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PI: And while I was in graduate school, I had been asked to do some research, historical research, for the law firm that was defending Daniel Ellsburg in the Pentagon Papers case. Now, the Pentagon Papers case, which started, I think, in 1972 when Daniel Ellsburg turned over to the New York Times this mammoth, secret history of the Vietnam War that the federal government had prepared. And Ellsburg was indicted for releasing these papers, criminal indictment. The government also sued the newspapers to prevent the publication. They lost that case, but they were prosecuting Ellsburg really in retaliation, to punish him. And the lawyers who were defending him wanted research to document other examples of people who have released classified government documents without being prosecuted. They were going to raise the defense of selective prosecution. Ellsburg was being singled out to punish him when other people had done the same thing and never been prosecuted. So I was asked to do this. And I worked on it for some months and put together a big collection of material that had been released by people like President Johnson and Henry Kissinger, other people who had, had released this material in books and articles. That case never went to trial because the government screwed up in the Ellsburg case. They offered the judge during the trial the directorship of the FBI on the assumption that he would be favorable to the government. And he immediately declared a mistrial. Ellsburg was never retried. But out of that I got a very interesting look at how the legal process operates. I only knew my own case and some of the civil rights cases that I'd been involved in. But I got interested working with some very excellent lawyers, Charles Nesson, who was on the Harvard Law School faculty; a man named Walter Slocum, who was a private attorney in Washington. And he had a very powerful legal team defending him. And I thought this was fascinating. I really enjoyed that kind of work and sitting in on those legal strategy meetings.

I didn't, at that time, have any idea of going to law school. I also got involved in another lawsuit as an outgrowth of my dissertation research. During the early Cold War periods, period, a man named Alger Hiss had been convicted of perjury, basically for lying about spying for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and early '40s when he worked in the government. The Hiss case became a real famous issue. And in fact it's what propelled Richard Nixon to fame. But at any rate, I got interested in this because in my dissertation research, I'd come across some fascinating material that suggested that Alger Hiss may have been framed and, which he had claimed all along. He was still alive. And so I contacted him. I worked with, at Boston State College, his niece. She put me in touch with him, and I worked with him. And he wanted to put together a lawsuit to reopen his case on the ground that he had, the government had fabricated the evidence against him. And so I worked on that. I got more and more interested in law particularly because Howard Zinn, although he wasn't a lawyer, we worked with justice issues involving the courts.

So one day, when I, my prospects for the future were looking rather uncertain and I didn't know where I was going to teach the next year, I was just sitting having coffee with a friend in Harvard Square in Cambridge, and she said, "You know, you keep talking about going to law school. Why don't you do it?" And I thought, "Well, I don't have anything to lose." So I walked across the street -- this is a true story -- to the admissions office at Harvard Law School. And I said, "Can you tell me what you need to do to apply to law school here?" They said, "Well, you have to take the law school, the LSAT," Law School Aptitude Test. And that was the last day to register for the test. So I registered. I took the test. And much to my surprise, I got virtually a perfect score on the LSAT. Back in those days it was a, sort of an advanced SAT test, lots of grammar, geography, history, what's wrong with this sentence kind of thing. And I was really good at that. And so I decided that I would apply to three law schools, Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. I wanted to stay in Boston. I was married, at that time -- I had gotten married just after I got out of prison to a woman I'd met at Antioch before I graduated. And so I did not expect to be admitted to Harvard Law School. In fact, I wasn't sure I'd be admitted to any of the schools because on my application forms I'd said I was a convicted felon. Also I had letters of recommendation to Harvard from two convicted criminals. One was Alger Hiss and the other was Howard Zinn. And I thought, "Well, this is probably not going to work." But to my absolute surprise, I got a letter from Harvard Law School that I'd been admitted. I never did hear from BU or BC because I called them up and said, "Cancel my applications."

And so I went to law school literally with the idea of, not of practicing law full-time, but of going back to teaching. I wanted to teach law, not necessarily in a law school, but to do the kind of teaching that Howard Zinn was doing, but with more of a real background and training in law. And I thought I also might do some legal work, maybe work for the American Civil Liberties Union, work that I could help people, civil liberties and civil rights issues. So I spent three years in law school, and I did, did not focus on my classroom work. And in fact, my grades in law school were sort of in the middle somewhere. What I did was as much legal and social activism as I could. I worked for an organization at Harvard called Harvard Voluntary Defenders, where they send law students, second- and third-year law students, into the local courts to represent indigent criminal defendants. And that was a fascinating experience. I spent a whole summer doing that. I realized that I didn't want to do criminal law partly because I felt very uncomfortable going into jails and prisons and lockups. I guess it was sort of like a post-traumatic stress kind of thing, the idea of going back in and being locked up, even if I could get out, didn't appeal to me. And it's very frustrating work. Most of your clients are guilty of something. The whole job is just to keep them out of jail or prison. It's not like Perry Mason. And the people you deal with, the prosecutors and the judges are generally very hostile and antagonistic. And I learned quite early that police officers will lie on the witness stand just to get someone convicted. The judges do not listen to arguments about constitutional rights. And so it was not, it was a fascinating experience, but not something I wanted to do as a career.

I also worked for the Committee on Military Justice, which helped people in -- and the Vietnam War was still going on at this time. I entered law school in 1975. The war was just ending. But there were a lot of people in the military in, in stockades or who were trying to get discharged either as conscientious objectors or to get a bad conduct discharge reversed. There were still people who were, had resisted the draft and fled the country. So there was a lot of work to do, and I enjoyed doing that.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.