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Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Northern California U.S. District Court Series

William H. Orrick, Jr.

A LIFE IN PUBLIC SERVICE: CALIFORNIA POLITICS,
THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION, AND THE FEDERAL BENCH

Interviews Conducted by

Robert A. Van Nest

1987-1988

Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading
participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of
Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral history is a modern research
technique involving an interviewee and an informed interviewer in spontaneous
conversation. The typed record is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity,
and reviewed by the interviewee. The resulting manuscript is typed in final form,
indexed, bound with photographs and illustrative materials, and placed in The
Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and other research
collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not
intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken
account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is
reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement
between the University of California and William H. Orrick, Jr., dated
November 30, 1988. This manuscript is thereby made available for
research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the
right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University
of California at Berkeley. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for
publication without the written permission of the Director of The
Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be
addressed to the Regional Oral History Office, 486 Library, University of
California, Berkeley, California 94720, and should include identification
of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages,
and identification of the user. The legal agreement with William H.
Orrick, Jr., requires that he be notified of the request and allowed thirty
days in which to respond.

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

William H. Orrick, Jr., "A Life in Public Service:
California Politics, the Kennedy Administration, and
the Federal Bench," an oral history conducted in
1987-1988 by Robert A. Van Nest, Esq., Regional Oral
History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of
California, Berkeley, 1989.

Copy No.

William H. Orrick, Jr.
ca. 1980

Photograph by Moulin Studios

ORRICK, William H. (b. 1918) Federal Judge

A life in Public Service: California Politics, the Kennedy Administration, and the
Federal Bench. 1989, viii, 296 pp.

Service in Army Counterintelligence Corps; practice with Orrick law firm; California
Democratic politics in 1950s; campaigning for Pat Brown, Harry Truman, Adlai
Stevenson; with the Kennedy Administration, 1960-1965, Department of Justice
including New Haven railroad bankruptcy, the Bahia de Nipe incident, New York
longshoremens' strike, civil rights protest in Alabama, antitrust problems, Cuban
missile crisis, communications system and Department of State including problems at a
bureaucracy, selection of ambassadors, well-known antitrust lawyers; law practice in
San Francisco 1965-1974; San Francisco Opera president; Eisenhower Commission on
Violence; San Francisco Crime Commission; U.S. District Judge, 1974 to present
(1989) including Patty Hearst sentencing, Hell's Angels trial, school desegregation,
county jail conditions.

Introduction by Charles B. Renfrew
Interviewed in 1986-87 by Robert Van Nest

TABLE OF CONTENTS -- William H. Orrick, Jr.

PREFACE by Robert F. Peckham i

INTRODUCTION by Charles B. Renfrew iii

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Robert A. Van Nest v

EDITOR'S NOTE vii

FOREWORD 1

I. GROWING UP AN ORRICK 2

A. The Downey Family 2

B. The Orrick Family 10

C. Family Roots in the Law 15

D. Early Education 22

II. COLLEGE YEARS AND THE WAR 29

A. At Yale College 29

B. With Edward Carter and the Institute of Pacific Relations 45

C. In the Army Counterintelligence Corps 47

D. At the Orrick Firm 57

E. With the California Olympic Organizing Committee 62

III. DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN CALIFORNIA 71

A. Volunteers for Better Government (1946) 71

B. Truman for President (1948) 74

C. Stevenson for President (1952) 76

D. Graves for Governor (1954) 77

E. Stevenson's Second Campaign (1956) 80

F. Pat Brown for Governor (1958) 86

G. Early Law Practice in San Francisco 90

IV. THE KENNEDY YEARS 94

A. The 1960 Campaign 94

B. Forming the New Administration 99

C. Running the Civil Division 107

1. The New Haven Railroad 110

2. The Bahia de Nioe 116

3. Enforcing Civil Rights in Alabama 120

4. Impressions of John Kennedy 136

5. The Matter of I.G. Farben 139

6. Putting the Longshoremen Back to Work 146

7. The Appointment of Federal Judges 152

8. Impressions of Bobby Kennedy 155

D. Life in the Department of State 161

1. Dealing with the Bureaucracy 163

2. Selecting the Nation's Ambassadors 169

3. The Bureaucracy Fights Back 171

4. The Cuban Missile Crisis 177

5. Selling Weapons Abroad 184

6. Learning Politics in the Department 187

E. Chief of the Antitrust Division 192

1. Preparing for the Job 194

2. Getting the Word Out 197

3. Dealing with Merger Activity 199

4. Politics and the American Can Case 207

5. The Antitrust Barristers 210

6. The Assassination of John Kennedy,

and the Johnson Administration 214

V. 1965 - 1974: LAW AND COMMUNITY SERVICE 220

A. Returning to the Practice of Law 220

B. The State Education Commission 233

C. President of the San Francisco Opera 234

D. The Eisenhower Commission on Violence 236

E. The San Francisco Crime Commission 240

VI. UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE 244

A. Appointment to the Bench, 1974 244

B. Preparing to Preside 250

C. Caseload in the Northern District 253

1. Sentencing Patty Hearst 256

2. Trying the Hell's Angels 264

3. Desegregating San Francisco's Schools 270

4. The San Francisco County Jail Case 278

D. Reflections on Judicial Philosophy 283

APPENDIX: Service for Civic Organizations 288

INDEX 290

PREFACE

The Historical Society of the United States District Court for the Northern
District of California is a non-profit organization established by federal practitioners
and judges and is dedicated to preserve and develop the history of this court. The
Society's goals are threefold: 1) to marshal the sources for historical study of the
District; 2) to initiate and encourage comprehensive and scholarly study of the court;
and 3) to develop interpretive programs and exhibits making the fruits of this research
accessible and meaningful to the legal community and the general public.

In 1980 this series of oral histories conducted by The Bancroft Library was
initiated as an important effort in the furtherance of the Society's objectives. By
preserving the personal reminiscences of individuals whose experiences and memory
can yield valuable "oral evidence" of the court's history, the Society hopes to enhance
and amplify the written record.

In addition to historical study of the District, the Society hopes to promote
greater public understanding and appreciation of the role of the federal judiciary.
Except for those involved in the legal process, the operation, significance, and impact
of federal trial courts remains largely a mystery to most Americans. By focusing on
the history and activities of the Northern District, the Society hopes to bridge this gap
between the legal and lay world and even encourage other District courts to initiate
similar efforts. As the nation nears the 200th anniversary of the ratification of the
United States Constitution, it is an appropriate time to raise the level of public
understanding by placing the contemporary role of district courts in historical
perspective.

Thanks are due to the foresight and generosity of the individuals and
organizations whose support make this work possible.

Robert F. Peckham,
Historical Society of the

U.S. District Court,
Northern District of California

San Francisco, California
April 1981

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA U.S. DISTRICT COURT SERIES
Interviews Completed by 1989

Harris, George B., "Memories of San Francisco Legal Practice and State and
Federal Courts, 1920s-1960s," 1981.

Orrick, William H., Jr., "A Life in Public Service: California Politics, the
Kennedy Administration, and the Federal Bench," 1989.

Phleger, Herman, "Observations on the U.S. District Court for the Northern
District of California, 1900-1940," 1981.

Sweigert, William T., Sr., "Administration and Ethics in the Governor's
Office and the Courts, California, 1939-1975," 1987.

Wollenberg, Albert C., Sr., "To Do the Job Well: A Life in Legislative,
Judicial, and Community Service," 1981.

Zirpoli, Alfonso J., "Faith in Justice: Alfonso J. Zirpoli and the United
States District Court for the Northern District of California," 1984.

Weigel, Stanley. In progress.

ill

INTRODUCTION by Charles B. Renfrew

A past worthy of record or out of the ordinary is a secondary meaning of
history -- and that is William Horsley Orrick, Jr. This is an oral history, for no one
appreciates more or excels in the art of story-telling than Bill Orrick.

It is difficult for anyone to evaluate a fellow human being. It is even more
difficult to do so upon the qualities and significance of a friend; yet there are certain
qualities which define Bill Orrick that are found in his stories and in his life that need
be noted.

Loyalty has been the hallmark of Bill's life: loyalty to family, friends,
institutions, and ideals. I had the privilege, on a number of occasions, of
accompanying Bill when he stopped by his father's house on his way home from work.
This was his regular practice every Monday through Thursday. I watched and listened
to the wonderful exchange of words, ideas, and love that passed between them.
These were not dutiful visits but rather the natural expression of the great and
extravagant love he had for his father.

Bill wrote more articles for the California Law Review than any of the members
on it when his grades had not qualified him for it. This speaks not only of the man
but foretells many of the subsequent stories of achievement. His desire for knowledge
and willingness to work for the best possible result enabled him to approach each new
task with unabashed enthusiasm, as well as the tools with which to conquer it. For
Bill, excellence is not a gift which simply flows from a natural talent. It is a product
of ideals and prodigious efforts. Bill's life has been an ongoing saga. As each chapter
or adventure ends, he commences a new journey and starts a new task with the same
enthusiasm, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to excellence that carries him
through completion and readies him for the next challenge.

Bill's stories of the Kennedy administration make Camelot come alive. A speaker
at the funeral of Thurmond Arnold, a predecessor of Bill's as head of the Antitrust
Division, although referring to an earlier period, captured Bill's feelings about his
service at that time: "Even now, we cannot think of it without a feeling of
exhilaration and delight, tinged with the sadness of knowing that what has been done
once cannot be done again. To the end of our days, we shall remember that time."

Bill's selection as a federal judge was the natural culmination of a lifetime
committed to public service. His deep and passionate love for our judicial system, "our
nation's highest calling," is the fitting conclusion to this history.

This oral history captures and conveys the pleasure and enjoyment of Bill's
company. And above all, and most of all, it conveys that wonderful gift of talk: the
talk in which he creates situations and universes in which actions, decisions, and a
unique personal odyssey are unfolded in the listener's imagination. His voice is a
constant call to duty, a reminder of loyalty and obligation. It is a record of a lifetime
commitment to public service. That voice, and the memories it recalls, will be with us
as long as men dare to dream and then dare to live their dreams.

Charles B. Renfrew, Esq.
Director & VP for Legal
Affairs, Chevron Corporation

January 1989

San Francisco, California

INTERVIEW HISTORY by Robert A. Van Nest

Anyone who knows him well can attest to the fact that Judge Orrick, is, above
all, a remarkable storyteller. He is at ease telling stories to a large group of
interested strangers as he is swapping tales over lunch with a friend or two. And
Judge Orrick has a lifetime of interesting stories to tell, having campaigned in
California for the likes of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Pat Brown, and John
Kennedy, having served under Robert Kennedy at the highest levels in the Department
of Justice, and having presided over hundreds of cases during nearly fifteen years as a
United States District Judge for the Northern District of California.

It was therefore the primary challenge of this oral history to select the best
stories, to organize them, and to draw them out in the most complete version
possible. To that end, the Judge and I began, in late 1986, a series of sessions at
which we covered each period of his life and determined which people, places, and
events to comment upon in this history. Our goal was to provide a complete yet
lively account of his life experiences which would enable future students of the federal
judiciary to understand something about those called to serve, as Judge Orrick would
put it, "in our nation's highest calling."

During the period from November 1986 through early July 1987, we met in
eight separate sessions to plan the oral history. All of our work took place in Judge
Orrick's library at home in San Francisco, where we worked surrounded by books,
photographs, and memorabilia marking his many years of political and public service.

In planning the history, we made reference to a wide variety of materials
chronicling Judge Orrick's activities and those of the public figures with whom he
served over the years. The books we reviewed included: John W. Field's Rendezvous
with Destiny, a chronicle of the lives of many graduates from the Class of 1937 at
Yale College; The Best and the Brightest. David Halberstam's account of the Kennedy
years; John Leacocos' Fires in the In-Basket. a contemporary history of the Department
of State; and Joseph Barkin's The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben. Judge Orrick's
service during the Kennedy Administration is the subject of an "Oral History Interview
with William H. Orrick, Jr.," conducted for the Robert F. Kennedy oral history
program in 1970, and his tenure as Chief of the Antitrust Division was reported in the
publication "Report of the Assistant Attorney General William H. Orrick, Jr. in Charge
of the Antitrust Division," for the fiscal year June 30, 1964. The Judge also reviewed
the reports of many of the committees and commissions upon which he served,
including the Report of the San Francisco Crime Commission, and the Report of the
San Francisco State College Study Team of the National Commission on the Causes
and Prevention of Violence.

In selecting from among the many cases which have come before him as a
United States District Judge, Judge Orrick received invaluable assistance from his .
secretary, Sylvia Cohen, upon whose good judgment and indefatigable efforts he has
relied for many years, and also from many of the nearly thirty law clerks who have
served under Judge Orrick during his tenure on the bench. Each clerk was asked to
submit a list and brief description of the most significant, difficult, and/or amusing
cases during his or her clerkship, and the cases which Judge Orrick chose to discuss
were selected from those lists.

The actual taping of the oral history took place in Judge Orrick's home over a
period of six full days, on July 21, 22, 23, September 3 and 5, 1987, and January 18,
1988. The sessions were conducted deposition style, and were both taped and
transcribed by Sheila Chase, a certified court reporter from San Francisco. The
deposition transcript provided the basis not only for additional editing, but also for
further reflections and yet additional recollections.

The editing process, which began in earnest in May 1988, took several months
to complete. As usual, Judge Orrick was meticulous in his attention to detail, and this
resulted in page after page of spelling and cite checks. During the summer of 1988,
with the text nearly complete, Judge Orrick took the opportunity to conduct a final
review to satisfy himself that the history was as thorough and as accurate as he could
make it. In this task, and the many others he undertook as part of this project, he
received incalculable assistance from his wife, Marion Naffziger Orrick, without whose
remarkable memory this work could not have been completed.

The Judge joins me in the hope that those having the time and interest to read
this journal will find it as rewarding in review as it was in the telling.

Robert A. Van Nest
Interviewer

San Francisco, California
September 1988

Vll

EDITOR'S NOTE

The oral history of William H. Orrick, Jr., judge of the U.S. District Court for the
Northern District of California, is an important addition to the Northern District Court
Oral History Series. Judge Orrick is the sixth person to be interviewed for this
ongoing project of the Regional Oral History Office of The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley. The series is sponsored by the Historical Society of the United
States District Court for the Northern District of California.

In view of the breadth and scope of Judge Orrick's career, his name has long
been high on the list of those to be interviewed for the series. It was fortunate for
the project when Robert A. Van Nest, Esq., volunteered to serve as interviewer.

As former law clerk to Judge Orrick, Mr. Van Nest was familiar with Judge
Orrick's career and his methods of working. Planning and research got under way in
1986. In preparation, Judge Orrick and Mr. Van Nest studied other oral histories
done by the Regional Oral History Office and organized the Orrick interviews in
accordance with standard oral history procedures. Their planning for the interview
sessions was careful and complete, and included much digging into files, books, and
memorabilia.

Judge Orrick and Mr. Van Nest have produced a volume that details the varied
aspects of Judge Orrick's career and also highlights significant perceptions about our
government and society and about our legal processes. Judge Orrick's warmth and
interest in his colleagues throughout his career come to life in his reminiscences and
anecdotes, and Mr. Van Nest's thoughtful questions were instrumental in eliciting
these recollections.

We would like to thank Judge Orrick and Mr. Van Nest for this outstanding
contribution to the Northern District Court Historical Society's continuing effort to
document legal history. Our appreciation also goes to members of the District Court
Historical Society. The efforts especially of Judge Robert F. Peckham, chairman of the
board, and Mike Griffith, court archivist, were most helpful in producing this volume.

via

Sylvia Cohen, secretary to Judge Orrick, was most helpful in arranging meetings
and coordinating plans. We are also grateful for the professional work of the people
who did the word processing. Sheila Chase, an experienced court reporter, took down
the record of the interviews and transcribed the draft; several sets of corrections were
accomplished by Susan Graham; and Elizabeth Kim put the final product into the
format of the Northern District Court Series.

Carole Hicke
Series Director,
Northern California United
States District Court Series

December 1988

Regional Oral History Office

The Bancroft Library

University of California at Berkeley

THE AMERICAN BENCH— 1985/86

ORRICK, William H., Jr. (Judge. United States £is-
trict Court for Northern District of California) Appointed
for life by President Richard M. Nixon to term beginning
Aug 28, 1974. Born San Francisco California Oct 8, 1915
to William H. and Mary Downey Orrick. Married Mari
on Naffziger Dec 5, 1947. Children Mary-Louise (Peter
son) March 20, 1949, Marion (Sproul)Oct 16, 1951 and
William H. Ill May 15, 1953. Episcopalian. Educated at
Yale University B.A. 1937 and University of California
LL.B. 1941. Admitted to practice California 1941. In le
gal practice San Francisco 1941-61 and 1965-74.

Assistant U.S. Attorney General in charge of the Civil
Division, Department of Justice Washington D.C. Jan
1961 to May 1962. Deputy Undersecretary of State for
Administration, U.S. Department of State Washington
D.C. May 1962 to June 1963. Assistant U.S. Attorney
General in charge of the Antitrust Division Department
of Justice Washington D.C. June 1963 to Aug 1965. Vis
iting Professor of Law University of California at Berke
ley 1965-66. Fellow American Bar Foundation since
1970. Member San Francisco Lawyers Committee for
Urban Affairs 1967-74, Executive Committee Lawyers
Committee for Civil Rights Under Law 1963-74, Ameri
can Judicature Society, State Bar of California (Member
1953-58 and Chairman 1958 Committee on Corpora
tions, Committee on Unauthorized Practice of Law 1958-
59), Bar Association of San Francisco (Director 1958-59,
Secretary and Director 1973, Treasurer and Director
1974), Federal and American (Former Council member
Antitrust Section, member General Litigation Section,
Corporate Banking and Business Law Section, Section on
Individual Rights and Section on International Law) Bar
Associations. Received Citation Award from Boalt Hall
School of Jurisprudence. Named Alumnus of the Year by
University of California 1980. Captain U.S. Army 1942-
46. Democrat.

Mailing address: P.O. Box 36060, San Francisco
94102. -

Office: U.S. Courthouse, 450 Golden Gate Avenue,
San Francisco 94 102.

Telephone: (415) 556-5286.

*Mrs. Norman B. Livermore III

WILLIAM H. ORRICK, JR.

Practitioner,

public servant, teacher and judge, you have rendered distin
guished service to the nation, the community, the legal profes
sion, and the law school from which you graduated just forty
years ago. Two departments of the United States Government,
State and Justice, have benefited from your loyal service; na
tional, state, and local bars have had your good advice and
wise counsel; and the community's religious, cultural, and
charitable organizations are in your debt for years of dedicated
attention to their needs. Your insistence on dignity, decorum,
and reasoned arguments in your courtroom has allowed the
light of justice to prevail over the heat of passion.

Bill Orrick, your fellow members of the Boalt Hall Alumni
Association, proud of your accomplishments, take great plea
sure in awarding you this citation.

Given at Berkeley, California, this 6th day of November, 1981.

ATTEST:

President

Regional Oral History Office
Room 486 The Bancroft Library

University of California
Berkeley, California 94720

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

(Please write clearly. Use black ink.)

(*9 1 f Birthplace

Your full name
Date of birth

Father's full name
Occupation

Mother's full name
Occupation

Your spouse

Where did you grow up?
Present community

Education

-X).

Areas of expertise

Other interests or activities

Organizations in which you are active

v .

. -J

•

AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, it is July 21, 1987, and we are here in your living
room with a court reporter. Can you tell us what you understand
to be the purpose for the interview we are going to begin today?

Orrick: This oral history has been prepared at the request of Chief Judge

Robert F. Peckham, Chairman of the Historical Society of the United
States District Court for the Northern District of California. Judge
Peckham, along with Mr. John A. Sutro, a prominent, nationally
known San Francisco lawyer, formed the Society. This Court, in
existence since 1850, has in its archives many interesting briefs and
opinions, including those rendered in connection 'with the grants of
California lands made by Mexican owners during the period before
California became a state of the United States. Another reason for
forming this Society was to furnish lawyers, judges, and scholars
information concerning judges of the Court and the parts they
played in local, state, and national history.

The Society has had several exhibits in the courthouse. One
had to do with admiralty and the sinking of the Argentine ship, the
Rio de Janeiro off the Golden Gate in 1901. Another exhibit had
to do with the remarkable Field brothers. Cyrus, you may recall,
laid the first cable across the Atlantic. David Field codified the
procedural law in New York. And Stephen J. Field was a member
of the Supreme Court of California and a long-time member of the
Supreme Court of the United States.

It is hoped that oral histories will make it possible for lawyers
and judges to know what kind of people served on the Court over
the years. So far, oral histories obtained with the assistance of the
Regional Oral History Office of the Bancroft Library at the
University of California have been produced for California Supreme
Court Justice Jessie W. Carter, California Supreme Court Chief
Justice Phil S. Gibson, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the
United States Earl Warren, United States District Judge William C.
Sweigert, United States District Judge Albert C. Wollenberg, and
United States District Judge Alfonso J. Zirpoli. The primary reason
I have taken the time to prepare this history is because Chief Judge
Peckham suggested I share some of my experiences during my
fifteen years on the bench as well as my experiences in the Kennedy
and Johnson Administrations.

I can state with certainty that this oral history would never
have seen the light of day without the imaginative and careful
assistance of Robert A. Van Nest, one of my very best law clerks,
who is now a distinguished partner in the firm of Keker & Brockett
in San Francisco.

Each time a [person] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of
others.. .he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a
million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that
can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

- Robert F. Kennedy

I. GROWING UP AN ORRICK

A. The Downey Family

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, I want to begin our interview by finding out

something about your family background. Starting with your
mother's side, can you tell us where your family came from, what
kind of people they were, and how it was they happened to come
here to California?

Orrick: So far as my grandparents on my mother's side goes, I know very
little. I do know that my grandfather was Andrew Downey, that he
came from Donegal, Ireland, that he lived for a time in Oakland,
that he married my grandmother Sarah Jean Wright in Oakland,
and later on he moved to Berkeley. William Jennings Bryan, I
believe, was his cousin.

I regret very much that I never played the game of "Roots"
with my parents. I was always too busy doing something else than
to worry about that. So, I have tried on trips abroad to locate the
Downey property or Andrew Downey, without success. I really
don't know much more than that about them.

Van Nest: Did you ever meet the Downeys?

Orrick: When I was 16 months old, my mother told me I met my

grandfather. I was told that I was dandled upon his knee, when he
was sick. Shortly thereafter in 1916 he passed away.

Van Nest: As far as you know, when did Andrew Downey arrive here in
California?

Orrick: I believe in the 1870s.

Van Nest: Do you know what it was that brought him here?

Orrick: No, I do not.

Van Nest: Do you know what sort of business he got involved in once he
arrived?

Orrick: Yes. He was in the real estate business. He owned a large block
in Berkeley bounded by Forest Avenue, Garber, Piedmont Avenue
and College Avenue. It was on that property that my mother and
father built a house, my aunt and uncle built a house, and also a
fourth house was built by my Uncle George Downey. Grandfather
Downey owned land going down to Shattuck Avenue or Telegraph
Avenue on which wheat was grown. He also owned property in
San Francisco.

Van Nest: Where was that property located?

Orrick: I am told that that property was located on the comer where Sutler
joins Market Street. He also owned other property south of Market
Street.

Van Nest: That is one of the most prominent addresses in San Francisco
today, isn't it?

Orrick: Yes, it certainly is. After the great 1906 fire, he came over to San

Francisco and inspected his burned property and he also inspected
the property that he had on the other side of Market Street, the
south side.

Van Nest: How much property did he have there?

Orrick: I can't tell you accurately. I do know that he had property on

Rincon Hill, which is where the post office now is, and that there
were other properties south of Market Street. He owned a large
building, which was used as a garage at Third and Howard Streets,
and then some small properties under the San Francisco Bay Bridge.
His task was to find out and predict which would be the most
valuable properties. He determined that the properties south of
Market would be more important than the properties on
Montgomery and Market and in that area, upon which all these
new buildings are now built.

Van Nest: Today?

Orrick: Today, yes. So, he made a bum call, regrettably.

Van Nest: And sold the property north of Market?

Orrick: And sold the property north of Market. Market, you know, was

known as The Slot, and he sold his property north of The Slot.

Van Nest: And he held onto the property south of Market?

Orrick: Yes. And we liquidated it only very recently. It was a constant
headache to my father, and later to myself, to ride herd on those
pieces of property. One was on Minna Street and one was at Third
and Howard.

Van Nest: As far as you know, was your Grandfather Downey a wealthy man?

Orrick: Not particularly. He was, however, quite well off, and his house
was rather elaborate.

Van Nest: His home was in Berkeley on the family property there?

Orrick: Yes. And then, as I say, he gave the comer of College and Forest
to my mother and dad. He gave the comer of Piedmont and Forest
to his son, George, and he gave the comer on Garber and Piedmont
to my Aunt Jean and her husband and my uncle, Hugh Goodfellow.

So, he had all his children literally surrounding him. And in the
middle of all that he had some small orchards, apricots, apples,
peach, cherry trees, and then a croquet court, I remember, which
was later turned into a tennis court.

Van Nest: Did Andrew Downey have any interest in local politics or civic
affairs?

Orrick: None that I know of.

Van Nest: What do you know about your grandmother, Sarah Wright?

Orrick: Absolutely nothing other than the fact that she produced three

beautiful, strong-minded ladies, mother, Aunt Jean and Aunt Lil,
and a fine son, my uncle, George Downey.

Van Nest: Let's talk a little about your mother, Mary Downey. Do you know
what sort of upbringing she had?

Orrick: Yes. She had a very happy childhood in Berkeley, being brought up
on the place. She had a horse of her own that she rode, and she
rode with a number of her girl friends. She went to Berkeley High
School, and then she went to the University of California. At the
University, she became a member of the sorority Kappa Kappa
Gamma and she was very proud of that sorority. She went to their
initiations even after she graduated, I remember. After I was bom
and after my brother Downey was born, she took some courses at
Cal and renewed her acquaintances with her sister Kappas.

Van Nest: How did she happen to meet your dad?

Orrick: She met Dad at a house party in the area of Mount Shasta, which

was quite a resort then, and is today.

Van Nest: Did your parents meet after your mother graduated from the
university?

Orrick: Yes. Dad was in the class of 1901, and she was in the class of
1908.

Van Nest: When did they many?

Orrick: They married March 14th, 1914.

Van Nest: Where were they married?

Orrick: In Berkeley, in a Presbyterian church.

Van Nest: Was your mother, in the years you were growing up, active in civic
and community affairs?

Orrick: Yes, she always was. In Berkeley, where we lived the first eight of
my years, she taught Sunday school and was active in the
Children's Hospital of the East Bay and other organizations. I don't
know them by name, but I remember she had several, which she
continued in San Francisco.

Van Nest: Let me ask you about the Century Club. Was that one of the
activities she was involved in?

Orrick: Yes. That was in San Francisco.

Van Nest: What was that?

Orrick: That was and is a gathering place for ladies to have tea parties and,

more importantly, listen to lecturers once a week. Mother was
president of that. She was president of about everything she ever
went into.

Van Nest: What about the Francesca Club? Was that also a San Francisco
activity of hers?

Orrick: Yes. That was and is today an excellent club of which she was
president. My wife Marion belonged to it for awhile.

Van Nest: Is it a civic affairs organization?

Orrick: Ifs primarily a social organization. Her activities in civic affairs

included being on the Board of Directors of Edgewood, which was
an orphanage then. It's still going now, but now it handles only

severely disturbed children. She was president of Edgewood. And
she was president of the Episcopal Old Ladies' Home. That was a
civic job. And then she was a member of an organization which
euphemistically, then and now, might be called a right wing
political organization.

Van Nest: What was that?

Orrick: It was called Pro America. I don't think they use the name Pro

America any more.

Van Nest: Was your mother active in politics?

Orrick: No. She just attended some of the meetings down there.

Van Nest: She was a Republican, I take it?

Orrick: Yes, she was.

Van Nest: Along with your Dad?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: How did she get involved with the Pro America organization and
what was it?

Orrick: It was an organization dedicated to promoting the welfare of the

Republican party and particularly, as it seemed to me then and
now, the right wing of the Republican party. And she became a
member because several of her good friends persuaded her to join.
She had one, if not two, bridge clubs, and she knew many, many
people in this city. And I think it was one of them that suggested
it to her.

Van Nest: Were your mother's civic and political activities - and I guess the
political activities were limited ones -- things that played an
important part in her life, that she shared with you and Downey as
you were growing up?

Orrick: No. It played an important part in her life, but we didn't share in

Van Nest:

Orrick:

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:

it. We were busy going to school and going around on weekends,
and so we had no part in that.

Were there aspects, Judge Orrick, of your mother's character that
you think contributed to your later interest in community service
and public service? Did she attempt to steer you in that direction?

Oh, no. Quite the contrary. She thought politics was a "dirty
business" and she didn't want to see her boys in politics. She
reiterated that many, many, many times. So, she didn't influence
me one way or the other. I didn't get into politics just to be a
nasty kid, either.

Did she have aspirations for you in particular?

Yes, she was very anxious that my brother Downey and I become
lawyers and go into Dad's firm. She didn't know a great deal about
the practice of the law, but she did know it was a very good firm
and a high class firm then, as it is under the changed conditions
today. That was always a hope of hers.

And it came true, to a limited extent. I went into Dad's office
just before the War. I was there for about a month or two. Then,
after four and a half years in the Army, I came back and was in the
office.

In later years, as you became involved in politics, did your mother
object or attempt to counsel you otherwise?

No. We discussed politics at the Sunday dinner table, sometimes
rather heatedly, particularly when my Uncle Oliver was there, who
was a rock-ribbed Republican. My father enjoyed the controversy.
He wouldn't enter into it. He was sort of a moderator. If things
got slow, he would make a provocative statement and my brother
and I always rose to the bait, and very often Uncle Ollie did.

I remember one time Uncle Ollie got very much upset, and he
said to Dad, "Bill, you are a damned fool to send those kids to
those fancy colleges in the East where they pick up all these crazy
ideas."

And Dad said, "Ollie, don't use that kind of language in this
house."

Then Uncle Ollie said, "I will say anything I want."
And Dad said, 'You leave the house."

Uncle Ollie got up and put down his napkin and, as he went
out the door, he said, "Like Voltaire, I can say anything I want.
And I don't like being thrown out." Uncle Ollie was the younger
brother.

Van Nest: He was your Dad's brother?
Orrick: Yes, and they were very close.

Van Nest: Was there ever a time after you became active in politics that your
mother or your father expressed concern about it, or attempted to
persuade you otherwise?

Orrick: No. Well, Mother always wanted me out of it. Dad did not think

it was a good way to make a living, and he encouraged me to go
to law school and not make politics my profession. And in the
depths of the Depression, when I went to Hotchkiss School in the
fall of 1933, Dad wrote me many letters on the subject of the
Roosevelt-Hoover campaign in which he stated, "I think it wise not
to change horses in the middle of the stream." The import of his
argument was that Mr. Hoover had had a great deal of experience
in these public activities going back to World War I and Belgium,
when he administered that gigantic food program, and also as
President of the United States; whereas, Governor Roosevelt had
had very little experience, limited to being Governor of New York
and an Assistant Secretary of the Navy. No less a commentator
than Walter Lipmann considered Governor Roosevelt a light-weight
not qualified to serve as President of the United States.

And he said, 'You should weigh that in the balance and come
out favoring Mr. Hoover." And I weighed that in the balance, and I
came out favoring Mr. Roosevelt. But I couldn't vote then.

B. The Orrick Family

Van Nest: We are getting a little ahead of ourselves. Let's go back and talk
about your family on the other side. What can you tell us about
your father's side of the family, where they came from, and what
kind of people they were?

Orrick: Dad's family came from Baltimore. We can trace his lineage, now

my lineage, all the way back to James Orrick, who in 1665 and
later in 1683 obtained from the United States patents totalling 250
acres in Baltimore County. We have tried in vain to get back of
that, at least to see how he came across the ocean, but we can't tell
whether he was a sailor or a runaway or what he was. All we
know about him was that he did get those patents.

Van Nest: Have you been able to leam anything about the origins of the
Orrick family in Scotland?

Orrick: Surprising to state, I have. The name of the Orrick family is said to

have originated from the rock upon that part of the Fife coast
where the estate lies. The family was an ancient and honorable
one, and Sir Simon de Orrok's name is inscribed on the Ragman's
Roll, which, for antiquity, is the Scotch rival of the British
Domesday Book. The Ragman's Roll originally meant the roll of
Ragimund, a legate of Scotland who compelled all the clergy to give
a true account of their benefices, that they might be taxed at Rome
accordingly.

In those early days, they owned a great deal of property in
Scotland. Going back to the 13th century, they lived in a maritime
county on the east coast of Scotland. In the County of Fife lay the
great landed estate called Orrok, belonging to the family of the
same name. This estate was near Burntisland, a seaport town,
which was selected by the Roman general, Agricola, as a landing
place for his forces when he explored this part of the coast of
Britain.

Van Nest: Can you tell anything about the role of the family in the succeeding

centuries in Scotland?

Orrick: I think so. The Lairds of Orrick were vassals of the Stewarts of
Rosyth, but their charters were destroyed by David Boswell. The
name appears in Scottish history books throughout the years. For
example, it appears in the book of Scottish arms 1370 - 1678, as
well as in Nisbet's Heraldry. The Orricks of that time bore armorial
bearings which had a sable on a chevron between three mullets.

One of the main estates of the Laird of Orrick was
Dunfermline, which was visited by King Edward the first of England
and was a favorite place of James the Sixth before he went to
England to become James the First.

Suffice it to say, down through the years, the Orricks played
important roles in their respective communities. However, there
was a good deal of fighting in Scotland, and the political troubles
of the time and religious disquiet everywhere were, doubtless, the
reasons why members of the Orrick family sought relief in the
tranquility of the Colony of Maryland.

Van Nest: And it was James Orrick who first came to Maryland?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What, if anything, do you know of him?

Orrick: Well, a patent was issued to him November 30, 1665, for 100 acres
on the bay side called Orwick. And, again, on May 1st, 1683, a
patent was issued him for 150 acres of land called Orwick's Ferry
located on the north side of the Severn River.

Van Nest: What did James Orrick do for a living?

Orrick: I really don't know. I suppose one could speculate that a person

owning 250 acres might be engaged in farming, but that is simply a
guess, and I don't know what he did.

Van Nest: How did the Orrick family make its way to California?

Orrick: My grandfather, Oliver S. Orrick married Mary Francis Scott. Mary

Francis Scott had three brothers, Henry T. Scott, Irving M. Scott,
and I believe John Scott.

Van Nest: Who were the Scotts, and where were they from?

Orrick: The Reverend John Scott was a quasi-clergyman living in a village
near Baltimore. He and his wife had three children, Irving M.,
Henry T., and my grandmother, Mary Francis Scott. Irving M. was
the first to come to California in the 1850s. He went into the iron
foundry business and sent for his brother Henry before the Civil
War. The Scott brothers, in partnership with a Mr. Prescott,
established their own foundry and were eventually able to buy the
much larger Union Iron Works, which was later taken over by
Bethlehem Steel. The battleship USS Oregon was built at the Iron
Works during the Spanish-American War. She was ordered to join
the fleet in Havana. She, of course, had to go around Cape Horn,
and it took her a number of weeks to join the fleet. It is said that
the length of the voyage of the USS Oregon sparked the
negotiations of the United States to finish the construction of the
Panama Canal that had been partially built by the French.

Van Nest: Had your grandfather met- Mary Francis Scott back in Maryland, or
did they meet out here?

Orrick: They met in Maryland. Mary Francis Scott's other brother, who
was in California, Henry T. Scott, .was president of the telephone
company and also one of the founders of the Burlingame Club. He
and Irving persuaded my grandmother, their sister, to come to
California and make the "Orrick fortune."

Mary Francis Scott was a very strong-minded lady, and she
was the prime mover in getting the family to California.

Once in California, my grandfather founded the California
Paint Company. They lived in a large house on Vemon Street in
Oakland next to Senator Perkins' house.

Van Nest: Did you know your grandmother, Mary Francis Scott?

Orrick: Yes, I did.

Van Nest: What can you remember about her?

Orrick: Well, I remember that she was small, that she wore black dresses

continuously, as I guess many ladies did in those days, with lace
collars. She was not afraid to speak her mind or to pick favorites.
Every Sunday lunch she had all of her family there, including us
kids. The lunch was long and heavy, and we would go down and
torment the Chinese cook. He only had one eye, and we would
taunt him about his eye until he picked up a meat cleaver and
started after us. Grandmother, needless to say, did not approve of
this, and she soundly lectured us.

Van Nest: Was it apparent to you then that she was from a wealthy and a
prominent family?

Orrick: I can't say then because I had no idea that anybody lived any

differently than we lived. We just never saw them. But, in
reviewing the family history in later years, it appears that the
Orrick family was prominent in Oakland. My grandfather was a
leader of the Methodist Church, and all his children had to go to
church every Sunday, and then grandfather would bring back the
preacher for lunch and they would hear the same sermon all over
again.

Van Nest: Was the Scott family somewhat celebrated back home in Maryland?

Orrick: Yes. In fact, on their 50th wedding anniversary the great American

poet John Greenleaf Whittier composed a poem in celebration of
that important event. I should also say that the Scotts traced their
lineage back to 1291 when John Scott II obtained a deed from
Robert Scott of Chiselhurst. Irving Scott commissioned a research
person to trace the Scott lines and important records of the
Chartularies monastic records as well as subsequent roles and the
records of the Court of the Exchequer. The first Scott to come to
America was Abraham Scott, who came to a Philadelphia meeting
of the Quakers bearing a letter of recommendation from the
Quakers abroad dated June 22, 1722.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, were your grandparents, Oliver Orrick or Mary

Francis Scott, active in civic or political affairs in the East Bay?

Orrick: Not to my knowledge.

Van Nest: Do you recall that being a topic of conversation with them?

Orrick: No.

Van Nest: When was your Dad bom?

Orrick: December 5, 1878.

Van Nest: What can you tell us about his childhood?

Orrick: He grew up on the big place in Oakland, and he was one of seven
children. Uncle Murray was the oldest and Dad was second oldest.
Some of the others died early. Uncle Murray was the leader of the
group. He would devise all manner of tricks and games, which
upset his mother, and also he would make my father play in these
games.

Dad didn't have any great interest in it. He liked to read. He
would get his book, some very exciting book like Ivanhoe or any
other masterpiece by Sir Walter Scott, and find a place in the house
where nobody could find him, and read. He also took violin
lessons. He would get on his horse and put his violin under one
arm and ride the horse down to the violin teacher's house. The
house was located in east Oakland, which wasn't too much different
from what it is today. And he said that it used to hurt his feelings
when little kids would pelt him with rocks which would hurt his
violin case. He said the biggest pain he felt was listening to the
rattle of the rocks off the violin case.

I don't want to give you the impression that the family was a
musical family, because it wasn't. However, one or two of the
other boys took music lessons. Uncle Murray took piano lessons.
They would practice together at great length, but they only learned
one song, and that song was 'The Shepherd Boy."

Van Nest: How much education did your father have?

Orrick: He went to the University of California when he graduated from

high school. Then he went to the law school, which at that time
was in San Francisco - it was Hastings Law School. Boalt Hall
didn't come into existence until 1912, and Dad graduated from law
school in 1903.

C. Family Roots in the Law

Van Nest: Was your father the first lawyer on either side of the family?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: He became a prominent San Francisco lawyer, didn't he?

Orrick: Yes, he did.

Van Nest: What do you know now about your father's beginnings in law?

Where did he start practice and how did he develop the firm that is
now the Orrick firm?

Orrick: He started to practice in San Francisco with Jesse Steinhart, who

was a friend and a classmate and who later formed his own very
prominent firm. They began by defending thieves, and Mr.
Steinhardt couldn't stand it. He was concerned about what would
happen to him when the thief got out of jail. So, that left my
father a sole practitioner. About that time, the city was leveled by
the fire, and Dad found a job working with Mr. A. A. Moore.

Van Nest: Let's stop there for a minute, Judge Orrick. Did the great fire of

1906 destroy a lot of either the Orrick or the Downey property that
existed at that time?

Orrick: It destroyed a great deal of the Downey property. The Orricks were

then living in Oakland, so they weren't bothered.

The insurance companies were having a very difficult time,
and there was a great deal of litigation, as you can imagine, after
the ravages of that fire. Dad became an expert in the insurance
law, and he was asked to go to Sacramento and codify it, which he
did. He spent about a year and a half up there. And the Insurance
Code today is his handiwork for the most part.

He then came back to San Francisco and worked under Mr. A.
A. Moore.

Van Nest: Who was Mr. Moore?

Orrick: Mr. Moore was a prominent lawyer. He had a son called Stanley

Moore, who was a good friend of my father's and who was a very
well-known litigator. About that time, there was a firm called
Goodfellow and Eells. Dad and Stanley Moore joined the firm, and
it became Goodfellow, Eells, Moore & Orrick.

They had an interesting practice. They represented several
persons who were charged with corrupt practices in the city
government. This was in the heyday of Abe Ruef, who ran or tried
to run everything in San Francisco. He was unscrupulous in his
practice, and finally he was indicted and sent to San Quentin where
he served, I believe, eleven years. But these graft prosecutions took
up most of the time of the courts.

Van Nest: And Mr. Moore was defending many of these defendants?

Orrick: Mr. Moore was, and his son, Stanley. A prominent trial lawyer

from New York called Francis J. Heaney was brought in as a special
counsel to prosecute. The firm, Goodfellow, Eells, Moore & Orrick,
found itself trying to defend a good many of the persons who were
indicted during the graft prosecution. My father's activities in that
litigation were devoted to research.

Van Nest: Is it accurate to say that your father's practice started off as a
criminal practice?

Orrick: No. That was a very small part of it. The only criminal work that

I ever saw him do or heard about that he did was this joint venture
he had with Jesse Steinhart.

Van Nest: And the Reuf prosecutions as well?

Orrick: Yes. And the Reuf prosecutions, the graft prosecutions.

Van Nest: What was the major part of the work that he did in his early years
at the Goodfellow firm?

Orrick: He helped out with everything. He could try cases. He was a good

advocate. He was good at business law. And, most importantly
perhaps, he was a first rate bond lawyer.

Van Nest: How did he happen to get into that area?

Orrick: Mr. Charles P. Eells got into it, and Mr. Eells would come to work

every morning a little early, go through all the office mail to
determine whether there were any letters from county attorneys or
city attorneys or any person having anything to do with bond work
that had to be done, and he would look at those and carefully pull
out the ones that wanted advice on municipal bonds or wanted an
opinion, or whatever, and he didn't let anybody else do that work.
When he finished that work, he would spend the rest of the day
translating Greek. He did need some help, and that is how my
father got into it.

The firm claims beginnings going back to 1863, when Mr.
John J. Jarboe became general counsel for the old German Savings
& Loan Society. He then formed a firm called Jarboe, Harrison &
Goodfellow. The bond business steadily grew and, eventually, it
was my father's main occupation and later it was George
Herrington's main activity in the firm.

Van Nest: Did your father and the firm he was involved with, the Goodfellow
& Moore firm, have some involvement in a high profile case during
the First World War?

Orrick: Yes. And this is one of the most interesting cases in our Historical

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:

Society of the Court. In 1916 Mr. Stanley Moore was engaged to
represent the leader of some East Indians who had been solicited by
Germans to return to India and fight the British. German warships
were plying up and down the California coast and occasionally
slipping one of these recruiters off under the cover of night to go
up to the San Joaquin Valley where these Indians were harvesting
rice.

The United States Secret Service managed to capture the
ringleader and bring him to San Francisco for trial. This was
Stanley Moore's client. The trial attracted a great deal of attention.
The courtroom was filled to overflowing every day.

There was an informant, as there often is in these kinds of
cases. The informant was on the witness stand 15 feet from the
place at the counsel table where Stanley Moore's client sat. As the
informant was testifying, Mr. Moore's client pulled a pistol from his
coat and shot him at almost point blank range.

At that, United States Marshal Holohan, later warden at San
Quentin, who was standing at the back of the courtroom, fired over
the heads of all those people, including Stanley Moore, and hit this
Indian on his left ear.

The defendant?

Yes, the defendant. There was a big uproar. Judge Van Fleet was
on the bench, and he rapped for order and said, "There will be a
ten-minute recess and, Mr. Marshal, clean this stuff up." So, ten
minutes later the court took up again.

And I bet the trial closed fairly promptly?

Yes. That is the most dramatic courtroom story I ever heard.

What other activities did your father get involved in down through
the years in building the Orrick firm?

He was a director of a number of firms: California Pacific Title
Insurance Company, Fireman's Fund Insurance Company,

Crown-Zellerbach Corporation, the San Francisco Bank, Del Monte
Properties Company, PG&E, W. R. Grace & Company. And I am
sure I have left out quite a number.

So, as you can see, just attending those directors meetings
was a full-time job. He turned most of the bond work over to
George Herrington, and he found time to deal with those companies
and many individual clients.

Van Nest: As you were growing up, Judge Orrick, how much time did your
father spend practicing law?

Orrick: He would be at his desk at 5:30 in the morning, and he would

come home about 7:00 at night. He worked very hard at that. A
lifesaver for him was when he and Mother built a house down in
Pebble Beach. Most of the people in the firm were younger than
he was, and every Friday afternoon they would be filling his
briefcase -- the old Southern Pacific train called the Del Monte left
at 3:00, and he would leave the office at a quarter to 3:00 with his
briefcases. The younger guys in the office would be out in the
lobby saying, 'Thank Heavens. Now, fellows, let's have a little fun
around this place."

Van Nest: Was he traveling a lot in his practice? Was he gone from home
overnight or on weekends?

Orrick: Not very much. Fortunately, in those days - I wish we had them

now - they had something called railroad trains. So, instead of
flying to Washington on the red-eye, you took the Overland
Limited, which took four days and three nights to Chicago,
transferred at Chicago to the Broadway Limited, and arrived in New
York the next morning properly rested. It was by no means as
hectic then.

Van Nest: Did he travel to the East and the Midwest a lot?

Orrick: Not a great deal. He represented the Sierra Pacific Power Company

out here. For years, the Sierra Pacific got their power from the
Truckee River, which runs out of Lake Tahoe, and there was
litigation that went on there for 30 years. Dad was the only

lawyer who was in it from beginning to end. He devised a decree
pursuant to which nobody could lower the level of Lake Tahoe
without a written order from the United States District Court for
the Northern District of California.

I remember one of my first jobs was to get such an order
signed by Louis Goodman, Chief Judge of the District. He could
never understand why it was necessary to get a written order, but
he never went into it either, because it didn't take much time. He
just signed it.

Van Nest: Was your father active in politics, community affairs, or Bar
activities in addition to his busy practice?

Orrick: No, not at all. It was all practice. I should say there was some pro

bono work. For example, he was counsel for the Protestant
Episcopal Old Ladies' Home. He was chancellor for a while of the
Diocese of California and attended all the meetings of the trustees
and of the chapter, as they called it then. Down in Pebble Beach
he was, for thirteen years, president of the Cypress Point Club.
That was hardly pro bono, although he didn't get any fee from it.
That is about all I can remember.

Van Nest: Were his political views conservative for that period of time?

Orrick: I would say that he was a Lewis Powell moderate. That is the buzz
word today for a good justice, and that is about where he was. I
would argue every kind of a question with him. It was always with
the understanding that he thought everything over and always
picked the best man -- Republican or Democrat « and it was his
effort to get me to do the same thing.

One summer some of my friends came out to go on a pack
trip: Jack Bingham, who was later a Congressman, Potter Stewart,
and some others. We spent a couple of nights before the trip in
our home at Pebble Beach and also up in the city. We all enjoyed
political argument. I told them, "My Dad is a moderate. He calls
them as he sees them."

So, finally, I said, "Dad, I understand this very sensible

position, but did you ever at any time vote for a person who was
not a Republican?"

life."

And he said, "No, Bill, I haven't. I voted Republican all my

Van Nest: He called the Republicans as he saw them?
Orrick: That's right. He was very good on the positions.

Van Nest: What was it about your father's character that had a lasting impact
on you?

Orrick: I admired him and loved him extravagantly, and he lives with me

today. Professionally, he had no peers. He was thorough in his
research. For example, he and a young lawyer in his office scanned
all three hundred volumes then existing of California Reports
because he didn't trust the index and he didn't want to miss any
point in the brief that he was filing on behalf of the underwriters in
the Golden Gate Bridge case, which he won. He wrote very well,
and he was equally at home in the trial courts as well as in the
appellate courts.

But more importantly, he was a man of impeccable character.
He was kind, gentle, patient and compassionate. His probity and
integrity were appreciated by everyone who came into contact with
him. He had the courage of his convictions, and he was
forthcoming in stating them.

I had the great pleasure of serving with him as a director of
the Del Monte Properties Company. The chief executive officer was
Mr. Samuel F. B. Morse, who liked yes-men about him. But that
never stopped my father from taking and explaining an appropriate
point of view.

This calls to mind a conversation I had with [Attorney
General Robert F.] Bob Kennedy on this subject. I told Bob that I
was having great difficulty in completing a particular project, and,
in passing, I told him, "My father told me never to give up, and, if I
wanted to go through a brick wall or some such thing, I should just

Van Nest:

Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

try and try and try, and, eventually, I would be successful." Bob
said to me that his father's advice to him, in similar circumstances,
was to go around the wall rather than to try and push through it.

Both Downey and I had a superb one-on-one relationship with
him. When we were away at school, we would get thick letters
with important quotations or some views of his own. I preferred
Mother's letters because she gave us news about what was going on
at the old homestead. But Dad wanted us to keep certain things in
mind. He had a number of plaques containing important
inscriptions, such as Thomas Jefferson's inscription at the University
of Virginia: "Enter ye by this gateway and seek the way of honor,
the light of truth and the will to work for man." By means of
these plaques, Dad urged us to follow Polonius' advice to Laertes,
Lycurgus' speech in 331 B.C. to Theocrates, and other wisdom
from the likes of Solomon, Socrates and Lincoln.

We have talked a little bit about your family origins. Where and
when were you bom?

I was born in San Francisco on October 10, 1915.
How many children were in the family?

Just two. My brother Downey was born two years later. And at
that time, our family lived in Berkeley.

D. Early Education

Van Nest: Can you tell us where you lived and how your family lived up until
the time you left home for school?

Orrick: Very briefly, the years from one to eight, I spent in Berkeley. We

had that large block, which we talked about earlier, to roam around
in, and we could have all kinds of games from hide-and-go-seek to

football. There were big lawns on which we could play football, at
our peril, lest we get in trouble with the Japanese gardener.

Van Nest: This was all part of the land that Andrew Downey owned?

Orrick: Yes. During our years there, I went first to the Bentley School,

which I was surprised to hear the other day is still in existence. If s
a private school within a couple blocks of home. Then, in the third
grade, I was sent to Emerson School, which was just a block away,
which was a public school.

To show you what kind of a, perhaps, sissy life I led, on the
first day that I walked into the yard at Emerson School, some little
rough-neck came up, and I hadn't said or done anything.
Nonetheless, he punched me in the nose, and my nose began to
bleed. Nobody had ever taught me how to fight. We didn't have
boxing or wrestling or karate there, so I flailed away at him.

Then the principal came out, and he made a judgment that I
was the guilty one. He ordered me into his office, and he gave me
a dressing down I have never forgotten. And so, it was not a very
auspicious day for me when I walked into Miss Wade's classroom
late, because the principal had been giving me a lecture.

Van Nest: Were you perceived by the group there as a rich kid that was
coming into public school from a private school?

Orrick: Not so much that. A rich kid, yes, whose family owned the whole
block of land across the street and wouldn't let them come in and

Play-
Van Nest: Where did you go on from Emerson?

Orrick: When we moved to San Francisco, which was in 1924, I went to

the Potter School. That was also a private school. We played
football there, I recollect, and sometime later Mr. Potter had to sell
it. And by way of showing you the scholastic standing of the
school, Mr. Potter's next job was as a headwaiter at a restaurant on
California Street.

Van Nest: You told one of your classmates at Yale that Potter was a school for
rich, spoiled kids. Was that what you thought then or what you
think now?

Orrick: Well, that is an overstatement. Anybody could go there who was

rich. There wasn't any question about there being a scholarship or
anything like that. And it went from the first grade up through
high school. But not all of them were spoiled.

Van Nest: Was there a perception in those days that there was a great

distinction between the quality of education you got in the public
and the private schools?

Orrick: Not especially. Our teams played in the San Francisco Athletic

Leagues, baseball and football and basketball. They were the high
school people. We didn't have a league as kids. But they would be
up against some pretty rough-tough fellows from Poly or Galileo.
And Lowell had good teams in those days, I remember.

Van Nest: In later years as a judge, you have had a lot to do with schools and
school systems, particularly here in San Francisco. I think people
would be interested to know: Was there a lot of deliberation in
your family back then as to whether to send Bill Orrick to private
or public school?

Orrick: As far as I was concerned, it was a matter of going where my

father sent me. I never had any choice on that, nor did I have any
interest in seeing if there were other schools I would like to go to.

The times have changed. I remember when we took our son
Bill to look at schools. He had a good SAT score, so we took him
to the East and took him down to Thacher School, where I went.
He made up his own mind where he wanted to go. I wanted him
to go to Thacher, but he couldn't see it. When we visited schools,
Marion and I would make him state his reasons first, why he liked
or disliked the school. We took him to Andover and Hotchkiss and
Deerfield, as well as Midland, Gate, Milton, and Groton. He picked
Groton, so that is where we sent him.

Van Nest: Where did you go after grade school?

Orrick: Thacher.

Van Nest: Where was that?

Orrick: It is in Ojai, California.

Van Nest: What kind of place was Thacher School, and what sort of an
education did you get there?

Orrick: The Thacher School was geographically located at the head of the

beautiful Ojai Valley near the mountains. Mr. Sherman Thacher
started the school in the same year that Mr. Taft started the Taft
School. They were close friends and roommates, I believe, in the
class of '68 at Yale. They intended to and did create very simple
schools. And Mr. Thacher's was a very simple school.

At Thacher each kid had his own horse. You had to take care
of your horse, clean it, ride it, clean the stables and so on. We had
a good curriculum. We didn't play any football, because there was
no place to play it, but our sports included baseball, tennis, track,
and soccer.

If you liked to go on a camping trip, you could do that on
weekends. You could get up your own group of five or six and a
teacher, and we were taught how to saddle a mule, pack it using a
diamond hitch, and wander over those mountains. And that was
very instructive. We did reasonably well in the college board
examinations. Then, most of the class went to Yale. Later on, most
of them went to Stanford.

Van Nest: Thacher was perceived at that time as a sort of a stepping stone
into Yale?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Were you directed to Yale even at that age? Was that something
that you or your parents aspired to?

Orrick: No. I always thought I wanted to go to the University of
California, because when we lived there in Berkeley, and

Van Nest:

Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:
Orrick:

afterwards, I don't think I ever missed a game up at the California
Memorial Stadium. And I was a very enthusiastic California rooter.

The reason I went to Hotchkiss was --

Let's talk about that. Thacher was a high school and you went on
from there to Hotchkiss?

Yes.

What sort of place was that and where was it?

Hotchkiss is in Lakeville, Connecticut. It was as different from
Thacher as night and day. The buildings were beautiful Georgian
style brick buildings. The curriculum was varied and difficult. We
attended chapel every day and twice on Sunday. We took turns
waiting on tables. The pressure was on all the time. I went out
for baseball. And there was track, tennis, hockey and golf. They
had a nine-hole golf course there. And then they had a glee club
and debate team. I was on the debating team, and I was on the
glee club.

Was it at Hotchkiss that you first became interested in politics?

Yes. It really was. The way I got there, which you asked first,
was: At Thacher, in the senior year, there was a dormitory master
who had come out from Milton. He wanted me to go to Milton,
and he talked to me a great deal about that.

I got the idea that I would go to Hotchkiss, because a very
good friend of mine, Pete Pond, had gone the year before, and he
was enthusiastic about it. And the reason I went was that I was
only sixteen when I graduated from high school, and it was
generally thought that another year would be helpful, which it was,
because it picked me up in my studies. The school was tougher.

How did you get involved or interested in politics at Hotchkiss?

This was in the depths of the Depression. As one left New York
City on the train up to Millerton, where we got off to go up to

Lakeville, you went through that then-and-now terrible slum. Guys
were standing around with apples. "How about an apple, kid, ten
cents."

There was a little time between chapel and the first class, and
I used to go into the library and look at the magazines. I came
across The Nation, which was there, so I followed the difficulties of
the country through that magazine and, I guess, Time Magazine.

Van Nest: Did you have a chance to visit Washington, D.C., during your year
at Hotchkiss?

Orrick: Yes. One Easter -- Well, the only Easter I was there, with a couple
of other fellows and our debating coach, a fellow called Harry
Davis. We went down to Washington and took the usual tour
through the Capitol. I don't think we got to the White House. But
in a couple of days, we went through the Capitol and the Lincoln
Memorial and climbed to the top of the Washington Monument,
among other things. That was very thrilling to me. We got there,
I remember, at night, and the Capitol was lit up, and it was really a
great sight.

Van Nest: Was it at Hotchkiss that you first began exchanging correspondence
with your dad on topics of the day and politics and that sort of
thing?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Did you keep up an active correspondence with him while you were
at school?

Orrick: It was pretty active. I didn't have that much time to myself. At
Hotchkiss, they kept you busy all the time.

Van Nest: You mentioned a moment ago the Depression. Was the Great

Depression something that had a lasting impact on you, either while
you were at Hotchkiss or later?

Orrick: Quite a lot, because in the growing-up period, through which we
have just come, we didn't see any "poor people." We didn't see

Van Nest:

Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

people in rags. We didn't see a man in tattered overcoats selling
apples, literally. We just didn't see it. When it came upon me, as
it did for me when I first went to New York, it made a lasting
impression.

I make the same judgments today. I could never understand,
and I don't now understand, why, with the enormous surpluses of
wheat and other grains in this country and others, ten of thousands
of black Africans are starving. As [President John F.] Jack Kennedy
would say, "Well, life never is fair." That may be, but it doesn't
solve that particular problem. So, I was interested in reading about
efforts being made along that line, and particularly with the New
Deal. That was very exciting then.

Was the New Deal something that first came to your attention
while you were at Hotchkiss?

Yes.

What was it about the New Deal that caught your attention?

Well, obviously, strong efforts were being made by the
Administration to get people out of the horrible depression.
Beginning, for example, with the NRA [National Recovery
Administration]. We have talked about price fixing. That was the
whole purpose of NRA. The idea was to fix prices in various
industries and eliminate price competition. The CCC, Civilian
Conservation Corps, put men to work. The WPA, Works Progress
Administration, put people to work. And I thought that was a very
good thing. I thought then, and it's even more true now, that the
rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and the
middle class is just about the same. In this, the most undertaxed
country in the world, it is absurd.

II. COLLEGE YEARS AND THE WAR

A. At Yale University

Van Nest: You went on to college at Yale?
Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

What was it that attracted you to going to Yale?

There again, my good friend Pond preceded me. And Hotchkiss
graduates primarily went on to Yale, Harvard and Princeton. But in
my class, there were more Yale people. I liked the campus.

What sort of experience did you have at Yale?

A great experience. I jumped into things that interested me, and
my main experience at Yale can be told through my activities on
the Yale Daily News. Although I rowed in the fall on a 150-pound
crew and went out for the Dramat on the business side and tried to
get in the glee club, my main interest was in the News.

The News competition started for me in the winter. They had
one competition in the fall and one in the winter and one in the
spring.

When you started at Yale, was law something that was a definite
desire, a career goal in your mind?

Orrick: No. It was certainly in my mind, and I certainly thought I would

go to law school. But I did not shape my course with that in mind.
There weren't many elective courses at that time, and I took the
courses that they served up and worked on them the best way that
I could.

Van Nest: How did you get involved or interested in journalism?

Orrick: Well, I read the News every day, and I thought that I could find
out much more about Yale if I was being a "heeler," as they called
them, for the News. So, that was my main activity throughout my
college career. I entered the winter competition, which was the
toughest because there were more competitors -- about thirty. They
were going to take four or five, and I badly wanted to be one of
them. So, I was up night and day trying to get on the News, and
my studies suffered in the meantime.

Van Nest: How did one go about getting on the News back then?

Orrick: You had to get points, which were awarded for stories that you

covered regularly. If the managing editor told you to go up to the
gym and cover the Yale-Ohio Wesleyan basketball game, that is
what you did. You went out and came back and wrote it up, and
you got so many points for that. If you brought in an unassigned
story, and it was printed, you got so many points for that. You got
more points than the regular work. And if you brought in some
advertising, you got points. So, I was sweating them all. I got
enough points and was elected to the board as a result of that.

Van Nest: Did you have occasion to go down to Washington to get an
unassigned story in pursuit of a board position?

Orrick: Yes, I did. I wanted to get these unassigned points, and I saw how
easy it was to get them if you interviewed somebody who was
important and then wrote it up. A lot of the heelers would grab
lecturers that came to Yale, and I thought I would do a lot better
by myself down in Washington.

So, I started in with Supreme Court Justices, and I
interviewed Justice [Louis D.] Brandeis. I interviewed Chief Justice

[Charles Evans] Hughes [Jr.] . In those days the justices had their
chambers, so to speak, in their respective houses, and they only
went up to the old Senate building for hearings. And everything
that was going on, as far as they were concerned, was down in
their house. There was little of so-called collegiality.

So, when I went to see Chief Justice Hughes, I had made a
date to meet him at noon at his house, and it was on a Sunday. I
went up to the door, trembling, and about five minutes to 12:00, a
butler came and let me in. He took me into the Chief Justice's
library, and I sat there waiting.

Promptly on the stroke of 12:00, the Chief Justice came in
with his full beard, and he was wearing a morning coat and his
striped trousers.

I said, "Mr. Chief Justice, I am Bill Orrick. I am heeling Yale
News, and I would like to have an interview."

He said, "I don't give interviews."
So, my face fell down to here.

But he said, "Sit over there, and we will discuss this. Do you
want to be a lawyer?"

I said, 'Yes, sir."

He said, "Well, my strongest advice to you is: Do not engage
in this silly business of going out for a newspaper. You will have
only one chance in your life to read, and you go into that beautiful
Yale library, into what they call the Linonia Brothers room, and you
read every free moment. You will be grateful for that when you
get to be my age, because you won't have a chance to read again."

I didn't follow his advice, and he was pretty near correct.
That was something I will never forget.

Van Nest: How was it that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was
available to talk on Sunday to a college kid from Yale?

Onick: I think I had an introduction. I can't remember, but that might be

it. Dad knew the Attorney General of Colorado, and the Colorado
Attorney General might have called Hughes' chambers - I just don't
remember. With Brandeis, I had no qualms about calling him on
the phone for an appointment.

Van Nest: He was willing to see you just on a phone call?

Orrick: Yes. And he invited me to come to tea, which I did. He lived with
his sister. And I forget what wisdom I learned, but I had
something I could put in the News.

Van Nest: Did you interview some political figures while you were in
Washington?

Orrick: Yes. I saw James A. Farley, the epitome of the successful politician,
who, after running the campaign, became the Postmaster.

Van Nest: And he ran the Roosevelts' campaigns?

Orrick: Only one of them. He signed his name in green ink, I remember.
He was friendly and jovial and a thorough delight.

I remember, when I was at the Democratic convention in
Chicago in 1956, I was walking across the street with Adlai
Stevenson, and Mr. Farley was going the other way, and he said,
"Hello, Adlai."

Adlai raised his hand, and he turned to me, and he said, "You
know, I never forget a face."

Every politician in the nation knew Farley. I tried to get an
interview with the Secretary of War [George H.] Dem.

Van Nest: Was he tougher to get to?

Orrick: He was much tougher. And I tried to get one with [Aviator

Charles] Lindberg, which didn't work. I got one out here with Joe
Cronin, who was a San Francisco boy, and who was manager -- I
think he was manager of the Washington Senators baseball team

then.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, in connection with getting your points and heeling

the News, did you have occasion to interview any other government
luminaries of the day?

Orrick: Yes, I did. Fortuitously, I had the opportunity of interviewing

President Herbert Hoover.

I was returning to New Haven after Christmas holiday.
Mother and Dad had come down to see me off at the old Oakland
Mole. In those days, one had to take a ferry boat over to the
so-called Oakland Mole where all the trains were.

Mr. Hoover came along, and my dad knew him and
introduced me to him. I asked him if I might interview him for the
Yale Daily News, and he acquiesced and said to come into his
drawing room after the train left Reno the next day.

Van Nest: Mr. Hoover just happened to be on the train?
Orrick: Yes.

In those days, it took the train known as the Overland
Limited four days and three nights to get to Chicago, so there was
a lot of time for the so-called interview. The train left San
Francisco in the evening and got to Reno around 10:00 in the
morning. When it left Reno, it went across the desert en route to
Ogden, Utah. I called on Mr. Hoover in his drawing room. I
wanted particularly to question him concerning certain New Deal
legislation. The so-called New Deal was really new then, because
this was January of 1934.

I started in asking him about some of the "alphabet agencies,"
as they were sometimes called. He answered with great knowledge,
but he was bitter, very bitter, toward his successor, President
[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt. He said that during his, that is, Mr.
Hoover's term in office, he had made suggestions for almost every
one of the agencies that were later made into law or authorized by
statute, and that Franklin Roosevelt had simply copied his material.

He said that anybody who had read Walter Lippmann's columns or
articles about Governor Franklin Roosevelt when he was
campaigning would know that the man had no understanding of
national domestic problems, let alone international problems, and
that he was something of a cheat, because he copied these
alphabetic agencies.

Van Nest: These were the agencies such as the CCC, the NRA, and other
agencies designed to carry out the policies of the New Deal?

Orrick: That's right. Also the SEC, Securities and Exchange Commission,
and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, RFC.

Mr. Hoover said that he had, as I recollect it, task forces
ready to start each one of these agencies, but he had no help
whatsoever from the Congress, and that the only one of the
agencies that kept its initials was the RFC, the Reconstruction
Finance Corporation. And that, of course, was run by Jesse Jones
from Texas and was one of the more important agencies in the
Federal Government.

Other than that discussion, all that I can recollect was the
impression that he made upon me as being a very bright, able,
articulate man, serious and conscientious, but nonetheless a bitter
man. He had, you will recall, been the Administrator of the Food
Administration which was set up in Belgium immediately after
World War I and which he handled very well, having received
decorations from all Western European governments, and
throughout his life had done nothing but public service.

As a matter of fact, just in passing, I would note that Bob
Kennedy had one of his first jobs as a member of what they called
the Little Hoover Commission. Bob thought very highly of Mr.
Hoover.

Van Nest: What was the Little Hoover Commission?

Orrick: Well, it was an efficiency-in-government commission. Bob had gone
to work for him. When you went into Bob's house on Hickory Hill
in McLean, one of the first pictures that one saw, which hung on

the wall on the right-hand side as you went in, was a picture of
Mr. Hoover inscribed to Bob Kennedy.

Van Nest: What was Former President Hoover doing at the time you traveled
on the train with him back East?

Orrick: I think he was just working on his memoirs. He was not in

university life. He was an engineer. They called him the "Great
Engineer," like they call Ronald Reagan the "Great Communicator."
He had the misfortune also of sending General [Douglas] MacArthur
after the veterans who camped on the Mall.

Van Nest: After you earned a seat on the board, did you spend the next four
years at Yale active in the Daily News?

Orrick: Yes. The most active time was the one year when I was the actual
managing editor, and that went from January in junior year to
January in senior year. So, I practically lived over there. It was
my baby. I had to show up every day and try to get "all the news
that's fit to print" about Yale. It was great fun.

Van Nest: Did you have a chance while you were in college to work
professionally as a journalist, outside of the Daily News?

Orrick: Yes. One summer I wanted to work on the FSan Francisco!

Examiner. I called on Mr. John Francis Neylan, one of the best
lawyers in San Francisco, who was a friend of mine as well as my
family, and whose daughter Jane Childs was and is a close friend
of mine. More importantly, he was Mr. William Randolph Hearst's
lawyer and, of course, knew the publisher of the Hearst flagship,
the San Francisco Examiner.

I asked him if he could help me get a job on the Examiner.
and he said, "Why certainly, Bill." He leaned back and picked up
the phone and called Clarence Under, who was then the publisher,
and said, "Clarence, I have got a new reporter for you. He will be
in your office in fifteen minutes." He put it down and said, "That is
all you want Bill?"

I said, "Thanks a lot, Mr. Neylan."

And fifteen minutes later, I was in Mr. Linder's office, who
was very nice. He took me then out to the dry room. The city
editor was Josh Eppinger. Mr. Under left me to the tender mercies
of Josh Eppinger. He had one of those phones on a hook like the
city editor in "The Front Page." He looked at me and said,
"Orrick?"

I said, "Yes, sir."

He said, "Do you see that miserable, stinking, rotten, dirty
little worm sitting at the last desk?"

I said, "Yes, sir."

And all the veteran reporters looked up.

He says, "There is only one person that is worse in this whole

room."

I looked around for him, and he says, "It's you. You go sit
next to him and do what he tells you."

I said, "Yes, sir."
Van Nest: Did you get a beat then?

Orrick: No. Well, yes. I was sort of what you might call a utility infielder.
The regular beats were assigned to the older reporters. But
whenever there was something that the older reporters should have
reported but didn't or something way off their beat, then I would
get the opportunity to go out.

On one occasion, there was a suicide on Telegraph Hill — it
was customary for the crime reporters, from the Examiner and the
Chronicle and the Call Bulletin and the San Francisco News to sit
around a table out at the Hall of Justice and play poker. If
something happened, one guy would go out and come back and tell
the other guys what happened. And then they would all get on the
phone and call the rewrite man in the city room.

Josh said, "These [expletives deleted] are not going to go up
on Telegraph Hill to cover a suicide." He said, "You go. And if
there is somebody else there, you can come back. But you go, and
if there is nobody else there, you bring the story and a picture of
the dead person."

So, I went up on Telegraph Hill. A policeman was standing
outside the house. The house had been sealed. I asked the officer,
"Where is the stiff?"

The cop looked me over -- I don't think I was fooling him.
And he said, "It's in there." So, he let me in. He said, "The body is
covered with the sheet." I jerked the sheet up like that, and I put
it back down. The guy had jumped down on his head, and he was
a mess. There was a picture of him on the wall, which I took.

When I got back to the city room, Eppinger said, "Were any
of those people there?"

And I said, "No."

He said 'You write the story."

Then he said, "Did you get a picture?"

And I said 'Yes."

"Good boy. That's fine."

So, I wrote the story, and he played it up. He had a picture
of the dead man on the front page of the second section with my
story. It turned out that the decedent had been a banker, a vice
president of the Bank of America. The story was one of the most
important in the bulldog edition.

Van Nest: The bulldog edition being --

Orrick: The first edition.

Van Nest: The first edition of the day?

Orrick: Yes. So, that was known as a "scoop." I had another similar

experience with another guy. But I enjoyed the work very much. I
covered two-alarm fires, Commonwealth Club lunches and stuff like
that.

Van Nest: Let's come back to Yale now. Did you continue your interest in
politics when you were a student at Yale?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What sort of political activities and experiences did you have at
Yale?

Orrick: Well, with others -- including Jack Bingham, who was a

Congressman; August Heckscher, who wrote for the New York
Herald Tribune: Potter Stewart; Louis Stone and Harold Turner --
we formed a political union based on the political union at Oxford.
We had the conservative party and the liberal party. And once a
week we would meet and debate. It went along fairly well.

I lost interest in it early, because I always had to be at the
News. I had to put the News to bed, and sometimes that wasn't
until 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning. So, I dropped out. But on the
News, we were indeed political. We saved the position of a person
called Jerome Davis, who was a well-known priest, I think an
Episcopalian priest. I am not sure. But he took up liberal causes,
as so many of them did, and he was being fired from the Divinity
School.

Orrick: Potter Stewart was the chairman of the Board. And I was the
managing editor of the board. He had to write two or three
editorials a week, and then the vice chairman wrote one, and the
next year's chairman wrote one.

He had the idea that Davis was being fired on account of his
liberal leanings. We wrote that story, and, in those days, nobody
had telephones in their rooms save and except the newspaper guys.
I got a call that morning. I had had about four or five hours' sleep,
and I was going to cut the first class. And the call was, "Mr.
Orrick, would it be convenient for you to see the President?"

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

I said, 'Yes, yes."

"He will be in the office in a half an hour."

I said, "I will be there in a half an hour."

And, fortunately, Potter got a call, too. So, Potter and I went
before President Angell. He was no angel. No pun intended.

He really was rough on us. He told us, if the News got into
university affairs like that again, he would see that it wasn't printed
there. And we backed out and thought: There was no use telling
him that the News building is not on university property. It was
built largely through the largess of Henry Luce, who was chairman,
and Britton Haddon, managing editor, who created Time Magazine
after leaving Yale. We were perfectly free to print that newspaper
any place we wanted.

Did you continue to do just that?

And we continued to do just that. We were, I think, a little more
circumspect than we had been in the past.

Did you have a chance to meet President Roosevelt while at Yale?
President Roosevelt, yes.
How did that come to pass?

Well, it was during the fall of 1936, and, of course, he was
campaigning. Yale University was about 99 percent Republican. I
say this to explain the reason that Potter and I were invited to
lunch at the home of Dr. Harvey Gushing in New Haven. You may
recall that Dr. Cushing's daughter, Betsy, married James Roosevelt.

Potter and I, with a lot of the local politicians, including
Governor Cross of Connecticut and Mayor Murphy of New Haven
and many other Democrats in the state, were waiting at Dr.
Cushing's house for the President to arrive. Potter and I were
looking around to find where he was going to come in. We found

the back door and a big ramp built from the ground up into the
door.

While we were looking at it, in comes the big Packard touring
car that he had, top down, secret service men on either side, and
we watched with our mouths wide open as the great man leaned
forward and grabbed the bar and pulled himself up. He always had
these steel braces on his legs, so he had to have big muscles. He
pulled himself up the gangway, and then he got to the top.

He said, "Here, you fellows, help me over this threshold."

So, Potter grabbed one side, and I grabbed him on the other,
and we pulled him over.

I said, "Mr. President, my name is Bill Orrick, and I am from
the Yale Daily News, and I would like to get a little story."

He said, "I was managing editor of the Harvard Crimson, and
when I was managing editor, I put out an extra in New Haven.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

Everybody heard the laugh, and they came and swept us
aside. But I had a story the next day for the front page. It paid
off. That was the only time I met him, but as you can see, I
haven't forgotten it.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, there were a great many personalities in your class at
Yale, the Class of '37. Which ones did you get to know best?

Orrick: First of all, when I came to Yale, I roomed with Bill Chickering.
Bill had been at Thacher and also at Hotchkiss, and so we knew
each other well.

Van Nest: And Bill was from San Francisco?
Orrick: And Bill was from San Francisco.

Van Nest: His dad, like your dad, had started a law firm?

Orrick: That is quite correct. Chickering & Gregory. He had two brothers,

Allen and Sherman, both of whom are very good friends of mine,
who went into the law firm. But Bill, from the earliest times, knew
that, whatever else happened in the world, he didn't want to be a
lawyer. And he turned out to be an excellent writer. He wrote a
book called Within the Sound of These Waves.

During the war, he was a correspondent for Time Magazine.
He was up near the front lines whenever he could get there. He
became quite a favorite of General MacArthur's. As they were
coming into Leyte Gulf, the kamakaze pilots were all around. Bill
was up on the bridge talking to the Australian Lieutenant General,
who was a commander of one of the armies invading the
Philippines.

Bill was never one to take orders from anybody, and so it
came as no surprise to me to hear that when the captain of the
ship, who likewise was on the bridge, ordered him to cross to the
other side because there was a Kamakaze coming in cross-wise, Bill
didn't do anything about it. And the Japanese plane smashed onto
that end of the bridge, killing both him and the General. General
MacArthur named a theater in Yokohama after him called the Bill
Chickering Theater.

Van Nest: What about Potter Stewart? Did you and he become good friends
at Yale?

Orrick: Yes, we became very good friends.
Van Nest: Where was he from?

Orrick: Potter was from Cincinnati. His father was Mayor of Cincinnati.
Then he became Lieutenant Governor of Ohio and, finally, he
became a justice on the Supreme Court of Ohio. He took us to the
1936 Republican National Convention that nominated Alf Land on
for President.

Potter and I became good friends largely on account of the
News. We worked together long hours on the News. Then, in the
senior year, we were thrown into very close contact in our senior

society. And I think that I can say for almost every month that has
passed since then, except during World War II, I have had some
kind of a conversation with him, usually on the telephone.

He was the closest friend that I ever had, and I think that the
loss is not only mine, but it is the country's, because he was really
the balance wheel on the Supreme Court, particularly during the
[Chief Justice Earl] Warren days.

Van Nest: Let's talk a little about Potter Stewart. Was he destined for a
career in law when the two of you were together at Yale?

Orrick: Yes. He had intended to go to law school, but at the end of senior
year, he got a Henry fellowship to Cambridge where he spent a
year, reading for the law, and reading such Roman scholars as
Caius.

Van Nest: How was it that you stayed in such close contact with Potter
Stewart over the years? Was he someone you saw a lot of in
Washington and thereafter?

Onick: Oh, yes. In the first place, we were in the same profession; in the
second place, our friends were the same. Louis Stone used to be
Potter's roommate. He was a very close friend of mine also, so we
always had "friend" problems to talk over.

Van Nest: Did you become something of a confidant of his once he was on
the Supreme Court?

Orrick: Well, we were always very close, and I used to confide in him and
seek his advice on many things, Whenever Marion and I were in
the East, we spent as much time with him and his lovely wife Andy
as we could.

Then, when we moved to Washington, we saw them almost
every Sunday. We would take our kids together and go down to a
park and play touch football, or go out to a battlefield and have a
picnic.

After I left Washington, I got him into the Bohemian Club and

into Zaca camp, which was and is my camp. He had lots of fun in
Bohemia. In between the weekends, we would go up to the
Cedars, which is nine miles from Soda Springs. He loved to fish.
And fishing on the North Fork of the American River is about as
good as there is any place, and he just enjoyed it tremendously.

The only other justices who had ever been members of the
Grove were Earl Warren and Justice [Robert] Jackson, although
Tom Clark, Bill Rehnquist and John Stevens have been guests.

Van Nest: What about Louis Stone: Did you know him well at Yale?

Orrick: Yes, I knew him very, very well. He was very bright. He was as
faithful a friend as you could have. He was humorous. And we
spent a lot of time together at Yale on the News and in the Society.

Van Nest: What became of Louis Stone thereafter? Did he go on to a career
in law?

Orrick: He went to the Yale Law School right away, and then he went into

the Army. He was in military intelligence.

Then, after the war, he went to work for the Cravath [Swaine
& Moore] office for a time.

Then he decided he would like to go into movies. David
Selznick hired him as kind of a special assistant, and he didn't like
that too much. He finally went to work for ASCAP. That's the
American Society of Composers and Publishers. Then he went over
and worked for CBS. All of this was in New York.

Regrettably, in 1958 he committed suicide.

Van Nest: Were there any other classmates at Yale, Judge Orrick, that you
became close friends with?

Orrick: Jack Field was another one. He was our class secretary. He was a
good friend. He had worked on Time, and then he ran his family
company, Warner Brothers. Then he took that public, and I think
he resigned shortly thereafter.

Van Nest: Jack Field has written a book about your class called Rendezvous
with Destiny about the class of '37. Was there a feeling when you
were in college that your class was a special class? You certainly
had a number of people who went on to prominent careers.

Orrick: No, there was not. And, if there had been, it would have been

knocked out of us by Dean Walden. One of our classmates, and a
very good friend, was John Alsop, who was a candidate for
Governor of Connecticut and a long-time State Senator in
Connecticut, a cousin of the Roosevelts.

During the first two weeks at Yale, he thought it would be
useful to take the gasoline caps off all the cars parked on Elm
Street. He was apprehended by the local constabulary and
sentenced to see Dean Walden, who said, "Mr. Alsop, you are a
member of the worst class that has ever come to Yale, and you are
the worst member in that class." So, we haven't forgotten it.

Nonetheless, we had our share of prominent people. Besides
Potter Stewart, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, we had
a senator, Peter Dominick, from Colorado; Billy Moore, who was
CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of Banker's Trust; and Roger
Milliken, who has run Deering-Milliken, and who is very able and
very active in politics in his part of the country; Dr. Harvey Brooks,
who is a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics and Dean of the School of
Engineering at Harvard.

Van Nest: Was there a sense of concern among the class about the crisis
developing in Europe at that time?

Orrick: But we were very much aware of the war in Europe, because we
had exchange scholars with colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, and
suddenly they had to leave Yale to join the English armed forces.

I recall very well Mr. Van Santvoord, who was the
headmaster at the Hotchkiss School, coming down to New Haven --
three or four of us had lunch with him -- and he asked us when we
were going to sign up. He was very serious about it, because he
had been a machine gunner in the First World War, and he wanted
to know why we hadn't gone to England and gotten into uniform.

Van Nest: This was in 1937?

Orrick: Yes. So, we were aware of what was going on, including, of

course, the celebrated renunciation of the throne by Edward the
VIII. We sat up all night and listened to that.

Van Nest: You graduated from Yale in 1937?
Orrick: 1937, yes.

B. With Edward Carter and the Institute of Pacific Relations

Van Nest: What things did you think about doing after you left Yale?

Orrick: Either going to law school or going to work at a newspaper, and I
wasn't quite sure. Then, I had the opportunity of traveling with
Mr. Edward C. Carter, who was the Secretary General of the
Institute of Pacific Relations.

Van Nest: What was the Institute of Pacific Relations?

Orrick: It was a nonprofit corporation formed, I believe, in California and
designed to make people on the West Coast and, particularly,
business leaders, familiar with the other countries on the rim of the
Pacific Basin, such as, obviously, China, Japan, Russia, Indochina,
and so on.

Van Nest: How had this organization come to your attention?

Orrick: A good friend of my mother's, Mrs. Emma McLaughlin, whom Dad
always referred to as the leader of the intelligentsia, suggested that
it might be interesting for Bill Chickering and myself to attend an
annual meeting of the Institute at Yosemite. I was very pleased to
do so.

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:

My job, when I got down there, was as a rapporteur for a
particular conference. The meeting was attended by A. V.
Alexander, First Lord of the British Admiralty; Mr. Yoshizawa,
Foreign Minister of Japan; Mr. Motylev, from the Soviet Union;
Newton D. Baker, the Former Secretary of War from the United
States; and Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, President of Stanford University,
was President of the institute. And there were other people there.
I remember Eleanor Heller being there.

What took place at the conference?

Discussions with respect to mutual defense. I remember a great
deal was made of the so-called Triangular Defense, the Panama
Canal, the Hawaiian Islands and Seattle. There was considerable
talk about broadening markets and immigration laws and that kind
of thing. Their programs throughout the week were excellent. I
remember, during the latter part of the conference, Owen Lattimore
came. Bill Chickering picked him up in an old Ford, and Mr.
Lattimore had just been out in Mongolia. He told Chick that was
the softest thing he had sat on for nine or ten months, the seat of
that Ford.

Did you then take on regular employment with the IPR, following
your graduation from Yale?

No. What I did do, though, was take advantage of a chance to go
with Mr. Carter, who was the Secretary General of the Institute,
and travel with him.

I went to Europe in the summer with Potter Stewart and
Louis Stone and some others, and then I met Mr. Carter in Geneva.
He had just come from Manchuria, where the Japanese soldiers had
blown up a bridge that belonged to China. He would go to the
foreign offices of these various countries, and they all expressed
great interest in what he had to say in his assessment of the
situation, because it was very serious.

As I said, I picked him up in Geneva, and then we went to
Paris. Then we went to Amsterdam, then to London, and then
came back to New York and made a swing out in the Midwest.

Then we came to the far West. At that point, I decided that I
would leave him, and I went to the Graduate School of Business at
Stanford.

Van Nest: What had been your role with Mr. Carter? What was the service
you were providing?

Orrick: As a kind of an aide who does everything. I helped him lift his

suitcase, take charge of the files that he had. I was supposed to be
able to take shorthand, but I never mastered the machine. So, I
wasn't particularly valuable as a secretary then or now.

Van Nest: Did your affiliation with the Institute become a source of trouble
later on in your career?

Orrick: Yes, it did indeed. When I was in the Army as a private soldier, I
had made application to get into the Counterintelligence Corps.
The Army always ran, quite properly, a record check, and they
found that I had been in the Institute of Pacific Relations. The
Institute of Pacific Relations was on the FBI [Federal Bureau of
Investigation] List because its American Secretary, who was an
engaging, attractive, bright man called Frederick Vanderbilt Field,
was a card-carrying communist.

So, it was kind of a McCarthy-like situation. If you were
tarnished by attending a meeting at which Mr. Field was the
speaker, or some other such thing, then you, too, were dangerous.

Van Nest: And that is because Mr. Field was --

Orrick: He was a "card-carrying communist." So, it took me a long time to
get over that hurdle and finally get into the Counterintelligence
Corps.

C. In the Army Counterintelligence Corps

Van Nest: You did serve in the armed forces of the United States?

Orrick: Yes, I did.

Van Nest: What branch?

Orrick: Military intelligence.

Van Nest: How did you get into military intelligence?

Orrick: Well, Pearl Harbor Sunday was December 7th, and on Monday, the
8th, I went down to see if I could enlist in the Marine Corps or in
the Navy or the Army. I went to all three places, and I couldn't
pass the eye test. So, then I got into our community air raid
warden business. I sat on a board with two police captains to
select air raid wardens. Five months later, I was ordered to report
on May 9th, 1942, to the Army recruiting station.

It's of some interest, perhaps, that, before that date, at the
instigation of my good friend and father-in-law of our daughter
Marion, Ike Livermore, we took a trip through the Owens Valley on
the east side of the Sierra to one of the places where the Japanese
had been sent. You will recall that General Dewitt, commanding
the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army, thought that the
Japanese living in California would turn into spies and bombers and
saboteurs, and arranged to have President Roosevelt issue that
infamous order which deprived the Japanese of their homes and
their fields that they had diligently cultivated for years, and sent
them to these relocation camps, which were nothing more than
zoos.

Van Nest: What was your reaction to that order at the time?

Orrick: At the very time, I thought that it was silly because Honolulu was
loaded with Japanese, and they weren't concerned about the
problem down there. I was outraged when I saw a couple of
Japanese in behind this barbed wire who called me by name, and I
picked them out, and we talked about it.

They were forced to sell their land at forced sale, and their
land was among the richest lands in the country. It lay primarily in
the Salinas valley, right in the middle of the "Salad Bowl of

America." The reason there are a lot of rich people down there
today is because they bought these lands at fire-sale prices, and the
Japanese were never recompensed for their loss.

Van Nest: Once you got into the Army, how was it you found your way into
the Counter-intelligence Corps?

Orrick: You take an intelligence test, and then they try to figure, when you
first come in, where you would be useful.

I was up doing basic training at McClellan Air Force Base
near Sacramento. After a day, and not much longer than that,
maybe a week after I had finished the training, I got orders to go
to San Francisco and report to the Counterintelligence Corps. The
headquarters of that was out in the Presidio. The head of it was
Colonel Pash, who used to be a gym teacher at Hollywood High
School.

I was assigned to San Francisco. So, I took off my uniform
and got back into civvy clothes and went down to the Balfour
Building and rapped on the door of the Olsen Mineral Supply
Company and went in, and there were my fellow spooks.

We were sent to school in Chicago, to the FBI school. While
there, we learned such useful things as how to pick locks and steal
things and tap telephones and tail people. We always enjoyed that,
because the guy that you were tailing would go out, and he would
go into the bar at the Palmer House, and we would go in a little
bit afterwards and sit around the comer. If we were spied, if he
saw us, why, then, we got bad grades. But, they were always nice
enough to take us to these great places.

Then I went to another CIC school, which was to learn how
to investigate a sabotaged airplane. And that was a 100 percent
disaster for me and for the country. I got in old jeans and coveralls
and went down to the hiring hall at 4:00 in the morning.

As soon as I arrived at the plant, somebody yelled, "Hey, get
in line now. Go get your tools."

So, I had a big toolbox they gave me, and the guys behind
the bar said, "What do you want?"

I didn't know what to ask for. "Some pliers."
They gave me pliers.

"You need a ball peen hammer, you need 'this' and 'that,' and
you need a wrench. What kind of wrench do you want? Female
or a male?"

So, I thought, when they said, "What do you want with your
wrench, a male or female?" this was some kind of a joke.

I said, "Ha! Ha! Ha!"

The guy says, "Tell me what you want!"

Well, I would say "How about a female?"

Tine." He picked up the wrench and threw it in my basket.

So, that was a bad experiment. I guess I was there for the
full two weeks. They did have a little classroom work.

Van Nest: What was the Counterintelligence Corps engaged in when you
finally got back on the post and out in a job?

Orrick: One of the missions assigned to the Corps in the United States was
to check backgrounds of applicants for sensitive positions. We had
to write a report, which was called a CIR-1, after a personal
investigation. That was name, date, birthplace, father's birthplace,
mother's place, education, employment -

Van Nest: And your job was to check it all out?

Orrick: Yes. And go to the school. If he went to Emerson School, you
went to Emerson School and looked for his report card, and stuff
like that.

Then we also had any number of so-called suspect persons in
the area. We would tail them to meetings, photograph them, go
into different houses. All that type of covert work. I remember,
there was a very important Italian called Sylvester Andriano, who
was supposed to stay in Chicago. But he liked to come back to San
Francisco. Every time he'd come back, they thought he was going
to bring something from Mussolini. We had to follow him and
report on his activities.

Van Nest: Was any of that work productive, as far as you knew?

Orrick: The personal background of persons who would be dealing with

classified material was important to the officers making such
assignments. Then overseas, it became quite a different operation,
and I wasn't in it then.

Van Nest: You were strictly here in San Francisco?

Orrick: Except when I went to Phoenix to tail a guy, and this guy was
going out and picking cotton. So, that was my job. I was
supposed to follow him. And they paid by the amount of cotton
you picked. You didn't get a daily or an hourly wage.

So, he started up this row, and I waited until he got up here.
And then I started up, and he went down this way. So, that is the
way it went. Your fingers get sore, they bleed. And you get
through, and this guy -- I don't know if he knew I was tailing him
-- put his bag on the scale, and he got eight or nine or ten dollars.
I put my bag on the scale, and the guy looked at me, and he says,
"Fifty cents."

Then, we were in a little detachment -- Captain Mountjoy was
the Commander - And he said, "Orrick, we are going to really build
you fellows up. We are going down to the YMCA at 6:00 in the
morning, get a little workout. I want you guys to be able to box."

One of the agents was the captain of the San Jose boxing
team. And I knew that. Mountjoy says, "All right, Orrick, why
don't you get in and spar a bit with Edwards."

So, I said, 'Yes, sir."

I climbed through the rope. I didn't even know how to box
at all, but I was watching these guys, and I had been to some
movies. Mountjoy yelled at us, "Come on, you fellows, mix it up.
What do you think this is, a dance?"

And so, I mixed it up a little bit and, by pure accident, I hit
my opponent on the nose. Nobody likes to get hit on the nose. All
of a sudden, there was a flurry of fists on my head and my heart.

Mountjoy says "Time! Time!"

And I was black and blue and had a nose bleed. I tell you.
That was --

Van Nest: The joys of being in the Army?
Orrick: The joys of being in the Army.

Van Nest: Did you then move on into a special branch of military intelligence
in Washington?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What was the work of that unit?

Orrick: We reviewed raw translations of intercepted, wireless messages and
then wrote them up in such a way as would be intelligible to our
clients. We had very distinguished clients. In Washington they
were limited to President Roosevelt, General [George C.] Marshall,
General [Henry Harley "Hap"] Arnold of the Army Air Force,
Admiral King, and the Secretary of State.

Van Nest: I take it that you had a sensitive job that made your affiliation with
the IPR suspect?

Orrick: Yes. Exactly.

A courier would take these little daily booklets to the clients

and hand it to them, and they would read it while he was in their
office, and then he would return it to our branch. The reason the
secrecy was so important was that the English had broken the
German code, and at NASA we had broken the Japanese diplomatic
code, as well as a number of their top military codes. This was
extremely valuable because we knew where the enemy was going to
strike.

One of the tragedies of it was Mr. [Winston] Churchill was on
his way down to Cliveden, his country place. A British courier on a
motorcycle stopped his car and told him that they were certain that
the next wave of German planes was going to Coventry. Mr.
Churchill had to make the decision whether he should call Coventry
and alert the people there, because it was just a matter almost of
minutes, or whether he should take the chance of the German
finding out that the British had broken their codes, as would have
been the case if he had notified Coventry.

He decided that he would save more lives if he just kept his
counsel and did not warn Coventry. He did not, and Coventry was
saturated with bombs and had to be completely rehabilitated after
the War.

So, it was the same thing with us having broken the Japanese
code, the so-called Magic Code. The British called theirs Ultra. We
kept Magic as tightly as we could and did very well with it.

For example, after the July 22nd attempt at bombing of
Hitler, where you will recall Count Von Staffenberg left his
briefcase filled with a bomb which was to go off after he left the
room and was apprehended doing so, we got detailed information
about all this from the Japanese Ambassador.

Van Nest: Through the code?

Orrick: Through the code. And he wired a very complete story back to
Tokyo, and, of course, our people got it as it was coming.

The Japanese Admiral, who was shot down near New Guinea
- I have forgotten his name - we were able to intercept his plane

and shoot him down because we had broken the Japanese code and
knew what time he was leaving and on what kind of a plane and
where he was going. It was easy to plot the course. There were
many, many incidents like that during the four and a half years of
the war.

Van Nest: For what period of time did the United States possess the decoded
information?

Orrick: At least from December 7th.

One of the tragedies of December 7th, which was learned
about a week later, was not that General Marshal was out riding
horseback, having been warned, having been given the so-called
"Winds Message," which was meant to - well, which conveyed the
news that the Japanese were going to strike at Pearl Harbor. But a
week or two or three later, as an investigation was being made and
people were pulling out the papers and the tapes, there it was, not
translated from Japanese into English, the particular cable ordering
Admiral Nomora to attack Pearl Harbor.

Van Nest: And that was found where?

Orrick: Practically on the cutting room floor, so to speak. It was found in
the office in NASA where they should have translated it.

Van Nest: Someone just passed over it?
Orrick: Yes. A major goof.

Van Nest: Were there a lot of other lawyers serving in Special Branch in
Washington?

Orrick: Yes, there were. That, of course, was a totally different operation.
There were a number of distinguished lawyers and academics,
including Lloyd Cutler, who was later Counsel to President Carter;
Jack Bingham, who was a Congressman from the Bronx; Telford
Taylor, who was abroad; and Lewis Powell, who was working in
our London office and would go back and forth; and a host of
others.

Van Nest: How was it that so many lawyers got involved in Special Branch?

Orrick: Because Colonel McCormick, who was in charge of the final editing

of that daily journal, which he would rewrite and rewrite, was a
Cravath lawyer, and he wanted lawyers. And the commander of
the unit was General Carter W. Clark. He was a very military type,
but he let McCormick pick his staff. So, that is how we got in.

Van Nest: Was the information you were providing the primary source of
military intelligence that people like Roosevelt were receiving at
that time?

Orrick: Yes, so far as the diplomatic intelligence went. The military

intelligence consisted, among other things, of translations of reports
made by Japanese commanders to their superiors. We would
summarize their reports for the benefit of the Air Force and the
Army. For example, a U.S. squadron would bomb trains and
bridges on the Indochina coast. When they returned and were
debriefed, they might report that they "destroyed two bridges, an
entire Japanese train, and set on fire a warehouse." Then we
would get a report on the same mission from the Japanese and they
would report, for example, "Four American planes overflew
such-and-such a bridge, dropped their bombs in the water, and
didn't touch the bridge. Trains are running partially damaged."

Well, that is human nature. The guys coming home to be
debriefed wanted to tell them that the mission hadn't been wasted.
And on the other hand, the Japanese didn't want to report to
headquarters that they had been beaten up. So, that was of some
use.

The most use of the lower-type intelligence was order of
battle intelligence, and that was useful to the commander in the
field, but way down there, down at the regiment or battalion
command level -- and we didn't do that there. That was done out
in Honolulu.

Van Nest: We got a little bit ahead of ourselves. Let's talk now about law

school. Did you enter law school prior to the time that you served
in the Army?

Van Nest:

Orrick:

Orrick: Yes. You will recall that I left Carter in 1937, at the end of '37.

So, from January to June of 1938, I was at the Graduate School of
Business at Stanford. The reason I was there then was because I
couldn't get into law school at that time. Boalt Hall didn't start
until the fall. When the fall came, I went to law school, and for
the three years, rather uneventful years -- law school years are
tough, as you know better than I -- that was about it. I lived at
my aunt's house with two friends, Ed Washburn and Al Wright, the
first year. We were about ten blocks from the campus, so we
walked up there. And the next two years, I lived at home on
Pacific Avenue and commuted by automobile.

Were there some prominent faculty at the time, at the University of
California, that you had the benefit of seeing?

Yes. There was James Patterson McBaine, who was our evidence
teacher and who had a fine reputation. He was a fine man. There
was Henry Ballantyne, who taught corporations. He had a fine
reputation. They had all published a good deal. There was William
Warren Ferrier, who taught real property and future interests.

Van Nest: Was Roger Traynor on the faculty at that time?

Orrick: Roger Traynor, I think, was just leaving the faculty to join the
Court. He, of course, became probably the best known Chief
Justice of California ever. He had a very high reputation. He
taught tax while we were there, one or two years. I remember
that.

Van Nest: You are a well-known federal judge now. What sort of a student
were you in law school?

Orrick: Not a particularly good student. The Law Review you had to make

on the basis of your grades. I didn't make the Law Review on
grades. I was highly annoyed. But, in those days, we didn't go
around and kick to the teachers about grades. But I was annoyed.

Van Nest: Annoyed with yourself or with the faculty?

Orrick: Well, with myself, primarily. If you are not on the Law Review.

Van Nest:
Orrick:

you could submit articles. So, I submitted a note and two
comments, which was more than any member of my class who was
on the Law Review got published. And that stood me in good
stead, and has for quite a while, when I was being considered for
different things.

When did you leave the Army?
June 16th, 1946.

D. At the Orrick Firm

Van Nest: What did you do after leaving the service?

Orrick: I went back into my father's office. He had a small room there for
me. I was assigned to work with Mr. George Herrington, who did
municipal bond business. That is what I did for the first couple
years after I came back.

Van Nest: Had it occurred to you ever to work somewhere other than your
dad's firm?

Orrick: Yes. When I got out of law school, I thought that I would like to
work as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and, of course, the Democrats
were in then, and I thought maybe I could do that.

Van Nest: Who was the U.S. Attorney at that time?

Orrick: Chauncey Tramutolo.

Van Nest: Did you explore that possibility?

Orrick: Yes, a little bit with Bill Malone, who was sort of the -- They used
to call him the Tammany Hall leader in San Francisco, head of the
Democratic machine, and, of course, there's never been any

Democratic or Republican machine, either, any place in California.
Van Nest: How did you know Bill Malone?

Orrick: I knew that he was a lawyer and that he was active in the

Democratic party. And somebody I talked to said, "Go and talk to
Mr. Malone."

Van Nest: Was your dad surprised by the thought that you wanted to be a
criminal lawyer?

Orrick: I didn't necessarily want to be a criminal lawyer. I wanted to try
cases. But after the War, I gave up the idea, because all these
people that were equal with me in the firm before I went away,
and had flat feet or something like that, had moved way up in the
firm. I wanted to regain my rightful place, so I got in and dug.
It's always points, you know. That is the name of the game.

Van Nest: What sort of work did you have at the Orrick firm those first
couple years out of the Army?

Orrick: Besides the bond work, I did some probate work. I did some

corporation work, some of my friends came to me for advice for
different things in connection with their proposed organization,
things like that. They were the only clients I had, and I fixed them
to me with hoops of steel, because the firm only had about fifteen
lawyers in those days.

Van Nest: How many?

Orrick: Fifteen. And it was considered one of the best firms in town.

Pillsbury had forty-five, and they were thought to be enormous. It
was kind of dog-eat-dog. Each partner had his clients. Most of the
clients were my father's; all the securities clients were Tom
Dahlquist's; and the municipal bond clients were George
Herrington's. That is the way it was. It wasn't like it was later on,
where you develop expertise in a particular branch of the law.

Van Nest: You developed clients, and you served the needs of those clients?

Orrick: That's right.

Van Nest: Did you have a strong interest then in trying cases?

Orrick: Yes. I guess I tried a couple of cases. But, I remember, the first
one was on behalf of Mr. Yanulawich, who was a Czech. He
wanted to run his own restaurant. And the lessor of the restaurant,
he thought, had gypped him. We went out to Municipal Court,
where Judge Joseph Golden presided. He looked like a big Alaskan
husky, hair out all over here. Mr. Yanulawich could hardly wait to
get his day in court.

So, the judge called us in, and he said, "I think you boys
better settle this."

My client says, "No. I want my day in court."

The judge says, "Well maybe you better listen to your lawyer."

So, he whispered like that, and I said, "Well, we will go
outside and talk about it for a little bit."

"Well," he says, "if you don't do it, I will take the bench in
fifteen minutes, and we will go through it. It's a short case."

I went outside and said, "Just as sure as I am standing here,
that judge is going to stick it to you."

And he said, "I don't understand it. They told us everybody
had a day in court. Judges were fair."

I said, "If you want fair treatment, you split the difference
with this guy."

"No."

I said, "Okay."

So, the judge comes out and I make a brief opening statement
and call my client, and the judge had his hands covering his face.

Van Nest: Not interested?

Orrick: Not interested, and actually sleeping. So, I turned to the other
lawyer, and the other lawyer was silently laughing.

If the judge is sleeping on the bench, how can you awaken
him without irritating him? It's bad enough with the jury giving
them that seventh inning stretch help. But this -- I had waited a
long time.

Finally, the judge looked and said, "Are you all done?"

I said, "Just two more questions, your honor."

"All right."

I asked my questions, and he said, "Now are you done?"

'Yes, your honor."

"Mr. 'So-and-So,' you want to cross-examine him?"

The guy says, "No, I don't want to cross-examine him."

He says, "Judgment for the defendant."
Van Nest: Just like that?
Orrick: Just like that.
Van Nest: That was your first trial?
Orrick: That was the first trial. I wish I had kept a picture of him.

Van Nest: In those first few years of practice, was most of your work outside
the courtroom?

Orrick: Most of it was outside. When I first came out of the Army and first
started doing the bond work, there were a lot of bonds that hadn't
been properly issued, and we needed curative statutes and new

trials and so on, so I rode circuit for two or three months in a
number of little towns in Northern California and Sacramento,
trying to get the procedure straight. But, save and except for that,
I was pretty well tied down.

Van Nest: How were you received by your dad's partners and the other senior
lawyers in the firm?

Orrick: I think I was well received by everyone except one important
partner, and that is just one of those things.

Van Nest: Just a personality situation?
Orrick: Yes, personality, primarily.

Van Nest: Did you have time during this early point in your career for
charitable community activities?

Orrick: Yes. I worked it in. I used to spend my noon hours, as well as a
good many evenings, doing it. And, in the course of the years, I
was president of the Community Chest of San Francisco and several
charitable agencies, including, the Family and Children's Agency, the
Mission Neighborhoods Center, and some others. I was also active
in my church. I was a trustee of Grace Cathedral for a good many
years, as well as being on the Standing Committee of the Diocese of
California.

Van Nest: What was the Mission Neighborhood Center?

Orrick: An organization in the Mission District consisting of two clubhouses
where young kids from six to fifteen could come could do artistic
projects or play basketball or take part in any one of a number of
other activities, which they would otherwise be doing out in the
street.

Van Nest: Was the Mission, at that time in the early '50's, a depressed area
economically?

Orrick: No. It really wasn't. It was beginning to lose its character as the
location for San Francisco Irish in San Francisco, and more and

more Hispanics were moving in.
Van Nest: And that was occurring during the 50's?
Orrick: Yes.

E. With the California Olympic Organizing Committee

Van Nest: The Olympics came to California during that period. Did you play
a role in that?

Orrick: Yes, I did.

Alexander Gushing had been a client of mine, and I helped
him do work up in Squaw Valley where the Olympics finally took
place. He would not take my advice on a number of matters, so I
terminated our relationship. So, I was quite surprised one day to
get a phone call from Gushing, from what is now John F. Kennedy
airport.

He said, "I need your help. I have just gotten the Olympic
Winter Games for 1960. May I come and see you?" And I said
'Yes," thinking what a hare-brained idea it was.

So, Gushing came to see me. He explained that he had
lobbied each member of the International Olympic Committee and
that they had finally granted him and California the right to hold
the 1960 Games.

I said, "What did you tell them about the cost of the Games?"
He said, "I wasn't quite clear on that."

I said, "Who is going to put up the money? You and Jock
McLean and Lawrence Rockefeller, the others? Have you talked to
them about it?"

He said, "No, I haven't talked to them about it."

I said, "Who is going to put up the money?"

He said, "I don't know. Can't you give me some help?"

Van Nest: At that time, was there anything up at Squaw Valley, or had a
location been fixed for the Games?

Orrick: No, indeed, it hadn't.

Van Nest: And Gushing had an open-ended invitation to conduct the Games
here in California?

Orrick: That is absolutely right. And even worse than that, he had certified

to the Committee that he had certain ski runs and a great place on
which a bobsled run could be constructed, without having title to
the property.

He showed me the picture. I know the area up there. I said,
"Whose property is that?"

He said, "That is all public land."

And I said, 'That is all under the control of the United States
Forest Service?"

He said, 'Yes."

I said, 'You have already encroached on it, and they can
throw you out on thirty days' notice at any time."

"Well," he said, 'you work with them, and we will get it
done."

So, you can see what a job there was. But I took it on, and
the first thing I did was get my good friend Prentis Hale interested
in it. He thought it would be a great challenge. So, in no time, he
had a couple of his friends help on the Organizing Committee, and
then we set about to sell the deal to the State of California.

The governor at the time was Governor [Goodwin] Knight,
and the people on the Organizing Committee were influential
Republicans, so he was willing to back the effort to raise a million
dollars. We asked him if he would appoint a Commission to
oversee the disposition of that million dollars. We gave him the
names of the people that were supposed to be on the Commission,
and he duly appointed them.

Right away, it was obvious that we could not do very much,
even in those days, for a million dollars.

Van Nest: Was anyone taking a look to see what the total projected cost of
the Games would be?

Orrick: There were some of the best businessmen in California on that
committee: Bob DiGiorgio of DiGiorgio Company; Reese Taylor,
who was CEO of the Union Oil Company; as well as Mr. Charles R.
Blyth of Blyth & Company; and others. And that is the very
question that they asked. I let Prentis answer those kind of
questions, which he did astutely. He thought and believed that this
would be a great feather in the cap of California and that
everybody should get behind it. We had a very enthusiastic group.

Van Nest: And you were primarily responsible for the legal work of the
Commission?

Orrick: Yes. And it wasn't just pro bono. We were compensated, but in a
way it was pro bono because we only charged half, or something
like that, of our time. And I had two other lawyers in the office
working all the time. The legal problems were enormous.

Van Nest: What sort of legal problems were there?

Orrick: Well, to begin with, we had to get easements for the trail runs from
any number of people, and that took up a lot of time. Then we
had all kinds of contracts to draft and a number of other matters,
including getting the television, which we needed and which we
counted on for a good deal of our money.

Van Nest: Was it the American Broadcasting Company that was the leader in

broadcasting the Olympic Games, even back then?
Orrick: I am not sure. I am just not sure.

Prentis and I went to New York to sell it to the TV stations.
We worked through J. Walter Thompson and a couple of
advertising agencies. We were there for about two weeks, doing
nothing but palling on these people and negotiating a contract.
Finally, we were able to do that.

Van Nest: I take it, it wasn't the plum then that it is today.

Orrick: Yes. That is absolutely right. It was a daily headache to keep

going to accomplish what Gushing had so offhandedly promised, the
Olympic Winter Games. Among other things, we had to satisfy, not
only the International Olympic Committee, but we had to satisfy the
Board of Governors, or whatever they call them, of the various
sport federations, skiing, ice skating, hockey, the whole business.

As far as hockey went, we needed, quite obviously, a suitable
ice rink, and we did not have the funds to build an appropriate
rink.

So, as a last resort, Hale DiGiorgio and I went to Washington
to lobby the Congress. The Republicans were in power at that
time. DiGiorgio and Prentis and other California Republicans on
our committees were substantial contributors. So we finally got the
Department of Defense to add $6 million to its defense budget,
which would be used to construct a hockey rink.

Van Nest: How was the Department going to fit this into the defense of the
United States?

Orrick: I will tell you, we were delighted, of course, to get the money. But
I was concerned about the very thing you just mentioned. So, I
went back to the Pentagon and talked to an Assistant Secretary of
Defense and told him how we were going to keep track of the
money. We were going to open a special bank account, have it
audited quarterly by certified public accountants, make periodic
reports to the Department of Defense and to the General

Accounting Office.

When I stopped, the Assistant Secretary looked at his watch
and said, "You have been talking about ten minutes. In that time,
we have spent about $100 million. So, kindly leave."

So I said, "All right, but I am going to file my reports." We
did build what became known as the Blyth Arena and had the most
exciting Soviet-American hockey competition ever, up until a few
years ago, when it was the same kind of thing.

But the postscript of it is, when I became Assistant Attorney
General in charge of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice,
the Fraud Section chief said, "We have a problem out there in
California with the hockey rink."

I said, "What is the problem?"

He said, "The rink was built about six or eight or ten feet
onto government property, and it's got to be torn down, and we are
going to sue the Olympic Organizing Committee."

I looked him and smiled and said, "That is one lawsuit we are
not bringing this year."

Van Nest: And the Blyth Arena was actually on government property?

Orrick: Yes. At the end of the Olympics, Pat [Edmund G. Sr.] Brown was
Governor. Pat, in a mood that frequently overcame him, agreed on
the part of the State of California to buy, not only the Blyth Arena,
but the dormitories that we had built, all on Forest Service land,
and the ski runs and so on, so we would be able to come out
whole.

I am very fond of Pat, and I consider him a good personal
friend. I see him every summer. But he did not follow through.

Van Nest: Did you have any occasion to travel overseas as part of your

Olympic efforts?

Orrick: Yes. We had to travel to Bulgaria, to Sofia, where the International
Olympic Committee was having its meetings, because we had to
make sure that the IOC would not make claim to monies coming
from the television, and that that money would come directly to us.
We also had to meet with the directors of these sport federations.

That was hard work, and it was hard because Bulgaria was
just a caricature of a communist country. We were met at the
airplane by our keepers. One person in their secret police was
assigned to each one of us. It was about 8:00 at night, so, when
we got into the hotel, they said that they would take our bags up,
and that was fine, and that they would register us, and that was
fine.

I had a little briefcase, a little flat one that I had tucked
under my arm. They told us to go right in to dinner. We went in
through a revolving doors. My keeper said, "Mr. Orrick, I will take
your briefcase."

I said, "Oh, that won't be necessary, thank you very much."

And he said, "Well, I would like to do it. I don't want you to
feel embarrassed when you walk in there with a briefcase."

I said, 'You don't have to worry about that. I won't be."

All I had in it was a draft of some contracts and things like
that, but I thought I would hang on to it. So, I kept it. As the
door went around and I went in, he gave the briefcase a
tremendous yank and pulled it away from me. I had a decision to
make instantly: Was I going to chase him around the revolving
door, or was I going to walk in in a stately and dignified fashion
with my colleagues? I chose the latter.

When I got to my room that night in this brand new hotel,
typical of Bulgarians, I looked in my briefcase as well as in my
suitcase. And, of course, they had been through it, because the
order of the papers was changed.

Before we went, the people in the security division of the
State Department told us that our rooms would be bugged, and
they weren't about to send in the Marines for us if we misbehaved.
So, it was kind of scary in a way. In the morning as soon was we
got up, instead of being plied with orange juice, we would be plied
with slivovitz, a prune brandy. So, it was difficult to stay on your
feet for fourteen or sixteen hours, to put it mildly, particularly
when you had this keeper with you.

If I wanted to go across the street to have a beer, I would tell
the keeper, "I am going over there to have a beer, and I will be
sitting in the third row, if I can, because it looks like there's an
empty seat there." The guy wouldn't say anything, and I would go
over and take the seat and, sure enough, he would be there, about
four or five seats down. This got rather tiresome.

The night before the morning we left, they gave us a big
banquet. In the middle of the banquet, I was just ready for bed. I
was tired of the whole business. I thought I would slip out and
could do so without being seen, and I was able to do that. I was
feeling pretty good. I walked across the square, which was
beautiful in the moonlight, and I was looking up, singing, and all of
a sudden, I felt something hit me in the stomach. I looked down.
It was the muzzle of an Uzi, or what I knew then as a tommy gun.

I put my hands up and said, "I don't speak. I am just going
over to the hotel. Just a nice night out here, isn't it?"

And the policeman pulled it back. I said, "I am just going
right over there, right over there to the hotel." Well, he walked me
over there.

I will tell you, there's nothing that will sober you up more
quickly than having an experience like that. In fairness to him, I
think I was --

Van Nest: - deserving of his services?
Orrick: That's right.

Van Nest: Was it during this period of time that you married Marion
Naffziger?

Orrick: Yes. I married her December 5th, my father's birthday, 1947.

Van Nest: How long had you known her?

Orrick: Well, I met her at a party that my mother and dad gave for my
brother and myself when we came home from New Haven one
time. They invited their friends and told them to bring along their
children, and that is when I met her.

But we didn't have anything much going until July the 4th of
1947 when her mother, Mrs. Naffziger, invited me - Marion didn't
invite me, but her mother invited me -- to the Cedars. And I went
to the Cedars, because an acquaintance of mine from New Haven
said he would be in San Francisco July 4th, and I didn't want to
entertain him.

Van Nest: Where is the Cedars?

Orrick: The Cedars is a tract of 5,700 acres largely of granite and unusable

timber in the heart of the Sierras. It's right below Dormer Pass. If
you know where Soda Springs is, there's a dirt road that takes you
in there nine miles. There are twenty-five members, and each
member has a building site and is entitled to bring up his wife and
kids and so on. So, on the 4th of July, there must have been 150
people up there.

Van Nest: And the Naffzigers had invited you up?

Orrick: Yes. This was back in 1947. Then I got interested in Marion. She
had some friends up there on a house party, and we fell in love.

Van Nest: And you married in 1947?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Did you start a family right away?

Orrick: Practically.

Van Nest: And you had three children?

Orrick: We had Missy in '49.

Van Nest: And you had two other children?

Orrick: Yes, Mo in 1951, and then our son Bill in 1953.

III. DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN CALIFORNIA

A. Volunteers for Better Government C1946")

Van Nest: I want to talk a little about politics now. You have been active and
were active, before you became a judge, in California politics and
national politics?

Orrick: Yes, I was.

Van Nest: How did you first get involved in politics after the war and after
returning to San Francisco?

Orrick: Well, along with a good many others who had been in the service, I

was appalled at the low quality of the intelligence and character of
the people then running the government in San Francisco. There
were any number of true-but-sad stories about supervisors like
Warren Shannon and others.

Van Nest: What was appalling about the situation?

Orrick: Well, those running the city were just doing nothing. It wasn't
scandal. It would be things like this --

In all seriousness, this wouldn't be a joke that was made up:

A member of the board of supervisors suggests that the
gondolas on Stow Lake are in very bad shape and that the City

ought to get two or maybe even four. Another supervisor says,
"Let's just get a male and a female, and they will probably
reproduce, and we will get the four."

And another example was the local public defender, who
would get up, time after time, in death penalty cases, and tell the
jury, "The gas chamber ain't no detergent to murder."

Van Nest: What, if anything, did you do?

Orrick: We formed a nonpartisan committee, because these city jobs were
nonpartisan, and we called ourselves the Volunteers for Better
Government. Instead of having some fellow be a self-starter and
come to us for money, we decided we would go out and pick
someone whom we could trust to run for public office, and we
would finance him.

We had a group of downtown backers, Jerd Sullivan, Jim
Lockhead, Garrett McEnerny, Ward Mailliard and others. We would
have them to lunch, tell them what we wanted to do and how
much we thought it would cost. I remember one time Jerd Sullivan
picked up his napkin and wrote on it and held it up to the person
sitting across the table. He nodded, and we had $30,000. It was
much less expensive then than it is now to run a political campaign.

Then we would get our candidate and provide him all the aid
that we could. And that aid wasn't simply dollars. Companies had
billboards all over town, and they would donate the billboards.
You didn't have any fancy reporting rules.

So, with the aid of downtown, we would put on excellent
campaigns. We elected Harold Dobbs, who was a first-rate
supervisor, who later ran for mayor against Joe Alioto and was
trounced. John Ferdon was a supervisor for eight or ten years, and
then was District Attorney for maybe fifteen years. Matt Carberry,
in his sober days, was a delightful, charming, able, political type.
He was on the Board and later became Sheriff. We also ran Roger
Lapham, but he lost. We also ran Gene McAteer, who was elected

and later became a very able and powerful state senator.

We didn't lose very many. We picked our spots and did a
good job. I was active in that. I was president of it in a couple of
years, and then we disbanded it because the campaigns got too
partisan.

Van Nest: When you say "we," who else was involved in this endeavor with
you?

Orrick: Phelps Hunter, Don Fazackerley, Roger Lapham, John Rogers, Gus

Knecht, and others of that kind, sort of the Guardsman type.

Van Nest: Was this more or less a downtown businessman's lobby, Judge
Orrick, or did it have a broader base than that?

Orrick: It didn't have a much broader base than that. The members lived

in the various areas in San Francisco, so we had the areas pretty
well covered.

Van Nest: Were you primarily targeting local positions, the board of
supervisors and that sort of thing?

Orrick: Yes. Just City jobs.

Van Nest: Did it turn out that most of the candidates that you promoted were
Democrats?

Orrick: Well, let's see. Fazackerley was not. He was a Republican. Harold
Dobbs was not. Ferdon was.

Van Nest: It sounds as though it was a mix.

Orrick: No. They were mostly Republicans, I think. I do know that
Ferdon, McAteer and Carberry were Democrats.

Van Nest: Why did the Volunteers for Better Government break up?

Orrick: The campaigns became very partisan, and you could no longer sell
the Volunteers to the diverse political constituencies emerging then

in San Francisco.

Van Nest: Did you go on then to other political activities and campaign
activities here in California?

Orrick: Yes, I did. As I say, I thought it was important to do this. In the
[Harry S.] Truman campaign, I was on the Speaker's Bureau.

B. Truman for President f 19481

Van Nest: Lefs stop with Truman for a minute. What sort of activities did
you get involved in for Truman?

Orrick: Primarily, just speaking in the districts. I didn't have a very high

opinion of Mr. Truman, at that particular time, at least. What I
would say in my speeches would be: We have got to reeled
Democrats, because we don't want to lose a great American as
Secretary of State. And I, of course, refer to George Catlett
Marshall." It didn't arouse much interest, I have to say.

Van Nest: Was Truman not popular here in San Francisco?

Orrick: Not at all. At that time. This was in the '48 campaign.

Van Nest: And this was a very Republican town then?

Orrick: No. But people were skeptical about Truman's abilities.

Van Nest: Just no excitement.

Orrick: No excitement.

Van Nest: How did you get involved in the campaign? Was Bill Malone
someone who asked you to help out?

Orrick: Yes. They had a local headquarters, and I said, "I will do
anything."

"Can you speak?"
'Yes, I can speak."
That kind of thing.

Van Nest: Later on, did Harry Truman campaign for Stevenson in the '56
campaign?

Orrick: Yes, he did. He came out to San Francisco one weekend. The

problem that faced the campaign committee was what to do with
him. Many thought that, at that time, he would not be helpful to
Governor Stevenson, nor did they know what to do with him.

Van Nest: Why was it felt that he wouldn't be able to help the governor?

Orrick: Because he hadn't been very enthusiastic about him in the first

place. Stevenson, of course, had lost to Eisenhower in '52. They
were just different types of people.

I was assigned the task of taking President Truman Saturday
night to the Press Club and let him address the Press Club, which I
agreed to do. I had several amusing experiences with him. He was
staying at the Fairmont Hotel, which is right across from the Pacific
Union Club. When I picked him up, he said 'You see that club?
That is the Union Pacific Club, and every time I come to San
Francisco they always pull down their shades."

I said, "Mr. President, as a matter of fact, I know about that
club. It's the Pacific Union Club, and they don't do anything of the
kind. The setting sun shines directly into the large sitting room
where shades are down."

He said, "Nonsense."
Van Nest: How old was President Truman at that time?

Orrick: Maybe in his 70's. I am not sure.

Then we went down to the Press Club. The place was
packed. That means there were maybe 150 or 200 people there.
The Press Club has a tradition. They have a stone sculpture of a
black cat. The cat is lying down. If the speaker of the evening
puts the cat in front of him, it's a signal to all the reporters that he
is speaking off the record.

So, Truman and I were shown to the head table. He found
another friend at the head table. They were busy talking. One of
the photographers - actually, Joe Rosenthal, the one who took the
picture of Iwo Jima and the flag -- said, "Bill, ask the President to
pat the cat."

So, I jostled his arm a little bit. He didn't pay any attention
to me.

Rosenthal said again, "Get him to pat the cat." I got his
attention, and I said "Mr. President, this is an old tradition here in
the Press Club. I explained, "They want a picture of you patting
the cat."

Truman replied, "I will do no such thing. I hate cats. And
Bess hates cats. If she ever saw a picture of me patting a cat, she
wouldn't let me in the house."

C. Stevenson for President (1952)

Van Nest: When Stevenson ran in '52, did you get involved in the campaign?

Orrick: In much the same way. I didn't do a great deal for him. I was

very much taken by him, as were many, many people. It wasn't as
though there was a Stevenson tide coming over the country, but if
you sat there and listened to the splendid speeches and then

Van Nest:

Orrick:

listened to Ike, all you could do was come out for Stevenson. He
really was great.

But he didn't have much of a campaign going in California. It
was at about this time that Alan Cranston, now United States
Senator, started his Democratic clubs. They were known as The
Clubs. They were little groups of Democrats all over the state.
They have a big convention usually in Fresno. I attended that
once or twice.

But these guys were pretty far to the left, for the most part.
At least they were too far left for my taste, which I tend to think is
about in the middle. But that was a big activity, and those groups
got Cranston elected to everything.

Did the Democratic clubs work in conjunction with the Stevenson
organization?

Yes.

D. Graves for Governor C1954)

Van Nest: In '54, [Richard P.] Graves ran for governor against Goodwin J.
Knight. What role did you play in that campaign?

Orrick: I played a very important role by the name. I was treasurer for

Graves, which meant that I did nothing at all, because there was no
money. Roger Kent was the campaign manager. He got me into it.
There were people like Pierre Salinger and Don Bradley involved.
Somebody asked Graves, the day before the filing closed, whether

he was a Republican or a Democrat. He said, "My god, I am a
Republican."

So, they rushed him down to City Hall and registered him as
a Democrat. Those were in the days when we had cross filing.

Van Nest: Who was Graves' opponent?

Orrick: I believe it was Governor Knight for a second term.

Van Nest: Was Graves openly opposed in the primary?

Orrick: Yes. But bear in mind that, at this time, we had cross filing in
California. That is to say, that if a Republican liked a Democrat
better than the Republican endorsed on the ticket, he could cross
over and throw his vote for the Democrat. And that is precisely
what happened in the Graves campaign in reverse, namely, people
liked Knight better than Graves. They didn't care whether he was a
Republican or a Democrat. They crossed over and voted
Republican, and Knight won by a landslide.

Van Nest: Graves, I take it, went down to defeat?

Orrick: Graves went down to defeat. He and his wife were at our house
for dinner on election night. His wife had never supported him for
anything. She kept saying, "See, I told you so."

Van Nest: How did you go about raising money at that time? At that time,
you were thirty-nine. How did you go about raising money for
candidates like Graves?

Orrick: Well, as in every Democratic campaign that I participated in, the
wonderful people like Ed Heller and his able wife, Ellie, were the
backbone of the campaign, financially, morally, and otherwise.
They got great assistance from Ben Swig, who was helpful at all
times, and also from Bill Malone, the long-time Democratic political
leader in our city. Bill Roth was another leader.

We would attend meetings called by them and discuss possible
persons who could contribute and make assignments, and go out
and do our best to persuade what seemed like a very few wealthy
Democrats to back our candidate.

And, as Ben Swig would say, "If you are going out to raise
money, you don't bark like a dog; you ask for the money."

Ben would hold a meeting in one of the rooms in the
Fairmont and get a staff person who always planned it through the
years. Most of the time, it was my good friend Jack Abbott. They
would work up lists, and then you were supposed to bring people
there to the meeting and use whatever device you needed to use to
part them from their money.

I remember, during Jack Kennedy's campaign in San
Francisco, Ben got some rooms down at the airport. I met the
President-to-be and brought him into the room. We came in, the
room was crowded, and Ben closed the doors and locked them and
said, "Now fellows, we are working for the next President of the
United States. Walter, how much are you in for? $50,000? I
won't take that, Walter. I am very sorry. Just think again, Walter.
Think again. Why don't we try a hundred and fifty, Walter?"

"Well it's been a bad year."

It will be a worse year next year if you don't get Kennedy
elected."

.
v

Jack Kennedy was so embarrassed that he kept saying, "Get
me out of here."

I said, 'You won't raise any money if you are out of here.
They are all looking at you."

E. Stevenson's Second Campaign (1956)

Van Nest: What about when Stevenson ran again in '56? Were you involved
in the campaign the second time around?

Orrick: I was really involved in that one.

Van Nest: He lost once to Ike. What was it about him that attracted you to
Stevenson?

Orrick: His intelligence, his thought on serious problems that faced the
world then, and his compassion for his fellow human being. He
was a fine character, indeed.

Van Nest: Had you gotten to know him at all well in the '52 campaign?

Orrick: No. But I got to know him really well in the '55 campaign. I

started in November of '55 to campaign for him, when they asked
me to be chairman of a meeting, which included these club
members, as I have told you, and some fat cats. I was warned that
this meeting was going to break open, and 'You have got to do this
and this and this."

And so I presided, and, thanks to the help that I got from the
group, our group, stationed in different parts of the room, I was
able to determine whom I should recognize and whom I shouldn't
recognize.

Van Nest: Was the purpose for the meeting to decide between [Estes]
Kefauver and Stevenson?

Orrick: We had gotten rid of cross filing. We wanted to see if we could
pull the Democratic party together and get it behind Stevenson.
We did a good job at that. About that time -- November or
December of 1955 -- Stevenson's gang arrived, including Marietta
Tree, Bill Blair, Hy Raskin, who was a pro from Chicago, and Jim
Finnegan, who was his campaign manager. We had that group
here at our house for dinner.

After dinner, Jim Finnegan took me aside and said, "Now, you
are Chairman for Northern California?"

I said, 'Yes, I am, Jim."

And he said, "Have you got chairmen in the other cities?"

I said, "We will have them." We had only twelve months to
go-

Van Nest: This was November of '55?

Orrick: Yes.

He said, "What kind of a precinct organization do you have?"
And, just to be facetious, I said, "What is that?"

And I noticed him tremble. He put his hand in there to mop
his brow and said, "Now look, Bill, this is serious. We have got to
have a precinct organization."

"We will do the very best we can."

He said, "Who is head of the machine?"

"We don't have a machine."

"Nobody will believe that. What about Malone?"

I said, "Malone can't be a one-man machine. He would vote
Democratic if the devil were running."

From then on, he always asked how the precinct organization
was coming. And we got good pros and did a good job, as we
always do, really, in the Valley, because we have the McClatchy
papers. Mr. McClatchy, in his will eighty or ninety or one hundred
years ago, left the newspaper to the family with the proviso that it
always endorse the Democratic candidate. They have done that
ever since.

On election night in the primaries, Stevenson had a
400,000-vote lead over Kafauver in the territory north of the
Tehachepis.

Van Nest: Was there a divided California contingent at the convention that
year, the nominating convention?

Orrick: Yes. There always is.
Van Nest: Where was the convention?
Orrick: Chicago.

Van Nest: Had you spent much time with the candidate prior to the
convention?

Orrick: Well, I travelled with him around Northern California.
Van Nest: That was before the convention?

Orrick: Before the convention, and then after the convention, we had a
dinner here for about fifty people for Stevenson and Kefauver.

Van Nest: Was it a whistle stop tour that Stevenson made out here?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Where did you go, and what was it like?

Orrick: We went over to the San Joaquin Valley. It started at Dunsmuir, a
little town on the Oregon-California border. At each stop in the
Valley, Stevenson would get out on the observation platform, and
give his speech. As soon as the train stopped, all the reporters
would get off the train and come around back and see how he was
doing, if he changed his speech any. I was with him part of the
time and with the reporters part of the time. It was lots of fun.

Van Nest: This was a classic, old-fashioned, whistle-stop tour?
Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: In that day and age was there advance work done that was an
important part of it?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Did you have an organization to do that for you?

Orrick: Yes, we had a good organization over in the Valley, and they got
people out and did a good job.

Van Nest: You mentioned the McClatchy newspapers. Was the media a big
part of political campaigns back then, in '56?

Orrick: Not really. For example, in San Francisco it was possible to cover

most of the city by ringing doorbells. That had a big effect, as did
bumper stickers and that kind of thing.

Today, people won't go out at night. They don't poke their
heads out, and they are afraid to answer the door. They would
rather be sitting in front of the tube. That is why today the money
for TV ads is so important.

Van Nest: I take it that TV and radio played almost no part in Stevenson's '56
campaign?

Orrick: That's right. Very little. It was the personal contact and the

whistle stops here and there, the newspapers and that sort of thing.

Van Nest: What happened at the convention? Was Stevenson a shoe-in?

Orrick: His main opposition came from Averell Harriman and Estes

Kefauver. Averell had the old-timers with him, but Stevenson was
a new face, and he won quite easily, as I recollect, over Kefauver
and Harriman.

The real excitement in the Democratic convention of that year
was: with whom would Stevenson run? Normally, theoretically,
the candidate picks his running mate. Actually, the
smoke-filled-room boys pick the candidate. In this case, the
decision was that they would actually let the convention do it.

So, they put up Jack Kennedy against Kefauver, and we all
thought Kennedy was great. Most of us in California stayed up all
night trying to persuade others and to count votes for Kennedy.
And the next day it was really exciting. Kefauver finally beat
Kennedy.

Van Nest: When had you first met Jack Kennedy, Judge Orrick?

Orrick: I met him when he came to California in 1956. We were all so

enthusiastic about him that we asked him to be the key speaker at
our big ~ for us at least — fund raising dinner in the Fairmont
Hotel.

Van Nest: Was this after Kefauver had been selected as the running mate?

Orrick: Yes. And then this was going to be the biggest fund raising effort
that we had. So, we all got out and tried to knock up people for
$100, which was big then. We had the place packed, and
everybody was at the table looking for Kennedy. Kennedy came in
a little late. While people were eating, he scribbled some notes on
the back of an envelope. He stood up and got a smashing ovation.
And then he started on this speech, and it was very poor indeed.
He didn't have Ted Sorenson around to write those moving
speeches.

Van Nest: He was not prepared?

Orrick: He was not prepared. And we were furious. So then, part of the
ritual was to go upstairs so that the fat cats, so to speak, would
have an opportunity to converse with the candidate. And Kennedy
hated stuff like that. I told you about the fund raising in the
airport, where he said, "I can't do this. I won't do it."

Well, he got kind of antsy upstairs. His friends, headed by
my old friend Red Fay and Jack Wamecke and some others, came
to pick him up and take him out to wherever he was going. And
we were left holding the proverbial sack and mad.

Van Nest: And this was your first introduction to Jack Kennedy?

Orrick:
Van Nest:

Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Yes.

And he did little to redeem himself, as I recollect, at least during
the campaign.

At least during the campaign.

Did you continue to be very active in the campaign, right up to the
election?

Yes, very.

Were there a lot of appearances out here by Stevenson?

Two. But I can remember, on October 26, in front of at St. Peter
and St. Paul Church on Washington Square there was an ocean of
people. Our guys from around the counties had chartered busses to
bring in people to hear him, and Stevenson gave a little talk, which
was very good. They cheered and cheered and cheered, and then
when he went off he said, "Well, Bill, how will I do?" I said, "I
think you will do great, Governor, just great."

The Governor was tight, in the money sense. When he would
get presents, he would give them to Bill Blair and would say, "Send
that to Libertyville." Here, they had given him a shawl with silver
dollars all through the shawl. He said to me "Bill, will you send
that back? Oh, you might be too busy." He turned to the back
seat, to Bill Blair, and said, "Bill, be sure that goes by very special
mail." It might have been worth $50, or something like that.

He thought he had a chance, and then came Suez a couple of
days later, and it was "bye-bye, baby."

Why did that have such a big impact?

Military leaders, military job. Eisenhower had told Britain and
France, "Don't do it." That was one time it was better not to
change horses in the middle of the stream.

Van Nest: Did Stevenson cany California?

Orrick: I don't think so. I don't know how many states he carried.

F. Pat Brown for Governor ("19581

Van Nest: What was the next political campaign that you got involved in,
Judge?

Orrick: The next one was Pat Brown for Governor in '58. He ran against

Bill Knowland.

Van Nest: How long had you known Pat Brown by that time?

Orrick: I had known Pat for years, when he was District Attorney. The
District Attorney's Office was near our office, and I saw him
frequently. I had helped Pat in one of his campaigns for District
Attorney and had helped him in the campaign for Attorney General.
Despite the Kennedy fiasco, we had our Democratic team going
along pretty well.

Tom Lynch was the Attorney General and a close friend of
Pat's and a very close friend of mine. He and I were the
Co-Chairmen. We would go up to places like the Blue Gum Lodge,
up in Mendocino County or something, and there would be twenty-
five people in there on a rainy night. I would get up and introduce
Lynch as the greatest living American. Lynch loved it, and the
people loved it.

Van Nest: What sort of a campaign did Pat Brown run? That, also, I take it,
was not a big media campaign.

Orrick: That's right. He had roots all over. As Attorney General, he knew
the Sheriff of every county. Pat is the kind of a guy who can't
stand to be alone. He always has to have people with him. He

knew everybody. We still had the nucleus of our previous
campaign, which was only two years before, and we reactivated
that. Pat won, hands down.

Van Nest: Did you do a whistle-stop tour with Pat Brown?

Orrick: No, Pat didn't do that. After he was governor, Pat had an airplane,

a marvelous old DC-3. It had windows from here to here on both
sides. He called it the Grizzly Bear. He would travel on the
Grizzly Bear. I don't think the Grizzly Bear went more than a
hundred miles an hour. He just loved that. But he didn't do the
whistle stop.

Van Nest: Who was Brown's opponent in '62?
Orrick: Richard Nixon.

That is when Nixon said he was getting out of politics. He
said, 'You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around any more."

Van Nest: What sort of a campaign did Nixon run?

Orrick: A single-man campaign. I don't remember who he got to run as

Lieutenant Governor. The people hated him. My brother was
supposed to run his campaign up here. He couldn't find anybody to
talk to. But he did lend his name to it. He never heard one word
from Nixon before, during or after the campaign. It was before
Nixon had [Robert] Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman. He had
somebody else.

Van Nest: Did he run primarily a Los Angeles-based campaign?
Orrick: Yes. And Pat beat him.

Van Nest: Were you interested in a position with the Pat Brown

administration when he was first elected governor in '58?

Orrick: Well, sometimes I wanted to get into politics. After the election,

Pat invited some of us down to Palm Springs to a place that we call
"Bandini Acres." We call it that because the Bandini, which was

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

fertilizer, was all around our place and under our beds and all. We
said, "Thanks a lot, Pat."

He took me aside and said "Bill, what do you want? I want
to help you in this thing."

first."

I said, "I want to be a Regent at the University. And that is

And he said, "Gee, everybody wants to be a Regent of the
University."

I said, "Well, that's right. Or the Director of Finance."

At that time, in state government, that was a very important
position, one from which you could run for governor. Well, he had
in mind what I wanted, and he didn't come through on either of
those. Then he had Fred Dutton call me and ask me if I would go
on the Superior Court. I said, "No, I don't want to go on the
Superior Court." I was just getting going in the law firm, and that
didn't appeal to me at all.

Why didn't the Superior Court appeal to you?

You have to run for public office every six years. They temper
their opinions and remarks all too often to: "What are you going
to do for me next year?" You see your finance chairman down
there making a speech: "If your honor please, it would seem to me
summary judgment would lie in this case," understanding it didn't
lie in any other case like this, but it would lie in this case. And
then he looks up at you, and you are looking at him.

that.

It was not for me. I couldn't sleep at night on something like

Had you given any thought, Judge Orrick, up until '58, in the
course of all of the campaigns that you worked on, to running for
office yourself?

Orrick: Well, I tried it once for a week. One Saturday morning, when we

were here, I opened the newspaper. There on column one, front
page, was a story about the upcoming mayoralty campaign with the
statement that Attorney Bill Orrick has a big following and is
thinking seriously of entering the campaign. It was made up out of
whole cloth.

So, I told Marion about this and said, "How do you like that?
Mayor Orrick. I could do a lot of good for the City." Marion didn't
think very much of it.

I had two good friends that I brought in to discuss things,
Tom Page and Harold McGrath. On Monday morning, I started to
see if I could count some supporters. So, I thought, "Well, I will
take the worst one first."

I went over to talk to Jack Goldberger, who was head of the
Teamsters. I had seen him in all the political things. I said, "Jack,
how does that grab you?"

He said, "Not very well."

Van Nest: You were perceived at that time as a downtown lawyer, I suppose.

Orrick: Yes.

He said, "What are you going to do for my people?"

I said, "Darned if I know, Jack. Why don't you tell me?"

He said, "Well, if you get a following, I will tell you, all
right."

So, I left that. Then I went to see Gene McAteer. McAteer
ran a big restaurant here. He was a football player. He put his
jaw out there, and he said, "Well, I will tell you. I will back you
the day you bring me your bank book which shows $100,000 in it
just for this campaign."

I said, "Well, thanks a lot."

I went to one or two of the newspapers, but I couldn't feel
any draft back here at all.

Van Nest: No ground swell under your feet?
Orrick: No ground swell under my feet.

So, McGrath said, 'You give a lunch for everybody in this city
that you think is for you, and we will talk about it after lunch."

So, I invited some good friends. After I had signed the bill
after lunch and they had all left, I said, "Harold, I resign."

But Harold made me take a ride, and he said, "Get up on
these wonderful hills we have and then go down and write your
inaugural speech." I even did that. But it wasn't good enough.
So, that is the only time I ever thought about going into elective
public life.

G. Early Law Practice in San Francisco

Van Nest: You were practicing law at the Orrick firm throughout the 50's and
throughout all this political activity that we have been talking
about?

Orrick: That's correct.

Van Nest: Can you give us some idea of what sort of a practice you had at
that time?

Orrick: As I mentioned earlier, I was trying to get clients. I was made a
partner in 1951, I think, and so I got my fair share. But I was
competing with some people who didn't like the fact that I was in
my father's office, nepotism. Dad, by that time, was in his 70's,
and I wasn't getting his clients. His clients weren't turning to me.

Van Nest: Was that because of your politics, you think, or simply the fact that
you were so much younger than your father?

Orrick: Partly, I think, politics, for a little bit of it. Not very much. But
they were all quite a bit older than I was. So, I kept my nose to
the grindstone, doing everything I could lay my hands on. Then,
on one happy day, Phil Coghlan, in the Checkering office, asked if
he could come over and talk to me. I said, "Sure."

So, he came in and said, "We have this Miller & Lux
litigation. C. Ray Robinson, who was the lawyer for the plaintiffs,
has just sued my father-in-law, Mr. Blyth, and his friend, and our
friend, Mr. Harry Fair. I have talked it over with them a lot, and
they would like to have you represent both of them." I would
never have expected that.

Van Nest: Why not? What sort of litigation was the Miller & Lux litigation?

Orrick: The gravamen of the complaint was that, during the time that they
had been directors of the Miller & Lux Company, they had
defrauded the shareholders and had squandered money.

Henry Miller was one of the early settlers here. It was said
that he could drive his horse and buggy from the Oregon border to
Mexico and stop every night on his own land. He had just lots and
lots and lots and lots of land. And his heirs, of course, were
anxious to get their fair share. The charge had been also that the
directors had laid off this money to all kinds of fake people and
some to other people who weren't named. It was a big mess.

C. Ray Robinson represented the plaintiffs heirs. He was a
very good trial lawyer. He got another sharp trial lawyer out of
Tennessee. They went after that money. I don't know why he
didn't take the depositions of Blyth and Fair at the beginning. But
he had everybody else there. So, we had a Miller & Lux Bar
Association, which did nothing for three years, at least, except take
depositions. I was thrust right in the middle of that.

Having done nothing but that for a year or two years, I

guess ~ having a good rapport with all the other lawyers, I learned

a lot. I got to know a lot of the lawyers, which helped me in
Washington. I did have to give up the client, if I took a job back
East. And so, I had it fairly well settled in my mind that I wouldn't
give up the client.

Van Nest: What sort of a practice did you have? Was it primarily a litigation
practice then, in the 50's?

Orrick: Primarily that. In the late 50's.
Van Nest: Primarily commercial civil matters?
Orrick: Yes. No criminal cases.

Van Nest: Who were some of the other prominent lawyers in San Francisco
practicing in the areas that you practiced in at that time?

Orrick: Well, Morry Doyle, Ham Enersen, over at McCutchen; Herbert Clark

at Morrison; and Theodore Roche.

Van Nest: Did you know Jack Sutro?

Orrick: Yes. He is a very good friend of mine and a fine lawyer. He did a
lot of very useful work for the telephone company and was, of
course, very active in the American Bar Association. I believe he
was President of the Bar Association of San Francisco and the State
Bar of California. He has also been chairman of a number of
committees of the ABA, including its most prestigious committee,
which reviews the records of persons who are being considered for
federal judges.

Van Nest: Was much of your practice then, before you went to Washington, in
Federal Court?

Orrick: I would say about half in Federal Court and half in Superior Court.

And not enough of either.

Van Nest: What do you mean?

Orrick: That I would have enjoyed more trial work than I had. As you

well know, in a big office, most cases are just settled. The best
litigation, which was litigation and not trial work, in effect, after
Miller & Lux, was the water meter business.

Before leaving Miller & Lux, I think I should say that the
directors won on the statute of limitations, which went up on
appeal. Just to emphasize this: the only director that Robinson
didn't sue was Max Sloss. The reason they didn't sue him was he
abstained from voting.

Van Nest: For two years of litigation?

Orrick: More than that, really. Six. They didn't end it until I got there.
They never got to trial.

Van Nest: Who were the prominent members of the Federal Bench before you
went to Washington?

Orrick: Louis Goodman. Absolutely superb judge. He was Chief Judge for

quite a while.

[Adolphus] St. Sure was there. He was a crusty old
so-and-so. He was the one who, for no matter what you did ~
steal a postage stamp, anything -- he would put up his hand and
say, "Five years," and the defendant would be marched off.

One time, a lawyer, who was a good little boxer at California,
Sol Abrams, was representing a fellow before St. Sure. St. Sure
had said, "Five years."

Abrams said, "Would your honor consider a $500 fine?"
St. Sure said, 'Yes. That is five years and a $500 fine."
Van Nest: Who else was sitting on the bench at that time in Federal Court?

Orrick: Mike Roche, the big labor judge. And I am not sure how many

other judges they had. George Harris went on. He went from the
Muni Court to the Federal Court in about '50, I think.

IV. THE KENNEDY YEARS

A. The 1960 Campaign

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, did you have occasion to work for the Jack Kennedy
campaign in '60?

Orrick: Yes, I did. I was at the convention in Los Angeles as a delegate.
The Democratic Party in California had convinced the Kennedys to
let them pick their own delegates. The theory was that most of the
delegates would be for Jack Kennedy.

I arrived at the hotel in Pasadena and saw Pat Brown and
said, "Where is the convention? When are the delegates going to
meet and where?"

He said, "Golly, I don't know, Bill."

Then Tom Lynch came along, and he said, "We are meeting
up in such-and-such a room."

Then along came a fellow we called Bullethead Miller, who
was a fine man, a State Senator. But he wanted to see the
delegation go to Stevenson. He had called for a meeting in his
room, and all the delegates, or most of the delegates, went to his
room. The Kennedy delegates consisted of Tom Lynch, Patricia
Lawford, and me.

Van Nest: Was this a difficult choice for you to make? You had been a big
Stevenson booster in '56, and you had one bad experience with
Jack Kennedy. What was it that made you a Kennedy booster in
'60?

Orrick: Well, as much as I liked Stevenson - and we had a good

interpersonal relationship -- I decided, since I had been close to him
in the campaigns, that he could never make up his mind, and he
never got things done until the last minute. So, I thought that I
would go for Kennedy.

Now a very close friend of mine from similar background,
who is also a Democrat, is Bill Roth. Roth didn't want to go for
Kennedy, but I persuaded Roth to meet with Kennedy up in a hotel
room en route to Los Angeles. He and I did that, and I said to
Jack Kennedy, "Have you made any kind of a commitment to
having Adlai Stevenson as your Secretary of State?"

He said, "That is exactly what I plan to do."

So, we walked out, and I said, "Now, see, Roth, you have got
to vote for him."

In Pasadena, Roth was still undecided -- he had Bill Malone
and Ed and Ellie Heller begging him to vote for Kennedy. He was
very close to the Hellers. As I recall, the California delegation was
split evenly, and he was the deciding vote.

Van Nest: "He" being whom? Roth?

Orrick: Roth. The next day, after the convention was over, we finally got a
count on the California delegation, which was thirty-four for
Kennedy and thirty-two for Stevenson. This is what always
happens. We are the biggest state in the union, and we had no
clout at all at the convention, mostly, because we don't vote. We
are always fighting on the issues. That is, it used to be.

Van Nest: You started telling us at the outset that the Stevenson group had all
the delegates, or a lot of them, and you had three or four. How
did you turn the tide?

Orrick: By calling on the wavering delegates. The Kennedy campaign had a

downtown headquarters team that would go to any shaky
delegation, and it would be a top-level team. Even Bobby would go
once in a while. So, they would say, "We are counting on you,
Joe" and all this stuff. But the vote wasn't close in the convention.
They really didn't need California, but that is the way it always is,
regrettably.

Van Nest: What happened after you got past the convention? What sort of
role did you play in the Kennedy campaign?

Orrick: Tom Lynch and I hitched up our dog-and-pony show and took it on
the road again. We got the same pros and the same groups up and
down the northern part of the state that we had in previous
campaigns. Then, the Kennedys, in every place that they could, had
their own campaign, and Bobby and Byron White came out.

Van Nest: I understand that in other states they ran their own campaign.
They didn't have people like you and Tom Lynch running the
campaign.

Orrick: That's right. Or they distrusted the party organization, so they just
had their own organization. And when White and Kennedy came to
town, Tom Lynch and I went up to call on them. That is the first
time I met Byron and Bob. We asked, "Are we running the
campaign in Northern California? We want to know."

Van Nest: Who was present at that meeting? You and Tom and Byron White
and Bobby Kennedy?

Orrick: Yes. Bob gave his eloquent, 'Yeah."

So, Tom and I turned on our heels and said, "Thank you, and
we will take hold of it."

Well, in the meantime, the Kennedys hadn't quite given up on
this. So, Admiral Harlee, who had been in the same PT boat
squadron with President Kennedy, was designated to run a separate
campaign for the Kennedys. We staffed his campaign. So, we
knew exactly what they were doing. He and Red Fay were doing

crazy things like distributing balloons that looked like donkeys, and
things like that. They had no idea where the town of Coarse Gold
was or where the Blue Gum Lodge was or who was on our team in
any town in Northern California.

Harlee would sit in his office and order 5,000 leaflets
distributed in Northern California. They would arrive near Mount
Shasta some place, and nobody would come to claim them. He was
always writing telegrams about what he was doing and how it was
all going well.

Van Nest: Did the situation come to a head, then, as between Harlee and that
campaign, and you and Tom Lynch?

Orrick: No. Because they weren't doing anything useful.

Van Nest: You just ignored them and ran your own campaign?

Orrick: Right. When we had big dinners, we would invite them to come.
But we didn't even have them try to collect money from our private
backers.

Van Nest: Was the fund raising done in the same manner that you described
earlier, big dinners and that sort of thing?

Orrick: Exactly the same.

Van Nest: How many times did you have the candidate to California?

Orrick: We had him once in the Cow Palace in October and once at the
start of the campaign. He started his campaign at the San
Francisco Airport where he addressed a big group and then got
back on his airplane and went to Alaska.

Van Nest: Was there a whistle-stop tour for Kennedy in California?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: When was that?

Orrick: That was the end of September, beginning of October. It started,

as the other one had started from Dunsmuir. And the same people
were on it. The county chairmen would get on and ride to the
next stop. The boys in the bus would get on and do exactly the
same thing. It ended up in Bakersfield. But it really did more to
get a big crowd out in the Valley than anything else we could have
possibly done, because there he was. He got tremendous ovations
every place that he went.

Van Nest: Was media a big factor in California? Everyone remembers the
Kennedy-Nixon debate, of course. Were they a big factor here in
California?

Orrick: Yes, they were. But there wasn't much else by way of media
coverage, save and except the usual printed press.

Van Nest: What was it like traveling with Kennedy? I take it you did the
whistle-stop tour with him?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Was he fun to travel with?

Orrick: Great fun. He gave the same pitch each time, and it was very

relaxing for him. The reporters would get a little irritated with
him, because you can't print the same story more than three or four
times. But it was fun. We would bring in the county chairmen
and introduce them, and he was gracious and a thorough
gentleman. He was great.

Van Nest: And you won big in Northern California for Kennedy?
Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, where were you and Mrs. Orrick on election night in
1960?

Orrick: We were right here in our home holding an election party, which

we did every election year. We would invite the people with whom
we had worked closely together in the campaign, set up several

Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

TVs, get on the phone to the first precinct to report, which was
down in Los Angeles and, generally, enjoy ourselves, provided the
Democrats were leading.

On the Kennedy election night, you will recall that the vote
was so close that for a long time nothing happened, no new
numbers were put up on the boards in New York or Hyannisport or
Los Angeles or wherever it was that Nixon was. We stayed up
until the early hours of the morning and, as I recall, we still didn't
know whether or not the returns from Cook County had made him
President of the United States.

Was Cook County the last county to report that year?

Yes, it was. And I suppose the reason was that there were so many
poll watchers on both sides, and Cook County, of course, was
heavily Democratic territory. But that is my recollection, that it
came in about last.

When do you recall finally learning that John Kennedy was to be
the next president?

Orrick: About 9:00 the next morning.

B. Forming the New Administration

Van Nest: Had you given any consideration up until that point as to working
in the Kennedy Administration, if and when Jack Kennedy were
elected?

Orrick: No, I really hadn't.

The situation at that time was: I was in mid-career. I was
forty-three and really beginning to move. I had some big litigation,
particularly the Miller & Lux litigation, in which I was deeply

100

immersed. Our kids were all at different schools, each one of them
doing a good job. So, there wasn't any particular reason why I
should have been thinking about it. The fact is, I didn't think
about it to any great extent. I remember at one point looking at a
list of some positions in an administration, but I wasn't interested
in them. So, as far as I was concerned, I was delighted President
Kennedy was elected and we would have a good four years coming
up.

Van Nest: Did you make any inquiries yourself after the election, as to
whether or not a job would be available for you?

Orrick: No, I did not.

Van Nest: How did it come to pass, then, that you were invited to join the
new administration?

Orrick: On New Year's Day, we were sitting around the swimming pool at

the San Ysidro Ranch, down in Santa Barbara. We went there
every New Year's with some friends. I received a telephone call
from Lloyd Cutler, who was and is a very close friend of mine. He
said, 'You better come back here and look over these jobs. They
are going to need to be filled, and it would be a great experience."

Van Nest: What was your understanding, then, as to the role that Lloyd Cutler
was filling?

Orrick: He was trying to perform one of the difficult tasks of the

changeover from one administration to another. He was, in
particular, working in personnel. So, I thanked him very much and
said, "Lloyd, I guess it's snowing back there."

And he said, "Yes."

I said, "Well, I am out here in the hot sun with Marion and
the Boones, and we are enjoying ourselves. Thank you very much,
but no thanks."

So then, I did begin to think that perhaps I should go back,
because I had spent many, many hours in the years previous trying

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to convince other people to run for public office and then help
them get the job. The more I thought about it, the more I thought,
"If I am asking others to do it, why shouldn't I do it myself when I
am getting pushed into it?" I thought further that if I didn't do it,
someday when I was teeing off on the 16th hole at Cypress, I
would jump off the tee, along with my golf balls, which usually
ended up in the ocean anyway, for not having done this. But, then,
that was just the middle of the weekend, and I didn't do anything
after that.

Van Nest: Was there some follow-up from the administration?

Orrick: Well, there was. The next Monday, in my office, I got a telephone

call from Byron White. Bear in mind, I had only met Byron once,
and that was during the campaign.

Van Nest: What was Byron White's role?

Orrick: Byron White is now an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of

the United States. At that point, he was very much into the
Kennedy campaign. He had been an all-American football player at
the University of Colorado. He had had a Rhodes Scholarship. He
had played professional football to make enough money to put him
through Yale Law School. He played on the Pittsburgh Steelers
and then played on the Detroit Lions. Each year that he played, he
was the biggest ground gainer in the National Football League. He
is now in the Hall of Fame of the National Football League.

Van Nest: And he was a man you barely knew back in 1960?

Orrick: That's right. And, as I indicated, he was a lawyer, and he actually
had clerked for Chief Justice Vinson and had a good practice in
Colorado.

So, he said, "We would like to see you back here."

"Well," I said, "Whizzer" -- that was his nickname, which he
didn't like -- "I am right in mid-career, and I don't have a client
who will pay my way to Washington at this time."

102

He said, "Well, I am just telling you that we want you. The
least you can do is come back and look at it."

I said, "Well, thanks a lot, but if I do, I will give you a call."

So then, that really got me going. I talked it over with
Marion, and I did go back there, just to see what was going on.

Van Nest: When did you go back?

Orrick: Right away, after his call, which would have been around January

5th or so.

Van Nest: What happened once you got back to Washington?

Orrick: I didn't quite know where to go. I had always had the idea that, if
I ever went back there, I would like to work in the Pentagon where
I had been during part of the war. I knew my way around there,
so I went up to see Gilpatrick, who was a former Cravath partner
and now Deputy Secretary of Defense, and whom I had met
through Roger Kent.

He said, "What are you interested in."

I said, "Something like Secretary of the Army."

He said, "We have already got someone for that. How about
Undersecretary of the Army?"

"Well," I said, "I will have to look at that, but it doesn't sound
bad."

He said, "We can give you a job at about that level, and we
would like to have you."

I said, "That is very nice." And I bade him farewell.

Then, I thought, "Well, I better stop by the Department of
Justice and thank Whizzer for having me come back."

103

So, I did that about 7:30 at night. He came out and shook
hands, and I said, "I appreciate everything you have done, but I
have got an offer for a job, and I don't know if I will do it."

"Well," he said, "Maybe you better come in and speak to Bob

Kennedy."

I said, "Okay."

So, I went into what was to be my new office in the Civil
Division. Bob was looking out the window at the snow. He barely
turned around, and he said, "We want you."

I said, "Thank you very much. I'm real pleased, but I have
already got a firm offer of one job."

He said, 'You have what? From whom?"
So, I told him.

He said, "You must have misunderstood him. You can't have
a job like that."

I said, "Why not?"

He said, "Because I make those determinations, and you can't
do it."

I said, "Okay. That makes it pretty easy for me."
He said, "We want you here."

I said, "Well, let me think about it. I don't know anything
about the job here in the Civil Division."

Van Nest: Did he tell you then that the job was in the Civil Division of
Justice?

Orrick: Yes, he did. Or Byron did on the way.

104

So, just before I left, I said, "I would like to have a little time
to think it over."

And he said, "Take all the time you want, just let me know
by 9:00 tomorrow morning."

I said, 'Yes, goodbye." Then I talked at length with Marion,
and we finally determined that I should take the job.

Now, that was a bigger decision than I had contemplated,
because I had to get rid of that litigation in the office. It was all
mine. And I had to pull my kids out of school with their roots
bleeding and have Marion pack up this place or get it ready to
lease, buy a house and arrange to get the kids in school in
Washington. That was quite difficult.

The inauguration was the 20th, I think, or the 21st, and I got
back there the day after and went down to my office. I remember
walking in with Byron and Sal Andretta, the Assistant Attorney
General in charge of Administration. My new office was on the
third floor. I could hardly wait to see it. It was the size of a
football field. My predecessor had committed the sin of turning it
over to a large portion of the stenographic pool in the department.
I made a note to myself that that would be the first thing we
would change. Then, behind that, was another room, which was
supposed to be a private office, that I used as a conference room.

So, I went in and sat down in that room and said, "Now I am
here. What am I going to do?" I was responsible for 300 lawyers
and all the civil litigation in the department, and I had no idea at
all about how I would handle it. But, first of all, it was necessary
to be confirmed by the Senate.

So, that afternoon, or the next day, I heard that many of my
colleagues were going to appear before the full Senate Judiciary
Committee, and I hadn't been invited to go along. I called Byron
and said, "This is ridiculous. I am coining up, too."

He said, "All right."

105

So, we all got into one of the limousines there, piled in, and
went up to the committee hearing. The room was jam packed. We
took seats, and, I remember, I had to get my own seat, because
they weren't going to deal with me at that time.

The Senators were all football buffs, or a lot of them were,
and they could hardly wait to shake hands with Byron. "Whizzer, I
saw you play in such-and-such a game." Byron was then, as he is
now, very modest. But everybody was crowding around him. And
then, a lot of them knew Archie Cox, the new Solicitor General,
because he had been Counsel to the Labor Committee.

And the others -- Jack Miller, then, as now, was a well-known
criminal lawyer in Washington. He had testified many times, and a
good many of them knew Miller. •

The Chairman, Jim Eastland, called them by rank and had
them each give a little talk about himself. That was very
interesting. I listened to it. I listened intensely for my name, and
nobody called on me.

So, as they were about to adjourn, I said, "Mr. Chairman, if
you please, sir, I am going to be in the Justice Department as
Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division."

He said, "Oh, yes. We don't have your paper, Mr. Orrick, but
we might as well do this now."

Van Nest: Who was chairing the meeting? Was it Senator Eastland?
Orrick: Yes.

So he said, "Tell me about yourself."

Well, I described the work that I had done in the San
Francisco office, the mundane list of what every lawyer has to do,
at least to pass the Bar exam. It seems to me I had done all of it.
I told him I had drafted wills, probated wills, drawn contracts,
drawn leases, litigated matters, drawn corporate resolutions, articles
of incorporation, all that sort of thing.

106

Senator [Roman Lee] Hruska from Nebraska said, "It's good,
at last, to hear that someone in the Justice Department is going to
practice law instead of having these other fellows, who are going to
spend their time on the Hill." Something to that effect. So then, I
went and joined my colleagues and went back.

Van Nest: Were you confirmed then and there at the hearing?

Orrick: No. Indeed, I wasn't. They were confirmed by voice vote within

two or three days. My name was off. As soon as I got back to my
office, I got a call from Pierre Salinger, who was President
Kennedy's Press Secretary from New York with whom I had had
contact out here on various political matters.

He said, "Bill, a reporter just came in here and said you are
going to be Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Qvil
Division. Who told you that?"

I said, "That was the understanding I have, Pierre."

He said, "Give me some background. The President has got
to learn about this."

So, I gave him a brief background -- where I had gone to
school and so on. After I had been at the hearing, why, out came
a press release: "The Senators knew roughly who was the
maverick."

Van Nest: Was there some embarrassment at the time that you had actually
appeared before the Committee, before President Kennedy
announced your nomination?

Orrick: Not for me. By then I was set. The job was mine, and that was

going to be it. But I didn't want to throw my weight around in the
Department until I was actually confirmed. So every day, I would
come to work at 8:00 and stay there until 6:00 or 7:00, studying
what was going on in the Division.

107

C. Running the Civil Division

Van Nest: How did you get on top of a job like that? What steps did you
take to prepare to do it?

Orrick: Well, there's a rather detailed description in the Annual Reports of
the Justice Department on what they did. The numbers are in
there as the cases, and also the budget. And, I managed to make a
few friends while I was waiting. I waited for a week. Then it got
to be ten days.

So, I called up Byron and said, "Byron, what is going on?"
He said, "Well, you better come up here."

So, I came up, and he said, "The FBI Report shows that you
were in the Institute of Pacific Relations."

I said, 'Yes, I was indeed. And so was President Wilbur at
Stanford and the First Lord of the British Admiralty," and so on. I
went through the list.

He said, "The American secretary was a Communist."
I said, "I have learned that since I was there."

He said, 'You haven't had anything to do with them since
then, have you?"

"Not a thing. Not a thing. I don't even get their
publications."

So he said, "We will see what we can do about it."

So then, in another week or so, I was finally confirmed.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, before you set out on your new job, did you seek any
advice from your predecessor?

108

Orrick: Yes, I did. Right after I found my office and was duly sworn in, I
went to see Judge Warren Burger, who was then a judge on the
United States Court of Appeals, and who formerly had been
Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Division. I went
there to get his views about how the department should be run and
see if he would give me any pointers on some of the personnel, and
things like that.

He was most courteous. And, among other things, he told me
that there were no communists in the division. I asked him, "How
did you know that?" And he said, "When we first came, Attorney
General Herb Brownell told us to go through our personnel, that is,
everybody in the department, with a fine-tooth comb," to satisfy
himself that there were no communists in his division.

And you will remember that that was right after the Truman
days when the President appointed Judge [Howard] McGrath, from
Rhode Island, as Attorney General, and told him to "clean out the
communists" from the Department of Justice.

I said to Burger, "Did you find any?"

And he said, "No, sir. I looked through the entire roster, and
I have talked to most of them, and I didn't find any. But I would
go very slowly about firing any people."

And I said, "Why is that?"

"Well," he said, "Brownell also told us to see if we couldn't
improve the lower range of our lawyers by finding the weakest and
replacing them. I did that. And the five fellows that I fired always
showed up at the Senate Committee Hearing Room, when I was
being considered for another post, and talked at length about my
bad character."

Van Nest: What was it that you did, when you first arrived at the Department
as the confirmed chief, to try to get on top of the enormous flow of
casework?

Orrick: The first thing was to get on top of the lawyers. So, when I was

109

sworn in, I had the ceremony in the big room that I have just
described, and Justice Stewart, my good friend, swore me in. The
Attorney General came down from his office up on the fifth floor.
The room was packed with the lawyers who wanted to see, not
only their new chief, but also the new Attorney General.

Van Nest: And the new Attorney General was Bob Kennedy?

Orrick: Yes. Once that was done, I called in my section chiefs, one by one,
to ask them what they were doing. Then, I set up a weekly
meeting of all section chiefs and set up a weekly meeting with each
one, individually. That was all very helpful in getting on top of it.

But the next thing that bothered me was that every day in the
division there were maybe 500 or 1,000 letters or more, for all I
know, going out over my name, not signed by me, but going out
over my name. I said, "I better see what they are sending out."
So, I ordered the mail room to send me every piece of incoming
mail and every piece of outgoing mail.

Van Nest: When was this, Judge Orrick? Early on?

Orrick: Oh, yes. Right after the confirmation. And I stayed there until

midnight, until my eyes were glazed, until 1:00 or 2:00 or 3:00 in
the morning, trying to read these carbon copies and so on.

Van Nest: What was the volume? It must have been several mail basketsful a
day?

Orrick: They brought the mail in on an enormous trolley. That activity

lasted about two days. I had no more idea about the job than I
had before. Nonetheless, I did see some things that bothered me,
and I made notes to talk to the section chief about them.

Then, I developed a report to the Attorney General. I told
him that I wanted him to see every day what I thought were
important things, and I didn't care whether he read them or not,
but it would make me feel better inside if I knew that I had made
those things available to him.

110

So, I did that. I would list any important callers that I had
and all political calls and what important cases - as I saw them
coming across my desk -- I had looked at that day for one reason or
another. He liked that and made the other assistants do the same
thing. I was very pleased with that.

1. The New Haven Railroad

Orrick: I took a long time to get on the proper track for handling politically
sensitive matters. I had two of them very early within the first
month. The first one had to do with the bankruptcy of the New
York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. I got a call from the White
House, from a guy called Mike Cohen, who said, "Bill, the President
says put $50 million into the New Haven Railroad."

I said, "Do what? Run that by me again."

The President says put $50 million into the New Haven
Railroad."

"Where am I supposed to get the $50 million?"
He says, "You are over there. You should know that by now."
Wham!
Van Nest: Who was Mike Cohen?

Orrick: He was a Special Assistant in the White House. Power abhors a
vacuum. Any power that the President doesn't grab for himself,
one of those assistants will grab. It's just like the President having
a big bundle of power lines, and if you are going to have any
power, he has got to hand you a pair of thick rubber gloves, so you
can hold that electric power. If you don't have a pair of those
gloves, you might as well go home.

Ill

I called for the Head of the Bankruptcy Section, a man called
Marvin Taylor, a good lawyer. He knew what he was talking
about.

I said, "Marvin, I don't know anything about bankruptcy1 -
and I might add, parenthetically, I know very little about it today «
"but they haven't even had a creditors' meeting, and don't I
remember correctly that last November or December the Eisenhower
Administration put $50 million into the New Haven?"

Van Nest: How had the New Haven Railroad gotten into the mess?

Orrick: Well, the case had been pending for perhaps six months. Nobody
will ever know how they got into the mess, except through bad
management.

Van Nest: But this was a major American private railroad which was seeking
the protection of the Bankruptcy Court?

Orrick: Two of them. The New Haven and the Pennsylvania, and later on,
the New York Central.

Van Nest: Was the Department of Justice a party to the proceeding?

Orrick: Yes. And, of course, the Interstate Commerce Commission. We
represented, in the Department, the Interstate Commerce
Commission.

I went upstairs to see Byron, who was my boss, and told him
this story. It was about 5:30 or so, and he said, "Did the President
say that?"

I said, "That is what Mike said."

He said, "That is not what I asked you. Did the President say
it?"

"How am I supposed to know if he said it?"
"Well, you are supposed to be a lawyer."

112

"The only way I can find out is call him on the phone or go
over to the White House."

He said, "Call him on the phone."

I said, 'Very, very runny, Byron. When I was a kid, I was
taken on snipe hunts. I am not doing it this time."

He said, "Call him up."

Byron is a big fellow. He wore short sleeves, and his muscles
bulged.

Van Nest: Why were you so reluctant to call the President?

Orrick: For the same reason you would be reluctant to call him from here.

You think twice about interrupting what he was doing. Turned
out, he shouldn't have seen me. He should have been studying the
Cuban crisis at that time. I would never have done it if Byron
hadn't been right there. To this day, I remember the phone
number: NA4-1414.

So, I picked it up. Feeling very foolish, I said, "May I speak
to the President, please?"

"Just a minute."

Wham! I am patched into Mrs. Lincoln, who was his
secretary. I took a deep breath and said, "Mrs. Lincoln, this is Bill
Orrick over in the Civil Division of the Justice Department. May I
speak to the President, please?"

I looked at Byron, and I was really losing my fear. It was
turning into anger. She came back on the line. You could hear her
talking. She put her hand over the speaker, and then she said,
"Would you mind telling me what it's about, Mr. Orrick?"

I said, "Not at all. It's about the bankruptcy of these two
railroads."

113

There was another little pause, and she said, "Well, the
President would like very much to speak with you. Would it be
convenient for you to come over now?"

I said, 'Yes, Mrs. Lincoln."

So, I put down the phone and said, "Byron, you see what you
have done?"

He said, "Come on. He said to come over there. He said get
over there. I am coming with you."

Van Nest: What was Byron White's position?

Orrick: He was Deputy Attorney General. The number two man in the
Department. He really ran the Department.

Van Nest: And the lines of authority were that you reported to Byron White,
and he reported to Bob Kennedy?

Orrick: That* s right. We didn't follow those lines precisely. A lot of times,

Bob wanted to talk to us. But that was the chain of command.

So, we get to the White House, and we walk through the
fishbowl. The reporters are there, and a couple of them look up.
Then, we go into the Oval Office --

Van Nest: What is the fishbowl?

Orrick: That is where the press used to gather.

Van Nest: Just outside the Oval Office?

Orrick: Yes.

Then we were ushered into the Oval Office by Kenny
O'Donnell, who was a great friend of the President and keeper of
the door and acknowledged leader of the so-called "Boston Mafia."
The President is seated at his desk. He has that great smile. He
says "Bill, how nice to see you, and thanks for coming over."

114

Van Nest: Was this the first time you had seen him since the campaign days?

Orrick: No. I had seen him during the first few days in Washington. He
had us over to the White House. I had been over there for Sunday
night dinner and so on.

So, he said, "How do you like your office."

I said, "I think it's great, Mr. President. I can practice
five-iron shots in there."

"Well, that is fine. Sit down here."

So, I sat at the table at his right, near the President. And
Byron walks back to where the fire is blazing -- you see it in the
newsreels -- and he warms his back and puts his hand behind his
back, and here I am, talking to the President of the United States
with no help from Byron.

So, I told him the story briefly, and he said to O'Donnell,
"Kenny, get Mike Cohen."

Cohen comes in, and the President says, "Mike, what is all
this about your telling Bill that I said to put $50 million into the
New Haven Railroad?"

Mike colored right up to his eyebrows and said, "It seemed to
me, Mr. President, to be in the best interests - in the public
interest."

The President said, "How?"

"Well," he said, "So-and-So is chief of the Brotherhood of
Engineers. He was very helpful to us in the campaign, as was the
then-president of the Pennsylvania."

The President thought a little bit and said, "Now, Bill, what is
your recommendation?"

I said, "Mr. President, I don't know anything about the public

115

interest." And, parenthetically, in four and a half years, I never
knew how to define the public interest.

"But," I said, "to me, it just seemed perhaps a little premature
to pour another $50 million into that endless pipeline, when the
Eisenhower Administration had done it only two months before.
And there hasn't even been a meeting of creditors. You will never
be able to follow it."

The President thought and said, "I think you are right, Bill. I
will side with you."

Then, Byron comes up in time to say goodbye. As we walk
out of the office, I felt like General [George] Custer must have felt
at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, because I had those arrows in
my back from every one of the Mafia waiting around.

Van Nest: Mike Cohen and his group?

Orrick: Mike Cohen and his group. Even Ralph Dungan, who was a good

friend. And the result of that -- I spent a little time on it, because
it meant two very important things to me.

First: When we got back to the Department of Justice at
about 6:30, quarter to 7:00, every light was burning on the third
floor, where I had my office. The lawyers were waiting there,
because the Civil Division hadn't been in the White House maybe
not ~ certainly not in the last previous eight years. From then on,
I had them eating out of my hand. It was just great.

The second reason is: A person is foolish if he wants to get
an approval of something by not going to the top. And every other
time, when some assistant from the White House called up and
said, "The President says --", I would say, "Dan or Mike, whoever,
may I speak to him, please?"

"No. He is busy. This is what he wants."

"Well, maybe he does. Maybe I will come over and wait
around until he is free."

116

And I got almost no calls like that from him. In the Johnson
Administration, where I had no clout at all in the White House, I
always made the request, because I always wanted to be on record
that I had at least tried to get to the top and couldn't get there,
and then I wouldn't do it, wouldn't do anything.

2. The Bahia de Nipe

Van Nest: Did you have, in your position in the Civil Division, a fair amount
of contact with the President?

Orrick: I don't know what a fair amount is. We continued to report on this

to him. Then, the next time I had fairly close contact was when
the United States Coast Guard took under tow the Bahia de Nipe.

Van Nest: When did the Bahia de Nipe incident arise, Judge Orrick?
Orrick: March of that year, 1961, is my recollection.

Van Nest: This was one of the early crises you had to deal with in the Civil
Division?

Orrick: That's right. The Bahia was a Cuban ship. She was carrying a

large cargo of sugarcane. The skipper wanted to defect from Cuba,
so he navigated the ship into American waters where, as I
mentioned, she was taken under tow by the Coast Guard and
brought up to Norfolk.

Now, the administration was very much disturbed about this,
because at that time, the Cubans were hijacking Eastern Airlines
planes, for the most part, and bringing them into Havana, primarily
to harass the United States. ,

Van Nest: What was the concern of the President with respect to the Bahia de
Nipe? Was it perceived that this was a hostage attempt by the

117

United States?

Orrick: Yes. And he was very much disturbed about it, because he wanted
to stop this rather senseless procedure. Every time they did
something, we felt we had to do something. It just escalated.

So, the very moment, almost, that she dropped anchor at
Norfolk, I got a call from Mac [McGeorge] Bundy. He was the
then-National Security Advisor, they called them then, to the
President. He said, "The President wants that ship sent back as fast
as you can do it."

I said, "Okay, Mac."

He said, "He doesn't want anything taken off it, just nothing."

And I said "Okay."

So then, I started to find out what I was supposed to do. I
learned then, for the first time, that the Coast Guard then was
under the aegis of the Secretary of the Treasury. I called up
Douglas Dillon, who was the Secretary, and told him about this.

He said "Well, I will call the Commandant, and then you call
the Commandant and tell him what you want."

A few minutes later, I called the Commandant and told him
under no circumstances was anything to be taken from the ship,
and no people were to be allowed on the ship, and the ship should
be towed back to international waters, and this as soon as possible.

Van Nest: At that time, was the Cuban crew still aboard the vessel?

Orrick: Yes. The crew was still aboard. The Admiralty Bar from the Gulf
States through New England, had learned of the arrival of the
Bahia. They descended like locusts on Norfolk and saw the Bahia.
which had dropped anchor in the stream, being circled by a Coast
Guard boat to ward off boarders. But the Admiralty Bar, and,
indeed, most lawyers are creative, bright, and problem-solvers.

Van Nest: Why was the Admiralty Bar so interested in the Bahia?

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Orrick: Because they all represented American companies whose assets in

Cuba had been condemned and seized by Castro's government.
They wanted to get hold of the sugar cane, sell it and at least
partially reimburse their clients.

So, with this state of affairs, the leaders located a former
Navy frogman. They convinced a deputy U.S. marshal to swear him
in as a deputy marshal, and they gave him a notice of libel and told
him, "You get on that ship and tack that on the mast."

So, this fellow swam to the ship in his diving suit and
flippers. When the Coast Guard boat went by the anchor chain, he
pulled himself up the anchor chain and sneaked on board the ship,
tacked this libel on the mast, by which act he brought it into the
gentle ministrations of Judge Walter Hoffman, who did not like the
Kennedys at all.

Van Nest: Judge Walter Hoffman was a Federal District Judge in Norfolk?

Orrick: Yes, a very good one. He is a friend of mine. I have discussed this
story with him.

So, the deed was done. That was done Thursday afternoon.
On Friday morning, bright and early, I got a call from the marshal
down there, or somebody, who said, "Now what do we do?" He
told me about this, and I just said, "Oh."

I called up Mac Bundy, and he said, "I think you ought to tell
the President about this."

You don't argue with Bundy, so I told the President. He said,
"Bill, do the best you can, but get rid of that ship."

I said, "Yes, sir."

Van Nest: The President still wanted the ship out of the harbor and back off
to Cuba?

Orrick: That's right. In the worst possible way. So, I then learned from

one of my staff about the Tate letter. The Tate letter is a letter

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that was written by Edward Tate when he was an Assistant
Secretary of State addressed to a federal judge, making the
"suggestion" that the ship was an international ship and "suggesting"
that all proceedings against it be dismissed.

Van Nest: This was a letter, I take it, that had been used in prior years in
similar cases?

Orrick: Yes, in similar cases. The federal judge was supposed to roll over
and play dead. Well, anybody who knew Walter Hoffman knew
that wouldn't work. However, I went over to the Department of
State Saturday afternoon. I had the letter. I talked to the
Secretary, whom I had known when he was a professor at Mills
College and a part-time student at my law school, Boalt Hall in the
University of California campus in Berkeley.

Van Nest: You are referring to McGeorge Bundy?

Orrick: No. I am referring to Dean Rusk. He was most obliging and gave
me the letter. Then I went back to the department. I then called
one of my young assistants and told him, "I want this letter to get
in the hands of Judge Walter Hoffman just as soon as you can. I
want you to go down to Norfolk, find him, wherever he is, his
chambers, his house, his golf club, wherever, and give him that
letter. In effect, serve him. Report to me every five hours."

Well, he went to the house, and they said Walter wasn't
there. Then he went to the golf club. He wasn't there, and he
wasn't in his chambers. My messenger called and said he didn't
know what to do.

I said, "Keep doing the same thing on Sunday. If you haven't
got him by 4:00 in the afternoon on Sunday, call me up again, and
we will figure out something else."

By Sunday, he hadn't found him, and I said, "Well, I have got
news for you. I just thought of what we can do. You get a
sleeping bag some place and go to the clerk's office. Stay there
throughout the night. When the clerk comes in in the morning,
you be sure this letter gets into the file and gets into Judge

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Hoffman's hands."

day.

But a funny thing happened. The judge was not sitting that

Van Nest: On Monday?

Orrick: On Monday, right. This time, Leonard Boudin, who is a very good
lawyer and counsel for many leftist organizations, including the
Government of Cuba, argued for the Castro government. To make
a long story short, Judge Hoffman listened to argument on this
thing for what seemed an interminable time, about ten days. And,
finally, he signed the order which we had suggested he sign, based
on the Tate letter. Boudin had already arranged for an appeal to
the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. We had
an expedited briefing schedule and an emergency hearing, at which
Boudin and I argued. The Court affirmed Judge Hoffman and
found for the United States.

Boudin then petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of
certiorari. Chief Justice Warren was the Circuit Justice. The Court
denied the petition. Almost the moment that happened, the Bahia
weighed anchor, and the Coast Guard took her out in the stream
and sent her on her way to Cuba.

Van Nest: Was a single item ever taken off the Bahia de Nipe?
Orrick: No, not a thing. She went back to wherever she was going.

3. Enforcing Civil Rights in Alabama

Van Nest: Early on in your career in the Civil Division, did you receive

another call from the President or his men in connection with a
civil rights problem in the South?

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Orrick: It wasn't from the President. I learned about the problem talking

with my colleagues at lunch. Once a week, Bob Kennedy would
have the assistants to lunch up in the private dining room. We got
to know each other very well. Byron White, Archie Cox, Burke
Marshall, Louis Oberdorfer, Ramsey Clark, Nick Katzenbach, Lee
Loevinger and Jack Miller.

Van Nest: Since you mentioned it, would you tell us what positions - You
have told us about Bobby Kennedy, of course, and Byron White.
What positions did the other men hold?

Orrick: Cox was Solicitor General. Marshall was Assistant Attorney General

in charge of the Civil Rights Division. Oberdorfer was Assistant
Attorney General in charge of the Tax Division. Clark was Assistant
Attorney General in charge of the Lands Division. Loevinger was
Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Antitrust Division.
Katzenbach was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office
of Legal Counsel. And Assistant Attorney General Miller was in
charge of the Criminal Division.

Van Nest: And these were men with whom you met on a weekly basis with
the Attorney General?

Orrick: Yes. And so, we followed the progress of the civil rights group

from their starting point, which I think was New York City, down
into the South. As they got further into the South, at each bus
stop they would be met by a gang of hoodlums who would take
their property, which was not a great deal, but take their suitcases
and just open the suitcases and let everything in the suitcase fall
out on the highway. They hit people with tire irons and chains.
And the freedom riders were not, as you may recollect, all black.
They were both black and white. But this made no difference to
these hoodlums.

Van Nest: What was happening at that time? Had there been some Supreme
Court action that prompted the freedom rides in the South?

Orrick: I don't remember the exact dates of the Supreme Court cases. You

will recall, the first overt civil rights act occurred in Montgomery,
Alabama, when a black woman, Rosa Parks, insisted on riding in

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the front of the bus. She was thrown off, and the blacks thereupon
boycotted all the busses. They just didn't ride on the busses, and
the busses went around empty. Then Lester Maddox had friends of
his take pickhandles and roust blacks. Then there was the
integration of the lunch counters. All these events resulted in
litigation. I am not sure which was the first one.

Van Nest: In any event, the freedom riders were riding to the South en masse
in an attempt to effectuate decisions by the Supreme Court that had
given blacks the right to desegregated facilities?

Orrick: That's right. Now they wanted to desegregate blacks riding busses

or trains and so on. One of the important events that was to take
place was a talk which Martin Luther King, Jr., was going to give
in a church in Montgomery. The last straw, so far as the Attorney
General went, was when the bus riders arrived in Birmingham.
They were thrown out on the streets, again, all their clothing and
personal effects, everything, and beaten up. During the brawl, the
Attorney General's good friend and special assistant, John
Seigenthaler, was beaten up by some of these people and ended up
in the hospital rather seriously injured.

At that point, the Attorney General and the President and
Byron decided that they had to do something, inasmuch as the
Governor of Alabama, Governor [John M.] Patterson, refused
telephone calls from the President of the United States which the
President made to persuade him to maintain law and order. The
president then "federalized" the National Guard, the so-called Dixie
Division. Police in the southern cities turned their backs on this
unnecessary violence. The question for the Administration, the
President, Bob, Byron and Burke Marshall was: what to do. They
had to decide whether or not they would do what President
Eisenhower had done in 1958 in connection with desegregating the
school in Topeka, Kansas, namely, send the military (elements of
the 82nd Airborne Division) to carry out his orders or to mobilize
essentially civic agencies to carry out the law. They chose not to
do what Eisenhower had done. Instead they wanted the
Department of Justice to carry out the law.

The word went out to the United States marshals all over the
country, to border patrol agents, to immigration and naturalization

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service agents, to some prison guards in federal penitentiaries, to
the alcohol and tax unit enforcement group, and others. They were
ordered to assemble at Maxwell Air Force Base, which is near
Montgomery. At that point we, being Oberdorfer and myself, along
with Byron White and Joe Dolan, Byron's assistant, and Jim
McShane, who was head of all the marshals in the country, went
down to Montgomery Air Force Base.

Van Nest: How was it that you were selected to go?

Orrick: I don't think I was. It was Sunday morning, and I couldn't get one
of them on the phone. So, I thought I would go down to the
department to see why I couldn't get them. I went up to Bob's
office, and he said, "They are going to Montgomery."

I said, "Well, if they are going, I want to go."
He said, "Go ahead."
Van Nest: Why did you want to go?

Orrick: Well, the team spirit kind of thing. My colleagues didn't know that
much more about civil rights than I knew. And I knew, for sure,
that they would have a problem with those people.

So, I went down. That was on Sunday afternoon. The first
thing that we all did was to try to register this motley group of
agents from the various agencies and swear them in as deputy
marshals. Then, we pied to divide them into operating groups.

Van Nest: These were special FBI agents?

Orrick: No. These were the marshals, border patrol, alcohol and tax unit
fellows, prison guards. The lot that I mentioned previously.

We were waiting there and getting reports from downtown
what was happening. We had agents following the hoodlums, and
there were many of them in their Ku Klux Klan suits. They
surrounded the little hill upon which was situated the church where
Martin Luther King was to address the parishioners and others.

124

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

At that point, Byron said, "Get those marshals into cars and
get them down there." We got post office wagons, motor lorries off
the base, everything that was free, loaded them with our newly
created deputy marshals and sent them down to the church.

Well, a lot of them, as you might guess, had no stomach for
this kind of thing. They would take their conveyance downtown to
a beer parlor or someplace like that. However, McShane got
enough of those guys out of the cars and got them up on the hill.

In the meantime, the hoodlums were throwing Molotov
cocktails on the roof of the church, starting small fires. The church
was jam packed. There were 800 people in that church. Some
fighting ensued. It was getting pretty violent, when all of a sudden
elements from the Dixie Division appear with their stars-and-bars
arm patches, and flag, I might add. They took charge of the safety
of the people in the church.

What was the Dixie Division?
The National Guard Division.
From Montgomery?

Well, from all of Alabama headquartered in Montgomery. To be
accurate, I would say some elements of which were, but I don't
know whether it was all or just some. We were satisfied that they
at least looked as if they would keep law and order. We sent the
marshals back to the Air Force base.

However, the Dixie Division Commander then decided that he
would keep the blacks in that church all night. And it was hot.
The church was right next to the neighborhood where most of the
blacks were. They could have easily walked back to their homes
without any violence.

So, about 3:00 in the morning, Byron called the commander,
who was a lily white, one star general, and told him he wanted
him to take those pickets away. The general said, "Well, if you
want to discuss it, I will discuss a truce."

125

Byron told me, "Someone from the division will pick you up,
and you can go over and see what the General has in mind."

Van Nest: By this time, had the mob subsided?

Orrick: They were gone. Just the division holding the blacks in the church
were left.

Van Nest: Had Reverend King arrived?

Orrick: He was there.

Van Nest: Was he in the church?

Orrick: Yes, indeed, I believe he was.

So, about 4:00 in the morning, a major in the Dixie Division
comes over in a jeep and picks me up and takes me over to their
headquarters. I found out the major was a lawyer.

I said, "Major, what do you think about this, as a lawyer?"

He said, 'You are just running into trouble. I am telling you
that."

"Well," I said, 'You passed the Bar exam, and you are sworn
to defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States. What
are you doing with this Hitler-type operation here?"

Needless to say, you don't win arguments like that. I didn't.
We got over to the headquarters. To get where the General was,
you had to go through the barracks. I was in the United States
Army for four and a half years, and I knew GIs like the back of my
hand. I went through there, and they all had their stars-and-bars
shoulder patches and confederate flags all over. You couldn't find
the American flag. Walking through that barracks, you would have
thought I was a Russian prisoner. It was a miserable feeling.

I then was taken upstairs to a room where the general was
having a conference with his officers. His uniform was spotless,

126

and his boots were polished. He was telling his officers the
importance of having their boots well polished.

He saw me come in. I took a seat where I could be seen
prominently, and he went on like this. I said, "General, my name is
William Orrick, and I represent the Attorney General of the United
States and the President of the United States. I want to hear from
you what your plans are with respect to keeping peace in
Montgomery."

He said, "That is none of your business."

I said, "It is very much my business. And if you don't have
your people withdrawn from the streets and let the police get back
on the job - and they will have to be kicked back, but they will go
back - we will be the only peace-keeping force in Montgomery
tomorrow. And if you want to keep us off the street, we will be
more than happy to fight with you about it."

This was rather distasteful to him, as it probably should have
been, and more so than a man with more control had. But I was
fed up with him.

He said, "Well, I will consider it."

And I said, "Why don't you consider it for about five minutes
and then give me the answer, because if it isn't, General [Creighton
W.] Abrams has been alerted by the President himself to send in
some real soldiers, and you can take these" - I didn't say it. I wish
I had said it - "toy soldiers off the street."

He said he would do that, take them off the street. So,
Monday was no violent scene at all.

On Tuesday, Byron was taking everybody back, and I was
really happy to be leaving that place. I was one of the first guys
packed. I was just waiting to get on the airplane.

He said, "Bill, you stay here in charge of the marshals."

127

I said, "Byron, I am a corporation lawyer from San Francisco.
I am not a military commander."

He said, "Why don't you tell that to Bob?"

So, I got on the phone, and I said, "Bob, I just want you to
know that my military experience is very limited, mostly intelligence
work, and that I am really a corporation lawyer from San
Francisco."

He said, "Can't you do it? And I said, "Well, of course, I can
do it."

That was always the hallmark of the Kennedys. Anybody of
whom they thought well could do anything. That was their theory.
So, I stayed there. As I bade my colleagues farewell, I felt like
General [Jonathan M.] Wainwright must have felt when he waved
goodbye to General [Douglas A.] MacArthur as MacArthur left the
Bataan Peninsula early in 1942. Saturday morning I had gone
down to see Judge Frank M. Johnson, who was the United States
District Judge in that area.

Van Nest: Had the week gone by peacefully?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Had Reverend King preached his sermon?

Orrick: Whatever it was, he preached Sunday night. He had long since
gone. But one of the problems was in getting the FBI [Federal
Bureau of Investigation] to dig up the witnesses. The lawyer who
was going to try the case was Carl Eardley, who was the best trial
lawyer in the department, I think. He was in my division.

Van Nest: What case was to be tried? Prosecuting those who had vandalized
the freedom riders?

Orrick: No. We were to get a mandatory injunction ordering the Chiefs of

Police of Montgomery and Birmingham, the Commissioners of Police
of those places, to do their job and maintain peace and order on

128

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

the streets and to enjoin the various segments of the Ku Klux Wan
from any violence. We had a good lawyer there, but we had no
witnesses because the FBI would not dig up any witnesses.

So, I fussed about that. We had an open line with Bob, so I
told him about it. This was about 11:00 at night. He told the
President, and in no time, the President had talked to General
Abrams and told Bob to talk to J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby did that,
in no uncertain terms.

I was sitting there finishing up something, when all of a
sudden two fellows appeared in front of my desk, one being the
local Commander at Maxwell Air Force Base, and the other the FBI
special agent in charge for Montgomery. I looked up at them with
drooping eyelids, and the General said, "Mr. Orrick, I don't know
exactly what you are doing down here, but if you will do me a
favor, just don't call the President of the United States every time
you need something. I have just had my ears burned off by
General Abrams."

And the FBI agent said, "I just want to get straight with you,
Mr. Orrick. Exactly what do you want?"

So, I had Carl give him a list of the witnesses and everything.
We would never have been able to try the case without that kind of
help.

Intervention from the President?

Yes.

You went down to see Judge Johnson?

Yes. I explained to him that I was just a corporation lawyer. He
wasn't much interested in that. He said, "General, tomorrow
morning you will be the only law enforcement officer in the streets
of Montgomery."

I said, 'Yes, sir."

129

"Well, do it right."

'Yes, sir." He really scared me.

Van Nest: Was your conversation with Johnson a week after all the
hullabaloo?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: And the problem still wasn't solved?

Orrick: Right.

Van Nest: And you were petitioning him for further power to enforce the law
in Montgomery?

Orrick: That is precisely it. So, I kept thinking about those marshals. You
know United States marshals. They are often a little bulky. Some
are, and some aren't. And the border patrol guys are lean and
hungry. The prison guard guys, all they want to do is bash
somebody.

So, I thought "Well, I will see where they are." I called Jim
McShane and said, "Jim, I am going to hit the panic button," we
had set up, "and have the marshals come in here. I just want to
see where they are."

He said "Aw, don't do that. You don't need that. They will
be here tomorrow morning. You don't have to worry about it."

I said, "I know I don't have to worry about it. I just am
worrying about it. So, you devise the system, and it's a question of
either you ringing the bell, or I ring the bell."

McShane says, "I will ring the bell."

So, he rings the bell. We go outside, and we wait, and we
wait, and we wait. Finally, two sleepy, overweight marshals,
wearing helmet liners and gas masks, come around the comer and
appear sheepishly in front of the car that they are supposed to go

130

in. Nobody else was there. I was scared, and I was furious.

So, I said, "Okay. Those are your marshals, McShane. Get
me the military police."

He said, "Don't do that." I said, "Get me the MPs." I called
up the head of the MPs and said, "Would you please round up
every one of our marshals that you can find, here or in town any
place."

Well, they had a golf course down there. There were some of
them out playing golf. Then there was the non-commissioned
officers' beer club. Our guys were swirling around and trying to
get up to the bar. They found them every place.

Finally, they brought them in, after about half an hour, and I
got up in front of them and gave them what-for. I told them I
could promise them, every single one of them that had been
appointed in this administration, that his time was up. He was
going back to civilian life and that the President of the United
States felt very strongly about it, and so did the Senators through
whom they were appointed. I said, "Just believe me that I am
going to do that."

Then they went away, and McShane said, "Do you think that
did any good?"

I said, "If it didn't, it will be your neck, not mine. You are
supposed to be in charge of those bums."

So, at 5:30 the next morning, every one of them was there,
standing at attention by their car. We put them into cars, and then
we went down to the courthouse. The Federal Court was located,
as it is in many places, in a post office. I was deeply grateful for
McShane, because he knew what he was doing, and I surely didn't.

So, he posted the marshals in strategic places around the
courthouse and put up ropes. By 8:00 a.m., the hoodlums were
present in trying to get through the ropes. And our marshals knew
it was their job, and they were all there. So, they kept the

131

hoodlums out. McShane posted marshals up above in the gallery of
the courtroom, so we had the place pretty well covered.

Van Nest: It was to protect the courtroom for the hearing in front of Judge
Johnson?

Orrick: Yes. And to protect the lives of the witnesses and, indeed, the
judge. The judge had been subjected to a barrage of Molotov
cocktails on his home. His wife and children had been moved
north. And he just didn't leave the job down there. He didn't have
very enthusiastic marshals either. So, the room was filled with
witnesses and with defendants. The defendants were represented
by the cream of the trial bar of the South, all ABA types, well
dressed and all.

Van Nest: Who were the defendants? These were prominent local police
officials and the like?

Orrick: Yes. The police chiefs.
Van Nest: Bull Connor, for example?

Orrick: Yes, Bull Connor. And police chiefs of Birmingham and

Montgomery, and the deputy sheriffs, wherever they were, and also
the Ku Klux Klan. After the confrontation, that night, with the
General and the FBI, we had gotten great cooperation. There were
about fifty witnesses.

So, Judge Johnson, at 9:00 on the dot, comes in and says,
"Any motions?"

The first lawyer gets up and says, "If the Court please, I move
to have a change of venue. The atmosphere is charged here, and I
move for change of venue to New Orleans."

"Motion denied."

"If your honor please, I move to sever my defendant. My
defendant happens to be the Chief of the Ku Klux Klan, and it's
unfair to him to have him tried with these other people."

132

"Motion denied."

"Your honor, I move to quash the subpoena served on my
client, and I would like to be heard on this one."

"I have just heard it. Motion denied."

I counted. He denied 18 — some of them very important
motions -- in 22 minutes. And it impressed me, because, at that
time, I had had a motion for summary judgment under submission
in the United States District Court for the Northern District of
California for four years.

Van Nest: So, Judge Johnson meant business, that was clear.

Orrick: You bet. Then, the next thing he said was, 'The witnesses will be
sworn." So, the bailiff swears each witness. Then, he says, "The
witnesses are remanded to the custody of the marshal and to the
upper gallery." The upper gallery is all blocked off, and it's hot as
Hades, and there are the witnesses.

Then, "Call your first witness."

So, Eardley calls his witnesses, one by one, one after another.
Finally, people are fidgeting, and it finally gets to be half past 1 :00.
The judge looks up at the clock and says, "There will be a brief
recess of 20 minutes."

With that, the crowd lunges for the doors and for the
bathrooms.

The trial was renewed about 2:00 p.m. and lasted with no
intermission until 6:00 p.m., at which time the matter was
submitted.

"All counsel and all defendants will remain here in this room."

So, Judge Johnson goes to his chambers and writes his order
and has it duplicated and brings it down and reads the order.

133

He said, "That will be the order. And now, Mr. Marshal, you
may serve each one of these defendants."

So, everybody was served.

Van Nest: And the order was to grant the TRO [temporary restraining order]
and the injunction?

Orrick: Oh, yes. And he called it "a TRO merged into a preliminary

injunction. In case there are any questions around here, it's a final
injunction."

Van Nest: All in a day's time.

Orrick: All in a day's time. I saw him at the White House a year or so

after I became a judge, when President [Gerald] Ford invited to the
White House certain judges selected for him by Ed Levy, his
Attorney General. And the idea was that he was going to have an
opportunity to look over the judges and make his selection.

Van Nest: For the Supreme Court?
Orrick: For the Supreme Court, yes.

Van Nest: Did you reminisce with Judge Johnson about those incidents in
Montgomery?

Orrick: Yes, I reminded him of the incident. He had it very much in mind.
He said, "Bill, I will tell you something. Rule them fast, but rule
them right." I said, "Well, that is what I learned."

Van Nest: I am looking at a newspaper article which appeared in The Virginia
Pilot in September 1961. It appears at some time in that year you
were out on the circuit, talking about a growing disrespect for law
among the citizens of the country. Was that circuit and those
discussions based on the experience you had in Montgomery?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What did you do? Did you actually go out and speak to police

134

officers and police associations and civic leaders and the like?

Orrick: Yes. Bob Kennedy thought that the story, just factually told, should
be emphasized in matters of police education and things like that.
A very good friend of his and the President's was Bill Battle, who
was later Governor of Virginia. Bill Battle had said that all the
deputy sheriffs and police in Virginia were holding a convention in
Norfolk, and this would be a good time to reach them. I would
have done anything for Bob Kennedy, but this really didn't make
too much sense to me.

I said, 'You think that is a sensible thing to do?"
He said, "Yes."

I said, "Okay, but I want to check all the facts."
He said, "Well, of course."

And I said, "I want to check the speech with you, since I am
appearing there on your behalf."

"Of course."

So, I got a transcript of the hearings before Johnson, and I
had newspaper clippings, and I wrote a totally factual account of
what had happened to the freedom riders from the time they
entered the first Southern city until the time they got over to
Montgomery. I took it up to Ed Guthman, who was the public
relations officer. He said, "That is the way I understand it."

And I showed it to John Seigenthaler, who had been injured
in one of these fights involving the freedom riders, and he said,
That is the way I remember it." Guthman showed it to Bob, and I
went down to make this speech.

Well, when I got there, before dinner, I talked to the police
chiefs. I like to talk to police officers. We had a couple of drinks
up in their room, and then we went down to the banquet room.
There were one hundred and fifty people there, or something like

135

that. Maybe two hundred.

We had the dinner, which was fine, and then I got the
introduction, and even that wasn't bad. You might say there was a
scattering of applause. Then, I started in on my speech. There was
a reporter there taking it down on a stenotype. I got going. Some
people can feel things, and I can feel hostility. I just knew that this
thing was bad. A couple of the people at the back of the room had
left.

I was determined I would get it into that machine. I just
gave up trying to get any applause or make a point out of this or
that, even change my voice, or anything like that. I just wanted it
in the machine.

So, I did that, and you could have heard a pin drop in the
dining room when I got to the end. I had to go up to the
chairman and lift his hand off the table and shake it and thank him
for the visit and tell him I was sorry I had to leave early because I
had a plane to take.

I walked through that long line of tables ~ one of the longest
walks I have ever taken — out to the end, people scowling at me.
They were there with their wives, of course.

They had a police sergeant there who was going to drive me
to the airport. I gave him a big, "Hello, sergeant." And I got in
the car, and we started for the airport, and he says, "Either you got
a lot of guts, or you are crazy."

"Well," I said, "neither."

He said, "You don't know what would have happened to you.
You are just lucky to have me driving the car."

I said, "How does that work?"

He said, "I came down here from Chicago. You know things
are pretty tough up there. I have seen them take guys on the
handball court, as they call it, and just take care of them. If it had

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Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

been one of these fellows from down here -- you have no idea how
tough they are and how much you have insulted them. If it was
somebody other than myself, you might well end up down in that
ditch with a bullet behind your ear."

I said, That may be so. My plane leaves at— — "
And on you went?

Yes. So, we got there, and I thanked him profusely for the nice,
safe ride I had had.

Did you accept any other speaking engagements of that kind in the
South?

Orrick: No. I don't think there were any.

4. Impressions of John Kennedy

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, you had a lot of contact with President Kennedy, both
in the Civil Division and later on in the State Department. What
impressions did you have, or did you come away with, of John
Kennedy as a man?

Orrick: I found him agreeable and friendly, thoughtful, gracious, with a

strong desire to get to the bottom of any particular subject.

Just to give you an example, when I was in the State
Department, the Secretary, Dean Rusk, his Undersecretary, George
Ball, the Head of the AID [Agency for International Development]
Administration, who was Fowler Hamilton, the Executive Secretary
and myself would meet every morning at 8:00. By that time, we
had read -- and I should add, parenthetically, so had the President
- the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Wall
Street Journal and the night's cables and telegrams.

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The President would pick up the phone and call either one of
the people who was at that meeting or, more likely, someone who
was sitting on the country desk. If, for example, there was a
problem in Denmark, he might very well call the fellow who was
the specialist in Denmark. He might even call the Assistant
Secretary in charge of European affairs, and he might call any one
of the substantive people in our meeting.

I mention this, because he was very much what they call, in
the common vernacular, a "hands-on" manager or President. He
wanted to be on top of everything. He was a voracious newspaper
reader. He took advice and information anywhere that he could get
it. His enthusiasm for his job carried down to the lower echelons
in the government and certainly down to those of us who had been
appointed to subcabinet positions.

For the most part, I am sure I would be accurate in saying we
would do anything that he wanted us to do. He inspired loyalty
and he was, himself, loyal to the people who were close to him in
his administration.

Van Nest: The public image of him, then and today, is that he was a man
with a keen intellect and one with great personal courage. Did
those qualities hold true in the man you saw privately, or were they
greatly exaggerated?

Orrick: Oh, no. I think they were very evident, manifested, for example, by
the first Cuban fiasco, as well as Second Cuba, when it was his
decision -- had to be -- to stop the Russian ships from carrying
particular types of missiles into Cuba. It was his courage. In
reaching down, as I mentioned, most of us had the idea that we
were there to help move the world at least a quarter of an inch off
its axis and make things better. And it was that kind of enthusiasm
which made us work night and day and Saturdays and Sundays and
do anything that the President indicated that he wanted to have
done.

Van Nest: This idea of the Kennedy Administration as Camelot, and the idea

that it was populated by the "best and the brightest" -- in the words
of David Halberstam's book -- is that an idea that was felt through

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the Administration, or was that something that is sort of an
after-creation that doesn't correctly describe what you were doing?

Orrick: No. I think that it was very evident during the Administration.

The President would entertain a great deal in the White House.
Bob entertained in his big place over at Hickory Hill. It was a type
of Camelot where all the knights were sometimes jousting with
each other, as it were, but loyal to King Arthur, and a very few,
very few even to Queen Guinevere. You could just feel that.

Van Nest: The Kennedy's, of course, are a political family and have long

political roots in this country. Was John Kennedy someone who
was always thinking about the political aspects of a problem, along
with everything else?

Orrick: I don't know that. I can't answer it, because I didn't know him that
well. I certainly didn't know him in the days While England Slept,
his first book of any note.

It had always been, as I gathered, an understanding in the
Kennedy family that Joe would be the one that they would get
behind. After Joe, then along came John. After he was killed,
along came Bob, and after he was killed, along came Ted. The
family almost seemed star crossed. But the idea was - and I don't
know whether that is still true with Ted - I would guess that it
was -- that they would follow along and enhance the family name.

Van Nest: Did Kennedy display an awareness of the political side of the
various problems that you talked about, how the people that
mattered to him - the politicians and others -- would react to the
steps he took as President?

Orrick: Oh, yes. He knew his business very well, and he knew who was
for him and who was against him and who he might be able to
persuade. He had good people in charge of legislative liaison. He
would often take them out on the Potomac in the Sequoia.

He would take influential Congressmen on the boat in the hot
summer days, spring days, and he would have Dean Rusk along, or
somebody from the Department, and they would talk. So, he was

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very sensitive as to what his political obligations were.

Van Nest: Were there weaknesses in President Kennedy's style of management
that you perceived, then or now?

Orrick: I realized at that time -- and I have no reason to change my mind
- that what is called management style - which, incidentally, is
almost an invention of the Iran Contra hearings - is different in
different managers.

If President Kennedy could be criticized, it could be that he
was getting advice from all sides. In other words, there wasn't a
neat chain of command, as President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower had,
from the President to a Chief of Staff, Sherman Adams, to lots of
other people reporting to him, and as [President Ronald] Reagan
insisted upon.

Quite to the contrary, he knew the people. He would call
them, or he would have Mac Bundy call them. He worked very
closely with Mac Bundy. But the people down below would
complain, because they didn't know who was going to write the
telegram or what should be done and through whom they had to
clear it. So, if there was any weakness, it was there.

5. The Matter of I.G. Farben

Van Nest: Let's go back to your service in the Civil Division of the Department
of Justice. Did you become involved in some other notorious cases?

Orrick: The I.G. Farben matter had been pending since before the end of
the War, and had been, I believe, once to the World Court or the
International Court of Justice, and twice to the Supreme Court.
Yet, when I was charged with carrying it on, to my astonishment,
there had only been one deposition taken in the fifteen years it had
been pending.

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Van Nest: What was the case about?

Orrick: The case, essentially, was about the ownership of the stock of I.G.
Farben. I.G. Farben, of course, was the great munitions
manufacturing corporation in Germany. One group claimed its
stock during the War was to be held in trust by the Union Bank in
Switzerland. And then it was to be returned to certain people.
Another group claimed that they represented the people who
actually owned the stock and that the stock was to be sold, and
they were to get the benefit from it.

Van Nest: Essentially, I take it, the stock was in the possession of the United
States, pursuant to the winning of World War II and the seizing of
those assets?

Orrick: That's correct.

Van Nest: The question was which parties were going to have the benefit of
the return of this alien property?

Orrick: That's correct. And it was in the Office of the Alien Property
Custodian. Byron decided we should merge it with the Civil
Division, because there wasn't enough to have a whole other
division. So, it came under my supervision, along with some
smaller matters.

Van Nest: Did you get marching orders from Bobby Kennedy or the President
with respect to what to do with this problem?

Orrick: No, nobody knew what to do with it. And I thought, like any

lawyer might, that we either would litigate it, or we would settle it.
There were two opposing parties. One was headed by a man who
was known as Electric Charlie Wilson, who was the CEO of General
Electric. He was represented by General Spofford, who was a
member of the Sullivan & Cromwell firm. Opposed to them was
the Swiss Bank, the head man being Mr. Adolf Schmidt. His lawyer
was a Washington lawyer, Mr. John Wilson.

Van Nest: These were the two parties competing for return of the property?

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Orrick: That's right.

Van Nest: Was this a big political issue as well?

Orrick: At the time when I had it, it wasn't. At least, at the start. I should

say, however, that Senator Kenneth Keating, the then-Senior
Senator from New York, had been pressured by General Spofford
and the head of General Electric, Electric Charlie, to get those
assets back into New York State.

Van Nest: What did you do about solving the problem?

Orrick: The first thing I had to do was find out what the problem was. So,
I set up my own office in the building where they were and
interviewed everybody who had worked on the case at some point.
I read the briefs.

Just about that time, I began to get pressured by those two
outside groups. Had they been on the same side, it would have
been what the police call a Mutt-and-Jeff operation, that is to say,
Electric Charlie Wilson was a well-known American businessman.
He was very courteous and friendly and represented by one of the
top lawyers in the country, never got irritated with anything and
took it very smoothly.

Whereas, Mr. Schmidt was a Swiss, having all the
characteristics of the Swiss that one doesn't like, being pompous,
stubborn, impolite, aggressive to a fault. His lawyer, John Wilson,
who was a well-known lawyer in Washington, had precisely the
same characteristics.

So, when Electric Charlie and General Spofford came to see
me, they were all sweet and honey. And so was I. I told them I
had to find out where we were going, and there was lots to be
done, and I would certainly keep them advised, "If you want
anything else, just call up, and we will tell you whatever we can
tell you."

Van Nest: What happened when you first met Schmidt in your office?

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Orrick: Schmidt walked in dressed in his high stiff collar, black suit and

rimless pince-nez glasses. He hardly took off his hat. John Wilson
and I knew each other a little bit, so he knew something about me,
how I might react. He didn't tell that to Schmidt.

Schmidt was most insulting. He said, "It's the United States
that is cheating the Swiss government, and it's the rotten way in
which this whole thing has been handled." He is walking up and
down in my office, which was another big office, pointing to the
American flag. "That means something to you; it means nothing to
us."

Finally, he got to me. I said, "Mr. Schmidt, I don't know who
you are or where the hell you came from, but you get out of my
office right now. Nobody insults the American flag when I am in
here."

He said, "Well, I take it back."

I said, "I don't want to talk to you. Goodbye.

"John, goodbye. When you can teach him some manners, I
will be glad to talk with him. But I am not satisfied with his
manners now, so goodbye."

The person who sent Schmidt here was Prince Radziwill,
whose wife, Lee, was a cousin of Mrs. Kennedy's. And Wilson was
told to let Prince Radziwill handle the whole thing. Wilson didn't
like that, and neither did Schmidt.

Van Nest: Was that perceived as a gross political mistake, sending in a family
member to talk to the President?

Orrick: It was conceived by me to be that way. I told that to Bob, and I
put it in my daily report. And nothing ever turned out. They had
another fellow, whose name I have completely forgotten, who was
supposed to come in and negotiate for the Radziwills -- I just don't
who that is.

Van Nest: What were the next steps that you took after these initial forays

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with Electric Charlie and Mr. Schmidt?

Orrick: I went to Zurich for the purpose of seeing Mr. Schmidt and to get

the lay of the land, so to speak. I called on him at his office, and
we had a very friendly talk. I felt that I then knew what he was
after, at least, and how he would be helped and who would help
him.

Following my visit to Zurich, I tried to develop a proper way
of settling the matter. I set up two teams, a litigation team and a
settlement team. I determined that we would pursue the matter in
the courts until there was a settlement, if ever, reached. Therefore,
these two teams went down parallel tracks, each working to achieve
its own purpose. On the settlement team, lots of time was spent
valuing the property and working out different positions.

Finally, in May or June of 1962, I was prepared to settle it.
In this connection, I added to my so-called settlement team a very
good friend of mine, who was and is a very bright, able, successful
businessman by the name of Prentis C. Hale. I visited Hale in
California on two different occasions to get his expertise in staking
out our positions.

Finally, we made our connection with Schmidt and his "team"
and decided that we would meet them in Munich for the reason
that the Civil Division had an office there. Hale and our local
representative and I decided that we would have all the Swiss
people whom they wished to bring come to the Munich office.

Schmidt was there with his lawyer, his Swiss lawyer, very
decent, well-spoken, erudite gentleman, and two so-called vice
presidents. We negotiated at some length and were able to make
speedy progress, owing to the preparation which had been made on
both sides. I remember distinctly that at 1:45 p.m. the Swiss had
agreed to pay for the stock, all that we were asking, but refused to
pay United States taxes to which we claimed we were entitled.

I was perfectly satisfied with the settlement at that time, and
I nudged Hale. Hale stood up and said if that was the way the
Swiss were going to negotiate, he didn't want any part of it, and

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they could just forget it. As a practical matter, I had to get up and
leave with him. But, when we got outside, I charged him with
throwing away the best possible settlement that we could have
gotten. Hale said, "Just take it easy, and you watch. They will
come back."

So, we went down to the Four Seasons Hotel and had a nice
lunch, a fine wine, and waited. At the other end of the room, the
Swiss were having their lunch. We waited until they were through.
We could have left the dining room very easily by a door near to
our place, but we stayed there, waiting for what I thought would
not happen, and what Hale thought would surely happen. And it
did happen.

The Swiss came down to our table and said, in no uncertain
terms, that they would, as a last gesture, pay the $17 million in
taxes, and that that was the bargain. We could take it or leave it.
So, Hale said, "We will call you tonight and let you know whether
we will take it or leave it," and they went away.

I said to Prentis, "I am going down there right now. You
aren't even in the government. You are here as a dollar-a-year
man. I rank you, and I am going to tell them that we take it."

"Well," he says, "there might be something else there."

I said, "There isn't anything else there, Prentis. You can't
even make anything else up."

To make a long story short, we took it. That was the best
settlement of a case that I know of during the time that I was in
the Department of Justice.

Van Nest: Was there some controversy about that case later on?

Orrick: Yes, there was. But, until we got to that point, we had to finalize

the settlement with appropriate papers, and the Attorney General
had to sign it. By this time, I was in the Department of State.

I remember so well, on New Year's Eve, about 5:00, getting a

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telephone call from Bob saying, "I want to ask you about the I.G.
Farben case."

I said, "Well, go ahead."

He said, "I think it's better if you come over here, because
there are some people that take exception to your position."

I said, "That can't bother me, Bob. I am in the Department of
State, and you are the Attorney General. You make the decision."

He said, "Would you come?"
I said, 'Yes."
Van Nest: Who had assembled?

Orrick: The then-Deputy Attorney General, Nick Katzenbach, plus two

members of my so-called trial team. There was nobody
representing the settlement team. The trial team were bitterly
critical of the settlement. I have seen that among government
lawyers before, particularly when they have worked on one case for
a long time and then it's settled out from under them. So, I didn't
blame them, but I did blame Katzenbach for not putting it correctly
to the Attorney General.

Van Nest: Had Katzenbach not given Kennedy all the facts he needed to
evaluate the settlement?

Orrick: I didn't think he had. I didn't think he knew enough about it, and
I still don't.

Van Nest: Did the matter remain settled?

Orrick: The matter remained settled. I told Bob, "I can't do anything

further. My strong suggestion to you is settle it. It's something
that is part of your job. It was part of the job of Attorney Generals
going back to the end of the War, including Tom Clark, and it
would be irresponsible, in my view, not to do it."

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So he did it.

Van Nest: Did this later become a source of political controversy for Bob
Kennedy?

Orrick: Yes, it did. He was running for United States Senator from New
York. There were many Jews in the proposed constituency. His
opponent was Senator Keating, whom I mentioned previously.
Keating campaigned on the issue that Kennedy had been
outmaneuvered by the owners of I.G. Farben, who were, in the
end, related to the Germans who put their Jewish relatives in the
furnaces.

I was in Europe in the middle of October with some State
Department problem, when I was awakened in the middle of the
night by Bob asking me if I could obtain several important
documents relating to the case and get them over to him promptly.

Through happenstance, one of the men who worked on the
case, by the name of Henry Ford, was our Consul General in
Frankfurt. I called Henry and asked him if he could tell me where
those documents were. For some reason, Henry had them with
him.

I said, "Will you kindly send them by courier to Senator
Kennedy in New York City?" at whatever hotel he was staying. He
did that, and the next night, when Keating made his charge, Bob
was able to refute it by reading from these documents, showing
that Keating didn't know what he was talking about.

6. Putting the Longshoremen Back to Work

Van Nest: Was enforcement of the Taft-Hartley Act within the jurisdiction of
the Civil Division?

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Orrick: Yes, it was. The first time I went to the trial court, while I was
Assistant Attorney General, was to represent the government in a
Taft-Hartley action which had been brought in New York.

Van Nest: What did that action involve?

Orrick: That action involved invoking the Taft-Hartley Act, which mandated

a ninety-day hiatus between management and labor if a strike
would be damaging to the national interest.

Van Nest: In this case, the longshoremen were refusing to load cargo on route
to Cuba. Why was that? Was it a political refusal to deal with
Cuba?

Orrick: Yes. As you know, the union from time to time, as indeed do city

councils, try to make foreign policy using a strike. The job, besides
entailing getting affidavits from the Secretary of Defense and other
people involved with the well-being of the United States, was going
up and arguing the point in Federal Court.

Van Nest: Did you run up against Mr. [Leonard] Boudin again in this case?

Orrick: Yes. Mr. Boudin was in the case. Arthur Goldberg assisted me in
understanding what the labor unions wanted.

Van Nest: Was Goldberg a lawyer at that time?

Orrick: He was Secretary of Labor at that time. Since it was the first
Taft-Hartley for this administration, the President wanted the
persons responsible for the results to do the job themselves, rather
than some staff person. We took the President's plane, the
"Caroline." It was to stop at Newark Airport in order to get the
views of Judge Rosenman, who had been General Counsel to
Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Arthur Goldberg said, "Bill, you are going up to Hyannisport,
of course."

I said, "No, I am not. I am going to be in court."

148

He said, "The President will want you up there when he
announces this decision on the television."

I said, "That is your job, Arthur. That is not mine. I am
going to do what I consider to be my job, namely, make the pitch
in the United States District Court."

So, when Judge Rosenman met us on that very rainy evening
out on the tarmac, I asked if I could ride in with him, which he
said I could, and I said goodbye then to Goldberg.

Van Nest: Rosenman had been counsel to Roosevelt during his administration?

Orrick: Yes. And I had always wondered what President Roosevelt was

doing during his campaign in 1940, when in October of that year,
he came to Boston and announced, "Not one of our boys shall leave
these shores." At the time that he said that, destroyers were
carrying a division of Marines up to Iceland, and the President had
promised a total of fifty destroyers to England.

So, when he got back to Washington, he called in Judge
Rosenman and said, "Sam, you heard my speech, and you know
that the Marines and the fifty destroyers are on their way to
England."

And the judge told him, "Yes, I know."
"What shall I do?"

Judge Rosenman advised the President of the United States,
"Deny you ever said it."

Van Nest: Was Rosenman reluctant to tell you this story?

Orrick: No, he wasn't. I had heard this story, but I was very pleased to get
it absolutely straight from Judge Rosenman.

Van Nest: What finally happened with the longshoremen?

Orrick: We tried the case all day. By "we," I mean Bob Morgenthau, who

149

was U.S. Attorney then and is the District Attorney for Manhattan
at the present time. We were up against Leonard Boudin, who
represented the longshoremen. Chief Judge Ryan presided over the
case. There was testimony from numerous persons that there was
no problem involved with the national security.

Finally, at 5:00, Chief Judge Ryan recessed the court and
ordered us to remain there until he could get his order out. We did
that, and when he came back, he brought the order enjoining the
strike. His clerk handed a copy to counsel on each side. Boudin
left the courtroom in a hurry, and Morgenthau grabbed me by the
coat and said, "Let's go."

I said "What's the hurry? We have got the injunction."
"Don't argue. Just come with me."

We ran out and followed Boudin, who was running to the
parking lot. Morgenthau's car was near Boudin's car. Boudin
pulled out of the parking lot in a hurry, and we followed closely on
his heels. As we were going up the East Side Drive, Morgenthau
told me, "It's very important to find out where he is going. I think
he is probably going to New Haven, to the home of Judge Charles
Clark, and get a stay."

Van Nest: Did Morgenthau say why he thought Boudin picked Judge Clark as
a place to rest in the Second Circuit?

Orrick: He didn't. But he had apparently made some determination from
the Clerk of the Second Circuit that he was the one who was
closest to New York. They were all over the place. We got on the
road to New Haven, Connecticut, We were going about seventy or
eighty miles an hour. Morgenthau was obviously relieved. He said
he was going to Charlie Clark's home, and that is exactly where we
went.

We arrived there about 8:00 in the evening. Boudin rang the
bell, and Judge Clark came to the door in his pajamas with a
bathrobe on. Boudin told him what we were doing. He said to
come back in about twenty minutes, and he would hear us. So, we

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came back in twenty minutes, and Mrs. Clark had set up card tables
on either side of the room. The judge sat in front of the fireplace,
with a little table in front of him, and listened to oral argument. It
didn't take much preparation. There was only so much that could
be said. Boudin said it very well.

And then I got up - I think he gave us fifteen minutes each -
and explained to him the military necessity, as supported by our
affidavits. Clark then told us to come back in an hour. When we
came back in an hour, he handed us a copy of his order affirming
Judge Ryan.

Van Nest: I take it the longshoremen went right back to work.
Orrick: The longshoremen went back to work the next morning.
Van Nest: Did you have occasion to argue in the Supreme Court?

Orrick: Well, I enjoyed arguing before appellate tribunals, and I had the
greatest client in the world, the United States. Justice was always
on our side, at least so I thought. I argued in different circuits --
the 2nd, the 4th, the 5th, the 6th, the 9th -- and the Circuit Court
of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Our division had a case in the Supreme Court, and I wanted
to argue it, because, up to then, I had never had an argument in
the Supreme Court. It involved interpretation of the Federal Tort
Claims Act. It wasn't too difficult to get on top of the facts. So,
that I did.

Van Nest: Did you have a lot of advance notice?

Orrick: They always tell you in what period your case will be heard. The

Supreme Court then, and I think now, holds arguments for three
weeks on, and one or two weeks off. Maybe three weeks off. I am
not sure.

But I watched my case on the Supreme Court calendar move
slowly to the top. As it got near, I communicated with the clerk
and told him I needed some lead time and would they hear it on

151

this particular hearing period. And the clerk said it looked like it
would go over to the next one.

Then, in a day or so, he called me back and said, "Maybe you
better come up here."

I said, "Why?"

He said, "They might reach it this afternoon."
Van Nest: What time was it?

Orrick: I turned white. It was about 11:30, or something like that, I guess.

The Government Counsel always wears a morning coat and striped
trousers. I called up Marion and asked her if she would please
bring them down to the department. During the time that I was
dressing, I had the young lawyer who had been very helpful in my
preparation come in. We started to go through the whole matter
again. I then took a car, a government car, up to the Supreme
Court.

A requirement of the Court is that counsel in the next case
shall be seated in assigned seats before the next case begins. So, I
took my proper position, looking at the brief that I was to argue
and looking at the Court clock.

In those days, the Court listened to oral argument from noon
until 2:30 and from 3:00 to 4:30. As the hands of the clock moved
during the hour that I was there to 4:30, I got more and more
nervous. I was beside myself as it got to 4:15 and then to 4:20,
because Chief Justice [Earl] Warren thought nothing of having
counsel commence an argument at, say, 4:20 or 4:25 and then shut
them off at 4:30. When they came back three weeks later, they
took up where he had left off.

So, I wanted more time and, happily, counsel who was ahead
of me was being questioned by Justice [Felix] Frankfurter. When
that happened, I knew we would be there through 4:30.

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I was first on the calendar at the commencement of the next
three-week period.

7. The Appointment of Federal Judges

Van Nest: We have talked a little about your service in the Civil Division,

about judges and the judges you appeared before. Was it also the
job of the Civil Division, or part of your responsibilities as an
Assistant Attorney General, to help the Administration select the
judges it was going to nominate and send up to Capitol Hill?

Orrick: Yes. The duty was imposed upon us by Byron White. Customarily,
the appointment of District Court judges and, indeed, Circuit Court
judges, was patronage for the Senators. Then, when the names
were sent to the Department of Justice, the Deputy Attorney
General would give the names to a committee of the American Bar
Association, which would make an investigation as to the
candidate's qualifications and personal character and then report
back to the Department of Justice.

Van Nest: Did Byron White institute a different procedure during the Kennedy
Administration?

Orrick: Well, he instituted an additional procedure, it might be more
properly called, for the reason that Bob Kennedy wanted
endorsements from a group other than the American Bar
Association.

Van Nest: Why was that?

Orrick: I don't think that he really trusted many of the people in the

American Bar Association, because their publications at that time
and selection of judges was on the conservative side. So, what
Byron had us do was to assign to each Assistant Attorney General
a section of the United States, with the idea in mind of getting

153

additional background information on these candidates.

Coming from the 9th Circuit - I had the 9th Circuit - what I
would do was to call lawyers in the different cities. By this time, I
knew lawyers, at least in the main cities in the Circuit, and asked
them for their opinion of the particular candidates. That way, I
would get an independent reading and transmit that to Byron
White.

My colleague, Louis Oberdorfer, did it for the South. Burke
Marshall did it for the Northeast. I think Loevinger did it for the
Midwest. The results were good.

Van Nest: Was the idea to get some political input into the process of
selecting judges?

Orrick: No. The idea was to get independent views of an attorney with

respect to the character and ability of the proposed candidate. The
politics in this part of the process had no place at all.

Van Nest: Were the Kennedys concerned about the political background of the
people they were sending up to the Hill?

Orrick: Yes, very definitely. That is inevitable. Byron and Bob didn't
always take our suggestions, for that very reason. For example,
Judge Sidney Cox was the roommate of Senator [James] Eastland.
I should say, the college roommate of Senator Eastland. It was
well known that Judge Cox was violently opposed to every aspect
of the civil rights prpgram as it affected blacks, and that he would
vote against any and all efforts to integrate blacks.

Nonetheless, Senator Eastland, then-Chairman of the
all-powerful Judiciary Committee, made it abundantly clear to Bob
and Byron that he wouldn't be recommending any persons to the
United States Senate for nomination to the post of United States
District Judge or, indeed, Judge of the Court of Appeals until Cox
had been confirmed.

Van Nest: What review came back from the In-House Committee?

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Orrick: That he was the worst anti-civil rights type in the South.
Van Nest: Was he eventually appointed?

Orrick: He was eventually appointed, and the appraisal of him was

absolutely true. I think he is still on the Bench. Whether he has
taken senior status or not, I don't know.

Another aspect of this was Charles Carr, a person appointed
Judge from California.

Van Nest: That was within your district, your region?

Orrick: That was very much within my region. And I got many accurate
estimates of his character. Not only did he not have a judicial
temperament, he didn't like the law. He was arbitrary and nasty.
But here again, Senator Clair Engle, whose patronage it was, said
that he owed Charles Carr and that he wouldn't make any
recommendations until Carr was appointed.

Van Nest: Was Engle pretty clear about the reasons for his support of Carr?

Orrick: Yes. Carr had supported him financially, substantially, in his prior
campaigns for the United States Senator. That was politics pure
and simple. Carr was appointed, behaved in the future as he had
in the past. Senator Engle, who was a first-rate senator, then
appointed many first-rate judges.

Van Nest: Was it your view then, or your view now, Judge Orrick, that there
is something wrong with the appointment process of judges in this
country when someone can demand or insist on appointment of a
judge purely because he had been a financial supporter?

Orrick: Yes. It, of course, violates the tenets of Alexander Hamilton, as
they are expressed in the 78th Federalist, namely, that federal
judges should be persons of integrity and ability, subject to no
other power, and should serve during good behavior throughout
their lifetimes.

Many different plans of appointing judges have been

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considered over the years. One plan that is popular is the so-called
Missouri Plan where the Bar Association furnishes the Chief
Executive -- in that case the Governor, of course ~ with the names
of fifteen persons whom the Bar Association thought would be able
to fill five positions.

Van Nest: Wouldn't that be a better and a less political way of doing it?

Orrick: I don't think so. I think all that would happen is it would move
the politics from the state senators or the legislative body to the
Bar Association. And over the 200 years which have elapsed since
the signing of the Constitution, there are very, very few federal
judges who have been impeached. There are not more than eleven
or twelve out of the whole number. I think that this is just as
good as you can get it.

Van Nest: You don't think there is a better way to do it?

Orrick: I don't think there is. Politicians are politicians, and people are
people, and they differ from each other. I think this is the best
way. We don't have an Athens where Pericles could appoint the
judges.

8. Impressions of Bobby Kennedy

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, before we leave your service in the Civil Division, let* s
reflect for a minute on your relationship with Bobby Kennedy. I
take it you saw quite a bit of Bobby in a work context. Did you
see him socially as well?

Orrick: • Yes. Bob and Ethel gave a good many parties at his lovely estate
called Hickory Hill, which is in McLean, Virginia, to which we were
invited and always attended. In addition to that, he would have
the Assistant Attorneys General and the Solicitor General for lunch
every week in the dining room, during which we would discuss

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current problems and mutual problems. Then, from time to time,
he would have us come to Hickory Hill for a discussion of the
problem.

Van Nest: Can you think of any examples of heated topics that you got into
with Bob Kennedy and the rest of the group, either at Hickory Hill
or in the office?

Orrick: Yes. We got into a controversy over introducing in the Congress a
wiretapping statute.

Van Nest: Was Bob Kennedy in favor of that?

Orrick: He was very much in favor of it, but he wanted the statute to be as
carefully drawn as possible. I recall one day, after we had had a
swim and a great lunch at Hickory Hill, we sat on the terrace and
discussed this matter. Byron had given us warning that the
Attorney General wanted us to discuss it. All I had done by way of
preparation, knowing nothing about wiretapping, was to read a
couple of Supreme Court opinions, the Olmstead opinion and the
dissent in the Weeks opinion.

Van Nest: What was the Attorney General's position on it? Was he a very
strong proponent of wiretapping?

Orrick: He was a very strong proponent of wiretapping. He had had the
experience of dealing with the Teamsters before the Senate Labor
Committee, where he was counsel, and the Mafia concerned him a
great deal. So, to get information, he thought that this method was
absolutely essential.

Many of my colleagues had had experience with it, as
Solicitor General Archie Cox had argued cases with respect to it.
Jack Miller, who, incidentally, was a Republican, and head of the
Criminal Division, had had a great deal of exposure to it, inasmuch
as he had represented the rank and file of a union - it might have
been an off-shoot of the Teamsters Union -- against the trustees
who were dissipating the pension funds. Burke Marshall had some
exposure to it through the activities of the FBI in connection with
the surveillance of certain persons in whom Burke was interested.

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Van Nest: What was your view?

Orrick: My view was that, as Justice Oliver Holmes said in the Weeks case

in his dissent, it was a "dirty business." I had had no exposure to
it. So, when it came my turn to speak up -- and Byron would go
right down the line - I said, "I have had no experience at all with
it. I am a corporation lawyer from San Francisco."

Then, he would pin me down. "Would you vote for it or
against it?"

I said, "I would vote against it on the basis of this opinion.
It's a dirty business."

Well, that got Bob Kennedy into action. He came down to
the place where I was sitting and said, "Suppose one of your
children was kidnapped? Would you be against a wiretap?"

I said, "No, Bob, of course I wouldn't. But hard cases make
bad law."

"Well, he said, "suppose it was your father who was being
blackmailed or some such thing? Would you be opposed to it
then?"

I said, "Just pragmatically, no. And again, hard cases make
bad law. But I am not the person on whom you should rely for
advice. Here are colleagues who have all had experience with it."

Well, he made me rather uncomfortable, because he didn't
move off for quite a while. He was rather irritated that I was the
only one against it.

Van Nest: And, finally, what course of action was taken?

Orrick: The wiretap statute was introduced, lobbied through and became
law. It's been amended a number of times since.

Van Nest: It's well known, I guess, or widely believed, that Bob Kennedy had

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an obsession with the Jimmy Hoffa case. Was that something he
shared with you?

Orrick: Yes, he did. In the Jimmy Hoffa case, the Teamsters had bribed the
jury in a criminal case, and they found Hoffa not guilty. There was
enough evidence so that the case could be tried for obstruction of
justice.

Van Nest: Did Bob Kennedy share with you his views or concerns about
Hoffa?

Orrick: Yes, he did. He said, at one of our meetings, "Can we get at him
civilly?"

I volunteered, "Why, of course, you can. Get him under
agreements or some such thing."

And he said, "How would you begin?"

I said, "The first thing I would do is to take his deposition."

"Well," he said, "how do you do that?"

I said, "Well, you pretend you are Hoffa, and I will be the
lawyer."

"All right."

So, I was sitting at the end of the table, and he was sitting at
his end.

Van Nest: This was at one of the luncheon meetings?
Orrick: Yes, one of the luncheon meetings.

So, I said "What is your name?"

And he said "J.R. Hoffa."

I said, "Will you spell that please? It sounded like Hoover.11

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And I got a little laugh from the fellows.
I said, "What is your address?"
He gave me the address.

"All right. Now, on the night of June 30th, Mr. Hoffa, when
you -- "

And we went on for about five minutes like that. He was
highly amused and, I think, educated to a certain extent.

Van Nest: Was there consideration given in the Civil Division to a civil action
against Hoffa?

Orrick: No. Eventually, they got Hoffa, and he did some hard time and

then was murdered.

Van Nest: What impressions did you come away with, after the time you spent
with Bob Kennedy, about him as an administrator of the
Department of Justice?

Orrick: He was a very good administrator. After we had been there a
week, he said, "I want to know what happens in here. I walk
around, everybody seems busy. So, it doesn't make any difference
if we are here all day or not." A couple of days later, right after
his lunch, he and Byron and I went out to the Chevy Chase Club to
play golf. I felt like a kid playing hookie, because never did I dare,
even as a partner in a law firm, leave during the middle of the day
to play golf.

We talked about what you can do in the division. Bob was a
good manager. We were making these daily reports, and he was
keeping his fingers on that, and then, of course, he had many other
duties, among them being a member of the National Security
Council. But, through the device of that daily report that I
mentioned, he knew what was going on in my division.

What he would do is, if he saw an item that interested him,
he would write, "I want to hear more about this," and put RFK

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there, or "Did you check with somebody on this?" So, he worked
at that, together with a myriad other duties of Attorney General. I
think he was a good administrator of the department.

Van Nest: Was he a political creature, in the sense that he asked you from
time to time to take steps, or act in cases, on political grounds?

Orrick: Never ever. He was bound and determined that politics would not
play any part in the operation of the Department of Justice, and
they did not. For example, a very forceful example, he forbade us
from employing anyone in the Division based upon his or her
political affiliation. This, of course, was directly contrary to what
most attorneys general have done: Sweep out the top people from
the other party. But not for Bob. That actually made it somewhat
difficult for me to get rid of some fellows in particular.

Van Nest: Did you have a lot of Republicans in the Division?

Orrick: If we did, I didn't know it. I literally didn't know the political

affiliations of anyone in our Division. And this was the way that
Bob wanted it. So, it didn't bother me.

Van Nest: Was there any sort of hiring clearing house in the Department of
Justice through which you had to check sensitive hiring decisions?

Orrick: No.

Van Nest: What other impressions did you gather about Bob Kennedy, as a

man, during the period of time that you worked closely with him in
the Department of Justice?

Orrick: He was intensely loyal to his country, to his brother and to people
who knew him well. He had good judgment. He was a man, as
far as I know, of the greatest integrity. He was a hard worker.

Van Nest: What about temper? Was he hot tempered?

Orrick: No, no. If he was, I never saw it. He wasn't one of these people
that laughs and smiles all the time. He was serious. He had a
serious job, and he knew it and understood it. And, of course, he

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was a great help to his brother.

Van Nest: Was he sensitive to the fact that there was a lot of criticism of him,
and of the President, for having put him in the Department of
Justice without much experience?

Orrick: He knew that. He was very much aware of that criticism, and he
would just laugh at that. As the President said, when someone
asked him that question: "The reason that I made Bobby Attorney
General was because I wanted him to get some experience before
he had to practice law."

That is about the way that Bob took it. He drew the fire
normally leveled at the President. And in that way, he was roundly
criticized for many things that he never did.

D. Life in the Department of State

Van Nest: There came a time when you left the Civil Division, did there not?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: How did you come to find out about your new position?

Orrick: I got a call from the White House that the President wanted to see
me at 2:00 that afternoon. I thought he wanted to see me in
connection with the Billy Sol Estes case, a big fraud case in which
the government was involved.

So, I got the file on Billy Sol Estes and boned up on it and
went over to the White House. The President said, "Bill, I would
like you to go to the Department of State as Deputy Undersecretary
for Administration."

I said "Well, this comes rather fast, Mr. President. But I came

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back here to help, and if that is where you want me, I will be glad
to do it. But," I said, "I have to have your backing to the extent
that I can call on you if I have any problems over there."

And he said, "Absolutely."
Van Nest: Did he tell you what he wanted you to do?

Orrick: Yes. I asked him what some of the problems were that bothered

him. He said the problem that bothered him most was the fact that
foreign service officers were so gun-shy, as it were, of the White
House, and that they always felt that the White House left them
out of things. He said, "One of the things I hope you will do is to
see if you can raise the morale of the foreign service." And I said I
would try to do that.

Then, when I went back to the Department, I went up to
Bobby's office and said, "What is the idea of letting me go? It's like
the Giants trading Willie Mays. I am a part of this team here."

Bob said, "Well, can't you do it?

I said, 'Yes, I can do it, but I just don't like being traded out
of hand."

"If you don't want to do it, I am sure we can get the
President - "

I said, "Bob, I said I would do it."

And he said, "We need you over there. There are things we
were thinking of, country teams and whatever. And we want to
work through you."

I said, "That is fine." So, I walked over to the State
Department to see Dean Rusk. I told him that I felt privileged to
be able to work for him in the department. Everybody knew I had
no experience in the program, substantively or procedurally, in the
Department. But I thought I could get on top of that pretty well
and do it, if I had the privilege of meeting with him once a week

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for at least a half hour or an hour.

I said, "Otherwise, I won't be sure of what I am doing. But I
will go ahead and run my part of the show - what I conceive it to
be -- if I can tell you once a week what I have been doing, and you
can tell me to stop that or whatever." And he readily agreed to
that.

1. Dealing with the Bureaucracy

Van Nest: What part of the show were you to be running? What was your
specific assignment?

Orrick: Deputy Undersecretary of State for Administration (now called
Undersecretary of State for Management). It was the care and
feeding of State Department personnel, which included civil
servants, as well as foreign service officers, and the
recommendations for the appointment of ambassadors and, literally,
everything procedurally, including things like communications and
security, just the whole thing.

The person whom I was succeeding was Roger Jones, who
had been Chairman of the Civil Service Commission. Everyone
thought he would be ideal at the job in this big, massive, running
bureaucracy. He didn't catch it at all. And the bureaucracies go on
from year to year. It doesn't make any difference whether they
have leadership or not. But leaders can at least do something.

Van Nest: I am looking at an article that appeared in The Plain Dealer in July
of 1962. The title of the article is "Orrick Cuts Trouble in State
Department." It's by John Leacacos, who was a long-time student
of State and covered it for the newspaper. It says in the article
that the big advantage you had, or would have, is that, "Orrick is
an insider with direct access to the President's ear, if necessary."

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Was that, you think, the way you were perceived at State
when you came in?

Orrick: Yes. And to the envy and intense dislike of some of the people
with whom I was associated, including George Ball, who was
Undersecretary of State, and was a very bright man, wrote well,
and a very courageous man. (He was the only person in the
department that stood up to President [Lyndon B.] Johnson with
respect to the Vietnam War.) I had admired him, but George and I
didn't get on very well. George was concerned that I was cutting
his communications to the White House, which I wasn't.

Van Nest: Did you think that the impression of you as someone with a direct
line to President Kennedy was an advantage in your work at State?

Orrick: Yes. I think so. It definitely was an advantage, and I took full
advantage of it.

Van Nest: In light of the direct line that you had established from President

Kennedy, what sort of a relationship were you able to develop with
Secretary of State Rusk?

Orrick: I had a very good relationship with Dean Rusk, going back to the

days I was at law school. He was a professor at Mills College. He
audited legal classes at Boalt Hall. We used to pitch pennies
together. I was very pleased to be working for him. I told him I
thought that I could do the work, if he would give me time every
week to tell him what I had done and to get his suggestions. And
he was good enough to do that. So, I would see him at a given
time each week and tell him what I had been doing and then ask
him for his counsel.

Dean Rusk is a fine man and very bright. He and I got along
very well together. He had ideas on every subject that I brought
up. And I found him very helpful. I felt that someone at the top
knew precisely the problems that I had to deal with in my
administrative job.

Van Nest: Did you sense any resentment on his part to the fact that you had

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such a close relationship with President Kennedy?

Orrick: No, not in the slightest. He is not the kind of person that would
harbor resentment. As far as I know, he was perfectly happy to
have me in the department.

Van Nest: We hear a lot today about the crafting of foreign policy and the
difficulties of making and establishing a coherent direction for
foreign policy. Was there an apparatus in the State Department
during the period you were there, Judge Orrick, for the
establishment and the maintenance of some sort of overall coherent
foreign policy?

Orrick: No, there was not. And I think for good reason.

One of the undersecretaries, George McGhee, undertook the
project of establishing a looseleaf notebook into which he would
have his staff place a summary of our "foreign policy" as to every
country in the world. This couldn't possibly work because there are
so many people involved in developing "policy." And it differed for
every country.

For example, our foreign policy, insofar as our relations with
Great Britain went, was made in the President's office and in
Washington. There was nothing for the American ambassador to do
in London concerning American foreign policy. However, when it
came to making our foreign policy as to the Belgian Congo, our
man on the job, Ambassador Ed Gullion, was making the foreign
policy himself. He didn't have time to get cables back to the
Secretary and then have the Assistant Secretary for Africa review
them and then have the country director review them and then
have them come back up that ladder. He was on the firing line.
He had to make these decisions, and make them he did, good or
bad.

Overall foreign policy, really, was made after consultation and
conferences among the top people in the State Department, the
National Security Advisor, Mac Bundy, as well as the President.

Van Nest: Was there no mechanism set up at the State Department during

166

your tenure there to attempt to formulate foreign policy with
respect to our major objectives in the world, for example, our
relationship with our major adversaries in the world?

Orrick: There was a section called the Policy Planning Section, headed by
an erudite, experienced foreign service officer and staffed by
specialists in various countries of the world. They worked and
produced papers primarily for the Secretary and for the President
on various major problems facing the United States.

Van Nest: That was something outside the realm of the administrative unit of
the Department of State?

Orrick: Yes. They were staff rather than line, as the distinction goes.

Van Nest: What sort of a relationship did you have with George Ball, who was
Secretary Rusk's chief deputy?

Orrick: As I stated previously, George and I didn't get on particularly well

personally. Although I tried to keep him advised, as I did the
Secretary, he didn't like to spend that much time. And he would
occasionally send an assistant of his around to see me and ask me
to do something. And I would do it, if I thought it was right. I
wouldn't do it if I thought it was wrong.

All this rather amusingly came to a head when I took my
family for a three-day vacation over New Year's down to the
Bahamas. When I got back, I found an order on my desk that I
was to move my staff from the 7th floor to the 3rd floor.

Van Nest: Was the 7th floor the floor on which the Secretary and the
Undersecretary were located?

Orrick: Yes. I learned very quickly in the Army, the closer you were to the
flag, the better off you were. And I didn't appreciate that at all.
So, I got hold of one of the best, if not the best of the civilian staff
that I had, who had been in the department some time, a fellow
called Herman Pollack, who was a superb bureaucrat and a superb
politician.

167

He said, "This should be no problem at all."

He suggested that I form a committee and have someone from
George Ball's staff attend the committee meetings and hold the
committee meetings once a week for several hours for the purpose
of planning the move. I did as he suggested, and I soon learned
what a very wise suggestion it was, because not one desk or chair
or body was moved from my office to the 3rd floor.

Van Nest: Thanks to Mr. Pollack and his planning?

Orrick: Yes. Thanks to Mr. Pollack and his planning. That, of course,
didn't endear me to George either.

Then we had a problem in the department in the passport
office of Frances Knight, who had a separate domain all of her own.
She claimed never to have been subject to supervision by the
Secretary or anyone else. She had started in this job during the
Eisenhower Administration, and she built a strong constituency on
Capitol Hill by furnishing passports overnight to any senator or any
congressman and, indeed, for any one of their friends. There was
no possible way that we could handle any problems with Frances.
And, recognizing that I backed her and promised any assistance that
I could give her, George gave me instructions to see her moved. I
didn't follow those instructions.

Sometimes, George and I didn't coordinate very well. The
President asked me to form a committee to study the feasibility of
having a professional foreign service academy similar to that at
West Point and at Annapolis for the Army and the Navy. To that
end, I was on this committee -- I might have been the chairman of
it. I have forgotten now. But other members of the committee
were Abe Lincoln, who was an Army general on the National
Security Council staff, and one or two others. The idea was to
have this committee talk to the people on the Hill who were
interested in this.

I remember one afternoon George and I went up to talk to a
subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee headed by
Senator Stuart Symington. George and I had different views with

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respect to some of the questions the Senator asked, and the Senator
was interested in it. We had gone up there with the President's
blessing immediately beforehand, but we made a mess of our
presentation because we hadn't spent enough time together to iron
out the differences that we had.

Van Nest: Was the problem that George Ball was uncomfortable with your
direct contact with the White House?

Orrick: I think that, in part, accounted for it. And when he got into

something, he just moved in. He was very effective and, as I say,
he was courageous and bright. I have seen him casually a couple
of times since, and we always are friendly and so on. We never
developed any personal animosity. Indeed, Marion, my wife, joined
George's wife in visiting foreign embassies, something that was not
a particularly pleasant task.

Van Nest: Whatever happened to the foreign service academy notion?

Orrick: It died aborning.

Van Nest: Was there no political interest in it?

Orrick: There was interest in it, as I said, from Senator Symington; also
from [Henry] Scoop Jackson, the senator from Washington, and
two members of his staff, who pushed things; Dorothy Fosdick and
some man whose name I have forgotten. But the foreign service
was strongly against it and pointed out, quite logically, that the top
foreign service officers had come from different backgrounds, had
developed different skills and had been successful and not put into
particular molds.

•

I had an exceedingly interesting talk with the permanent
Undersecretary of the foreign office of Great Britain, in which he
told me that die British foreign office had an arrangement pursuant
to which they carefully monitored each foreign service officer for
eight or ten years, placing him or her in different posts and then
finally deciding who would be capable of being ambassador and
where and when. So, just to take a major example, he said he
could tell me on that day who would be the British ambassador to

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the USSR ten years hence.

I will say for our foreign service, we shuttled ambassadors
and top officers back and forth between the Iron Curtain countries
and the United States so that we always, with the possible
exception of Averell Harriman - and I call him a pro -- we always
had professional people in the embassy in Moscow.

2. Selecting the Nation's Ambassadors

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, did you have any role in the selection of ambassadors
during your tenure in the State Department?

Orrick: Yes, I did.

Van Nest: What was the system and how did it work in the Kennedy
Administration?

Orrick: Well, generally speaking, Ralph Dungan in the White House, who
supervised foreign affairs to an extent for the President, and I
would meet and discuss the virtues of a political appointment whom
Dungan would suggest and a foreign service officer appointment
whom I would suggest. I would get my candidates after reviewing
a list prepared by the director general of the foreign service, Tyler
Thompson, who was on my staff, and discussing qualities and
drawbacks that they had with other top officers in the department.
And that included, at one time, Chester Bowles and at another time
Averell Harriman.

Then Dungan and I would see if we could come to an
agreement on who would be the best. And, if we couldn't, we
would agree to go to the President. I think that happened only
once. President Kennedy was very much sold on the
professionalism of his foreign service officers. He is about the only
president that I can recall who had professional foreign service
officers in the main embassies in Europe, such as Madrid, Rome,

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Van Nest:

Paris, London, Stockholm. While I was in the department, they
were all professionals.

Was there tremendous pressure within the administration, generated
by people other than the President, to accept non-professional
candidates, political appointees to some of the more desired spots?

Orrick: Yes, very definitely.

For example, our ambassador to Ireland has usually been an
amateur. The man that I swore in was Matt McCloskey, who had
assisted financially to a large degree in the campaign and who had
a good many contacts with the federal government. I remember,
after he had taken the oath, he was overcome. Tears came to his
eyes, and he said how grateful he was for the appointment because
he had long looked forward to bringing all his family back to
Ireland, and they could come and stay with him at the embassy.

Van Nest: Can you recall the one occasion on which you and Dungan had to
go to the President over an appointment?

Orrick: I don't. It could have been the appointment of Outerbridge Horsey
to Prague.

Van Nest: What was controversial about that appointment?

Orrick: Arthur Schlesinger, who kind of made his own job around the

White House, followed what I was doing. He would have me lunch
with him over at the White House dining room and discuss possible
ambassadors and differences in writing cables and a lot of things
that were desirable.

But, usually, I am practical. He was quite concerned about
the appointment of "Outer" because he felt that he was not liberal
enough in his views. I pointed out to him that our ambassador to
Czechoslovakia hardly ever got to see anyone in the
Czechoslovakia government. He was watched day and night and,
although he had a beautiful big embassy, he didn't need and, as I
recall, didn't have more than fifteen people in the whole embassy.
I think that was the one that we have talked about.

Van Nest:

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Horsey got the job, I should add.

Was Schlesinger pushing from time to time for specific candidates,
or was he looking for political orientation more than anything else?

Orrick: Well, it was both.

3. The Bureaucracy Fights Back

Van Nest: Did you receive any special assignments from Secretary Rusk during
the time you were in the State Department?

Orrick: Yes, I did. There are so many Americans stationed in embassies

around the world that it becomes, not only very hard to keep track
of them, but nobody assesses the value they are to the United
States.

On one occasion, the Secretary asked me to accompany him
abroad and talk to the European ambassadors about what use they
made out of these numerous people that are not State Department
connected people. The first place I went was to London. Our
ambassador then was one of the great ambassadors we have had,
David Bruce.

I asked him "David, do you know how many people you have
in your embassy?"

And he said "No, I really don't."

I said, "Would it surprise you to know that you have" - and, I
think, the number was in the neighborhood of a thousand --
"American military people stationed here, Army, Navy, Marines, Air
Force?

Van Nest: Just affiliated with the embassy?

172

Orrick: Yes, all affiliated with the embassy. He said, "That is perfectly

absurd. If I want information about Great Britain's defenses, or if I
have a question, I just call up Peter Thorneycroft," who was then
the Minister of Defense. "He will tell me what they are doing in
such-and-such a place. Or I see him at the club. I don't need all of
those military to be finding out what they do here."

So, I then determined from an administrative officer that there
were persons attached to the embassy from every single one of the
cabinet departments and from every single agency in the United
States Government. And this just doesn't mean the CIA [Central
Intelligence Agency] and the FBI, but the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Social Security, from each of the myriad agencies
which are so difficult to support these days.

When I went to Rome, our ambassador there, also a first-class
ambassador, was Freddy Reinhart. I asked Freddy if I could meet
with the people who were annexed to his embassy, and he said that
was no problem. We would meet the next morning at 9:00. When
we went into the room where the people were, it was another huge
room, crowded with people, Fred said, "Do you want me to ask
each one of them to stand and give you the name of their agency?

And I said, 'Yes."

We were there for about three hours. The same thing was
true in Bonn and, to a lesser extent, in Madrid.

Van Nest: Whatever became of the project? Were you able the do anything
about the number of American public servants abroad?

Orrick: Only complain to their particular agencies. But nobody had time to
work on that.

Van Nest: I take it the real concentration was in the popular capitals of
Europe?

Orrick: That was true. And there were lots of, for example, veterans, living

over there. So, if they didn't get their check from the Veteran's
Administration, they wouldn't have to come back to the United

173

States. They had some place to go. Social Security and that sort
of thing. But really a huge complex.

Van Nest: Later on, in a book he wrote about the State Department, John
Leacacos states, "Poor Orrick aged six years in six months in the
State Department." Is that an accurate statement of your
experience?

Orrick: That is not the way I would have written it.

Van Nest: He was implying you had a tough time. Did you?

Orrick: No, I don't think that I did. I had a tough time only in the sense
that I was changing a number of procedures. I did my level best to
get them well done and done up properly.

I had, working with me, my law clerk from the Department of
Justice, Murray Bring, who clerked for Chief Justice Warren for two
years, and then with me for two years. He is a very close friend of
mine now. I was also fortunate to have top-flight Junior Foreign
Service Officer, later an ambassador to Tanzania, Brandon Grove,
who was marked as a Kennedy man, and who was also my special
assistant. He, too, became a close friend of mine. And then we
surrounded ourselves with people who were like them.

So, to me, it was exciting and interesting for the most part.
But, when I would get to one of these new ideas, and it was
properly prepared, I had to get Dean Rusk to sign off on it. So, he
would sign off, and, at first, I was very pleased. Now we were
getting some place. But nothing, but nothing, ever happened. I
could tell you dozens of things.

Van Nest: Give us one or two.

Orrick: Well, I said that in order to properly prepare for what was the most

important domestic act we had, namely, getting money for what we
wanted to do abroad, that we should make the assistant secretaries
justify their budgets. This wasn't something for some lower
civil-service type to put in.

174

Dean Rusk said, "Let's see how it works."

I said, "Just like the old community chest days, United Way,
you and George are the top of the ladder and ~ well, the three of
us will listen to the pitches. I will pitch the questions, and then we
can confer on these things."

So, on one matter, - and Leacacos wrote this in his book - I
had told the Assistant Secretary for Europe that he had to get rid of
his train that ran from Bonn to Berlin. This is a good example,
although, it's a little bit of another story.

I had been visiting in Bonn with the Ambassador. I always
took one of my assistants with me. I would talk to the Ambassador
and the CIA agency chief, and my assistant would talk to younger
officers. I would talk to the political officer, so we would get an
idea of what was going on.

After the War and Yalta, when the United States, Great
Britain and France ceded to the Russians all the land between Bonn
and Berlin and kept Berlin under the control of the four powers, it
was thought to be necessary to show that we could travel any time
we wanted across Russian property to get into Berlin. The
Americans had liberated the famous Blue Train, which was the
Train of the Future in the 1939 World's Fair at New York. The
Ambassador would go up once a month, or twice a month, and he
would send other people up in it.

Van Nest: Riding into Berlin?

Orrick: Riding into Berlin. It had a sleeping car. The Ambassador took me

up with him. It was a pretty lousy train compared to modern
standards. It rocked all over. I had a chance to observe the
Russians stop us and ask to get on board, and our personnel told
them to stuff it. It was sort of a ritual that went on.

Well, I asked the Ambassador, "Is it absolutely necessary to
keep that train?"

And he said, 'Yes. Yes, it is."

175

Then, I asked him, 'You were talking about John Rooney.
Did he come over here this summer?"

And he said, "Yes. I forgot to tell you that. Yes, he was
here."

I said, "Did you entertain him?"

"No, no I didn't this time. Of course, he doesn't like to stay
in the embassies. He and his wife, Kate, get a suite in a big hotel,
and scream and yell at each other and break whiskey bottles. The
further they get away from here, the better."

I said, "Why did he come here?"

"I don't know. Maybe he just wanted the trip."

"No, no. Rooney doesn't travel just for that."

So, I got the administrative officer and said, "Did Rooney talk
to you?"

And he said, 'Yes."

I said, "What did he talk about?"

"Oh, he talked about some expenses and one thing or another.
And he asked for the log book of the Blue Train."

I said, "Where is the log book of the Blue Train?"

He said, "Well, do you want to see it? Nobody really wants
to see it."

I said, "Rooney saw it, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"Get me the log book and give me your private office."

176

I went through the log book, and, yes, the train did go to
Berlin once or twice a month. But guess where it went the rest of
the time? It went for rest and recreation for the officers. They
would take the train down to Munich and go skiing and go to the
Octoberfest and other spas.

I said, "We won't be needing the train next year."
"Oh yes. We need it to go to Berlin."
"Oh, no, you don't."
Van Nest: Did you then appear before Rooney?

Orrick: Well, Bill Tyler was the Assistant Secretary for European affairs.
When he appeared before the Budget Committee, I asked him to
justify the train. He did, to the satisfaction of Rusk and Ball.

I said, "Well, I want to tell you" -- I already told them
previously what the Administrative Officer told me and what I told
him.

And Tyler said, "I just have to have it. That is all there is."
So, we passed that. I didn't have to present that part of the budget
to Rooney. The assistant secretaries did.

Bill Tyler was a very bright, small fellow -- knew [Chancellor
Conrad] Adenauer. He was a perfect diplomat. He no sooner got
into that room than Rooney just tore his skin off, piece by piece.
And that ended the Blue Train.

So, that is the kind of thing. But Rusk signed off on that
budget process. They never held another meeting.

He asked me to get a set of procedural rules governing a
"trial" of one of the victims of the [Senator Joseph] McCarthy days,
who was a very good friend of Rusk's. His name was John S.
Service. Murray got up a good set of rules, so he could regain his
good name. Dulles had fired anybody that McCarthy poked his
ringer at. [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles threw them out

177

just like that, without a hearing or without anything. So, we did
that. And, again, Rusk signed off on it. I asked him if I could
proceed with the matter. He was defended by Roger Robb, now a
D.C. Court of Appeals Judge.

Van Nest: Whatever became of the rules that you drafted?

Orrick: They are someplace in the State Department, as far as I know.

Van Nest: Not implemented?

Orrick: Not implemented. This was true of many, many things. So, to that
extent, it was, indeed, frustrating.

4. The Cuban Missile Crisis

Orrick: But then, in about the middle of all of this, came the second Cuba.

Van Nest: The incident you are talking about is the missile crisis.

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What do you remember about that?

Orrick: That occurred in October.

Van Nest: Of which year?

Orrick: Of 1962 or '63.

Van Nest: Were you in the State Department at that time?

Orrick: I was in the State Department at that time. On that occasion, the
Agency, the Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Winston
Churchill, everybody, were very much disturbed by the fact that the

178

United States had determined that Soviet freighters, which were
covered by destroyers and followed by American planes, were
coming to Cuba. Photographs had been taken of the cargo on deck,
and experts had determined that they were missiles.

At this time, the government was in the biggest trouble ever,
I guess. The safe places where the leaders were supposed to go,
the big cave that is in the Blue Ridge Mountains and out at the
Western Defense Command post in Colorado -- Everybody was
getting up to Condition Two, Condition One being the real red
alert.

So, on this morning, we were meeting with the assistant
secretaries. We had that small meeting I mentioned earlier on
every morning with the Secretary of State and the Undersecretary.
Then, we would meet with the other secretaries twice a week.

Van Nest: "We" being whom? You and Rusk and Ball?

Orrick: Yes. And the AID guy, Fowler Hamilton or Dave Bell. And my seat
was next to Averell Harriman. Harriman was so great.

Van Nest: What position did Harriman hold at that time?

Orrick: Undersecretary for Political Affairs. Harriman went up and down in
the government. We used to say of him his only problem was at
the age of 77, he was still very ambitious. He was very serious,
and a good friend.

So, he looked at his watch and said, "Mr. Secretary, it's four
minutes to 10:00."

And the Secretary said, "The meeting will be adjourned for
five minutes, or longer." So, they went back to their offices.

We were blockading Cuba, and the meeting of our blockading
ships with the Russians ships was scheduled at one minute past
10:00. About two minutes of 10:00, the word came over - we had
a direct line, of course -- that the Russian freighter was turning and
going back.

179

We went back into the room and were very pleased. That is
where Rusk made his famous remark, "They blinked." But what the
event did show was that we were not properly prepared.

Van Nest: What was it about the state of preparation that troubled you?

Orrick: Not only was it troubling to me; more importantly, it was troubling
to the President. That was our communications. We just didn't
have the up-to-date communications that we should have had. So,
Mac Bundy called me and said, "The President wants you to head
up a special committee on communications. You are to make
reports to the National Security Council on the present state and
what should be done to bring it up to current levels and what
should be done to keep abreast of it in the future."

Van Nest: What was it that had happened during the Missile Crisis that had
called this problem to the President's attention?

Orrick: The President couldn't communicate with anybody. He couldn't
communicate with the Russians. We finally had to send his
communications in the clear.

Van Nest: By "in the clear," you mean outside diplomatic channels?

Orrick: No. Just the way we are talking, uncoded. We couldn't use this

magnificent code, which I have mentioned previously.

So, I went into the departments as soon as Mac told me that.
I figured I better know what our own was like. At this point, the
President was trying to communicate with the heads of state all
over the world and tell them that the crisis isn't over, but this is
why we were doing this and that. The United Nations Security
Council was being called into session.

I went into our department and almost cried. You could not
have believed it. I can't believe it today. There were little old
ladies and little old men looking like pictures in a telegrapher's
office out of Lathrop, California, in the old days ~ green visors
down to here, black shirt sleeves -- punching codes in, and yards
and yards of tape out here, which nobody was translating. It was

180

just a mess.

Van Nest: And this was the central communications network for the State
Department?

Orrick: For the State Department. However, the other services -- everybody
needs his special communications, and every agency had their own
communications and their so-called back channels.

So, the next day, I was ordered to have lunch with [Secretary
of Defense] McNamara and Bundy. We discussed what we should
do. There wasn't too much to discuss, except we had to look at it.
They then assigned a rear admiral as my deputy. I was getting a
little shaky then, because I was in another field.

Van Nest: I take it the idea was to improve communications throughout the
departments of the government?

Orrick: Throughout the departments of the government and with other
countries and, as far as that goes, with our own armed forces all
over the world. So, I got my top staff together and, as I mentioned
before, the best bureaucrat I ever met, Herman Pollack.

He said, "You don't know what you are in for. I know one
thing. Don't move until you get a certificate or an order signed by
the President of the United States."

I said, "They have told me that the verbal command is
enough."

He said, "No. It is not enough."

So, I called up Bundy and said "Mac, I need a NASAM -- I
have forgotten what the acronym was -- It was an order from the
National Security Council -- rather like one of those findings they
are talking about in the mess today -- signed by the President and
marked "approved."

Van Nest: By "mess today," you are referring to the Iran-Contra affairs?

181

Orrick: Yes. So, I got the NASAM, and Pollack said, "The next thing to do
is to seize the whole bottom floor of the State Department, except
near the elevators, and order the Marines in."

The State Department had, then, a company of Marines who
were Fox Company. They were stationed at different posts around
the world and quite a few of them in Washington. He said, 'You
get double their number and close off these entrances." So, I did
that.

Van Nest: What was the idea of closing off the entrances on the bottom level?

Orrick: So people couldn't come in and see what we were doing at all.

There were several big offices back there. There was a big
conference room, which was used for international conferences, and
a nice big table. And then there were assigned to my committee ~
I was chairman, the Rear Admiral was Vice Chairman. We got a
top person from Western Electric, Bill Baker. We got Jerry Weisner,
who was President of MIT at the time, and knew what he was
talking about. We got a fellow from the Agency who knew about
their communications.

Van Nest: By the "agency," you mean whom?
Orrick: The CIA.

Van Nest: All right.

Orrick: And that was the group. Then I said, "Now, I don't know anything
about the communications. We want to have experts right there."
So, we set up chairs around the table of where our experts could
sit, and then we started in first with big maps, showing where the
current communications went, and then how could we seize one
communications system, for example, from Paris to Brussels, which
wasn't needed by the military at that time, and put that over here
in another place. There was a complicated system of channels, and
the Pentagon rose up as one man in arms against this, taking any
of their systems, even though they were not used or were obsolete.

Van Nest: Why was the Pentagon completely opposed to it?

182

Orrick: Because, as they pointed out to me over and over again, "If I can't
get into immediate telephonic communications with my colonel on
the line, I only have command of this desk, and I want
communications with all of them." And that began with [General
Henry H.] Hap Arnold and the lot. They figured out how to play
me. I was in a tough bureaucratic game that I had no experience
with.

Van Nest: With lots of resistance all around?
Orrick: Lots of resistance all around.

Van Nest: Were you able the solve the problem eventually, or did the
bureaucracy win again?

Orrick: No, I couldn't solve it.

I will tell you one amusing incident to show what the
problem was. With the aid of our experts, we had rerouted quite a
number of these channels, put in new channels in different parts of
the world all over. We were really getting going. So, I said, "We
have no recess during our conference. We go from 9:00 to 12:00,
except maybe five minutes for everybody to go to the bathroom,
and that is all. Nobody comes in. In the afternoon, we will deal
with any problems we hear about during the noon hour, which will
be many."

So, we were into this, and all of a sudden, a Marine comes in
and says, "Fm sorry sir. There is an urgent call for Admiral
So-and-So." I turned to the Admiral and said, "I thought we had an
agreement that we weren't going to leave."

He says, "I have to. I have to."

"Well," I said, "I am going to keep going. If you have to -- "

He said, "If you don't mind. Just give me ten minutes,
because I don't want to miss any of this." He came back, and he
was white as a sheet.

183

I said, "What happened?"

He said, 'That was General [Curtis] Lemay on the phone."
And his ear was red. "He said that I was going to be removed
immediately, and I was not to do another thing on this thing."

It was near the noon hour, and we broke up.

Van Nest: The idea was that General Lemay was not at all interested in
participating in the program?

Orrick: Precisely. He was the Chief of Staff of the Air Force at that time,

or right next to Hap Arnold.

Van Nest: Did these problems eventually overwhelm the efforts to improve the
system?

Orrick: Not completely. The Pentagon and Bob McNamara - smart as a

steel trap - knew how to run things. He ordered General Starbird,
who was young general and who had graduated with honors at
West Point and then obtained a Ph.D. from MIT, to replace the
admiral as my deputy. General Starbird at the time was
commanding the nuclear test operation at the Bikini Atoll in the
Pacific. They flew him home, gave him a third star, making him a
lieutenant general and of equal rank with me. General Starbird
was smart, friendly, and a superb diplomat and advocate. With his
efforts we finally finished what was known as the "Orrick Report on
Communications."

As a result, the State Department communications equipment
was greatly improved. We got important new channels and the
Committee was responsible for the launching of three or four
communications satellites. We also recommended the President of
the United States be given the power to talk on a direct line on the
telephone with the head of each country of the world such as the
Prime Minister of Great Britain or the President of Ecuador. He did
have a direct line scrambler phone to No. 10 Downing Street in
London and was able at all times to talk to the Prime Minister.
The Committee also recommended a direct line to the Kremlin.

184

Under the old system we would send our encoded messages to
their PT&T. It would stay there about three or four days, and then
they would send that down to the KGB. The KGB would try and
break our code and see what it was and then send it back to the
PT&T, and a messenger from the embassy would come down and
pick it up.

Van Nest: Three or four days later?

Orrick: Yes. Our embassy also received daily diplomatic pouches. The

direct line to the Kremlin was installed shortly after our Committee
report was completed.

Van Nest: That is the Dr. Strangelove line between the President and Soviets?

Orrick: Yes. The General Secretary of the party could talk directly to the
President. The idea of having the telephones in so that the
President could talk to each head of state also worked in reverse.

The President of Ecuador, down in Quito - who turned out to
be a drunk -- used to call up President Kennedy on this direct line,
at any time, day or night. And so we had to make an Ecuador
cutoff in the system.

5. Selling Weapons Abroad

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, after you moved over to State, did you discover some
rather surprising practices there with respect to the management of
atomic weapons and their sale to third countries?

Orrick: Yes, I did. When I first came over there and looked at my position
on the chart showing the chain of command and the bureaus that
reported to me, I had the top person in each come in and talk to
me and tell me what they were doing. Finally, I got down to one
little box that said something like defense liaison-weapons. I

185

thought, "Well, that is something I never heard of." So, I called the
number given on the chart. The man who did the work there
answered, and I told him I would like to see him.

He said, "Well, nobody sees me."

I said, "I am new in this job, and I want to see you in my
office this afternoon at 2:00."

So, when the time arrived, this person came in furious.
I said, "What are you so mad about?"

He said, "Well, nobody has ever asked me to come from my
office over here."

I said, "Where is your office?"

"It's over on Ninth street."

"Tell me about it. How many people are over there?"

"About six or eight. That is all."

"How many rooms do you have?"

"I have got three or four or five rooms. You could probably
find that out, if you looked on your own chart."

I said, "Doubtless, I could. Tell me what those people do.
First, you tell me by whom are you supervised on this chart?"

And he drew himself up and said, "By the Secretary of State."

Well, I am enough of a bureaucrat to know that anybody who
says he is supervised by the Secretary of State is lying to you,
because the Secretary of State just does not have time to supervise
anyone.

186

I said, "Well, tell me exactly what you do from 9:00 to 5:00."

"Well, those are my hours," he says. "And I read all I can
about nuclear weapons and other weapons. Then, I sit on our
weekly meetings of our committee."

"Who sits on the committee?"

"General So-and-So from the Army, General So-and-So from
the Air Force and Admiral So-and-So from the Navy, as well as a
high official the CIA. I represent the State Department."

I said, "Why do you have these meetings?"

He says, "Well, whenever we are selling arms or loaning arms
to other countries, we meet to see what effect it's going to have
and decide whether we are going to approve it."

I said, 'You are going to be approving this?"
Van Nest: What kind of arms was he talking about?

Orrick: He was talking about not only regular rifles, machine guns and so

on, but he was also talking about nuclear weapons. The minute he
left, I went down the hall to see Alex Johnson, who was the
Undersecretary for Political and Military Affairs, and was a
long-time State Department Foreign Officer. He had been
Ambassador in a number of places. He was a superb top officer.

I said, "Alex, I don't know anything about this person. Do
you know anything about him? Well, you don't have to answer
that, because he is not going to be under me any more. I am
moving him, right now, under you. You supervise him."

Just the other day there was a story in the newspaper which
criticized a decision to sell nuclear arms to a small country made by
State Department personnel in a particular small office in the State
Department, and I would bet my meager salary that that was the
same type of operation, and it never changed.

187

6. Learning Politics in the Department

Van Nest: Did you run into some ticklish political problems during your tenure
at the State Department?

Orrick: Yes, two in particular that I remember very, very well. The first

had to do with a request from Senator [Mike] Mansfield -- who, at
that time, was majority leader of the United States Senate -- to
send him an employee of the State Department called Henry Ford,
who happened to be the communications expert in the State
Department, to act as Mansfield's guide on his upcoming trip to
Saigon.

Van Nest: How did you hear about this request?

Orrick: Mansfield's administrative assistant called me and said that he

assumed there would be no problem with it. I said, 'You are
asking for about the most important person in the Department now,
because of our communications setup. I can send a former
ambassador with him who would know a lot more about the
background."

He said, "The Senator wants Ford."
Van Nest: Had Ford traveled with Senator Mansfield before?

Orrick: Yes, and it was for that reason that he wanted him. I wanted the

approval of Secretary Rusk before I turned down Senator
Mansfield's request and sent with him instead a former ambassador
who knew a good deal about the problem. The Secretary said: "I
agree with you." I then went back to my office and called Senator
Mansfield and told him that we needed to keep Ford here on
account of his communications specialty. The Senator
uncharacteristically was mad and hung up.

I immediately went down to see Secretary Rusk to tell him
about this. As I walked into his office I heard, 'Yes, Mike. Why, of
course. Why, certainly. Of course you can have him. Sorry you

188

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:

were inconvenienced." The Secretary was sitting there with his
shoes off, with a little glass of whiskey by his side. He liked to be
called Mr. Secretary.

I said, "Mr. Secretary, I think that is most unfair. I could
have made my number with Senator Mansfield, if I had known you
weren't going to back me. But you told me when I came in here
you would back me.

He said, "Don't get so mad, Bill."

I said, "I have a right to be mad."

He said, "Come and sit down over here. We went and sat
down. I sat on the couch, and he sat on the protocol side.

He said, "I will tell you what it reminds me of. When I was
in the Army -- " he loved his Army experience -- "we were down at
Fort Benning. It was a hot day, and we were out on the rifle
range. We had had a short break, so we all went onto the
bleachers that were there. I was sitting up at the top, next to a
second lieutenant, and the general was sitting down on the first
row. It was a National Guard outfit, so nobody was in very good
shape, least of all the general. The general was fat.

"The lieutenant leaned over and said to me in an audible
voice, 'How do you suppose that miserable, fat old jerk ever became
a general?' Everyone in the bleachers could have heard him. The
general turned around and looked up at the lieutenant and said,
'Politics, my boy. Just politics."1

You got the message?
Yes, I got the message.

Did you get some political advice in the State Department from
your friend, Byron White?

Orrick: Yes, some very good advice.

189

The assistant secretaries, when they had problems involving
personnel -- housing, feeding, everything except substantive problems --
were to come to me and not directly to the Secretary. I found they
were not coming through my office. And Rusk would never tell me in
these weekly meetings that I had. Maybe he didn't remember it. But
these characters were just running my end. I found things happening
that I thought were inappropriate, and I didn't know what to do.

Van Nest: End running you to Ball or directly to Rusk?

Orrick: No, directly to Rusk. So, I asked Byron White for advice. We had

lunch together, and he said, "Does that really bother you?"

And I said, 'Yes, it does. Wouldn't it bother you?"

And he said, 'Yes. I will tell you how to handle that. I had a
similar problem. When I first started playing for the Pittsburgh Steelers
in about the first game of the season, I was just getting beat up. By the
second game of the season, it was mayhem, and I spoke to the coach
about it. In those days, we didn't have any good trainers. If you were
laid out, they would put you on a stretcher and throw you under the
bench and look down every once in a while and say, 'How do you feel?'
I was very tired of that.

"So, the coach said, 'I know what you mean. Now, when we
come back in the second half -- and he told the quarterback -- You call
Byron's number, and I don't care where you are on the field. You call
his number."'

Whizzer I guess he called him -

"And he said, "White, you carry that ball out of bounds. You are
going to get tackled. You get up just as fast as you can, and you kick
that fellow — in front of the crowd -- in his vital parts, and then bend
your foot back and put your heel right down on his Adam's apple, or as
near to there as you can get it.'"

So, I said, 'Then what happened?"

He says, "I did exactly as I was told, in full sight of the

190

crowd. The whole stadium rose and booed. The Pittsburgh Steeler
fans were booing. And they took this fellow off the field on a
stretcher. The penalty then for unnecessary roughness was half the
distance to the goal line. It put the Steelers way back on the
five-yard line. I was taken out of the game. But not once in the
rest of that season, or in the season that I played with the Detroit
Lions -- I never had any more trouble like that. We had a fair,
clean game."

Byron was the leading ground gainer in the National Football
League each one of these years, making money to go to law school.
They paid him $15,000, if you can believe it. He is now in the
football Hall of Fame.

Van Nest: One of the problems that you told us President Kennedy was
concerned about at State was low morale, and the problem of
foreign service officers not feeling a part of the government, not
feeling called upon and consulted. Did you figure out a way to
improve that problem?

Orrick: Yes. I did. That was something the State Department was always
complaining about, low morale. I would say to my staff, "How do
you know what the morale is in Ouagadougou, where we have an
embassy?" I never got a satisfactory answer.

Every year a group of prominent public persons come in to
review the files of each foreign service officer. They are people
from private life who are willing to give up two or three or four
weeks of their time to serve on this board, reviewing those eligible
for promotion. An older foreign service officer and one or two
civilians make up each panel. They would recommend to me who
should be promoted.

I suggested to the President that we bring the personnel who
had been promoted to the White House. After everyone was
assembled in the Rose Garden, all he would have to do was
congratulate them and shake hands. I thought this would be a
great morale boost. Kenny O'Donnell, who was in charge of the
President's appointment list, said, "No, the President is too busy."

191

I had done the appropriate bureaucratic thing. I had talked
first to the President. So, I said, "Kenny, if you talk to the
President, I think you will find he changed his mind. If he has,
please let me know and tell me what time will be convenient to
have these fellows in the Rose Garden, and we will be on time. If
he hasn't changed his mind, I hope you will call me anyway."

So, he called back in about fifteen minutes and growled into
the phone, "Wednesday at 11:00." We assembled in the Rose
Garden at the proper day and time.

The President came out, his smiling self, and congratulated
everybody. He said how much he appreciated the support that he
got from the State Department on different foreign policy matters.
Then he walked around and worked the crowd, as the pol says. He
shook hands with everybody there and thanked me effusively for
bringing them in. Kenny was still scowling.

Well, I will tell you, the morale in the State Department lifted
the building about six feet high. It was incredible. The word of
the Rose Garden meeting went out to foreign service officers
serving all over the world. The morale throughout the service was
very high. This was a worthwhile thing to do, and I certainly
would have made that an annual event had I stayed there any
longer. It was incredible.

Van Nest: Can you tell us what the circumstances were under which you left
your job there?

Orrick: The attorney general was very disappointed and, in the vernacular,
fed up with [Lee] Loevinger, who was the assistant attorney general
in charge of antitrust.

Loevinger was an antitrust scholar. He had written widely on
it. He had been appointed to the Supreme Court of Minnesota
from whence he came to his present job. He knew, intimately, the
leaders in the field, and he seemed to be a good choice on his
record.

His problem was that he could not get along with Bob, and

192

he would change his recommendations at the slightest sign of
irritation from Bob. The result was that Bob had no confidence in
him. He resorted to putting Burke Marshall, who had been an
antitrust expert in the prestigious Washington firm of Covington &
Burling, but who then was assistant attorney general in charge of
the civil rights division, to supervise Loevinger.

This didn't appeal either to Loevinger or to Marshall, and so it
was suggested that I return to the Department of Justice and take
over the antitrust division. Loevinger received notice of this when
he had his radio on one day at noon on the newscast. It was
announced then that he had been nominated for the position of
Commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission.

Van Nest: This was not viewed by Loevinger as a promotion, I take it?

Orrick: No. Nor by anybody else. It wasn't the best way to ask a fellow
to leave.

Van Nest: Were you anxious to leave the State Department?

Orrick: No, I was definitely not anxious to leave it. I was enjoying the
work. I thought I had made a number of worthwhile changes in
the areas of my operations. I had put in a budget system,
developed the way to appoint ambassadors, had worked out a
system of getting my own views on how the various embassies were
doing by periodically visiting them with one of my younger
assistants. I had revamped the communications system for the
whole government and done it through the State Department.

So, I was perfectly satisfied and was looking forward to doing
other things; however, I took the job to help. And when Bob asked
me to come back, I acquiesced.

E. Chief of the Antitrust Division

Van Nest: Did Bob Kennedy give you any specific marching orders in terms of
what he wanted to see done in the Antitrust Division?

193

Orrick: No. As usual with him: "Run it."

Van Nest: Had the Kennedy Administration taken an aggressive view of
antitrust enforcement up to that point in time?

Orrick: Yes. The President was very much upset in 1962 by the rise in
steel prices. He was upset because the President of U.S. Steel,
Roger Blough, had, in a personal interview with him at the White
House, stated that the industry would not raise prices.

You may recall that inflation was starting to come down.
And President Kennedy, like every other president, didn't want to be
saddled with the heavy weight of inflation. His economic advisors
told him that, as soon as they increased the price in steel, there
would be strikes and general inflation.

He was quite concerned and ordered the Antitrust Division to
investigate evidence of price-fixing in the steel industry. So, a
grand jury was convened very promptly, and the leaders in the steel
industry ordered to testify to it very promptly.

Van Nest: Was it then the perception, prior to the time you joined the

division, that Kennedy and the Kennedy Administration had been
vigorous antitrust enforcers?

Orrick: No, definitely not. To the contrary. On this occasion, you might
recall that a big fuss was stirred up by the FBI calling on these
officials late at night and early in the morning. Some said this was
done at the specific direction of Nick Katzenbach, who was then the
deputy attorney general, although Katzenbach later denied it.

Van Nest: What experience had you had up to that point in antitrust and
antitrust law?

Orrick: None, other than a minor amount of work in my law firm. At law
school, I wrote an article on price leadership, which is still doctrine.
That is about the extent of it.

194

1. Preparing for the Job

Van Nest: Did you take some special steps, Judge Orrick, to prepare yourself
to perform the job?

Orrick: Yes. I realized that I would have to work hard to get up to speed.
I left my post in the State Department and then tried to get some
space down at the United States Courthouse. To that end, I went
to see my predecessor in the civil division, who was then on the
Court of Appeals, Warren Burger, and asked him if there wasn't
some room up in the attic of the courthouse where I could set up a
small office and start pulling down the law books and getting up to
speed in antitrust. He was very helpful and very kind in making a
room available to me.

So, I spent day and night for three weeks in there going
through the big cases. I was fortunate enough to get my good
friend and special assistant, Murray Bring, home to help me. He
was on his way to California when I got the Highway Patrol to stop
him in the State of Ohio and telephone me. I encouraged him to
come back, which he did. So, he and I prepared together to go
over and take over the Antitrust Division.

Van Nest: Did you make some effort to consult the leading antitrust experts of
the day as part of your preparation for the job?

Orrick: Yes. After I was sworn in, I thought that it would be very

worthwhile to get the current views of the academic community on
the various theories of antitrust. So, I went up to Yale and I had
an interesting meeting with King Brewster, who was provost then, I
believe - He was teaching an antitrust course, foreign antitrust -
and also to Bob Bork, who is now making such headlines in
connection with his pending hearings to be Justice of the United
States Supreme Court.

Bork was an exponent of the so-called Chicago school, which
decried any antitrust enforcement with respect to mergers, vertical
or horizontal, and who thought that the Antitrust Division's efforts
should be limited to price fixing.

195

Van Nest: How much time did you spend with Mr. Bork?
Orrick: I would guess an hour and a half, or two hours.

Van Nest: Was he a very committed proponent of the Chicago school of
thought?

Orrick: Oh, yes. He had written on it, and there was no question about his
views.

Van Nest: What were the reasons why, in his view, antitrust enforcement
should be so limited?

Orrick: The main reason was that he thought that, if it were a truly
capitalistic economy, it would run itself. And the state, in
particular, coming forward and saying that Company A should not
merge with Company B, puts itself in the position of not knowing
what savings, if any, could be made by mergers or how it would
benefit a particular industry or a particular part of the country. To
a certain extent, I think that is entirely logical.

I remember I always quoted Mr. Herbert Hoover, who said
that the reason the American economy prospered so much more
than the European economy was because it did not permit cartels to
operate the economy. But Bork was very clear on it. I had no
doubt about the thought of the Chicago school when I went out to
Chicago on that trip and talked with Phil Neal, who was dean of
the law school at that time, and Ed Levy, who, I think, was
president of the university — I am not sure ~ but he had a top
position in the university. I also went up to Harvard and talked to
Donald Turner.

And then I invited each of them to come to Washington and
discuss antitrust with my section chiefs on one Saturday. This, they
were kind enough to do, and the discussion was quite helpful. My
first assistant, Bob Wright, whose father, incidentally, was Frank
Lloyd Wright, and who brought the famous Paramount Pictures case
and was a real scholar and good friend, kept the discussion on the
track. So, we really got a good deal out of it.

196

Van Nest: Was it primarily Chicago school thinkers who were invited to this
informal conference?

Orrick: No. All the ones that I mentioned. Don Turner, for example, is a
great exponent of all antitrust theories, and still is.

Van Nest: Did you develop some personal views from all this discussion, Judge
Orrick, that established the objectives you wanted to accomplish in
the division?

Orrick: Only to this extent: The Division -- and I say this is true up to the

beginning of the Reagan years where President Reagan and the
Attorney Generals [William French] Smith and [Edwin] Meese have
practically put the Antitrust Division out of commission - the
Division was always criticized for reacting to situations, rather than
studying the economy and then trying to make changes which
would improve it. We had an economic section which was active,
but we had no real stars there. They would simply add their
thought to cases that looked like they should be brought, cases that
were discussed and the situations discussed in the newspapers and
the Wall Street Journal and so on.

And so, I undertook to combat this criticism by forming an
evaluation section under the leadership of my colleague, Murray
Bring, to delve into the various sectors of the economy and see
what we could do along those lines.

Van Nest: How did you go about setting up this evaluation unit, and how did
you define the goals?

Orrick: I just ordered the unit set up and selected the personnel to work

there, rather than in the places that they were working. I told
them that I wanted their recommendations with respect to any
sectors of the economy that should be blessed with our
ministrations. The evaluation unit was more useful in evaluating
proposed complaints and proposed settlements than they were in
identifying different parts of the economy which we should attack.

197

2. Getting the Word Out

Van Nest: Let me show you some headlines that appeared at the time that you
took over the Antitrust Division.

Here is one, April 5, 1964, from The Herald Examiner: "Trust
Buster Out to Hunt Wolves" and a picture of Assistant Attorney
General Orrick.

Here is one from The Miami Herald. April 12, 1964: "Don't
Wait, Find Cases, Trust Buster Demands" and a picture of you
sitting before a map of the United States.

And a third which apparently was in The London Financial
Times sometime later in April: "Sharper Teeth for U.S. Trust
Busters" and a picture of you on the cover.

And let me read one more. U.S. News and World Report.
May 1964: "New Crackdown on Business" with a picture of you
standing before the mast of the antitrust division.

Was there some concerted effort to get the word out to
American business that the Antitrust Division was going to get
down to business?

Orrick: Well, I thought it was part of my job in law enforcement and in
running the Antitrust Division to let the interested people know
what we were thinking about. And, indeed, the talks which I gave
periodically at section meetings of the antitrust section of the
American Bar Association and industry groups throughout the
country, served, I was told, in many instances, to not only prevent
practices that might violate the law, but also stopped such practices
as having cocktails every Friday in a private room in the Hilton
Hotel and fixing interest rates, things of that kind.

Believing that, as I did, I made myself available to any
reporter who wanted to come in and talk to me about the public's
business, and to any lawyer. I sent invitation after invitation to the
Bar to come and present any problems they had questions about in

198

the antitrust field and that we would answer the questions. More
than that, we would give them a "no-action letter", which simply
said the "The Antitrust Division has no intention at this time of
filing a criminal lawsuit against you." And the fact of the matter is
that the Antitrust Division had never gone back on one of those
no-action letters from the time they were started, which was maybe
in the Truman Administration.

Van Nest: Did you discuss with Bob Kennedy the fact that you intended to

take this aggressive posture and to get the word out, as it appeared
through these articles that you did, that the Antitrust Division was
going to be looking very aggressively at American business and
American mergers?

Orrick: I don't remember discussing it with him. I continued that system
that I mentioned earlier, of making daily reports to him of what I
was doing. And, if he was interested, he would make notes on the
side and return it to me and expect that I would know whether he
was interested in it or liked it, or didn't like it, or whatever. He
was a close student of the newspaper. His public relations officer a
great human being called Ed Guthman, kept him fully advised of
what was in the press on it. And I think that was the way he liked
it.

Van Nest: Did Bob Kennedy take a very active interest in the work of the
Antitrust Division?

Orrick: No, he did not. The assistant attorney general in charge of

antitrust did not have the power to file a lawsuit. This power was
taken away from him some years ago with the result that, although
the newspaper articles always said that I filed the case, I didn't file
the case. The Attorney General, in effect, commenced the case by
signing the complaint. At that time, I would explain, in as much
detail as he wanted, all about the case and what I thought probably
would happen.

He showed confidence in me by always signing my
complaints, although he asked me more than once, rather
mournfully, "Must you always sue our biggest contributors?"

199

Van Nest: Can you think of any instances in which the Kennedy

Administration, either the President or Bobby, intervened with your
office with the effect to change the intended course of the Antitrust
Division?

Orrick: Never. Absolutely not.

3. Dealing with Merger Activity

Van Nest: What, if any, posture did the Antitrust Division take under your
tenure with respect to merger activity?

Orrick: We were engaged in a great deal of activity, both reviewing

proposed mergers and attacking mergers that had taken place. At
the time that I came to the Division, the Supreme Court had just
handed down its decision in the Philadelphia Bank case that
prohibited the merger of that bank with another bank and, in doing
so, appeared to approve this interpretation of the antitrust laws.
Having that in mind, we carefully watched for any proposed
mergers.

Van Nest: Was there a lot of merger activity in the country at that time, in
the early '60's?

Orrick: Yes, there was, but nothing like the mergers encouraged by the

Reagan Administration, which has simply put the antitrust laws on
hold. There was too little coordination of administrative action. It
was not unusual to have the Antitrust Division disapprove a bank
merger, while the Controller of the Currency approved it. This
resulted in blatantly bad government. Attorney General Kennedy
ordered me to work out an appropriate system with Douglas Dillon,
who was then Secretary of the Treasury and superior to the
Controller of the Currency, who was James Saxon.

Also, some bank mergers needed the approval of the Federal

200

Reserve System. So, to devise a viable plan for applying "good
government" to these mergers, I met with Bill Martin, who was
then chairman of the Fed, James Saxon and Doug Dillon. We
agreed that, if any one of the three agencies disapproved the
merger, we would meet and discuss it and see if we couldn't resolve
our differences.

I was astonished when Saxon took the position that he was
not supervised by the Secretary of the Treasury, and that he would
approve or disapprove mergers in his own good time. This, again,
resulted in outrageously bad government, because Saxon would
send a telegram approving it, and the Antitrust Division would
immediately file a lawsuit in the town where the bank was and get
a temporary restraining order.

Van Nest: Was Saxon refusing to meet with Dillon and with you to work
these things out?

Orrick: Yes. He was full of himself. And the bankers were very fond of
him because he did whatever they told him. This eventually came
to Bob Kennedy's attention. He and Doug Dillon talked with
Saxon, but they didn't fire him. Saxon just kept doing business in
the same way. And so did I.

Van Nest: Had you made some effort to get out the word, specifically with
respect to mergers, that you were going to be looking more
carefully at mergers than prior administrations had?

Orrick: Yes. And, in the general articles to which you made reference
earlier, I said that. In most of my remarks to industry groups, I
mentioned that we were looking at mergers. And, indeed, in the
twenty-five years that have transpired since then, the department is
still working on what they call merger guidelines. The last
so-called merger guidelines were published only two years ago.

Van Nest: I see here that Anthony Lewis wrote a special report in the New
York Times sometime in late 1984 in which he talks about the
so-called Orrick theory of antitrust. Let me quote to you from the
article. He is attempting to paraphrase comments you made about
the Humble Oil merger.

201

What he says is this: "In effect, the Orrick theory was that
the really huge companies, the number one in each industry,
seemingly cannot gobble up smaller enterprises. They can grow
only by internal efforts." Was that your view and the view of the
Division back in 1984?

Orrick: Yes, absolutely. After all, the antitrust laws were created to

prevent monopolies and cartels and the like. And, if a company has
a monopoly, it must be a "benign" monopoly, that is to say it must
be one that hasn't been formed by acquisitions. And that certainly
is my view today and was the department's at that time.

Van Nest: There was criticism of you in the New York Times and in

Newsweek and several other magazines, to the effect that the
Antitrust Division was looking at bigness itself as something that
was wrong, and that, in any attempted merger which involved a big
or major player in an industry, you were objecting whether or not
there would follow an anticompetitive effect.

Orrick: That is not true. I always tried to make the point whenever I gave

one of these talks - and I can remember specifically doing so in a
talk I gave before Town Hall in Los Angeles and also before the
Commonwealth Club here - that bigness, by itself, is not "badness."
But, as I have said, the monopoly must be benign. We were not
going to let big companies keep gobbling up small companies, as
seems to be the situation today. Or even in some cases today, that
is in the reverse. Outside of that, I didn't think then, nor do I
think now, that just because the company is big, it's violating the
antitrust laws.

Van Nest: There was a fair amount of controversy over the Humble Oil

proposed merger with Tidewater Oil here in California. Was that
something you played a role in?

Orrick: Yes, I certainly did. We had many meetings with counsel for both
companies and the officers for the companies. What Humble
wanted to do was, instead of coming out here and purchasing sites
for the distribution of their own products, they wanted to get
Tidewater's stations and other points of distribution and simply
change the name to Humble.

202

That is the kind of thing that we were very much opposed to
because it destroys competition. If Humble wanted to compete,
they could come out and put a gas station on the comer across
from Tidewater. Then we would have some competition. But to
give them wholesale all of Tidewater's distribution system seemed
to us a rank violation.

Van Nest: Weren't there other oil companies out here prominently competing
in an open market at that time?

Orrick: Yes. Arco was one just coming out then.
Van Nest: Chevron?

Orrick: No. Standard Oil Company of California, which is Chevron, is a
local company, or used to be.

Van Nest: Weren't there other companies here, competing in that particular
market, that made it a fairly vigorous market?

Orrick: That is absolutely right.

Van Nest: Whatever became of the proposed merger?

Orrick: The merger was disapproved. I think that Tidewater was a Getty
asset. It may have been merged into Getty Oil. I don't know what
happened to it.

Van Nest: Can you tell us about the El Paso Natural Gas case? Was that
pending when you arrived at the department?

Orrick: It was. The very week I arrived at the department was the last

week in the Supreme Court term. And, on that last day, when they
announced their final opinions, they announced three or four that
had to do with my division. And El Paso was one of them.

Van Nest: What were the issues in El Paso?

Orrick: El Paso wished to acquire a company owning a pipeline that would
take the oil from Texas to California. The Antitrust Division

203

opposed it. The case was filed in the District of Utah where
Government's greatest enemy, Harold Ritter, was the district judge.
Ritter would never let the case come to trial. It went three times
to the Supreme Court, and this occasion was the second time.

So, I knew that the best thing I could do was to settle that
case because we couldn't get it litigated. The Tenth Circuit, as I
recall, took the case away from Ritter, and still nothing happened.

Van Nest: Was Ritter simply anti-government, generally, or was this case one
he had a personal interest in?

Orrick: No. He was anti-government, generally. He had been appointed by

Truman, and he ruled against the government every single case he
sat on. He would tell you that, and it was true. We kept book on
him.

Incidentally, when the government condemned acres of that
arid land in Utah which supported only wild horses and was
inhabited by a few Sioux Indians, he was the judge who said that
each horse was worth $7,500 because they were the only horses in
the world who could understand the Sioux dialect. That is a true
story.

Van Nest: Made it expensive to buy?

Orrick: Right.

Van Nest: You set out to settle the El Paso Natural Gas case?

Orrick: I undertook to settle the case. I have done a lot of negotiating in
my career, and I have never had as difficult a negotiation as this
one. We met regularly ~ it seemed like it was all the time ~ but
about twice a month with the very competent officers of El Paso
and their very competent lawyers. I can remember getting the
Federal Power Commission in on it and spending one whole
Saturday, with the chairman of the commission, in his office on my
knees, peering at a map, and trying to figure out whether we
couldn't come up with some other solution.

204

As I say, this was the most difficult negotiations I have ever
had, and the fact of the matter is that the case again went to the
Supreme Court, and this time Justice Douglas, in his friendly, kind
way, began his opinion with "The government knuckled under," and
that made me just plain sore. When I saw Douglas again, which
was at my first circuit conference after I became a judge up in Reno
in 1974 -- he was then our circuit justice -- I told him that it made
me sore, and I said that it was an untruth. He didn't like that very
much.

Van Nest: He believed that the government had sold out the case?

Orrick: Yes. And I never, in my negotiations with anybody in the

department, had less than the whole staff that had worked on it. I
always had my first assistant, Bob Wright; I always had Murray
Bring; I always had the head of the economic section, Lou Marcus;
and the head of the particular litigating section, Gordon Spivak,
who today is one of the real leaders of the nation as an antitrust
lawyer. They were always there at those meetings. But that's the
impression you got from Douglas' outrageous opinion.

Van Nest: What about newspapers? Were newspaper mergers the subject of
concern during the Kennedy Administration?

Orrick: Yes, they were. What was happening, and has happened since, was
that, where you had two newspapers in the town, they would try
and set up a joint printing facility and eventually merge. The
inevitable results were newspapers like the Chronicle and the
Examiner, or like the Honolulu Advertiser and many others. There
were a lot of them.

Van Nest: By "results," you mean not enough diversity?

Orrick: And no competition. And they just went downhill as newspapers
because, if there's only one paper that the stores could advertise in,
the owners, naturally, cared more for the money than for the
quality of the paper.

One of these mergers occurred out in Cincinnati, the home of
the Scripps Howard newspapers. They had bought the Cincinnati

205

Post, so, we moved in and ordered them to divest themselves of it.
And the court so ordered, and we were quite successful. I
remember that merger, particularly, because it's called to my
attention every summer by Jack Howard, whom I see up at the
Bohemian Grove. We always laugh about it. But, for the first ten
summers, he always castigated me for doing such a low act and
being of such disservice to the public. However, about five or ten
years ago, he said that the best thing that had ever happened to
him was to get rid of the Cincinnati Post because he would have
lost a great deal of money had he done what he' wanted with it.

Van Nest: I have a picture here of you and a railroad map. This appeared in
Newsweek in October of 1963, shortly after you joined the Antitrust
Division. What can you tell us about the negotiations involving
railroad mergers in the East?

Orrick: The Pennsylvania Railroad, as I mentioned earlier, as well as the

New York Central, as well as the New Haven, as well as the Boston
and Hartford and others, were all in bad financial shape. The
Interstate Commerce Commission had undertaken to see whether or
not they should be restructured. But, typically, they worked very
slowly. Bob Kennedy didn't want to waste all that time, so he got
his good friend, Barrett Prettyman, who is an exceedingly good
lawyer, to head up a task force and talk to the railroads about
restructuring their routes and so on, and to do it all over the
country.

I remember sitting with Barrett and my good friends, the
presidents of the Southern Pacific and the Western Pacific, and
feeling quite uncomfortable, as we pointed out the ways in which
they were run and what we thought they ought to do.

Van Nest: Were the people running these railroads people you had known
here in San Francisco?

Orrick: I knew personally Don Russell, Fred Whitman and others. I would

see them at the Bohemian Club.

206

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:

Orrick:

But what occasioned that article was the proposed
restructuring that Barrett and his committee had determined upon.
I had been in Europe for a week or so. I was the chairman of the
United States delegation to the OECD, the Organization of
European Community Development. I hadn't kept up with what the
committee had been doing, but I was asked to announce the
proposed changes to the railroads and to the press. There were so
many people involved, we had to use a big auditorium in the
Department of Commerce.

I recall that occasion very well. I had some copies of this
press release, and I told my assistant to bring in the copies after I
had finished reading the proposed plan. So, like anybody who has
had anything to do with politics, I always enjoyed addressing a
room filled with people. I was reading slowly, when all of a
sudden, everybody got up in the room and turned their backs and
ran from the auditorium to my assistant, who had just opened the
door of the auditorium with a big pile of press releases. I was left
talking to myself and two or three others who were polite enough
not to leave.

And for whom you were very grateful?
Very grateful, yes.

Some of the newspaper reports that we have looked at talk about a
proposed merger between General Telephone and I.T.T. Do you
recall discussions with the principals involved in that case?

I do recall that the president of I.T.T. then was Harold Geneen. He
was a very active, thoughtful, smart businessman. It didn't bother
him that he had to take on the American Telephone & Telegraph
Company. He saw how to do it and do it in a place that is in part
of Los Angeles County, where General Telephone still is.

He wanted to get our ideas as to whether or not we would
approve that merger. And I said that we would have to get the
facts and, if it was all right with him, we would send in the
accountants from the FBI and find out what the facts were. He
said "Well, thank you very much, but no thank you."

Engaged to be married to Marian Naffziger — 1947.

-7-

, - •• ' ••

/ * ij

i f

With Adlai Stevenson and Pat Brown
on the campaign trail in 1956.

At San Francisco International Airport
with Candidate Kennedy en route to Alaska — 1960,

With Bobby Kennedy and Justice Potter Stewart

at his swearing-in as chief of the Civil Division

of the Department of Justice. 1960.

Defending Civil Rights in Montgomery, Alabama
with Byron "Whizzer" White and Jim McShane — 1961.

As Under Secretaryof State for Administration,
with Secretary Dean Rusk, in 1962

Accepting a commission as Assistant Attorney General
for Antitrust from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy — 1963

Commencing work as Chief of the Antitrust Division — 1963

At a Cabinet Meeting with the President as
Under Secretary of State for Administration — 1963

At work at his desk in the State Department
as Under Secretary of State for Administration — 1963

With the President and others in the Oval Office — 1963

Antitruster Orrick:
no enemy of oil

New antitrust chief implies
he's approaching oil-related
problems with an open mind

Clyde La Motle

Washington Editor

IF THE Justice Department is planning any new.
aegressive moves against the oil industry, the word
apparently hasn't been passed along yet to William H.
Orrick. Jr., the new antitrust boss.

Orrick moved in last month to succeed Lee Loevin-
ger as assistant attorney general heading the antitrust
division. Loevinger has become a member of the Fed
eral Communications Commission.

Orrick evidently is still in the process of finding
out what is going on in the department and hasn't yet
shaped any specific plans or targets.

"The basic problem is to marshal the resources
of the department and to use them where we think
it will do the most good." he told the Journal in an
interview.

"I don't know just what our points of emphasis
will be. We have to develop a policy, and that takes
some time." The implication is that he will not neces
sarily adopt the policies of his predecessor.

Philosophy. Basically. Orrick takes the traditional
position that competition, rather than government regu
lation, is what makes our economy run.

The role of the Justice Department, as he sees it,
,s to keep competitors within legal boundaries, else
competition itself suffers.

For instance, if a company or a combination of
companies controls a given market, then others have
difficulty in entering that market, and competition is
inevitably lessened and restricted.

"We want to stimulate competition, not regulate
or run an industry." Orrick says.

The way to attain that objective, he feels, is vigor
ous enforcement of antitrust laws applying to price
fixing, monopoly, and restraints of trade.

Orrick doesn't seem to have singled out oil for
any special attention, although he has already been
made aware that he inherited some oil-related issues.

IOCC report. One of Orrick's first duties in office
was to appear before a congressional committee con
sidering extension of the Interstate Oil Compact Com
mission.

That naturally brought the attorney general's re
cent report on the IOCC into the picture.

Orrick had nothing to do with preparation of that
report but says he has studied it carefully.

William H. Orrick, Jr.

"... it takes time to develop a policy."

"I see nothing sinister in it." he says. "Frankly,
we were surprised by the uproar it seems to have
created in the oil industry.

"We endorsed the extension of the compact, and
we expressed some opinions and viewpoints on some
oil problems. That doesn't mean we want to run the
industry. We don't."

He declined to elaborate on or interpret some of
the implications of the report, such as the statement
that Justice intends to play a more active oil-policy
role because of the impact of federal and state oil
controls on competition.

"The report speaks for itself." he said, using a
lawyer's typical defense. He did. however, comment
favorably on the Journal's analysis of the report lOGJ.
May 27. p. 47 1. saying that it coincided with his own.

He promised, with a wry grin, that henceforth
Justice will make an IOCC report to Congress an
nually as specified in the legislation. The recent report
was the first made since 1459. and the lack of reports
in intervening years had been criticized in Congress.

Pipelines. Another unsettled issue Orrick found
on his desk concerns pipelines.

Justice has been making noises about oil pipelines
for years, but has never taken any specific action. In
the recent IOCC report, the attorney general indicated
that some action is likely. Orrick neither confirmed

THE Oil AND GAS JOURNAL • JULY 15, 1963

Explaining Administration antitrust policy to the oil and gas industry — 1963.

THE LOUISVILLE TIMES

U.S. Reshaping Trust-Busting

Washington Wl — The na
tion's chief trust-buster is dras
tically reshaping the Govern
ment's antitrust enforcement
posture.

His strategy is based on the
observation that speeders slow
down when they know the
traffic policeman is patrolling
nearby.

Thus William Horsley Or-
rick, Jr., the vigorous, intense
boss of the Justice Depart
ment's Antitrust Division, is
steering away from any idea
of enforcing antitrust laws by
sitting back and waiting for
complaints.

Orrick feels that approach
may be all right for the local
district attorney, but that it
leaves large gaps in antitrust
prosecution.

That's why he is redeploying
his forces to make sweeping
studies of entire industries
when the opportunity arises —
either as the result of a com
plaint or of investigations by
his staff.

The goal is to eliminate any
anti-competitive practices that
may have developed, un
checked, in some industries.

It was past quitting time in
the late afternoon, but the 41-
year-old Californian still was
waist-deep in work in his Jus
tice Department office.

Offers Illustration

In an adjacent conference
room, his lawyers argued voci
ferously, hammering out a
pending case that will be as
airtight as possible when it
reaches court.

Orrick had just emerged

Associated Pr«s Wir.photo

William Horsley Orrick, Jr., points to pins on a
map showing locations of antitrust investigations.

from that battleground. He was
in shirtsleeves, his suspenders
visible, sleeves rolled up.

To illustrate what he's get
ting at in new antitrust policy,
Orrick thrust a hairy arm to
ward a wall map of the United
States. Little flags clustered
about the major cities, where
antitrust fieVi offices are lo

cated. Red flags indicate crim
inal antitrust suits, blue flags
civil suits, orange ones grand-
jury investigations.

Away from the major cities,
the flags are sparse or non
existent.

"That's why I'm changing
our emphasis," Orrick f.aid.
"An unscrupulous businessman

in Spokane isn't any more in
terested in obeying antitrust
laws than the man in San
Francisco, where our field
office is."

While 70 percent of antitrust
cases stem from behavioral
problems in business, Orrick
said, only 30 percent are con
cerned with structural prob
lems. With his new approach,
he hopes, these figures will
change.

He recently told a New
York law group that companies
in a particular group may be
operating in complete contra
vention of law, "yet they may
also have so fastened their
hold on the industry as to
have settled into a comfortable,
amiable groove of non-competi
tion, which produces no news
paper headlines and no com
plaints from businessmen, Con
gress, or the public." He added:

"I have no doubt that it
is my duty to scrutinize such
situations carefully."

Orrick took over the anti
trust task from Lee Loevinger
last June, when Loevinger was
named to the Federal Com
munications Commission.

At Attorney General Robert
F. Kennedy's behest, Orrick
formed a policy-planning group
from among his 292 antitrust
lawyers and 30 economists.

Their task is to decide whe
ther a reported business abuse
merits a full-scale investigation
of the industry involved.

"We're just now getting this
program off the ground," Or
rick said. "A few studies are
under way right now. I can't
tell you what industries — but
at least we've started."

Outlining Administration antitrust policy — 1964.

Crime Committee co-chairman William J. Orrick Jr. and Moses Lasky

— UPI Photo

Why Lasky Is the Spokesman

Why is Attorney Moses Las
ky the chief spokesman for
the City Crime Committee?

Lasky shares the commit
tee chairmanship with Attor
ney William H. Orrick Jr.

Orrick was Assistant Attor
ney General in charge of the
U.S. Department of Justice's
Anti-Trust Division in Presi
dent Kennedy's administra

tion. He has been an active
spokesman in many past po
litical campaigns.

Lasky is a member of one
of The City's most respected
law firms.

Orrick says that Lasky was
"chosen" as spokesman for
the committee "because he
is most articulate."

"He and I have worked

very closely together on
these reports, editing and
re-editing them as lawyers
working on a legal brief,"
Orrick said.

"The only reason that I
have not attended all of the
press conferences and some
of the committee meetings is
that I have been either out of
town or in court.

''I support everything In
the city crime reports," Or
rick said.

Lasky also prepared a
lengthy defense of the com
mittee's reports which The
Examiner published in its
Editor's Mail Box column
last Wednesday. It was
signed by Lasky a s co-
chairman but bore no other
signature.

With Moses Lasky as Co-Chairman of the San Francisco Crime Commission.
San Francisco Examiner, June 19, 1971.

207

And he left. He got his answer, and he immediately branched
out into other businesses. It became one of the most diversified
companies in the country. He took it to South America. The
telephone is just a very small part of it. I don't know what has
happened to it since. He is dead now, I think.

4. Politics and the American Can Case

Van Nest: Did you have any notable run-ins on Capitol Hill during your years
in the Antitrust Division?

Orrick: I always tried to make myself available to any congressman or any

senator because I know how important it was for them to be able
to satisfy their constituents that they had talked to the proper
person in the government. Most of the time, I had the senator or
the congressman come to my office.

One day Senator [Robert C.] Byrd from West Virginia called
and said he would appreciate it very much if I would come up and
talk with him privately in his office about some matters.

Van Nest: What was the matter that Senator Byrd was concerned about, and
what had been the history of the problem?

Orrick: Senator Byrd was concerned with a divestiture order that had been

made in the case of the United States against Continental Can
Company, which had merged with Hazel Atlas. The court required
that Continental get rid of the two Hazel Atlas plants in West
Virginia. The problem, for the people in that poor community, was
that it meant closing off over 2,000 jobs.

But Senator Byrd didn't tell me that was what he was going
to talk to me about. When I got up to his private office, his
secretary said, "Oh, the Senator would like to see you in the

208

conference room." I said I was going to talk to him privately in his
office.

She said, "Well, he is waiting for you in the conference room."

So, I went into one of these enormous hearing rooms
scattered throughout the Senate building. I could hardly get in,
there were so many people. The Senator was sitting up at the head
of the room, and he said, "Come right up here, General Orrick."
These hostile people frowned at me as I came in, and he said, "I
want you to sit right here, and I want you to tefl these good people
from West Virginia just exactly why you have made my
government, our government, take 2,000 jobs away from these fine
people. And I can tell you that every labor leader in West Virginia
is here; the editor of every newspaper is here; Governor [William
Wallace] Barren is sitting right here; Senator [Jennings] Randolph
is here; and Representative Arch Moore is here. And we just did
want to hear from you."

Van Nest: You knew you had been had?

Orrick: I had been had. Fortunately, one of the people present whom he
didn't mention was the counsel for the American Can Company,
who was seated near the Senator. And I said, "Senators, Governor
Barron," and so on, "I would be very pleased to tell you exactly
what we are doing. But there's one person in this room who
knows a lot more about it than I do, and it's Mr. 'so-and-so,' who is
sitting there" - in his dark suit and his starched collar -- "who is
general counsel for the American Can Company, and who was
present in court at the time that the judge made this divestiture
order, and who approved divesting the Hazel Adas plants. And
Senator, I suggest you call on Mr. 'so-and-so' of the firm of Davis
Polk." So I sat down, very pleased with myself, and this other
lawyer had to get up and make some remarks. And I slipped out
the door.

Van Nest: Having made the proper introduction?
Orrick: Right.

209

Van Nest: Was there some further activity on that case?

Orrick: Yes. Senator Randolph had always been a great friend of President
Johnson. So, I got a call from him one day and, as he put it —
other people would do this, which always annoyed me because they
thought I would be much more amenable to their suggestions -- he
said, "I am calling from the White House. I have just been talking
to the President, and I would like to come over and see you."

And I said, "Certainly Senator." So, he came over and said,
"As you know, I have been to the White House, and I have just
been talking to the President."

I said, 'Yes, sir."

And he said, "I want you to put an end to this business about
Continental Can Company divesting itself of the Hazel Atlas plant."

I said, "I can't do that, Senator, and you know that. The
judge has ordered it. It's the law, and I simply can't do it."

He said, "Well, I anticipated that. I will tell you that, if you
don't do it on Thursday next commencing at noon, this building is
going to be surrounded by automobiles driven from West Virginia
so that nobody can get in or out."

I said, "Senator, you do what you think is right, and I will do
what I think is right."

I told Bob Kennedy and my colleagues about this. They didn't
believe it, until Thursday, when all these cars showed up and,
where it was necessary to double park, they double parked, and
they went right around that enormous building. It was true that
nobody could go in or go out.

Van Nest: And Senator Randolph was in the lead car?

Orrick: I didn't bother to see.

Van Nest: Did the divestiture go through as planned?

210

Orrick:

Yes.

5. The Antitrust Barristers

Van Nest: Did you have occasion to meet with some of the prominent

antitrust lawyers of the day while serving as chief of the Antitrust
Division?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: How much time did you spend with lawyers?

Orrick: I would spend my mornings working over complaints, letters and so
on with my top staff, and almost every afternoon, at least three
hours, talking to lawyers whose clients wanted to merge or do
something that was close to, and maybe governed by, the antitrust
laws. What I did was have every member on my staff who had had
anything to do with the problem present in the big conference
room. That began with the lowest- ranked person in the economic
section to my top staff, Bob Wright, Murray Bring and so on. Then
the lawyers would come in, and I would introduce the staff. And
they would talk to us and find out what we were thinking about
particular problems. It was useful for them, and I think it was
useful for my staff.

Van Nest: Can you give us some examples, Judge Orrick, of the best antitrust
barristers that you saw from time to time?

Orrick: I can begin with Arthur Dean, who was head of Sullivan &
Cromwell at that time; Hammond Chaffetz, who was the top
partner in Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago; Abe Fortas, who was in
Arnold, Porter and Fortas; Judge Rifkin. I saw them all. And the
reason was that antitrust was very much on the minds of our
corporate leaders. They always turned to the top trial men in the
firm for advice. Some of these men did almost nothing but

211

antitrust work.

Van Nest: What do you remember about Hammond Chaffetz from Kirkland &
Ellis?

Orrick: Hammond was a character. He used to be in the Antitrust Division.
And, with all my staff present, he would come in and say "Well,
Bill, you still have the same dumb people that used to be here
when I was here. I would think you could clean some of these
fellows out."

And I would say, "Hammond, that is a marvelous way, as an
advocate, to get my staff to listen to precisely what you want."

"Oh, they know it. They know it perfectly well. It doesn't do
them any harm to know that I still know it." Hammond got very
little from the Antitrust Division.

Van Nest: What about Abe Fortas? Was he a close personal friend of
President Johnson's at that time?

Orrick: Yes, he was a very close personal friend. He was the one to whom
Johnson gave the eighty-seven ballots in the famous landslide
Johnson election in Texas. You will recall that he managed to
garner eighty-seven ballots and take them up to Washington. He
put Fortas in charge of them, and that is the number by which he
won.

But Fortas was a New Deal wonder boy and an absolutely
superb lawyer and an even better advocate. I remember that he
represented, I think it was Procter & Gamble, and he wanted to
save the name "All" for Procter & Gamble. And he would give the
Antitrust Division all the rest. It was something like that. When
most lawyers left the room, the staff would turn to me and say,
"Now what do we do?" And I would say, 'You tell me what we
do."

But when Fortas left, they would not say, "What do we do?"
I said, "The meeting is adjourned. We will not decide this request
of Fortas' for at least twenty-four hours or maybe forty-eight hours."

212

Van Nest:

Orrick:

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

Because he was so gifted as an advocate, he could take you down
any road that he wanted. I have never heard a better one, and I
have certainly heard more than my share of fine oral advocates.

Can you recall any of the special circumstances which brought
Judge Rifkin into your office?

Yes. I remember one time he called and wanted to talk to me. I
was delighted. He came down from New York. I really looked
forward to it because I had admired him as a federal judge, and I
knew he was a great advocate. I looked forward to a very pleasant
time with him. I knew he would have good briefs.

So, he came in, carrying his briefcase, and I looked at it
approvingly. We sat down, and he said, "General Orrick, this case
is a simple case." And he reached down into his briefcase, and I
thought, "Oh boy, I am going to get the brief right now." But,
instead, he pulled up some suspenders and said, "The question is
whether such-and-such a suspender company can buy another
suspender company."

I said, "Judge, perhaps you can decide that one yourself. I am
not about to become an expert on suspenders." So, we talked
about some other things, and he left. He was a charming man.

When I was in private practice afterwards, I was in a case
with some really good lawyers, with Louis Nizer and Whitney
Seymour and Judge Rifkin. I reminded Judge Rifkin of the
suspender story, and I said, "I presume that you are not going to do
the same thing to this judge, Judge Palmieri, that you did to me
with the suspenders."

He got a kick out of it?

He got a big kick out of that.

What about Clark Clifford? Did you see a lot of him?

No, not a lot. I saw people from his office and, on very important
things, he would come over. Those Washington lawyers are superb.

213

They know their way around the city.

I had great regard for Clark. There's one time I remember,
right after I had gone to work in the Division. A meeting had been
set up. I came into this large conference room, and there were
most of the big antitrust lawyers in the country, beginning with
Clark Clifford and Arthur Dean, Taggart Whipple, Warren
Christopher, Whitney Seymour and others.

Then I was introduced to one of their clients who was sitting
there, Mr. D. K. Ludwig, of whom I had never heard, but I was
shortly advised was the wealthiest man in America at that time. I
don't know if he still is. But at that time he was. And he was
going to buy from Phillips Petroleum — I think that's right — the
Tidewater Oil stock from Phillips Petroleum for fifty million dollars.
He wanted to know what I thought about it. I hadn't thought
anything about it. I told him that and went out of the room with
one of my litigators, who was an expert in the oil industry called
Harry Sklarsky.

I said, "Harry, who is this guy?"
And Harry said, "I don't know."

I said, 'You don't know? That is your job, for heaven's sake.
Should we approve a sale of fifty million dollars worth of stock to
this guy?

And Sklarsky said, "I don't know."
I said, "We will we have to find out."

So, we checked around and found that he was good for it and
that he owned a lot of freighters. That is where he made his
dough. And it seemed all right to us. So, we eventually approved
it, and we learned six months later that he had sold the stock for a
hundred million dollars to some company. I guess that is the
reason that rich people get the best lawyers.

214

6. The Assassination of John Kennedy, and the Johnson
Administration

Van Nest: The assassination of John Kennedy was certainly a traumatic event
for the nation. What can you remember about that period of time
in Washington, D.C., and the effect it had on people there?

Orrick: It had a most traumatic effect on the people there and, I guess, all
around the country. It was a tremendous shock, as everybody will
remember, because you can always remember where you were. I
was having lunch with Brandon Grove over in Georgetown at the
time. We started out to Hickory Hill to see Bobby, but they had,
by that time, closed off all the roads.

The government was just dead. Nobody could do much of
anything there until the funeral was over and so on. President
Johnson lived near our place on Rock Creek, and we would see him
coming by every day in his limousine going down to the White
House. But you couldn't get anything done in the office. It was
just a general period of mourning and wailing.

Van Nest: What was the impact on Bob Kennedy?

Orrick: It was just terrific. He was downhearted. It just took all the

spunk, so it would seem, right out of him. He could talk about it
with great difficulty only. I went out the next day and had a talk
with him. It was just very, very difficult. He didn't know what to
do or how to do it. And Johnson, of course, hated the Kennedys
and all the Kennedy retainers and friends and everything else, and
it created an unbridgeable dichotomy.

Van Nest: Was there any real discussion or relationship between Bob Kennedy
and the new president?

Orrick: Just not at all. And the new president made, in my view, a serious

error by not, in due course, having all the Kennedy people resign
and putting his own people in there. That is the only way you can
get something done in the government. I think, by leaving
everybody there, he thought that, at least until he got a chance to

215

run, the American public would like that. But it was clearly the
wrong thing to do.

Van Nest: Why?

Orrick: Because he couldn't get anything done. Everybody was saying,

"Well, the Kennedys would have done it this way or that way." He
didn't want anything to do with the Kennedys, and there we all
were: Bill Wirtz as Secretary of Labor; Bobby as Attorney General;
Ed Day, the Postmaster General; Stewart Udall, Secretary of the
Interior; Bob McNamara, of course; all the closest friends of
President Kennedy; and Dean Rusk. I think he got along better
with Rusk than anybody else.

Van Nest: What impact did the change of administrations have on your work
in antitrust?

Orrick: Well, it took a lot of the interest out of it. Johnson didn't know

anything about it. He used it as kind of a pawn in the complicated
games that he played. He wouldn't see anyone from the division. I
asked several times if I could go over and talk to him, and I did
that whenever I would get a phone call from one of his staff telling
me to dismiss a lawsuit.

I would tell him, "I can't dismiss that lawsuit, and I am sure
the President wouldn't want me to, if he knew the background of
it. May I come talk to the President?"

And the special assistant said, "No, no chance."

So, most of the time, Johnson went through Katzenbach, who
was then Acting Attorney General. A couple of times, Katzenbach
would call me up and say, "I want you to dismiss that case." I
would tell him, 'You dismiss it. I am not going to dismiss it. Ifs
improper. They violated the law, and they are being prosecuted. I
haven't any intention of dismissing it." That didn't improve my
relations with Katzenbach at all.

Van Nest: Did Johnson seem to have any interest in antitrust policy?

216

Orrick: None.

Van Nest: What about Katzenbach? Was there any effort made, during his
tenure as Acting Attorney General, to formulate antitrust policy?

Orrick: No. He had a lot of other things on his plate, and he just didn't

approve of the whole business.

Van Nest: Did you have a difficult time, in that last year or year and a half,
getting the go-ahead to file some of the cases that were on the
division's docket?

Orrick: Yes, indeed. They made Ramsey Clark the Deputy Attorney

General. Ramsey didn't know much about it. Nick didn't have
much confidence in Ramsey, so it was exceedingly difficult to get
any case filed.

Van Nest: Can you recall any specific cases that you had a strong interest in
that you were unable to get on the table as a result of that kind of
resistance?

Orrick: I remember a merger case in Louisiana about two rice companies.
Van Nest: What happened there?

Orrick: We wanted to bring an action, and the Acting Attorney General
wouldn't sign it. He told me to forget it.

Van Nest: What about the case against AT&T? Was that something that was
discussed again in the Johnson Administration?

Orrick: Not until the very end. One of the last things that Ramsey did as
Attorney General was file that AT&T case.

Van Nest: That was after you had left the department?

Orrick: That was after I left the department.

Van Nest: Why did it take so long to get that case to court?

217

Orrick: Because it was a cinch that the President would not have approved

it.

The Kennedy holdovers did a lot of things in those last days.
Secretary Udall changed the name of the football stadium in
Washington from Redskins Stadium to Kennedy Stadium, RFK
Stadium, I believe they called it. And they changed names on one
of the launching sites. Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy. I
think it's been renamed Cape Canaveral. Johnson got the space
center in Texas named for him.

Van Nest: Did you have occasion at all, as chief of the Antitrust Division, to
do any hands-on investigating yourself?

Orrick: Just once that I can recall, and it was done under unusual

circumstances. The department had five grand juries going in
various parts of the country investigating the scrap steel industry
and alleged price fixing by the defendant companies. The buyers
were Japanese, and I asked our Ambassador to Japan, Edwin
Reischauer, to Japan to speak to the presidents of the important
steel companies and find out precisely to whom they had spoken in
the government that they thought gave them some kind of
immunity from the operation of the antitrust laws. In the summons
it said "Edwin Reischauer."

Ambassador Reischauer was unable to do that, but he
suggested that I come out and that he would arrange meetings with
each of the persons whom I requested to see. I did this because in
no other way could the department obtain information sufficient to
make a decision whether to continue trying to make the case
through the grand juries or to dissolve them.

The meetings were arranged in a hotel room. The president
of the Japanese company would come, always accompanied by an
interpreter, and I had an interpreter from the American embassy.
The president invariably spoke excellent English. But when we
would start our session, he would immediately revert to Japanese.
I would ask the question in English, his interpreter would interpret
it to his president in Japanese, the president would think about it,
and then he would say to his interpreter in Japanese what he

218

Van Nest:

Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:

thought the answer was, and then his interpreter would tell me in
English what the answer was.

This was extremely tedious and took a long time, but I
realized that it was my duty to do all five of them. I soon got
quite interested because the answers to my questions from each of
them was identical. For example, when I asked which American
government official had approved the transaction of the sale of the
scrap steel, each person interviewed replied "Averell Harriman," who
was then Secretary of Commerce.

I would then ask them what a lawyer asks people, namely,
when was the conversation and where was it and who was present
and, to the best of your recollection, tell me what each one said.
And their answers to that were identical, down to the point where
each time, just to test my theory, I would ask them how Secretary
Harriman was dressed. The answer in each case was that he had
on a pin-striped blue suit with a red necktie tucked in a particular
way into his vest. And the words used were simply identical.

It was plain to me that they had collaborated on the answers
and had agreed to let the first person who was interviewed set the
pace. They simply copied what he did.

Was there any other way to compel the testimony of these Japanese
officials?

None that I knew of. And the result was that we scrapped the five
grand juries.

Judge, what do you think were the greatest accomplishments during
your tenure in antitrust?

I think my greatest accomplishment, if you can call it that, was to
do my job, which was to pull the division together, see that we got
operating, knowing what everybody else was doing. On occasion, I
would attend a part of the trials and would have an opportunity to
talk to the lawyers and keep their spirits up. I don't think we made
any great changes in the American economy. We headed it in the
right way by the type of cases that we brought and by the close

219

scrutiny that we gave to mergers.

Just as soon as that stopped - it really stopped toward the
end of the Nixon Administration ~ the division went off the film.
Antitrust lawyers lost their jobs. In the big firms, they dissolved
their special antitrust sections and all that kind of thing, not that I
think that is bad. What I think is bad is that they have let
behemoth corporations run the country.

Van Nest: Did you leave before the end of the Johnson Administration?
Orrick: Yes, I left in August of 1965.

Van Nest: Why did you decide to leave at that time? Johnson had another
three years to go.

Orrick: Well, he did. It wasn't any fun working there. We all wanted to
give Bob the most support that we could. He left to run for the
United States Senator from New York in September, I guess, of '64.
We had all had things started then. In early '65, I think Burke
Marshall was the first to leave from the Civil Rights Division, and
then Jack Miller left. He said, "Don't get tied up in this Johnson
Administration. You will regret it for a lot of reasons." And then, I
guess, I left about that time.

Van Nest: Were you anxious to get back to private life?

Orrick: Not particularly. What I wanted was to get out of the Johnson

Administration. And I didn't want to stay in Washington. Half the
fun in Washington was participating in running the government.
Although our kids were in school there, and they were doing fine, I
thought I had better get back on the job here.

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V. 1965 - 1974: LAW AND COMMUNITY SERVICE

A. Returning to the Practice of Law

Van Nest: After leaving your job in Washington, did you return to San
Francisco?

Orrick: Yes. And I went back into the firm.

Van Nest: What sort of work did you take up once you returned to the law
firm?

Orrick: Well, almost entirely antitrust work. When a person has had a
government job as important as that job, or as a member of the
Securities & Exchange Commission or some other job, he often
brings with him people who have problems with the government
and think that he has some contacts that can help him. And that is
true to a certain extent.

Van Nest: Was there a revolving-door rule then, as there is now, that

prohibited you from practicing in Antitrust Division matters for a
year or two?

Orrick: No, there wasn't. And the practice of antitrust law was, I think, at
if s zenith in San Francisco at that particular time. I never was
quite sure why this was so, but we did have one of the greatest
plaintiff antitrust lawyers in the country in the person of Joe Alioto.
And for some reason, maybe because of the composition of the

221

Van Nest:

Orrick:

Van Nest:
Orrick:

court, numerous plaintiffs out of town filed suits out here.

When I had left in 1961 to go to Washington, there were
about twenty-five lawyers in the firm. When I came back, there
were about thirty-five or forty, and only five people doing litigation.
Now there are one hundred sixty in the firm, I have been told. I
had to build that litigation department, if I was going to handle
these antitrust cases. And that I did, because not only was I
employed by local companies with officers with which I had been
thrown into contact before going to Washington, but also the
Washington and New York law firms. And those from other cities
had all been in my chambers in Washington, and I always attended
the antitrust section meeting of the American Bar Association. I
was actually a member of the council, ex officio. on account of my
position as Assistant Attorney General.

So, we did a great deal of what you might call local counsel
work, where you either just carried the briefcase of your friend to
the court, or you did the entire job and reported directly to him, or
her, as the case might have been.

You mentioned that many out-of-town plaintiffs filed suit here in
San Francisco because of the composition of the bench. Who was
sitting on the federal bench in the Northern District at the time?

At that time, Lloyd Burke was on the bench. I had known him
since law school where he was a class ahead of me.

Then Al Zirpoli ~ I mentioned him before in connection with
politics ~ and he claims that when I went to Washington I tried to
keep him off the bench. And, to a certain degree, that was true.
We have laughed about it often.

Why?

Well, because when we first came back here, Byron White wanted
names for the best U.S. Attorney. Zirpoli would have been far and
away the best U.S. Attorney that we could have had.

Van Nest: What was his background at that time?

222

Orrick: He practiced a good deal of criminal law in the federal court. It was

almost entirely federal court practice. He had been a member of the
Board of Supervisors for four or five years, and he was a polished cross
examiner, just a superb trial lawyer.

I said, "Al, the Kennedys want you to be United States Attorney
for the Northern District."

He said, "I don't want that. I want to be a Federal judge."

I said, "Now look. There's no question about it. You will be one,
but the Kennedys don't like to be turned down."

He said, "Well, I will just keep that in mind."

Thereupon, he got on a plane and got hold of his friend -- who
ran the Italian American Society -- and that friend took him up to meet
Bob. Bob had a secretary who was of Italian descent. They all had just
a splendid time talking.

He then was sent down to talk with Byron White, and when Byron
saw him, he said, "How would you like to be the next United State
District Judge in San Francisco?" And Zirpoli said to his Italian comrade
that that was exactly what he had come to do. He has been just, I
think, the best trial judge on that bench ever since. First rate.

Judge George Harris was Chief Judge during part of this time as
was Chief Judge Oliver Carter who succeeded Harris. Albert
Wollenberg, William Sweigert and Stanley Weigel were also sitting at
that time.

Van Nest: Did you have something to do with his appointment as a judge?

Orrick: Yes. As I mentioned earlier, Byron and Bob wanted us to make a check
on every person whose name had been submitted from our area. At
that point, they were looking for a Republican, and Stanley was the only
Republican that I thought would fit in with the Kennedys.

Actually, there were a great many others, namely Jack Miller,

223

the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division,
for one. Stanley was duly appointed, and when I came out, he was
trying a case brought by the Government against a beer company.
I knew something about the case from my experience in
Washington, and all the correspondence that went out bore my
name or initials.

So, the defense lawyer made the mistake of calling me as a
witness against the Government. I couldn't believe that, but when
he served up those questions, I explained that I knew something
about the case. I told him what I had done, but, nevertheless, he
asked the questions. He kept trying to make me say something that
would redound to the detriment of the Antitrust Division, which
was very foolish of him.

Van Nest: What was Judge Weigel's background prior to being appointed a
judge?

Orrick: He practiced law in the firm of Landels, Weigel & Ripley. And he

had helped in the Graves campaign. He had also taken a stand on
the loyalty oath problem which was going on over at the University
of California, and he seemed ideally suited for a judgeship.

Van Nest: What was the loyalty oath problem?

Orrick: The State of California Legislature required every professor, or
employee even, at the University of California to swear that he
wasn't a communist. I remember that Judge Weigel represented
Professor Hildebrand, who refused to sign the oath, as did many.
At that time, the Board of Regents was split right in the middle as
to who should sign it and who should be allowed not to sign it. It
was a very ugly Joe McCarthy type of situation that hurt the
University a great deal.

Van Nest: Who else was sitting ,on the bench at that time?

Orrick: Judge Schnacke. I remember arguing a matter before Judge

[Robert] Schnacke having to do with a change of venue, or some
other such thing. Bob Raven of the Morrison [& Foerster] office
was on the other side.

224

Van Nest: How did Judge Schnacke come to be appointed?

Orrick: Well, he had been a United States Attorney. He had been Assistant
Commissioner of Corporations, and he came to our court directly
from the Superior Court of San Francisco.

Judge [Samuel] Conti was on the court. I may have had a
few matters with him, and the same with Judge [Spencer] Williams.

Van Nest: During this period of time, after you returned to San Francisco,
who were the prominent civil trial lawyers practicing in the
Northern District?

Orrick: You can't mention an antitrust lawyer in America without

mentioning Francis Kirkham, who was, and I think still is, a great
lawyer.

Van Nest: Where did he practice?

Orrick: He practiced with the Pillsbury [Madison & Sutro] firm. He was
superb. Bob Raven and Dick Archer of the Morrison firm at that
time were rated very highly. Morry Doyle in the McCutchen
[Doyle, Brown & Enersen] firm was the perennial lead counsel.
One of the finest lawyers in the country then, and now, is Moses
Lasky, who at that time was in the Brobeck [Phleger & Harrison]
office.

Van Nest: Was there an active plaintiffs' antitrust bar, as well?

Orrick: Yes. Outstripping all the plaintiffs' lawyers was Joe Alioto. Joe

Alioto is a superb trial lawyer. All during the war, he had worked
as an Assistant United States Attorney, I think, under Tom Clark,
doing all the antitrust work that was done out here. So, he had
plenty of experience. They came from all over to get Joe as
counsel. And then the perennial plaintiffs' lawyers from
Philadelphia and Chicago and New York would come out here.
Antitrust, as I noted earlier, was a very big field at that time.

Van Nest: Did you have occasion to litigate some antitrust cases against
Alioto?

225

Orrick: Yes. One case involved H&R Block, who called themselves "the

income tax people." Joe's client was the H&R Block representative
for Northern California. The H&R Block people wouldn't give him
any more territory, so he had some kind of a monopoly case under
Section 2 of the Sherman Act, which had to be settled. There
wasn't any question about that.

Joe, at that time, was just about to become Mayor, so he did
all his antitrust work, or a good bit of it, in his home, as well as in
the Mayor's office. I suggested we have a settlement conference. I
said I would get Henry Block out from Kansas City, who was the
head of the firm, which I did, and said we would meet him here at
my house at 7:30.

I had the Kansas City lawyer and the president of the
company here, and I told them what would happen. I said, "As
soon as Joe comes in the house, he will take charge. We will be
sitting in here, and he will take one of these other rooms. This is
the way he always negotiates, walking back and forth."

They were surprised.

'You let him do that in your house?"

I said, "Do you want to get a settlement or not?"

They said 'Yes."

So, I said, "All right."

Joe came with his client. After a little coffee and brandy, Joe
said, "Now, do you mind if we use your library? And you fellows
stay here."

I said "No, that is fine."

He walked back and forth between the two places all evening.
Finally, at midnight we had an agreement.

Van Nest: What other significant cases did you handle during the period of

226

time before you were appointed to the bench?

Orrick: The biggest case I had was an antitrust case brought against

Rockwell Manufacturing Company, now North American Rockwell,
charging it and the four other manufacturers of water meters
throughout the United States with monopoly and price fixing.
There were some 23,000 end users of water meters. And the
counsel for Rockwell who had employed me said that no expense
should be spared.

Colonel Rockwell had never before been charged with being a
conspirator, let alone violating the laws of the United States. He
wanted the most thorough job that he could get. Under those
conditions, and with the other companies represented respectively
by John Hauser of the McCutchen firm, Tony Dungan of the
Brobeck firm, and some other lawyers, I was selected as lead
counsel.

For the next sixteen months, at least, I was continually
involved in taking depositions, attending depositions, arguing
motions in various courts in the country, and trying to learn all I
could about computers and how they entered into the importance of
this water meter litigation. At the end of three years, John
Mauser's client settled. I told the able counsel for Rockwell, George
Flinn, when I first got into the case, that I was certain I could settle
it for $10,000, that it was a lawyer-made case because each time
the bids were taken they were always very, very close, and there
was never an iota of evidence that there had ever been
collaboration between those manufacturers.

George told he me that he discussed that with Colonel
Rockwell, and the Colonel said, "No sir, I won't settle for anything."
At the time I came on the bench, the litigation was going and went
for about one more year, at which time the North American
Company bought Rockwell. When it found out its exposure, the
case was settled for $560,000. It makes you cry, doesn't it?

Van Nest: After all that?
Orrick: Yes.

227

Van Nest: Was it a $10,000 case?

Orrick: To this day, I believe it was. We had professors from Columbia,

Missouri, experts in computers. For heaven's sake, North American
Rockwell put a man on the moon. They made calculation after
calculation on these hundreds of bid reports. As I say, we took
countless depositions of city officials, the city manager, the manager
of the water department, the mayor sometimes.

Van Nest: And this was in cities all over the country?

Orrick: In cities all over the country. I did nothing but travel that year.
And there wasn't a single piece of evidence against Rockwell. I
think that was the biggest private litigation I was in, even including
the Miller & Lux case we have discussed previously.

Van Nest: Was there a case that drove you into the arms of the federal bench,
Judge Orrick?

Orrick: Yes, there was. This was in about 1973. Our firm represented
Transamerica Corporation, which owned all of the stock of Trans
World Airways. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Transamerica.
The airplane company leased a DC-6, or a DC-8 -- I am not sure
which it was now -- to Singapore Airlines Limited, not to be
confused with Singapore Airlines, the main carrier of Singapore.

The lease was carefully drawn by my partner, Bill McKee, and
covered every possible contingency. However, at one point, the
airplane company stopped getting rental payments from Singapore
Air Limited. And, like a stroke of magic, not only the airplane but
Singapore Airlines Limited had vanished.

The president of Trans World Airlines was justifiably
concerned. He gave me the job of getting the airplane back,
getting the back rental, and so on. I didn't know where to start.
So, I began with some of my former colleagues in the State
Department and also in the Department of Commerce. They
explained to me the way business was done in Singapore and, in
particular, how one employed lawyers there and what obligations
they were under.

228

Simply stated, everybody in Singapore at that time - and I
am told right up to now -- does precisely what the president or
prime minister -- I am not sure which ~ tells them to do. It prides
itself on being run as Greece was in the age of Pericles. The streets
are always clean; there's absolutely no crime of any kind, nature or
description; no drugs. American companies can come over there
and take advantage of the very low cost of labor, which a lot of
them have done.

Van Nest: Was there just no sign of the airline anywhere in world commerce?

Orrick: There was no sign of the airline. I then decided to get out on the

ground, and I flew out there. But first, I had asked the State
Department to have the American ambassador make an appointment
for me to see the attorney general. When I reached Hong Kong
enroute to Singapore, I had a cable saying, "Impossible to make this
appointment."

Being halfway around the world then, I decided to go on out.
I went out there and called on the ambassador. He was most
cordial. He said, "I have tried again to get this appointment for
you, but I couldn't possibly do it. Mr. Lew says 'no."1

I said "Well, isn't there anything you can do?"

He said, "No."

I said, "I am going downtown. I have got to litigate, I guess."

So, I went downtown. I went from solicitor's office to
solicitor's office, trying to find a solicitor or barrister who would
represent us out there. As soon as they heard I was going to sue
the Government of Singapore, they said absolutely no, we couldn't
do business out here.

I had about given up, when the American ambassador said he
would make one more try and make it clear to the foreign minister
that it was part of the business and policy of the United States. He
did that, and finally he got me an interview for a brief period with
the attorney general.

229

Van Nest:

I told the attorney general my problem. He said, "Well, the
airline went bankrupt, but I will see if we can find the airplane." It
turned out that the pilot of the airplane had heard about this
sudden bankruptcy, where everything was going to be shut down as
far as this one airline went, and had taken the plane to Hong Kong,
awaiting further orders. He finally flew it back to the United
States.

I brought back to the United States an agreement from the
attorney general that we would exchange briefs and that he would
come to the United States, come to San Francisco, to discuss the
matter with me next time. It would be his turn.

What was left to discuss was the outstanding lease payments, I take
it.

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: The plane was back?

Orrick: Yes. The plane was back but in very poor condition. After lengthy
correspondence with him, and preparing memoranda and briefs and
so on, I called him on the phone and said if he wouldn't come here,
I would go out there, and would he please be ready to talk with
me, that this was the last time.

I said, "I hate to talk like this, but I am going to litigate with
your government. There are plenty of things here in the United
States in which the Government of Singapore has great interest.
Among others, we can attach any of your planes of the regular
airline when it comes and make it difficult for the ambassador to do
things", and so on.

He said, "All right, all right. That is fine. We will settle it."

So, before I went out, I got the president of the airline, Hank
Hough, to come over. And with my able partner, Bill McKee, I said
"Hank, what do you want?"

"Well," he said, "we have got the plane."

230

I said, "I mean in money. Because if I tell them I am going to
litigate, I am going to litigate. I don't negotiate any other way.
Now, if he won't pay more than a million dollars, shall I say we are
going to litigate?"

And he said, "Oh, no, no, no, no."

I said, "750,000?"

"No. That is too high."

I said, "Well, you run the airline. What is it?"

And I think McKee might have said, "500."

And Hough kept saying, "No."

I said, "When do I tell him we are going to litigate? At a
150? Or how about 100?"

"Make it 50."

I said, "If they won't give us at least $50,000, then I can start
litigating. Is that the understanding?"

"Yes."

So, I took his vice president in charge of finance, or
something like that, who knew something about the airplane, and
had him list everything that was wrong with the airplane, from the
type of switches that they had lost, all the operational things that
were wrong with it, plus the payments for the lease. And I went
out there. The attorney general was most cordial, and assigned his
deputy to negotiate, and we sat down.

Van Nest: This was back in Singapore a second time?

Orrick: Yes. The attorney general was there with his man. I was there
with the vice president.

231

I said, "Let's take this list of things. I will draw a cylinder. It
looks like it costs $80,000. That was not on the plane."

"Well," he says, "I am not so sure that it wasn't on the plane."

I said, "Okay. Let's pass that. Then, for example, I would
say, "This Notazari wrench, which is normally in between these two
cylinders, was broken. I understand that is only worth about
$15,000."

He says, "That is okay."

I said, "Fine. Let's put a check after that."

So, we went down the list. By the time we had gotten to
lunch time, we had everything on the list, except three or four
pretty big items. The Transamerica guy was excited as he could be.
I would tell him "Be quiet. Don't you say a word. We will come
back after lunch and discuss these other points." We were well
over a million dollars before this point.

Van Nest: Before lunch?

Orrick: Before lunch. When we came back afterwards, I said, "What do

you say? Can we start in on this top item, this cylinder?" He said,
"I think so."

Then we came on the next questioned item, and we argued
about it a little bit. I said, "I don't know enough about it, and I
have confidence in you. If you tell me it's not worth that, I will
accept that. What do you think it's worth?"

He said, "Well, I guess you are right. These are American
figures?"

I said, 'Yes."

He said, "That is all right."

To make a long story short, he agreed to practically every

232

number on our list. It aggregated some -- I am not clear on the
amount -- but it was like $1,500,000 or $2,000,000. It was a
Saturday, Saturday afternoon in Singapore.

I said, "How do you get the money?"

He said, "You can't get it Saturday afternoon. The Finance
Office might be closed."

I said, "Let's just try."

He said, "Well, I have to talk to the attorney general." We
went in and talked to the attorney general, and the attorney
general approved it. The deputy took this bill, in effect, over to the
finance office and said, "It's all right. But they won't be able to get
a check for you until after 6:00."

I then went across the street to the branch of the Bank of
America situated there. I told the manager, "I absolutely need to
have the bank open when I deposit a check for this $2 million,
which must be transferred to your branch in Oakland, California."

He said, "All right," and agreed to keep the branch open late
so that I could deposit the check.

I went back, got the check, thanked my friend, whose name is
Goh Phi Cheng, wished him good luck and took the check across
the street and received advice that it had been deposited at the date
and time at which I had said. So, I was pleased with that.

I took the plane back home the next day. It was just a
terrible, terrible commute. I went into my partner's office and said,
"How did you like that?"

He said, "That was great. That was really great."
I said, "What did the client say?"

He said, "As soon as the client heard about it, he picked up
the phone to call his financial vice president, who was down in

233

Ecuador, and asked him 'Did Orrick have this case on a
contingency?"1

Well, I will tell you now, as I have told many, many people,
that was the end of the private practice, as far as I was concerned.
That took my enthusiasm for the private practice down a good deal.

B. The State Education Commission

Van Nest: Had you spent some time during these years doing charitable
activities?

Orrick: Yes. I had interesting times. I have always enjoyed the public

work. When I first came back, Governor Brown appointed me as a
member of the State of California Committee on Public Education.
I had some distinguished colleagues on there, among them Irving
Stone. The director of it was Newton Chase, whom I have known
quite well. We met every Saturday morning for about a year,
either at the San Francisco Airport or at the Los Angeles Airport,
for all-day meetings.

Van Nest: Did the Commission have a specific purpose, or a limited, focused
goal?

Orrick: Its purpose was to appraise the state of education in California to

determine whether or not it could meet the changing conditions
which were immediately ahead. At that time, there were about a
million people a day coming into California, I think it was. I think
Pat Brown used to say they had to build a new school every week.
This was, of course, during the baby boom. Our report, I think,
was, and is, an excellent report. But I have no reason to think that
anybody read it other than ourselves.

234

C. President of the San Francisco Opera

Van Nest: You also had a stint as the president of the San Francisco Opera,
did you not?

Orrick: Yes. I was president for three years of the San Francisco Opera.

Our opera is one of the four best in the world, the others being the
Met, La Scala in Milan, and Covent Garden in London. The main
job that I had was to raise money.

We had an excellent maestro, Kurt Herbert Adler. He ran
that opera with an iron fist. He negotiated all the contracts with
the stars, with the musicians, with the costume designers, with
everybody. He knew the music backwards. He conducted on
occasion, and he lived for, and was, the San Francisco Opera. I
can't speak highly enough about him.

But he was a taskmaster, and when I asked him for a budget,
he would say 'You don't need zee budget." And I said, "I have to
have that because I know that we raise, by selling out the house
every single night with performances, or whatever it is, only
two-thirds of what it costs. The other third has to be raised by
private contributions every year." At that point, it was a million
dollars a year, which looked very, very big to me. Today, it's like
$20 million. How they raise it now, I am sure I don't know.

But I said, "I must have it."

He said, "You cannot."

I said, "If you can't cut the budget, I will cut it."

"No."

I said, "I will give you one week." So, the next week, he
came down to my office. He was mad. I said, "Have you cut it?"

"No."

235

And then I ran a line through one of my favorite operas, Don
Giovani. He said, "Whoever heard of an opera company that did
not have a Mozart opera once every two years? Nobody."

I said, "There it is. If you can save that much money
someplace else, you can go and do it." I don't take my work home,
usually, but I told Marion that night that, in one fell swoop, I had
ruined the most important cultural activity in San Francisco, the
only one that has international fame, and that is the San Francisco
Opera. And the next day, to my surprise, but not to anybody else's,
Kurt came up with a budget, which we could accept. Outside of
that, the job was to raise money from every source that I could.

Van Nest: Did the Opera have an endowment at that point, or were you
raising it on an annual basis?

Orrick: No. The opera did not have an endowment. I was particularly
fortunate because the Chairman of the Board, one of the finest
citizens in our state, or any other, had just retired as the Chairman
of the Board of the Standard Oil Company of California. His name
is Gwin Follis. It was largely due to him, and certainly not due to
me, that we were able to raise these enormous amounts of money.

However, the first thing that we had to do was to go to the
bank, hat in hand, and tell them that we were $450,000 in debt
and we needed to borrow $900,000. Again thanks to Gwin, I
think, the then-chairman of Wells Fargo, who was a good friend of
both of ours, Ernie Arbuckle, said, "We will go with you on it."
This money-raising went so well - and we really hadn't covered all
the bases ~ that we started an endowment drive. We created an
endowment of, I believe, six or seven million dollars. We had
people, wealthy partners in investment firms, giving us whole
operas. It was a great success.

Van Nest: Was this the beginning of the endowment that the Opera now
possesses?

Orrick: This was the beginning. I am not sure that they do have an

endowment at this point. But one of the perquisites of being a
federal judge is that you are absolutely forbidden to raise money.

236

And that is almost worth the job itself.

D. The Eisenhower Commission on Violence

Van Nest: The late '60's and early 70's were a very tumultuous time on many
college campuses. Did you get involved in some of the issues
giving rise to campus unrest in the United States?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: How did that come about?

Orrick: President Johnson appointed a Commission on Violence and asked
Dr. Milton Eisenhower to be the chairman. Dr. Eisenhower was
smart enough to name Lloyd Cutler, who was, and is, perhaps the
best lawyer in the country, and who was counsel to President
Carter, as the director of the Commission. Cutler got the specialists
in all types of violence and crime and who had written books on it,
people like Professor Skolnick, to serve on the staff. And then he
asked for actual reports on what had happened, how violence got
started. California gets blamed for everything. This was all before
the Kent State unhappiness. Students of the University of California
were said to have started the unrest on college campuses by
starting the free speech movement.

Van Nest: You were appointed as the director of one of the regional teams?

Orrick: Yes. He wanted a detailed report on the trouble out at San

Francisco State [College] and, to that end, I was able to get two
excellent reporters, who were much interested in this whole
problem, and to build up a small staff. They interviewed students
and professors and police, both the chiefs and the Tac Squad
commanders, as well as those who participated on the Tac Squad,
and came up with an excellent report, which was published. We
called it, Shut It Down, a College in Crisis. Besides working with

237

them and making suggestions and editing some of their reports, I
interviewed then-Governor Reagan.

Van Nest: What did Governor Reagan have to say on the pertinent topics?

Orrick: He was interested only in the way blacks got into baseball. He said
that blacks had a long way to go and that they should start in the
minor leagues, as it were, and shouldn't be brought into the
colleges. He gave the example of Jackie Robinson, who, as we all
know, was the first black player in the big leagues, brought in by
the Brooklyn Dodgers by Al Campans.

Then we started playing these games that baseball aficionados
played. I asked him, "Don't you think that Satchel Paige should
have had a chance at being in the big leagues, since they all said he
was the best pitcher in all baseball?"

"Well," he said, "the country wasn't ready at this time to have
colored players in the big leagues."

Then I said, "Look at Willie Mays, who came right to the
Giants."

He said, "No, you are wrong on that. Willie Mays started in
with the New Orleans Pelicans at the age of sixteen." And I think
that he was right on that. I also interviewed Dr. Sam Hayakawa
with about as much success. But the report is a very good report.

Van Nest: What were the key issues that had seemed to lie at the root of the
problems at San Francisco State?

Orrick: They had black studies groups, and some of the blacks wanted to
just keep it right for themselves, and others wanted it to be
integrated in different classes. There was a general feeling abroad
in the country at that time that the blacks had been held back,
which they certainly had been.

There were occasional scuffles with white students. This
violence got started when the Tac Squad of the San Francisco
Police Department, which had been stationed in an out-of-the-way

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place just off the campus and was to report to a particular place
only upon command, lost control of their communications with the
officer on the spot, who was to call them, if needed. They got the
wrong signal and in they came. They came just at noon, when the
students were all getting out. There was nothing in those Vietnam
War days that infuriated students more than the Tac Squad in their
very useful, but rather outlandish-looking, masks and armor. That
started a strike and a whole series of events.

Van Nest: There was a set of demands from black students at San Francisco
State?

Orrick: Yes. Also demands from the Third World Liberation Front. But the
black students had, as I recall it, about ten demands, all centering
around the formation of a black studies department. Those were
the same type of demands that were being made all over the
country. They stemmed, so we were told, from the violence at San
Francisco State.

Van Nest: Were there also allegations of police brutality in connection with
the investigation?

Orrick: Oh, yes.

Van Nest: What was the basis for those claims?

Orrick: Whenever you have the police, as I say, in their battle dress, as it
were, they are trying to protect themselves, and so are the students,
protecting themselves from the police. At that time, actually, there
were several serious confrontations with the police, not the least of
which was at City Hall, which, as you know has broad marble steps
going up to the second story. There were protestors down at the
foot of those stairs. There were protestors at the top, in the Board
of Supervisors' chambers. The police turned firehoses on the people
that were there and, literally, cut out from under them their
footing. Down they went on their backs, some of whom, as a
result, suffered very serious injuries.

Van Nest: Did the report reach any conclusions, either in the area of racial
unrest or police brutality?

239

Orrick: It has several, I think, quite objective statements of conduct of

students and police, which could probably be characterized as police
brutality.

Van Nest: I know you have had a lot of experience as a judge handling cases
concerning racial discrimination, some involving racial violence and
certainly some involving police brutality. Do you think that your
work on the Eisenhower Commission has influenced, in any way,
the way you viewed these cases as a judge?

Orrick: Oh, a human being's views come from experience; and the law, as

Justice Holmes told us, is not logic, it is experience. So,
unquestionably, these experiences, as well as the experience at the
Chicago Convention in 1968, right after Johnson took himself out
of the race, all had an impact. It's part of being a useful human
being, as well as a judge, to have some common sense, some sense
of balance. But all of these experiences are certainly thrown into
the balance on one side or the other.

Van Nest: Since you mentioned it, let me ask you about it. Did you attend
that Democratic Convention in Chicago in '68?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Were you a delegate?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What role did you play at that convention?

Orrick: Not a very important role.

I was a member of the California delegation, and we were
for [Hubert] Humphrey. Bob Kennedy had been murdered two
months before. Jess Unruh was the chairman of the California
delegation. And Marion and our kids came back. We were
quartered in a downtown Chicago hotel, surrounded by police who
were trying to move all the excitement about it and the protestors
out to Grant Park. It was rather eerie to walk around downtown
Chicago and never see an automobile, and people afraid to walk a

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Van Nest:
Orrick:

block or so to a restaurant. We would be taken out to the
auditorium in buses with police escorts.

It was a thoroughly unpleasant experience for me. I think it
was a very interesting one for the kids. Two of them started a
boomlet for Ted Kennedy for President. Some enterprising TV
reporter saw this little hole in the wall with pictures of Ted
Kennedy. So, they enjoyed it and got a good experience out of it.
But I decided that was about my last convention.

Why?

Well, I had been a Democratic Delegate to conventions in '56, '60,
'64 and '68. I didn't go to the [George] McGovem convention. It's
an outmoded way of selecting candidates, not that it's not better
than the way it's being done now. But it's outmoded.

E. The San Francisco Crime Commission

Van Nest: You had another opportunity to look at the operation and the

functioning of the police with the San Francisco Crime Commission.
What can you tell us about that experience?

Orrick: When Mayor Alioto commenced his term, he named Moses Lasky

and Sheriff John Lohman from Chicago, and myself as co-chairmen
of a commission to study crime in San Francisco.

Van Nest: Had there been some underlying problems in San Francisco that led
to the appointment of the Commission?

Orrick: Just the usual, which you find in every city. San Francisco has its

own special crime areas. But he wanted to know how well did the
criminal justice system work. The Mayor appointed the other
members of the Commission, which included Dianne Feinstein and
Fred Furth, among others. We met regularly on Thursday nights

241

and, to our chagrin, we found that there was no money available to
hire staff. Obviously, you need staff for a report like that. So, I
got hold of Mac Bundy, who was president of the Ford Foundation
at that time, and asked him if I could come back and make a
presentation. He kindly consented to let me do that and financed
the major part of the work that had to be done.

The first thing we did was hire a director, a mutual friend of
ours, Irv Reichert, who was thoroughly familiar with the criminal
justice system. Irv and his staff would make a presentation to the
Commission, then Lasky and I would go over the reports that the
staff wrote up as a result of their investigations and invariably
rewrite them. Moses Lasky is a gifted lawyer and writer. He wrote
the majority of the report. I helped him to the extent that I could,
but most of the writing in the report is his. It's very clear.

The report is just as useful today as it was then. We made
specific recommendations concerning operations of the police
department, the jails, the public defender's office, everything.

Van Nest: The report was extremely critical of the San Francisco Police
Department, was it not?

Orrick: It took great exception to some of the findings in our report. The

report irritated the Mayor because the Mayor was a strong booster,
as he should be, of his own police department. And he was, I
think, surprised, maybe even chagrined, when we started to turn
out these reports. We would always send a copy to his office first.
The press were always anxious to get it. But one time, he had to
read about one in the paper. He was highly irritated by that, and I
didn't blame him, particularly. We didn't do it intentionally, of
course.

Van Nest: The report was a controversial one. Let me show you some

headlines again. The Chronicle story in June of 1971 headlines,
'Very Critical Report on San Francisco Police Department", with the
rebuttal from Chief [Al] Nelder indicating ifs totally misleading,
and reactions by the Mayor. And another story, also in June of
1971: "Crime Probers Hit Detectives Tac Squad," and Nelder again
responding on page one that the report was disappointing, outdated

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in major areas, neglecting to point out significant changes. Did you
and the other members of the Commission realize how controversial
the report would be when you wrote it?

Orrick: I don't think so. We did think that we would raise some hackles

with our recommendation that marijuana be legalized. And we did.

Van Nest: Was there a lot of discussion on the Commission before that
recommendation came out?

Orrick: Yes. The Commission had all the opportunity in* the world to

discuss it.

Van Nest: On July 19, 1971, an enormous headline appeared in the Examiner:
"Legalize Marijuana for Adults, Crime Report Says, Sharp Minority
Dissent." Were you among those who were advocating legalizing
marijuana for adults?

Orrick: At that time, I think I was. I think I supported that. I wouldn't be
for it today, I don't think.

Van Nest: Let me read what you apparently endorsed in '71 and ask whether
you remember talking about it.

'The consensus at the present time is that the deleteriousness
of marijuana, or its extent, remains largely unestablished. We know
that a vast number of the citizenry cannot understand and will not
accept the marijuana laws. Not all the ills or aberrancies of society
are the concern of government." I take it you shared those views at
that time.

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Your view has changed?

Orrick: I think my views, so far as the deleterious effects of marijuana goes,
have changed, largely because of the number of marijuana users
that pass through my court and what they have been doing. But at
that time, a Stanford professor had written a book, and it was
pretty good authority for those conclusions.

243

Van Nest: The conclusions that marijuana was not demonstrably deleterious to
one's health?

Orrick: Right.

Van Nest: What about the recommendations concerning police changes and
findings concerning police brutality? Did you realize those would
be so controversial?

Orrick: No, I don't think so.

Van Nest: What were the findings that were most criticized by the Mayor and
the police?

Orrick: Well, I think you have named them. The legalization of marijuana

and the criticism of the operation of the police department. The
San Francisco Police Department has never, ever been willing to
subject itself to an inspection by POST, which is a highly-regarded
police officer association ~ kind of gives the Good Housekeeping
Seal of Approval to the work. They are skilled, able police officers
and very experienced. You can have them go into your city, and
they will write you a confidential report. They ride with the
officers and so on. And the City has never been willing to do that,
right up to this day.

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VI. UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

A. Appointment to the Bench

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, how did you first leam there was some interest in
making you a federal judge?

Orrick: Actually, I had lunch one day with Charlie Renfrew, and he asked

me if I was interested in it.

Van Nest: Who is Charlie Renfrew?

Orrick: Charlie Renfrew, at that point, was a federal judge who had been
on the bench about three years. He is now vice president, general
counsel and a director of Chevron. This lunch was shortly after my
Singapore experience. So I told him, yes, that I might very well be.
He said, "I want to know for sure."

So, I called him the next day, after I talked with Marion and
said yes, that I would like to be considered. At that time, both of
the United States Senators from California, Cranston and Tunney,
were Democrats. They had made an arrangement with the attorney
general -- I believe it was Smith -- that they could nominate a
Democrat for every three Republicans.

Van Nest: I take it the president was a Republican, President Nixon.
Orrick: Yes. John Tunney, who was then on the Senate Judiciary

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Committee, was very much interested in the appointment of judges.
Alan Cranston, the other senator, was not particularly interested.
Tunney formed a committee consisting of Warren Christopher, Bill
Coblentz and maybe one or two others.

Van Nest: At that time, Mr. Christopher was a prominent lawyer in Los

Angeles, and Mr. Coblentz was a similarly prominent lawyer here in
San Francisco?

Orrick: Yes. That committee had already recommended Bill Enright, who

was then on the United States District Court for the Southern
District; Matt Byrne, who was then on the United States District
Court for the Central District; and Renfrew. Renfrew submitted my
name to the committee. The committee thoroughly investigated my
background, and thanks to them, Judge Renfrew, and others, I was
lucky enough to be appointed.

Van Nest: Had you known Judge Renfrew in practice prior to that time?

Orrick: Yes. We were active in the Episcopal church at that time, and that
is where we knew each other. Also, I knew him professionally.

Van Nest: Prior to that time, Judge, had you ever expressed interest in being
on the federal bench?

Orrick: No, I hadn't. The only time I had ever considered being a judge
was when Pat Brown was first elected governor. Within ten days
after he had taken the oath, he had his special assistant, Fred
Dutton, call me up and ask me if I wanted to serve on the Superior
Court. I thanked him and told him I did not. So, I really hadn't
thought about being a judge.

Van Nest: Were you immediately interested in the job when Judge Renfrew
proposed it?

Orrick: Yes, I was. I love the law, and the law without clients is a
particularly good way to live.

Van Nest: You mentioned that Senator Tunney was the one that set up this
committee. Had you done any work for Senator Tunney?

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Orrick: I had worked in Senator Tunney's campaigns, yes.

Van Nest: He had run, prior to that time, once or twice for the Senate?

Orrick: Once. It was on the second time that Hayakawa beat him.

Van Nest: What role had you played in the Tunney campaign?

Orrick: I helped him organize his Northern California campaign to some
extent. I raised some money for him, not very much.

Van Nest: Do you know whether or not the Kennedys -- of course, by this
point in time, it would have been just Ted ~ had anything to do
with your appointment as judge?

Orrick: Yes, Ted Kennedy did. When there were questions as to where I
stood on certain matters, I told them to talk to Burke Marshall,
who was then back in New Haven as a professor at Yale Law
School, and also to Ted Kennedy. What bothered the committee
was the thought that I was too conservative in my political views.
I had to show them that I was in the middle of the road. And I did
this through Burke recounting the wiretapping story and what we
did back there in the Department, backed up by Ted.

Van Nest: You say "they." You are making reference to the committee?

Orrick: To the committee, yes, and to Tunney's staff.

Van Nest: Did you actually do an interview for the committee?

Orrick: No.

Van Nest: Were they, as far as you could tell, examining your political
philosophy quite carefully?

Orrick: Yes. And my entire background.

Van Nest: Do you know who else they spoke with prior to approving you for
nomination?

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Orrick: John Frank and, I think, his wife, who was a staff person for Ted

Kennedy. I didn't know them, but Mrs. Frank was particularly
interested in my political stance.

Van Nest: What role, if any, did Mrs. Frank have in this process? Was she a
member of staff to the Judiciary Committee?

Orrick: Yes. Staff for Ted Kennedy. I don't know how often they

consulted her or what influence she had or anything else.

Van Nest: Was there any organized opposition here in San Francisco to your
appointment as a judge?

Orrick: None, other than the Charles Houston organization, which opposed

my nomination because I wasn't black.

Van Nest: In fact, did they portray you as a product of the old boy, downtown
business club network?

Orrick: I don't really know. I only saw one article on it. It didn't make
much of an impression on anybody, I am glad to say.

Van Nest: Was the fact of your membership in the Bohemian Club an all-male,
exclusive organization - the subject for controversy at the time of
your appointment?

Orrick: Not at that time. At that time, I was a member of a number of

exclusive clubs, including the Bohemian Club; the Pacific Union
Club; and in Washington, the Metropolitan Club and Chevy Chase
Club; and in New York, the Yale Club.

Van Nest: Were these all clubs that exclude women members?

Orrick: At that time, they all did, yes. When I took the bench, we

experienced a drastic lessening in our cash flow, we cut out all the
things that we could think of. The clubs were the first to go. I
just stayed with the Bohemian Club and the Pacific Union Club.

Van Nest: Has your membership in those organizations caused any controversy
in your years as a judge?

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Orrick: No.

Van Nest: Did you appear for a confirmation hearing in the United States
Senate?

Orrick: Yes, I did. I don't know if Jim Eastland was present. My

recollection now is that there was only one senator there, and that
was Senator Hruska. Senator Cranston accompanied me to the
hearing room and, as is customary, said a lot of very nice things
about me. And Senator Hruska was very polite and welcomed me
to the judiciary. I don't think he asked any questions. The whole
process took about fifteen minutes.

Van Nest: Can you tell us how it was that you were sworn in? There was
some urgency, was there not?

Orrick: There was. I was up in the mountains on a vacation about the
time that the Watergate scandal reached its peak and President
Nixon was considering resigning. On the day upon which he left
the White House, I was ready, with my wife and some others, to
take a hike, which we had been looking forward to for quite a
while. I was just pulling on my boots when my mother-in-law came
down and said, "Bill, dear, did you know that President Nixon is
going to leave the White House today?" And I said, "No, I didn't.
But thank you very much for telling me."

Then I sat and thought about what might happen to my
commission. I had already received the commission. I was just
postponing the swearing in until it was convenient for me at the
end of the summer. I had gotten the commission on July 9th, I
remember. I thought the swearing-in ceremony was just a
ministerial act and that no one could prevent me from serving.

So I thought about it. What could happen? And I thought of
the famous case of Marbury v. Madison. You will recall that the
Judicial Act of 1801 creating new courts had been passed by the
Federalists. The Jefferson Republicans partly repudiated the Act
upon coming into office. President Adams had named judges (they
have been referred to as the "midnight judges" in the history books)
to preside in the new courts, and he signed their commissions

249

before leaving office and sent them to his Secretary of State, John
Marshall, to be countersigned and delivered. At about that time,
Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth took sick. One of the last things
Adams did in his administration was to appoint his Secretary of
State, John Marshall, as Chief Justice. Thomas Jefferson appointed
James Madison as his Secretary of State. Of course, Jefferson
needed to appoint his own party members to the new courts. In
the meantime, Mr. Marbury, whom Adams had appointed as a
part-time justice in a lower court, asked Madison to deliver the
commission. Madison refused, and Marbury thereupon applied for a
writ of mandamus to compel Madison to deliver his commission.
Chief Justice Marshall ordered Madison to deliver the commission,
holding that when the President signs a commission the
appointment is complete.

I thought, "My case is nothing like that. I have gone through
the whole process. I have my commission. It was signed by
President Nixon and then Attorney General [William Bart] Saxbe.
It is just an administrative act to swear me in." Then I thought Fd
better check that. I did not know then that the commission became
effective at the time the President signed it.

So, I called my best friend, Potter Stewart, who was an
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, at his summer
home up in New Hampshire. I explained all this to him, and he
said, "Well, I agree with you. It is a ministerial act." And I said,
"Would you also agree that, if you were in my shoes, you would
hightail it to San Francisco and get sworn in as soon as you could,
before Nixon's resignation took effect?" And he said, "I would, by
all means."

So, we hopped in the car. It was a three or three-and-a-half
hour ride. I think that, technically, Nixon lost his authority at high
noon when Ford was sworn in. Air Force One was then over
Kansas or Nebraska. When we got down to The City, we picked up
my dad and went down to the courthouse. The chief judge then,
Oliver Carter, had us in chambers and swore me in. We had a
formal swearing-in ceremony three or four weeks later on August
28th. That is when I first got on the payroll.

250

Van Nest: How many cases had you tried before becoming a judge?

Orrick: I really don't know.

Van Nest: You had not been in federal court trying cases on a regular basis?

Orrick: Oh, no. Definitely not.

B. Preparing to Preside

Van Nest: What did you do to prepare yourself to take on the job as a federal
trial judge?

Orrick: I read every book I could get my hands on that had anything to do
with judges' experiences.

Van Nest: Was there a regular training program for judges at that time?

Orrick: Yes. The Federal Judicial Center had a seminar for a week in

Washington for newly appointed judges that was extremely helpful.
The center brought in judges from all around the country to discuss
different aspects of the work, such as civil trials and management of
cases and things like that.

Van Nest: Did you seek personal advice from anyone, other judges or friends,
prior to actually beginning your job as a judge?

Orrick: When I was back there -- I think it was that time -- I went in to
see a good friend of mine, Gerry Gesell, who is the United States
District Judge for the District of Columbia.

Van Nest: How did you know Judge Gesell?

Orrick: I knew him professionally, and I knew him when he was on Adlai

Stevenson's staff writing speeches. His wife and my wife were good

251

friends. He was trying a murder case, as I recall. There were no
ifs, ands, or buts with Judge Gesell. He runs a tight courtroom.
That has always appealed to me, because decorum is so important
in this very fragile institution of ours. I got a lot of help from him.

Van Nest: Were there any judges before whom you had practiced or tried

cases, whom you tried to set up as examples for yourself in being a
judge?

Orrick: No.

Van Nest: Why not?

Orrick: Every judge has his own style, and I never made a conscious effort

to copy anybody else's style.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, at the time you took the bench here in the Northern
District in 1974, what kind of people were serving as judges here in
the Northern District? Can you tell us who they were and a little
about their backgrounds?

Orrick: Lloyd Burke was there. He and I had been at Boalt Hall at the

same time. He had been an assistant district attorney in Alameda
County. As he tells me, he and his family and the Knowland family
were good friends. The senator had him appointed as United States
Attorney and later on as United States District Judge.

And then Al Wollenberg was on the court at that time, who
was a fine man and a fine judge. He had a great mind, great
memory. He had been on the superior court bench in San
Francisco for many years and was well-respected by the entire legal
community.

George Harris had been a long-time acquaintance and a
friend. We grew a lot closer together, of course, when we were on
the court.

Van Nest: Had Judge Harris been a superior court judge prior to that time?
Orrick: He had been a municipal court judge. He went from there to the

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federal bench right after the Truman campaign.

There's also Al Zirpoli. Al had tried many, many cases in the
federal court, both on the defense side and as an Assistant United
States Attorney. He had been a member of the board of supervisors
and was and is a superb trial judge in all respects.

Van Nest: Was Judge [Robert] Peckham sitting at the time you took the
bench?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: What was his background?

Orrick: He had been an Assistant United States Attorney. Then Pat Brown

appointed him Superior Court judge in Santa Clara County. Then
he came to the court in about 1966. He is a superb Chief Judge
and has a national reputation as such. The other judges sitting at
the time that I came to the Court besides Chief Judge Carter
included Judges Weigel, Sweigert, Schnacke, Conti, Williams, and
Renfrew. They were and are all good judges and, of equal
importance to me as a sitting judge, were and are friendly and
interested, and we became and are good friends.

Van Nest: Were there any women sitting on the Northern District bench at
that time, or minorities?

Orrick: No, none.

Van Nest: Most of the judges you have described for us either had criminal
law backgrounds or were business lawyers in their practices.

Orrick: Yes, that is true. When I first started practicing law, which was
right after the War, the big emphasis was in securities work and
corporate work. And there was not much prestige attached to
being a trial judge, even a federal trial judge. That, of course,
changed drastically within ten years, where both are very, very
important today. Top litigators, as well as the top business
lawyers.

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C. Caseload in the Northern District

Van Nest: Can you give us some idea, Judge Orrick, of the kinds of cases that
you handled early on in your career as a judge, and then as you
continued to preside these thirteen years?

Orrick: Well, our docket is about ten percent criminal cases, and the rest of
them are civil cases from every possible branch of the law that
there is. In this highly diversified practice, we became of necessity
generalists, or generalists' generalists. And the specialties that one
might have had in the private practice came into play only very
occasionally. So, you are always learning something in another
part of the law. When I first went on, we had a number of
antitrust cases. Those petered out when the Republicans --
particularly the Reagan Administration -- stopped enforcing the
antitrust laws.

Van Nest: When was that?

Orrick: It was with Reagan, in 1981.

We have also had a steady stream of petitions for habeas
corpus because one of California's biggest prisons, San Quentin, is
in our district.

We also get an endless stream of what we call SSI cases,
Supplementary Social Insurance cases. These usually arise when
the plaintiff, who has made a complaint to the secretary of Health
and Human Services that he or she is totally disabled and can't
handle any job, then tries to get this extra social security money.
And, if he or she is turned down, they inevitably come to our court.

I think this is one of the worst examples of the waste of time
and energy of judicial officers. It's a situation where the plaintiff,
under this program, gets six bites at the apple instead of the normal
two or three. The plaintiff goes first to the office of the Secretary.
A person there listens to the complaint. The plaintiff fills out a
form, and then that person looks at it and says, "We can't do

254

anything for you, but you can appear before an administrative law
judge."

Then, if the applicant lives, say, in Santa Rosa, an
administrative law judge comes all the way out from Washington,
or maybe from a regional group, and goes up to Santa Rosa. Then
the plaintiff can appear before him or her, with or without an
attorney, and bring doctors, medical reports, and other evidence.
The administrative law judge is then required to make findings of
fact and to create a record, including all the medical information, as
exhibits. If the administrative law judge decides against the
plaintiff, he tells the plaintiff that he or she can go to the Appeals
Council in Health and Human Services. The Appeals Council then
reviews the record that has been made, usually sides with the
administrative law judge, and denies the plaintiff the benefits of
increased income.

At that point, the plaintiff can come to the United States
District Court and ask the court to review the record to see if
there's substantial evidence to back up the findings made by the
administrative law judge. I almost always look at the findings of
fact and conclude, "There's substantial evidence to back the opinion
of the administrative law judge. The applicant then has the right to
appeal."

Then the plaintiff, on the fifth bite, goes to the United States
Court of Appeals, and they review the decision of the district judge.
If they affirm, the plaintiff can still, to my surprise, petition the
Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of certiorari. This
six-bite procedure is really outrageous.

Van Nest: It's a lot of time and money?
Orrick: Absolutely. A big waste.

Another twenty percent of our cases are diversity cases.
Diversity jurisdiction may have been important in the late 18th
century and even into the middle of the 19th century, when travel
was so slow. It was likely that, if you lived in Boston and sued a
person in New York, as the vernacular has it, the New Yorker might

255

"home-town" you, that is to say get a big advantage by the fact that
he was trying the case in his own home town, and play on the
jury's sympathy for someone in that home town.

But those days have long since passed. Today, when you can
cross the country in just a very few hours, there's no sense at all,
so far as federal judges go, to maintaining this diversity jurisdiction.
But the lawyers insist on it. It's a perennial source of argument
between the Bench and the Bar, because they can get to trial more
quickly in the federal court and because a lot of them think, rightly
or not, that the caliber of the judges is better in the federal court
than in the state court. So, in every Congress a bill is introduced
to divest the court of its diversity jurisdiction, but it never passes.

Van Nest: And I take it you would vote for it.

Orrick: I would, certainly. And, indeed, many of my longest cases have
been diversity cases.

Van Nest: What sort of criminal matters have you been hearing as a federal
judge sitting in the '80's?

Orrick: Primarily drug cases. Drug cases and bank robberies and

embezzlements, done mostly by people who had a drug habit and
needed to buy drugs.

Van Nest: Do you have any idea what percentage of your criminal work load
either involves drugs as an offense or involves drug users as the
defendants?

Orrick: I don't. It seems a great, great many.

Van Nest: Has there been much emphasis on white collar crime during the
fourteen years that you have been on the bench?

Orrick: Yes. It's increased a good deal. We have had more tax fraud cases,
for example. And we have had embezzlement cases and securities
fraud cases, lots of those. Those are all white collar crimes.

Van Nest: One of the most important tasks of the federal court is to enforce

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the civil rights laws of our country. What kinds of civil rights cases
have occupied your time as a judge?

Orrick: When I first came to the court, we had a number of fair housing

cases. Those cases were won almost every time by the plaintiff,
and before white jurors. It never has made a difference as to
whether there were blacks on the jury in that type of case.

Van Nest: You say most of those cases were victories for plaintiffs?

Orrick: Yes. And wrongful termination cases are our most prolific source of
so-called civil rights cases these days.

Van Nest: What sort of circumstances do those involve, or what sort of
patterns?

Orrick: A failure to promote, failure to employ, failure to assign persons to

a different type of job, even though it was the same pay. That sort
of thing. The big companies in the United States, counselled as
they are by the best lawyers in the United States, have discovered
that it's not desirable profit-wise to keep running into these
wrongful termination cases or wrongful employment cases.

Another thing that bothers me about such cases is the role of
the judge forever as the last word in a particular industry. The
judge becomes a personnel manager. Just to give an example, there
are some 58,000 cannery workers in the state for whom I am the
court of last resource. There are numerous military aircraft of all
kinds which, under a decree, I can order back to their base because
they are polluting the environment. There are a dozen other
similar types of cases. That has never been my idea of what a
judge should do. What he is doing there is administering laws.
And that is not his function.

1. Sentencing Patty Hearst

Van Nest: You have handled some of the most celebrated criminal cases in our
district during the last thirteen years, the best known being the

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Patty Hearst case. Tell us about the background of that case.

Orrick: Well, Patty Hearst, as almost everyone knows, was kidnaped from

her apartment in Berkeley while she was attending the University of
California. Her kidnappers were a man and a woman, Bill and
Emily Harris, and a black man named Cinque. The case was
handled badly by everybody, and certainly at the beginning. Emily
Harris, had a big bank account at a bank in Berkeley, which the
FBI staked out for two days and then quit. On the third day, Emily
Harris came in and drew out her money, and the FBI never did find
her again for about three years, I think. Her captors drove Patty
Hearst all over the United States and went to retreats where they
talked about revolution in America and what they were going to do
to bring it about. It was nothing more nor less than one of these
crazy cults, which we still have in our country.

Van Nest: And if I recall correctly, the name of the group was the Symbionese
Liberation Army.

Orrick: That is correct. Finally, the San Francisco police, acting on a tip,
picked her up in San Francisco with her Japanese companion, and
she was tried for robbing the Hibemia Bank in which a gun was
used and fired. She is in a famous picture holding a tommy gun
right outside the bank.

Her parents tried to get the best lawyer they could for her.
They got good advice and didn't take it. They could have hired
James Martin Mclnnis at that time. He was the very best criminal
trial lawyer in the city. Everyone had a high regard for him,
including the judges. He most certainly would have been able to
work out a satisfactory plea bargain with Chief Judge Carter, who
drew the case and who ultimately tried it.

Instead, they picked F. Lee Bailey, who had a national
reputation built largely upon newsworthy clients. He had an
assistant, Mr. Johnson, who was a good lawyer. Together, they
defended her. Judge Carter wouldn't hear a motion in limine to
prohibit questioning her about what she had done on this long trip.

Van Nest: What was her defense at trial?

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Orrick: Her defense was that she was "brainwashed" by these people.

However, she had had ample opportunity to escape but failed to do
it. She even fired a gun into a sporting goods store in Los Angeles
from which the Harrises were emerging with some stolen property.

The case went on for at least three months. The ceremonial
courtroom was filled to overflowing every single day of the trial,
not just with sightseers, but with press from all over the world. At
the conclusion of the trial, the jury found her guilty, and Judge
Carter, under a provision of the Criminal Code, sent her to San
Diego for an evaluation which would assist him in imposing the
proper sentence. Almost the day after that trial, he started a
difficult antitrust case. After a week of that, he died of a heart
attack.

The next job for our court was to determine who would finish
the Hearst case. So, we all gathered in the robing room and had
the clerk bring down the box. We each were satisfied that he had
mixed up the ballots. The first ballot that he pulled out had my
name on it, and that was the Hearst case. He reached in again and
pulled the second ballot, and that ballot -- it was another case --
but that was my case. The third time, he pulled out a ballot that
was George Hams' case, and the fourth time he pulled out a ballot
that was my case. So, I got three out of his four then-pending
criminal cases.

Van Nest: You hadn't sat in on the trial, and you were being called upon to
sentence Patty Hearst in this very important and highly publicized
case. How did you go about preparing to do that?

Orrick: The first thing I did was keep her down in San Diego for another

six months to see if I could get some help from them. They had
said that she had some psychiatric problems. So, I considered that
the proper thing to do. I had accepted an assignment to sit out in
Guam, and I took my law clerk with me and a hundred pounds of
paper, being the transcript in that case. During the day, I held
court in the courthouse in Guam. In the evening, night after night
after night, I read that transcript. There's nothing more boring than
reading a transcript.

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Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:

What impression did you come away with after reading the transcript?

That these kidnappers were psychiatrically -- well, were to the point of
being insane -- and that she had possibly been brainwashed, because it
is true that she didn't take the chances that she had to escape. But that
is just speculation on my part. I wasn't the judge or a member of the
jury. And the jury found her guilty of bank robbery and using a
weapon in a robbery in which shots had been fired and people injured.
So, that was the subject matter that I had to deal with.

I then got advice from whomever I could. 'I managed to get views
from most of my colleagues. I also wrote to Norman Carlson, who was
the Director of the Bureau of Prisons, and asked for his
recommendation. The recommendations, as you can imagine, went
everywhere from time served, pardon, twenty-five years, all over the lot.

Were there really other judges and people advising that Patty Hearst
should get a twenty- or twenty-five-year sentence?

Yes.
And?

Norm Carlson of the Bureau of Prisons, whom I had asked for a
recommendation, recommended nine years. I thought a lot about that
and talked it over with one or two of my colleagues for whose judgment
I had great respect and who were very good friends. They thought that
was about right. So, I kept worrying about it, and finally, on the day
on which I had to sentence her, I decided seven years would be about
right.

What were the issues that troubled you most as you tried to determine
what a fair sentence would be for her?

Well, it wasn't clear that she had actually pulled the trigger on
the gun. But she did have the gun in firing position during the
robbery, and there was one bullet missing from the chamber. Others
thought that somebody else used the gun that ricocheted off

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the wall and wounded a pedestrian.

Van Nest: What about her standing in the community? She was a young

woman from a wealthy family, had all the advantages that wealth
can provide, had a fine upbringing, went to private schools and to
the University of California. Did her family or her standing in the
community pose a troubling issue for you?

Orrick: No, it frankly didn't. Of course, I had all the information about her
at the various schools. Her records were poor. I was punishing
her, as I would any other person, male or female, who was
convicted of armed robbery and in which a gun was fired. Society
requires that people like that get sentences that they will remember.

The upshot of it all, as is obvious, was that it was a no-win
situation. And for days and weeks and months, I got letters, not
from local people so much, but from people all over the world,
people in little towns in Louisiana. I got a weekly death threat
from a fellow in New Jersey. I got a number of death threats. I
just turned those over to the FBI. I got letters from Belgium, from
Australia, from Tonga, the Midwest, but very few from California.

Van Nest: What was the public reaction to the seven-year prison term?

Orrick: Just what you would think. Both: "The only reason that she got
seven years and wasn't treated like other criminals was because she
had a wealthy family." Or: "What right have you to sentence a
daughter of the great benefactors of California, the Hearst family?"
That kind of thing.

Van Nest: The whole gamut?

Orrick: The whole gamut. A few said, "Well, you did just the right thing."
But it didn't bother me. The job was done, and she was out on
bail. I let her out on one million dollars bail. She had her appeal
through the Court of Appeals and then the Supreme Court.

Van Nest: What happened legally after the appeals were over?

Orrick: After the appeals, I intended to send her to jail, and probably over

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at Pleasanton, which I eventually did. The mandate had not come
down from the Court of Appeals, but I knew the day that they had
sent it. At that time, I had the United States Attorney and the
marshal come to my chambers. I was about to leave on a trip to
Europe, and I wasn't going to change my plans. I ordered them to
say nothing to the press or anyone else about when they were to
take her to Pleasanton. They were to avoid the publicity in every
way possible. "Take her there at 2:00 in the morning, or whatever.
And don't tell anybody."

And, regretfully, that didn't work because Billy Hunter, who
was then the United States attorney, blurted out to a newspaper
reporter, who had called him on the phone, that he was going to
take her at such and such a time. It wasn't a serious matter at all.
Billy apologized to me when I got back. Everybody does it. I had
no feeling there, except for her safety.

Van Nest: The Hearst family hired a lawyer to challenge Bailey's conduct at
the trial?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: That matter was brought before you a year or two later.

Orrick: Yes. My plan had been for her to serve part of her sentence up to
about October. The impression that I did want the public to have
was not that just because she had rich parents and could appeal to
the Court of Appeals and to the Supreme Court, that she would
then be free on time served. So, I wanted to show people that isn't
the way we worked. I treated her like I treat everyone else.

Van Nest: How much time did you intend to have her serve?

Orrick: Six months. From May to October. So, when I got back, Bailey
and Johnson came to see me and asked me if I would let her out.
I said no, and she thereupon fired her lawyers. She got another
lawyer, Mr. George Martinez. Mr. Martinez came to my chambers,
and I told him he could look at the record and, if he had any
questions, I would be glad to answer them.

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Van Nest: Did you tell Martinez that you intended to let his client out within
the next few months?

Orrick: I told him in a general way that I intended to keep her in until the

fall. I said, "If you want to be a hero on international television,
all you have to do is file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
But I don't know what ground it would be on, unless you thought
that these two well-known lawyers were not competent counsel."

Mr. Martinez said, "You said it. I didn't."

I said, "I thought her lawyers were entirely competent, just to
be clear with you. If you want to file any papers, lodge them with
me first. I will tell you what I am going to do with them. But, if
you want to get on television, just file them up in the clerk's
office."

So, a month went by, and he filed a petition for habeas
corpus, complete with exhibits in boxes three feet high, and the
exhibits — I couldn't believe it. The exhibits were newspaper
clippings from all over the world. He had them all. Magazine
articles and newspaper clippings. His petition charged all kinds of
things, so I couldn't let her out then without dealing with her
petition, and that took a long time.

Van Nest: One of the claims in the Martinez petition was that it was

incompetent of Bailey to put his client on the stand, knowing that
she would be required to assert the Fifth Amendment in response to
questions. In fact, she asserted it some forty-two times in the
course of the trial.

Orrick: That's right.

Van Nest: Were you troubled by the conduct of the trial by Mr. Bailey?

Orrick: It's hard to criticize another lawyer's tactics in the trial. Bailey had
tried to get a ruling in limine prohibiting questions concerning
every part of her captivity. Judge Carter declined to rule on it
before trial, so Bailey was taking a chance, because he did not
wish his client to rely upon her Fifth Amendment right of not

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testifying before the jury. The fact of the matter is that his client
asserted her Fifth Amendment rights forty-two times. So, when the
jury retired to deliberate, they were deliberating the fate of a
person who forty-two times had taken the Fifth. And there is no
doubt that that made a big difference to the jury.

Van Nest: Did Mr. Bailey appear before you to defend his conduct of the trial?

Orrick: No.

Van Nest: What finally happened?

Orrick: The next thing that happened was we filed our opinion on the

habeas corpus matter. What followed was a "grass roots" demand
all over the country for her release. An Episcopalian priest
organized this letter-writing campaign to President [Jimmy] Carter.
The following February, the pardon attorney in the Department of
Justice got in touch with me and asked if I had any problems about
having the President grant Ms. Hearst executive clemency, and I
said, "No, not at all."

He said, "Well, do you want to give me your idea of what
should be said?" And I said, "No. That is up to you and the
President. The only thing that Martinez did for her was to force
me to keep her in jail four more months, and so maybe she ought
to be given executive clemency."

The mail came in floods to the White House to pardon her.
She wasn't pardoned. She received executive clemency, is what the
technical name is. No sooner had President Carter given her
executive clemency than the very next day hoards of mail and
telephone calls overwhelmed the White House, charging the
President with playing favorites and letting the daughter of a
newspaper publisher out of jail when, if she had been an ordinary
bank robber, he wouldn't have thought of it. So much for the view
of the public.

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2. Trying the Hell's Angels

Van Nest: You also presided over another celebrated criminal trial here in San
Francisco involving the Hell's Angels. What can you tell us about
the background of that case?

Orrick: That case had already been tried by Judge Conti. The charge

against the Hell's Angels, and twenty-five of them were in custody,
was that they were manufacturing methamphetamine with the
intent to possess it and distribute it. The case had been building
for more than three or four years by various law enforcement
agencies in and around San Francisco. When the FBI and all the
interested parties swooped in one evening on each one of these
people, it caused a big stir in the community.

I remember Judge Conti telling me that he was just returning
from Hawaii and was met at the airport by the U.S. Attorney and
United States marshals who explained all this to him, and he
decided that with these defendants, who had such miserable
reputations and who thought nothing of using violence to
accomplish the slightest end, that he would require a specially built
courtroom. He had Judge Burke's courtroom — Judge Burke was
sick at the time - remodeled. He had bulletproof glass, I think, in
front of the bench. I know he had it at the end of the courtroom.
He had the desks bolted to the floor, as well as the chairs.

There was a very bad relationship, and perfectly natural,
between counsel for the Hell's Angels and government counsel and
the court. The defendants got some of the best criminal lawyers
that there were. They paid enormous amounts of money to them.

Van Nest: The first trial ended in a mistrial?

Orrick: Yes. The first trial ended in a mistrial. Then it came time for the
second trial, which I drew. I decided that I would not use the
special courtroom, but that I would conduct the case in my own
courtroom.

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Van Nest: Why did you decide to do it that way?

Orrick: Well, because I found it very depressing being in that courtroom. It

was dark, and it was as though everybody in the room was in
custody, and I didn't want any part of it. So, I had it in my own
courtroom. I had a metal detector at the entrance to the
courtroom, in addition to the metal detector down on the first floor.
I want to emphasize that my case was very different from Judge
Conti's case, the main reason being that the defendants had gotten
a deadlocked jury in the first trial. The Hell's Angels and their
lawyers thought that they would get the same again and maybe
even be acquitted, if they behaved themselves. Or they must
have come to that conclusion.

Van Nest: So, you think you had an easier time of it than Judge Conti
experienced the first time around?

Orrick: Yes, I did. And I thought that that was the reason. And, also, I
had the United States Attorney, Billy Hunter, cut the number of
defendants down to twelve, and that was bad enough. Judge Conti,
I think, had about eighteen all together. So, in my courtroom, we
had benches in a rectangular mode with a defendant, and then a
lawyer, and then a defendant, and then a lawyer. So, it went right
around the room.

I told the Hell's Angels' lawyers that I wouldn't be having any
conferences in my chambers, and they said, "Well, we appreciate
that very much, judge." And one of them said, "My defendant is
very suspicious, and he wouldn't believe what I told him went on."
And I said, "Well, that's all right. It's all going on the record."

Van Nest: What were some of the special problems in trying the cases? You
had some colorful witnesses, no doubt.

Orrick: That's right. The main problem was the witnesses. As the
government is fond of saying, "We don't have Boy Scouts as
witnesses in criminal trials," and particularly not in this type of a
trial.

Van Nest: What sort of people testified on behalf of the government in the

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case?

Orrick: With the sole exception of a couple of agents, they were nothing

more nor less than thugs, who were either in the government
witness program, or who had been given immunity from
prosecution for another crime. One had even been given immunity
from prosecution for murder. I thought that was outrageous. But
the government all over the country was anxious to put an end to
these motorcycle gangs. There were cases similar to this one in
Omaha and in Baltimore, just two that I happen to know about.

Van Nest: Can you give us the flavor of some of the testimony of some of
these witnesses?

Orrick: Many of the witnesses had been members of the Hell's Angels.

When they took the stand, you could just feel the hate between the
defendants and the witness on the stand. It permeated the
courtroom. We had a number of marshals in the room, but they
were in civilian clothes. They rotate around the country. I never
knew who was a marshal and who wasn't. In addition to that, the
other Hell's Angels who hadn't been tried or were not part of this
prosecution, at least, took turns coming to the courtroom.

So, daily, we had at least a dozen of these smelly, rowdy
hulks in the courtroom staring at the witness. Even with the metal
detector there, the marshals told me they picked up big belt buckles
and tire chains and all that before they even came into my
courtroom. They could best be described as Tony Serra described
them in his opening to the jury. Serra is a skilled cross-examiner
and an excellent lawyer, in my opinion. When he got up, in the
course of his opening statement to the jury, he said, "Ladies and
gentlemen of the jury, you will find these witnesses are nothing but
scumbuckets!"

Van Nest: Shouting?

Orrick: Shouting. And I admonished him for that. But for the entire

balance of that trial, I looked at the witness and wondered whether
the marshal was close enough to pull him back, I thought, "Well,
Serra was right. That is a scumbucket," witness after witness after

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witness.

Van Nest: Give us the flavor of some of the testimony of some of these
people.

Orrick: These people, as you can well appreciate, were very easy to

cross-examine. They all had rap sheets six feet long. The opening
question would be, "Now, will you tell us why, on the night of
January 16th, 1974, you killed one Jefferson Oboe?"

"Well, yes. A bunch of us were standing at the bar, with our
chicks. And this Oboe, he's big, too, and he's black. And I just
didn't think very much of him. He says something about my chick,
and I had a knife in my boot, and I pulled it open, and I gave it to
him like that and didn't hit a rib. It went right into his heart, and
the guy just keeled over."

"Well, then, I understand you only spent five years in custody;
is that correct?"

'Yes. Thafs correct."

"What happened when you got out?"

"Well, the night I got out, I looked up some of the boys. We
went down and had a few beers. The bar was crowded, and they
didn't get the idea that I wanted a drink. So, I came in, and I
spread them with my elbows, and some guy takes a poke at me.
Well, the first thing I , done when I got out of prison was to pick up
my gun. I just picked it up — his head was right there, and I shot
it right in his ear."

That is an exaggeration, but not much of one.

Van Nest: During the middle of the trial, were you surprised and disturbed to
learn that one of the government's chief witnesses had earned a
hefty sum for his services?

Orrick: I was just coming to that, yes. The government, on direct

examination of a fresh witness, said, "Now, Mr. So-and-So, the

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government has paid you for your testimony, has it not?"
He says, "Yes."
"How much did the government pay you?"

The guy said, "$50,000." I forget. Maybe $35,000. At that,
I ordered the jury back to the jury room, and I said to the
prosecutor, "Do I understand from you that the United States
government has paid this man $35,000 for what he is about to
say?"

'Yes, your honor."

I turned to the witness and said, "Did you get that money?"

And he said, "Yes."

I said, "When did you get it?"

"Oh, about two or three weeks before the first trial."

"Well, how did you get it?"

He said, "It was no big deal. I was down in a cabin we had
in the Santa Cruz mountains. About 2:00 in the morning, that
fellow sitting over there next to the attorney comes to my cabin,
and he says, 'I want you to testify as to what these fellows were
doing most of the time in connection with manufacturing
methamphetamine .'

"And I said I would do that, but for a price.
"And he said, 'How much?'
"And I said, '$35,000.'

"So then, he opens his suitcase, and there it is in bills, ten's
and twenty's, and so on."

269

Van Nest: Were you shocked?

Orrick: I was shocked to pieces. I thereupon declared a recess to go in and
think about what I should do. The government had spent well over
a million dollars preparing this case, and I was not up on the
procedures or the uses made of the Drug Enforcement Agency, or
the current thought on it, either. So I called up a judge in
Philadelphia who had had one of these cases and asked him what
he did about it. He said, "Well, the case had been lost anyway, but
I just declared a mistrial."

Van Nest: Based on the payment to an informant?

Orrick: Yes. So, I weighed that against the trial and the effort that had

been put into it, and I thought, if we got a verdict, I would let the
Court of Appeals do that. So, I went on with the trial.

Van Nest: What was the result?

Orrick: A hung jury, again. I talked to a couple of the jurors. The people

who voted against them said, "What we didn't understand was why
the government would give these people immunity for murder and
give this kind of testimony. Why didn't they prosecute the
murderers?" That is a very good question. That is the question I
asked. They got these gangs, and they were bribing witnesses.
They thought $35,000 was nothing.

Van Nest: Was the case retried a third time?

Orrick: No. Let me mention one more thing about the Hell's Angels case.
Going into that courtroom, which was packed with people, where
fifty-nine people had to be in place before I came into the
courtroom, four times a day, was a great strain, to put it mildly.
And it was a strain to be taking your notes, watching that witness,
keeping an eye on everything going on down in front of you and at
the back, and trying to see who that big fellow was who just came
in the door. It was a great strain.

During one afternoon recess, the marshal came in and asked
me if I would give him ten or fifteen minutes more, and I said, "Oh

270

sure, absolutely." So, when I came in, we went on with the trial,
and I happened to look over to my far right, and the fellow sitting
there had a big bandage over his head.

Van Nest: One of the defendants?

Orrick: One of the defendants. So, when we recessed for the afternoon, I
asked the marshal, "What happened to that fellow?"

"Well," he said, "that fellow was making faces at you and
giving you the finger and so on. When we took the afternoon
recess, the defendants formed a half circle in front of the holding
cell, and four or five of them took this fellow into the holding cell.
The other Hell's Angels kept the marshals outside, and they just
took this guy and really beat him up. They slammed his head
against the bars." He was really in tough shape.

I said, "Why did they do that?"

He said, "Well, you can see they are not being obstreperous.
They are trying to play it right."

The leader, Walton, I think his name was, was fed up with
this fellow's conduct because he wasn't following the rules. And I
must say that I looked over there a lot after this incident, and he
was as good as he could be. He couldn't have been any better.

Van Nest: He was an angel, not a Hell's Angel?
Orrick: That's right.

3. Desegregating San Francisco's Schools

Van Nest: You have also presided over some very important civil rights cases
in San Francisco, one of which was a challenge by the NAACP to

271

the racial segregation of the San Francisco schools. Was that a
tough case for you?

Orrick: Yes. That was a difficult case. I hadn't been involved in any of the
school desegregation cases, and the counsel that I had in this case
were skilled at it. In fact, they spent their entire time going around
the country prosecuting and defending these cases. So, rather than
take a strong activist position, I thought I would let them dispose of
the case in die manner that seemed fair to them and on which I
was sure that they could reach some kind of an agreement. They
would come to status conferences every three months, and we
would discuss what was going on.

Finally, after the case had gone for a while, I said, "I want
this case settled. I told you that the first day you came in. You
are so busy going around the country, you don't have time to think
about this case. So, what I am going to do is, you give me three
days, I get your undivided attention for those three days, and you
will have mine. I won't be trying any cases. And we will see if we
can't settle it."

When they came for the three days, they came to the
courtroom every morning at 9:00. I would lock them in the
courtroom until noon, and I would say, "If you want anything from
me, just come get me in my chambers," and I would excuse them
for lunch, and then they would come back. At the end of two
days, it was apparent to me that we weren't going to get any place.
So, I went in to see them and said, 'You are not getting any
place. In 1963 I settled a big case for the government, the I.G.
Farben case, and I am going to use some of the same methods on
you that I did on them. What I am going to do is, first, I am going
to set the case for trial. I am going to do that right now. The case
is going to trial on February 8th." This was in May or something
like that.

"So, I want you to have one team to get ready to litigate this
and get another team working on the settlement. If we don't have
a settlement by February 8, we will be all set and ready to go to
trial. If you don't like that idea, and I must say that I don't know
how great it is, you can go out and give me another. I will give

272

you two hours for lunch. If you don't come back with a better
idea, we take my idea."

My law clerk was in the courtroom, and when we went back
into chambers, he said, "Judge, that was sheer brilliance."

I said, "What do you mean?"

"Well," he said, "your plan is so bad and so stupid that there's
no possible way that they are going to come back without a good
program." To make a long story short, they didn't have a program,
and I put my program into effect.

I said, "The next thing I am going to do is to get the best
professional people in the country to work on this case. I am going
to employ them as the court's experts, and the chairman will be the
former Commissioner of Education, Professor Howe of Harvard. I
will start in with him." Howe is one of the best known educators
in the country. He told me that he was trying to retire, and he
couldn't possibly do it. Well, I worked on him, and finally he said,
"I will do it, if you get Gary Orfield."

I said, "Who is he, and what is his phone number?" Gary
Orfield is a professor at the University of Chicago who is a
specialist in this desegregation work and who testifies all over the
country and has written a lot on it. I got him, and he agreed to be
the co-chairman. I then told each party, the parties being the
NAACP, the San Francisco School District and the State of
California, that they could each appoint one expert to this
committee. And I advised them to get one with as high credentials
as mine, and that they could talk to their expert, but they could not
talk to any other member of the committee, nor could they attend
any meeting of the committee.

So, they did get first-rate people. One gentleman was a
Quaker from the University of Miami, who specialized in this field.
Another was Dean of the School of Education at the University of
Michigan, or Michigan State. I have forgotten. And the other
experts were very good.

273

I called these the "Committee of Wise Men." They met
around the country, as these types of committees do, in New York
and Boston and O'Hare [Airport] and San Francisco. Finally, they
came up with a superb report, which I handed to counsel. I asked
them to read it and then come back and we would talk about it.
So, they came back and they said, "Judge, this is an excellent
report."

I said, "Well, that is very high praise from you, Mr. Atkins."
And he said, "I agree with it, in principle, absolutely."

Then Mr. McCutchen, who was the other attorney from
Detroit --

Van Nest: He represented the school board?

Orrick: Yes. He said, "I agree with Tom, Your Honor. If s an excellent
report, and I agree, in principle."

I said, "Gentlemen, I haven't been away from the practice of
the law long enough to make me forget that when I wanted to say
no politely, I would always say, 'I agree, in principle.' So, let's
begin with the first sentence." I read it, and I said, "Does anybody
object to that?"

"No, sir."

I said, "All right," and I went on and read the second
sentence. "Any objections?"

"No, sir."

So, that is the way I went for one or two paragraphs, at
which point they said, "Judge, we can't do this this way. We have
got to get hold of this and edit it."

I said, "No, no. You guys are experts, and you are flying
around the country and everything. But your paperwork in this
case has been very poor. I am going to get an amanuensis."

274

They looked at each other and said, "Exactly what is that?"
I said, "Somebody who writes for you."
They said, "Who?"
I said, "Lloyd Cutler."
They said, "You know Lloyd Cutler?"
I said, "Yes. He is a very good friend of mine."
Van Nest: Who is Lloyd Cutler?

Orrick: He is perhaps the best lawyer in the United States. He went to

Yale, clerked for Judge Learned Hand, started his own firm in
Washington, was counsel to President Carter, and has been in
countless national and international ventures, including getting the
hostages back from Iran. It was all his plan.

So, I called him. Lloyd loves this kind of business. The next
morning, two young partners from the Cutler firm were in my
office. I told Atkins and McCutchen, "You two better stay here for
the weekend."

I put them in the jury room, and I said, 'You tell these
fellows where you disagree."

Van Nest: Had the experts proposed a settlement plan or a consent decree for
the schools?

Orrick: Yes. And they had outlined what should be done.

Van Nest: Was it pretty clear, from the evidence that the parties had

developed, that the schools had in fact been segregated for a long
time?

Orrick: Oh, yes. San Francisco schools have been segregated since 1850.
All you have to do in one of these desegregation cases is to find
that just a part of the school district is segregated. Of course, it's

275

easy enough to find in Hunter's Point. Then the judge has the
power to rearrange the entire school district. So, that was no
problem for the committee. They looked primarily at how it should
be done.

Van Nest: And the task for Cutler was to take the committee's report and turn
it into some sort of working document?

Orrick: That was the idea. Turn it into what became the consent decree.

So, they started in and worked in Washington firing out drafts to
McCutchen in Detroit and Atkins in New York and the state lawyer
up in Sacramento and to me. It became necessary to get it done in
a hurry because of the election. I wanted it in place when the new
administration, and Governor [George] Deukmejian, came into
power. So, everybody cooperated fully. The Cutler firm had
counsel come to Washington. They worked day and night for two
or three days. Finally, we got down to the zero hour. The next
day, the counsel were to come across the country and talk to me
about the consent decree. Well, one of the Cutler lawyers called
and said, "Judge, we are sorry. They left here at 4:00 this
morning, mad. They couldn't agree on anything."

I said, "Did they tell you what they disagreed on?"

And he said, 'Yes."

I said, "Was it important, or not?"

He said, "No. It's really of very little importance. Do you
still want to see them?"

I said, "Definitely." So, when the lawyers walked into my
chambers two days later, I thanked them effusively.

Van Nest: I take it they were ready for a lashing.

Orrick: That is what they thought. I thanked them ever so much for all
the trouble that they had gone to and their help to me. I then
said, "I have had to move up the trial of the case until next
Monday."

276

Van Nest:
Orrick:

They said, "Next Monday?"

And I said, 'Yes. I am bringing out the co-chairmen of the
Wise Men, Professor Howe and Professor Orfield. They will testify
Monday morning as to whether or not San Francisco is a segregated
school district. They will have two hours, and you will have two
hours. Then, in the afternoon, we are going to deal with the
remedy."

And they scowled, and I said, "Well, it's yours. You did it. I
thank you for it." I held up the consent decree and struck out the
word "consent," and I said, "I am really delighted that we did have
this agreement because I have always been interested in education.
I have been on a state education commission, and a trustee of a
number of schools: the Thacher school, Katherine Burke school, the
San Rafael Military Academy and others. And I have got some
ideas of my own about education in general. I was just going over
them when you came in. If you don't like them, then you take it
across the street to the Court of Appeals."

So, I opened the decree, and they said, "Judge, could we have
about five minutes?" I said, "Sure." They went outside, and in
about two minutes they came back and said, "We agree with the
decree just exactly the way it is. We don't need Your Honor's help
on anything."

I said, "That's too bad. But, as long as we have got it, we are
going to have a little signing ceremony." So, we got the
superintendent over, Superintendent Alioto, and they all signed, and
I signed.

Did the plan call for busing in San Francisco?

Yes. Some busing. And busing was already going on. We bused
some ten thousand kids a day at that time.

What were the other principal features of the consent decree?

Well, the goal was to change the ethnic composition in the schools,
so that students from different races were spread throughout the

277

Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:
Van Nest:
Orrick:

Van Nest:

Orrick:

district.

There was a question of making these what they call magnet
schools, putting in special types of computers and things to arouse
the interest of kids in other school districts, and busing them in.
The ethnic distribution was that there would be no more than forty
percent of any ethnic group in any one school.

Forty-five, I believe.

Well, it was to go down to forty.

I see.

And it was forty just recently.

When was the decree to go into effect?

July of '86. And the decree worked very well.

Has it been a success?

Yes. It's been a great success.

Why?

Because the ethnic composition in the schools has been changed.
The magnet schools have attracted others. The proof of the
pudding is in the scores. And the scores, even from the school
with the lowest in the city, have improved. So, in my view, and
from the periodic reports that I get from the school district, it's
been a definite success.

Have you had to be the kind of hands-on administrator that judges
have become in other cities, such as Judge Garrity in Boston and
some of the other desegregation cases?

No. I have not, and I resolved at the outset I would not do that,
don't think that is a proper part of the duties of a federal judge,
and I have eschewed that to the extent that I can. I have,

278

however, appointed Professor Orfield to monitor the school district
to be sure it is following the dictates of the decree.

4. The San Francisco County Jail Case

Van Nest: Another civil rights case that has received attention here in San
Francisco is one which involves the San Francisco County Jail.
What do you recall as the big issues in that case?

Orrick: The San Francisco County Jail, like too many jails around the

country, has not been kept in good shape. As the public demands
that more and more people be sent to jail, the jails become
crowded. A civil rights prison case was filed in my court by
Professor Morton Cohen and John Hauser of the McCutchen office
as counsel. For a matter of years, two years at least, I would get
reports from them and from their staff as to what happened, and I
would get the sheriff into court. Nothing much did happen. In any
event, the city did nothing, and we needed help. We needed the
strong backing of the Mayor and the Board of Supervisors, as well
as the Sheriff. The Sheriff was doing his best to make the changes
suggested in our proposed consent decree, but he could not get
assistance, primarily financial assistance, from the City.

Accordingly, I held a status conference at this time. I told the
City, represented by the City Attorney Louise Renne -- who is a
very good lawyer, I might add -- that I would no longer stand for
complete disregard of my proposed order, and that, as of now, I
was making it an order and, if it wasn't complied with, I would
impose appropriate sanctions, possibly civil in the form of heavy
fines, daily fines, and criminal in the form of commitment to the
custody of the United States marshal.

Van Nest: I take it you were not able to resolve the case by means of any sort
of consent decree?

279

Orrick: We had a consent decree, but the City failed to implement it.

There wasn't any question about the condition of the jail. I had the
declarations from counsel. It hadn't been too long since I had
visited the jail in connection with the San Francisco Crime
Commission.

Van Nest: So, you had firsthand experience with the system and the conditions
of the jail.

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Your order was imposed but disregarded prior to your meeting with
City Attorney Renne?

Orrick: The order is now being carried out.

Van Nest: What changes have you made in the jail?

Orrick: Changes in "the hole," proposed construction of modular cells to put
out in San Bruno, and a number of other things. That is the main
thing.

Van Nest: Primarily addressed to overcrowding?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: And providing better physical conditions for inmates?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: In these cases, the school case and the jail case, did you feel as
though you were acting as a judicial activist, as the term is being
used today?

Orrick: Yes.

Van Nest: Is that something you think is important for federal judges to do?

Orrick: Well, I disapprove of it in principle. But, in these days when we
are considering the benefits of the three-layer power structure set

280

forth in the Constitution, and when we look at what the executive
branch is not doing and what the Congress is not doing, in order to
continue the great country that we have, the federal judiciary has
to take on that kind of power. As I say, I don't think it's a legal
problem, so much as it gets to be an administrative and political
problem. It is perhaps best illustrated by one of the great federal
judges, Frank M. Johnson, who was recently appointed to the
Eleventh Circuit and who was the judge in the Middle District of
Alabama, where he took away from the Governor, his former
college classmate, George Wallace, jurisdiction to run the mental
hospitals, the University of Alabama, and the prison system.

Of course, that is what happens daily. Every single day, you
will see one or more stories in the newspapers, the lead of which
is, "A federal judge yesterday," and then he did something like stop
people from striking, holding the Secretary of the Interior in
contempt because of his failure to carry out a congressional statute,
things like that. So, to keep the country running, the federal court
has to step out of what should be its main role.

Van Nest: Are you troubled by the frequency with which federal judges are
being called upon to intervene in the life of the country?

Orrick: Yes. It's all too often. It takes us back to the oft quoted de

Tocqueville report in 1735, wherein he said that Americans love to
make legal problems out of every personal or economic problem
that they may have. And it's much truer today than it was then.
Some people argue that it keeps the country in order, that there
should be a forum where every person who believes he was
wrongfully terminated, for example, can come and tell his story.
There are lots and lots of things like that, which are probably
worthwhile from the point of view of the country, but which have
no place in a federal court, in my view.

That isn't to say that I think we should have specialist courts
like the tax court. Many people say in the antitrust bar we should
have a court that is limited to considering antitrust cases and would
require particular expertise. Well, this has been in effect at the
Federal Trade Commission with not any great amount of success. I
am strongly opposed to the so-called specialist courts.

281

Van Nest: You would rather keep it all within the federal bench, as it is
today?

Orrick: Yes, because it has worked.

Van Nest: We have talked about some of the important cases you have
handled. Can you think of any other memorable courtroom
moments in cases of lesser importance?

Orrick: I remember one case very well. It was a contract case between two

people who hated each other and were unable to keep their feelings
out of the courtroom. It was a jury trial, and the plaintiff had just
finished testifying and making a statement about what was said.

Then the defense was to put in its case through the
defendant, who took the stand. The defendant was obviously
angry, and he said, pointing his finger at the plaintiff, "That is a
goddamn lie, and you are a" - and with that, he went up
backwards and slumped in his chair. I looked over. A juror had
vaulted over the bar and came up to massage his heart to see if he
couldn't do something. We called the doctor in the building and
got the ambulance over. Those were the last words that that
defendant said on this earth. He was dead on arrival at the
hospital.

Van Nest: Do you have any other cases that were particularly memorable?

Orrick: Well, I had one case that amused me because it was really trying a
police dog to determine whether he had been properly instructed in
his duties. A San Mateo policeman in the dog police section was in
a gas station which faced on El Camino Real at dusk one Sunday
evening. He observed a "hot rod" exceeding the speed limit coming
up the highway. He finished filling his car with gas and took off
after the hot rod.

The hot rod, seeing that he was being chased, turned up a
side street and into the driveway of a house in which there were no
lights. The officer, with his dog in the back of his car, stopped and
went up to the driver of the car and asked him out and told him to
come down to the police car and take everything out of his pockets

282

and put it on the hood.

In the meantime, he had called for a backup car, which had
just arrived. The defendant put everything on the car. Then the
officer said, "Put out that cigarette." The defendant flicked the
burning cigarette into the car where it got Danno, the police dog,
right on the soft part of his nose.

In the meantime, the defendant had started to wrestle with
the officer. They were going back and forth in front of the open
window. Danno had a chance to get ahold of the defendant's ear.
Then Danno jumped out of the car. He did that because a woman,
who was in the car with the defendant, came out and was
screaming and hitting the officer on the back. The officer threw
her off. She fell down on her back. She was pregnant. Danno, as
he was taught to do, put his two paws on her shoulders.

Van Nest: And pinned her down?
Orrick: And pinned her down.
Van Nest: How did Danno do at trial?

Orrick: Danno was superb at trial. Counsel wanted to bring him to court,
but I declined. I was calling the earless man the defendant. He
was actually the plaintiff in a civil rights suit. He had his hair
grown over his ear, but he showed me his ear. I think the jury
came in for Danno.

Van Nest: Have you ever thought about moving up to the Court of Appeals?

Orrick: No.

Van Nest: Is that something that is attractive to you?

Orrick: No, it isn't. I have the opportunity, which I take -- almost every
time ~ to sit on the Court of Appeals three or four times a year. I
enjoy the argument and the work. We have our fair share of
opinions to write. But that is enough. It's just too lonely in the
Court of Appeals. You never see anybody. You are always writing.

283

You don't see the law, the real law, being made. The law is made
in the trial court, as we both know.

D. Reflections on Judicial Philosophy

Van Nest: You have developed a reputation in our district as a real stickler on
decorum and proper behavior by lawyers. Why is that so important
to you?

Orrick: Well, if s of the greatest importance because of what I said

previously. In my view, the federal judiciary is the most important
branch of the government in many ways. And, like all of our
institutions, it is fragile. It demands, much as a church demands, a
certain amount of dignity. And, further than that, if the lawyers
know that they are going to have to behave in a dignified fashion,
they are likely to be better prepared and to get along better in
court than otherwise.

I think that a lawyer, as I say over and over again, is above
many, many other types of people in our society. He or she is
creative and bright. They are problem solvers. That is what makes
the society stick together. So, believing, as I most sincerely do,
that the lawyer's job is important and that he is important, I have
little regard for lawyers who are not prepared and who do not treat
their clients properly by virtue of lack of preparation. And, further
than that, in a controlled courtroom, you get through your trial
much easier if everybody knows the rules.

Van Nest: What is the toughest part of being a federal judge?
Orrick: The most difficult part, by far, is sentencing.

Van Nest: What is it about sentencing that makes it the most difficult feature
of your job?

284

Orrick: Well, you must take on the qualities of the Almighty. You have to
make your own evaluation of what the defendant is going to do in
the future. Nobody can tell that. But judges have to do it. There
have been many efforts to take judges off that hook. One way is
by having the Parole Commission do the sentencing or giving it
indefinite sentences, or by the effort now to give the court
sentencing guidelines.

But none of those have worked. The sentencing is best done
by conscientious judges who have gotten all the information that
they can get from the defendant and from the defendant's counsel
and from the probation officer. And then use common sense.
There is constant criticism of the courts because of alleged disparity
of sentencing. I would defend courts against that. Every person's
case is different. It's one thing for a child of seventeen with no
prior record to rob a bank, where an experienced bank robber of
the age of forty-five with a long rap sheet does the same thing and
gets a longer sentence.

Van Nest: Isn't there something to the criticism that today, even among

federal judges, there are wide differences in sentencing for crimes
that are substantially similar, and that a defendant's fate shouldn't
hang so much on the luck of the draw?

Orrick: There is, without doubt. And that is because all human beings are
different. The criticism is well taken.

Van Nest: There's a current effort afoot, in fact, to implement new federal
guidelines for sentencing. Do you support the effort that that
commission has made?

Orrick: No, I don't. I have tried to follow those rules, and it's just a waste
of time. In the end, you are going to come back and use your own
common sense.

Van Nest: Judge Orrick, you served for four years as one of the nation's top
legal officers in the Department of Justice. Does that have any
impact on the way you treat your job as a federal judge?

Orrick: Well, it's been helpful because, as assistant attorney general in two

285

divisions of the Department of Justice, I learned a great deal about
the operations, not only of the Department of Justice, but of the
other departments which we represented in court. So, when I have
a problem that involves the Pentagon, and the local United States
Attorney doesn't seem to be getting any place with it, I tell him
what to do. In fact, I order him who to telephone and to report
back to me. In many cases, I know the section chief that he ought
to be talking to. Undoubtedly, as Justice Holmes said, law is not
logic; law is experience. And those experiences impacted on me in
the way I have described previously. I think it has been of help.

Van Nest: Has it made any difference to you, in the manner in which you
view the government, when it is a party in the civil and criminal
cases before you?

Orrick: No. I don't think it has. I think that I treat the government the
way I treat it now whether I had worked for it or not. In other
words, I recognize the government, as every federal judge must, as
the biggest and most frequent litigant in the judicial system. But
that doesn't give it, by virtue of that kind of prominence, any
advantage over a private litigant. I do my best to treat the
government the way I treat a private litigant.

Van Nest: How would you sum up, Judge Orrick, your judicial philosophy
after fourteen years on the Federal bench?

Orrick: My judicial philosophy, that is, my system of principles, which I
endeavor to apply in carrying out my duties as a judge, is best
summarized by the great English lawyer and philosopher Sir
Francis Bacon. He said, "Judges should remember that their office
is to interpret laws and not to make or give laws." As Alexander
Hamilton points out in the 78th Federalist, judges should be
appointed who "should be bound down by strict rules." And it is
their duty to interpret them.

And I would emulate the philosophy which was adopted by
my good friend, Associate Justice Potter Stewart. In his recent
book, The Supreme Court. Chief Justice Rehnquist, speaking of
Potter, says, "He was also, I think, of all the colleagues with whom
I have served, the one least influenced by considerations extraneous

286

to the strictly legal aspects of a case. He was, that is, the
quintessential judge."

I think of myself as a man of the law, and I tell my law
clerks that I am a man of the law and that I agree wholeheartedly
with the judicial philosophy which I have discussed above. And,
conversely, I do not believe in what some of my colleagues term
"social engineering." I have no doubt that the work of the federal
judiciary is the most important work going on in this country today,
and my every effort is to see that the work is properly done.

I don't think the country would exist today without the
federal judiciary as we have it. If anyone doubts that, all they have
to do is look at the morning paper and see what is going on in
Washington and elsewhere in this country. You will find, every day
you read a newspaper, the lead of at least one, and often more,
stories is "A federal judge yesterday..." and that he did something
like make a cabinet officer perform duties imposed upon him by the
Congress, or any number of other things that should have been
addressed by the executive or legislative branch of the government.

So, my belief is that there is no person in our great country
that has a calling higher or more important than lawyers and
judges. And it is my hope that we can strive to be and be judicial
philosophers, mainly those who love the pursuit of wisdom in their
daily ministrations of the law. I also believe that a judge must
bring to his courtroom not only a profound understanding of the
law, which can only be obtained by consistent research, but also a
deep and abiding sense of the nature of his or her responsibilities in
the administration of justice, which must be discharged freely and
impartially and with great industry, courage and compassion.

The fulcrum of our system of government is the federal
judiciary. Our courts are fragile institutions to be protected by
judges and lawyers from attack by those who fail to revere them.
The judge's duty is to create and maintain decorum and order in
the courtroom so that reasoned arguments will allow the light of
justice to prevail over the heat of passion.

Therefore, it goes without saying, in applying this philosophy

287

to the varying and many cases a judge should — and I must admit
that I have been sometimes unsuccessful in doing this — show
unfailing courtesy, compassion, patience, industry, dignity and
understanding to all persons, including the lawyers, juries and other
court personnel.

Van Nest: Thank you, Judge Orrick.

288

APPENDIX I

SERVICE FOR CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS

Charitable:
President:

Schools:

Trustee:

Other:

President:
Trustee:

Director:

Community Chest of San Francisco
Family and Children's Agency
Mission Neighborhood Centers
The San Francisco Foundation

The Thacher School

The Katherine Delmar Burke School

Katherine Branson School

San Rafael Military Academy

San Francisco Opera Association

Grace Cathedral Corporation
Children's Hospital of San Francisco
Graduate Theological Union
San Francisco Law Library
Episcopal Church Foundation
The Legal Aid Society of San Francisco
San Francisco Symphony Association
World Affairs Council of Northern
California

San Francisco Bar Association
Study and Report to Eisenhower
Commission on Violence at San
Francisco State College 1969: "Shut
It Down: College in Crisis"

289

Member:

Co-Chairman:
Member:

Citation
Award:

Board of Governors, American Red Cross
Program Committee of Commonwealth

Club of California
State Committee on Public Education

San Francisco Committee on Crime
(1969)

Organizing Committee 1960 Winter
Olympics Games

Awarded Citation as Alumnus of the Year
by Boalt Hall Alumni Association,
University of California, 1980

290

INDEX » William H. Orrick, Jr.

Adler, Kurt Herbert, 234,235
Alioto, Joseph, 220,224,225,240,241
ambassadors, U.S., 169-176
American Bar Association, 152,155
antitrust law enforcement, 193-199
antitrust law practice, 220,221,253
antitrust conference, 195,196
antitrust barristers, 210-214

Bahia de Nipe case, 116-120

Bailey, F. Lee, 257,261-263

Ball, George, 164,166-168,178

Blue Train, 174-176

Boalt Hall, 56

Bork, Robert, 194,195

Boudin, Leonard, 147-150

Bring, Murray, 194,196,204

Brown, Edmund G., Sr., 86-88,94

Bruce, David, 171,172

Bundy, McGeorge, 117,118,139,241

Burger, Warren, 108,194

Byrd, Robert C., 207,208

California Committee on Public Education,

233

campaigning, 80-90,94-99
Carr, Charles, 154
Carter, Edward C., 45-47
Chaffetz, Hammond, 210,211
Chickering, William, 40,41,45,46
Cincinnati Post divestment, 204,205
civil rights cases, 256
civil rights protests in Alabama, 120-136
dark, Charles, 149,150
dark, Ramsey, 216,217
Cohen, Mike, 110,114,115
Continental Can case, 207-210
Conti, Samuel, 264,265
Cranston, Alan, 77

Crawford, Patricia, 94
criminal cases, 253,255
Cuban missile crisis, 177-184
Cutler, Lloyd, 100,236,274,275

Dahlquist, Tom, 58

Democratic Convention of 1968, 239,240

Dillon, Douglas, 199,200

diversity cases, 254,255

Downey, Andrew, 2-5

Downey, Mary, 5-9

Dungan, Ralph, 115,169

Eisenhower, Milton, 236

Eisenhower Commission on Violence, 236-

240
El Paso Natural Gas Company, 202-204

Farley, James, A., 32

Federal Judicial Center, 250

Finnegan, James, 81

Follis, Gwin, 235

foreign policy, 165,166

foreign service officers, 168-176,190,191

Fortas, Abe, 210-212

Geneen, Harold, 206,207

Gesell, Gerry, 250,251

Goldberg, Arthur, 147,148

Goodfellow, Eells, Moore & Orrick, 16-19

Graves, Richard P., 77-79

Hale, Prentis C., 64,65,143,144
Harriman, W. Averell, 83,178
Harris, George, 251,252
Hearst, Patty, case, 256-263
Hell's Angels trial, 264-270
Herrington, George, 57,58
Hoffa, Jimmy, 158,159

291

Hoffman, Walter, 118-120
Hoover, Herbert, 33-35
Horsey, Outerbridge, 170,171
Hotchkiss School, 26-28
Hughes, Charles Evans, Jr., 31,32
Humble Oil Company, 201,202

I.G. Farben matter, 139-146
Institute of Pacific Relations, 45-47
Interstate Commerce Commission, 111

Johnson, Frank M., 127-133
Johnson, Lyndon B., 214-217
judges, federal district court, 221-
224,251,252

appointment of, 152-155
Justice Department

Antitrust Division, 192-219

Civil Division, 107-161

Katzenbach, Nicholas, 145,215,216

Kefauver, Estes, 80,82,84

Kennedy, John F., 79,84,85,94-100,112-

115,118,128,136-139,161,162,169,

179,191

assassination of, 214-219
Kennedy, Robert F., 21,22,34,35,96,103,

104,109,113,121,127,128,134,138,145,

146,152,153,155-161,192,193,198,200,

214,215,222

Kennedy, Edward M., 246,247
Kirkham, Francis, 224

Lasky, Moses, 240,241

lawyers in San Francisco, 224

litigation, 59,60

Loevinger, Lee, 191,192

longshoremen strike, 147-150

loyalty oath controversy at University of

California, 223
Ludwig, D.K., 213
Lynch, Tom, 86,94,96,97

Malone, Bill, 81,95

Mansfield, Mike, 187,188

marijuana, legalization of, 242,243

Martin, William, 200

Martinez, George, 261,262

McNamara, Robert S., 183,215

McShane, Jim, 123-131

mergers, 199-207

Miller & Lux litigation, 91,93,99

Moore, Stanley, 16-18

Moore, A.A., 15-17

New Deal, 28

New York, New Haven & Hartford

Railroad, 110-116
Nixon, Richard M., 87
North American Rockwell Company case,
226,227

Olympic Organizing Committee, 62-68

oral histories, 1

Orrick family, 10-16

Orrick law firm, 15-19,57-70,220-232

Orrick, Marion Naffziger, 6,69

Orrick, William H., Jr.,

appointment to bench, 244-250

community service, 220-243

early education, 22-28

family background, 2-22

as journalist, 29-38;

judicial philosophy, 283-287

at Yale University, 29-45;
Orrick, William H., Sr., 15-22,90

Peckham, Robert F., 1,252
Pentagon, 181-183
police dog case, 281-283
Pollack, Herman, 180,181
power, 110
Pro America, 7

railroad mergers in the East, 205,206
Randolph, Jennings, 208,209

292

Reagan, Ronald, 237
Reischauer, Edwin, 217
Ritter, Harold, 203

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 39,40,148
Rosenman, Samuel, 149,150
Roth, William, 95

Rusk, Dean, 119,162-165,171,176-179,
187-189,215

St. Sure, Adolphus, 93

Salinger, Pierre, 106

San Francisco city government, 71-74

San Francisco Examiner. 35-38

San Francisco County Jail case, 278-281

San Francisco Crime Commission, 240-243

San Francisco Opera, 234-236

San Francisco State College controversy,

236-239

Saxon, James, 199,200
Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 170,171
Schmidt, Adolf, 140-143
school desegregation in San Francisco,

270-278

Scott family, 12-14
State Department, 161-192
Stevenson, Adlai E., 75-77,80-86,95
Stewart, Potter, 38-43,46,109,249,285,286
Stone, Louis, 43,46
supplementary social insurance cases,

253,254

Supreme Court, U.S., 150-152
Sutro, John A., Sr., 1,92
Swig, Ben, 78,79

Thacher School, 24,25

Tidewater Oil Company, 201,202,213

Transamerica Corp. case, 227-233

Truman, Harry S., 74-76

Tunney, John, 244-246

weapons sales to third world countries,

184-187

Weigel, Stanley, 222,223
White, Byron "Whizzer," 96,101-105,107,

111-115,123-27,140,152,153,188-190
wiretapping legislation, 156,157
WoUenberg, Albert C, Sr., 251
World War II, 44,45,47-55
Wright, Sarah Jean, 2
Yale Daily News. 29-35
Zirpoli, Alfonso J., 221,222,252

United States Army Counterintelligence
Corps, 47-55

Robert A. Van Nest

A.B., Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 1973, Honors in Humanities,
Distinction in History.

J.D., Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA, 1978, magna cum laude.

Law Clerk to the Honorable William H. Orrick, United States District
Court, Northern District of California, 1978-1979.

Trial Attorney, Keker & Brockett, San Francisco, CA, 1979 --, specializing
in complex civil, criminal and administrative litigation.

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Full text of "A life in public service : California politics, the Kennedy administration, and the federal bench : oral history transcript / 1987-88"

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