training which was, as I said, pretty
rigorous, pretty demeaning at times, especially during the first couple of
weeks. But most of the people, I would say almost all, perhaps it was all,
but almost all in officer candidate school at that time there for engineering
were college graduates, recent college graduates, so I was in a peer group
42
that was pretty much like me and identifiable. Probably the racial
composition was maybe one or two Latino, a handful of African
American, and the rest white. The geographical dispersion was probably
more heavily from the southern United States and the northwest as I
remember, but certainly reflected America generally but not precisely.
MR. COONEY: In terms of mathematical abilities, did you have any preparation in high
school or college to make it easier to absorb?
JUDGE BATES: None at all. My grandfathers both had engineering skills, disciplines and
degrees, but of course I never knew my grandfathers. They had died
either before I was born or just after I was born.
MR. COONEY: What was the coursework like? Some work in engineering, or was that
once you had your basic introduction field work?
JUDGE BATES: I would say that if you divided the time out, in the first, well, that’s not
early. The field work early on was not necessarily strictly engineeringrelated.
It was you were outdoors doing stuff a lot, but it wasn’t really
building sophisticated engineering skills. Later on, there was more field
work that was identified with engineering. Throughout, there was a lot of
field exercise that was leadership-oriented, and that is how I recall it.
There were times when we were out in the field for many days at a time,
living out in the field. There were exercises near the end of OCS that were
taking you to a camp called AP Hill, that was probably a little wilder then
than it perhaps is now. That was fifty years ago. You were basically set
free and had to find your way back to safety with enemy forces around.
43
You were pretty much on your own. You might have started off with
another person or two, but before long, you were trying to get back with a
compass to where you had to get, and you had all these enemy obstacles in
the way in order to get there, and since virtually no one succeeded in
getting back, you were then treated as a prisoner of war when you were
captured. That was an interesting exercise in preparation for real life
possibilities. I would say that was the most demanding of the times in
OCS, although some of the academic work was demanding. Some of the
physical training was pretty demanding, but I was always in pretty good
shape so I was able to handle that alright. And certainly some of the
training that was in-your-face discipline was tough, but I remember most
clearly those exercises where we were out in the field trying to accomplish
things as a team or out in the field alone trying to evade capture.
MR. COONEY: How realistic was the capture exercise once you became a prisoner of
war?
JUDGE BATES: John, it’s hard for me to answer how realistic it was because I never
actually was later on a prisoner of war, but I would say it was fairly
realistic and demanding. It was not put you in cages and so forth. It was
basically trying to get information out of you and without subjecting you
to torture but certainly subjecting you to hardship, and it was interesting in
that way and demanding.
MR. COONEY: That must have been an interesting conversation the first night you got
back to the barracks having been through that.
44
JUDGE BATES: I’m sure the first night we got back to the barracks everybody was too
tired to have much of a conversation at all.
MR. COONEY: When did you make the transition from Officer Candidate School to your
first assignment? I guess I should ask you before that, what was
leadership training like? People who were going to be of your own rank,
but you must be in role playing, you must be designated as the head of an
outfit for some period of time?
JUDGE BATES: That would be the primary field exercise leadership training. There was a
lot of classroom leadership training, but what I remember best was the
field exercises where you were actually put in a position of responsibility
and authority and had to accomplish something. It’s moving the unit from
one place to another, whether it was in the engineering field, you know,
doing something from an engineering perspective. There were exercises
which were mock combat exercises, but not a lot of those. Those were not
a dominant part. The leadership training was taking place on a daily basis
just kinds of problems and kind of demands and then, both through
classroom, and more importantly I think, the field exercises of putting you
in demonstration of your skills.
MR. COONEY: What were any principal lessons that you learned from the leadership
training? Do you remember back discreetly how you felt coming out of
Officer Candidate School?
JUDGE BATES: It’s a little hard to differentiate between what I learned at Point A versus
Point B versus Point C in the military. Certainly the leadership training in
45
Officer Candidate School was important, building in me some concepts
that stayed with me, also team building was an important part of it as well
because you had to rely on others, and that is something that, whenever
you’re trying to accomplish something, doing it alone is hard, and you
have to rely on those others who are there in some capacity.
From the leadership perspective, some of the things that I think I
learned are respecting others, listening to the views of others, taking those
into account. I learned to lead by example, always be candid. Those
things were part of the training.
Military leadership is a little bit different than a lot of other
settings, but it has some similarities. But there is structure in the military.
Pretty defined structure, and it demands strict adherence and following of
orders. That’s not the way leadership always is in society, and certainly I
have not felt that structure that existed for some of the training. But
there’s no question that the military training and particularly the training at
OCS was invaluable for instilling ideas, concepts, disciplines.
MR. COONEY: You’ve mentioned concepts a couple of times.
JUDGE BATES: Some of those concepts, yes.
MR. COONEY: That’s very interesting. What is the transition like from Officer Candidate
School to your first assignment?
JUDGE BATES: And it is a transition. Because in OCS, you start off as just a grunt in
training. You’re demeaned, and it’s very hard. By the time you graduate,
you become a little comfortable with that. But you’re still just one of a
46
large class of people who are subservient to everyone who’s giving you
the training, and then, at the end of the line, you’re commissioned an
officer, and you then are going to have the responsibility or some of the
responsibilities others have had with you. So there is a transition.
The first thing that happens from OCS at that time was a
determination had to be made of whether most of the people from
engineering OCS wound up as engineers. A couple of people either at the
top of the class, one or two or three people and maybe one or two others
would go elsewhere. The one or two others were people who, for
instance, would be volunteering or something of that sort. They might still
wind up as engineers, but they would have additional training to do that
and more likely, they would be winding up in the infantry. And then the
people at the top of the class, this was how some of the other branches
were filled up in their officer ranks, by part of the class opting to go into
other branches. Finishing first in our group, I went into the finance corps.
I don’t think there was any admirable reason for that. It seemed like it was
my skill set, my basic skill set, and might be a safer venture than some
others. So I was given these options, and I took the finance corps.
MR. COONEY: So you’ve just been assigned to finance and given your commission.
What happens next?
JUDGE BATES: I go back to artillery because I was assigned to Fort Knox in the finance
corps, to the finance unit at Fort Knox. And Fort Knox was then the
major, or one of the two majors along with Fort Sill, artillery posts in the
47
United States. Of course Fort Knox makes you think finance because it
makes you think of the gold at Fort Knox, but I had nothing to do with
that. I was just a finance officer serving Fort Knox. I would not say that
was a very formative experience. I was at Fort Knox for a year
assignment. At that period, I became a Second Lieutenant, the lowest
officer. The promotion to First Lieutenant was an automatic promotion
that occurred after one year. And I did my job. I lived in officer barracks
and had some friends.
I did a few interesting things both in terms of the military career
just learning the basics of the finance corps. I had to go away to a finance
school for a couple of weeks, to Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, but that
was right at the beginning. Basically I just served as an officer in finance
at Fort Knox. It was Kentucky. I took advantage, and then in Indianapolis
as well, I took advantage of the only opportunities to see the Kentucky
Derby and to see the Indianapolis 500, that at that time was the car race.
It’s not the car race anymore. But those were outside of my military
duties.
MR. COONEY: Rational behavior. Finance training was working well.
JUDGE BATES: Absolutely. Take advantage of what you can. But as I said that year was
not a memorable year. There wasn’t that much. I was learning the skill
set necessary for finance corps and learning to be a young officer in the
Army. I was basically just more or less treading water, waiting on getting
orders to go to Vietnam.
48
MR. COONEY: Go to Vietnam as an individual?
JUDGE BATES: As an individual. It was an individual assignment – assigned to the 13th
finance corps.
MR. COONEY: Where were you based?
JUDGE BATES: Let me give you a little bit of geography. In the central highlands, which
is where I was, on the coast, which is the east side of probably the third,
fourth, fifth largest city in South Vietnam at that time, Qui Nhon, and that
was where the 13th finance corps was. That was my home base, if you
will. A highway that runs across the central highlands from Qui Nhon to
Pleiku, Vietnam to the Cambodia border. It runs from Qui Nhon to the
major towns of An Khe then Pleiku and then the border. I spent most of
the first seven months in An Khe in a finance unit that was in An Khe and
to some extent Pleiku, as well was the home of the 4th Division.
I was a finance officer who was servicing to some extent the
indigenous population that was working for the military and all the units
outside of the 4th Division that were stationed with the 4th Division, the 1st
Air Cav and some other units that were there. I had a unit. There was one
officer in the finance unit, and I had about thirty men, as I said, this was a
little over half the time that I was there because eventually in September
of 1970, the 4th Division went out of Vietnam back to the States, and so
that changed things dramatically and I’ll get to that.
So I was at An Khe, which was a major base. There was a little bit
of a mountain right on the side of it called, I can’t remember, which posed
49
a little danger for the base. It was vulnerable because with the 1st Air Cav
there and some related units, there were a lot of helicopters. A lot of
helicopters on that base, and that meant that there were attractive targets
for mortars, or what they called sappers, who were Viet Cong individuals
who would bring explosives in and plant explosives. So the base was hit a
lot. Where my unit was not right next to the helicopters so we weren’t a
prime target, but there were many times where the base was being
attacked, if you will. Not a major attack but a pinpointed attack to try to
wreak havoc or specifically to try to blow up helicopters.
My time at An Khe, I was basically positioned there. My only
travel really, I went to Pleiku once or twice. The only travel was back and
forth to Qui Nhon on occasion, and often I would do that by helicopter,
but other times I would do it by Jeep. We had two vehicles for the unit.
We would, not frequently, but occasionally, travel back to Qui Nhon by
Jeep. I had a fellow who was the driver who went with me. Occasionally
I would drive, particularly if I had someone else going with me. The road
between Qui Nhon and An Khe, that was traveling west on Highway 19,
went through one mountain pass area. That was an area of danger where
there were attacks on convoys or even less than convoys, so you had to be
careful traveling through there. The road from An Khe further west to
Pleiku was more dangerous because there were more mountain passes to
negotiate.
50
I think I have a funny story. When I was driving back to Qui Nhon
with a friend of mine, another young officer, just to show you not
everybody is totally used to everything in a combat arena, I was driving.
We were going downhill in the mountain area, and as we were going
downhill, we started hearing these all explosions pop pop pop-type
explosions, and he, more than me, but he, being in the passenger seat,
thought we were being attacked in some way, so he immediately grabbed
his rifle and was ready for whatever. By that time, I realized that all that
was really happening was going downhill, releasing from the accelerator,
the Jeep was backfiring, and this had initially startled me and continued to
startle him for longer until he realized as well that this was not any enemy
attack but rather was a mechanical attack from the Jeep. He was probably
my best friend in Vietnam. He became later a lawyer, and I’ve seen him a
couple of times since. He also was the source of another funny
experience. One of the reliefs that one would have occasionally was to
have a few beers. He and I on a monsoon rainy evening went to the
officers’ club and had a few beers. It was pouring rain, and as we came
out after having a few beers, he got in the Jeep, but as I started to back up,
he did not stay in the Jeep. He fell out, and I actually ran over him. I ran
over him on his thighs, but the ground was so soft, and the Jeep is so light,
that he wasn’t injured. What he did have was beautiful tire tread marks
going right across both his thighs, and so he kept those fatigues on for two
weeks even so that he could go back to Qui Nhon with those tire tread
51
marks across his thighs on his fatigues. Such was the diversion that we
occasionally had.
I know I’m rambling on, but I’ll just keep telling you some things.
I had a great time working with the men who were in the unit. They were
not happy to be there. They were very diverse in terms of their
backgrounds and experiences. But they did their jobs, and they did their
jobs well, and they were proud of doing their jobs well. No matter what it
was, whether they were well-trained in terms of the financial stuff or were
the driver of the truck or whatever they happened to do. That was a good
experience in terms of human relationships, working with a group to
whom you had to give some instruction and leadership but from whom
you also learned a great deal about dealing with adversity. No one really
wanted to be in, but they worked and contributed. I didn’t see much
action, other than the occasional entry of Viet Cong into the base, and this
happened in Qui Nhon in a different way. In Qui Nhon, every once in a
while when we got a mortar attack, be it Viet Cong or NVA. One time the
barracks that I was in was actually hit. I don’t think it actually injured
anyone, but we were evacuated to a safer location. But only two times in
An Khe that I recall actually were we prepared to be engaged in real
combat, and two occasions at night where I was receiving fire. There
were no injuries on our part and we incurred no injuries on the other side
either. On the third occasion, where my living quarters were slightly
elevated over some other areas which had some gullies, and during this
52
exercise, I could actually see from a distance some Viet Cong going down
a gully to escape. That was about it for the actual combat.
MR. COONEY: You had to muster up your men and get your weapons.
JUDGE BATES: On different occasions. On two of those occasions, I actually went to my
men’s quarters. They were in one building, I mean, these were Quonset
huts. I don’t give the impression of something more structurally sound
and significant, but they were in one place, and then about 300 or 400
yards from there was where some officers were quartered, and that’s
where I was. So on two occasions, I went down to where my men were,
and there wasn’t much to it. I mean we just had to be prepared in case, but
we didn’t have, because of what we were in the finance unit, we didn’t
have frontline responsibilities to get into battle. The third occasion, where
I saw some Viet Cong in a gully, I didn’t even get down with my men.
MR. COONEY: There must have been incidents where adrenaline coursed through the
system, first exposure to fire.
JUDGE BATES: Absolutely. And exposure to fire and actually firing your weapon. I mean
either kind of experience, adrenaline-provoking or caused by adrenaline.
MR. COONEY: How long did you stay deployed to An Khe?
JUDGE BATES: As I said, it was about seven months, and then as the 4th Division moved
out, my responsibilities changed. There then were limited units at
An Khe. The 1st Air Cav was there. The 1st Air Cav was deployed out at
various airbases as well. My responsibilities changed because my unit
basically dissolved back to Qui Nhon to the States, and I stayed in An Khe
53
with a small group. There were four of us actually for the most part. A
sergeant and then two men, and we handled some of the issues for folks
who were at An Khe and some of the indigenous population. What we
really did more was travel by helicopter out to various airbases. I say
various.
There were probably five or six air bases that we visited, some
more than once. We took care of financial issues and problems that might
have popped up with people there. So we were a traveling unit. It was
interesting. It was a different experience, an overall experience. You
were in helicopters a lot going out to these locations. Once or twice we
got held up and had to stay overnight, but for the most part, it was just a
day trip. You’d go early in the morning, go back later in the afternoon.
The helicopter trip itself was less than an hour. You would just deal with
issues that people had. Some of it was just answering questions and
helping with financial problems that people had in terms of okay, I need to
deal with this. Okay, maybe you need to have an allotment that deals with
that. Some of it was financial advice on a very rudimentary scale, and
other parts of it were just servicing the financial needs and so forth. I did
travel sometimes in ways unexpected. There was one occasion with a
colonel who had his own helicopter, a smaller helicopter. I was used to
traveling in Hueys. They were not the biggest helicopters, but they were
helicopters that would have six or eight people in them. His helicopter
was a smaller helicopter, and it really only held four people, a pilot and a
54
copilot, and often not a copilot, so it might be three others. On this
occasion, I hitched a ride with him, but he wasn’t going, I don’t know that I
knew this originally, but he wasn’t going right back to where I was going,
either to An Khe or Qui Nhon, but instead he had some men out in an area
that were under attack, and so he went there, and we hovered quite a ways
up in the air and didn’t stay in one place. We moved around while this
engagement was taking place below. It was interesting. I’m not sure what
was happening because I couldn’t see all that much happening, but it was
an interesting trip.
Being in Vietnam was very educational. It was educational from a
growth perspective. It was a time of my life that one would expect a lot of
growth in your early 20s, getting an experience in which really there were
demands put on you that accelerated your growth. I learned a lot. I
developed a lot. I matured a lot as a human being. Not a good experience
that, oh boy, I would like to do that again or I’d wish that on everybody,
but in terms of making the most of it, there were some definite benefits to
it, given what one faced during that portion of one’s early adulthood and
period of growth.
MR. COONEY: Are there specific benefits that you can say that continued the growth
process?
JUDGE BATES: I think it’s part of that same growth, leadership, team building, all of those
different kinds of things. There’s the, you know, realization that each link
in a chain of operation is important. It may be the person making the
55
decisions who’s most important, but it may be some of the people
effectuating those decisions in getting them done, and they have to work
together, and you accomplish things better if you work together with
mutual respect and support. I think those are the kinds of lessons that
were instilled in me during that time. Flexibility. I mean it was an
evolving situation on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis, so you had to
be flexible and make the most out of and do the best in whatever situation
was presented.
MR. COONEY: When did you learn that your deployment to Vietnam would end?
JUDGE BATES: Everyone knew that the deployments to Vietnam, unless you chose to stay
in the military, at that time were one year, but they were usually cut off a
little bit at the end, and that happened to me too. My deployment was cut
off. Everybody knows approximately when they’re going to be leaving,
and you not only know it, but you’re aware of it on a daily basis. Some
even to the point of saying I’ve got 43 days left or whatever. I’m getting
so short that I can tie my shoes through my ears or something like that. So
it’s something that you’re aware of, and different people more aware, and
for me, no doubt I knew.
I had a sergeant who I had most relied on who left before I did, and
the two men who at the last time that I was there and were traveling with
me, they both left. Things just took a natural flow. When I left, I went
down to Saigon in an area where I stayed for a few days before you caught
your transport back to the States. When I was there, it turned out that one
56
of the officers who was there in terms of their duty assignment was a
college classmate of mine. His name is Wig, Wig Sherman. It gave me
some opportunities to spend a couple of good days as I left. I stayed in his
officer quarters. I went to the beach once. It was a nice exit from
Vietnam. I went out to Washington, Fort Lewis, and from there, mustered
out, as they say. If I had stayed in, I would have become a captain
because that was the normal progression that you were promoted to
captain. But I had no desire to stay in. Not that I hated it. I did my job. I
got unit citations, and individual awards and came back.
MR. COONEY: What was your reception like?
JUDGE BATES: Well, it was not the kind of reception that was so problematic in those
times, particularly for those who had experienced more intense combat or
other traumatic experiences. I wasn’t scorned. I didn’t have problems in
that regard. Nobody welcomed me as a hero, nor should they have, but it
wasn’t an uncomfortable transition for me, other than the okay what do I
do now part of the transition. I went back to work a little bit, at first with
the sheet metal company I worked at previously, but that was just short
term. I did some traveling. I, with another friend from Vietnam who was
a First Lieutenant stationed in Qui Nhon, bought motorcycles. We
traveled to Europe on motorcycles, bought them in England, and then
drove around Europe for a few months. It was a nice experience, although
one of the motorcycles was very problematic, so it created some
mechanical difficulties for us, but a good time going to, not all, but a good
57
number of the European countries for a few months. I came back. I went
back to work. I had to travel to a wedding of one of the men who had
worked with me in Vietnam, so I did that. It was a wedding down in
Tennessee. I went out West. I’m tying this up in terms of the end of the
Vietnam experience. I visited my friend Jim Fitzgerald in Wyoming and
my friend Tupper Briggs in Denver, who was the guy I traveled with, and
went to the West Coast. So I went on an extensive cross-country trip all
the way to California and then back in my Volkswagen. Then, before I
was accepted to law school, I sailed with my brother-in-law and sister and
their five children. Okay, we’re going to do something else, and so they
bought a sailboat. He was the sailor. They bought a sailboat and said
we’re going to sail it down in the Caribbean and then South America and
then across the Atlantic. So I agreed to go with them for at least part of
that time, thinking that maybe I’d go across the Atlantic with them and
wound up not doing that. But we sailed around down in the Caribbean,
three adults and five children, my nephews and niece. We had some
wonderful experiences. They had later, after I left, they had some
traumatic experiences along the coast of South America. They did not sail
across the Atlantic. But they did go through the Panama Canal. I was
with them probably for about the Caribbean arena. We had a good time. I
was not a sailor before. Well not that much of a sailor. My wife is more
of a sailor than I am, but certainly we had a lot of fun adventures. It was
an adventure. And that ended.
58
I had applied to law schools. My academic record, which was not
stellar, although some law schools I would get into. The only way I could
find out whether I had and make decisions if I’m into law school, was
those days, again, we’re talking about fifty years ago, was to hop on an
island and go to where there was a telephone that could reach the States,
and a telephone that could do so was at the top of the biggest hill on the
island, and I went there and I called back. I got ahold of my folks who
told me what schools I had or had not gotten into and what I was on the
waiting list for, and I made a decision at that phone on that island. Okay,
let’s accept the University of Maryland. Go there, basically pretty much
fully paid.
MR. COONEY: What made law school an attractive option?
JUDGE BATES: I might have said this earlier in our conversations. I think law school was
a door-opening experience. It was viewed as such then, maybe it still is,
that you can go a number of different directions from the legal training,
and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I thought that law was a viable
alternative. Being a lawyer seemed to me the best choice. I didn’t have
the requisites for medical school, for example. I thought I wanted to go to
a professional school. I didn’t think I just wanted to go and try to get a
doctorate to teach, for example, so in the process of elimination, it seemed
a viable option.
MR. COONEY: At some point you get on a train and come down to Baltimore?
59
JUDGE BATES: First, I had to get back to the States from where I was, and that required
getting to an island with an airport and getting on a plane coming back.
And then my car was still sitting there, my little Volkswagen, and packing
it up and coming down to Baltimore. And I did. Ready to go to a new
adventure.
MR. COONEY: What was it like making the transition from first Vietnam and then a
sailing trip to a disciplined process.
JUDGE BATES: I was committed to do better in law school than I had in undergrad, both
with respect to absorbing more learning and in terms of, oh I was a very
committed student, and, of course, I wasn’t coming right out of college
like a lot of the class. I had all this other experience post-college, and so I
was a little more mature perhaps in my outlook and my approach to things.
So I got myself a place, by myself living. It was a long walk to school.
The midway access to law school downtown and where Johns Hopkins
was, and I committed to a full day’s work whether classroom or studying,
and I was pretty good about keeping up. I enjoyed it as well. It was
different. Some of the first year required a little less imagination. You
learned sort of the process of law, but I still enjoyed that, and I had friends
in law school. Many of them were younger than I was, but probably my
closest friend was a guy named Cary Adams, who had been in the Navy.
My other closest friend Graham Bush is in Washington. He was at
Zuckerman Spaeder for many years. As I said, I worked hard, particularly
in the first year.
60
MR. COONEY: Where did you work?
JUDGE BATES: I worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. My first summer I worked in
Legal Aid. My second summer I worked at a law firm in Baltimore, but a
good law firm. During the school year, in my second internship, at the
U.S. Attorney’s Office, I stayed with that. I did it during my second, and
then I did it again in my third year, and I actually worked there after
graduating from law school. I worked with three gentlemen. I worked
more with two of them than with all three, one eventually was the U.S.
attorney in Baltimore. Those three were sort of an elite team in the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in Baltimore who did a lot of the work on the Spiro
Agnew investigation and then on the Governor of Maryland, Marvin
Mandel.
MR. COONEY: Two of the big corruption cases of that decade.
JUDGE BATES: Two of the great corruption cases. I didn’t work on the corruption aspects
of Spiro Agnew because it pre-dated my starting to work. I worked on
some related things. For example, I had FOIA production. Most of my
work was devoted to investigation and prosecution of Mandel. I had a
very close relationship with Ron Liebman, a pretty good relationship with
Barney Skolnick although Barney was an unusual character, and a good
relationship with Tim Baker, although I worked less with him. He was
sort of the junior member of that three. I remember my first embarrassing
moment sitting there was from Liebman as one of them introduced me and
I was acknowledged by the judge, and afterwards when I was introduced, I
61
sat in my chair, and that was not a scolding but an enlightenment for me in
terms of oh what’s the courtroom decorum that you have to follow.
MR. COONEY: Everyone has to start somewhere.
JUDGE BATES: That’s exactly right. But that was a great experience. Working there was
a very good experience. That’s what I did, as I said, the summer after law
school. In addition to taking the bar, I was working still in the U.S.
Attorney’s Office.
MR. COONEY: Were you doing a lot of the discovery work and making a first read
through the papers?
JUDGE BATES: Discovery work, some motions response, motions preparation. So it was a
combination of some legal work in terms of preparing briefs and memos
and some factual work. They weren’t going to rely on me for factual
work. That needed to be done both by them, and to the extent necessary,
on financial issues by the experts.
MR. COONEY: Most people in law school are happy to have had some clinical work.
JUDGE BATES: It was a great experience, and it instilled in me an appreciation for, and a
desire, quite frankly, to work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
MR. COONEY: How did you land the position in the first place?
JUDGE BATES: I don’t remember exactly, John. I applied for it. It may have been, and I
think it was, I think maybe Mike Milliman or one of the professors knew a
little bit of an entree there.
MR. COONEY: That’s an interesting point. You talked about your fellow classmates.
You must have had relations with your teachers.
62
JUDGE BATES: I did have relationships with some teachers. I would say that professors
who are clearly foremost on my mind would be Bill Reynolds, who was a
young professor out of Harvard. He was probably only a few years older
than I was, because I had this time between college and law school, but he
was a very dedicated young professor. He’s just recently retired, I think.
He was my professor for contracts, and that was our small section class, so
I had a lot of interaction with him, and I developed a certain affinity for
him. Another professor wasn’t as much of a personal relationship but was
more of an academic relationship taught First Amendment law and
evidence and was a very demanding professor. He was a very hard
professor, but he really taught subjects and asked quite a bit, and he was
pretty much the opposite of Bill Reynolds. Bill Reynolds was very easy to
talk to. Peter Quint was a little more difficult, but that’s about it. I didn’t
have that much of a life outside of that.
MR. COONEY: Was there a teacher or an experience that sticks out?
JUDGE BATES: I don’t think so. Well, I did take a clinic, a trial practice clinic. I guess
that was taught by Mike Milliman, who was a very successful professor
and got accolades, but it was co-taught by a gentleman by the name of
Steve Sachs, who was a former U.S. Attorney in Maryland, and that was a
very good clinical, if you will, experience. It really was more trial practice
than it was a clinical course because we didn’t handle real cases. It
probably helped along with the work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, for my
63
interest in litigation. I had some subsequent relationship with Steve Sachs.
He actually referred me a couple of cases.
MR. COONEY: What did you learn in the summer at Legal Aid that you were there?
JUDGE BATES: That was a pretty good experience. I mean I handled a lot of small
matters, paperwork, and I was a little bit in court. That gave me an
appreciation for the breadth of the law in that it was not dealing with
major matters, headlines in newspapers, prosecution of Marvin Mandel.
Or you could be dealing on an equal level of importance in some ways
with seemingly minor matters that really were determinative of how one’s
life was to be, represent people on behalf of Legal Aid. You’re dealing
with real problems for real people who were potentially struggling to
make ends meet or facing a certain circumstance, and so it gives you a
different perspective. And I value that. I think it’s good that I did that. I
love experiences that gave me the glimpse that the practice of law
involved circumstances that are difficult for the client but are very
meaningful for the client, with real life clients there, whereas at the U.S.
Attorney’s Office, I wasn’t dealing with real life clients. I was dealing
with lawyers.
MR. COONEY: Were you able to do any meaningful amount of pro bono work?
JUDGE BATES: In law school, I didn’t really do that. But as a lawyer, I did some pro bono
work, and we’ll talk about that when we get to that part. There wasn’t
anything in law school. I wasn’t involved in the group that was doing that,
aside from working, my involvement was really focused more on law
64
review and moot court. Again, I was on the law review. I put a fair
amount of time into law review and wrote and was editor of the law
review. It was a good experience. It gave me the opportunity to probe as
well as reviewing the work of others, both from a qualitative perspective,
making judgments on whether this was worthy, and also from a technical
perspective. Editing, as you know, is really more technical than anything
else.
MR. COONEY: What was the topic of your note?
JUDGE BATES: My note was a federalism topic, Younger versus Harris federalism.
MR. COONEY: We must have been in school at the same time. My class was assigned it.
I drew professor Posner as my judge.
JUDGE BATES: That was one of the big issues that was good for academic exploration.
MR. COONEY: Who else was on the board of your law review? There must have been
some standout lawyers.
JUDGE BATES: Cary Adams, who became a very successful lawyer in California,
Sacramento, and he had some cases dealing with healthcare, one or two of
them here in this court. He was the editor in chief, a very close friend.
Bush was not on the law review. There are a couple of other people. If
you don’t stay in the immediate Maryland area, you lose contact with a lot
of people. Elijah Cummins, who just passed away, but I knew him.
Academics were not his focus, but you could see that this was a special
guy.
MR. COONEY: Were there many African Americans in the class?
65
JUDGE BATES: I would say that it was fairly well-populated in terms of African
Americans. I don’t know what the percentage was, but certainly there
were a good number of African Americans. I would say the class was a
little over a third women, which was probably on the high side for then,
but a good number of women in the class. I think a respectable percentage
were African Americans.
MR. COONEY: How did you make the transition from there to your clerkship?
JUDGE BATES: The transition to the clerkship, I clerked with Judge Roszel Thomsen who
was an icon in Baltimore. He was very well-respected in the federal court.
I clerked for him on the, I won’t call it the tail end, but the latter part of his
career. He had already become a senior judge. Graham Bush, who I
mentioned before, was my co-clerk, a great experience. I did well in law
school. I think I was either second or third in my class. I don’t remember
exactly. Working for Judge Thomsen was a good experience. He was a
pretty formal guy, so I wouldn’t say it was a warm and fuzzy experience.
I think I have a different relationship with my clerks than he had with his
clerks. I have a closer relationship. He had a good relationship with his
clerks, and I admired him quite a bit. He was very conscientious. He was
able to get to the point, and that’s how he liked to write. So he expected
our draft opinions to be nice and concise and not cite three cases if one
case is sufficient. That kind of approach to writing is a valuable approach.
I did a lot of different things during the year that I was with him in
addition to the cases that we were handling. There was a special
66
assignment from the Chief Justice. He designated us to handle a case
brought here in Washington. I’m not remembering the name. By
someone who had been a superior court judge ousted from that position.
Judges on the federal court knew him and so were recused. Thomsen was
designated to handle it, and I worked on that case. He also was the chair
of the Standing Committee on Rules. That brought us to Washington on a
couple of occasions when he brought a law clerk. I saw that process
through Judge Thomsen.
MR. COONEY: Fast forward forty years.
JUDGE BATES: Fast forward forty years. That’s right. And he also was on a court called
the Railroad Reorganization Court. This was the court that dealt with
Amtrak, property issues, eminent domain issues, as well as legal issues.
Working on that court was pretty fascinating because of the other two
judges on that court, Henry Friendly and John Minor Wisdom. These are
two icons, again to use that term. Henry Friendly is probably the number
one most respected intellectually court of appeals judge of all time. John
Minor Wisdom was almost of the same level, although it’s probably not as
much of an intellectual respect, although he was an exceptionally bright
guy. He fit the role of a judge, and in the South, he, like Frank Johnson,
was really instrumental in New Orleans, with John Minor Wisdom, in
bringing the South out of the remnants of reconstruction into a more equal
world for all. He was a real treat of a man. Judge Friendly was more of
an imposing man, but working with them, I mean Judge Thomsen was
67
working with them. I was sort of experiencing it from afar, but working
with their clerks too who were very very accomplished dealing with
complex issues on railroad reorganization. That was interesting.
Thomsen had some interesting assignments in addition. He had
fewer criminal cases than I would have preferred because of his status and
cutting back on those and some others. So in that regard, I probably
missed out on some things because of what he was focused on.
MR. COONEY: And again, you had first-hand exposure at least on one side of the table.
JUDGE BATES: Absolutely. No question about it. And as I said, it was a pretty formal
relationship. I drafted opinions, and the clerks did the first drafts. Now,
back then, as you might know, John, a secretary was essential because
basically you might be typing some, but you would be handwriting a lot,
and the secretary would be transposing that, transcribing that. The
secretary was really the force in the office, as well as Judge Thomsen,
because she was a part of the team. It was a good working relationship, a
good group. And Cary Adams, who I said was a good friend of mine, was
in the chambers next door clerking for Judge Frank Kaufman on the court,
so we had a good group there that I knew well in addition to some other
people that I met there. Jack Kenny, who was at Hogan for many years
and did a lot of pro bono work. He was another clerk that I had a good
relationship with.
So that was that experience, and it lasted for about a year, and of
course what I wanted to do from there was go into private practice to pay
68
off some of my debts and that was the next step after working for Judge
Thomsen.
MR. COONEY: That’s a good place to begin for the question, if I could in this one. So
looking back after all these years, almost half a century, who do you think
the young John Bates was when he makes the transition? If you could talk
to him, what would you tell him?
JUDGE BATES: I was a pretty mature transitioning young lawyer. I had the military
experience and hadn’t gone straight through the academic route, so I think
my maturity was reflected in judgment and discipline, and so I transitioned
into the work environment perhaps easier than some might have.
Philosophically, I was moderate. Maybe a little more left side than on the
right side of moderate, but still pretty moderate in my political, social, and
other views. I recall thinking alright this is what I want to be long term. I
think I entered into the practice of law thinking I want to hone my skills. I
want to become good at what I’m doing and take it from there. But I had
in the back of my mind that the “there” I would eventually wind up in,
would probably be in a U.S. Attorney’s Office. That was something that I
admired and enjoyed from my past experiences, and I sort of viewed the
private practice as a waystation along the way.
MR. COONEY: The Justice Department is so good for your standards and your aspirations.
JUDGE BATES: I’ll say one thing on that. Then, and subsequently, when I advised others,
although I’m not that sure that it’s true now, but at least then, and for some
decades thereafter, I always felt that it wasn’t a bad idea to go into the
69
private practice of law first because in public service, particularly in
litigation, you’re going to have more work than you can do at the highest
quality, so you need to make decisions about not cutting corners but being
efficient in getting the most important thing done and giving most of your
attention to the more important because you have more responsibility and
more matters. In private practice, I always felt that you had more
instruction and teaching and more focus on developing good habits
without the volume causing you to cut corners or make adjustments. And
so I always felt that it wasn’t a bad idea to go first into private practice and
instill some of those good habits that you then could take into the
demanding, at least in terms of the responsibility level, public sector
employment where you have to make decisions on your own and perhaps
make decisions and set priorities. And that’s a good point to end with for
today.