Full text of "Litigator, federal district judge, director of the Federal Judicial Center, and professor, 1952-1997 : oral history transcript / 1998"

University of California Berkeley

Regional Oral History Office University of California

The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Northern California U.S. District Court Oral History Series

William W Schwarzer

LITIGATOR, FEDERAL DISTRICT JUDGE, DIRECTOR OF THE FEDERAL
JUDICIAL CENTER, AND PROFESSOR, 1952-1997

With an Introduction by
James R. Browning

Interviews Conducted by

Carole Hicke

in 1997

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

William W Schwarzer, "Litigator, Federal
District Judge, Director of the Federal
Judicial Center, and Professor, 1952-
1997," an oral history conducted in 1997
by Carole Hicke, Regional Oral History
Office, The Bancroft Library, University
of California, Berkeley, 1998.

Copy no.

District Judge William W Schwarzer, 1990.

Photograph by DuPont Photographers

Cataloguing information:

William W Schwarzer (b. 1925) Lawyer and federal district judge

Litigator, Federal District Judge. Director of the Federal Judicial Center,
and Professor. 1952-1997. vii, 378 pp., 1998

Childhood in Berlin, early 1930s, and family move to Los Angeles, 1938; WWII
intelligence work; University of Southern California, and Harvard Law School;
trial lawyer with McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, 1952-1976: antitrust
litigation, colleagues, Morris Doyle, cases involving Stewart Hopps, McCloud
River Railroad Co., Shell Oil, Harvey Motors, Greyhound Corp., Lucky Lager
Brewing Co., others; Federal District Judge, 1976 to present: appointment,
court administration and case management, jury management, complex litigation
and insurance antitrust, drug cases; Director, Federal Judicial Center, 1990-
1995: Washington, D.C., facilities and personnel, previous history and Center
relations with Administrative Office; comments on judicial training, expert
witnesses, and on splitting the Ninth Circuit Court.

Introduction by James R. Browning, Chief Judge, Emeritus, U.S. Court of
Appeals, Ninth District.

Interviewed in 1997 by Carole Hicke for the Northern California U.S.
District Court Oral History Series, the Regional Oral History Office,
The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Regional Oral History Office, on behalf of future researchers,

wishes to thank the United States District Court for the Northern District

of California Historical Society, whose contribution made possible this
oral history of William W Schwarzer.

TABLE OF CONTENTS- -William W Schwarzer

PREFACE i

INTRODUCTION by James R. Browning iv

INTERVIEW HISTORY vi

I BACKGROUND AND EARLY CHILDHOOD IN BERLIN, GERMANY

History Notes 1

Family Antecedents 1

Growing up in Berlin 3

The Coming of Adolf Hitler 4

Early Childhood in Berlin 7

Family and Surroundings 7

School and Outside Activities 10

More on Immediate Family

Hicke: You've talked about your father quite a bit in your notes, but
you haven't said much about your mother, and not much about
your sister. So can we talk about them a bit?

Schwarzer: My mother always was under the total domination of my father.
She was quite talented; she had a good voice and liked music
and art, had a great interest in that, and those kinds of
things .

But I think when it came to bringing up her children--
except when we were very young, of course, it didn't ever seem
to me that she had a whole lot of influence over our bringing
up or much of an impact on my life and on my development. My
father was a very dominating presence at all times. It was
clear that things were done the way he thought that they should
be done. He dominated our upbringing. But I had a good
relationship with my mother, always had an easy, comfortable
relationship, but not a particularly warm or close one.

One thing I remember: I was sent away to a boarding
school around 1933, I think because I was having problems, I
don't know, psychological problems, something. They thought it

would be good for me to get away. And actually it was one of
the best things that ever happened to me. I went to Bavaria
for six months.

It was an interesting experience, because I didn't want
to go. The only way my parents could bribe me into going was
if my father would fly with me. I'd get to fly. That was very
early in the days of commercial aviation, but I had always
loved airplanes. So he took me down there, and I still have a
picture somewhere, taken at the Munich airport with him and me
standing in front of this German two-engine airplane, which
later became a well-known and frequently seen German troop
transport. At the end of that six months, my mother came to
pick me up, and I just remember that trip was a nice
experience .

Hicke: You came back on the train?

Schwarzer: Came back on the train. But I don't remember anything else

that I ever did with her. And nothing in particular stands out
about our life together.

Hicke: Did she read to you, when you were very young?

Schwarzer: Maybe. I don't remember that. She was not intellectual. She
only went to what would be the equivalent of high school. She
never went to college. My father rushed her into getting
married. And of course, in those days, German women didn't go
to post-secondary schools anyway.

So intellectually she was never my father's equal, and I
think he had a tendency to let her know that was so. He could
be quite critical and cutting and ironic. Everybody was very
well aware of that. That was just one of his traits. He was
very supportive of his family, and worked very hard in their
interests, but he also could cut people down. He particularly
did that with my mother at times, and certainly with her father
and her brother, for whom he had very little regard. You know,
they were together all the time, but he wasn't particularly
kindly in his dealings.

Hicke: He was a caring parent, though. I can tell from what you've
written about him that he cared about you.

Schwarzer: Yes, to a fault. Probably to a fault. He was an interesting
person at an interesting time. I wish I could remember more
about my mother, but nothing comes back. Of course, those
years were a terrible, terrible strain on her and undoubtedly
really took their toll.

Hicke: Now can you tell me a bit about Ruth?

Schwarzer: My sister. Well, I guess the truth is that we were never
close.

Hicke: She was younger?

Schwarzer: She's three years younger than I am. And lives in Los Angeles
now. We used to have a lot of fights.

Hicke: Not very unusual!

Schwarzer: Yes, right. I remember I used to scare her. But it is clear
now that 1 was the favorite child. I was the older child, and
I was the son, and my father took greater interest in me and
was more ambitious for me. Although we did things together. I
do remember when we were quite young we used to go out
horseback riding together, all three of us--my father, my
sister, and I.

I remember one summer, my sister and I went away to a
camp in what was Silesia, which is in the eastern part of
Germany.

Hicke: Up on the North Sea?

Schwarzer: In the mountains; that's Poland now. That's pretty far in the
east. But I don't remember anything that we ever did together.
We really didn't have any common interests. We had no
affinity, and we still don't have any affinity for each other.
We don't have any problem getting along; we just don't have any
particular interest in doing things together. We're not close,
we never have been close. But then we haven't had, except for
my teasing her when I was a little boy, we haven't had any
problems either.

And our respective children are close to each other. My
sister is very fond of our children, and we're very fond of
hers. She has a son and a daughter, her son lives in Mill
Valley. This is sort of getting into perhaps more family
detail than is of interest.

Hicke: No, please continue.

Schwarzer: My nephew has looked to me as a role model and a mentor, much

more than my son has. It's kind of interesting, crossing over.

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

Hicke:
Schwarzer:
Hicke:
Schwarzer;

And we're really pretty close to him and his family; they live
close to us.

What's his name?

His name is Edward Schuller. So that's kind of an interesting
way in which our families have developed. Then our son spent a
summer living with my sister and her husband in Los Angeles,
while we were away. So they're very close.

Well, since we're talking about this, tell me about the rest of
Ruth's life and her marriage and so forth.

Yes. As 1 said, my father was less focused on her for starting
a career, then, than on mine. When we came to the United
States, we went to public school, and she went to high school.
In her last year of high school she met her now husband and
decided that she wanted to get married. My parents were very
upset, because they really wanted her to go to college. They
did not think she was marrying as well as they would have liked
to have her marry.

But she insisted. And I think, in large part, that was a
reflection of her feeling that she wanted to make her own way
and assert herself, and that she didn't think that my parents
judgments about her were all that much to be appreciated. She
wanted to get out of the house and be on her own. She probably
didn't think that she would have all that many opportunities to
find somebody to marry. So she got married. But she has been
happily married for all these years. It worked out all right,
even though my parents didn't really approve of it.

What's her husband's first name?

Stanley. Schuller.

And she has how many children?

She has two children. She has a son and a daughter. The
daughter lives in southern California and has three children.
She is happily married, has a fine family, doing very well.
Her son, Edward, lives in Mill Valley, is married, and has two
daughters, and they're doing very well.

Hicke:

We'll get to your family later,
career ever?

Did she have any kind of

Schwarzer: Yes, she worked for an insurance company when she got out of

high school, and for some yearsuntil she had her childrenin
Los Angeles.

Travels

Hicke: Back to Berlin. Other than that trip to Bavaria, did you do
any traveling with your family, or without? Of course, you
said you went to Silesia.

Schwarzer: Well, we went to this camp, my sister and I, around 1934. That
was for a summer, but it didn't amount to much. Except, as 1
recall, we had either yogurt or sour cream, and I remember
being terribly sick. It took me many, many years before I
finally could eat yogurt. Now, I eat it all the time,
[laughter] It always reminds me of that experience, this awful
dish that they served us.

Well, I can't recall any travel until about 1935 or '36.
And then my father took us on a number of trips, to Switzerland
primarily, in order to take money out of the country. You'd
get a certain--my information about this is fragmentary, but
you were allowed a certain amount of money that you could take
out and convert into foreign currency. Of course, in Germany,
foreign currency was tightly controlled and you couldn't own it
unless you had permission. That was not surprising to me;
foreign currency controls have been pretty common among poor
countries around the world.

You could convert a certain amount of money for each
person for the number of days that you were out. We would go
to these offbeat places in Switzerland, off season, where we'd
get very low rates. So we did not ever have to spend all of
the allowance, and so they were able to accumulate money
outside. I remember how careful we were.

You used to be able to buy postal-exchange coupons. So
in Germany you would buy a coupon, and then you could exchange
it in another country for stamps. So it's like foreign
currency but it could only be used for stamps. So you could
take out small amounts of moneythese are really small amounts
of money by way of taking these coupons. I remember taking
these coupons with us, and then cashing them, and then giving
my father the money or keeping it. That's how concerned we
were about accumulating some money abroad. Now whether he was
also smuggling money at the time, I have no idea. He may have.

Hi eke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

Hicke:

But I remember we took my grandparents along, and we would stay
in these deserted hotels. My mother was not very enthusiastic
about this. But that was just a way to take money out.

At least once, I know, we bought a big car, an Audi. You
know, they had those big sedans in those days. We were all
driving in this sedan through Germany down into Switzerland. I
remember the car broke down at one point; we didn't get it
fixed. When you look back now, those were really pretty risky
activities to take. No telling what you'd run into, or who
might do what to you. But those are the trips I remember.

One place we went to in Switzerland was a town called
Chateau d'Oeux, something like that. It was just a little
abandoned village, not too far from Lake Geneva. And I
understand now it's built up with no end of condominiums owned
by Germans and others. In fact, one of my friends has a
condominium there. I've been wanting to go back. It was just
a little village then. I remember walking around and seeing
them milk the cows.

Another place we went to was on the Italian lakes, on
Lago Maggiore, a place called Ascona, [Switzerland], which has
since developed into a fashionable resort. It was a wonderful
place. We went to these three beautiful islands out on Lago
Maggiore, which have become great tourist attractions since.

So those are two trips that I remember. There may have
been some others. They were major enterprises, but it was
wonderful for a young boy to get to explore all of these
places. So that was fun.

These were summer trips?

Well, no. Not necessarily. The whole idea was to go off
season, when the hotel rates were low. So they were odd times.
I don't know when we went.

You don't remember snow, and--

Well, I do remember going to a winter resort. But that was one
that was in Germany, and it was quite early. And I remember
sledding it was someplace in the German Alps. It has become a
pretty well-known resort too. In fact, it may even have been a
scene of some of the Olympic events. But I just can't remember
what it was .

Somewhere around Garmisch? South of Munich?

Schwarzer :

Hicke:
Schwarzer;

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:

No. It wasn't Garmisch. Well, the best trip that I ever took,
at least until we came over here, was in 1938; that was before
we came over, before we left Germany. My father had a friend
who lived in Florence, just on the outside of Florence in a
country house. Her name was Mrs. Munz . He arranged for me to
go and spend the summer there in 1938. I was just thirteen,
and I took the train from Berlin to Florence by myself. And
went back by myself. I don't know whether they called me back
early, or what. But I was there for at least four weeks. It
was just terrific. I'm just thinking about it. I spent, oh,
lots of time at all the museums. We went to concerts at night.
I remember that they had outdoor concerts at the--I don't
remember the name of the palace, but behind the palace are some
gardens called the Boboli.

Pitti Palace?

Maybe so. It's across the Arno [River]. They had these
concerts outdoors in the gardens. That's where I really
acquired appreciation for music and art.

Did somebody take you along to the museums and explain things
to you?

Well, I may have gone with the people. But I think I probably
also went alone a lot. I spent a lot of time in the Uffizi
Gallery. I remember seeing the statue of David. I was back
last June, and it was great to see those places again, although
Florence now is all torn up--dusty, construction going on
everywhere, crowded with tourists, noisy. It was a beautiful,
other-worldly place then.

You saw it in the good old days,
you stayed also?

Did you see the place where

No, I don't know where that was; it was a private home outside,
I remember it was on some country road. But not far out. It
was easy to get back and forth.

I remember so clearly sitting in the Boboli Gardens and
hearing "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." So that was the travel, I
guess. I can't imagine why my parents let me go. But I guess
they thought it was worth it, and it wasworth taking the
risk. I mean, that was a hazardous time to cross the border.

Indeed. Not just your normal journey,
through Switzerland on the train also.

And you must have gone

Schwarzer: Yes, yes. Let me think, I know I traveled down there alone,

but I don't think my mother picked me up. I think I went both
ways by myself.

Hicke: You said, in your notes, that your father had been taking trips
to Paris also.

Schwarzer: Well, his aunt lived there, and his cousin ran a bookshop. He
made trips there. I don't know much about what was going on,
but I do know that he told us later that he smuggled a fair
amount of money to Paris. As I wrote, the one specific bit of
information that I have is that he carried a herbarium. That
is a glass container, like an aquarium, only it has soil in it,
and plants. And under the soil, he had a lot of money buried.
That was one way that he smuggled it into France. As I
described, if he had been caught, I don't doubt that he would
have been sent to a concentration camp, and probably executed.
That was a pretty serious offense. He felt it was necessary,
but I also believe that he enjoyed taking the risks. I think
that was his nature.

Hicke: It goes along with what you said about his activities with the
stock exchange and other risk-taking ventures. That took a lot
of courage.

Schwarzer: Yes, well, now how much of it was courage and how much was
desperation?

Hicke: Well, that's true.

Schwarzer: I don't know. Certainly a lot of people left Germany without
having any money abroad, but it was much more difficult to do
that. In any case, as I described, the great irony was that
when we arrived in Paris, after we left Germany in October
1938, he came to get the money and it wasn't there. My
father's cousin had apparently deposited it in her commercial
account. She owned a bookshop, and the bookshop had fallen on
hard times, and so she had essentially spent the money keeping
her bookshop afloat.

I found a letter in my file here at home, in which she
tried to--it was a little hard to readbut she tried to
explain how she had been well intentioned, and it just got out
of control, and that she was going to pay it back. Supposedly
she had started to make some payments. But this is a letter
that came after we arrived here, but before the fall of France.

I have the distinct impression that she committed
suicide. But when she did it and whether it was because of the

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

money, I don't know. I thought that she had committed suicide
because of having lost our money. But this letter gives me
pause; maybe I'm of the wrong impression. In any case, she
obviously didn't survive the war; I don't know what happened.

He did have money outside of Germany that she didn't
lose. Now whether that was money that had been given to her, I
think her name was Helene, or whetherhe must have had some
other deposits, because when we came over here there was some
money.

Did he have deposits in Switzerland?
I don't know.

Moving to the United States

Hicke: Well, let me ask you to start with whatever recollections you

have of your family talking about and then beginning to prepare
for the move.

Schwarzer: The first thing I remember is that in 1935, my parents gave
serious consideration to going to Israel. It was relatively
easy. The Germans encouraged Jews to emigrate to Israel. The
Arabs were not anxious to have them come, and the British, as
usual, were sort of in between. But it was easier, I think, to
get a permit to get into Israel than it was to get into the
United States.

So I remember they went--I remember this very distinctly
--they went to Israel, and my father had cousins who had
already gone children of one of his mother's sisters. And--
this was my first creative ef fort--while they were gone I
prepared a show; first I wrote a little book about what it is
to go to Israel, and then I prepared a sort of a shadow play,
where you put up a screen and you had figures you make with
your fingers. It was some sort of dramatic production, which I
put on when they came back from their trip. I had this little
book that I wrote, and I bound it and had pictures in it. So I
must have gotten very interested in this.

But anyway when they came back, they never pursued it. I
think that they came to the conclusion that living in a kibbutz
in Israel was not for them. I mean you have some idea, I'm
sure, what it was like for Jewish settlers in those days. You
tilled the soil and turned the desert into a garden. It was a

highly disciplined life; there was no personal freedom at all.
And then, of course, there was always the hostility of the
Arabs, and for that matter of British. But that was no place
where any middle-class, educated, intellectual German family
would want to go.

So I think that at that point, my father began these
efforts to establish contacts in the United States. I don't
know that we ever considered going to any other country. But
they didn't discuss those things with us. And I don't know how
much discussion there was around the house at all. I don't
recall any. Occasionally, I remember hearing about the great
efforts that my father was making to push our application for
immigration visas. I remember he would take boxes of candy to
the secretaries at whatever office, maybe the American Embassy,
and did all sorts of things like that. I don't know how much
you've read about the way these things went during the 1930s--
trying to get into the United States was very, very difficult.
And if you're interested, this book, Nazi Germany and the Jews,
gives you some pretty good insight into the enormous
difficulties that American officials, particularly people in
the Foreign Service, put in the way of German Jews trying to
get immigration visas.

Hicke: Was there some sense of why?

Schwarzer: Why? Because, the notion of receiving Jewish refugees from
Germany was not at all popular in the United States. And if
you go to the Holocaust Museum, for example, you get some
pretty good insights into this.

There was a quota; I forget what it was, maybe a hundred
thousand, something like that. And the quota was never even
filled, because the State Department people just made it as
difficult as possible to come over. In the Holocaust Museum
there are some numbers, and this is the number that really
struck me: only 40,000 German Jews escaped to the United
States. At the beginning, in 1933, there were, I don't know, a
million, something like that. Only 40,000 made it, and the
quota was much higher than that; I think it was well over
100,000. There have been books written about that. The United
States was not at all hospitable. Occasionally there was some
pretense at trying to help, but it never became a national
policy. President Roosevelt, although he made some noises,
never went out and really made an effort, because it was not
good politics.

Schwarzer: I wish I knew more details about what happened, but I do know
that it took quite a while for my father to persuade his aunt
in Los Angeles to execute this affidavit that is still
required, by which an American citizen guarantees that a person
will not become a public charge. He had to get that from her,
and then he had to get on the list. I don't know where we were
on the list of applicants for American immigration visas, and I
don't know whether he succeeded in moving our name up higher.
We certainly didn't have any connections or any pull. Oh, 1
know, I recently read in the New York Times, about a month ago,
a story about a German family trying to get an affidavit from
their American relatives, and it talked a little bit about how
difficult it was to get on the waiting list for an American
visa. It was an instance where an American congressman had
written to the consul to ask him to move these people up and to
help them get their visa, and the Foreign Service people just
ignored it .

Hicke: This is during which period? During the thirties?

Schwarzer: Yes. What the New York Times had they ran across a bunch of
letters between the Germans and their American relatives. I
wish I had letters like that; I'm sure they weren't saved. But
I have a pretty good notion that it took a lot of persuasion to
get the affidavit, and it took a lot of effort to get high
enough on the list. I think our name must have been on the
list for immigration visas for two or three years.

Hicke: Persistence finally paid off.

Schwarzer: I imagine my father must have applied when they came back from
Israel, in 1935. So it's just purely capricious, pure accident
that I 'm here.

Hicke: Well, do you recall when the visa came?

Schwarzer: I remember that we packed up in September of 1938. It all went
pretty fast.

Hicke: Were you able to sell your house?

Schwarzer: We were living in a rented apartment. But I think we took all
of our furniture with us. We moved with at least one if not
two large containers, wooden containers. We took all that with
us, although, I think, much of the furniture was probably too
bulky for us to use in Los Angeles. But we took it all with
us. Now, I have read in this book recently that the Germans
imposed very heavy taxes on Jews leaving Germany at that time.
I don't know what happened in our case, how that was managed.

But my father apparently had enough resources to be able to pull
it off.

In fact, what I do remember and I simply can't understand
why that was so--we traveled first class on the liner from Le
Havre to New York. I still have the passenger list, which is
sort of interesting. A number of people on that became quite
famous afterwards. And then we traveled, I think first class,
on the steamship from New York through the Panama Canal to Los
Angeles. Now why they spent the money to do that I had no idea.
There must have been some rational basis for doing it. Perhaps
they were able to pay for the tickets in German money they would
not have been able to take out of the country.

Hicke: It's more secure?

Schwarzer: I have no idea how that could have been helpful to our getting
out. I mean, once we were across the border, nothing really
mattered anymore. I remember crossing the border.

Hicke: Yes, I was going to ask if you remember the trip.

Schwarzer: Oh, I remember the trip distinctly. We took the train from

Berlin to Switzerland, and we crossed the border at Basel. It
was a very exciting moment, but of course I couldn't really
fully appreciate the relief that my parents must have felt in
getting out.

Now, I have a strange confusion in my memory. I had always
thought that we left Berlin on the 10th of November, 1938, and
we took a sleeper. When we woke up the next morning crossing
the border at Basel, we looked out the train windows, and we saw
the headlines which reported the events of that famous night,
kristallnacht , which I've written about the first great pogrom,
attacks on Jews and Jewish property all over Germany. But in
the research that I've done now, I found that actually we were
on board the ship going to the United states on the 10th and
llth of November. So it happened while we were on board ship.

I guess what we must have seen was the headlines in the
paper when we landed in New York. So I'm confused. But that
coincidence stands out in my mind--that we got out of there just
before that event. And that was really a turning point. After
that the Jews were really being actively persecuted, and they
were essentially on the run. You could not expect anything
anymore .

My grandparents stayed on, because we didn't have a visa
for them.

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:
Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

These are your paternal grandparents?

Both. Well, my maternal grandmother had died some years
before. So my father's parents and my mother's father stayed
on until the next year; I don't know exactly when. But my
father was able to get them out and arranged for them to go to
Shanghai. Shanghai was the only place where you could go
without having a visa. If you could get out of Germany, you
could get into Shanghai, and quite a few people got out of
Germany that way. Then my grandparents waited in Shanghai for
a visa. Then another absolute miracle--! mean, I don't know
how it happened that my father was able to get them immigration
visas to come to the United States just before the war broke
out with Japan.

That is really an incredible story, when you put it all
together.

Yes, it sure is.

Do you remember anything about being in Paris, when you were
there?

Well, I remember we stayed in this lovely Parisian apartment,
in Montmartre. It's like out of a movie about Paris. It had a
little garden on different levels, and beautiful flowered
curtains. I've always looked for an apartment like that all of
my life since then; I've never found one. [laughter]

I don't think you'll find it up there anymore either.

Probably. We didn't stay very long, but I spent some time
exploring Paris. We must have left about the first week in
October, 1938. I don't know whether we went to Switzerland
first to visit friends--we may have--f riends of my patents. I
have some recollection that we went to Lake Geneva and stayed
at a villa with them. I think that may have been this trip,
I'm not sure. But what I remember is sitting at lunch on the
terrace overlooking Lake Geneva. It was a very elegant lunch.
The maid brought in the salad course, and it was artichokes,
and she had thrown away the hearts of the artichokes and served
the leaves. [laughter] I remember that so distinctly. Every
time I eat artichokes I think of that. I don't know where they
got that maid.

So then we went on to Paris, and I guess we got on board
ship just around the beginning of November. Then we stayed in
New York with old friends of my parents who had preceded them
by a short period, a few months. I guess my parents considered

whether to stay in New York, but since their family was in Los
Angeles, they decided they should go there.

I spent lots of time walking around New York, and taking
the subway, and enjoyed it. 1 don't remember anything
specific. But it was very exciting to be in the United States.
I felt like a different person.

Hicke: Did you speak any English at this time?

Schwarzer: Well, we learned English. We had studied English in school, so
I could get around, but I certainly spoke broken English. It
took me no time, once I was in school, to learn it, and so
that's why I've never been able to understand the raucous
controversy here over bilingual education. I mean, I was at
home with English within a few months, weeks.

Hicke: I think effort had something to do with it. But probably not
everybody has quite the intellectual power that you have,
either.

Schwarzer: Well, kids learn. Kids learn the language. They may not learn
the fine points, but just being around other kids speaking it,
they pick it up right away. Now, they have to be around other
kids who speak English. If you're just around other kids who
also speak a foreign language, you're not going to learn it.

What made a difference in our lives was that my parents
were determined for themselves, before I was, that we would be
fluent in English, and that we would be totally assimilated.
So we never spoke German at home anymore. And that's probably
why I have virtually no accent. You'd have to be a linguist to
detect my accent, and if you did, you'd probably think I was
from New England rather than from Germany. My parents, while
they retained some accent, certainly spoke English very well.
But you take somebody like Henry Kissinger, for example, who
never lost his accent--! 'm sure that's because his family spoke
German at home.

Now the downside of that, of course, is that I have
essentially lost my mastery of German. I can understand it
very well, but I don't speak it fluently. If I spent a couple
of weeks in Germany, it would come back to me. But we had no
problem with the language. And in some ways, of course, we had
an advantage: if you learn English as the second language, you
are much more sensitive to the nuances of meanings of words.
That's because you think of it also in terms of how it would be
said in the other language. So I think you have an advantage,

really, in mastering the language, if you have the perspective
of knowing a second language.

Hicke: Now that is really an interesting thought. Do you think that
has had an impact on your speaking and writing?

Schwarzer: Well, I think so. I'm very conscious of the correct use of
Englishsimple things like whether to say "he" or "him," or
"who" or "whom," which people more and more neglect. When
you've grown up in a language that has a very rigorous grammar,
or for that matter, studied Latin, you just would never make
that kind of mistake. So the knowledge of another language
with a rigorous grammar imposes a discipline on you that leads
you to use English in proper ways and make the best use of it.

Hicke: I know language--communication--has been one of your special

interests. So here we have, perhaps, a little clue to how that
came about.

Schwarzer: Yes, I think that is a part of it. Because you learn English,
not as a child growing up, but after you've learned another
language. You're more sensitive to the proper use of the
language.

But there are other reasons why I became interested in
communication: it's largely the importance of language in the
legal process, and the importance of the absolutely precise use
of words and precise expression. Saying exactly what you mean,
no more, no less, is very important, in transactions and in
litigation. We have a lot of opportunity in this job to see
the consequences of people not using the language carefully and
correctly. That leads to lots of lawsuits and controversies.

Hicke: Do you think that German has a capacity for being more precise
than English?

Schwarzer: I think a German mind leans toward precision and discipline and
rigor anyway. But the German language is fundamentally
different in that you don't have homonyms, for example. 1
mean, you don't have a word like b-o-w, that could be bow
[sounds like cow] or bow [sounds like doe]. And you don't have
numerous nuance synonyms, each one of which is just a little
bit different than the next.

I'm working on a case right now in which it is necessary
to decide what the meaning of a word is. The word is
"misappropriation." Well, misappropriation could have many
meanings. There are other words that you might substitute, but
those words might mean something slightly different. That

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

wouldn't happen in Germany. There is one word for one thought,
and you know exactly what it means, and there are no other
words that shade off in their meanings.

So English is a much more versatile and literate and
colorful language than German. But it also is much more
challenging to be precise in the use of the words. I don't
know if I'm right about it, but that's my impression about the
difference in the languages.

That's really interesting,
in New York.

So you started to pick up English

As I mentioned, we had studied it in school in Germany, and I
think we maybe even had some private lessons, briefly. But
once I was in New York, I was on my own, and 1 was speaking
English. I never had any problem.

Anything about the trip from New York to California that stands
out in your memory?

Going back to the trip from Le Havre to New York, I remember
traveling first class and eating these marvelous breakfasts,
you could order. I had never been exposed to a breakfast menu,
and I remember eating three- or four-course breakfasts. That
was wonderful. I was pretty much on my own eating breakfast.

When we went through the Panama Canal, it was a very
interesting experience. I talked to some friends recently who
just made this trip, and they're still excited about going
through the Panama Canal. It's quite something to see this
great big ship that you're on rise up and go down again.

But the one thing I remember is stopping at Acapulco. I
don't know why the ship stopped at Acapulco. It was a little,
sleepy village, and I guess they must have dropped off some
cargo. I'm sure this doesn't happen anymore, but as soon as
the ship dropped anchor, there were just dozens and dozens of
little boats that came out with boys that dive for money. You
throw money out, and they dive for it. I don't think they do
that anymore in Acapulco.

Of course, there were no hotels; it was not a resort. It
was just a sleepy, semi-tropical village. I remember seeing
Acapulco. I always think of that when I read about how- -well,
we once went down there, in fact, to a meeting, and it was
really something to see the change since 1938.

Hicke:

Schwarzer ;

The other outstanding experience on that trip was we
landed--! think it was the 9th of December, 1938--we landed in
Los Angeles, and if you know southern California, you know that
it tends to get very hot in December. There usually is a heat
wave in December, and there was then. We were wearing our
heavy North German overcoats, and hats, and gloves. I guess
one reason why we were wearing them was because we wanted to
take them with us and they're too big to pack, so we were
wearing them. And we looked very odd.

And felt worse.

Schwarzer: Right. I guess those overcoats didn't last very long; we got
rid of them.

No, you didn't need those,
what your feelings were?

Do you recall coming into port,

No, I don't remember the port at all. I remember just arriving
and, I guess, being met by our family there. They took us to
an apartment in the apartment house in Los Angeles on Kingsley
Drive. I don't know how they came to take us there. We lived
there briefly.

William W Schwarzer, Berlin, 1934,

William and Anne Schwarzer on their wedding day. At left: best man John
Karns. Cambridge, February 2, 1951.

William Schwarzer's parents, John and Edith Schwarzer, on the
occasion of John's 50th birthday, Los Angeles, 1950.

II EARLY LIFE IN CALIFORNIA

Parents' Work

Schwarzer: And then, I don't know exactly what happened, but I know that
it wasn't very long until my father bought an apartment house.
Now this is 1938 and early 1939, and that was still pretty much
in the Depression, or the coming out of the Depression. But
real estate prices were really low, and he bought an apartment
house on Mariposa Avenue. I guess it must be a four- or five-
story building.

Hicke: Still there?

Schwarzer: Oh, I think it is. What's it called? I think it's called

Mariposa Apartments. Probably had about forty units, something
like that. But I think he bought it with all of the cash that
he had. I have some recollection--! 'm not sure at all if this
is right that he paid $10,000. Of course, it was mortgaged.
There was nothing else for him to do. I mean, there was no
obvious place for him to go and get employment. He wasn't
qualified to do anything except a menial job. So somehow,
somewhere, he got the idea that he would go into the real
estate business. We bought this apartment complex, and my
mother and my sister and I lived in this two-room apartment,
which was the manager's apartment. And they managed it.

I remember we had a curtain drawn across this little
room; my sister lived on one side of the room--I think that was
the only bedroom she and I shared. We had this curtain drawn
on a string across, diagonally, across the room. I think my
parents slept on a foldaway bed or a convertible couch in the
living room. They managed the apartment; they were there all
the time.

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Now here they were foreigners coming into Los Angeles,
speaking broken English. Under the best of circumstances,
managing an apartment with tenants is a nightmare, because you
always have those that complain and cause trouble, make noise,
let the water run. They had to deal with this as people who
are not likely to be well received under any circumstances. So
between being a landlord and being a refugee, it was pretty
tough.

Oh, yes. They had to deal with city government too, probably.

Yes. Of course, in those days regulations were benign,
compared to what you run into today. But it was certainly the
right move, because it got them launched into real estate
investments at the right time, and that turned out to be very
successful.

Joining Boy Scouts

Schwarzer: Now I come to the outstanding experience of that time. I

should mention that one thing that our Los Angeles relatives
with whom we were never close; we didn't see them muchthey
insisted that we should speak English all the time and get
assimilated. As far as I was concerned, they took me to a Boy
Scout troop and introduced me. They said, "You have to join
the Boy Scouts." That was the best thing that happened to me
around that time.

In the Boy Scouts, I was very active and very ambitious.
One of the activities was signaling with flags. You've
probably seen it before, signaling. A friend and I were going
to practice, and we thought the best place to practice there
weren't a lot of open spaces there, because there were a lot of
apartments where we livedso we ran up on the roof one
evening, early evening. He stood at one end of the roof, and I
stood at the other end, and we would signal to each other, to
learn the code. It wasn't very long before a couple of
policemen came up to the roof. Well, this was January 1942,
shortly after Pearl Harbor. We had been designated enemy
aliens because we were German. At least, unlike the Japanese,
we weren't deported to relocation camps, but we were enemy
aliens. So the police came up, because the neighbors had
reported suspicious activity somebody signaling on the
rooftop, although this is twenty-five miles from the Pacific
Ocean, inland, in Los Angeles. But they took us down to the
police station and met with my parents, and my parents had to

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

convince them that we were not German spies signaling to enemy
submarines or other installations.

It was a pretty scary experience, because, at that time,
people were very jumpy on the West Coast. There had been some
Japanese submarines off the coast. And at least one submarine,
I think, had shelled the Oregon coast. There were some
Japanese balloons that--l don't know whether they had
explosives on it landed. But people were very jumpy. And, of
course, the Japanese were being deported. So that was a pretty
scary experience. I remember that; it took place on the
Mariposa Apartments roof. [laughter]

Were you having blackouts?

Yes. There were blackouts, although, they were not rigorously
enforced, and they didn't last very long; but for a while we
had blackouts.

You know I think we might find this a good place to stop.
Okay, fine.

[Interview 2: May 29, 1997]

Hicke: I'd like to start this morning by going back to what you were
talking about at our last sessionthe Boy Scouts--which you
encountered when you went to Los Angeles. And I want to talk
about some of the earlier days in Los Angeles. But since we
are on the Boy Scouts, maybe you could tell me a bit more about
how you joined and what you got out of that experience.

Schwarzer: As I said, this was one of the very first things our Los

Angeles relatives said to us: that I would have to join this
troop. One of their acquaintances was a scout in this troop,
he had just started. It was known as Troop 121. So within a
week or two, I showed up at this meeting, and I joined what
they called the candidates class.

Now this was really an extraordinary troop; it was head
and shoulders above Boy Scout troops elsewhere. And the main
reason was that it was led by young men. The problem with Boy
Scouts had always been that when boys reach sixteen or
seventeen, they drift off, they're interested in girls, and
other things. And so the young boys don't have the leadership
and the role models that the older boys can provide. The
secret of this troop was that people stuck around.

It was an old troop; it went back to just after World War
I. It took great pride in its appearance and its emphasis on
skill and outdoor activities. It was the only troop that had
wool uniforms, for example. That was pretty unusual.

Hicke: That's hard to imagine in Los Angeles.

Schwarzer: I know; when you think about it, it does seem odd. But there

was a lot of spit and polish, you know. You'd line up whenever
there was a troop meeting. Every week there would be a
fingernail inspection, for example. That's a pretty good
training program for young boys. And your fingernails had
better be clean, and your neckerchief be straight, and uniform
be clean. Your mother had better sewn on all of the badges,
and not just sewn them on, but sewn them in the exact right
spot. They'd go around with a ruler and measure.

So it may seem silly, but it had a wonderful impact on
generating esprit de corps, discipline, the ability to work
within an organization and be part of it. I can tell you it
really stood me in good stead when I went into the army.

Hicke: Yes, I believe that.

Schwarzer: I was well prepared. But it isn't as though this was just a

military organization, although it had a military overlay. But
the emphasis was on learning the skills of scouting--lots of
things. At one time I think I was able to identify sixty
birds. Lots of outdoor activities that led me to take up
skiing, and every Labor Day, a carefully selected group of
people climbed Mt. Whitney. There were lots of contests, and
at the end of each year there was an award banquet, at which
all kinds of awards were given to people.

Hicke: How old were you?

Schwarzer: I was thirteen when I joined. You could join when you were
twelve. I really got excited about this. Of course, I knew
very little English, and I didn't know anything about knot-
tying and making a fire by rubbing sticks together and all
those things. But I learned pretty fast. I became very
ambitious about advancing in the Boy Scouts, and ultimately
became an Eagle Scout. I won lots of awards. I remember, I
think, I even won an award for writing a play at one time;
strange.

They just stimulated lots of activity, and there were
wonderful older leaders to whom we looked up. In Boy Scouts,
there's a tendency for the fathers to provide the leadership.

Hicke:

Here, the fathers participated, the fathers stayed around, but
the leadership was provided by boys eighteen, and young men up
to twenty- five, twenty-eight. That lasted until the war came
along, and then that was all disrupted.

I still have ties to those people. Last year I met the
person who had been my patrol leader and then later senior
patrol leader. He lives in Los Angeles. We had dinner, and it
was like we had been friends all the intervening years.

What's his name?

Schwarzer: Alfred Wilkes.

Hicke: So you joined just about as soon as you got there.

Schwarzer: As soon as I came, right. I worked my way up, and I ultimately

became the senior patrol leader. The troop had about forty to

forty-five members. I think there were five patrols of about

eight boys each.

Hicke: Did the patrols meet individually?

Schwarzer: Yes, patrols would meet each week. Then once a week, I think
on Friday nights, there was a troop meeting. It was a very
different time, when you think about it, because that was the
main activity for kids. They didn't have money to go out and
do a lot of things that they do now. Of course, there wasn't
any television. Very few of the boys had cars. I finally
bought a car, I guess, when I was sixteen or seventeen with
earnings from a paper route. But most people didn't have cars.

And there weren't a lot of other sources for

entertainment. You didn't go--well, occasionally you might go
to a movie. But this was reallythis and school the main
life activity for young people then.

So you could count on the kids being involved and doing
their work and progressing in the scout troop. Obviously there
were some people who never went beyond second class or first
class scout. And I think I was much more ambitious than
probably anybody else. But still, there was great
participation and commitment to the troop.

I'm trying to think if there was anything particularly
noteworthy. Well, I was active until October 19A3, when I went
into the army. Right after Pearl Harbor, the older boys
disappeared and went into the service. So the fathers then
really took over. So the best time for the troop really was

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

from 1939 until the beginning of 1942, after Pearl Harbor.
Those three years really were the period in which 1 was deeply
involved in it and very active.

After you became an Eagle Scout, did you take on more
leadership yourself?

Well, the rank that you earn, the badges that you earn, and
your leadership position weren't necessary related; the fact
that you became an Eagle didn't necessarily mean that you
became a leader. But I worked my way up from assistant patrol
leader to patrol leader, and then I was senior patrol leader,
who was the senior boy, under the scout master. The scout
master would be an older person, usually somebody in his
twenties, thirties. So I both worked up in the badges and
worked up in the leadership ranks.

What part of it did you enjoy the most?
out?

Can you pick something

I think really the best part of scouting was the outdoor
activitylots of camping and hiking. That was all new to me;
I had never been exposed to anything like that. I do remember
that I took a fair amount of hazing and kidding when I first
came. I remember the first camp I went to, I was kidded a lot,
or hazed, or whatever. Because I did have an accent, and I was
a stranger and foreigner. People growing up in Los Angeles--
that was a very insular crowd, and they really weren't
accustomed to foreigners. But that ended pretty quickly.

Was that a spur to get rid of your accent?

Probably, didn't think much about that. One of the things that
I remember was that the troop was given a cabin in one of the
canyons in the San Gabriel Mountains called Thomas Lodge, which
was about fifty miles outside of Los Angeles. It was an old,
run-down cabin, and the troop took it on itself to build a new
cabin. It was about a three-mile hike in from the parking lot
--or the place you park; there wasn't any parking lot, it was
very primitiveup the canyon to the site of the cabin. I
remember that we all used to hike up and down that canyon,
carrying boards, building materials. I remember we carried
these long beams; there would be two or three of us carrying
them up the trail to build. We built this cabin under some of
the older boys, who were the leaders. Some had some
experience, I guess; they must have known what they were doing.
It was a wonderful cabin. And then we had summer camps up
there. So that was a great bonding experience for the boys.

Hicke: How did you get out to these places? Did parents drive?

Schwarzer: Sometimes fathers would drive, sometimes older boys would

drive. You could get a license when you were sixteen, and some
people were able to borrow a car. As I say, that was still the
tail end of the Depression, so there wasn't a lot of money
around. The great treat would be stopping at a soda fountain
on the way back and having a malted milk. That was really a
big treat. And you know, those were the days when they had
these wonderful soda fountains, that you now only see in
movies. The Art Deco style, with stools that twirl and soda
jerks .

Hicke: Well, I'd say you deserved it after building that cabin. Your
parents were quite supportive of you?

Schwarzer: Yes, yes. They certainly encouraged me to do this.

Part-time Work Experiences

Schwarzer: The other thing that filled my time during those years was the
part-time jobs. Everybody had a part-time job. Boys had to
earn their own money. I don't think most kids got an allowance
in those days, at least not at the economic level where we and
our friends were.

So I started out; I did everything under the sun. I had
every kind of paper route. Let's see, for a while I had a
paper route with paid subscriptions. I think it was Hollywood
Citizen's News; it has long been out of business. So I
delivered the paper either in the morning or in the afternoon,
and then you had to collect from people. And it wasn't easy to
collect for newspaper subscription in those days.

Then I sold Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' florae
Journal from door to door. And I used to sell the Sunday
paper; the way you did that, you would get a little wagon and
pull it down the residential streets, and yell at the top of
your voice, "Examiner! Times I "--those two papers were published
then. And then people would come out and buy the paper. So I
guess there were a lot of people who didn't subscribe, who
would buy from the paper boys as they came down the streets on
Sunday morning. For a while, I spent a lot of Sunday mornings
selling the paper.

I think the job that I had the longet, and probably
earned the most, was delivering the Shop ng News. That was a
throwaway paper. So you just walked dow the street and you'd
throw one on every porch. But you had t get it on the porch
or else the people wouldn't get it. The managers did not look
kindly on you if you did not walk up to tie porch, which also
sometimes meant encountering dogs and oter hostile elements.
But that was a pretty good job. You coud earn quite a lot of
money, I mean for that time. You didn 1 have to collect; you
didn't have to sell. And, I think, for i while then I also
became a district manager, and had peop^ working for me. I'm
not sure about that. I made enough mor. v that I was able to
buy an old Model A. So I had a car.

Hicke: This was a Ford?

Schwarzer: Ford Model A, yes. And that was very -jportant to have a car.
Hicke: You don't happen to recall how much yc made?

Schwarzer: I have no idea. But it was pretty goc money at the time. It
might have been ten dollars a week or omething of that sort.
That was in the morning so you'd get early, and that had an
impact on my grades. By then I was ii high school.

Whenever 1 had the Shopping News my grades went down.
My father was really opposed to it; h wanted me to quit
working. That was a constant argumer . I would quit for a
while and my grades would go back up. Then I'd persuade him to
let me start again, and my grades WOT.. d go down. It was a dumb
thing to do, for sure. So I was alw s just on the edge of
having very good grades, but then southing would knock me
down, probably because 1 got up earl in the morning.

Schools and Education

Hicke: Now, let's go back a little bit. Yo must have been in junior
high when you got to Los Angeles?

Schwarzer: When I came, I started out in the eghth grade, at John
Burroughs Junior High School, on Wi shire Boulevard.

Hicke: What was it like to join a group of foreign-speaking strangers?

Schwarzer: Well, I think I felt like a strange. I have no recollection
of having any friends in junior hip school. I did have

friends later; I got involved in some groups when I went on to
high school. I must have started high school in the ninth
grade, I'm pretty sure. So I don't remember much about junior
high school, except standing in line in the cafeteria. I don't
know why I remember that.

Hicke: Hungry. [laughter]

Schwarzer: I don't know what it was. And I don't know what I was taking,
but I guess I got along all right. I graduated from junior
high school in June. And I remember my parents it was a
terrible rainy day, and my parents took me to the May Company
and bought me a dictionary. Well, that was a good thing to
get. And then I started at Los Angeles High School in the fall
of '39.

Hicke: Did you have some choice of courses?

Schwarzer: Yes, there was a choice of courses. There certainly was
starting the tenth grade. I took an academic course, and
science and math courses, which I liked. But math--I was very
good in geometry and not good in trigonometry. I got erratic
results in advanced math courses. I liked physics; I did well
in that. My grades were respectable, but I wasn't in the top--
I guess I just missed the California scholarship group by 10
percent, something like that.

Los Angeles High School was regarded as a good high
school in those days, with good teachers. Things have
certainly changed since then. It was peaceful, orderly.

Hicke: Homework?

Schwarzer: Quite a lot of homework, yes.

Hicke: Did you have after-school activities, other than your job?

Schwarzer: And Boy Scouts.

Hicke: Yes, that probably accounts for most of your time.

Schwarzer: I tried to become involved in the life of the school. I

remember running for membership in something called the Senior
Board. That was a group of students that had some
responsibility for student affairs. I lost, of course. I had
no political following at all. I guess I was just ambitious.
I think I might have been appointed briefly to a vacancy,
because I had some people that were friendly and wanted to be
helpful.

One of the few people that I remember--! guess there are
two people I remember; one of them whose name was Jerry Doff,
became a lawyer. I never had any contact with him again until
I noticed during the Watergate period that he had done some
work for Nixon, and I think was the person who was responsible
for the fraudulent affidavit that Nixon executed in support of
his taking a deduction for a gift of art. Do you remember
that?

Hicke: Yes.

Schwarzer: And I think he may have been disbarred or in some way

sanctioned. I knew him; he was a nice fellow, and he was
friendly to me.

Hicke: He was in your class?

Schwarzer: Yes. The class president was a man named Tinky Shows, and he
also became a lawyer, and also was caught up in the Nixon
activities and had some involvement in an illegal transaction.
He was regarded as a very bright and promising young person in
our class student body president. But something happened in
connection with the Nixon affair, and he fell by the wayside.

I had similar contacts with other people, when I later
went to USC [University of Southern California] , who ultimately
went into the Nixon orbit and got involved in illegal
activities. So that was the generation of people who were
tainted by Nixon's political activities. But I remember those
two people, because it was so shocking to me to see what had
happened to them later, because they were the bright young men
in our class.

Social Activities

Hicke: What about social activities?

Schwarzer: I think I belonged to some social club. And I must say my

efforts to make progress with girls in the class were not--all
I remember is they were generally unsuccessful. I was neither
very adept nor did I expend enough energy, I guess, in getting
involved socially, with all the other things I had going on.
Not a lot of social life. I remember going to some dances. I
remember taking out a number of girls, but it wasn't a very big
part of my life. Well, I guess I shouldn't say that; I think I

did have romantic times, but that isn't what stands out in my
memory a great deal.

Hicke: Did you go to football games and things like that?

Schwarzer: Yes. But I think the scouts had a higher priority with me than
the social activities in high school, although I was involved,
and I did go out. But there was no particularly outstanding
memory.

Dances were a big deal at the time. I suppose they still
are, although ours were on a more modest scale.

Hicke: Weren't some of the big bands around at that time?

Schwarzer: Yes, but I don't know whether they played for the dances that

were put on by groups in school, whether they brought in bands,
or whether students went out to places where bands were already
playing. I remember that one of the big places at the time,
one of the most popular places, was the Coconut Grove at the
Ambassador Hotel. Freddy Martin played there for years and
years. The Coconut Grove finally burned, I think. Sometime
during the war, there was a fire, and it was destroyed. But
that was a very popular place. And Freddy Martin's theme was
the theme from Tchaikovsky's Second Piano Concerto, "Tonight We
Love." Does that ring a bell with you?

Hicke: Oh, of course. I know it well.

Schwarzer: I remember that was the time when Frank Sinatra was first

hitting big time. He was on a program that was sponsored by
Chesterfield [cigarettes], and I remember getting into a radio
studio to hear his broadcast. That's the time when teenagers
would scream and faint.

Hicke: The girls.

Schwarzer: I remember that. [laughter] Well, sometime during that time,
one of my great experiences was, a request came to our troop--
we did a lot of public service; we'd take turkeys to people on
Thanksgiving. That was an important part of troop activities.
We got a request from one of the studios that they needed a lot
of snails.

Hicke: Snails?

Schwarzer: Snails. Well, snails or slugs are very common in Los Angeles.
You see them out there in the morning all the time. They
needed these snails for a movie that Cecil B. De Mille was

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:

making of the life of Dr. Wessel. You've probably never heard
of Dr. Wessel, but he went to the Philippines and brought
public health of some kind to the Filipinos. At one point, he
was quite a famous character. In order to enhance the
credibility of this scene of Dr. Wessel in this jungle, they
needed a lot of snails.

Somehow, our troop had a connection with the movie
business, because one of the people active in the troop was the
professional first-aid person who worked on the sets. So we
went out and collected snails. And we all went in our uniforms
to his studio and delivered them to Cecil B. De Mille and had
our picture taken with him.

Personally handed over the slugs to him?

Well, to his assistant. But he was there to receive them. I
remember standing in this group with De Mille and having our
picture taken on the set. So that's a highlight from that
time. [laughter]

Indeed.

Hicke: Other than that, were you much affected by the Hollywood
activities?

Schwarzer: No. Well, I had another experience. I was riding my bike with
a friend in the San Fernando Valley, and I had a flat tire. He
went on, I guess, to get help. I was sitting by the roadside,
there was nothing I could do. A station wagon came along and
picked me up. There was a man and a woman in the car, and they
said, "Can we take you somewhere?" I asked them to drop me off
at the end of the bus line. The man was driving, and he
stopped and let the woman off at their house, and took me on.
He said, "Do you know who that was?" And I said, "I don't have
the slightest idea." He said, "That was Lucille Ball."
[laughter] And, "I'm Ricky," his stage name, her husband.
[Desi Arnaz]

Hicke: Two famous people.

Schwarzer: So, yes you did have contact with the movie business, but it
was pretty capricious and sporadic. [laughter] But it shows
you how closely I was following it--I had no idea who they
were. I knew who Lucille Ball was, but I wouldn't have
recognized her.

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

Well, that was before television. So she was not so
recognizable as she became after television.

I took a girl to a dance one time, whom I met I don't know how.
She was a nice person, we had a good time, but I never saw her
again, until later. It turned out that she became a famous
movie actress. I think it may have been somebody called Rita
Moreno, some Hispanic name. She was good looking, but she was
nobody when I was taking her to dance. But she did become a
famous movie actress.

And you were writing plays?

I wrote this one play for the scout troop, but nothing happened
to that. I got back into that many years later. But I had no
contacts. I thought I wanted to write music. I thought I
wanted to write songs, and I know my father introduced me to
some song writer in Hollywood, but that never got anywhere. I
think what he said was this has already been done, or something
like that.

Did you actually write one?

I don't know. I may have put some words together, but I don't
remember that that got anywhere.

Did you have any musical training?

My father wanted me to take the violin. When I was still in
Germany, I took violin lessons, and I hated it. I wanted to
learn to play the piano. But that didn't come off until many
years later. About twelve years ago, I decided the time had
come. I started taking piano lessons. I did that for a while,
but I reached a plateau, and I didn't get any better; so I
dropped it. But that was the only music training I've ever
had. I like music, but I don't know anything about it.

Anything else about your high school days that stands out?

The only other thing to add was that our class was accelerated.
I don't know exactly how. I don't know whether we went during
the summer, but after the war started the class was
accelerated, and instead of graduating in June of 1943, I
graduated in February. The main idea was to make it possible
for people to go into the service and have their high school
diplomas. But that gets us into the whole business of the
military.

III WORLD WAR II: MILITARY SERVICE

Early Days of U.S. Involvement

Hicke: First, let's talk a little bit more about the beginning of the
war; you were still in high school when the war came.

Schwarzer: I was in high school. Everybody remembers where they were
Sunday morning, of December 7. I was in my room building a
model--! think I was building a ship model listening to the
radio, when the news came on.

I had been following the war pretty closely because of my
interest; because of having come from Europe I was particularly
interested. I remember having a whole album full of newspaper
clippings of what had been going on, following the war. Of
course, that attack on Pearl Harbor came as a great shock. But
it didn't affect me, except that we were then enemy aliens,
because we were still aliens.

As I mentioned, I think, the last time we talked,
fortunately people who had come from Italy and Germany were
simply enemy aliens and were subject to a curfew for sometime--
maybe a year or so. But the Japanese people, including
American citizens, of course, were deported. I told you a
little bit about that last time. For a while I think the
curfew affected me, but not for very long, either because it
was lifted or because it wasn't enforced and nobody paid any
attention to it.

Hicke: Was your family concerned about people back in Germany?

Schwarzer: We didn't have any.

Hicke: No relatives, that's right.

Schwarzer: By the time the war broke out, by December 1941, my

grandparents had left. They had come to the United States by
way of Shanghai. So there was nobody left in Germany. We
would have been concerned about them anyway before the war,
just because of what was going on in Germany. My father had
friends who were German Protestants, with whom he maintained
contact of some sort. And he saw them after the war. But I
don't know how concerned he was on account of the war. My
father had friends in Switzerland too. But the outbreak of the
war--I'm not aware of any impact that it had on his thinking
about them.

Hicke: Were you getting any kind of religious training at this point?

Schwarzer: I was only when we were in Germany. I had to go through this--
as I described in the memoir. I had to go through this ritual
of the bar mitzvah. But that was pretty much the end of my
involvement in religion. And I haven't really had any
involvement in it at all since then.

Hicke: And your parents didn't?

Schwarzer: My father was quite devout and quite serious, particularly

after we came over here. I suppose maybe, in a way, it was his
way of showing his gratitude for having been able to escape.
Occasionally, I suppose, I would get dragged to a service. But
I really divorced myself from religion when we came over here.

Summertime Activities

Hicke: I know you had all these jobs, but what about summers? What

did you do in the summers? The jobs you described before were

part-time.

Schwarzer: I think I was mostly working and then going to camps. I was a
gardener for a while. I spent more time on paper routes, I
guess, during the summer. I have no recollection, except for
going to camp. One of the Boy Scout leaders had a camp in
Yosemite [National Park]. That was for two or three weeks. He
would take a group of us up. You wouldn't believe this: we
went up in an open truck. Can you imagine today taking kids
out on a two-hundred-mile trip in an open truck? We had our
sleeping bags thrown on the floor of the truck.

Hicke: I don't even like to see a dog riding in the back of a truck.

Schwarzer: Nothing ever happened. We camped along the Merced River. It
was a wonderful time. I don't know if you ever went to
Yosemite before it got crowded, but it was a different place.

We'd hike to Half Dome and to the back country. The
fellow who ran the camp was an ex-Marine. So the pup tents
were lined up in perfect orderit was a well-organized camp.
We had bugle call in the morning, and all of that. It was fun,
and very good training for the kids. Eventually I became a
leader in the camp. I think the last time I went up was in
1947, after I came back from the service. And I think that was
about the time it ended.

So that was one summer experience. I think the first
summer we were in Los Angeles we went to a place called Camp
Seely, which was a camp run by the city of Los Angeles, up near
the San Jacinto Mountains. My parents and my sister and I
stayed in a little cabin. I had never been to anyplace like
that the trees, it was wonderful. I spent a lot of time
reading books and playing games. We may have done that more
than once. But I don't remember any other family outings. It
was hard for my parents to get away, because they were managing
the apartment building.

I remember reading, when I was up there, I remember
reading You and Heredity. Did you ever read that book? It's a
wonderful explanation of Mendel's laws and how heredity works.
I forget the name of the author.

Hicke: What else were you reading?

Schwarzer: I don't remember what I was reading at that time. That book

happens to stand out. I think I was so busy that I was reading
a lot less than I had been reading in Germany, when I had a lot
of time to read. So nothing stands out in my mind. Magazines
and newspapers, but no books. I'm sure I must have been
reading books. But nothing right now that makes an impression
on me. Maybe it will come back to me.

I know that there was a reading merit badge a Boy Scout
merit badge. You had to read a certain number of books, and
write book reports. And I know we had to write book reports in
school. But I don't remember any of the books.

Hicke: Did you have to memorize poetry?

Schwarzer: I remember reading "Idylls of the King," I think in the tenth
grade. I guess we had to memorize some of that.

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

What about a foreign language?
Obviously, you had one, but--

Did they require that?

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

I took a few semesters of Spanish. I remember that.
Generally, it was a pretty good high school. But it was too
easy. I never really had to study.

No challenge.

You never really had to learn to think. And that was true, to
some extent, in college too, until I went back to Harvard Law
School. I never knew what it was to really study, and to
think, and to apply yourself. The courses that I did poorly
in, I guess, were mostly the advance math courses. I think
they should have been taught, perhaps, in ways so that you were
forced to think. I don't know why I didn't do better.

I think that was generally true. I don't think I was ever
taught to think critically or to criticize. I was taught to
learn what they were teaching me, and hand it back in a test.

Yes, that was pretty much it. Well, California education has
never been distinguished public education. It wasn't really
bad, but it was not anything like what it should have been.
The style of living and the good weather militated against
imposing a lot of homework on kids. There just wasn't enough
homework required, and it's probably still true.

Starting at UCLA, Then Being Drafted, 1943

Hicke: Okay, so the war came along and you figured you were going to
have to do something.

Schwarzer: I was very anxious to enlist. But because I was not a citizen,
I could not enlist. I tried all sorts of things. I was
interested in meteorology, and I wanted to get into the [U.S.
Army] Air Corps to be a meteorologist. I tried to get into the
navy. I tried to get into the coast guard. But I kept running
into a brick wall. There was no way you could enlist if you
were not a citizen. I had to wait until I got drafted. So my
father urged me and pushed me to start college.

I did start in February 1943, at UCLA [University of
California at Los Angeles]. I took a terribly difficult
program. I was then thinking of going into some kind of
sciencemeteorology or astronomy. So I took calculus and

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:

physics and astronomy and one other course. I had a terrible
time. I barely passed those courses. I had not been prepared
for those courses. UCLA was a very demanding schoolvery
smart people there, and they really expected you to work hard
and to think. High school just didn't prepare me for that. So
I had a terrible time, but I hung on. I guess I went for one
semester, and then 1 must have done something during the
summer, waiting for the draft call, and then I was called, in
September. In October I went into the army.

This is 1943?

Nineteen forty-three. I was inducted at Fort MacArthur in Long
Beach, and went through all the preliminaries there: shots and
medical exams and being issued uniforms, and so forth. After
about a week or so, the whole lot of us, probably several
hundred people, got on this troop train.

Wait a minute, I want to hear about your first lunch,
mentioned that.

You

Schwarzer: First lunch, yes. [laughter] Fried bologna. I never had

fried bologna before. 1 don't know why I remember that. It
was all right, but it was a surprise.

Hicke: And were there other things that were rather a surprise?

Schwarzer: Well, I felt pretty comfortable, because I had been exposed to
a certain amount of quasi-military training and discipline in
the scouts. I was pretty enthusiastic about getting into the
service. I had great hopes of doing things, accomplishing
things and advancing myself. So nothing bothered me. I
remember one thing that impressed was about the peoplewe
would march, and there would be some people who simply never
could keep in step. They just could not walk with an organized
group of soldiers, and I remember the sergeants yelling at
those people to keep in step. They would bounce up and down;
they'd never be in step. [laughter]

Hicke: They'd be going up when everyone else was going down.

Basic Training

Schwarzer: I don't remember anything else about that. We weren't in San
Pedro very long. We got on this troop train, and it wound all
over the Southwest, dropping off people at various army bases.

Ultimately it ended up in Michigan, at Camp Custer, where the
rest of us were taken off the train and marched to barracks,
and that's where I took basic training. 1 think it took maybe
close to a week on this train to get there.

By then, it was November, and it was starting to get
cold. 1 was assigned to the military police, which meant that
you took basic infantry training. In addition, you were
trained to perform military police duties. So from November
until about February, we had this really intensive course in
basic training, with a lot of drills, a lot of field exercises,
learning to shoot, and manage, clean, assemble, and disassemble
weapons, map reading, and the kinds of things that military
policemen dodirecting traffic, and so forth. A lot of night
exercises in the winter, in the snow, and it was really cold.

Hicke: Michigan was quite a change from southern California.

Schwarzer: Yes, very cold. But I thought 1 was pretty well prepared for
it, and I never had any problems. There are a few things 1
remember.

One of them was that we had a commanding officer who was a
professional soldier, never got above captain, I guess. But he
actually was in the U.S. Army detachment that took part in the
war against the Bolsheviks at the end of World War I, when
Americans and others came in on the side of the White Russians,
briefly, to fight the Bolsheviks. He was actually in
Kamchatka, or someplace like that. I don't know why I remember
that. He was a very stern, ramrod-straight commanding officer,
and I didn't ever talk to him at all. He inspired fear and
respect. Interesting person; I can still see him in front of
me, and I think I have some pictures of our company.

The other thing I remember about the training company was
that it was a great mixture of people. We had people from New
York City, who had never been in the field and had a terrible
time dealing with it. I remember we had a guy from South
Carolina, I think his name was Dear, who had carried a rifle
probably since he was four years old. I mean, he had always
been hunting and out in the woods. But he barely knew how to
read. He was almost totally illiterate. But in some ways he
was a terrific soldier.

So it was really interesting to see the contrast of people
that were thrown together by the military, all of whom
benefited enormously from this experience.

That's why I've always regretted that we don't continue to
have a citizen army and a draft, or some kind of national
service obligation. Because there's no substitute for the
educational experience that you gain when you're thrown
together with people who come from all kinds of backgrounds.
When you grow up here in the suburbs you have no idea what
people from the backwoods of Mississippi or South Carolina are
like. You don't understand the nature of much of the
population of this country. The army gave us that. That was a
great experience.

It was tough training. I remember distinctly a few
marches. We were out at night--! don't know whether you
appreciate that you could actually fall asleep while you're
walking and I would find myself bumping into the person next
to me, because I had fallen asleep. I can see falling asleep
driving, but falling asleep walking is a little surprising.
But it happens, and it really happened to me then.

Hicke: Total exhaustion.

Schwarzer: We stood guard duty at night. It was very, very cold. We
really were worried about staying awake and keeping from
freezing. But it was good training. At the end of that--I
think it was about ninety days at the end of that, I became
eligible to become a citizen, and I was inducted as a citizen
in the federal courthouse in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I think that
because I became a citizen, the rest of my family also were
naturalized because of that. I think they became citizens at
the same time.

Hicke: Because of your service in the army?

Schwarzer: Yes, I think so. So then I sat around, waiting to be assigned.

Hicke: This was 'AA by now?

Schwarzer: Yes, this was about March of 'AA, and I was still at Camp

Custer. People from the training battalion were being sent all
over the place, but there were no orders for me. In those
days, everybody had a card, a card about this size. I forget
what it's called.

Hicke: Are you demonstrating about two feet by one foot, or would it
be a little smaller?

Schwarzer: It was probably eight and a half by eleven inches. And on the
margins of the card were places where holes could be punched.
Now on the main part of the card they would have basic

Hicke:

information about you. But everybody had one or more MOS,
that's a Military Occupational Specialty. The holes on the
edges of the card would be punched to reflect your MOS, or
MOS's. This was the precursor of computers. So if they wanted
to have people with an MOS, say, of a military policeman, they
could punch a button and all the cards with that MOS would be
either dropped out or picked up, or something like that,
automatically. So that's how a lot of these assignments were
made in the army, basically on the basis of the mechanical
application of the MOS's assigned to the individual soldier. I
don't know what MOS's were assigned to me, but obviously, one
part would be language capability in German. And perhaps some
other things. I don't remember if I ever knew what my MOS's
were.

Let me stop you because I need to change the tape.

Schwarzer: People were being shipped off, I don't know where. But I was

still waiting around. Apparently they didn't have any place to
put me at the time, so I stayed at Camp Custer. And for a lack
of any other place to put me, they assigned me to the basic
training company. So I repeated the basic training cycle.
Only instead of doing it in the winter, this time I did it in
the summer. The summer was about as unbearable in Michigan as
the winter was. So from about March until about July, I was
again doing basic training in Michigan. During that time, the
invasion took place in Europe, in June 1944. That was very
exciting. And I had made quite a few friends.

At that time the USD was very active, the United Service
Organization; it provided entertainment for soldiers. Through
the USO, 1 met a number of girls who lived in Jackson,
Michigan, which was nearby. So I had the opportunity to be
invited to families' houses and went to parties. It was really
a lot of fun. I really became quite involved there. So while
the military duty was hard, there were a lot of pleasant
associations that came along with that.

Hicke: Did this just start with your second round?

Schwarzer: No, actually during the winter. Eventually I almost married a
woman whom I met there. But it came to an end. At the end of
the training cycle, in July or August, I was again sitting
around .

Intelligence Work: Training and Assignments

Camp Ritchie

Schwarzer: By that time everybody else was being shipped out to the
Pacific, and I was waiting any day to be sent out to New
Guinea, or the Philippines, or wherever the war was going on at
the time. But when my orders came, I was ordered to report to
Camp Ritchie, in Maryland, which was the Intelligence training
center. That was a pleasant surprise.

Hicke: Now why did they pick you for that?

Schwarzer: It was obviously my capability in German. A big part of the
training in Camp Ritchie was interrogating prisoners and
deciphering and analyzing battlefield information--order of
battle, identification of aircraft. Order of battle means the
structure and organization of military forces, interrogation
techniques, I forget what else. But that training lasted, it
must have been from about August until the end of October.

Hicke: You said that Henry Kissinger was there?

Schwarzer: Yes, Kissinger was there either at the same or just before
that. It was an interesting place, because it was full of
people who were very well-educated with lots of experience,
many of them also refugees. But also there were other people
who somehow got an MOS that was relevant to Intelligence. So,
I'm trying to remember, but I think the friendships I made
there with a couple of people have continued until very
recently. We maintained contact. For me it was an incredible
experience, because I was nineteen, and most of these people
were in their late twenties or thirties and had a college
education. They were very sophisticated and experienced
people .

So that was interesting. In fact, that contrast continued
throughout my whole army career. I was always around people
who were very well educated and experienced and were terrific

role models.

Hicke: This was the group that was in Intelligence?
them out?

How did they pick

Schwarzer: Yes. Well, you never knew how the army picked people to fill
particular jobs. [laughter] But it wasn't always the square
peg going into the round hole. I was really very, very lucky

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:

Schwarzer;

to somehow get picked to go into that training, because since I
had military police training, they could have easily sent me
somewhere where they needed military policemen.

One thing I remember about training: I said we were
trained in techniques to interrogate prisoners, and I can say
with assurance that torture or anything like that was never
considered or suggested. But maybe the worst thing that 1 can
remember was that somebody was talking about the fact that if
you give a prisoner a shovel and tell him to go out and dig a
pit that would be suitable for a grave, that that might help
persuade people to talk. [laughter] We never used it, never
had time to use it. But I do remember that that came up in the
discussion.

And not facetiously?

No, not facetiously. I don't know what other techniques were
discussed but certainly nothing was ever suggested that would
be violent.

You discussed ways of questioning and what kinds of questions
to ask?

Yes, what kind of information you want.
How long were you there?

At the end of October, we were all promoted to various
grades. I became a staff sergeant; some people were made
master sergeants. It may be that some people got commissions.
I should say that all during the time I was at Camp Custer, I
was applying for officer candidate school. I was very anxious
to become an officer. For some reason, that never
materialized. If it had, I would have gone to Fort Benning and
become an infantry second lieutenant, who had by far the
highest mortality rate of any specialty, any group of people in
the army. I was just lucky, I guess--for some reason, I was
never picked. I think they were still training infantry
officers. I think that some people got a commission at Camp
Richie; I don't recall. I think a few did, but I didn't. But
I was reasonably satisfied to become a staff sergeant, at the
time.

54
Assignments in Britain

Schwarzer: So we all shipped out to Camp Kilmer [New Jersey] and were put
on a troop transport, and went to Southampton [England]. That
was a very stormy crossing, and there were a number of
submarine alerts. German submarines were still out in numbers.

We were not in a convoy. I think we went on a large, what
had been a passenger liner; it was the United States or the
America, or something like that. So it was a pretty fast ship.
But as you can imagine, people were packed in there like
sardines. It was not very pleasant smelly , dirty.

We got to Southampton, and then we were all moved to the
staging base in Birmingham. Birmingham--! haven't been back
there sincewas really a dismal place. All I remember is that
it was always cold and foggy, and if it wasn't foggy it was
raining. We lived in Nissen huts, which are metal huts
[quonset huts] basically unheated. It was pretty grim. We
were waiting to be assigned.

Now this was in November, 19A4. Let me just try to
remember. The first assignment that I had--a few of us out of
that group were assigned to a British Intelligence Center at a
place called Chalfont Latimer, outside of London. That was an
old British estate, and it had been turned into an Intelligence
base, at which they placed German pilots and navigators and
submarine officers. The place had been wired, and all the
conversations there would be two or more German officers in
each, you can call it a cell, or room, I guess, would be more
accurate each room was wired, and the conversations were
recorded .

Our job was to listen to the conversation to pick up any
technical information about two things the military was
concerned with at that time. One of them was the snorkel,
which had just come in. The snorkel now is, of course, a well-
known idea. But at the time it was a new idea that the Germans
had developed that enabled their submarines to stay under
water. It was just a pipe that rose above the surface, by
which they could pick up air. Pretty simple, the idea. But it
meant that the submarines didn't have to surface to recharge
their batteries or recirculate the air, whatever. So it
greatly extended their range. It was a matter of great
concern, and the military wanted to know what there was to
know. So by putting submarine officers together in cells or
rooms, they hoped that they would start talking and that there
would be some useful technical information. I guess other

Hicke:
Schwarzer :
Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:
Schwarzer ;

information about submarines would have been welcomed too, but
that was, 1 remember, the main point.

And then the air force officers, the interest was in what
radar countermeasures the German air force had developed and
was using. Radar was still pretty new then, and it was being
developed by the British. They wanted to know how the German
air force dealt with it.

So we spent maybe a month or two, probably more like two
months at this place, which was a wonderful experience. We
lived in Nissen huts again, but the British had a much more
civilized way of serving in the military. I mean, they all had
bat men servants who would take care of your uniformand that
sort of thing. And we were served tea and other amenities-
sherry, I guess.

The food wasn't very good, but it was all done in a very
civilized way. We were only about a half hour, by train, out
of London, so I remember spending a lot of time in London
during the war. It was a great experience. It was a dynamic,
electric atmosphere there, with the war going on, and everybody
who was anybody was either in London or coming through London.
Also, the theater was great; I remember seeing Lunt and
Fontaine on the stage, and some other things too. Of course,
everything was blacked out, but that didn't dampen people's
spirits at all. So that was an interesting experience.

The buzz bombs were a problem, I understand.
Yes, the buzz bombs were dropping, right.

That didn't last too long, did it? Well, you were only there
two months .

Yes, now there were two series. The buzz bombs were the first
series, I think they were the V-l's. The V-2's came later, and
those were rockets that went up and then straight down. The
buzz bombs flew horizontally. You could hear the engines.
When the engine shut off, you knew it was about to drop. So
you had some warning. With the V-2's there were no warnings at
all. But the V-2's came pretty near the end of the war. So I
think this was the time when there were just buzz bombs and no
V-2's.

Were you successful in gathering some of this information?

Well, that's a good question. I don't know whether we were or
not. I think we may have written up some reports. I have no

recollection, personally, that anything useful came out of
that, but it might have.

There were some interesting American and British people
there. One of the people we worked with was a man named
Bobbing; I remember him. I think he later became an editor of
Time magazine.

Paris

Schwarzer: Shortly before Christmas, some of us were ordered to go to

Paris to join a new unit that had been established, or created.
It was called MFIU4, Mobile Field Intelligence Unit Number
Four. That was the unit with which I stayed until sometime in
the next summer, when we ended up in Frankfurt, or outside of
Frankfurt .

Mobile Field Intelligence units had several vans that had
various kinds of intelligence equipment. It was set up so you
could interrogate prisoners or do photo intelligence and
various other kinds of things.

There was a wonderful group of people there. The
commanding officer was Major Theodore Voorhees, who was a
leading lawyer in Philadelphia and later became president of
the American Bar Association. Another of f icer--Henry Lennon--
later became the editor of Fortune magazine. So that is the
kind of people that were in this unit. There were probably
about twenty-five, thirty, something like that.

We were waiting in Paris to be assigned, and about that
time the Germans broke through the Allied lines in the Ardennes
Forest, and that was the Battle of the Bulge starting. So
there was a lot of excitement. There were rumors that German
parachutists had landed outside of Paris and were engaged in
sabotage, but none of that ever turned out to be true.

Belgium

Schwarzer: We moved then to Namur, which is in central Belgium, right
behind the American lines fighting the Germans after the
breakthrough. So we were pretty close to the front, but we
never got to the front. I think all we were really doing was

waiting to be assigned someplace where we would be working with
prisoners, or doing other intelligence work.

I don't remember that we did much, except we stayed in a
very cold and uncomfortable school, and we had terrible chow
lines, in which you would wash your mess kit in a garbage can
full of hot watersupposedly hot waterafter you ate, and you
just knew you were going to get sick. I mean, just looking at
it, you were going to get sick. You know, the water was dirty
and it wouldn't be hot. And you knew you weren't cleaning your
mess kit. That's one part that stands out; it was terrible.

Hicke: And did you get sick?

Schwarzer: I don't recall. [laughter] I may have, probably not. So as
soon as the Germans were stopped, the Third Army under General
[George S.] Patton [Jr.] moved forward and broke through the
German lines. And we followed right along; we were right near
the front of the American column moving into Germany.

They were taking German prisoners by the thousands.
There would be enormous barbed wire enclosures as far as your
eye could see filled with German prisoners. These were really
the dregs of the German population. I mean they were young
boys and old men. It was pathetic. We interrogated them in
great numbers, trying to gauge what kind of resistance could be
expected, what kind of forces were still in existence, what
sort of training they had been given, how they were organized.
But the war then was moving so fast. This would have been in
March and April.

Hicke: Can you tell me exactly how you went about this? Did they
bring the prisoners in to you, or did you go out?

Schwarzer: You'd set up a table out on the field, and they'd bring them to
you one after another. You'd look at their little book that
they each had--a little book, like a passport, but it was their
military service record that they had to carry with them all
the time. So you'd look at the age and where they were from,
and you'd get some information on what the unit was and what
their training was. It wasn't interrogation in depth; it was
very speedy. You just tried to get a general sense of what
kind of forces were still in existence.

Hicke: Then did you have to record each one of these?

Schwarzer: Well, we must have written it down, but what finally became of
the reports, I don't know. Somebody was putting them together;
I don't recall that.

Hicke: How many people would you talk to in a day?

Schwarzer: 1 think we must have talked to twenty-five to fifty people in a

day. I don't have a distinct memory of all the things that we

did at that time. I just remember seeing these vast expanses
of German prisoners.

Luxembourg

Schwarzer: So, we followed the Third Army into Luxembourg, and then we set
up our shop in an estate outside of the city of Luxembourg. It
was a lovely place, and we were there in the middle of April.
And I remember that's where we heard that [Franklin D.]
Roosevelt had died.

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

I don't know what all we did. I just remember that we
lived very well and drank a lot of good German wine. I
remember being awakened one morning listening to the radio that
the Germans had surrendered, and an armistice had been signed.
We were still there. So we may actually, at that place, have
been interrogating. I think that's it: we were interrogating
high-ranking German officers to get information about how the
Battle of the Bulge, the breakthrough, had been organized, and
what military resources they still had. I remember seeing
German generals around there. We must have done something with
them, but I don't recall the details of that.

You mentioned General Rundstedt?

Yes. That's right. He was the commanding general. It's
pretty hard to have any kind of distinct memory, but I think he
put the blame for the whole Battle of the Bulge on Hitler that
he had been forced by him to go forward, when he knew it
couldn't succeed. I don't remember much about that.

Germany

Schwarzer: The war ended early in May. During the next few weeks, we

moved to a place outside of Frankfurt, called Oberursel. There

was a camp there, I guess it must have been a German military
camp, and it was being converted into the intelligence center
for the allied forces. So we set up offices there.

From then on our responsibilities with this unit really
focused on counterintelligence, and that is to investigate
whether there was going to be any kind of underground movement,
any expectation of sabotage or resistance to the occupation.
There was a lot of talk at that time about something called the
Werewolves. That was supposed to be the German underground
movement. Nothing ever materialized; there wasn't the
slightest hint of any effort at resistance, sabotage, or
otherwise. But the allied forces were concerned.

Sometime in July, I think, I was assigned to go to London
and I was temporarily assigned to MI-5, which was the British
counterintelligence service, in London to learn about sabotage
techniques, and devices, and methods, so that I would know
something about it. I remember flying in this DC-3 in a bucket
seat from Frankfurt to London.

Schwarzer: I was assigned to work at the headquarters at MI-5, which was
in one of those wonderful Georgian buildings on Pall Mall in
downtown London, right near Leicester Square. I was assigned
to the person, who I guess was in charge of technical,
antisabotage activities: Victor Rothschild, of the Rothschild
family, who in private life was a prominent banker, and, as I
recall, died just recently. He was an interesting person. I
don't remember too much about it, except I remember reading the
manuals and looking at models and equipment.

I was there maybe two or three weeks and then went back
to Frankfurt. But I can't say that I ever had any experience
to which that training was relevant.

Hicke: That's probably good news.

Schwarzer: Yes. The most serious problem that we encountered was, shortly
after we were there, a woman was picked up who was believed to
be a Soviet spy. That was the first hint of the Cold War, and
this is back in 1945. I know that she was held in a cell and
was being questioned. But I don't remember anything more about
that.

Hicke:

Was she actually Russian or was she a German spy?

Schwarzer: I don't think so, probably German. So we settled down in

Oberursel. We had a nice German villa where we lived. It was
a very comfortable life. I remember that I went out with some
people to go deer hunting in the woods behind the camp. And we
traveled around the neighborhood a bit.

The area was pretty well devastated, and Germany was
really in shock. 1 remember when we first drove into Germany.
You'd see the people in the streets, and they were just dazed.
And there was a lot of destruction. The food situation was
terrible. During the first winter, there was great scarcity of
coal. The military occupation forces lived very comfortably,
but Germany was in a disaster. It was a total disaster.

And so was France. I remember I made a trip to Paris,
and I remember selling a carton of cigarettes on the Champs-
Elysees to somebody for some astronomical amount. Cigarettes
were the currency at that time.

One of the things we did was to make some survey trips.
There would be teams of three or four of us in a jeep who would
travel through the American zone and talk to Germans to get
some idea of how they were dealing with the crisis: what the
food situation was. I remember we looked into the schooling
situation for children, and then we wrote reports on what we
found. I don't remember anything else about it.

We also were somewhat involved in the hunt for German
scientists. I remember at least one session, in some town that
we had gone to, where we met with a bunch of German scientists
to find out what they had been working on and whether these
would be people that the Americans would want. As you know,
the Russians were out scouring Germany for scientists. So
there was a real race on to get German technology and know-how.
That was one of the things that we did. I don't remember any
of the specifics about whom we had latched on to.

Scotland

Schwarzer: After a while, it turned out that there really wasn't a whole
lot for us to do anymore. So we were given time to do other
things. And we couldn't go backwell, the war ended, of
course, shortly after we got to Frankfurt. The war ended in
the middle of August, 1945. But demobilization was on the
basis of points. When people were sent back to the United
States, the priority order was based on points, and points were

calculated mostly with reference to how long you'd been in the
service, and your age, and your family. I don't know whether
combat participation was a factor or not. I had a fairly low
point count, because I hadn't been in the array -that long, and 1
was young and didn't have any family. So one of things that I
did was to go to Aberdeen, to go to the university for a
semester.

Hicke: In Scotland?

Schwarzer: In Scotland. And what I remember about that was that it was
not only miserably cold but terribly damp, and you could not
possibly go to bed at night without a hot water bottle, the
sheets were so cold. You couldn't touch them. It was
incredible. Britain was having a very hard time during that
winter .

There was a great coal shortage. If you read the history
of the time--I read something recently--! think we were
shipping coal to England. They were so desperate. So it was
very cold, very little heat. You couldn't take a bath, because
there was very little hot water. So I remember once a week we
went to the Turkish bath, and that was the only way you could
bathe. So it was pretty grim. I don't remember too much about
the school, but I remember drinking a lot of gin, and going to
the Turkish bath.

Hicke: No Scotch whiskey?

Schwarzer: Oh, there wasn't much of that. I think whatever there was, was
rationed. Gin was pretty much available, but Scotch whiskey
was scarce and expensive. It may be that it was all being
exported to earn foreign currency.

Aberdeen was a pretty desolate place at the time. It has
changed a great deal since North Sea oil has been discovered.
And I remember going skiing for a couple of weeks in Chamonix
[France]. I don't know how else I killed the time in Europe.

Conditions in Europe

Hicke: Let me ask you a couple of things: Was there any talk about the
Marshall Plan at this point? Were some of these reports that
you were writing--

Schwarzer: Well, the reports certainly reflected that Europe was an

absolute disaster and that there was an enormous amount of
suffering. We did not address questions about what it

needed or how it should be dealt with,
before the Marshall Plan.

This was two years

Hicke: Do you have more about the Marshall Plan to say, while we're on
the subject?

Schwarzer: No. Well, what I do recall was that there was a great debate
going on in the American government. Now, it's a little
difficult for me to distinguish for you between what 1 knew
then and what I've learned since. But certainly there was a
division in the American government about how to deal with
Germany. The secretary of Treasury, Henry Morgenthau,
advocated what was known as the Morgenthau Plan. That would
turn Germany into an agrarian countryeliminate its industry,
so it could never again become a threat.

So there had been no policy decision about what to do
about Germany when I was over there. Or, for that matter, what
to do about western Europe. The most immediate concern, I
guess, was about helping the British. I think there was a
large American loan that was made at the time. Coal and I
guess food were shipped to England. They were having a very
hard time. But I don't recall any discussion of or reading
anything about what would be done about the continent.

The decision to rebuild and for the United States to
finance the rebuilding of Germany wasn't really made until
early 1947. So they went quite a long time before the United
States stepped in and took an active part in rebuilding.
Obviously, they couldn't have rebuilt as they did, or it would
have taken a long time. They were in desperate straits, for
sure.

Hicke: The other question I had was about the zones: the different
occupying powers had different zones. Did you have to deal
with intelligence in the French zone, the Russian zone, and the
British zone?

Schwarzer: The zones were created at the Potsdam Conference, if I remember
correctly, held in July of 19A5--that's about the time they
came into existence. So they reflected, to a large extent--
certainly between the United States and Britainthe areas of
control. The British army had control of the northern part of
Germany, and the American army, the southern part of Germany.
Anyway, that confirmed the status quo that existed when the
fighting stopped. The French really didn't have a significant
part. The French were given a zone simply to accommodate
[Charles] De Gaulle, and they moved in there.

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

So the existence of zones didn't have any real impact on
what we were doing. Nominally our center was the Allied Forces
Intelligence Center. That is, it was attached to SHAEF, which
was Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, and
therefore had responsibility with respect to the whole area. I
imagine that we focused our work on what was essentially the
American zone. I don't recall that we had British officers at
Frankfurt, or for that matter, French officers. There may have
been some, but I think it was pretty much an American
operation, and so I think our activities were pretty much
focused on what became the American zone.

I wish I could remember more. Probably would remember
more if I had been older at the time and would have had more
experience into which to assimilate the experiences there. But
this was all a very strange and unexpected experience for
somebody who was nineteen years old--by then 1 was twenty, I
guess .

Just a sideline on how bad it was in Europe. I went over
to Europe while I was in law school in the summer of 1950, five
years later. Although the destruction had been cleared up, it
was still economically a very depressed area, and people were
having a very hard time. There were still food shortages. It
took them well over ten years, I think, to really get on the
road to recovery. I think around the late 1950s and early
1960s is when German industry began to take off.

I remember working in downtown San Francisco, and the
first Volkswagen dealership opened around the corner on Sansome
Street in a little store there at Sansome and Bush. It was
this funny little car, in the middle of the 1950s, about as
different from American cars at that time. People shook their
heads. "They're never going to make it here." [laughter]
That was the first return of German products that I remember.

There's one other thing that you mentioned, and that was
interrogating Otto Skorzeny.

Yes. I had forgotten about that. He was a swashbuckling,
freelance operator. I guess he was a colonel in the S.S. He
had a history of being engaged in dramatic exploits. He was
the person who was assigned to rescue [Benito] Mussolini after
he had been captured by Italian forces that were fighting with
the allies.

And he did rescue Mussolini, in some sort of spectacular
operation, to the best of my recollectionwell, I guess he
rescued him, and then he must have been turned over into

custody. Ultimately, Mussolini was recaptured by Italians that
were liberating the country, and I think he was hanged.

Hicke: Yes, upside down.

Schwarzer: Upside down, right. Skorzeny was involved in all sorts of
exploits. I do remember that we interrogated him. I think
that must have been in Luxembourg rather than in Oberursel. I
don't remember what we talked about. Actually there was a stop
between, now that I think about it; there was a stop between
Luxembourg and Oberursel. We were in Wiesbaden for a while,
during the summer of 1945, before we moved to Oberursel.

Wiesbaden was a lovely city. The American air force
preempted it then and still has its base there. There were
some interesting things going on. But I can't remember. I
should have kept a diary, except diaries are not appreciated in
the military.

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Returning to the U.S.

Well, maybe we better get you back in the U.S., and then quit
for today.

My number came up in April of 1946, and we shipped out of Le
Havre. And there was another impression: I guess it was on the
way to Le Havre that we saw these large camps of what were
referred to as the DP's, displaced persons. That's something I
haven't mentioned before, but Europe was overrun with people
who had been uprooted.

Some of them had been in camps or had been slave
laborers. These were ones that survived, had just been
liberated, and either were trying to get home or had no place
to go. They were in terrible shape. They were starving. The
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, UNRRA, had
taken responsibility for these people.

But it was an enormous chore to take care of them, and
they had no place to go. I remember seeing these terrible
camps, where they were being held or taken care of, or
whatever, on the way to Le Havre.

I came back on a troop ship, and I was a senior
noncommissioned officer by that time on the ship, so I had a
nice cabin, and it was a wonderful trip. The weather was
great. [laughter] Sunbathed, played, whatever. I went back

to Fort Dix, and I was discharged from the army at Fort Dix.
From there, I visited a woman I had met while I was at Camp
Custer, and then went back to Los Angeles, and started at USC.

Hicke: Good stopping point.
Schwarzer: That's about it.

[Interview 3: May 30, 1997] ##

Hicke: I think we left off yesterday when you were just cruising home
on a somewhat relaxing cruise. What was the name of your ship?

Schwarzer: Yes. It was the Texarkana Victory.
Hicke: What kind of ship was that?

Schwarzer: A victory ship. During the war, the first series of freighters
that was produced when the United States was rearming were the
so-called Liberty ships. Some of those were produced out here
in Marin City. I think that's what really put Henry Kaiser on
the map: it was the first time that ships were produced
essentially on an assembly line. They were pretty small, I
guess, probably 15,000 tons, or something like that. But they
served a purpose.

One of the things, too, for which the shipyards were
noted was that was the first time women came out and worked on
jobs that were always held by men. You know, that's when Rosie
the Riveter came out. All those things, big change. So the
Liberty ships were sort of emblematic of big changes taking
place in American society.

After a while larger and faster ships were designed, and
they were called the Victory ships. They were freighters,
supplemented the Liberty ships. Most of the troop movements
and freight movements later on in the war were on Victory
ships, and this was one. I think that was probably about a
twenty-five- or thirty-thousand-ton freighter.

Hicke: Was it outfitted for a troop ship?

Schwarzer: Yes, I think it was outfitted for a troop ship. Of course, it
didn't take much to change it; they just stuck in a lot of
bunks, just put them in the hold, and that made a troop ship
out of a freighter. So that was a pleasant trip. And
eventually I got back to Los Angeles about May or June of 1946.
And then I was confronted with the decision of what I was going
to do.

IV COLLEGE AND LAW SCHOOL

University of Southern California

Schwarzer: I pretty well concluded that much as I would have liked to have
gone into science or engineering, I just wasn't going to do
well enough in math to make it worthwhile or promising. So, I
didn't really know what to do. I remember lying on top of the
bed in ray room and discussing with my father what I should do.
He urged me to go to law school. I didn't have any interest in
law, never had any. But he persuaded me that it was a good
education.

So I enrolled at USC [University of Southern California],
mainly for the reason that they had a law school. It wasn't
easy to get into college or graduate school at that time
because of the enormous number of veterans who were coming
back, and schools were flooded. We figured that if I were to
graduate from USC, I would have an advantage in being admitted
to USC Law School.

So I enrolled in a pre-law curriculum. 1 had already
gotten some credits for having been at UCLA [University of
California at Los Angeles], and for some of the schools I
attended while I was in the service. So I started out, I
guess, as a sophomore, and I went straight through, summers and
all. I finished in 1948.

Hicke: Are you going to tell me a little bit about your courses?

Schwarzer: Yes. It was a general curriculum. I think I took mostly

political science and history and English. I remember taking
psychology. It was a liberal arts curriculum. I don't think I
took any more science that I can recall, or any more
mathematics. At that time, you could get into law school at

the end of your junior year and take your last year of college
as the first year of law school.

I started law school in the fall of 1947 and graduated
from USC in June of 1948, after completing one year of law
school. I must say, I had a pretty low opinion of USC. In all
of my courses, I think almost without exception, or at least of
what I remember, the exams were all true or false tests or
multiple choice tests. And it was very superficial. I don't
know that it ever was any better, but it was certainly true
that veterans were being rushed through college on an assembly
line. I never had to study, I never had to think. I didn't
learn anything.

Hicke: How to take a test.

Schwarzer: Yes, I was pretty good at that. I always was good at taking

tests. I assume USC has gotten to be a much better university
and the teaching is at a much higher, more demanding level.
But I have had no contact with it since, and I can't say.

Hicke: Possibly the flood of students had something to do with it.

Schwarzer: I think it did. But in comparison to Harvard, where I then
went later, it was basically a streetcar college, and people
really weren't involved in an educational enterprise. I think
that UCLA was a much more demanding school, and I think had a
much smarter and harder working student body at that time than
USC. USC, in many respects, was a sports-oriented and a play
school. It was more expensive than the state schools, and it
wasn't hard to get into.

Hicke: But the G.I. Bill

Schwarzer: I was on the G.I. Bill so that paid my tuition. That was a
wonderful thing. When I got to law school, I really enjoyed
it. And I did very well. But, again, as I found out later at
Harvard, it was a superficial educational experience. I mean,
it was kind of a black-letter law schoolyou looked at cases
to see what the case stood for. You were never pushed into
thinkinggetting beneath the surface and thinking what lay
behind the case. I think I got all A's, and I must have been
one of the top people in the class.

I was very happy there, and I was very happy in southern
California; it truly was lotus land at the timea greatly
enjoyable life, and I went through school without having to
struggle very hard, and had a lot of friends and lots of
activities .

Harvard Law School

Application and Acceptance

Schwarzer: Then my father got the idea that I really should go to Harvard,
and through the Boy Scouts we had a connection with one of the
families who were in the troop, a distinguished family of
doctors who had gone to Harvard. We had a connection to, or an
introduction to, a man named Smith, who must have been the
alumni representative in Los Angeles. In the summer of 1948,
my father arranged an appointment with him. I remember going
to this strange office that he had in one of those bungalow
complexes that you only find in southern California and that
you associate with Raymond Chandler's novels and some of the
pre-war history of Los Angeles. It was a bunch of bungalows
among palms, and one-story houses strange place.

Hicke: But this is an office?

Schwarzer: It was an office, yes. It may have been also his home; I'm not
sure. He was an elderly man. I talked to him for a while, and
I think my father was along. It was his notion that if you
wanted to be a lawyer, you had to go to Harvard. Harvard was
clearly the distinguished law school, and everybody knew about
it, and it was the source of establishment lawyers. He thought
that I should go there.

I wasn't particularly keen about going, but I wasn't
prepared to oppose it. Besides, I figured I would never get
in. It was already July, I think, of 1948, and this would be
for the entering class of September 19A8. So, lo and behold,
shortly after the interview, I got a letter from Harvard saying
I had been accepted for the class. I don't know how it
happened, considering the enormous number of returning
veterans .

At Harvard, you didn't just have the new people coming
in, but you had people that had interrupted their studies and
were coming back to school, who had been at various stages of
their law school studies before they went into the service.
But in those days, being from California still gave you a
substantial advantage. Geographic distribution in those days
mattered. And there weren't a lot of people from California
who would go back to Massachusetts to go to school.

Now, that certainly isn't true anymore. If geographic
distribution helps you today, you'd have to be from North

Dakota, or someplace like that. The largest number of entering
students then were from New York City. That, 1 think, has
probably always been true.

Hicke: How did you feel about this, now that you were accepted?

Schwarzer: I don't remember having any feelings about it one way or the
other. I thought it would be an exciting adventure. But 1
will say that was another turning point in my life when I think
about it now. Because if I had gone on at USC, I would have
become a lawyer in Los Angeles, but I don't think I would have
developed as I did by having gone to Harvard. I would have
stayed in Los Angeles and practiced there and probably would
never have become a judge. Although a number of people that
went to USC have become judges.

Hicke: Your father must have been a very astute judge of what was
going on.

Schwarzer: Well, it didn't take a whole lot to figure out that Harvard was
the best place to have graduated from. But he certainly was
ambitious for me. And in a sense, I suppose he was working out
his own frustrations of not having been able to pursue his
career in that fashion. I had no idea, of course, what a
change Harvard would mean, and how it would affect my life and
my career, and how differently I would develop by reason of
having gone there. But I went, and 1 went cheerfully. I
didn't have any problems with it.

Hicke: And you went in a car?

Schwarzer: I drove across the country. I don't know whether I had
somebody with me or not; I probably did. I have a vague
recollection that I had a friend who rode with me. It was
wonderful driving across the country. I did it several times
during the time I was in Harvardonce after we got married.
Young people today miss a lot by getting into a jet at one
coast and flying to the other coast, not knowing what's in
between. We'd camped by the roadside and ate in diners.

East of the Mississippi, it's a little hard to camp by
the roadside, partly because of the weather, and it's more
developed. So you could stay in these overnight places, in
homes, for two dollars a night. Well, now they've become bed
and breakfast places. But in those days, they had a sign that
would just say "Guests." They would take in guests, and it
would cost you two dollars a night, in small towns. So we
stayed there.

I got to Cambridge, I guess, early in September, and
found a room in a lovely rooming house owned by a professor and
his wife who took in students, out near Fresh Pond Parkway.
The professor was the director of the Houghton Library; you
must know about the Houghton Library. It's a collection of
rare books and manuscripts. His name was Van Lennep.

That was a good place to be, because I could leave my car
there. Cars, even then, were difficult to store if you were
living on the campus.

Hicke: You could walk to the campus?

Schwarzer: I could walk, yes. It was about a mile or so from the law
school. There were two other roomers. One of them was a
second-year student named Derk TeRoller, who it turned out
later also went to McCutchen the year before I did. And then
later he and I became partners the same year. That was a
coincidence. I forget the third roomer.

Hicke: Was he from New York?

Schwarzer: From San Francisco. He was from an old San Francisco family.

Importance of the Law Review

Schwarzer: I enrolled, and as ambitious as I was, I tried to persuade them
that I already had completed the first year, and I should be
enrolled in the second year. Mercifully, they said that was
out of the question. But they allowed me to take one second-
year course. That was a course in commercial law, taught by
Karl Llewellyn. He was one of the most original and creative
legal scholars during the 1930s. I think he was from the
University of Chicago, and he was a visiting professor.

He had ideas about a new commercial code, which actually
ultimately was adopted to replace the old common law of bills
and notes. He had a unique way of speaking and expressing
himself. He was very original and very dramatic and colorful.

Hicke: In his teaching?

Schwarzer: Yes, in his teaching and in his writing. I was totally lost in
that course. I never understood what was going on, and there
was no way to get any help. I ultimately ended up, I think,
with a D. I had A's, I think, in every other course. And if

it hadn't been for that D, I would have been on the law review.

Now, this was another turning point in my life, because
if I had been on the law review, my life would have followed a
wholly different course. If you were on the law review then,
that made the difference in getting jobs in top firms. And
later when I went looking for jobs, at the end of my second and
third year in New York and Washington, I only got one offer,
which was unattractive; basically none of the law firms had any
interest in me.

If I had gone in there having been on the law review, it
would have been different. Once you get on, you stay on, even
if your grades aren't as good. My second-year grades were
fine; that would have been no problem. But I would have gotten
offers at any number of downtown New York firms, and that would
have appealed to my ego sufficiently so that I would have gone
there, and if not there, to Washington.

Now, jumping ahead, in 1951, at the end of my third year,
and before I became a teaching fellow for a year, we got
married, and my wife and I went to San Francisco for a summer
job. She fell in love with San Francisco and became very
strongly committed to coming here. Now, that might have been
sufficient to overcome my desire to stay in the East. It's
problematical. I always felt that since I had the choice of
profession, she should have the choice of where to live. And
that's the way we did resolve it.

If I'd had some dramatic offer that I couldn't refuse in
New York or Washington, it would have been a different story.
But even given the decision to come out here, [had I been on
the law review] I would clearly have had an offer from
Pillsbury, Madison, and Sutro, which I interviewed, but which
didn't have any interest in me. I don't know if I ever
interviewed at Brobeck [Phleger & Harrison]; those were the two
leading law firms.

But with a law review credential I clearly would have had
an offer there, and I would have gone to work there. I would
not have gone to McCutchen, almost certainly. And I would have
had probably a significantly different career if I had stayed
in New York: while I would have clearly had offers from which
to choose, it would have been much more difficult to become a
partner. My friends at law school who went to New York firms
all ended up going somewhere else as counsel for corporations,
or teaching, or something of that sort.

Hicke: Because it was so difficult--

Schwarzer: Because it was so difficult to become a partner. Now, what it
might have meant also, and this is perhaps kind of foolish to
speculate, but another likely possibility would have been that
with law review credentials, I could have gotten a job in a law
school. I did look for teaching jobs, because I was more
interested in teaching then practicing. I never got any
significant response. It was clear that if you wanted to
teach, you had to be on the law review.

But I would have most likely gotten an offer for a
position teaching, and I probably would have been pursuing a
teaching career, which certainly would have been a whole
different path. So, that decision to insist on taking a
second-year course and getting a D made a major difference in
the course that my career followed after that. You can
identify it as a turning point.

Hicke: Let me just ask, did you think that you could finish school
sooner? Why did you want to take the second-year course?

Schwarzer: I felt that it would be a waste of time for me to repeat Torts,
in which I had received the highest grade in the class at
Southern California. They agreed, but it was very dumb,
because Torts at USC was not the same course as Torts at
Harvard.

At Harvard, it was taught by a professor named Warren
Seavey, one of the great teachers in the history of Harvard Law
School, who really challenged people. I missed a great deal by
not having taken that course. It was a dumb thing. But in the
end, as things turned out, it wasn't all that bad. I mean, the
consequences of a poor decision were nothing to regret.

Hicke: Not at all. But it's just interesting how much of a difference
little turns could make.

Schwarzer: Yes. I had a few clearly identifiable turning points in my

life, and I don't know to what extent other people are able to
analyze their lives in the same way. Maybe it's unusual; maybe
it isn't.

Hicke: I think it's kind of unusual to pinpoint. For instance, not
making DCS, again it seems like not a good thing at the time,
but as you pointed out, it was probably better in the long run.

Professors and Courses

Hicke: Now getting back to your first year, what were some of your
impressions of other students?

Schwarzer: I'll start out with the professors. We were blessed with great
professors. Now, I'd like to think that the students that have
followed afterwards have felt the same way about at least some
of their professors. But certainly history vindicates the
judgment of these people. There was Barton Leach, who taught
property, who I think was probably the best teacher that I had.
He also taught Future Interests.

Hicke: Why do you say he was the best?

Schwarzer: He had a wonderful way of getting you to think, to ask the

right questions, using the Socratic method. He made what was a
dull course extremely interesting. He would bring in
sidelights about cases that piqued your interest. But above
all, he was one of those people who taught you to think.

Now, I'm trying to think, I had Professor Robert Braucher
for contracts, and he was very good. I'm a little hard pressed
now to distinguish among the professors that I had for
different years.

I don't remember who else I had. Well, let's see. I
guess I could refresh my recollection. I have a strong
attachment to the Harvard Law School, to have kept my
notebooks, class notes [indicates].

Hicke: Those were notes you took in class?

Schwarzer: Yes, those are my notes, and I still have them in chambers.

Hicke: They look very neat.

Schwarzer: Well, probably neater than what I would do now.

Hicke: It looks like you wrote on about half the page and the other
half is left for comments. Is that right?

Schwarzer: There was a large margin, I don't know why. I guess it's

always been that way. But probably it's to allow you to put
either captions there or later notes. These are all second-
year notes.

Hicke: Was that the standard sort of notebook that everybody used?

Schwarzer: Everybody used it, right. Oh, Criminal Law, that was another

first-year course, and we had Professor Sheldon Glueck, who was

one of the leading authorities in Juvenile Delinquency. But it
was a pretty straightforward course. I don't remember much
about it. Agency was another course.

Hicke: What is that about?

Schwarzer: Agency is about the responsibility of principals for the acts
of agents. The notebooks I have seem to be all second- and
third-year. And I remember more of my second and third year, 1
think. I'm not sure.

I think another course was Trusts, and that was taught by
Professor Ralph Baker. He was another character, in some ways
larger than life.

We had a rather sizable case book, probably several
hundred pages, and to the best of my recollection, we never got
beyond page 168. [laughter] I had taken lots of notes, I can
see. He had the most incredible capacity to go into depth on a
case, and to use a seemingly simple and straight-forward case
as a vehicle for developing an endless analysis, pursuing all
the ramifications. It was a wonderful experience.

Hicke: Was perhaps studying the cases that you did study in depth more
valuable than getting through the rest of the book?

Schwarzer: Yes, I think his approach was that it was more important to get
depth than to spread out. But in the course of it, we had a
pretty thorough grounding in Trusts, I think.

Another one of the great teachers was Professor Paul
Freund, who, of course, was a national figure, who taught
Constitutional Law. He had a wonderful way of analyzing cases
and leading you to understand basic concepts that, although the
law has changed a lot, are still useful tools for analysis.

Then one of the courses that I really enjoyed a lot was
Labor Law, and I took two years of that, taught by Archibald
Cox, who later became Watergate special prosecutor and
solicitor general.

Hicke: Let me turn the tape over.

Schwarzer: To go back to Professor Freund, his signature habit, I think,
was the use of his eyebrows to underline important principles
or ironies that would come up in some context. I can still see
how his eyebrows, or maybe his right eyebrow, would go up at

some significant point in a discussion or lecture. He had a
great, dry sense of humor, and he was able to teach
Constitutional Law without introducing any ideology, which is
not easy to do. But he was above all of that. He was
certainly one of the giants.

Then I started to talk about Professor Cox, who taught
Labor Law. I remember he would always sit on the edge of his
desk, and his leg bounced up and down. He was a very energetic
person, a classic New Englander, who spoke with a classic New
England accent. Again, labor law changed a lot, but the basic
ideas about labor-relations law are still valid today and still
help me analyze problems as they come up.

The same is true of tax law. Dean Griswold taught Tax,
and that's not regarded as a very popular or attractive course.
But somehow even in his rather dry and stolid manner, he made
it interesting. What I learned there I still find useful in
analyzing tax issues.

Hicke: So what you got out of a lot of these courses was the concepts
or the way to think about them?

Schwarzer: Yes, the way to think about them and the way to attack

problems. It was remarkable that they could train your mind to
think like a lawyer and to be able to attack these problems and
take them apart. Even if you got into an area which was
foreign to you, you would find a handle, and you would begin to
work the problem and peel back layers and get to the heart of
it. That's basically what we learned.

In later years when law school teaching became more
socially and ideologically oriented, the notion of "thinking
like a lawyer" became odious in some circles. But I still
believe it is essential training for lawyers, and has been a
dominant factor in all my professional work.

Not everybody was equally good. I remember that
Professor Livingston Hall taught Evidence. I thought that was
a terrible course, and I guess it was the only other D that I
got. Even with those two D's, I managed to end up in the top
10 percent, and I received the degree cum laude. Although I
didn't make the law review, I did get selected for Legal Aid,
which was another, lower-level honor society.

That was a useful exercise, because we got some
introduction into what it's like to practice law. In Legal Aid
you represent indigent people.

Hicke: You actually practiced?

Schwarzer: Yes, under supervision ofWell, not much supervision actually.
Supervision of older students. I don't think we had any
contact with lawyers. But we would represent indigent tenants
in disputes with their landlords. And a lot of it was domestic
relations and custody. I don't remember too much about it.

I found it pretty scary to suddenly represent people in
real-life disputes, to have that responsibility for them. But
it was a pretty good experience.

Hicke: Are we going to get back to Professor Seavey?

Schwarzer: Well, I never had Professor Seavey. I sat in on some of his
classes; I know him by reputation. But I missed having him
because of the unfortunate decision not to take Torts.

Another one of the giants at the time was Professor Lon
Fuller, who taught Contracts. And 1 had him for a course in
Jurisprudence. I don't remember too much about it, but I
remember that he had an incredibly incisive mind that really
cut to the heart of issues.

Hicke: Must be very stimulating to be exposed to these kinds of
people .

Schwarzer: Yes, they were wonderful professors; they really were giants.
But beyond that, the law school student body is so full of
accomplished people from all over the country that even if you
had no professors, you would learn a lot even with mediocre
professors, just what went on in the classes and what went on
outside of class. People would argue the cases and really be
involved in their work. You'd get so much out of those
discussions .

Other Students

Schwarzer: I belonged to a study group throughout the time there with
three other students. One was Stuart Gaul, from Tacoma,
Washington. One, Robert Jordan, was from, I think, Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania. And one, Albert Eustis, was from New York City,
if I recall correctly. They had gone to college in different
places and came with a whole range of interests and knowledge
and experiences that were totally different from mine. Just
being around them regularly and frequently was a tremendous
educational experience for me.

But then, of course, there were close to four hundred
other people with equally diverse backgrounds, whom you got to
know and with whom you were involved in various kinds of
projects. It was a terrific educational experience. I think
that's still true today. Students who are able to attend these
national universities with students picked from all over the
place get an enormous benefit from that experience.

Well, my study group members now are all long retired.
None of them is working anymore. [laughter] They went to work
for law firms in downtown New York, and then one became general
counsel with Grace, and retired, and another one became a
professor at UCLA, and retired; another one was in the legal
department of US Steel, and has retired. So there aren't a lot
of my contemporaries anymore who are still working--hardly
anybody, except for federal judges. [laughter]

I'm trying to think if there's anything else aboutWell,
of course, there was a lot more to law school than just the
classes. I took advantage of the opportunity to attend a lot
of things that Harvard, the college, the university, offered--
lectures and programs and concerts and so forth.

Hicke: Can we go back to your study group for a minute? Was this a
group of students that met once a week?

Schwarzer: At least, and then particularly before exams. That was

recommended procedure, that everybody join in study groups.
And that was pretty much standard in law schools around the
country. I don't know that's it's so true anymore today.

Hicke: So you literally met to study together?

Schwarzer: It was a true study group, and you were strongly encouraged to
join a study group. It was very helpful, because you would go
over the notes and over the subject matter and discuss it, and

then develop your own outline of the course. So, you would be
sure you understood it. It was working together that tested
your knowledge. So that was very good.

Hicke: Were you all taking the same courses?

Schwarzer: Yes, there wasn't a whole lot of difference in the courses.
There weren't a lot of electives then. For the most part,
people took the same courses. I think each semester you maybe
had one elective. It's not like it is now, where law schools
offer this wide range in curriculum, and you can take all sorts
of courses. Maybe that's one reason why study groups aren't
practical anymore.

Law Schools, Yesterday and Today

Schwarzer: Law school was a very different enterprise in those days. We
had our noses to the grindstone. We were there to study and
not to change the world. That changed; law school changed
fundamentally around 1969 and 1970, when the war in Vietnam
suddenly brought a revolution to law schools and universities
around the country, but particularly law schools.

Law schools then began to feel that they had a mission.
Of course, that was also stimulated by the civil rights
revolution. Law schools feltperhaps in response to the
feelings of students--that they had to be on the cutting edge
of social change. Since then, law students have been heavily
involved in all sorts of social movements and activities: civil
rights, poverty, peace movements for a while.

Today law schools have a whole range of activities,
organized by the school to various degrees, that deal with
social problems. Law schools have clinics that provide legal
services for the indigent, clinics that provide service to
criminal defendants, and I don't know what else. But there's
just no end to social-type causes in which law students are
involved today.

That, of course, takes away from their commitment to
studying. We were very concerned about getting jobs. It was a
very competitive school, and we were very concerned about
getting the best grades we could, because that was your entry
into the profession. That is still true today, that law
schools are competitive and students are concerned about grades
and about getting jobs. But their commitment to those

objectives is certainly qualified by their commitment to social
causes that they're also pursuing.

So, they're not as single-minded about studying, going to
class, studying, learning, and doing well on exams as we were
then. It was quite a different time.

Hicke: Since we're on that, can you see a change between the
seventies, eighties, and the nineties?

Schwarzer: Oh, I think so. I think that law students today are less

idealistic than they used to be. That's not to say that many
of them aren't still involved in a variety of social causes.
But my impression is that ever since the 1980s, they've become
much more preoccupied with earning a lot of money than they
were for a time there in between.

Now, we never thought, when were at law school, in terms
of getting rich. My idea was that if I would earn just $20,000
or $25,000 a year, that would pretty much satisfy my ambitions.
Of course, those were different dollars from what they are
today. But 1 never thought that I would earn as much money as
I ultimately did as a partner, which is still modest by present
standards.

Today, I think, since the 1980s, law students have become
very conscious of the kinds of money that partners earn in
large firms. Partly that's due to the fact that that was a
subject that was never talked about in the 1950s and sixties
until Steve Brill and The American Lawyer came along and,
through his own irresistible techniques, made information about
firm income, partner income, and generally financial data of
law firms of any size public property. Now everybody knows
what everybody else earns, and so law students have become very
conscious of that, and they're looking at what they can earn in
law firms. We didn't really think beyond just getting a job.

The down side of all of that, of course, is that as law
practice has evolved and has become much more profitable, for
some not for everybody, it has also become much more
pressurized. We can talk about that later, when we talk about
the McCutchen firm. But today's law students and young
lawyers, while they're very conscious of the money to be made,
they're also very conscious of the price that a career like
that requires them to pay. So more and more of them become
disenchanted.

We never thought about getting disenchanted by law
practice, but today that's a real factor. So there are big

differences. But, of course, we're also talking about a space
of forty-five years nearly half a century.

Hicke: But you did do some legal aid work; was that for the Legal Aid
Society?

Schwarzer: It was the Legal Aid Bureau of the Harvard Law School. That
was an autonomous operation, analogous to the law review and
something called the Board of Student Advisors, which ran the
moot court competition. It was really run by the students.
There were some organizations outside, I guess, with which we
coordinated, but I don't recall. I think the court sent
clients to the bureau, and the bureau helped take care of their
problems .

Hicke: Were you appointed or asked to do this?

Schwarzer: I think so. Yes, I think it came from the courts. But there
may have also been a Legal Aid Society in Boston or Cambridge
with which the bureau worked.

Other Activities; Admission of Women; Ames Competition

Hicke: Were there other kinds of political activity that you were
interested in?

Schwarzer: I don't think there was any political activity going on at the
time, other than just discussions. I doubt that there was a
Democratic club, a Republican club, or anything of that sort.
I have no recollection. Of course, a lot of that developed in
later years. There was an eating club that had a little house
off campus called the Lincoln's Inn Society. That was an
innocuous thing where you went and ate occasionally.

Hicke: Strictly social?

Schwarzer: Yes, that was just social. Of course, there weren't any women
there. The first women were admitted in, I believe, my second
year, in 1949 or 1950.

Hicke: The first ever?

Schwarzer: The first ever, yes, absolutely. That was a big change, and

there weren't many. In the first class, there might have been

six or eight; it was probably 1949; there were probably about

six or eight women. I remember we had an Ames Competition,

named after a former dean. It was a moot court competition.
And in the first year everybody had to join a club. Ames Clubs
had six members.

I belonged to the Cardozo Club. In the first year we
would have four rounds. We would partner. There would be
teams of two. Each one would participate in a round. And then
it went on in the second year. I remember that in the second
year we took in one of the women as a member. I think her name
was Louise Florencourt. Of course, each Ames Club had three
levels: there would be third-year students, second-year
students, and first-year students.

And then in the second year, in the fall semester, we had
again competition of teams of two. At that point it became
voluntary, and each team got a score. Based on the score, you
would qualify for the quarter finals, which were in the spring,
and then if you came outit's like the basketball
eliminations if you came out in the winning group, you could
go on to the semi-finals and ultimately the finals. The finals
in the Ames competition were very that was a real
accomplishment, and it really put you on the map.

If I remember correctly, Morris Doyle was a finalist in
the Ames Competition in his year. But I'm not sure about that;
it was many years earlier.

In the fall of my second year, when we were going through
the first round of the competition, I came down with polio. I
went to the hospital for about a week or ten days. That was
the time before the polio vaccine had come along, and it was
pretty scary. It was very painful. I worried about whether it
was going to be paralytic, but it wasn't.

They thought that there was a slight touch of paralysis
in my ankles, and I've been doing exercises ever since that
they prescribed for me. It hasn't had any effect on me, but it
did take a lot out of me. I remember that when my turn to
argue came up, after I was back in class, I gave my argument,
and the judge asked me a question. I just drew a blank; I
thought I was going to faint. I didn't have the strength to
deal with it. So I caused my team to lose out and not get into
the quarter finals, because I lost that argument.

The odds were, we were not going to get beyond the
quarter finals, but in any case that was a chance at
accomplishing something very significant, having a run at
accomplishing that: that is, winning the Ames Competition. The
finals are usually held before a justice of the Supreme

Court and other distinguished judges. It's a very big deal.
We didn't get beyond the first round of elimination, and that
was basically because of my polio attack.

Hicke: Was it a major setback for you?

Schwarzer: Well, no. I didn't have any problems as far as my grades and

class work were concerned. I think 1 may have missed two weeks
of class, something like that.

Hicke: I'm sure you weren't fully recovered for a long while.

Schwarzer: Well, it ' s a scary thing. I don't know if you've read any

biographies of FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], but he'd come
down with this terrible back pain, and you don't know what's
happening to you. They took me in the ambulance to the
hospital. I was pretty lucky; that was the only serious health
problem I ever had.

A Few More Professors

Hicke: There are a few people that you have here in your notes that
you haven't mentioned. Professor Eddie Morgan.

Schwarzer: Professor Morgan was a first-year professor who taught us

Procedure. He was a wonderful, lively, energetic person. He
was an inspirational teacher. But I can't say that I got all
that much out of that course, although, procedure ultimately
became my great interest after I became a judge. The course
didn't have much of an impact, except for his wonderful
personality. He had a way of being confusing.

Austin Scott was one of the great men around there in the
area of Trusts, but I never had him for a full course. So, I
don't know whether anything else stands out about law school,
except there was some social activity, particularly getting to
know women at Radcliffe [College], which was across the street.
Radcliffe women were attending Harvard classes, although, of
course, not at the law school. So, they were a presence, and
that was the most obvious place where you would get dates. And
it was ultimately where I met my wife.

Marriage and Family

Hicke: Her name is Anne?

Schwarzer: Anne. Her last name was Halbersleben.

Hicke: Did the Korean War affect you at all?

Schwarzer: The Korean War came along in June of 1950, which was at the end
of my second year. I had gotten a reserve commission at the
end of the war, at the end World War II.

Hicke: In the army?

Schwarzer: In Army Intelligence. So I was very conscious of the risk of
being called back. Well, just to turn back, I started going
out with Anne during my second year. And then in the summer of
1950, I visited her in her hometown, Harrisburg, Illinois,
which is pretty near the Kentucky border. We went on a tour of
Europe. I mentioned before that I was in Europe in 1950, some
kind of a student tour. It was a lot of fun. And later that
fall, I think, we became engaged.

As the Korean War became more serious and reserves were
recalled, I decided to resign my commission. I really didn't
want to go back in. I figured I had been there once, and they
didn't need to get me again. That was one of the decisions.
The other decision we made was to get married. So, we got
married in February 1951, between semesters.

Hicke: In Harrisburg?

Schwarzer: In Cambridge. That was one of the good things that we

arranged it ourselves. It was just a simple wedding. Our
parents came out. We had a few friends. And so we got married
then, and got an apartment in Boston, and lived there to the
end of the semester. My job search to that point had been
unsuccessful, but I did apply for and was appointed as a
teaching fellow at the law school.

That was a new program at the law school, in which new
graduates were selected to help first-year students with legal
writing and problem solving and so forth, meeting with them in
small sections. I thought that one of the things that I was
interested in was getting into teaching, and that might help,
it would enable me to put off the job search. I had another
year to find a job.

But I did get a job for the summer in a small San
Francisco firm, called Athearn, Chandler, & Hoffman. Anne and
I drove out--we had gotten a new car--and we drove out to
California, camping along the way. We got an apartment,
through my father, on Nob Hill, and spent the summer. I was
working there, and she was sight-seeing. She fell in love with
San Francisco. We went back in the fall and lived in
Cambridge, and I started working as a teaching fellow.

Hicke: I want to go on with that, but since we're talking about Anne,
could you tell me a little bit more about your family, your
children, when they were born?

Schwarzer: Anne grew up in Harrisburg, Illinois, which is a town of about
10,000 people. Her father was the general manager of a pretty
sizable coal company based in Chicago, Sahara Coal Company,
with mines around Harrisburg. He took it over as a bankrupt
company and turned it into a very successful and profitable
company until he retired, some twenty years ago.

She grew up there and went to high school there. Then, I
guess, having been persuaded by a high school teacher she
should go east to college, she went to Radcliffe. Again, it
wasn't too hard to get into Radcliffe because of geographical
distributionsmall town and all that although, I think she
did very well in high school. So, she went to Radcliffe in
1947; she was in the class of '51 and was a fine arts major.
We got married in February of 1951 in Cambridge, and eventually
moved to San Francisco.

Our first child, Jane, was born in December 1955. Our
second child, Andrew, was born in May of 1958. Do you want a
brief sketch of their lives?

Hicke: Yes, I would appreciate that.

Schwarzer: Jane went to school in Marin County. She went to Marin Country
Day School, and for high school to a boarding school in
Monterey: Santa Catalina School for Girls. She then went to
Middlebury College in Vermont and graduated from there, it must
have been around 1976 or 1977. She struggled through
Middlebury, made various changes in her major, but she got out.

Then she came back to San Francisco and I think decided
to go into teaching. She got a masters degree in teaching
learning-impaired children and then worked for a while in a
small private school as a teacher of learning-impaired children

in San Francisco. That was a very tough job; these children
are very difficult and often quite aggressive.

She met a fellow Middlebury graduate, Stanley Fields; he
was ahead of her. He had gotten a Ph.D. in Cambridge, England
in microbiology. They got married in 1985 in Marin County and
lived in San Francisco while he was a post-doctoral fellow at
UCSF [University of California at San Francisco] . When that
ended he became an assistant professor at the State University
of New York in Stonybrook, which had a good microbiology
department.

They have three sons, who are now ten, seven, and four.
In 1995, he was invited to develop a microbiology lab at the
University of Washington in Seattle, so that's where they live
now. His area is genetics, and I think he does a lot of work
related to the action and behavior of genes, particularly in
connection with cancer research. He has been very successful,
and I think he's one of the promising young scientists in this
country in that area of genetic research.

Our son, Andrew, also went to Marin Country Day School,
and then went to high school at Tamalpais High School in Mill
Valley. He then went to Carlton College in Minnesota, where he
did pretty well--I think he graduated cum laude--but couldn't
decide what he was going to do after that. So he drifted
around the country for a few years pursuing ideas, thinking
about what he might do, but not very well directed.

One of his problems was, I think, that at the time he
suffered from various allergies, and he tried to get away from
them. So he lived in various places. He got involved in
various things, none of which were illegal or dangerous or
anything like that. Then he decided that he would get a Ph.D.,
and he went to the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he
received a Ph.D. in American Literature two years ago.

In the meantime, he also married. He married a
physician, whom he met at Columbia, who got a job both
practicing and teaching at the Health University of Oregon in
Portland. They moved to Portland and bought a house and
settled down there. When he got his Ph.D., he started looking
around. It wasn't too easy to find teaching jobs. But he has
been teaching on a contract basis at junior colleges in the
area, of which there are a number, and primarily at Heald
College, which is a college for people who already have jobs or
have been out of school for a whilerelatively mature adults
who want to advance their education. Now he could be teaching
full-time there but is teaching somewhat less than full-time

because they recently adopted a baby in Korea. So they now
have their hands full getting their life organized to take care
of this kid; he's nine months old. But Andrew seems to be
fairly well employed; that is, I think his work is pretty
satisfactory.

Our daughter, since she got married has not worked
outside; taking care of the children is a full-time job. She
has some outside interests, mostly in music and drama. But she
pretty well devotes her life to her children.

Hicke: What's your daughter-in-law's name?
Schwarzer: Nancy Elder.

Hicke: Well, you have your family on the West Coast; you're pretty
lucky.

Schwarzer: That's right. Neither of them ever had much interest in the
law, but there was a point at which Jane went to Hastings for
one semester in a momentary lapse, I guess. She quickly
decided that law wasn't for her. [laughter] Andrew never
considered it. So, there aren't any more lawyers.

Teaching Fellowship at Harvard

Hicke: All right. Let's get back to Cambridge and your year there.

Schwarzer: I became a teaching fellow, and that was a very rewarding
experience not only getting your feet wet in the teaching
area, although we weren't teaching courses; we were basically
teaching first-year students how to deal with the technique and
the method of being a law student and a lawyer. But it made us
members of the faculty. The program was conducted by Professor
David Cavers, one of the brilliant minds at the school.

There were six or eight of us teaching fellows. So we
had a lot of close contact with the faculty. We got to know
them very well, and that was a rewarding experience.

You had a chance to look back on what you had done for
three years and digest all of this learning that had been
thrown at you for all that time and reflect on it and
assimilate it.

It wasn't too demanding, so I had time to write an
article.' I wrote it working with Professor [Benjamin] Kaplan.
That was the article which you read on wages during temporary
disability. I did a lot of research in the stacks.

Hicke: How did you pick this subject?

Schwarzer: I don't know how I picked it; maybe he and I talked about an
old case or some case that seemed to be of interest, and one
thing led to another. I have no idea how I got into it.

Hicke: The problem was what to do about an unexpected event that
wasn't covered in the contract. Is that right?

Schwarzer: I'd have to look at the article, but there were some recent

cases that determined whether a person who was employed with no
contract, that just had a job, should be paid when he or she
was out for temporary disability. For one reason or another, I
got interested in the historical background of the rule that
addressed that particular problem. And there was a rich
historical background on this question of whether persons who
had jobs were entitled to be paid while they were temporarily
disabled.

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

It went back to some of the social welfare laws that were
adopted in England in the 1500s and 1600s. I'm frank to say, I
haven't looked at that article for a long time. But it was an
interesting exercise to take a fairly innocuous legal principle
that courts were applying currently and to go back into the
history and dig up its origins and how it had developed over
time.

Actually the article mostly dealt with English law; it
was of some interest to people in England, because it was
republished in an English journal later.

It was published in the Stanford Law Review.

Initially in the Stanford Law Review, right, which would not
publish an article like that anymore. Legal scholarship, as I
think I indicated to you, has changed into a very different
kind of animal. It's much less doctrinal today and far more
interested in abstruse social or intellectual issues that are

'"Wages During Temporary Disability, 5 Stanford Law Review 30 (Dec.
1952), reprinted in 8 Industrial Law Review Quarterly (England) 12 (July
1953).

not of much interest to people who are involved in the practice
or administration of the law.

Hicke: So it's not clear, it's not--

Schwarzer: It's not doctrine, it's not doctrinal, it's much more

theoretical, abstruse, philosophical if you will, other
worldly often. A lot of it is something that people refer to
as story telling. Story telling is a very big deal among legal
academics today. Somehow they derive an understanding of
society and the way that society works and is regulated by
relating the stories of people. I don't think I could go much
further into it than that. But that is a large part of legal
scholarship today, and a recognized part.

One of our fellow teaching fellows was a person named
Clyde Ferguson. He was black, and there weren't more than two
or three blacks in our class. I think I can remember one other
one, if I'm not mistaken, who later became a judge in the state
court in Illinois. But that was very unusual. Clyde Ferguson
had a distinguished career ultimately became U.S. ambassador
to Uganda at the time of Idi Amin, when Uganda was a basket
case, and later became, I think, the first black law professor
on the Harvard Law School faculty. He died an untimely death.

V McCUTCHEN, DOYLE, BROWN & ENERSEN

Joining the Firm

Schwarzer: During my year there, of course, I continued to be concerned

about getting a job. Another ironic twist in the course of my
career was that nothing of particular interest had even turned
up. I had contacted the firm for which I worked during the
summer. I said, "As I understand it, you want me to come back
to work for you, and I'm happy to accept." I got a letter back
saying, "Well, there was a misunderstanding. We didn't make
you an offer, and at the moment, we really don't have a need
for anybody." I was a little taken aback. But shortly
thereafter, one of the partners of the McCutchen firm came and
interviewed me.

Hicke: Which partner interviewed you?

Schwarzer: It was George Harnagel, who was a partner in the Los Angeles
office. He evidently knew something of me, since I had made
some calls on offices while I was out here during the summer,
not really interviewing but just meeting people. I remember
meeting some people at McCutchen and going out to lunch with
them.

He made me an offer. The irony is he made me an offer to
work in San Francisco, although he was from Los Angeles. But
at that point, because I didn't seem to have anything better,
and my efforts to try to find something in the teaching area
were also unsuccessful, I accepted. So that's how I came to be
hired by the McCutchen firm. It was then McCutchen, Thomas,
Matthew, Griffiths & Greene, and its major clients were mostly
San Francisco-based corporations: Shell Oil Company, Kern
County Land Company, the Western Pacific Railroad Company, and
a number of shipping companies. The firm also represented some
of the leading families and their property interests.

The Firm in 1952

Schwarzer: I came to work in July of 1952.

Hicke: Can I ask you how much they offered you in the way of pay?

Schwarzer: Oh, yes, well, I don't think we had any negotiations. The

starting salary for new graduates was $300 at that time; that
was pretty standard in all the law firms. They paid me $350,
because that's what I had been getting as a teaching fellow,
and they gave me credit for having been out one year.

Of course, they thought that was pretty good pay, because
the principal partners at McCutchen at that time had gone to
work around the time of the Depression. I think that Mr.
Doyle, when he got started, got $50 a month, or something like
that.

Hicke: Sometimes people even worked just for the experience.

Schwarzer: Yes right. So, I came to work one day after John Hauser,

who is still there, and he and I were friends throughout the
whole time. For a while, because he was my senior by one day,
he would always get the better office. Until once, for some
reason he agreed that we would flip, and 1 won, and I got the
better office. That was many years later.

Hicke: I talked to him; he told me it was a corner office.

Schwarzer: That's right. It was in the International Building; it was a
wonderful office. Do you know that building? It's 601
California Street; it's now overshadowed by the Bank of America
across the street and other high-rise buildings around there.
It was designed by Anshen and Allen. It was the only building
ever built in San Francisco by architects who really came up
with an elegant design. It was an elegant building. It was
beautifully built. It was only twenty stories, I think.

I was responsible for the move. This is a little out of
sequence. We moved there in 1960. I had just become a
partner, and because I had always had an interest in space and
interior decoration, they put me in charge of it. I still have
this clock over there [indicates] that was a gift they gave me

to memorialize what I had done. It was a very low-key design,
with walnut and dark brown carpets, nothing like what you see
now. It wasn't glitzy at all, but it was comfortable. It was
a pleasure to work there.

I worked there until I went on the bench, and at about
the same time the firm moved to the Embarcadero Center. And I
did have this lovely corner office.

Hicke: Where were they located when you first came?

Schwarzer: They were in the Balfour Building, which is still there. It's
an old building, but it's been refurbished, and it's still a
good location. They had two floors--! believe the 14th and
15th floors. Partners were on the 15th floor, and the library
and the associates were on the 14th floor. When we came, the
firm was just beginning to go into a generational change. The
generation of leaders who were then still the leaders of the
firm were first, Crawford Greene. Greene was really the senior
of the name partners; he had been there longer than anybody
else. He had actually worked for Mr. [Edward J.] McCutchen,
who had died in 1933. He came into the firm working for Mr.
McCutchen, and because of his connections and his stature,
really developed the firm.

Then the four other senior partners joined the firm
later, around the early 1920s. Mr. Thomas, Fred Thomas, came
in; his principal client at the time was Shell Oil Company.
Mr. [Allan P.] Matthew, who came in 1918, had been with the
Interstate Commerce Commission, and was a railroad lawyer. He
represented a number of railroads, including at the time the
Western Pacific Railroad Company, in a big case. Mr. [Farnham
P.] Griffiths had come in at about the same time; 1 he was
primarily an admiralty lawyer, represented a lot of shipping
lines .

So those were the four leaders in the firm. Then the
person immediately under those four people was James Adams, who
had come to work in 1920 after graduating from Harvard, and was
probably the most brilliant lawyer in the firm. He had worked
for Mr. McCutchen. At the time, his principal work was
defending Shell Oil Company in a large antitrust case against
the West Coast Oil Companies.

Then there was a group of partners who had come in around
War World II and became partners after the war: Robert Brown,

'He had actually been employed in 1913 and became a partner in 1919.

Gerald Trautman, Philip Ray, Brent Abel, and Gordon Weber--
actually Weber became a partner a little later. I think those
were the partners in San Francisco, and Los Angeles was pretty
autonomous, so I won't go into that. The principal partners
there were Harold Black, George Harnagel, Bill Shea, and Phil
Verleger.

Hicke: Was that a separate profit center?

Schwarzer: No. Financially, the results were pooled and profit

allocations were made in a unitary way. So everybody was
evaluated at the same time against each other. But they had
their own practice, and that's another story that we can talk
about when we get to the 1960s.

Then there were some senior associates, who had been
passed over in the partnership process. There were three of
them. One of them was Hazel Flagler, who was a very good
corporate lawyer who had come from New York. This was a clear
case where a lawyer did not become a partner because she was a
woman. Nobody could conceive of a woman being a partner in the
law firm.

Hicke: When did she join the firm?
Schwarzer: During the war.
Hicke: And they kept her?

Schwarzer: Oh, there was no question about it. She was very valuable, and
doing excellent work. There was one other partner of the
postwar class, that was Owen Jameson.

Declining Practice of the Firm

Schwarzer: Now, when you look at it with the benefit of hindsight, you

could see that the foundations for the firm's practice at that
point were destined to crumble. And they did crumble. The
Shell Oil Company moved out of San Francisco, and the antitrust
case was ultimately disposed of. The admiralty business,
although always a part of the firm's business even today,
shrunk with the coming of radar and larger vessels and
containers. There weren't a lot of collisions anymore, and the
business declined greatly.

Mr. Greene was a great business-getter; he had great
connections; he was very social. A lot of his business came
from old families in the San Francisco area. In those
families, with succeeding generations, their wealth became
dispersed, and so they were no longer significant sources of
business.

To back up a bit: I told you about Adams, but I didn't
mention the people that came during the Depression--Doyle and
[Burnham] Enersen.

Schwarzer: I mentioned that because one of the major clients that Mr.

Greene had was the Kern County Land Company. In talking about
the different levels of the partners, I neglected to mention
Doyle and Enersen, both of whom had come during the Depression.
Brown and Trautman and Ray came in the late thirties and became
partners after the war. Jameson about the same time. Also
John Parker, who headed the probate practice, who had started
as an office boy for the firm in 1906. Russell Mackey was an
admiralty partner. Robert Lipman was another partner admitted
during the war.

And then I mentioned the postwar additions--Abel and
Weber, and Walker Lowry was another one. That, I think was
pretty much the group of partners. I was starting to say that
the foundations of the business, looking back now at the
business of the senior partners, were starting to crumble
slowly. That process accelerated later. I mentioned Shell
moving out. Kern County Land Company was still significant.
The railroads were bringing their business in-house, and there
wasn't much railroad business as we moved into the 1950s. The
admiralty business declined.

Major Changes in the Firm Begin, 1958

Schwarzer: So, looking back now, it's clear that the position of the four
senior partners, who were also well along in years, was not
going to secure the long-term business of the firm. Mr.
Greene, to his credit, had the wisdom to know that there was a
time for a generational change. In 1958 all the seniors
retired, the firm changed its name to McCutchen, Doyle, Brown,
and Enersen, and those three partners then became the senior
partners in the firm, shortly to be augmented by Gerald

Trautman, when the firm's name was changed around 1960 to
McCutchen, Doyle, Brown, Trautman, and Enersen.

flicker So there were three and then four?

Schwarzer: Yes, because of course, McCutchen died in 1933.

So when the firm's name changed in 1958, the business was
beginning to change significantly. Doyle's major client was
U.S. Steel, which still had a big operation on the West Coast
and a lot of litigation, including at least one large antitrust
case. Brown's business was primarily Stanford University and
privately owned water companies on the peninsula. Enersen 's
business was primarily the Kern County Land Company. And
Trautman' s business was, to a large extent, transportation
business that he had inherited from Mr. Matthewprincipally ,
Greyhound and then some other litigation business. No single
significant client at that time.

So the firm was undergoing change. And looking back now,
the impression you have is of a very conservative, conventional
firm that placed its priorities strictly on quality work as
opposed to business getting. That lasted until recent years.
Since the departure of Crawford Greene, who was a very
accomplished, and aggressive, and energetic, and successful
business-getter--today we would say rainmakerthere were no
partners in the firm who felt that it was necessary to
aggressively go out and get business.

This is kind of a crude way of putting it, but that's
what it came down to. They were happy to receive it, to have
people come. But they weren't going to go out after it. One
of the great weaknesses of the firm, for example, was it did
not represent a bank. When you represent a bank, you not only
have the business of the bank, but you have invariably contacts
with businesses and great opportunities to attract business.

I think we represented the Bank of Montreal, which has
nothing but a little branch in San Francisco of the Canadian
Bank, which produced virtually nothing. So the foundations of
the firm's business were not very strong.

The 1960s and 1970s

Schwarzer: In the 1960s, they grew even weaker. The Kern County Land

Company, which was a major client, was absorbed or purchased by
Occidental Petroleum Company and left the city. Shell was
gone. The railroad business was gone. Stanford was still a
large client, although not for too much longer.

There were opportunities for the firm to develop
corporate business. For example, Brown represented Hewlett-
Packard in its early days. But from my observation, the firm
was essentially laid-back. They had made little effort to
encourage the businesses with which they had contacts to bring
all of their business to them.

Hicke: It sounds like the old, gentlemanly type of firm.

Schwarzer: It was a gentlemanlyvery gentlemanly operation. Excellent

work. But it had a weak foundation in local business, when you
compared it, say, to Pillsbury, which represented Safeway and
the telephone company and Standard Oil, just to mention a few,
and to Brobeck, which represented a large bank and other large
companies .

By not representing banks, by not representing on a
regular basis underwriters the securities business was very
weak, always has been, still is the firm's corporate
department was never effectively developed.

So, what saved the firm? Well, what saved the firm was
essentially that Morris Doyle had acquired a reputation as a
premier litigator, and he was well known around the country.

The firm became a lawyer ' s-lawyer firm. We didn't work
for companies; we worked for other law firms, who referred
litigation business to us. That became the backbone of the
firm's work. There were exceptions, but generally speaking
that is true. One of the largest cases that we had was the
Mono County litigation that Morris Doyle handled, which came to
him because of his family connection to Mono County and went on
for years. It was litigation over taxation of the water
resources that had been acquired by the Los Angeles
Metropolitan Water District and went on for many years and
generated large fees.

The firm did perfectly well, and of course, during that
period of time, as the change was taking place in the 1960s and
seventies, nobody knew how much money other firms were making.

Firms weren't making the kind of profit, and they weren't
charging hourly rates of the kind that we've seen since then.
What held the firm together during that entire period was, 1
think, that all of us as partners felt that we were getting
paid more than we ever thought we would, more than we ever
expected, and there wasn't any reason not to be satisfied with
the way it was operating.

But it clearly had its weaknesses, and when I left in
1976, the profession, the practice of law was at a turning
point and was about to move into another generational change.
That was the time when law practice became very aggressive and
business-getting became very aggressive. There was a real
question, I think, about how well the firm would do in that
environment. But fortuitously, a new generation of young
lawyers came along to take over the leadership, although the
name wasn't changed, and has done very well. The firm is
holding its own.

That is kind of a superficial, brief historical
perspective of the way the firm functioned during the period
from '52 to '76. We can go into some more details, but this is
the way I see it.

Hicke: I don't know if this is too much to take on, but can you tell
me a little bit about who made the decisions, and how that
changed?

Schwarzer: Until 1958, the decisions were made by the name partners.
Hicke: In a meeting?

Schwarzer: Of course, the firm had regular firm meetings. How often? I
think for a while every week, then maybe every two weeks, all
the partners met. But the decision, for example, to change the
firm's name and to turn over the leadership was made by Greene,
and Thomas, Matthew, and Griffiths. But it was Greene's
initiative, and he persuaded the others to go along, which
wasn't all that easy, because the tradition in those days was
that lawyers didn't retire. Firms didn't have a retirement
age.

This has been the undoing of a good many law firms: that
the old men stuck around and tried to hang on to the business,
and suddenly they would find that their clients felt they were
too old and had gone somewhere else. Even McCutchen did not do
as well as it should have in passing control of the business
down to the next generation of partners. That's the key to
survival of a law firm or to growth, for that matter.

But it's also very difficult, because you have to train
clients to accept the new lawyers before it's too late.
Crawford Greene had the foresight to see the necessity for
doing that. I'm not convinced that the next generation of
leaders of the firm learned that lesson or did as well as they
should have in passing the business down.

Hicke: Without a retirement system or a pension system of some kind,
the only way the older partner could have an income was to
continue to work. Is that correct?

Schwarzer: Well, yes and no. Keep in mind that they had practiced for
many years with very little income tax to pay. Income tax
didn't come in until 1916, I believe, and it was pretty modest
until World War II. Then it began to rise. So these people
had done very well for themselves, particularly Mr. Greene.
They had saved enough money so that they could live well. The
firm didn't adopt a retirement age until, I think, sometime in
the late sixties, after I became a partner. We then adopted a
retirement plan. And there was a plan by which the firm
required people to retire at seventy, required them to retire
partially at sixty-eight, and guaranteed them an income on
retirement equal to 1 percent of the firm's net income. Later
on that was modified or eliminated when the government changed
the tax laws and there was something called a A01(k) plan. It
was 401 (k) which allowed a lot of people like partners in the
firm to take up to $30,000 or $40,000 in pre-tax money each
year and invest it and defer the tax on it. So you could put a
lot of money aside. And then also there was the Keough Plan.
So there were ways in which you could provide for your
retirement. And people were paid well enough.

The retirement age has stuck, except in the case of a few
exceptional people like Doyle and one or two other people, the
firm made contracts with them so they would continue to work on
a counsel basis after their retirement age and get paid for it,
in order for the firm not to lose the benefit of their services
and their contacts with clients.

Things have changed a great deal in the law firm business
over the last forty-five years. It's a very different place,
and a very different operation. It has basically become a
business. I remember thinking, when I became a partner, about
how unbusinesslike we were about many of our practices; that we
weren't doing well enough in collecting the monies we had
advanced for clients; that some people were putting in only
nominal amounts of hours, while other people were working very
hard.

I used to think that really ought to be fixed, and I
think I was kind of a curmudgeon about these things. But now
when I look at law firms, in which all these things have been
fixed, I'm not so sure I want to practice there, because we had
a wonderful, collegial atmosphere, and it's less collegial now.
In those days, it would be extraordinary for any partner to
leave a law firm. We had two people leave.

Phil [Philip] Ray became general counsel of the Commerce
Department in the Eisenhower Administration. I don't think he
ever came back, but if he came back, it was only for a matter
of months; then he went to practice somewhere else. People
just didn't take kindly to the idea that the partners would
leave; it was a lifetime marriage.

Hicke: You're not allowed to move to another firm?

Schwarzer: Well, he never did go to another firm.

Hicke: Oh, I know, I didn't mean him, but I mean the--.

Schwarzer: That didn't happen at McCutchen until the middle seventies, I

think. One new partner went to work for another law firm. The
other partner that left in the early sixties was Walker Lowry,
who was kind of a free spirit anyway; he left to write novels.
He never practiced law again.

Hicke: Way ahead of John Grisham?

Schwarzer: Except his never sold. [laughter] I'm not sure if they were
ever even published. He just wanted to write. So it was very
stable. Now, associates, of course, left. People generally
were not fired--only in extreme cases. People were told that
their prospects weren't very good, prospects of becoming a
partner, and they might want to look somewhere else. In the
1950s until 1960, the firm was very slow about taking in new
partners .

Gordon Weber was taken in in the middle of the fifties;
he was a tax partner. I forgot another older partner who was
there, who was Henry Costigan, who was a tax partner; he didn't
play a significant role. So the firm took in an additional tax
partner. Another partner, who was taken in in 1957, I think,
was Crawford Greene's son, A. Crawford Greene, Jr., who is dead
now.

Other San Francisco firms were doing a little better.
But it's understandable that the firm would be stodgy about
this, because I think that they didn't think all that much

about the prospects of expansion in business. I think they saw
the firm's business as being stable but not expanding. Of
course, the 1950s was not a time of expansion anyway. The
economy was pretty much on dead center, and they were stodgy.

But something happened, because in 1960, the decision was
made to take in six new partners. I think the reason probably
was that some good people had left--Peter Teige, for example, a
very smart lawyer. He left because he saw no prospects of
becoming a partner, and went to American President Lines. Two
or three other bright and able people left. I think that the
partners must have decided that they didn't want to lose this
group that was coming up. So in 1960, six of us became
partners: myself, and John Hauser, Norman Richards, Al Moormon,
Derk TeRoller, and Mortimer Smith.

How much that group added to the strength of the firm is
a debatable subject. I think that of the four, probably only
two of us really made significant contributions: John Hauser
and I. And even he and I, in my view, were not particularly
outstanding business-getters, although some people seem to
think that I did attract or hold business. John certainly has
done well. The other four were good lawyers but not strong
partners .

Ironically, three of them are dead, and died earlier than
you would expect, before they retired. One of them never
really did contribute much to the work of the firm, although he
had the capability of being a good trial lawyer. But 1960, as
it turned out, was the time when the economy began to expand,
and the 1960s were good years for law firms. The business,
mostly litigation business, grew.

Quite a number of partners were taken in during the
1960s, as somebody said at the time, not so much because they
were good but because they were needed to do the work. That's
not to say that there weren't some very good people who were
very effective lawyers, and very good business-getters. But
there were also some weak people.

Of course, the dilemma that you have in any organization
like that is that you have to make a decision when somebody has
been with you for only seven or eight years. You don't know
how they're going to develop, they haven't developed yet.
They're still unformed as professionals. And there are some
people that we admitted as partners who were marginal who just
took off and became terrific lawyers, and great contributors to
the firm.

100

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

And there are others who fell by the wayside--lack of
motivation, lack of ability, bad health, alcohol, women. So
it's a big gamble when you take in people when they're around
thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five. An awful lot of things
can happen to them, and you have to accept the fact that it is
a big risk.

With some people the firm has done enormously well, and
some have been disappointments. Now other firms obviously had
the same experience. But I'm certainly aware of how uneven the
results were of the partnership process at McCutchen.
Nevertheless, the firm has done consistently well and continues
to do so, because there were some very good people who emerged
in positions of leadership and have done a good job.

It was a complicated business, but it's a people
business. Obviously, the quality of the product you turn out,
legal services, is a very significant part of whether you fail
or succeed. But you have got to have the opportunity to turn
it out, and so you have to attract business. The quality of
work will do a lot, but it isn't going to do it all.

Well, I don't know whether that's too dim of an
appraisal, but I think the firm has emerged through some
difficult times quite well.

That's a fascinating overview of the firm. Quite interesting.
Is this a good stopping place?

Yes, I think I've said about all I have in mind at this point
about the firm generally. There probably are some other
things. They'll occur to me later.

That's fine. I think we can start next time with what kind of
an office you had and who your fellow associates were.

[Interview 4: July 21, 1997]

We're continuing this morning with the McCutchen firm. You
have some more to add to that?

I think at the time, the youngest partner was Brent Abel--you
mentioned him in your outline- -who with John Parker was running
the Probate Department. Some of the older partners, of course,
had as clients families that had been represented by the firm
for a long time. But I think Brent really developed the
probate practice.

101

Senior Associates

Schwarzer: I don't know if I mentioned that there were three senior

associates. One of them was Hazel Flager; she was the only
woman in the firm. It's interesting to look back on this. She
came out from New York during the war, and the firm took her on
because they were desperately short of lawyers. She would have
obviously never been hired if she had not come out. She was an
experienced securities lawyer, who had worked in one of the
major firms in New York.

For the rest of her career--! think she retired probably
in the early sixties she was doing securities work and she was
doing partners' work. But the question never came up that she
might be made a partner.

Then there were two other senior associates who had been
around for a long time: Charles Heimerdinger , who did probate
work, and Ray Vandervoort, who did litigation work. They were
people who had just simply been passed over, but they stayed
on. They were never, as far as I know, considered as
partnership material. But they did responsible work.

That was a situation that was the subject of a lot of
discussion over the years over whether the firm should keep on
lawyers who had been passed over for partnership. Around 1960,
I think it was pretty well accepted policy that the firm would
not do that, that if you did not become a partner in, well, say
eight, maybe nine years on the outside, you would be encouraged
to leave, and the firm would not have senior associates.

There were a number of reasons for that. One of them was
the general thought that if people weren't good enough to
become partners, they really shouldn't stay around and the
people in that position would tend to be somewhat demoralized
and lack the drive and energy and ambition that we wanted in
lawyers.

The same was true in other major firms in San Francisco.
They all had senior associates who had been passed over and had
stayed on, and they all gradually moved away from that policy.
Although, it wasn't true in every case that the people who had
been passed over were passed over because they didn't measure
up to the quality expected. In order to become a partner in a
large San Francisco firm, you had to have strong sponsorship,
and some of the associates just simply worked in peripheral
areas of the firm and never had powerful sponsorship. That was
a factor all the way through my time, and still is.

102

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

Did you have to invest assets or money?

No. The way that worked--! think it was generally true in
firms- -was that when you became a partner, some of your share
of profits for the first three years was withheld until you
came up to your share of the firm capital. Your share of the
firm capital was equivalent to the share in the profits. So if
you had a 3 percent profit share, then you would be responsible
for 3 percent of the firm's capital.

But nobody ever paid in; that wasn't required. It just
came out of profits, and people were making enough money so
that was feasible. I think that's probably the way most firms
worked, although in some it may be that some of the senior
partners contributed all the capital, and therefore basically
had all the power too. This was a more democratic way of doing
things, and it worked well.

How was your share determined?

Well, that's a whole other story,
about senior associates.

Yes, please do.

Let me just finish one thing

The irony of all this is that in the last few years three ,
four, five years the firms have grown so large and the
partnerships had grown so large that firms began to give
serious consideration again to having senior associates or
something like that, so that people could be given an
opportunity to work at the firm, and do gainful work, and make
a good living without having to enlarge the partnership that
much.

Back in the fifties, the partnerships were very small in
relation to the number of associates. But in the eighties the
firms expanded greatly, and in many firms, large firms, there
would be a one-to-one ratio of partners to associates. So most
of the firms have now developed something similar, but they
don't call them senior associates; they call them counsel.
They're basically people that are never going to be made
partners but may be doing partners' work, and are well paid but
don't share in the profits. So the wheel is sort of coming
around.

They also don't have the pressure, I guess.

Not really. I guess it depends on the individual case.

103
Profits Division

Schwarzer: Now you asked about how profits are determined. There are

different ways of doing this in different firms. In some of
the firms, a small group of senior partners pretty well
controlled that division of profits, and they ran the firm.
That was true at Pillsbury [Madison and Sutro] and at the
Brobeck firm; they were really quite autocratic firms.

But at McCutchen, it had always been the practice to have
input, at least in my time from 1960 on, it was the practice to
have input from all of the partners. So every two years or so,
a partnership review committee would be appointed of three or
four or five partners, spanning the range of practices and
ages, and so forth. They would interview every partner. Based
on the respective evaluations that they got from the different
partners, they would come up with a proposed schedule of
percentage shares.

Now, there would be a fair amount of soul searching and
negotiation, and before the proposal would be published, it
would certainly be run by the senior partners to get their
general agreement. But we never had a formula, and it's
probably still true; I'm not sure. Some of the firms do; they
had formulas based on the amount of billing that a partner did,
the amount of business that he generated, maybe hours that he
put in. Some use a lockstep system where seniority alone
determined individual shares.

But we never did that; it was a very subjective
evaluation, and although business-getting was an element, it
was only one element that people considered. I think the
dominant element was the perception of the quality of the work
of a partner by all of his other partners. It really worked
quite well. We didn't have partners leave because they were
disgruntled.

I think the truth was, as long as I was there, every one
of us felt that we were making much more money than we ever
thought that we would, and people were satisfied with their
compensation. Now, that may have changed, because in the last
few years, lawyers' income has risen enormously, and the
expectations have risen probably more than the income. But
during the time that I was there, I can only think of four
partners who left the firm, and each one had distinct reasons.
We can talk about those, if you want to talk about that now.

104

Hicke: Yes, but first I want to ask a couple of more questions.
Everybody knew how much everybody else was making?

Schwarzer: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Hicke: And the other thing was, when you made partner, your first

determination of the share, did they tell you what it would be
when they offered you the partnership?

Schwarzer: They told us what we would get. I can't remember for sure, but
I think when I started, my compensation was something like
$110,000 or $120,000, and some part of that was withheld, and
that seemed quite astronomical to me. Of course, that was
thirty-seven years ago, and I don't get paid much more than
that as a district judge today. [laughter]

Hicke: Expectations have lowered, not risen.

Schwarzer: Yes. And I guess there's one other thing about percentages.
One of the determining factors, I think, about a law firm's
success was the spread between what the youngest partner got
and what the most senior partners received. I think the
McCutchen firm was always very good about that that the senior
partners were not greedy. They obviously got quite a bit more,
but nobody ever felt that they were greedy at the expense of
the partners at the lower levels.

In some firms that wasn't true. I think in the Brobeck
firm, for example, until they had a palace revolution sometime
in the seventies, the senior partners really took the lion's
share of the profits. And that was very damaging. I think
that was true of Chickering & Gregory, which ultimately self-
destructed because it didn't bring younger partners along. I
think we were very good about that.

There was, of course, always some unhappiness about some
people who other partners thought had disappointed their
expectations, who didn't perform as we had hoped. You don't
know how a person is going to develop as a law partner when you
take them in at age thirty-five or thirty-six, something like
that. Some of them grew and became wonderful lawyers, and
great partners, and some of them declined and contributed very
little.

It was always touchy to reduce people's percentages or to
have them falling behind their contemporaries. But it
happened, and it had to be done. There were people who fell by
the wayside, and ultimately there were three or four people
where the firm simply worked out an arrangement to retire them,

105

and continued to pay them something. It was cheaper to retire
them and pay them an annuity than to keep them on as partners.
And some died.

Partners Who Left

Hicke: Were you going to talk individually about the ones that left?

Schwarzer: Yes, I can do that, to the best of my recollection. One of the
earliest departures was Phil Ray, about whom I spoke before.

Walker Lowry was the closet thing to a hippie--an early
hippie--that we had in the partnership. He was a brilliant
person, very literate and literary, marvelous brief writer, a
very good trial lawyer, but intellectually, he was way beyond
law practice, and he ultimately left in the 1960s to write
novels. He did write one or two, but to my knowledge they were
never published. I think he went to live in Spain for a while,
and he died after a while, as did Phil Ray.

Hicke: He was ahead of his time writing novels.

Schwarzer: Yes, that's right. But these weren't the kinds of novels that,
say Richard North Patterson has written, who was a partner in
the law firm for a while after I had left.

The third person was Gerald Trautman, and that's quite a
story, and we'll touch on it in different contexts as we go
along. He had been doing a lot of work for the Greyhound
Corporation, and he was persuaded by Frederick Ackerman, the
chairman of the board, with whom he had a very close working
relationship, and who wanted to retire, to leave to become
chairman of Greyhound. So he moved first to Chicago and then
later to Phoenix to become the chairman of the Greyhound
Corporation. He had been my principal mentor and sponsor. I
took over much of his work when he left.

The fourth person that I can remember was a young partner
named Bruce Vanyo, who left sometime in the seventies to go to
work for Wilson, Sonsini. I'm sure he thought that his
opportunities there were better, and they undoubtedly turned
out that way, because that became far and away the most
profitable law firm in this area. So he had a lot of
foresight. And he's done very well down there.

106

Offhand, I can't think of others; there may have been
others, but during the time I was there, we had a very good
record of no losses of partners. It was quite a cohesive law
firm. Those are the only examples that I can remember. In
addition, there were several partners who retired early by
mutual agreement.

Brent Abel

Hicke: We didn't get too far with Brent Abel. You just started to

talk about him; I don't know if you have more to say about him.
I think I mentioned that we'd like to interview him at some
point, so a little background on him might be good.

Schwarzer: We became quite close friends. One of the circumstances that
led to that was it was the firm's practice to have parties on
the fortieth anniversary of a partner's having been admitted to
partnership. They were wonderful parties. They were then held
at the Bohemian Club. You can imagine trying to have a law
firm party at the Bohemian Club today. It would cause a great
furor.

We had parties for Mr. Greene and Mr. Matthews and Mr.
Griffiths and Mr. Brown and Mr. Enersen. We put together a
little group of people, of which Brent really was the leader,
to put on skits and songs at these parties. So that's how we
became quite friendly. In addition to that, he and I were the
hiring committee for a few years and did a lot of the travel to
interview at law schools and, I think, for a while had the
major part in hiring new associates.

He had an interesting history. He served in the navy,
and was the captain of a destroyer which rammed a German
submarine and captured it. That was the only time in naval
history that an American ship captured a enemy submarine. He
became famous for that. He developed the Probate Department,
but there was always an argument in the firm over whether the
Probate Department carried its own weight. I don't have an
answer to that, but it did not keep up. It couldn't keep up.

Hicke: You mean profit-wise?

Schwarzer: Profit-wise, with the Litigation Department.

107

Morris Doyle

Schwarzer: Morris Doyle, as I told you, had acquired a national reputation
as a trial lawyer. Probably, the first case that gave him
national exposure that I'm aware of was an antitrust against
U.S. Steel, brought by Independent Iron Works. It was going on
in the 1950s.

It gave him very prominent exposure, even though the case
was ultimately dismissed on motion and never went to trial.
But that and his other activities and his personal charisma as
a trial lawyer really put him on the map, and that brought
quite a bit of business to us from eastern law firms. With the
growth of litigation in the late fifties and early 1960s, it
would be inevitable that firms would come to us, and as we
became better known as litigating lawyers, more business came
our way.

I guess another major case, which he discussed in his
oral history, was the Owens Valley water rights litigation
against the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water District. That was
a huge case and gave him a lot of publicity. He was very
successful in that case.

So there were some of those cases that helped put the
firm on the map. Because Mr. Matthew was a very well-known
transportation lawyer, railroads and other transportation
companies came to the firm with their litigation. They all had
in-house lawyers, but they came to the firm with litigation.

Robert Brown; The Gentlemanly Practice of Law

Hicke: Can you tell me anything about Robert Brown?

Schwarzer: He was primarily a corporate lawyer. His clients were

primarily water companies down on the Peninsula, and Stanford
University, which the firm had represented for a long time. He
was well connected on the peninsula and early on had a
connection with Hewlett-Packard. He was a brilliant lawyer but
was probably typical of the firm's traditional attitude of not
going after law business.

I think there were people in the firm who felt that the
firm could have become general counsel for Hewlett-Packard.
That could have been a major client, but it never developed
because of the passive attitude of the senior partners who were

108

not interested in aggressively pursuing business as, say,
Pillsbury and Brobeck did, for example.

Hicke: Does this policy of staying aloof from pursuing business, is
that a personal characteristic of some of the leaders, or is
that some sort of corporate culture of the firm?

Schwarzer: Well, traditionally lawyers sat in their office and waited for
clients to come. You didn't call anybody; you didn't go push
yourself forward. And that tradition was very much the
McCutchen culture. But there were always, obviously, lawyers
that were considerably more aggressive, and the lawyers that
built the large firms in the city were more aggressive.

I think the success of McCutchen was attributable to its
reputation as very good and careful and dependable and ethical
lawyers. But they were not as successful at getting business
as they might have been. I think, from my perspective,
probably the partner who did the most to develop his own line
of business was Gerald Trautman, who worked hard to develop the
Greyhound connection. That led to quite a lot of work, not
only Greyhound but also the representation of Lucky Lager
Brewing Company, which was then the largest brewing company in
the West, which is another colorful story.

And it is only fair to say that being less aggressive
than it might have been, the firm was probably also a happier,
more collegial place to work.

Schwarzer: Of course, that attitude is gone now, since the time I left.

The firm, like all other firms, aggressively pursues business.

Early Days As An Associate

Working for Robert Lipman

Hicke: This has been a good overview. Now let's get back to your

first days as an associate. Do you remember your first day at
the firm?

Schwarzer: I remember it quite well. I remember having trouble finding
the building.

109

Hicke: You hadn't been there?

Schwarzer: Yes, I did interview there one time, but I wasn't sure where it
was. I do remember confusing the Balfour Building with the
Russ Building, but 1 did find it. I think I reported to Gerald
Trautman and was assigned one of the cubicles off the library.
Just a cubicle. I remember my first assignment was working for
one of the older partners, Mr. [Robert L.] Lipman, who was a
probate partner but also did a variety of other things. He had
been an associate for a long time but became a partner during
the war.

He was working for California Water Service Company,
interpreting the company's rights under a water service
contract in light of provisions of the California Constitution.
I do remember writing the same memo over and over and over
again until he was finally satisfied, which was a very good
exercise. It was the kind of exercise that I put my law clerks
through and I used to put my associates through. [laughter]
So I worked on that for a long time.

Offices

Schwarzer: The firm was a very staid, genteel firm whose offices pretty
much looked down at the heels. All the offices needed paint
jobs. It was a pretty run-down place, but as you might expect
had an old-fashioned lawyer's office look.

Hicke: Which floor?

Schwarzer: The partners, for the most part, were on the fifteenth floor
and the associates were on the fourteenth floor. There was
quite a division. Early on, I remember going up the elevator
and running into Mr. Greene, who was really the senior partner,
had a very large office, and was quite an intimidating
presence.

He started talking to me and had me introduce myself and
asked me to come up. I remember talking to him for a while.
It was quite an occasion to meet the senior partner. It was a
very hierarchical firm. You didn't call partners by their
first name, at least not for a long time. I didn't call Mr.
Doyle by his first until he told me to after I became a
partner. It was quite formal. You didn't walk around with
your coat off, and you didn't go out on the street without a

110

hat. Somebody told us that gentlemen don't go out without
hats.

Bar Examination and Bernard Witkin

Schwarzer: I can tell you about some other early work that I did. I don't
have any other particular impression about showing up there for
work in July, 1952. I guess the first thing I did was take off
a month to study for the bar exam.

Hicke: Which you took in August?

Schwarzer: In October.

Hicke: Did you study at home or at the library?

Schwarzer: I think I studied in the library, and I probably also studied
at home. Everybody was scared to death, and they still are,
about failing the bar exam.

Hicke: A lot do.

Schwarzer: Yes, but you shouldn't fail it if you went to a good law school
and did reasonably well there. I went to the lectures at
night. The lectures then were given by Bernard Witkin, which
seems hard to believe in light of the status as a law guru he
later achieved. He was teaching the course.

Hicke: He pretty much wrote the book, literally.

Schwarzer: Well, that's right, at that time. The other night I was

talking to his widow and told her how I remembered getting his
books. There were two volumes, blue-bound volumes; that was
the whole of Witkin, and that's what we used to study for the
Bar. And now there are I don't know how many volumes of
Witkins; it must be in the twenties, an enormous operation,
huge set of books. But he was just getting started.

Hicke: What was he like?

Schwarzer: Oh, he was excellent. He was a great lecturer and very witty.
It wasn't bad going to the lectures at all; it was enjoyable.

Hicke: That's quite an art, I would think, if he was able to make that
review so interesting.

Ill

Schwarzer: Yes. Bar reviews can be pretty dreary.

Partners and Other Associates

Hicke: I also want to hear about the other associates you worked with.

Schwarzer: Well, let's see. John Hauser came at the same time I did. And
then there were some associates who had been there for a few
years; these were people whose law school educations had been
interrupted by the war, and they graduated in '48 or '49.

Peter Teige was one, a very bright and able person. Jim
Oakes, was an associate, but he shortly left to go back to New
York, and ultimately became the chief judge of the Second
Circuit Court of Appeals. George Blackstone and Lewis Hamlin
were there, and there were some others. I mentioned these
people, because they all left the firm some time in the 1950s
to pursue successful careers. They were all people who
probably should have become partners, but the prospects just
did not look very good for associates in the light of the
policy the firm was following, which seemed like kind of a no-
growth, no-expansion policy.

Peter Teige, for example, went out to become general
counsel of American President Lines. George Blackstone became
a partner at Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe.

Sometime during that time, I remember having a
conversation with Walker Lowry, who encouraged me to leave the
firm, because he said that in order to become a partner in the
firm, you had to be in what he called the chain of command.
And he pointed out that I was in the chain of command that was
headed by Mr. Matthew, who did regulatory type of litigation.
Under him was Gerald Trautman, and then under him was an
associate named Frederic Sawyer, who was about one year, I
think, my senior. And he said, "So you're never going to make
it, because Sawyer will be the next person to become a
partner. "

I then talked to Mr. Adams, who was one of the senior
partners and a very able, highly intelligent person. He
encouraged me to stay. The irony of that was I became a
partner in 1960, and Sawyer didn't become a partner for a good
many years later and ultimately retired early from the firm.

112

But there were people, obviously, in the partnership
during the 1950s who realized that the firm was going to have
to change, that it would have to make opportunities for younger
associates if it was going to hold them, and it would have to
grow. That all came to a head about 1958, I think, when the
firm leadership changed, and it was probably all due to Mr.
Greene's foresight and his determination to put the interests
of the firm ahead of his own.

Shell Oil Company Case

Hicke:
Schwarzer ;

Hicke:

Schwarzer;

Now we have to back up a little bit: your first assignment.

I think the first major job was working with Mr. Adams on the
West Coast antitrust case, in which the firm represented Shell
Oil Company. All the major oil companies were sued by the
government for price-fixing in violation of the antitrust laws.
This was the classic antitrust case, which involved
interminable churning of papers, huge amounts of discovery and
motion practice.

But as far as I can remember, I didn't get into the
discovery side of it. I was always writing memoranda and
thinking about the theoretical aspects of applying the
antitrust laws to the West Coast oil industry. I remember
writing a lot of memos and reading a lot of books about the oil
industry.

Was this just West Coast oil companies?
worldwide sort of--.

Because there was a

Well, of course, they were always getting into problems over
alleged conspiracies, the oil companies. And there was a lot
going on. They obviously worked together in various ways. But
this concerned price-fixing that affected the prices at the
pump on the West Coast.

In those days, of course, there were more oil companies
and they were more regional. For example, Standard Oil of
California was a West Coast oil company, not an international
oil company. Some on the West Coast also had operations
elsewhere, but Union Oil, for example, was just a California
company. Texaco, I think, had operations elsewhere, and I
think there was then a company called Tidewater Associated,
which was a West Coast company.

113

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

It was just a regional market, and the charges concerned
regional activities. It was a civil case, not a criminal case,
It went on and on for a long time, long after I got out of it.
In fact, I think the firm continued to work on it into the
1960s. I think that Mr. Doyle took that case over later.

Eventually, Shell did more and more of its own work, and
I think our work for Shell pretty much came to an end by the
late 1960s. I did some work for them in connection with labor
relations, but it was very little.

I always thought it was interesting that at the same time all
this antitrust was going on, the government was trying to
persuade the international oil companies to form a cartel to
extract the oil in Iran.

Oh, sure. Well, I think the attitude toward international
operations was quite different, because that involved also
American foreign policy.

Yes, that's true. So what work were you doing?
were writing memos .

You said you

I was just thinking and writing abstract memos about the
antitrust laws and their application to the operations of the
oil companies. I wrote them for Mr. Adams, and I doubt that
anything ever came of them. He just wanted me to think about
it and educate myself. The idea, I guess, was to develop
theories for defending the action. But I think ultimately it
was settled. It never went to trial.

Hicke:

I remember doing some work for Mr. Thomas for a client
whom he represented, the California Almond Growers Association.
I don't know what I did. I know I had to go to Sacramento one
time, and I decided it would save time if I drove my car up,
which I did. Then when I put in for reimbursement, he called
me in, and he said that I could have taken the bus for a
fraction of what it cost to drive my car. Well, it's an
illustration of the thinking of the law firm: they were
preoccupied with things of that sort.

But also not realizing that your time was involved.

Schwarzer: Yes, of course.

Stewart Hopps Case

Schwarzer: The first big case that I remember being involved in was also
with Mr. Adams. We were asked by a law firm in Providence,
Rhode Island called Edwards & Angell to pursue a man named
Stewart Hopps, who had been the president of the Rhode Island
Insurance company- -the company was a client of Edwards &
Angell--and he had basically bankrupted the company. It was
believed that he had made off with large amounts of money that
belonged to the company. I think he had a history of
defrauding companies.

Hicke : He was an officer of the company?

Schwarzer: He was the president of the Rhode Island Insurance Company.

Hicke: Yes, I thought that's what you said, but I find hard to believe
that somebody would hire him if they knew his background.

Schwarzer: It's not hard to believe. Insurance companies attract

fraudulent operators like honey attracts bees. Just read the
paper today look at Prudential, for example, or Bankers Trust
Company. Where there's a large amount of money around or to be
had, dishonest people will appear, and they always seem to find
ways of perpetrating schemes without being caught, at least for
a while.

Hicke:

I don't know that there was any more fraud then than
there is now. I rather doubt that there was more then. But in
any case, Stewart Hopps was fired, and he moved out to
Belvedere [California] , and he built this extraordinarily
expensive, elegant mansion. Because he was out here, Rhode
Island Insurance Company decided to sue him out here for breach
of fiduciary duties, theft, and misappropriation.

I remember that my wife and I were just about to take off
for the Fourth of July holiday when the company decided that
they wanted the case started, right then and there. I remember
canceling our trip--I think it was in '55--and getting all the
papers ready to be served. And what struck me then was that
you learn a lot of law in law school, but you don't learn
simple things like how do you get a summons, and how do you
serve a complaint and what are the little technical details
that are involved in bringing a lawsuit. It was a nightmare.
I think I lost a lot of sleep and worried a great deal before
we finally got those papers served. It was a very elaborate
complaint .

Which forms to fill out, I suppose, is a problem.

115

Schwarzer: Yes, and how do you get a summons? And what's the proper form
of service? Those were the kinds of things that I didn't know
anything about, should have but didn't.

Hicke: How could you know unless somebody showed you?

Schwarzer: Well, you know, that's not what law schools are for. But on
the other hand, when you get out of law school, it would be
nice if you could be prepared to do some of these simple
things. But anyway, I learned. That case got us involved in a
lengthy campaign of pleading technicalities, motions,
discovery, which as far I can recall got nowhere.

Hopps was represented by Jake Ehrlich, who was probably
the premier criminal defense lawyer at that time in San
Francisco, and maybe the most flamboyant. He was assisted by
Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe. Of course, the fact that
Hopps would retain Ehrlich sent a kind of message that he
recognized he was in serious trouble. We were in the Superior
Court in Marin County in San Rafael.

I remember spending a whole day arguing a demurrer, the
defendant's demurrer to the complaint. You don't do those
things anymore. There's no way you can afford to spend a whole
day arguing over pleading technicalities. The partner at
Edwards & Angell who was responsible for the litigation pursued
a strategy which got the case bogged down. And as I sit here
now, I don't know that any money was ever recovered. He took
lengthy depositions of Hopps and others.

One of the conclusions that I drew from that experience
was that lawyers who customarily defend cases are not very good
plaintiff's lawyers. You have a whole different mind set.
When you are a defendant, you want to cover all the bases. You
want to pursue all of the avenues that are open to you. You
want to take lengthy depositions and dig out all of the facts.

But when you're a plaintiff, you should have a much more
limited objective, and try not to get distracted but get to the
point where you have the defendant in a position where he will
feel that he's better off getting this case settled than going
on. We never had this clear-eyed vision of where we wanted to
go, how we could get there most directly in prosecuting this
case.

It cost Hopps a lot of money to defend it, but I don't
know that he ever paid anything to the company. He died
somewhere along the line, and I don't know whether he died
before the case was over or afterwards. But it never went to

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trial. It may have been settled for a modest amount, but I was
out of it by then.

Hicke: McCutchen normally took the role of defendant?
Schwarzer: Yes. Corporate law firms generally defend cases.

Schwarzer: We did have plaintiffs' cases in the Mono County litigation, of
course. I can remember some litigation we had over the
Stephenson Estate we had on a contingent fee. But those were
the exceptions.

McCloud River Railroad Company

Schwarzer: I remember the first case that I ever tried. We represented a
small lumber-railroad company, the McCloud River Railroad
Company, which served a mill near Mt . Shasta. It operated
through the timber country, but also between the Western
Pacific and the Southern Pacific railroads. It was quite a
profitable railroad, because the Western Pacific and the
Southern Pacific would pay them part of the long-haul freight
for the lumber that was being transported out of the area
operated by the McCloud River Lumber Company. They were
extending their line and building a bridge across the Burney
River.

Hicke: The railroad company?

Schwarzer: The railroad company was. They had a contract with Judson

Pacific Steel Company to put the bridge up, and it was a girder
bridge. The contract was a cost-plus contract. In the course
of construction, the contractor was hoisting one of the
girders, and the winch used to hoist it slipped, the ratchet on
the winch didn't stop it, and so the girder fell into the
river. The railroad maintained that doing it over again was
the construction company's expense. And the company said, well
it's a cost-plus contract and this is just a cost. The case
was turned over to me.

Hicke: This was when you were working for Allan Matthew?

Schwarzer: Actually Trautman was the partner who represented that railroad
company. There was no law on this point. It had never been
decided whether, on a cost-plus contract, an error which is

117

clearly due to the negligence of contractor although it could
have been an act of God, but that's a little hard to argue
since the contractor had control of the winchwhether an act
due to the contractor's negligence is reimbursable under cost-
plus contracts. It seemed to us it couldn't be.

We tried this case before a court it was not a jury
trial in Oakland. Judson Pacific [Steel Company) was
represented by a lawyer who was a very well-known and very
experienced lawyer, who had represented the steel and
construction industry for a long time. That's a rough-and-
tumble industry, and they like rough-and-tumble lawyers. He
was very experienced and aggressive, and he gave me a terrible
time .

Hicke : What was his name?

Schwarzer: Gerry Heafy.

Hicke: These are courtroom tactics that you were talking about?

Schwarzer: Oh, yes, cross examination of witnesses. I don't think we had
much discovery; in those days cases pretty much went to trial
without a lot of discovery. He would succeed in disrupting my
cross examination, and he would go after my witnesses, and he
would come up with questions for which they weren't adequately
prepared, and all that. It was a great experience.

Well, ultimately, the judge decided to rule in my favor,

and he told me to prepare findings of facts and conclusions of

law, which I did. I took them out there to sign, and the judge

looked at them and said, "You know, I still don't know whether

I'm making the right decision here or not." I was worried that
victory was going to slip away, but he did sign. That was a
wonderful trial experience.

Hicke: Did that make case law then of some sort?

Schwarzer: No, it wasn't reported, it was just a trial court decision. I
don't think they appealed. So that was the end of it. I think
we got our $50,000, or something of that sort.

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Greyhound Corporation

Schwarzer: During that time we did quite a bit of work for Western

Greyhound Lines, transportation work, and most of that was
before the public utilities commission. We would have hearings
about routes that Greyhound wanted to serve or that they would
want to abandon, or about routes that prospective competitors
wanted to serve that we would protest.

The bus business was highly regulated; you couldn't get
in without having a certificate, and Greyhound was the dominant
carrier. There wasn't much competition, and they were very
assiduous in keeping out competitors. But at the same time,
they were also very active in trying to get out of running
unprofitable routes. So from time to time, they would try to
abandon routes, for which they had to get authority. And then
there would be, of course, a lot of protests from the riders.
These cases involving applications and protests, involved lots
of witnesses.

They were great, because there was never any pre-trial
discovery. You went around and tried to find out who the
witnesses would be, and you would interview them. But usually,
all you could do was get your own witnesses and take your
chances on what the opponents would say and be prepared to
cross examine them at the hearing. The hearings would be
before hearing examiners, and they were held all over the West.

I did a lot of those, and that gave me a lot of courtroom
experience, although these were not jury cases and they were
before administrative law judges. But you learn to prepare
witnesses, to put them on the stand, to protect your own
witnesses, and to cross examine the other side.

Also, I did more of this kind of work later before other
agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the
Federal Trade Commission, but it persuaded me that you can have
perfectly good adversary proceedings without a whole lot of
discovery. That was one thing that came out of it. The other
thing that we gradually developed was the practice of
presenting the direct examination of all the witnesses in
writing, in advance, so that people would have the written
testimony, and the hearing would be basically cross examination
of the witness on the basis of his direct examination, which
you had in advance.

That was something that I ultimately instituted in my
court when I became a judge, where it was practical to do that.

119

So those were educational experiences, and they were fun. It
was lively, because you weren't dealing with past history; you
were dealing with the future.

I remember that we had a big case in Half Moon Bay over
an unprofitable bus route, which Greyhound wanted to abandon.
Lots of opposition there.

We had a hearing in Monterey and Carmel. We represented
a small bus company which was fighting to keep a competing
sight-seeing company out of there. We had all sorts of
witnesses from motels, chamber of commerce, and other people.
I think what happened was that we represented this little
company that was running a bus service and sight- seeing, and
the Gray Line wanted to come in. We were trying to keep the
Gray Line out, and, I think, at the time succeeded in doing
that.

Hicke: I thought you were working for the Gray Line.

Schwarzer: No, Gray Line was a separate company, which was later acquired
by Greyhound, and then we did work for Gray Line much later.

Hicke: Okay, thanks.

Schwarzer: So, that was some of my litigation experience, before I became
a partner.

Hicke: You said you did succeed in keeping them out?

Schwarzer: Yes, I think we did keep them out for a while. That has all
changed now, because today the transportation business is
almost totally unregulated except for safety and hours of
service by drivers, safety requirements for equipment. But
these expensive procedures to obtain certificates of public
convenience and necessity, I think, are pretty well a thing of
the past. The transportation business is highly competitive,
and entry is quite easy now. That's all I can remember of the
work that I did in my early years before I became a partner.

Allan Matthew

Hicke: There's one thing you said in your notes about working for
Allan Matthew.

120

Schwarzer: Oh, that's true. That was an experience. I didn't do much

work for him, but when I first came, we represented the Western
Pacific Railroad Company, the operating company. There was
also a holding company, the Western Pacific Railroad
Corporation, that was represented by the Brobeck firm. This
litigation was between the Western Pacific Railroad Corporation
and the Western Pacific Railroad Company over who would be
entitled to the benefit of the tax loss that resulted from the
bankruptcy of the operating company.

There was a lot of money at stake. I remember that when
I first came, we were working on the appeal in the Ninth
Circuit. One associate spent the entire summer working on one
footnote in the brief. It was a very esoteric case. And quite
a number of partners worked on it. But I remember this one
footnote taking a whole summer's time. Eventually our client
won.

Hicke: It must have been complicated.

Schwarzer: It was very complicated. And Mr. Matthew used to like to take
us to lunch at the Lochinvar Room in the Mark Hopkins [Hotel] ;
that's long-gone, but it was a wonderful place with a Scottish
motif. I think he would take Sawyer and me to lunch, and
sometimes Trautman, and try out on us his various theories
about this case.

Mr. Matthew was like no lawyer that I ever knew. Here we
had what was just basically a tax and corporate law
controversy, but to him it was a fundamental moral issue.
Every case he ever worked on was a moral issue. There was
right and wrong, and he was always on the right side. I always
felt that was a dangerous way to approach legal issues, because
when you confuse the law with your moral notions, you get on
slippery ground. That was a lesson that I learned from that
exposure: that you treat a legal dispute as what it is, most of
the time, and that's as a dispute over money.

Now that's not to say that there aren't civil rights
cases, in which there are moral implications and they're
important. But in the kind of litigation that McCutchen was
involved in, morality had very little to do with the proper
resolution of the issues, and it gets in the way when you're
trying to achieve a reasonable settlement.

Hicke: Did he try to fit his theories into the facts, or vice versa?

Schwarzer: Well, I suppose it becomes a matter of not changing the facts
but viewing the facts in a framework that supports the

moralistic reasoning,
give to that.

121

I think that's the best answer I could

Hicke: I guess I'm really thinking about history, where you can

emphasize and de-emphasize facts to bring out whatever sort of
structure you want, and that's probably not the case in these
legal disputes.

Schwarzer: Oh, I think that a legal dispute is as much as anything a

statement of the history of how you got there, and history is
viewed very differently depending on the perception of the
viewer. So it's not dissimilar from the discrepancies that you
run into when you read history. The description of past events
by one side of a controversy can be diametrically different
from the description given by the other side.

Morris Doyle: The Way to Practice Law

Hicke: Right. Then there was also the U.S. Steel case that you were
working on with Morris Doyle. You didn't tell the part about
the extension that the plaintiff had asked for.

Schwarzer: Oh, that. Yes, I think this is a case that came up before I
became a partner. We did a fair amount for U.S. Steel, which
then still had a plant in the Bay Area as well one in Geneva,
Utah. This was a personal injury case, involving a seaman on
one of the ore ships that U.S. Steel operated.

1 was defending that case, and the plaintiff's lawyer had
not done much on it; it had just been sitting there. In
California, there is a five-year limitation that requires a
plaintiff to bring the case to trial within five years of the
filing of the complaint or the case must be dismissed.

I think it was day or two before the time ran, the five-
year time, that the plaintiff's lawyer called me and said,
"Will you give me an extension?" I said, "Well, I don't really
think I should. There's no reason why I should do that." And
I think we left it there. I went to see Mr. Doyle, and I was
very proud that I had just about won this case by default, and
told him what had happened. He said, "That's not the way we
practice law. We don't take advantage of our opponents." So I
had to go and give him this extension.

That was a memorable experience, and I have at times in
recent years related that experience when I've talked at

122

continuing legal education programs about professionalism and
lawyer ethics, and about the adversary process. People are
absolutely astounded. The usual comment I get is, "I suppose
you then checked with your malpractice carrier after having
done that." [laughter]

Hicke: Would that in fact be a problem today?

Schwarzer: It's unlikely that somebody would give a continuance under
those circumstances today, and it's not out of the question
that a client would hold you responsible for doing that. But
that's really an illustration of how the law practice has
changed. I can't say that other lawyers would necessarily have
acted the way that we did in that case. But that was not out
of the ordinary. You just didn't take advantage of your
opponent .

Learning to Litigate

Hicke: How did you actually learn how to be a litigator?

Schwarzer: Just practice and exposure.

Hicke: Did you go and observe other people?

Schwarzer: I had some limited experience sitting as a second chair in some
minor matters with Trautman. But I think that we as associates
had very good training at McCutchen on the paper side, that is,
analysis and writing. Briefs didn't go out, for example,
pleadings didn't go out, without very thorough examination by
the partners for whom you worked. But people did not have a
lot of courtroom experience, and the reason why is that we
didn't represent corporations that had a lot of small cases
that you could give to young people to try.

Now at Pillsbury, lawyers had small cases from the phone
company and Safeway and Standard Oil. We didn't get that sort
of work. The closest thing to the small cases were these
Greyhound route cases on which I worked, and so I got courtroom
experience by doing those cases. I argued a lot of motions,
but I didn't try a jury case until about three years after I
became a partner. I really didn't have a full blown trial
until that time.

The irony of that was that we represented Chrysler in
their dealer disputes. That client was handled by Walker

123

Lowry; he was the one who was trying their cases. I had never
worked for him. But when one of these cases, Harvey Motors
versus Chrysler in Oakland was scheduled for trial in the
federal court, Walker had already decided to resign from the
firm, as I mentioned earlier, and I was the most promising
partner around to take over that case and try it.

So, I went in to try this jury case on relatively short
notice, and I was held out to the client as an experienced
trial lawyer. We didn't tell them that I never tried a jury
case before. That's pretty much the way things operated in our
firm and in most corporate law firms you didn't really get
trial experience until you were pretty well along, when people
assumed that you're already experienced.

Fortunately that case went reasonably well, and 1 won it
by the skin of my teeth. Chrysler became a good client, and we
did other work. But you just learn by doing, and there were
limited opportunities for doing, because too many of the cases
we had were big cases.

Passing Work Down to Junior Lawyers

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

I wanted to touch on that subject, as to how work was handed
down from say the major lawyers in charge of the cases, how the
lawyer passed the work along and how the client reacted.

That's the most difficult problem probably that
faces. To a degree, business comes to the firm
it was because the client, and in our case very
law firm or a lawyer in the legal department or
was looking to a particular partner in the firm
work, because he thought well of that partner's
confidence in him.

a law firm

But generally
often another
corporation,
to handle the
work and had

But, of course, on that theory, following that approach,
you can never bring anybody along, and there would also be far
too much work for the lawyer who is attracting business to
handle. So it's the job and the responsibility of the lawyers
who generate business to try to bring others in and work them
into the chain of command and get the client to accept the
younger lawyer. That's just common sense, although it's not
easy. It's not easy to persuade the client and then back up
your juniors when the client might not be totally satisfied.

124

It's also demanding on the ego of the partner who has
attracted the business, who wants to keep a hand on that, keep
a string on it, and not give it up. On the whole, that worked
quite well in our firm. Trautman was very good in handing
cases to me, when we were working with Greyhound and the Lucky
Lager Brewing Company. Some of the cases I had were handed to
me by Doyle, and minor matters came from other partners.

Some of the business came to me directly, although that
was later on, and I couldn't always be sure how something came
to me, there may not have been any kind of formal handing over
by a partner. The client may have talked to a partner and then
called me, possibly.

But to tell the truth, I felt that toward the end of my
time at McCutchen, I wasn't really satisfied. I thought there
was work in the firm that I could have done better than others
who were doing it, and it wasn't handed to me, and that, in
part, made it attractive to go on the bench. That's always a
delicate and difficult problem, but on the whole, it worked
well. Most of the time I had plenty of work to do.

But it poses problems for senior partners, deciding which
way to direct the business. If they don't direct to younger
partners and take the risk, then when they retire the client is
gone.

Hicke: Does it then depend a lot on the individual, how smoothly it
works?

Schwarzer: Well, it depends on the nature of the case or client that's at
issue, and on the relationships of partners. When a senior
partner has a client with particular business, that senior
partner has the difficult choice whom to bring in. It could be
a real plum, and you can give it to somebody who is your
protege, or you can bring in somebody who may be the most
likely to do a very good job. You may also deliberately avoid
giving it to somebody who you're afraid might displace you and
in effect steal the client.

Now those are the kinds of things that I think
consciously or unconsciously go into the calculations. But as
I say, I never thought that was a big problemat least not
toward the end of my time at the firm. I inherited a lot of
work when Trautman left, because I was the logical person to
take it over.

125

And then I did work involving the Oroville-Wyandotte
District. I guess that came through Feather River Railway
Company, which I had been representing, and that came through
the Matthew-Trautraan connection and mushroomed into a lot of
work over the years. Those were major pieces of work that just
kind of grew out of a situation.

Social Activities and Billable Hours

Hicke: Let me ask you a bit about your social activities as an

associate. Did you have lunches or dinners or such things?

Schwarzer: We went out to lunch together. The associates would generally
go to Mannings Cafeteria on Market Street, long-gone. And then
we had quite a lot of social activities, not organized, but it
was a congenial group of people. I think really most of our
friends were other associates, in particular the Hausers; they
were probably our closest friends.

Then an associate named Bob Edmondson and his wife were
very close friends, and that led to the kind of problem that
arises in a corporate firm when a close friend of yours is
passed over for partnership. It creates a very difficult,
uncomfortable situation. That was true in that case.

We had a close relationship with the Abels; they were
close friends. You know, as young couples, we did all sorts of
things, but the only things that were organized were these
anniversary dinners. I remember that. Then beginning around
1960 or so, we began this practice of entertaining summer
associates who were with us, and that of course grew into quite
a big activity. We would have picnics and all sorts of things
for summer associates, to make them feel at home and encourage
them to come back to the firm.

Hicke:
Schwarzer:

1 don't remember anything else particularly outstanding.
Well, I guess it's fair to say that I really was quite
dedicated to my work. [laughter] Those things I remember.
And then, you know, we did other things. We went skiing and
went on a few trips. But until I became partner, I was really
pretty single-minded about keeping my nose to the grindstone.

How many hours did you work a day, or a week?

Oh, I don't know. We certainly worked Saturdays. Saturday
morning was a regular part of the work week until some time

126

Hicke:
Schwarzer :
Hicke:
Schwarzer:

around 1960, I guess. I suppose I'd work from eight-thirty to
six. And we did work nights; that was not unusual. We used to
eat at Jack's Restaurant. The firm would pay for your dinner.
It was a very nice place to eat. I guess it has gone out of
business, and it's being revived now by new owners. I haven't
been there. That was the place where lawyers would eat
occasionally at lunch, and it was a good place to eat dinner.

We also went to Schroeder's, which is still there, the
German restaurant. We put in a lot of hours, but that wasn't
the way we were judged. We didn't have to meet a minimum as
they do now. When we evaluated people's performance, we would
try to avoid comparing people's hours, because the fear was
that by looking at quantity, you would diminish the importance
of quality.

There was always the problem that some people put in an
awful lot of hours, but you couldn't charge for it. When you
looked at the bill, you didn't just automatically multiply
hours by the hourly rate, although that was the basis for
computing bills. We always considered whether the time was
well spent, and if you had an associate who spent a hundred
hours on some little research project that in the end didn't
make a whole lot of difference, you just couldn't charge for
that.

So, at least as important as the number of hours the
people put in were the number of hours that would have to be
written off, or the perception of the amount of time that had
to be written off for associates because of the fact that they
were inefficient. Hours were not the key element of success.
That's not to say that we didn't put in a lot of hours, but you
tried to put in hours that could then be charged.

How were the hours charged?

What were the rates in those years? I don't know.

Well, and how were they calculated, if not on actual quantity?

Every day you would fill out a time slip. Every day you would
write it in your diary- -everything you worked on and the amount
of time you spent on that particular matter. Then the
secretary would type up the time slips. There would be a
separate time slip for each client and matter that you worked
on that day, and then the time slips would be assembled.

When you came around to billing a client for a particular
matter, all the time slips for that matter would have been

127

Hicke:
Schwarzer :

bound together. You take those and you go over them; you add
up the hours. But you also look at what the hours were spent
on, and the bill would itemize to some extent the work that was
done, not the number of hours on each.

Also you would look at the time that was spent on the
particular parts of this assignment. You would multiply that
lawyer's hourly rate by the time that he put in; then you would
see whether that comes out at a reasonable number. You might
write it down, or if it was very successful, you might add
something to the bill to reflect the favorable result.

I think hourly rates were pretty modest. I think that
when I started, the rate for an associate was probably about
$25 an hour; maybe for a partner around $50 an hour. That's my
best recollection. And they didn't go up much for quite a long
time .

Do you think now we've covered the associates' part of it?
That's about all I can think of right now.

Secretarial Help

Hicke: I guess I have to ask you something more: did you have
secretarial help?

Schwarzer: We shared secretaries. You didn't have your own secretary
until you became a partner. I think that when I started,
probably two associates had a secretary. It's hard to imagine
what it was like. Everything was done using carbon paper. It
took a lot of time to get something out, typed, because if
there was a mistake, you would have to erase all the carbons,
and if you wanted to change and revise a memo, it had to be
done over again.

About the time when I came, the thermofax machine first
came in. That was the first copying machine. You could copy
one sheet at a time. It was very slow and inefficient, and the
copies would come out on thermofax paper. I don't know if you
ever saw that paper, but if you left it out in the light, it
would fade away.

Hicke: I remember, yes.

128

Schwarzer: So producing letters and memoranda and pleadings was a major

undertaking and very labor-intensive. So you needed all those
secretaries. I think one secretary who was there then and
worked for Mr. Doyle still works for him. I think she's still
at the firm.

Hicke: I think she is.

Schwarzer: Ms. Railsback.

Hicke: Yes, Helen Railsback. Any others that you can remember?

Schwarzer: Eva Borak was there. I don't know whether she's still with the
firm or not. She worked for Mr. Brown, who died a few years
ago. 1 don't think anybody else is around.

Hicke: Did you have any problems getting your work done in a hurry
when necessary?

Schwarzer: I don't recall. I remember the secretaries 1 had after I
became a partner, but I don't remember anything about the
secretarial work. Actually, now that I think about it, it may
be that we actually had a secretarial pool for associates

Hicke: Did you have to proofread everything, or did somebody else do
that?

Schwarzer: No, I think we did our own proofreading. I don't think we ever
had a proofreading editorial staff. I think that at Pillsbury
they did that. But the firm didn't have that.

Pro Bono Work

Hicke: I don't know if we covered everything under associates or not.
Anything else that you know about, such as other work not done
by you? I mean work that you weren't involved in but that was
particularly significant.

Schwarzer: Well, I was trying to think whether there was any such thing as
pro bono work at that time. 1 think that we probably did work
for institutions such as a hospital or some such organization
with which a senior partner had some connection, but nothing
comes to mind. And I don't know of any instances where
associates did pro bono work, although it's likely that
somebody did some pro bono criminal defense work.

129

Hicke:

Schwarzer :

The way it worked in those years: if you went out to the
federal court and sat in the courtroom waiting for your case or
your motion to be called, a criminal case came up, the
defendant plead not guilty, the judge would look around, and if
the defendant didn't have his own lawyer, he'd pick somebody he
knew in the courtroom and assign him to defend that person.

I know Judge [Alfonso] Zirpoli did that, and others too.
So in that way, some criminal defense work was assigned to
lawyers in corporate law firms. But 1 have no recollection of
any specific instance where that happened. And I don't recall
any pro bono work being done by us, but it may well have been
that there was some. It was not a big factor in those times.

Now I think you've pretty well wrung me out on that.

Now maybe we just have time for you to tell me how you found
out you were going to become a partner, and then we'll start
next time with your work after that.

In June, 1959, we were building a house. It's the house that
we still live in. We were getting close to the end of
constructionthis is really silly--and my wife called me and
said there was a question about whether to put in a disposall
in the kitchen, and I was a little skeptical about it. I said,
"Well let us think about it."

Then I got a call from Trautman, and I went in his
office, and he said, "You're going to be a partner at the end
of the year." They had just had a firm meeting, I guess,
although it wasn't official. I remember that I called her back
and told her to put in the disposall. [laughter]

Hicke: Oh, that is a great story.

Schwarzer: So that's how I found out. That was in June, and then in

December, it was formally announced. Of course, I didn't know
it was coming. I had been encouraged to stay on; I thought I
was doing well. But there was no assurance at all.

Hicke: You didn't see it coming?

Schwarzer: No. There were six of us. John Hauser, mainly an antitrust
lawyer, Norman Richards, who is retired now, Al Moorman.
Richards was an admiralty lawyer who is retired now. Al
Moorman was a corporate partner, working on Stanford matters,
who died a few years ago. Mortimer Smith, who became a probate
partner and was ultimately retired, and he died some years ago.
And Derk Teroller, who essentially did oil lease work for Kern

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Hicke:

County Land Company, and he died some years ago. John Hauser
is retired from the firm now, although he still does some work,
So, I'm the only person left of that class who's still working
full-time.

Okay, good place to stop.

1960: The Firm Moves Its Offices; A Watershed Year

[Interview 5: July 23, 1997]

Hicke: We left off in 1960, and you told me you had a new house

complete with disposall, and you had been made partner. You
also mentioned that the firm moved in that year, and perhaps
you could tell me a bit about how and why that happened.

Schwarzer: There was a new building under construction at the corner of
California and Kearny Street, designed by Anshen
and Allen. The owners were Natomas Corporation, which also was
the holding company for American President Lines, which was a
client of the firm. I guess in part because of that
relationship, but also because, as I said, about 1958, the firm
began to move toward a new era and to change its image and
approach to the world, it was decided to move out of these old,
really inadequate quarters in the Balfour Building to a new
building. And that was the logical place to go. This was
almost the first of the new office buildings going up in San
Francisco. The first one was the Equitable Building on
Montgomery Street, at the corner of Sutter, and I think
Bethlehem [Steel] built a building on lower California Street.
This then was in this small group of new buildings going up in
San Francisco.

I was put in charge of the move. I think the partner in
charge, as I recall, was Walker Lowry, but I did all the work.
I was interested in doing it. It was a wonderful building, and
it gave us the opportunity to create a modern office that was
efficient and aesthetically pleasing and a comfortable place to
be . And that ' s how it turned out .

We retained architects, and they incorporated novel
ideas, such as secretarial stations outside of the lawyers'
offices. All in all, it was an excellent layout. I remember
that one of the issues on which I succeeded was a novel idea
that there would be only one carpet throughout the whole
office. People would not have individual carpets or rugs.

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Hicke:
Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

Hicke:
Schwarzer :
Hicke:
Schwarzer:

Well, I guess they could put rugs over the carpet, but there
was just one carpet. We spent a lot of time selecting it. It
was a handsome brown tweed carpet that unified the appearance
of the office; that was something new.

I think we used some exotic woods on the doors and the
secretarial stations. One of the nice parts of the office was
that it had doors that went to the ceiling. So it didn't look
like somebody just punched a whole in the wall, but the door
really was an integral part of the design. It was a great
place.

I don't remember when we moved in, but it must have been
early 1961. The firm stayed there until 1976; then it moved
about the time I left the firm.

What exactly did your work involve? For example, did you have
to deal with the architects in the planning?

Yes, yes. I was the contact person for the architects. We
designed the size of offices, the whole layout of the floors,
the conference rooms.

Did other people have input?
Yes.

Somebody could say, "I really have been unhappy with what I had
before, could I have this and this?"

There were discussions, but fortunately, nobody interfered with
our achieving the objective of having a well-designed,
attractive office. So it went smoothly. There were no
problems that I recall. It was a rewarding, but also time-
consuming experience. I still have a clock on my desk that the
firm gave me.

As a thank you?
As a thank you.
And you were building your own home at the same time?

Oh, no, we had moved in by then. But I guess I've always had
an interest in design and construction. We had an architect
build our house, and we've done various renovations over the
years. I always seem to think of ways of improving on
buildings. So that's been sort of a hobby for me designing
and building homes and offices.

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Hicke: Also, you started to tell me about the fact that this was a
watershed year for the firm.

Schwarzer: This gave us a whole new image and a whole new outlook. I
don't know that I can give you anything specific. But it
really had an impact, I think, on the firm- -moving from these
really dilapidated old quarters to a shiny new office. It made
a real difference. And, of course, the firm had a new name,
and there were new partners, and we were then hiring some very
good new associates.

Now, I can't say there was a significant change in the
work, but there was certainly a significant change in the whole
attitude and outlook of people who were working there.

Management and Administration

Hicke: Who was heading the firm now?

Schwarzer: Mr. Doyle was the senior partner in the firm. But he worked
closely with the other name partners, Enersen and Brown.
Around 1962 or 1963 the firm name was changed again, and Mr.
Trautman's name was added to it. So it became McCutchen,
Doyle, Brown, Trautman, and Enersen. That name was retained
until Trautman left about 1966, and the name has remained the
same since then. I think there is a general sense that it's
desirable in the interests of continuity not to change the
name.

Hicke: Now maybe we can talk a bit more about the administration and
how that's changed over the years.

Schwarzer: Well, 1960 was still long before computers came into being. I
think it was about the time the xerox machine came out; if I
recall correctly, I think about that time we had xerox machines
in the office. And we had improved reproduction machines, the
Multilith machine, which were more efficient. I'm sure that we
had a modern telephone system installed when we moved.

But computers did not become a factor until later in the
sixties. I recall that then we went over to a system of punch
cards.

Hicke: IBM [International Business Machine] cards?

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Schwarzer :

Hicke:

Schwarzer:

IBM. We used to take our time records down to the IBM Service

Bureau, I think in the Ferry Building, and they would punch the

cards. They turned out automated time records, I think maybe

every day, every night, something like that. But I never had
anything to do with computerization.

I don't think it came to the firm until after I left, but
the format of our time summaries that we would get in order to
prepare bills, those changed when we used the Service Bureau.
I don't recall that we investigated computers or that I was
involved in any changeover to computers.

How about partnership meetings?
can you tell me about them?

You were now attending those;

Yes. When I entered the firm, the firm had, I believe, weekly
partner meetings at the then Palace Hotel, now the Sheraton
Palace. Those were quite formal, pleasant occasions. But that
didn't last very long. We moved from the Palace, I believe, to
hold our meetings at the Commercial Club on California Street.
I believe the frequency was reduced to once every two weeks. I
think it continued at that rate.

I remember partners' meetings, but I don't have any
particular impression of anything significant in connection
with the meetings. They were fairly routine. Then the firm
had an annual meeting of partners at the Del Monte Lodge in
Pebble Beach, the last weekend in April. I remember the first
one because that was an exciting event to go the partners'
meeting down there.

I remember going down in Mr. Adams' car and with John
Hauser. Mr. Adams was so absorbed in telling us whatever he
was telling us that he actually got lost, and we ended up in
Salinas instead of Pebble Beach. [laughter]

The main item of business at those meetings would be
decisions about taking in new partners. There would be fairly
lengthy discussions. But in the first part of 1960, not much
was happening. We didn't take in partners every year, but
nearly every year. The firm was definitely expanding during
the 1960s.

All the meetings were presided over by Mr. Doyle. That
continued certainly during my time in the firm, and I think
only recently did he cease to be the presiding officer. Even
after he retired, I think he presided for a while, because he
was a very good presiding officer and had the right personality
and was widely respected.

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Aside from that, I think the most notable activity was
playing golf, which 1 never mastered, and playing poker, at
which I wasn't much better than golf. But it was a festive and
collegial occasion.

At that time the partnership was only about twenty to
twenty-five partners. As it increased, as it grew, of course,
the atmosphere changed, and inevitably it wasn't as collegial
as it seemed when I first came in, but it was still a pleasant
occasion.

Expansion and Hiring

Hicke: When the firm started expanding, it's always interesting to me
to know which came first: new associates and partners, or work
demanding more associates and partners.

Schwarzer: It demanded both. Some people became partners because they had
demonstrated a record of excellence. But in the latter part of
the 1960s, there were some people who were proposed and then
admitted frankly because of the fact and the sponsoring
partners made no bones about it--that they simply needed to
have a partner to assist in handling certain large cases.
Those people did not necessarily turn out to be assets to the
firm. So there definitely were some compromises that were made
because of the need for additional help.

People, of course, did not necessarily agree on who were
the excellent people and who were the compromise candidates.
In some cases, they did. Becoming a partner was always a
matter of having strong sponsorship. So associates who had
worked for a number of partners around the office and
established their credentials had a much stronger case going
for them than people who had only worked for one or maybe two
partners .

For example, this was a perennial problem in the Probate
Department, because associates working in the Probate
Department generally did not work for anybody else. So it was
much harder for Probate to have partners admitted to the firm,
because they would be narrow specialists and wouldn't come with
the same credentials. Nevertheless, the Probate Department did
expand, although that was always controversial.

We never brought any partners in from the outside during
the time that I was there, although we did bring in several
lawyers who had worked for clients and whose position had been

135

eliminated. They came in as of counsel and worked with the
firm for a while. Of course, that was also the time when the
Los Angeles office grew substantially, because Los Angeles
itself was growing much more than San Francisco was growing.
That office did bring in a lateral partner from an oil company.
That's a whole story right there about the Los Angeles office.

The Los Angeles Office

Schwarzer: The Los Angeles office had been created about 1928 to assist in
the handling of the firm's admiralty work, which was a big part
of the practice then. It, of course, declined over the years,
because there were fewer ships, and with radar on the ship,
they rarely collided; so there was much less admiralty work.
Mr. Black and Mr. Harnagel were the original partners down
there .

After the war, when Los Angeles took off, that office
took off. 1 don't remember the numbers, but around 1960, it
had probably around twenty-five or thirty people. So when we
met at Pebble Beach, we would be confronted with proposals to
admit as partners associates who were recommended by the Los
Angeles partners but about whom we knew very little.

That was a constant problem that was aggravated by the
fact that the San Francisco partners had a somewhat snobbish
attitude. They regarded the lawyers in San Francisco and the
operation in San Francisco as superior to that in Los Angeles.
And so they looked askance at associates who were proposed for
partnership in Los Angeles, and that was a source of some
tension. Nevertheless, partners were admitted, and the Los
Angeles firm, whatever people in San Francisco thought, turned
out to be, for quite a number of years, a very successful
litigating firm.

About 1963 or '64, a conflict developed between the two
offices. In San Francisco, a major client had become General
Motors. But we also represented Chrysler, and General Motors
insisted that we not represent their chief competitor.
Chrysler was a respectable client in San Francisco, and I did
their work about that time. But for Los Angeles, it was a
major client; they did little work for General Motors, but they
did a lot of work for Chrysler, and they were unwilling to give
up Chrysler.

136

It seemed that there would be no possibility of
compromise. So in the early sixties, the firms decided to
separate. The Los Angeles firm became a separate firm. People
in San Francisco, for the most part, did not regret the
separation, although, I had mixed feelings about it.

People in the maritime area worked well together and were
sorry to see the office go. But there was no alternative.
Ironically, in recent years the San Francisco McCutchen firm
established a new office in Los Angeles and now has a sizable
branch down there. Meanwhile, the old McCutchen firm in Los
Angeles gradually went into a decline, particularly when its
senior partner retired, and ultimately merged with a firm out
of Cleveland, Baker Hostetter. I'm not sure that office still
operates under the McCutchen name in Los Angeles.

Hicke: Did it continue to use the McCutchen name?

Schwarzer: Both firms used the name, yes, after the split. That was
unavoidable, I think. The Los Angeles firm was McCutchen,
Black, Harnagel, & Shea, and later McCutchen, Black, Verleger,
& Shea.

Hicke: That's good. That's a nice summation of that story. Although,
they must have been making profits, which--?

Schwarzer: Well, that was always the question. How could you accurately
determine the profits? In a way, each firm was a profit
center. But you could always argue over that, in part because
if a client came from San Francisco and then the work was done
in Los Angeles, should the entire credit go to Los Angeles? So
there were arguments over whether the partners' shares in Los
Angeles, the amount of income they were taking out, was greater
than the amount of profit they were bringing in.

There was never any answer to it. But it was a pain in
the neck arguing about this, when it came around to allocating
shares to partners. Nobody was ever satisfied. So the
separation of the firms eliminated that source of tension.

I don't know how firms do it now. Nearly all firms have
operations in different locations. I'm glad I don't have to
deal with it.

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