Memoir of a 1960s Federal Judge Clerk Describing Social Circles with Judges and Politicians

4.2.12 WC: 191694 assassinated and Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered. I had personal connections to each of these momentous events. Those years were also eventful in terms of judicial decisions. Many of the most important civil rights, criminal law and freedom of speech cases were decided during my tenure as a law clerk. It was a period of liberal judicial activism—the Zenith (or for those more admiring of judicial restraint, the Nadir) of The Warren Court. It was a heady time for a young liberal lawyer to be in the nation’s capital. My year of clerking for Judge Bazelon Even more important than my substantive experiences in working with these two important judges, was the personal impact they both had on my life. Each was to serve as a mentor, though in very different ways, throughout their entire lives. Indeed, I continue to be influenced by them even years after their deaths. I arrived in Washington during the summer of 1962, in the midst of the Kennedy Administration. Although Judge David Bazelon was a court of appeals judge—early in my clerkship he became Chief Judge—he was at the center of Washington life, both socially and politically. He knew everyone. He socialized regularly with Senators, Congressmen, cabinet members, White House staffers, Supreme Court justices, diplomats and other movers and shakers. He had two clerks, but I was very much his senior clerk, and he didn’t much like or respect his junior clerk. He saw me as a protégé and he took me with him everywhere that it was appropriate for me to go. At the center of his social life were the weekly lunches at the office restaurant of a local liquor distributor named Milton Kronheim, whose personal chef would prepare simple but superb lunches for “Milton’s boys.” Kronheim himself was in his mid-seventies when I met him. (He would live to 97, pitching in his weekly company softball game until his late 80s). His frequent guests, in addition to Judge Bazelon, included Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justices Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan and William Douglas, Judges J. Skelly Wright, Senators Abe Ribacoff and Jacob Javits and many other judicial and political notables. The small lunchroom where Milton’s entertained had photographs of Kronheim with every president since Harding. Hundreds of other wall-to-wall photographs showed him with just about every important political, business and sports figure of the Twentieth Century. Judge Bazelon once told me a joke about Kronheim, which, with a change of name, from Kronheim to “Katz,” became a standard part of the Jewish joke cannon. “There was a guy named Kronehiem who bragged he was so famous he could be photographed with “anyone in the world.” A skeptical friend challenged him. “You can’t be photographed with the President!” Within days, Kronheim was standing on the White House balcony with JFK, as photographers snapped pictures. “Ok,” the friend conceded “maybe in the United States, but not in other parts of the world!” He then issued another challenge: “You could never be photographed with Israel’s Prime Minister 48 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017135