It’s been a while, but I’m back in the saddle and eager to share some profiles of people I’ve met and known over the years.
On a day when a dismal sycophant named Pam Bondi was being “vetted” by Congress to be the country’s next attorney general, it’s painful to remember what a worthy, thoughtful and generous man Ramsey Clark was. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.
When he ran for the U. S. Senate in New York in 1974, Ramsey Clark refused to accept donations of more than $100. From anyone. Two men put his name in nomination at the state Democratic convention that summer; a former New York City cop named Frank Serpico and a former convict and survivor of the Attica prison uprising named Herbert X. Blyden.
Clark received 1.6 percent of the delegates’ votes.
But Clark was nothing if not persistent. Though the former U.S. Attorney General of the United States was regularly dismissed by the state Democratic Party machine as an “ultra-liberal” loser, he amassed enough petition signatures to have his name placed on the state’s primary ballot. Then he won the primary. He lost that November to incumbent Republican Senator-for-life, Jacob Javits, by a mere seven percent of the vote.
I was reminded of Clark’s amazing run 42 years later, when I received a Facebook message last May from a guy I hadn’t seen in all that time, inviting me to join him and Clark for dinner in Manhattan over the Memorial Day holiday weekend.
He didn’t have to ask twice.
My new-found Facebook friend is named Marshall Adler. Today, he’s a Workers’ Compensation attorney living in Orlando. Back then, he and his brother Jeff, who’s now a podiatrist working in New York City, managed Clark’s Western New York Senatorial campaign. It was their first — and last — political campaign. By their own rueful admission, they were college kids, making it up as they went along, hoping that political passion would somehow trump the need for political experience.
I felt the same way at the time. I was a newly hatched reporter for a Buffalo, NY alternative weekly newspaper and I was eager to interview their man. They got me complete access to him as he swung through the region a month before the election.
The Adlers had stayed in touch with Clark over the years and were now back performing their old jobs, helping a reporter — me — gain access to one of the most storied human rights activists in recent American history.
My respect for Clark has only increased with time. Unlike every one of his contemporaries in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, he never parlayed his post-government credentials into a plush K Street consultancy. He never turned lobbyist. Rather, his political trajectory since leaving government in 1968 became increasingly radical. He’s now the last living member of LBJ’s cabinet, saying things and defending people no one could ever have anticipated. I was beyond curious to meet and talk to him about his career.
We met for dinner at a Japanese-Italian restaurant called Basta Pasta, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, where Clark has lived for more than half his 89 years,
Dinner was a pleasant disaster. The food was fine, but the place was crowded as Grand Central at rush hour. Its high ceiling stole conversation below it, making the place an unforgiving echo chamber. I sat one seat away from Clark and couldn’t hear a word he said all evening.
Before my wife and I left the restaurant, I voiced my frustration and asked if I could call him later. “Sure,” he said. “I’m in the book.”
We shook hands and I left, feeling simultaneously deflated and elated. I’d met the man. Now I had to talk to him.
***.
Two months later, Clark welcomed me into the apartment he had shared with his wife Georgia until her death in 2010. He’s easily recognizable from his days in Washington. He’s still rail-thin, with deep-set eyes, large ears and a crop of still-dark hair. The living room has a sleek, modern feel to it, open and welcoming. Clark looked at ease when he sat down in a classic black leather Eames Lounge chair stationed near the living room’s large front window that overlooks West 12th Street A larger-than-life-sized bronze bust of Mohandas Gandhi loomed over his right shoulder, seeming to listen in on our conversation.
Despite his years as a New Yorker, Clark still speaks with a soft, Texas drawl. He can be laconic as Gary Cooper but more often takes generous pauses before answering questions, often in surprising detail. The seriousness of what he says is frequently undercut by a bemused tone that, despite his years, hasn’t festered into bitterness.
Knowing I’d have little more than an hour before Clark was off to Jeff Adler’s office that day, I faced an impossible task: should I focus on a single one of his many (and controversial) achievements? His activist days as Attorney General? His opposition within the Johnson cabinet to the Vietnam War?
What about his post-administration career as a lawyer who won acquittals for war resisters like the Rev. Philip Berrigan? Or the years he spent — for $10 a day plus expenses — defending the first two inmates to be tried in connection with the uprising at Attica State Prison?
Any discussion of those remarkable days would only have taken us up to the mid-1970s. How could I question him about his subsequent efforts, like his call for the impeachment of George W. Bush for war crimes committed in Iraq? Or his notorious willingness to defend seemingly indefensible world leaders like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic.
I confessed to him that I was flummoxed, that I didn’t know where to begin, that he’d succeeded in outraging more people — left, right and center — than anyone I knew of.
“I tried,” he said with a nod and a grin. “Done my best.”
Still groping for a way into his story, I asked him to summarize his life.
He thought a moment. Then:
“If I had to use one word (pause) I’d probably say . . . ‘full.’”
So would anyone who’s followed Clark’s career. But how to discuss that life in so short a time?
Maybe, I thought, instead of a formal Q & A-style interview, we could have a conversation Just keep my my intrusive, knee-jerk impulses at bay while Clark took the conversational reins and told his own story.
This is the result:
Though Texas-born, he spent his Wonder Years in Los Angeles, where his father Tom was head of Franklin Roosevelt’s antitrust section on the West Coast. His father was appointed U.S.Attorney General by Harry Truman in 1945 and then to the Supreme Court in 1949. To avoid a conflict of interest, Tom Clark retired from the court after swearing his son in as Attorney General in 1967.
Clark spoke about how World War II dominated his childhood, how he and his best friend tried to enlist in the Army the day after Pearl Harbor. They were kicked out for trying.
“The weren’t accepting eighth-graders at the time.”
Clark finally got his wish to join the war effort near the end of the war, putting off college and law school to enlist in the Marines.
He talked about how important books were to him while growing up. In this respect, he said he differed from his parents.
“Dad didn’t read much. And mother carried Gone With the Wind around with her for about five years. I’m not sure she ever finished it.”
He became a “book freak.” His grandmother fed that desire. He still has one of the books she gave him: The Raven.
No, not that Raven.
““It was a biography of Sam Houston, by a guy named Marquis James. Pretty popular around Texas in those days. Good Book. James was a good writer.”
He still has a copy of the book his grandmother gave him back then.
Clark returned from the war and attended the University of Chicago law school, where, he said, he found his studies to be “boring.”
Flashforward nearly a half-century, where a copy of the morning’s New York Times lay on the window sill. A jubilant Hillary Clinton dominated the front page.
“I think it’s going to be great to have a woman president,” Clark said. “Unless something unforeseeable occurs, it’s gonna happen. She’ll be a strong president.”
Clark then recalled his first meeting with Clinton, at a White House dinner party during the first year of her husband’s administration. Hillary met the Clarks at the door. Clark took the opportunity to give her what he called a “fairly hot” analysis he’d written about the situation in Iraq.
After dinner, Clinton saw the couple to the door.
“‘Oh here,”’ she said. “I want to return (the analysis) to you.’
“No, I told her, it’s yours, you can have it.”
She looked him in the eye.
“No. We don’t want it.’”
Clark burst out in laughter at the memory.
.“They were new,” he said. “It wasn’t an exercise in common sense.”
He recalled another national political convention, this one in Miami, in 1968. He’d just gotten home after a long day at the office. He plopped onto a couch next to his wife Georgia and blearily looked at the television screen before him. Richard Nixon had just been nominated for the presidency. No sooner had Clark settled into his seat than Nixon made a promise to the cheering delegates.
“I wasn’t sure I’d heard him correctly,” Clark recalled. “I thought I’d fallen asleep and dreamed it. So I checked with Georgia.”
Sure enough, his wife told him, Nixon had just said that if the country was ever going to have respect for law and order, “there’s one place we’re going to begin: we’re going to have a new Attorney General.”
Once again, the smile.
“I must have been doing something right.”
The Attorney General the nation got was was Watergate conspirator John Mitchell, who wound up serving 19 months in federal prison.
Time was getting tight. I decided to nudge my way back into the conversation. It had long seemed to me, I told Clark, that he was more concerned with the issue of justice, rather than with lawyerly concern with the rule of law.
He wasn’t so sure about that.
“The law is pretty darned boring and rigid,” he said. “But it’s an important instrumentality for peace and the protection and rights of the people.”
“And in times (like these), it’s essential to supporting the life of the people. It used to be you only had to look out for yourself. You grew your own victory garden. But our interdependence has grown with technology — which makes “love thy brother as thyself” more important an action than ever.”
Technology — television, the internet, you name it — has stunted people’s lives, he said.
“A lot of people spend more time watching TV than talking to people”.
While there’s plenty of information out there,“It’s getting harder not to be smart but to be wise. It’s harder to see the whole picture, to see beyond the horizon.”
Technology, he said, needs to be directed for the well-being rather than the harm of society, he said.
“We spend a lot money on more efficient means of mass destruction. So our capacity to injure ourselves is . . total. And that means we have to behave as individuals, but not through coercion. Coercion doesn’t work too well. You have to recognize that none of us were born to be forced. Force creates resistance and the threat of violence and the capacity of violence for destruction is vast. Its why we have to eliminate weapons of mass destruction. . .
Does he hold out any hope for that happening?
“Oh, I certainly do — I’m an optimist. It defies rationality, I know but it’s a fact. We shall overcome. And by ‘we’ I mean all of us. No man of force is gonna save us — or woman — not even Hillary.”
On that note, we exchanged pleasantries, shook hands and said our goodbyes. I made my way to the subway station at bustling Union Square, a few blocks away. Along the way I was startled to discover a memorial to another great optimist lurking behind an array of decorative summer plantings on a stone island in the southwest corner of the square.
The inscription to the statue of Mohandas Gandhi held a double resonance for me that day:
“My optimism.” it reads, “rests on my belief in the infinite possibilities of the individual to develop nonviolence . . . in a gentle way you can shake the world.”
This story first appeared in Medium in Oct. 2016. Ramsey Clark died in April, 2021.
Victoria: That quote of his stirs me to this day. He really was a great, though humble, man. Thanks for giving him the attention he deserves. Cheers, despite it all, Jeremiah
"While there’s plenty of information out there,“It’s getting harder not to be smart but to be wise. It’s harder to see the whole picture, to see beyond the horizon.” Thanks, Jeremiah..I'll carry these around with me for a while.