Thomas C. Green Interview 2

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ORAL HISTORY OF THOMAS C. GREEN
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 Jeffrey D. Bauman and the
interviewee is Thomas C. Green. The interview is taking place at Mr. Green’s office at Sidley
Austin LLP in Washington, DC in 2019. This is the second interview. [Updated 1/2025]
MR. GREEN: I served in Vietnam as an artillery officer, and my tour of duty was a little
bit over a year. It was a combat assignment. We were on hilltops
shooting fire missions for the army and the marines. And when I came
back, I experienced what all of us were experiencing, which was not a
very charitable or hospitable environment with respect to Vietnam
veterans or returning soldiers. It really was much more of a hostile
environment and contrasted with today where there’s kind of widespread
veneration and adoration for the troops, so that’s how it’s kind of stuck in
my mind a little bit.
MR. BAUMAN: How did that play out?
MR. GREEN: You just had to ignore it. Your close personal friends and colleagues of
course were not displaying that kind of behavior. But for the most part,
unless somebody knew, once you were out of uniform and back into
civilian clothes, it was hard to tell whether you were a returning soldier or
not. But sometimes you would be in a situation, social situation, where it
somehow would become known that you had served and there would be
people around and some were very uncomplimentary, not only of the war,
which I can understand, but in a much more personal sense. But I was
able largely to brush it off. It didn’t impinge on my life. It was a
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disappointment that people felt that way I think, but it wasn’t inhibiting
my existence.
MR. BAUMAN: Where did you come back to?
MR. GREEN: I flew back to Fort Lewis in the state of Washington. I had suffered an
incident in Vietnam where I was standing next to a huge 175-millimeter
gun and a fire mission was called in. I was daydreaming or something and
I forgot to put my earplugs in or to stick my fingers in my ear, and the gun
went off. I was right next to it and I couldn’t hear anything for the next
three days. Finally my hearing started to come back but I have a
substantial hearing deficit in my right ear from that incident, even today.
When I came back, I was examined and they told me that I should
wait for the audiologist, the doctor or technician, because I qualified for
disability because I was having trouble hearing. But I was so anxious to
get home that I signed all the papers and left the service. Because of the
fact that I was in combat for the entire 12 months that I was there, I was
relieved from having to serve in the reserves. I was just mustered out
completely. I came home and I married, in very short order, a woman
who I had been dating for a while before I left for Vietnam.
MR. BAUMAN: From Minnesota?
MR GREEN: From Minnesota. And we moved to Washington together as I began to
look for a job. That marriage floundered. I think in part it was because in
the year that I had been away, actually more than a year — what with the
training and that, actually it was kind of two years — we had become
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different people. But we lived together for about four years and we had
two children. Wonderful children, a boy and a girl. My son is named
Joshua; my daughter is named Marisa. We separated when those children
were very, very young. We were ultimately divorced a few years later.
But I worked very hard to be a father and to be present in my children’s
lives, and I think, knock on wood, was pretty successful at that.
I ultimately remarried. I’ve now been married almost 46 years to a
wonderful woman by the name of Pam, Pamela Green. She obviously was
introduced to my children at a very young age, and my children grew up
with her, essentially, as their second mother. And one blessing in my life
is that all four children grew up believing that they were literally blood
brothers and sisters. They’re incredibly close, they consider themselves
and with Pam one single family, so that’s been a very fortunate and
wonderful aspect of my life. Now they’re all adults, all are married, and I
now have seven grandchildren and that’s been a very happy and significant
part of my life. The other blessing in my life was meeting Pam. I would be
lost without her love and support and guidance. She is the most wonderful
wife and partner whom I dearly love and an incredibly accomplished
person. I am an imperfect person at times, and I am grateful that Pam, with
her wisdom and insight, has always been there to guide me back to the
better path.
MR. BAUMAN: What do your children do?
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MR. GREEN: The oldest one, Joshua, is a Harvard Business School graduate. He has
been active in green energy, alternative energy and related financial
services. He has now created a company called Inspiration Mobility
Group, which is in the business of providing and financing fleets of EV
vehicles to large business clients. And then his sister Marisa lives in
Boulder, Colorado with her husband and daughter. After she graduated
from college she had a number of jobs and married when she was about
40, and then they worked on having a child, and they have a beautiful
daughter named Violet. She’s now concentrating on raising Violet, but
also working part-time. Her husband Patrick is what I would call a
software engineer. He is working on a new venture for a trade association
doing all their IT stuff. It’s all a mystery to me. Her younger brother David
went to Wharton Business School. At present he lives in California and is
the CEO of Earnest which is in the business of making and refinancing
student loans and related endeavors. His younger brother Michael, who
lives in the D.C. area, is a graduate of Northwestern Business School and a
Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He is very active in their forensic
and governance operations. He was posted in Japan for two years to help
run those components out of the Japanese office.
Before we get too far, I want to mention that I have three
wonderful daughters-in-law, Natalie, Caroline and Kristin, who are all
very accomplished with their own careers. I love all of them very much, to
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include, of course, my seven grandchildren — Violet, Ajax, Bear, Julian,
Wesley, Axel and Noah. Lots of boys in this family!
MR. BAUMAN: Did any of your children think about becoming lawyers?
MR. GREEN: I don’t think so, and I think I kind of discouraged them, but not in an
active way; I certainly wouldn’t do that. I think they came to the
conclusion that their father was working very hard, a lot of long hours,
was often on the road away traveling on cases, trying cases around the
country. And I think they concluded that that was not exactly what they
wanted to emulate. And just as well. I’m very content that none of them
are lawyers. I have no vested interest in their becoming lawyers. I think
the profession has changed dramatically over the decades that I’ve been
practicing. I think there’s going to be even greater changes. I personally
think it’s a much more difficult profession today than the profession I
entered back in 1967. I think they’ve all made prudent decisions in doing
what they’re doing.
MR. BAUMAN: Let me stay with that for just a second, because, as you know, I graduated
from law school a few years before that, but it was the same kind of
profession. Did you have any idea of what the profession would be like?
MR. GREEN: No.
MR. BAUMAN: What were your ideas when you started?
MR. GREEN: I really was a babe in the woods. As I attempted to explain during the last
session, I became a lawyer almost by serendipity. I was interested in
being on my feet, I found that to be challenging and stimulating, and was
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kind of drawn to this profession because of a lack of a fascination with
anything else. So I didn’t know. I had a law degree; I had passed the
Minnesota Bar. I now had to come and get a job. I could not have, at that
moment in time, described for you any vision of what it would look like. I
came to Washington in search of a job. I had no leads; I had nothing. I
just came here and said I’m going to try and find a job.
So just to kind of complete the cycle of my extra-curricular
activities, if you will, I had always participated in athletics. And one of
the things that I liked to do when I was a much younger man is that Pam
and I took a number of bicycle trips in Europe, and I found that
extraordinarily enjoyable. I also maintained my latent interest in radio
work and broadcasting that I had mentioned before, and that has
manifested itself, or risen its head here, later in life, because I have
become an amateur radio operator, a ham radio operator. I have sat for all
three exams, so I’m now at the top level of amateur radio, and I have a
ham station down at my house in the country, and when I’m down there,
on the weekends, I’m on the radio. Not all the time, but maybe a few
hours every weekend I’m on the radio, making contacts with fellow hams
around the world.
MR. BAUMAN: What do you talk about in these sessions? What’s it like to be a ham radio
operator?
MR. GREEN: There’s two facets. Some hams like to make conversation. You talk about
your equipment; you talk about your antennas; you talk about your
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families; you talk about the weather; you can talk about anything. What
you did that day. But there’s a great segment of the amateur radio
community that is simply devoted to logging contacts, to see how many
people they can talk to and find in the various comers of the world, and to
confirm that their signal got through and that they made contact. So those
conversations are often very short. It’s just to acknowledge each other, get
a little bit of data about each other and what equipment they’re using, etc.
It goes into the logbooks, and then they’re on to the next contact.
MR. BAUMAN: So what is it that gives you the most satisfaction?
MR. GREEN: Well I like to talk a little bit. But you have to find a soulmate to do that
because not all ham operators are interested in that.
MR. BAUMAN: Do you find that the hams that you’re talking to – that you’re talking about
your work at all, or is this just a way of getting away from your work life?
MR. GREEN: It’s more or less getting away from working. I really don’t talk about my
work. I don’t think it would be appropriate in most cases to talk about it.
So it’s just friendly conversation, but at the same time, trying to reach out
and talk to someone, let’s say in Italy, or in Argentina; it’s not the guy
next door. There’s an art and science to propagation of radio waves —
when the bands open up, when the troposphere or when the atmosphere
opens and so forth. There’s more than a little science to it as well. So it’s
kind of a fascinating hobby. I do a lot of sailing; I’ve always been a sailor.
MR. BAUMAN: Where is your country house?
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MR. GREEN: It’s down on the Eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, in a small town by
the name of Neavitt.
MR. BAUMAN: And how often do you go there?
MR. GREEN: We go there almost every chance we can. Not so much in the winter now.
We used to go in the winter a lot too but not now. So those have been my
principal hobbies. For a while I had a motorcycle and I rode my
motorcycle around. I don’t do that as much anymore.
MR. BAUMAN: You sail?
MR. GREEN: I sail as often as possible if I can find someone who wants to go.
MR. BAUMAN: You have a boat?
MR. GREEN: I have a sailboat. But I’m a fair-weather sailor. I have no desire to go out
and prove that I can survive in a gale. I prefer fair wind and sunshine.
So those are my principal hobbies, and of course I spend a lot of
time with my kids. We have to travel to see some of our grandchildren.
We’re into that. Also I’m pretty good at fixing things. I can do plumbing.
I can do a little electrical work. I can do a little carpentry, so I enjoy that.
MR. BAUMAN: How did you develop those skills?
MR. GREEN: I don’t know. It just kind of intrigued me. There are a lot of things that I
look at and I want to learn. For a while I was into astronomy, and so I
studied astronomy. I have a telescope, but I don’t have a big telescope. I
vacillate on whether I need to go out and buy a really big telescope. So
something not too complicated goes wrong in the house, I figure I can
learn how to fix this. That kind of approach has served me well.
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I grew up loving classical music because I had cousin who was an
executive at Deutsche Grammophon, and every time they did a new
classical LP, he would send me a copy. I was 10-12 years old, started
listening to this music and it is what I came to know and love. I’ve always
been a fan of classical music, and if I were ever to come back, to be reborn
in another life, I would like to be a conductor, a maestro conductor of a
symphony orchestra. I’m now on the board of the National Symphony
here in Washington. I love the music so much I decided I wanted to learn
how to read the conductor’s score. I could sit in the auditorium, if you
would, or the concert hall, and if they were playing Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony, I could have the score and I could actually follow it as the
orchestra is playing it. So I took music lessons from a wonderful teacher,
who tried to teach how to read those scores. The conductor score is, as
you probably know, much more complicated than the score each musician
just looks at for his or her instrument. The conductor is looking at all of
them. I can now follow a score that is not too complicated, but there are
many where I would be lost pretty fast.
MR. BAUMAN: How were you able to integrate all of that into, to put it mildly, an active
practice?
MR. GREEN: Well the practice did slow down as I arrived in my late 70s. But I just
somehow was able to make, find the time, find the opportunities, and then
schedule it in and try to stick to it. Sometimes you can’t. I think one of
the things that’s been most problematic about my career, and what I’ve
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done through my life, is that I have no schedule. By that I mean it is
subject to change at a moment’s notice, and it does change, all the time.
Used to drive my wife nuts. I have to go here on this day, and then the
judge changes it to this day, or this meeting gets moved. Everything gets
moved — everything, every day, all day long, every week. That’s probably
the most exasperating part of what I did. I try as best I can to carve out the
time that I want and need for myself, and to see if I can preserve that on
my calendar. It’s not always successful but that’s what I tried to do.
MR. BAUMAN: In addition to the National Symphony board, are there any other pro bono
activities that you are involved in?
MR. GREEN: The biggest pro bono activity that I’m involved in is that I am the president
of the International Anti-Corruption Resource Center. This is kind of
getting ahead of things, but about 25 years ago, I was asked by the general
counsel of the World Bank to come on over and talk with him. I had no
idea what he wanted to talk about. When I got there, he explained that the
Bank was trying to get serious about anti-corruption with respect to their
lending program, and wanted to know if I would come help them develop
the architecture for an anti-corruption office, if you will. So for the next
couple years, I and my colleagues at Sidley Austin put together all of the
procedures, rules and regulations and set up the protocols for the sanctions
board and this and that. Then I conducted many of the initial
investigations around the world into fraud in connection with World Bank
loans.
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Eventually all of that was moved in-house, which was very
appropriate, rather than being outsourced. Thereafter, for a number of
years I continued to be an adviser to the World Bank and its anticorruption efforts. I’ve been over there many times to give instruction to
their investigators about how to investigate and a number of other
assignments over there. In addition, I secured for Sidley a mandate where
Sidley represents the World Bank in every case where the Bank’s
immunity is challenged, which is not what I did, but my partners did that.
So I got very involved in this anti-corruption activity and got to know a
number of people over there very, very well and we would often talk.
The principal problem at the Bank, and it’s no secret, is that the
Bank has about 110 or I don’t know the number now, constituent
members, and the Bank was always reluctant to go after the public
officials who were in office in those countries that were members of the
Bank. They would go after the companies that were doing the bribing,
i.e., the vendors, the architects, the engineering firms, etc. But of course
the real problem is not so much from the vendors offering bribes; it’s the
public officials in these countries that demand the bribes. And nobody was
working the demand side of this corruption equation so we would talk
about that. We decided that we would form an organization that would be
dedicated to training indigenous law enforcement personnel in countries
around the world in how to detect and investigate and prosecute
corruption, principally in connection with large procurement projects
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because that’s where the big bribes are paid, but with a further emphasis
on training those elements to pursue the public officials in their own
countries who are demanding the bribes. We as an organization are less
active today for a variety of reasons, but in our heyday we would go
around the world and train law enforcement.
MR. BAUMAN: How successful has it been?
MR. GREEN: Everybody asks how successful it has been. And what is the benchmark
that you use for that? That’s the $64,000 question. If you say how many
public officials have been convicted and imprisoned as a result of your
training, I would say we’re going to have a low success number. If you
look at how many countries have changed their rules and regulations to
cover these situations, not all stimulated by us, but also by OECD and the
United Nations, and so forth – if you look at the number of individuals
trained around the world — you could get a pretty high number on the
success index. The point is that you can’t even begin to put a dent into
this problem if the indigenous enforcement personnel don’t even know
what to do. So by simply equipping them, and I know just from my
interaction with these law enforcement units around the world that as they
get better trained, as they enhance their capabilities, the prospects for
doing what we want them to do is greatly increased. So I come away from
what we’re doing gratified.
MR. BAUMAN: What is difficult to measure, of course, is the deterrent effect — what’s not
happening because of the training that you’re giving them.
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MR. GREEN: You’re absolutely right. There’s been profound advances in the
technology, both in processing bids and in pursuing wrongdoing. Once
you can impose a kind of computer analysis on bids that are submitted
electronically, it’s much easier to detect wrongful manipulation and fraud.
So there is a deterrent effect out there gradually building.
MR. BAUMAN: Are the countries themselves more sensitive as to who becomes the public
official, so that you get fewer bribes?
MR. GREEN: I don’t know; that’s a hard question. I think it’s hard to generalize. Yes in
some countries, but in lots of areas, no. There are still some pretty crude
attempts to put their hand in the till.
MR. BAUMAN: How much time did you spend on this organization? Roughly?
MR. GREEN; It varies, but when we were active, probably a few hours a week. We had
meetings from time to time, but I am disappointed that, given all of the
other things that were on my plate, I didn’t always dedicate as much time
to this as I should.
MR. BAUMAN: What’s the difference in your mind between slowing down and retiring?
MR. GREEN: I think you have to have some continuing stimulation in life. I’ve seen too
many guys who are adversely impacted by complete retirement, where
every day is just sitting on the couch. You can’t do that. And I don’t want
to do that. I am now past being an elder statesmen at Sidley; that status
came to an end when I retired at the end of 2023. So the result is that I
will have to find other outlets to keep busy, and this is a perfect outlet. I
can increase my participation on the Symphony Board.
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There are other things. I’m not inclined to just join organizations
for the sake of joining organizations. It has to be a situation where I can
make a contribution. So many of these things you just go to meetings and
you go home and that’s not what I want to do. But I’m confident. I’m not
concerned in the least and I have found ways to fill up my time.
MR. BAUMAN: There may not be much of a difference between public service and pro
bono, but to what extent would you think about doing public service?
MR. GREEN: I think public service has probably passed me by and I’m not sure there is
a meeting of the minds on what public service is. I think I’m probably not,
because of my age, I’m probably not an attractive candidate for a host of
things. And most of the things that I would volunteer to do, or be asked to
do, I would be perfectly content to do on a pro bono basis.
MR. BAUMAN: To what extent did you mentor younger lawyers in the firm, shaping their
career paths to include some piece of, call it pro bono or public service, or
call it what you will?
MR. GREEN: My style was to work very, very closely with the lawyers that I’m working
with. There have been a great number of young lawyers who have worked
with me for a number of years and then gone on to their own great careers,
some here in Sidley. Others have left Sidley and gone on to great careers.
I take great pride in the fact that I’ve turned more than a few of them into
pretty effective and accomplished trial lawyers. With respect to pro bono
in particular, Sidley is one of the leading pro bono firms, and demands a
pro bono commitment, so I really haven’t had to mentor anyone too much
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in that because it’s just kind of part of life there, but all those pro bono
efforts are legal cases of one kind or another.
There was a lot of movement in the firm, between the firm and
outside opportunities, whether they be in government or other
organizations, and a lot of young people took advantage of that. For
reasons I am not fully able to explain, those opportunities did not seem to
present themselves in any stark way to me when I was younger. I was
never invited to leave my law firm, or Sidley’s law firm, and become the
general counsel of x or go here or there. And I never sought it out. I was
just too occupied by what I was doing at Sidley or earlier at my own firm.
MR. BAUMAN: That goes back to what you were saying about how the profession has
changed and what you went through as a younger lawyer. Don’t you think
it’s different now?
MR. GREEN: Yes, it is. It is different, and the whole ethic is different in the sense that I
think that the younger lawyers are looking for something different than
just 30-40 years in the same law firm. I wasn’t necessarily looking for 30
or 40 years in the same law firm either and I did not practice in the same
law firm for all that time. It wasn’t something that was presenting itself to
me as a young lawyer, and I didn’t do it, for one reason or another. Again,
when I was a young lawyer, I was in government. I was an Assistant
United States Attorney, which we haven’t talked about yet, so I was in the
Department of Justice. In those times it was thought when you leave
government you go into private practice.
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MR. BAUMAN: Don’t you think in those days, like I did this at the FCC, I spent four years
at the FCC, that gets you automatically thinking it’s a form of public
service, and even if you go into private practice, you never lose sight of
what it has been like to be on the other side?
MR. GREEN: I think every one of us who has served in the United States Attorney’s
office and some of my closest, closest, eternal friends were there —
colleagues I met and got to know during that period of my life — I think to
a man and to a woman we would say that was probably the greatest time
we ever had, as lawyers and as colleagues. It was a profound experience.
But even those offices have changed. It’s night and day now because
when I was there, virtually no one, with just few exceptions, no one made
a career out of those opportunities. You went there, you learned your
craft, you absorbed what there was to absorb, and then at some point you
moved on to another life. Today, 50 years later, these offices are
populated by many, many individuals who are making it a career. That
has changed the dynamics of all those offices, the character of all those
offices.
MR. BAUMAN: Do you think that’s for the better or for the worse?
MR. GREEN: I think it’s for the worse. Now many would disagree with me. I think this
phenomenon probably resides in the judiciary as well or it can be seen in
the judiciary as well. I think that when we went into those jobs we were
idealistic, we had compassion, we thought of ourselves as administering
justice. No one was keeping score. You got as much credit for washing
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out a case as you did for prosecuting the case. For us there were always
three colors in life: there was black and there was white, but there was also
grey, and there was always a lot of grey. And when things were in the
grey area, you had to really use your discretion and decide what was just,
what was right. Over the years, grey has disappeared. That’s my thesis
and I believe it emphatically. When you stay in the prosecutor s office for
years, year after year after year, you get hardened, and grey disappears.
So if you are not lily-white, then you’re black and black is evil, and we
need to take an extraordinary pound of flesh.
It would be interesting to put me on a panel and hear other voices,
but I really do believe what I’m saying. And even on the bench, judges,
when they sit on these cases year after year, for 20, 30, 40 years, whatever,
they get hardened too. Not all of them. I’m not trying to say this is a
universal phenomenon, but when I was a young guy, to become a judge
you had to be a lion of the bar. You had to be in your late ‘50s, early ’60s.
You had to have a little bit of wisdom, or a lot of wisdom. Now the
operative tactic is to put them on the bench when they’re 12 years old and
hope that they’ll be there for the next 60 years. So you get your man and
your philosophy in place and so forth. When I used to travel around the
country I encountered judges who were younger than my children. They
had very little trial experience and I think it’s deplorable. It’s completely
different from when I began this career, and I think we’ve not advanced or
helped the interests of justice through these developments.
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MR. BAUMAN: One final question that I wanted to move into your career; do you see that
kind of mindset in your young lawyers here? Do they have the same black
and white – the lack of grey?
MR. GREEN: No, not really. It would be pretty hard to work for me if that’s the only
two colors you can see, because I work in the grey 24 hours a day.
MR. BAUMAN: I know you do. But you look at all the other associates who don’t. Or do
they?
MR. GREEN: I think that if they hang around me they kind of either pick up my
harmonics or they move on. But I think it takes some repetitive exposure
to these kinds of cases that slowly works a transformation. I don’t think
any of these guys go on the bench on Monday and by Thursday they’re
just looking to find trouble.
Over the years it been very fashionable for members of Congress
or people running for Congress to be perceived as tough on crime. Well
how do you get tough on crime? You get tough on crime by making more
things criminal, and more significantly, by ratcheting up the sentences for
the existing offenses. So what used to be a five-year offence is now a 20-
year offense. That’s how you get tough on crime. And that’s had a
debilitating impact too. I think a horrible impact. We’ve got too many
people in jail for too long a time. The obvious example of that is the
minor drug offenses, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the
previous Attorney General’s posture with respect to low-level drug
offenses. Sessions wanted to lock everybody up and throw the key away.
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So there’s been a lot of changes, and many of them not for the good in my
view.
The world is substantially more complex than it was in the 1960s
when I began my legal career. Today there are really countless
opportunities for young lawyers that were unforeseen. There’s the ability
to move in and out of the private law firm in a much easier and, in many
respects, significant way than was available to us when we were young
lawyers. And I think that many of the young lawyers today do see
themselves as capable of just following the next opportunity; the loyalty to
the firm qua firm is not what it used to be.
MR. BAUMAN: To what extent do you think that’s a two-way street, that the loyalty of the
firm to the young lawyers is not what it used to be?
MR. GREEN: I think firms always have a vested interest in trying to hang on to people
whom they feel are really qualified, competent, classy individuals and I
think there’s always disappointment when a number of them leave, I really
do. I know that Sidley, and I’m sure other firms, works hard at trying to
create an environment that will keep young lawyers interested and on
track to stay. But it’s a world with a lot of competing opportunities out
there and you can’t blame young lawyers. I’ll give you an example. There
was a young partner at Sidley, great lawyer, who left some years ago to go
over and be one of the counselors to the Attorney General. He thought
that that was a sufficiently unique opportunity that he should take it, and
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he did, and sometime later he was welcomed back to the firm. So it’s a
different world. That was not the world that I grew up in.
MR. BAUMAN: Returning to your career, what happened after the army?
MR. GREEN: When I got back to Minnesota I got married, almost right away. I always
thought I was going to end up in Minnesota. I liked Minnesota.
Minnesota was a wonderful place to grow up, as we’ve talked about, and I
had tons of friends and family and everything there, and always, always
thought I would be in Minnesota. But I wanted to try something different
to begin with, as did my wife, and so we decided that we would come to
Washington and I would look for a job. I had no idea how this was going
to happen by the way. So we came here. We didn’t have a lot of money.
We had little money so we rented an apartment. We had a roof over our
heads but I knew I had to get a job pretty quickly.
MR. BAUMAN: And two small children?
MR. GREEN: No children at the time; our children were born in Washington. So we
came here. I had known a couple of guys that I had met along the way in
college, that lived in D.C., so I kind of reacquainted myself with them.
And in light of my kind of crazy vision that I wanted to be a trial lawyer, I
thought I should go down to the Department of Justice and see what’s
going on down there. I remember going to the Department of Justice —
this is now in the Fall of 1967 — it’s a long time ago, over 50 years ago.
I’m not sure how I got there, but I remember that I walked right in.
There’s was no security. Nothing. Not one drop of security. Contrast that
49
with what goes on today, it’s mindboggling. But anyway, I walked in.
I’m in a long hall filled with office doors, both directions, all closed. A
couple of signs on things that say this-and-that, but nothing that made
sense to me. And I think I stuck my head in one office and said, “Hello,
I’m here, I’d like to talk to someone about a job.” And I remember a
woman said, “Well, we don’t really have an employment office here.” So
the conversation went something like, “Well, how does one get a job at the
Justice Department?” I mean, what did I know? “How does one get a job
here?” And she said, “Well, I’m not sure, but let me call one of the
lawyers I know and see if he can say hello to you.”
This guy whom I met kind of gave me a little tour of the
Department. You could take an elevator right then to the 5th floor, get off
in front of the Attorney General’s office, walk right in, and someone
would say “Can I help you?” It was almost comical. But I talked to this
guy, and we talked for a while and he said, “Listen, I think you’re better
off talking to this guy, let me call him,” and then the second guy talked to
me, and then I think he said, “I think you should talk to this guy,” and he
calls a third guy, and I’m kind of wandering around the halls talking to
these guys. Finally, I think it was the third guy that said you really want to
be at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I didn’t even know what the U.S.
Attorney was, I don’t think. He said let me call down there and see if
somebody will see you. So he made a call, and they said go to this address
and ask for this person and they’ll talk to you.
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I think that I told them, I’m sure I told them, that I had just come
back from Vietnam, so I was a little bit of an oddity, a rarity. First of all,
1967 was really before the massive buildup, so there weren’t that many
guys that were coming back. There weren’t that many guys that were
lawyers certainly, so it was like wow, we’ve never met a guy who has
come back from Vietnam and who is a lawyer. So I think that helped me
just a little bit, subliminally almost.
MR. BAUMAN: Did the Yale degree help you?
MR. GREEN: Yeah, I think so. So I went to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and I was taken
up to meet the First Assistant U.S. Attorney.
MR. BAUMAN: Who was the First Assistant U.S. Attorney?
MR. GREEN: Alfred Hantman.
MR. BAUMAN: Who was the U.S. Attorney?
MR. GREEN: David Bress. Alfred Hantman was around 40 years old, and I was ushered
in and sat across from him. I had a great conversation with him, probably
for about a half hour. He was very nice to me, and he said we’ll think
about this, but let me see if the U.S. Attorney has a moment to talk to you,
to meet you. Again, I think it was because I was different than anyone
else there. So they said if you can just wait a while, the U.S. Attorney will
see you. I was probably waiting around, I don’t know, 15-20 minutes,
whatever, and then I was ushered in to meet David Bress, who was the
U.S. Attorney. And what was supposed to be a 10-minute interview
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turned out to be a two-hour conversation. We talked about everything
under the sun.
It became clear in the conversation somehow that I was Jewish and
he was Jewish, and so there was a little bit of that; where did you come
from; tell me about your family; what was it like to be in Vietnam; how
did you end up in Vietnam; why do you want to be a lawyer, and so it just
went on and on and on. It was one of those totally serendipitous moments.
They’re few in life, but it was just a connection. And at the end he said to
me, “This has been wonderful, wonderful to get to know you, a wonderful
conversation. I’m sorry to tell you though that I can’t offer you a job.”
And I said, “What do you mean? Why can’t you?” And he said, “Well,
we have a policy that you have to have had a clerkship or been in private
practice for two years; that’s just a Department policy. And I understand
that you’ve had a different exposure but there’s not much I can do about it,
and I’m sorry but let’s stay in touch.” Something like that. And I don’t
know if I went crazy, but I launched into my first, and maybe most
effective closing argument ever. I told him that that was totally unfair,
that all these guys with their bad backs, and their draft deferments, and
their bad knees, they’re all dodging the draft and I’m sitting there fighting
for my country in a war, and I come back and you tell me I can’t have a
job? I’m broke, Mr. Bress, I’m broke, I need a job. I got my clerkship
next to an 8-inch howitzer. You just can’t do this to me, it’s totally unfair.
And I was ranting and raving and stopped and he just looked at me and he
52
said, “You’re absolutely right. It’s totally unfair. I’ll get this waived. You
report for work Monday morning.” And you know, you count your breaks
in life, you don’t get a million breaks in life. But thankfully, you get a few
and that was my first big break in life.
Mind you, there was no Superior Court then in the District of
Columbia. All the street crime was tried in front of federal district judges.
And because I didn’t know my right foot from my left foot, Bress decided
to send me to a section called Special Proceedings, which was run by a
guy by the name of Oscar Altshuler who was one of the most wonderful
guys in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, a career guy, but an enormously wellrespected and beloved guy. This small section handled 2255s and habeas
and mental health hearings and things like that. When Bress sent me
there, there were two lawyers in that office. I became the third. The two
lawyers were Earl Silbert and Judy Rogers.
MR. BAUMAN: You’re kidding me.
MR. GREEN: Judy Wilson Rogers. So of course Earl later became one of the most wellknown lawyers in the District of Columbia, the U.S. Attorney himself.
Judy Rogers ended up on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. They were
my mentors; I learned at their knee.
I’ll tell you one funny story. I had been there just a couple of days
when I met an Assistant by the name of Nick Nunzio. Nick Nunzio was
also a colorful, wonderful guy — just Mr. Personality. He went on to
become a Superior Court Judge a few years later, was a great judge,
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passed away a number of years ago. But one day I’m standing in the hall
and he rushes up to me and he says, “Tommy, take this file up to Judge
Alexander Holtzoff’s courtroom. It’s a mental health hearing and the
defendant is going to seek to be released from St. Elizabeth’s Mental
Hospital. All you need to do is say, ‘I object.’ Government objects, that’ll
be it, they’ll send him back to the hospital.” I said, “That’s all I’ve got to
do? Really?” He said, “That’s all you’ve got to do, don’t worry about a
thing. Just take this file, go on up there. When they ask what the
government’s position is, just say ‘Government objects,’ you’ll do fine.” So
I, like a good soldier, take the file.
MR. BAUMAN: Did you know anything about Holtzoff at the time?
MR. GREEN: Knew nothing about Holtzoff at the time. And so for this record we’ll just
say that Holtzoff was a Truman appointee; he stood about five feet one
inches tall. I don’t think he was on senior status at the time, but he was
well into his career. Extraordinarily intelligent, but kind of an irascible
guy. He did not suffer fools well and when he took the bench about all
you could see was his head; he was so small and demure. He had a huge
head, I remember that. But in any event, I go up to that courtroom. I don’t
even know where to sit. Do I sit at this table or that table? The courtroom
clerk said, “No, sit over there, Mr. Green.” I’m up there before anybody;
the courtroom’s empty, and I’m staring at the files in front of me. I figure I
should probably open up this file and look at it. And I opened it and I see,
sitting on top, “Motion of defendant so-and-so to declare the Mental
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Health Act of the District of Columbia unconstitutional.” And I’m
thinking to myself what’s that doing in here? This couldn’t be about that,
could it? So I start looking at it, it’s about 50 pages long. And now the
bodily functions are starting to percolate.
MR. BAUMAN: Did the defendant have a court-appointed lawyer?
MR. GREEN: I don’t know if he was appointed, but he had a very fine lawyer, a lawyer
by the name of Al Ahern. He probably was appointed. Al, I came to
know later, was a very well-respected lawyer. I didn’t know him at the
time, but I’m looking at this and I’m thinking, what is going on here? I
knew that if there’s a motion there should be an opposition that I could
look at real quickly. There’s no opposition in the file — nothing. And at
about that moment the courtroom fills up, the judge swooshes into the
courtroom and tells the clerk to call the case. They call the case. And
Holtzoff says to Ahern, “I’ll hear your argument Mr. Ahern.” And now
Ahern gets up and argues the unconstitutionality of the mental health
statute for about 45 minutes. I’m sitting there dying a thousand deaths.
Every word of this is true. I was terrified because I had never encountered
anything like this. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say. I
couldn’t escape. I was kind of like waiting for the guillotine; this is not
going to end well. And what’s going to happen to me? How’s this day
going to end? Am I going to be locked up? Embarrassed? Because this is
not going to end well.
55
Ahern gets done and the judge calls on me, “Now what’s the
government have to say?” He said something about, “I don’t see any
opposition in here, Mr. Green.” I said, “Well, Your Honor, I can’t account
for that. I’m sorry, I was just assigned this file about 15 minutes before
court convened, and I’m just not prepared to address that.” He said, “Well,
what’s the government have to say?” And for a few moments I was just
lost and he’s looking at me. There’s dead silence in the courtroom and
somehow I had the presence of mind to say to him something like this, I
don’t remember the words, but “Your Honor, I am sure that this is not the
first challenge to this Act, and knowing that it has obviously been upheld
previously, I stand on all of those points and authorities in support of
upholding the Act that have been previously considered. Thank you, sir.”
Holtzoff gave me a look like you must be one of the dumbest
Assistants they have ever hired in the office. And so what seemed like
interminable moments passed, but then he removed his glance from me
and just off the top of his head — I couldn’t tell if he had anything written
or whatever — he just said, “This matter having come before the court –”
and off he went delivering his opinion, citing this case and that case. In
the end, after five minutes of flowery speech that mesmerized me to some
degree as I’m standing there, he denies Ahern’s motion.
I can’t remember whether I went back to my chair or what, but as I
was preparing to leave and as Holtzoff pounded the gavel and said, “Court
adjourned” or whatever, he waved me up to the bench and he looked at me
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and he said, “Mr. Green, don’t ever enter a district court again if you’re not
prepared.” I thought my career was over. I thought he would go into
chambers and call up Dave Bress and say, “You’ve sent a nincompoop up
here, you need to fire him.” So the anxiety followed me around that day,
but apparently he didn’t do that.
I saw Nunzio — I don’t know whether later that day or the next day
— told him the story, told him how ticked off I was at him. And he just
kind of laughed and we became great buddies. That story stayed with us
’til the day he died. Whenever I would give a lecture on trial practice I
told that story. The moral being just what Judge Holtzoff said to me,
“Don’t ever enter a courtroom unprepared.” So that was the propitious start
of my career as an Assistant United States Attorney.
It’s interesting because David Bress reached out to me very early
on and he would invite me to have coffee or this and that. I became a little
bit of a son to him. He had an adopted son but he became very fond of me
and in the ensuing years I was invited to his home for dinner; I was invited
to his home for the Jewish High Holidays. He, I think in all fairness, was
fond of me and I was fond of him. He was a wonderful guy. And the
result of that is that I was soon removed from Special Proceedings and
sent not even to General Sessions, I was sent right to the district court trial
team to try cases in district court.
MR. BAUMAN: Can I go back a step or two? I understand why Judge Holtzoff said what
he did, obviously, but my understanding of the U.S. Attorney’s office, not
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just here, but everywhere, is that the young lawyers are overloaded, that
they give them files, they don’t have time to prepare, and how could you
do this? Was that not the case at the U.S. Attorney’s office?
MR. GREEN: Well in Special Proceedings, because you handled special cases, special
files, you had more time to prepare and to write oppositions and so forth.
That’s pretty much the picture of how General Sessions operated. The
guys who went to the district trial teams lived a life pretty similar to that.
So the minute I got over there I was assigned a multitude of cases,
bunches of files, and in those days many of these cases were very small in
dimension. There would be an indictment, a police officer would testify,
maybe a complaining witness. Maybe rarely a fingerprint guy or
something like that and then the defendant, and maybe if the defendant
didn’t, maybe there’s one alibi witness, his mother who said they were
home watching television. A lot of these trials were literally one-day
trials. But they were trials. You were up on your feet; you had an
opening; you had a direct examination; you had cross examination; you
had this and that and motions to argue and then closing and whatever. I
don’t want to diminish the experience. Every one was a teaching moment,
a teachable moment and a teaching moment. And because you had so
many of these files you were often preparing your next case out in the hall
waiting for the judge to call you in. It was very hectic. I sometimes tried
three cases in a week. But I also got some choice assignments. There
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were some big, big cases and David Bress saw that they came my way as I
got to be more experienced.
When you start out, you start out kind of on the lower rung of the
trial team, and then you move up to be the senior member of the trial team.
I kind of took to it like a duck does to water. I mean obviously, without
sounding silly, I have some talent for this. I don’t have a lot of talent for
anything, but I had some talent for this and I was pretty successful. I felt
comfortable talking to these juries. I studied how to do it, learned how to
do examinations, learned how to do cross-examination, learned how to
introduce evidence, and did pretty well.
MR. BAUMAN: Did you get supervision or training at all from people within the –
MR. GREEN: The training really came by watching others. We didn’t have a lot of
formal training. Most of the guys that were coming over into the district
court had been in General Sessions for a year, year and a half – and so
that’s where they got their real teeth, teething over there — General
Sessions. And so they came over, they kind of knew what they were
doing. I was probably the only guy that was ever slotted into the federal
district court trial teams that had not been in General Sessions. And so I
had to really learn on the fly. So every spare moment that I had I would
walk the hall, see if there was a criminal trial going on. I would open the
door and I would just sit there. Often I might be the only spectator in the
courtroom, and I would just sit there and sop it up. I would listen to every
question, watch everything that the lawyers were doing, listen to the judge,
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watch the judge, watch the jury. It was really through that process of kind
of just applying myself to ingest everything that I was seeing and to learn
the techniques. That’s how I trained myself and then I went and got up on
my feet and figured out what worked and didn’t work and so forth.
David Bress sent me some great cases to try or he saw that they
were assigned to me. For example, there was a big anti-war protest case,
called the “D.C. Nine,” which was 1968 or ’69, in which several priests
and nuns invaded the offices of Dow Chemical and threw furniture all
around. He said, “You’re the man, go try that case.”
I tried a lot of really significant, interesting cases that were not day
cases. They went on for a couple of weeks. And I tried a few murder
cases as well, prominent murder cases; there were some big murders at the
time. I had a lot of wonderful experiences. As I said earlier, made a lot of
great friends, knew all the judges well, and it was a most enjoyable time in
my life. It just couldn’t have been better professionally. Probably at home
I was having a few issues. But that’s how I got my training.
David Bress aspired to be on the bench. He wanted to be on the
federal district court and he would’ve been an extraordinary judge. He had
a great mind; he was a great trial lawyer and Lyndon Johnson appointed
him to the bench in 1968. I remember the day that he got appointed to the
bench and he had a grin on his face from ear to ear. I don’t think there was
a day in his life when he was happier. I was happy for him. I remember
giving him a big hug and then he lived to see, or to experience, profound
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disappointment because President Johnson declared that he was not going
to run for office and Hubert Humphrey ran against Richard Nixon. Nixon
won. Nixon withdrew all of the nominations that were pending that
President Johnson had made and Bress lost his judgeship. So David Bress,
not long thereafter, left the office and went to practice with David
Ginsburg and Myer Feldman and the firm became Ginsburg, Feldman and
Bress.
MR. BAUMAN: A good breaking point.