<Begin Segment 9>

TK: Do you have any anecdotes or stories that you remember during those days with, in those meetings or with your staff?

AM: (...) What certainly occurs to me is clearly one of the strongest personalities was Justice Goldberg. He would talk at great length and had complete confidence in himself in these matters. He probably was the one person with whom in the end there was, there was somewhat more tension. And really, partially because he had a tendency to want to deal with everything. There was one point, for instance, when he was really urging the commissioners to include a lot of what seemed at the time to be quite detailed provisions. This or that ought to be done with the Social Security system, this or that ought to be done with dishonorable discharges from the armed services and so on. They were not things that in principle the other commissioners disagreed with, but there was this sense among most of the commissioners that it was important to keep the focus on the big items here. That this would not be an easy matter to persuade the Congress to act on, and that part of being able to persuade them was to present the recommendations and the case in, in very clear, unmuddied terms. And that if you start to get down to how we are going to adjust Social Security benefits in light of three years in camp, that we're losing the big point. A point wasn't that people lost their Social Security payments at that time, it was that something much worse was going on that we were trying to address and set straight. And there's one of the things that we discussed at this conference in the last few days, (...) Justice Goldberg's expression of his views on the coram nobis cases. And (...) remind me again that he told me, and I think a couple of commissioners, what his views were, made it plain and he was going to make them public. But that this was not a situation which he (...) was expecting the Commissioners to do anything about it, nor was he asking advice or direction. He was simply informing us as to what he intended to do, which he certainly went right ahead and did. So it was... at the same time, he brought to all this a background, and he was obviously the only Supreme Court Justice there, former Supreme Court Justice that we had among us, and wide experience, and could talk about the people on the Court. But also add at the times when there ultimately were criticisms of the Supreme Court, a certain degree of stature to do that. I mean, it's a little different when the former Supreme Court Justice criticizes what the Court has done than when a group of lawyers criticize what the Court has done. [Laughs]

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1997 Densho. All Rights Reserved.