THIS IS WHAT THE MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION STAFF ACCOMPLISHED AFTER 1964. I include here Nick Katzenbach, the deputy attorney general, and Jack Miller, the head of the criminal division, because they were the ones who sent me to the Warren Commission in the first place and supported me during the entire endeavor.
Frank Adams continued practicing law in New York City as a partner in the law firm Satterlee, Warfield and Stephens. One of the oldest lawyers on the commission staff, he came with a distinguished record of public service He continued to be active in state politics during the 1960s and in 1970 left the Democratic party to support a fourth term for Republican governor Nelson A. Rockefeller. He retired in about 1970 and died in 1990.
Joe Ball returned to his criminal law practice in Los Angeles and continued a courtroom career that extended over more than fifty years. During that time he represented such well-known clients as Watergate figure John D. Ehrlichman, auto maker John DeLorean, and Saudi Arabian financier Adnan Khashoggi. During the 1960s and 1970s he served on the US Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Committee to Revise the California Constitution. He also was a member of the California Law Revision Commission, which produced the Evidence Code of California and the Tort Claims Act of California. According to the commission’s executive secretary, Ball was “one of those who worked hardest at it.” Ball also served as the president of the American College of Trial Lawyers and the State Bar of California. At his death in 2000 at the age of ninety-seven, he was hailed as “the best trial lawyer in California in the 20th century.”1
David Belin returned to his practice in Des Moines, Iowa, where he specialized in corporate law, litigation, and estate law. Later he established a second office, in New York City. He was on the board of directors of several corporations and was active on behalf of nonprofit and religious organizations. Belin returned to public service in 1975 when President Ford appointed him to serve as executive director of Vice President Rockefeller’s Commission on CIA Activities within the United States. In this capacity Belin learned of extensive US government plots to kill Fidel Castro, information that had not been provided to the Warren Commission. Belin wrote two books about the Warren Commission—November 22, 1963: You Are the Jury (1973), and Final Disclosure: The Full Truth about the Assassination of President Kennedy (1988). At his death in 1999 at the age of seventy, Belin was a co-owner of The Tribune in Des Moines, which described him in an editorial as “a moderate Republican who had no use for the far right of his party or the far left of the Democratic Party.”2
Bill Coleman published his autobiography, Counsel for the Situation: Shaping the Law to Realize America’s Promise (2010), at the age of ninety. After his service on the Warren Commission, Coleman returned to the practice of law in Philadelphia. In 1975, President Ford asked him to serve as secretary of transportation. During his two years in this position, Coleman oversaw the opening of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s car testing center in Ohio and the enactment of regulations covering the safety of pipelines and hazardous-materials shipment. In 1977, he joined the Washington office of the Los Angeles firm of O’Melveny and Meyers, where he advised clients on litigation matters in the corporate, antitrust, natural gas, and constitutional law fields; foreign trade and other international matters; and the handling of corporate acquisitions and divestitures. He continued to be active in public matters and served in several leadership positions in the NAACP. In 1982, he successfully argued before the Supreme Court in favor of upholding a ban on tax exemptions for private schools that refused to admit black students. President Clinton awarded Coleman the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996.
Mel Eisenberg returned to his law firm in New York after his assignment with the Warren Commission. He then reunited with Lee Rankin and Norman Redlich at the office of the New York Corporation Counsel for a short period before accepting an invitation in 1966 to join the faculty of the University of California Law School in Berkeley, California. Eisenberg is the author of The Nature of the Common Law (1991) and The Structure of the Corporation (1976) and has published casebooks on the subjects of contracts and corporations. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard University, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Fulbright Senior Scholar. He was chief reporter for the American Law Institute’s Principles of Corporate Governance. The ALI also turned to him as an adviser on its very prestigious publications the Restatement (Third) of Agency and the Restatement (Third) of Restitution. He was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has delivered lectures at universities around the world, and since 1998, he has been the Justin W. D’Atri Professor of Law, Business and Society at Columbia University in New York City. Eisenberg was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award in 1990 and maintains his professorship at Boalt Hall, the law school at the University of California at Berkeley.
John Ely began his year as law clerk to Chief Justice Warren immediately after leaving the commission staff. In 1966 he worked as a criminal defense lawyer at Defender, Inc. in San Diego before joining the Yale Law School faculty in 1968. He taught at Harvard Law School and was asked by Bill Coleman to be the general counsel at the Department of Transportation in 1975. His 1980 book, entitled Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review, discussed key problems of modern constitutional law and the role of the US Supreme Court. He was invited to become dean of the Stanford Law School in 1982 and served in that position for five years. His tenure there was marked by the introduction of loan repayment assistance programs for students choosing public interest employment, the development of clinical learning programs, and the hiring of a new generation of faculty. He subsequently published two other books: War and Responsibility (1993) and On Constitutional Ground (1996). Ely became the fourth most often cited legal scholar in history. He died in 2003 at the age of sixty-four. A former colleague at Stanford declared that Ely “was the leading constitutional law expert of his time; a superb scholar and an even more superb individual.”3
Alfred Goldberg was the historian on loan from the Department of Defense to assist the commission. After the commission he returned to his position as historian with the US Air Force Historical Division. Goldberg then served for thirty-seven years in the Office of the Historian of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, eventually rising to be the head of that division. In that capacity Goldberg edited and produced books on the term of each secretary of defense during the last several decades, based on interviews of the persons holding that position and the military and civilian leaders that served under them. He received the Department of Defense Distinguished Civilian Service Award and the Presidential Meritorious Award. Goldberg officially retired in 2007, but remained in the Washington area and at the age of ninety-three was still working part-time, in 2012, on the editing of these volumes. He was honored in January 2012 with an award from the American Historical Society for his professional work as a historian.
Burt Griffin returned to Cleveland, where he continued to practice law for ten years. From 1966 to 1975, he served as a legal aid lawyer in various capacities, including executive director of the Cleveland Legal Aid Society and national director of the Legal Services Program in the US Office of Economic Opportunity. He was elected to serve as a judge of the Common Pleas Court of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1975 and served on that court for thirty years, until his retirement in 2005. At various stages in this career, Griffin served as an adjunct professor of law at Cleveland State University, a member of the Ohio Criminal Sentencing Commission, and a member of the board of trustees of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. In their periodic review of judges, Ohio lawyers generally praised Judge Griffin for his careful preparation, thoughtful opinions, and fairness in his dealing with litigants and their counsel. After retirement, he took up work as a mediator and arbitrator, and also devoted time to Cleveland community groups dedicated to the improvement of the criminal justice system.
Leon Hubert returned to his firm in New Orleans after his work on the Warren Commission. He helped draft the Code of Criminal Procedure for the Louisiana State Law Institute, which was implemented by legislation in 1966. He authored and co-authored several articles and books on Louisiana statutes and legal practice, including a pleading and practice guide. Hubert continued to teach at Tulane Law School until his death in 1977.
Bert Jenner returned to his law firm in Chicago, which became over the next two decades the prominent national firm that bears his name today. He continued to be widely recognized for his legal skills, his commitment to the profession, and his undertaking of a wide range of public assignments. In 1974, the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee forced Jenner to resign as chief special counsel after he advocated the impeachment of President Nixon based on their inquiry into the president’s role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up. During his career, Jenner received numerous awards and eight honorary degrees, was president of the Illinois Bar Association and chairman of the Judiciary Selection Committee of the American Bar Association. He helped establish the responsibility of major law firms nationwide for a continuing commitment to pro bono work of the kind undertaken by Jenner during his lifetime. Jenner died in 1988 at the age of eighty-one.
Nick Katzenbach served as attorney general under President Johnson until 1966. Although a Democrat, he cultivated the goodwill of Republican senators to help pass the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which he also helped draft, ending a century of discrimination at the polls.4 In 1965, he had the Justice Department seek a federal court order barring Alabama officials from interfering with the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, which was led by Dr. King. He resigned in 1966 because of conflict with FBI Director Hoover over that agency’s illegal investigative activities and advised President Johnson that he was available to take the number-two job at the Department of State. As under secretary of state he defended the legality of US involvement in Vietnam. At the end of the Johnson administration, Katzenbach went to IBM as senior vice president and general counsel. He represented the company in a thirteen-year antitrust battle with the Department of Justice, including a trial of more than six years, which ended in 1982 when President Reagan declared that the case had no merit. After resigning from IBM in 1986, Katzenbach practiced with a New Jersey law firm and often took on special assignments in the public and private sectors. He was respected widely for reconciling differences and cooling tempers, for his unflappability under crisis, and for the loyalty and competence that he brought to every assignment. He died in 2012 at the age of ninety.
Murray Laulicht began his year’s clerkship with Judge Harold Medina on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit after completion of his commission assignment. He began practicing law in New York with a major firm after his clerkship and then was recruited by a New Jersey firm, where he practiced for several decades specializing in antitrust, unfair competition, and other types of business dispute resolution, including dealer and franchise issues, partnership disputes, legal malpractice cases, regulated industries, and real-estate controversies. He has been active in the American Bar Association, the New Jersey State Bar Association, and several nonprofit organizations. He has retired from the active law practice, moved from New Jersey to Florida, and conducts his own consulting practice.
Jim Liebeler chose an academic career shortly after leaving the commission and taught antitrust law and constitutional law at the University of California in Los Angeles for more than thirty years before he retired in the mid-1990s. He took a leave of absence from the law school during 1975–76 to serve as director of the Federal Trade Commission’s policy planning and evaluation office in Washington, DC. With a variety of interests—including personally constructing small apartment buildings, farming, and piloting his airplane—Liebeler taught at the George Mason University School of Law in Virginia from 1999 to 2002. One of his projects during the 1980s and 1990s was an unpublished book with the working title Thoughts on the Work of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations as to the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Jim died in 2002 at the age of seventy-one. The dean of the George Mason University School of Law, who had learned antitrust law from Liebeler, said, “You could not have a better start than to be taught by Jim Liebeler. He was a unique combination of enthusiasm, warmth, and acute intelligence.”5
Arthur Marmor went back to his position as Chief of the Editorial Services Branch at the Department of State. During his government career Mr. Marmor served as a historian in the Departments of Interior, Army, and the Air Force. He also taught at the American University and the University of Maryland. He died in 1968.
Jack Miller left the Department of Justice in early 1965 and created one of Washington’s outstanding litigation law firms. Miller worked in Robert Kennedy’s campaign for president in 1968 and later represented Senator Edward Kennedy after the Chappaquiddick episode. In August 1974, he took on former President Nixon as a client, after successfully representing several minor figures involved in the Watergate scandals.6 Although Nixon wanted to face his challengers in court, Miller persuaded him that he could not get a fair trial and that he should accept a pardon from President Ford. He persuaded Nixon to sign a statement admitting that he had been wrong in certain respects regarding Watergate, and the pardon, granted on September 8, 1974, spared Nixon any indictment and trial. Miller represented Nixon for twenty years, asserting Nixon’s ownership rights to White House tapes and documents, a hotly contested issue that took years to resolve. He handled many other politically sensitive matters over the years with a level of competence, loyalty, and discretion that won the respect of clients and adversaries. He died in 2009 at the age of eighty-five.
Richard Mosk served as a law clerk for California Supreme Court justice Mathew Tobriner for a year after his work on the commission. He then entered private practice in Los Angeles, where he specialized in litigation until 2001, when he was appointed as an associate justice on the California Court of Appeal. During his years in private practice, Mosk was a special deputy federal public defender (1975–76), served as the US appointed judge on the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal (1981–84), was a member of the Christopher Commission, which investigated the Los Angeles Police Department (1991), and was chairman and co-chairman of the Motion Picture Classification and Rating Administration. Mosk also served on many domestic and international arbitration panels, taught at the University of Southern California, and lectured at various law schools in Europe, Australia, and the United States.
Stuart Pollak completed his work as special assistant to the assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s criminal division in 1965 and joined a law firm in San Francisco. He specialized in litigation and, on one occasion, took on a major assignment on behalf of California Rural Legal Assistance, whose federal funding had been withheld based on charges of unprofessional conduct. In the course of this assignment, which ended with a favorable ruling for the client, Pollak worked with several officials in the California state government. In another case Pollak successfully defended the California Department of Correction’s use of race in an affirmative action hiring program. In 1982, he was appointed to be a judge in the San Francisco Superior Court, where he served for twenty years, until he was appointed an associate justice on the California Court of Appeal.
Lee Rankin’s return to his private practice in New York was interrupted again, sooner than he expected. In 1966 Mayor Lindsay asked him to serve as New York’s corporation counsel and he did so for six years. He supervised a staff of 378 lawyers, who defended New York City in a wide range of lawsuits and provided opinions on a variety of municipal problems, from the legality of a police officer’s membership in the John Birch Society to the legal status of school decentralization efforts. While serving as corporation counsel, Rankin began a program under which law-school graduates worked in his office for a year or two, receiving valuable experience before moving on to law firms. He returned to his own firm in 1972 and continued in private practice until his retirement in 1978. Throughout these years he taught constitutional law at New York University Law School. After retirement Rankin and his wife moved to Connecticut and then to California. He died in 1996.
Norman Redlich returned to the New York University Law School, but took a leave of absence in 1966 to serve as Rankin’s executive assistant in the corporation counsel’s office. When Rankin left this position in 1972, Redlich was appointed by Mayor Lindsay to be his successor. In 1974 Redlich became dean of the NYU Law School and served in that capacity until 1988. During that period he expanded the school’s library, introduced new programs, built dormitories, and “brought extraordinary faculty to this law school,” according to his successor as dean. He sought to deepen the school’s commitment to the training of public interest lawyers and, with this goal in mind, recruited the most renowned capital defense lawyer in the country at the time, Anthony G. Amsterdam. When Redlich died in 2011, Professor Amsterdam, referring to Redlich’s lifelong, outspoken opposition to the death penalty, said, “His style in this and in every one of the important fights he fought was selfless, steadfast, unsensational.”7
Charles Shaffer remained in the Justice Department until 1966, when he entered private practice with a small firm in Rockville, Maryland. He became widely recognized as a smart, politically savvy Washington attorney and attracted many well-known clients over the years. He represented John Dean, the White House counsel who played a critical role in the unfolding of the Watergate scandal leading to Nixon’s resignation. He guided former senator George Smathers through a series of congressional inquiries related to Watergate, and also defended prominent mobsters in a case involving alleged skimming of profits from the Stardust Casino in Las Vegas. On one occasion he represented a local Maryland doctor alleged to have killed a goose on the 17th hole of a prestigious country club with his putter and who had been charged with a violation of the federal Migratory Bird Act. The details of the case, with the conflicting evidence of the behavior of both the goose and the doctor, were described by humorist Art Buchwald in a column in June 1979, entitled “Doctor’s Goose May Be Cooked.” As of this book’s writing, Shaffer is still practicing law and hunting regularly on his thoroughbred bay gelding.
David Slawson returned to his Denver firm for a short time, but decided to pursue an academic career. He served for a year in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel before joining the faculty of the University of Southern California Law School in 1967. He remained there until his retirement in 2004. At the invitation of Bill Coleman, he took a leave of absence in 1971–72 to serve as general counsel to the Price Commission, formed as part of the Economic Stabilization Program in Washington. While at the University of Southern California, Slawson taught administrative law, agency, antitrust, contracts, and insurance. He specialized in the law of contracts and was a cofounder of the contracts doctrine of reasonable expectations. His book, Binding Promises: The Late 20th-Century Reformation of Contract Law, received laudatory reviews as a modern classic in the field. After his retirement, Slawson moved to Orcas Island in the San Juan chain off the coast of Washington State, and has continued to work in the field of contract law.
Arlen Specter returned to the district attorney’s office in Philadelphia. He successfully ran for the position of district attorney in 1965. He stayed in that office until 1974 and then returned to private practice from 1974 to 1980. Specter won election in 1980 to the United States Senate and was reelected to four additional terms. At various times he chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, and the Committee on Veteran Affairs. Whether in the majority or the minority, Specter played an especially significant role on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where his legal training and experience, combined with his considerable debating skills, won widespread respect among his colleagues. He explored a run for president in the mid-1990s, competing in the New Hampshire primary. In 2000, he published (with Charles Robbins) the story of his life and career in a book entitled Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK’s Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton. In 2012, he wrote (with Charles Robbins) Life Among the Cannibals. He died in 2012 at the age of eighty-two. Upon his death, President Obama stated: “Arlen Specter was always a fighter; from his days stamping out corruption as a prosecutor in Philadelphia to his three decades of service in the Senate, Arlen was fiercely independent—never putting party or ideology ahead of the people he was chosen to serve.”8
Sam Stern returned to his law firm on a full-time basis. He became recognized as an expert in the reform of legal infrastructure in countries moving to open-market economies. Stern has served as counsel or adviser to the governments of more than forty countries seeking advice with respect to the appropriate legal infrastructure for oil and gas, power, mining, and water. In some of these instances he was designated as a consultant from the United Nations. He has done significant work in privatization, particularly of utilities and power. Stern has lectured at conferences around the world and published in professional journals on government regulation, foreign investment/finance, project finance, and trade and risk management. He has served as an arbitrator, advocate, or expert in international commercial arbitrations. Stern is a member of the American Law Institute and has remained in the Washington, DC area.
Lloyd Weinreb served as special assistant to the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s criminal division during 1964–65. He joined the faculty of the Harvard Law School in 1965 and became a full professor in 1968. His research interests include criminal law, criminal procedure, intellectual property, and legal and political philosophy. Weinreb has published extensively in these fields, including Denial of Justice: Criminal Process in the United States (1977), Natural Law and Justice (1987), Oedipus at Fenway Park: What Rights Are and Why There Are Any (1994), Legal Reason: The Use of Analogy in Legal Argument (2005), and Leading Constitutional Cases on Criminal Justice (1977 [serial]). A reviewer of one of Weinreb’s books described him as “a remarkable model of competence and clarity.” A law-student review of his skills as a teacher commented: “What students will find in Weinreb is a model of competence, a master of clarity, and someone who knows exactly where to put the spotlight on the issues. His mild-mannered approach also masks considerable dry wit that makes his classes enjoyable even in the earlier hours.”9
Howard Willens. I left the Department of Justice in August 1965 to serve as executive director of the President’s Commission on Crime in the District of Columbia. In a one-thousand-page report in December 1966, the commission made recommendations regarding the various institutions in the District of Columbia criminal justice system—ranging from the police function to the correctional facilities. I joined a Washington law firm in January 1967 and remained there for twenty-eight years. I represented clients in white-collar criminal work, regulatory work before federal agencies, constitutional law, and arbitration and litigation in state and federal courts. I attended the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a delegate committed to Robert Kennedy. I assisted the people of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific during their negotiations (1972–75) with the United States that resulted in their becoming United States citizens in a commonwealth under US sovereignty and later assisted in the drafting of the commonwealth’s first constitution. My relationship with the Northern Mariana Islands continued over the next four decades. I have co-written two books about the Northern Marianas—Willens and Siemer, National Security and Self-Determination: United States Policy in Micronesia 1961–1972 (2000); Willens and Siemer, An Honorable Accord: The Covenant between the Northern Mariana Islands and the United States (2001);—and another book about Guam, Willens and Ballendorf, The Secret Guam Study: How President Ford’s Approval of Commonwealth Was Blocked by Federal Officials (2005). I still live in Washington, DC, where I continue to practice law, consult, and write books.