From Midnight to Guntown

by Hailman, John

  Courtroom Rat in Paris and London

  One day a French friend took me to one of his law classes and then to court. The class was as boring as the Sorbonne, but the court case was fascinating. Soon I was going nearly every day to what the French call the “Palace of Justice.” The bailiffs and attorneys would tip me off to interesting trials. I became a “courtroom rat,” hanging out daily to watch trials. I lived that year with French students in a boardinghouse with one eighteen-year-old English student who had just graduated from Eton and was taking a year off before college. When he moved on to Oxford, he invited me to visit several times. Tickets were cheap, so I went often. Each time I would stop in London, eat Indian food, and watch criminal jury trials all day at the Old Bailey. Despite my days as a courtroom rat, it never occurred to me that I might one day be a lawyer myself. My father had so drummed into my head how boring and commercial the law was and how shady lawyers were that the idea never seriously crossed my mind.

  Upon my return from Paris in 1964, I met my future wife, Regan, at Millsaps College in Jackson. A small Christian college (for small Christians, some said), Millsaps had strict rules for young women, who had a 10:00 P.M. curfew. One night I let the time slip away and could not get Regan back to the dorm on time. Her absence was reported. The next day the dreaded Women’s Council of grim-faced, aspiring matrons convened and, invoking their puritan code, sentenced Regan to be “campused” for the rest of her last semester, a medieval punishment which meant she had to be in her room by 6 P.M., 7 days a week. This was too much injustice. For the first time the aggression of an advocate awakened somewhere deep inside me.

  I was angry not just about being deprived of her company, but because she had been humiliated and I felt responsible. Our good friend, Professor Bill Baskin, told me that there was some procedure for appeal of the vestal virgins’ decision. I searched student manuals and found that the Faculty Senate could appoint a three-person panel to review student-imposed punishments. Our allies on the faculty got a friendly committee appointed, including our two philosophy/religion professors who were too kind to impose such a cruel punishment. We thought it best that I not be a witness at the hearing, so I wrote what turned out to be my first legal brief, a statement of facts for Regan to read. She was too shy at the time to make a forceful oral presentation (those were the good old days). The panel rejected the Women’s Council decision entirely and Regan was a free woman. I had won my first case.

  New Orleans

  As my Millsaps years wound down it became necessary to do something to avoid being drafted and sent to the jungles of Vietnam. In 1965, I managed to obtain a one-year Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for prospective teachers at Tulane in New Orleans. After getting my M.A. in French, I was looking for my path. Excited by friends who’d seen adventure in the earlier, easier years of the Vietnam War, I thought seriously about going after all. My coach advised I join the Marine Corps. When I told my father the good news, he went ballistic at the idea of his only son going into combat in what he thought was a foolish war. My line that I would be “missing the adventure of my generation” did not persuade him, nor did my idea that I would return and write a best-selling memoir of the war. He said firmly, “Unless you give me your word you’re going to forget about Vietnam, I will fly down there and personally stomp you till you cannot even crawl to the recruiting station.” I knew he would never do that, but I was moved by his passion. My father always gave me lots of freedom and good advice, so his violent reaction impressed me. Maybe Vietnam was not such a great idea. But what would I do?

  Just then Don Stacy, an old friend from Millsaps, called and asked me to meet him at the Napoleon House, my favorite café in the French Quarter where I often studied. Don had, like me, gotten an M.A. on a Woodrow Wilson and had also not enjoyed it much. He had gone on to law school, however, and loved it. He urged me to take the LSAT, the entrance exam. I signed up to take it the next weekend, not knowing you were supposed to study for it. My scores came back surprisingly strong. Stacy told me what to do next: “Apply to four or five law schools, and we’ll get them in a bidding war over you. Friend Hailman, we’ll make a happy, healthy, wealthy lawyer out of you.” Stacy had a strange vocabulary and a voice like a power saw. He once accurately called himself an eighteenth-century man trapped in the twentieth. Later, dissatisfied with his own progress, he committed suicide, leaving a nice wife and two little boys. But in his brief life he had a huge positive influence on me, and got me a full three-year scholarship to Ole Miss. As he said, pitting competing offers from Tulane, Duke, and Virginia against each other and Ole Miss did the trick.

  Law Clerk

  I loved all three years of law school, working twenty hours a week for Legal Services doing chancery court cases like divorces and defending misdemeanors every Monday in city court. One afternoon in 1969, as I neared graduation, I was walking down the hall of the law school swinging my tennis racket. I saw behind a desk in the dean’s office a big man with a long mane of white hair sitting in a tall chair looking impressive. He said “Come on in. Sit down.” He began asking questions and telling me little stories. We got along well for about five minutes. Then he said: “Why do you want to be my law clerk?” I said abruptly “I’m sorry sir, but I don’t want to be your law clerk. The word clerk sounds boring and menial to me.” He couldn’t stop laughing. “You are certainly the most unusual applicant I’ve ever had. Tell me your name again.” I told him my name and explained that I was not an applicant. He said, “But you’re on my list,” and showed me my name. He picked up the phone and called two of my professors. I could hear his end of the conversation. He kept chuckling. “I just talked to my friends, Professors Paige Sharp and Frank Maraist. They said they recommended you as a law clerk applicant, and I put you on my list, but apparently you never took the trouble to apply. However, I’m going to disregard that and interview you anyway.”

  The judge asked me a lot of questions, then leaned forward and said, “This is my last question: What is the role of reason in human life?” Luckily, I had been a philosophy major for a while so his question did not surprise me. I told him that Plato had said that reason in human life is like a charioteer driving a chariot with two horses. One horse, representing the appetites, is pulling the chariot toward one ditch. The other horse, representing the passions, is pulling the chariot toward the other ditch. Like horses, the appetites and passions of human beings can easily pull them into the ditch. Only the charioteer—reason—can keep them in the road. At that point Judge Keady stood up and said, “I will be in touch with you to tell you who I’ve selected.”

  The following morning I received a call from Judge Keady. He said, “I have interviewed the other candidates. All are highly qualified and want the job. I understand you do not want it, but I’m going to make you the offer anyway. Drive over to Greenville tomorrow and we’ll spend the day together. Frankly, I think you should be my clerk because you need it more than the others. You have talent, but you need direction.” In Greenville we spent a couple of hours in his chambers talking law. Then he showed me his old office, where his senior partner had been Delta planter/lawyer William Alexander Percy, who wrote the classic memoir Lanterns on the Levee—Recollections of a Planter’s Son. I was hooked. Whether I liked the title or not, for the next two years I was going to be a law clerk.

  Life with a Federal Judge

  So oblivious had I been to the world outside law school that I’d never suspected Judge Keady was the most respected judge in Mississippi, a legal lion on the level of Frank Johnson of Alabama. Unfortunately for Judge Keady, his renown came mainly through his enormous docket of school desegregation and other civil rights cases. From 1969 to 1971, while I was his clerk, he ordered the integration of half of all public schools of all thirty-seven counties of the northern district. The great irony of Judge Keady’s fame as the “civil rights judge” was that he was personally on the conservative side, loving the law as an institution and enforcing it whether he agreed with i
t or not. His dream was to be a legal scholar who raised the reputation of the Mississippi judiciary and made law more rational and fair to ordinary citizens and lawyers alike. He loved to write precedent-setting opinions, fifty-pagers, loaded with scholarly references to the wisdom of the great legal treatise writers. His subject matter was broad and deep, thanks to a crowded docket of varied cases left by his deceased predecessor.

  Law school had not prepared me for the real legal world. Our first trial was a labor case involving violence during a secondary boycott. Then came complex tax cases, medical malpractice, legislative reapportionment, and admiralty cases with Mark Twain–like characters who worked towboats on the Mississippi River. The weeks in the library depressed me. I told Judge Keady I was a courtroom rat, not a library rat. He wisely made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: Bring my law books in the courtroom so I could watch and listen to all the trials while doing my research and writing draft opinions. For two years I observed Mississippi’s finest trial lawyers practice their trade.

  Georgetown Law School

  After two happy years, Judge Keady helped me receive a prestigious fellowship to Georgetown Law School in its two-year master’s program. The program called for us Prettyman Fellows (Greta Van Susteren is the best-known) to act as defense attorneys the first year, then to serve as federal prosecutors the second year while taking one class in Supreme Court practice and writing for the Georgetown Law Journal. Our L.L.M. would qualify us for either a lucrative job with a good law firm or a teaching slot at a prestigious law school. To supplement my fellowship, I got a job as a clerk/consultant at the Wine & Cheese Shop in Georgetown, and my wife soon joined me in the cheese department. Within a few months, I landed another part-time job as the regular Washington Post wine columnist, thanks again to my French and the lady who called me countrified.

  The program at Georgetown Law included a series of visits to local legal institutions. Our first stop was the chloroform-scented office of the D.C. Medical Examiner. Our tour was chilling, not just because it was cold to keep the bodies from rotting, but because there were so many of them. With typical gallows humor, the dapper little medical examiner, who sported a bow tie and clipped moustache, cheerfully showed us his “clients,” as he called them. My most vivid memory is of all the tags on the big toes of the rows of corpses. Someone asked if these bodies were recent homicide victims. “Yes, all of them.” Asked if it was not depressing to deal with dead bodies all day, he said, “Not really. Some are challenging to diagnose, there is a lot of variety, and it’s less stressful than dealing with live patients. These guys can’t complain that my stethoscope is cold.”

  Then he showed us the other side. “There are some that bother me, however. This tiny one here is a year-old baby whose stepfather decided to pick him up by the foot and bash his brains out against a brick wall. The appearance of that soft skull was something I found pretty hard to leave at the office.” Little did I suspect that I’d soon be appointed to help represent the killer.

  The next day we visited St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, the sort of place they used to call an asylum for the criminally insane. It was creepy. Patients babbled away with no one listening. A few were openly hostile. Our guide gave us a warning: “Do not interact with these people. You never know what will set them off. A few months ago, a visiting student started talking to a little guy who was just in here for observation. He had never given us a moment’s trouble. We were about to send him back to the judge as competent to stand trial when he snapped and hit the student a vicious blow to the head with a piece of metal. The student is now a vegetable, so be careful.”

  My first client as a defense attorney was a parole violator less memorable for himself than for his sponsor, Washington, D.C., mayor Marion Barry. We met in a visiting room at the grim and notorious D.C. Jail. Barry, a handsome man with strangely hooded eyes and a mercurial disposition, greeted me coldly, no doubt seeing another white liberal do-gooder. Barry was from Itta Bena, home of Mississippi Valley State and Jerry Rice. When he heard I was from Mississippi, he blinked. When he learned I’d worked three years for Rural Legal Services and two years for the famous Judge Keady he laughed. It wasn’t that he liked me any better, just that he found the situation a little more familiar. He asked point-blank why I would do such a lousy job. My honest answer, to get experience and see the real world, seemed to satisfy him. Mayor Barry said not to worry about the hearing—he had helped the judge get appointed, and my client was nonviolent and a good candidate to go back on parole. In an hour, my client was back on the street. I had won my first big-city case, though I could hardly claim much personal credit for it.

  Senator Stennis

  After less than one semester, I knew I did not want to be a defense attorney. Judge Keady called to ask how I was doing, and I told him. He said he didn’t know if I would be interested, but Senator John Stennis had just called him seeking a lawyer for his Washington staff. The judge suggested I go see the senator. We hit it off right away, and I landed the job. The senator told me that my work would be as a problem-solver and troubleshooter and that I could choose my own job title. I chose “legal counsel” as a title for my business cards but ended up being more of a speechwriter, sounding board, and traveling companion for the quintessential old-time southern senator. On my first day, his secretary ushered me into a large, high-ceilinged conference room with a marble fireplace over which hung a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. In the center of the room stood an enormous mahogany table formerly used by vice presidents. Seated behind his desk, with the U.S. Capitol framed in the window behind him, the senator was an impressive figure. Already in his seventies, he was energetic and vigorous, with keen blue eyes and a booming but controlled voice. Because he thought like his constituents, he did not need to play games or try to deceive them. He was a wonderful storyteller.

  Then-Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, in his 2007 memoir of his years in the Senate, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics, aptly characterized Senator Stennis as the very model of a statesman. As for the difficult issue of his positions on race, the man who went on to be vice president said that Senator Stennis “was not like some of the others. He was not a hater. His heart was not in it.”

  My most enjoyable times with Senator Stennis occurred when he would pop in my office and say, “Come walk with me.” I would follow his long, quick strides through the marble Senate halls or ride with him on the underground Senate railway to his private office in the Capitol. He was a quick study with a phenomenal memory for detail. I never knew anyone who said fewer trivial things. We worked long and hard on bills to finish the Natchez Trace Parkway and on collecting his papers and establishing the Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State.

  We traveled often to Mississippi by military plane to meet constituents, but my favorite trip was to Montana in September of 1972. Senator Stennis had been asked, as a member of the Senate’s “inner club,” to patch up a dispute between two fellow senators, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana and Harold Hughes, an eccentric former long-haul truck-driver from Iowa. The Senator never confided to me the nature of the dispute. All I knew was that we went trout fishing nearly every day, ate whole steers barbecued in pits in the ground at night and rode all over the state by jeep and small plane. The bonding worked. The Senators buried the hatchet. It was one of the great trips of my young life.

  On our return to Washington my assignments were to attend and monitor the Senate Watergate hearings and to brief him on them thoroughly and then to work with him on the War Powers Act and on a proposal to amend the filibuster rule. He had me research thoroughly the procedures for a Senate impeachment, for Vice President Agnew, not for President Nixon. I was having the time of my life. Then in January 1973 everything changed. The senator was shot and gravely wounded in a street robbery and was hospitalized for months thereafter. I recount that trial in detail as the first case in Chapter Four, “Killers and Wannabes.” My experiences watching the trial of his assailant certainly
had a huge influence on my later decision to become a federal prosecutor.

  Washington Lawyer

  When it came time for me to leave Senator Stennis, he recommended me to friends at several Washington law firms. One boutique firm of a dozen lawyers invited me to interview over lunch at the Metropolitan Club. The managing partner was Gilbert Hahn Jr., the wealthy owner of the Hahn’s shoe store chain who was also chairman of the D.C. City Council and founder of the Give a Damn Foundation, a liberal Republican group dedicated to improving the city government of the nation’s capital. Richard Nixon soon fired Mr. Hahn for being too independent.

  My first week at Hahn was interesting. The firm had split in half just a few months before I joined. One partner, Bruce Sundlun, went on to become governor of Rhode Island. Another partner, Bardyl Tirana, became head of the U.S. Civil Defense Agency. The firm was really wired politically. But it was Mr. Hahn who kept most of the trial business, and he needed lawyers quickly to handle all their court cases. It was an unusual firm in that nearly all our clients except my main client, the French embassy, came through referrals from other lawyers. As now, most Washington lawyers were lobbyists or commercial specialists or somehow affiliated with the government. No one seemed to do any trial work, and other lawyers sought us out to try their cases.

  The first week we ate lunch every day at the same restaurant, a ratty little meat-and-three place on G Street called the Old Ebbitt Grill. (It has since moved around the corner near the White House and is now a fancy watering hole worthy of Georgetown.) On the first Friday, I asked Mr. Hahn, “Don’t y’all ever eat anywhere other than the Old Ebbitt?” He looked at me strangely, then looked down the table at one of the partners and said, “Jack is Orthodox and the Old Ebbitt is kosher so—” He stopped in midsentence. “You’re not a Jew, are you?” he said. “I never said I was. No one ever asked me.” Our law clerk, Carl Bergman, started to laugh. Then everyone began to laugh. Carl said, “You’re a goy. A fucking goy. Don’t you know this is a Jewish law firm?” Then someone else said, “Hey, John can be our house goy, our designated non-Jew.”