Living History by Unknown (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

of them should have been sharing cells with hardcore adult criminals, who could prey on them or further educate them in criminality. CDF led an effort to separate out juveniles and provide them with more protection and faster adjudication.

In New Bedford, Massachusetts, I went door to door trying to identify the source of a troubling statistic. At CDF, we took census figures of school-age children and compared those numbers to school enrollments. We often found significant discrepancies, and we wanted to determine where these unaccounted-for children were. Knocking on doors was revelatory and heartbreaking. I found children who weren’t in school because of physical disabilities like blindness and deafness. I also found school-age siblings at home, babysitting their younger brothers and sisters while their parents worked. On the small back porch off her family’s home in a neighborhood of Portuguese-American fishermen, I met a girl in a wheelchair, who told me how much she wanted to go to school. She knew she couldn’t go because she couldn’t walk.

We submitted the results of our survey to Congress. Two years later, at the urging of CDF and other strong advocates, Congress passed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, mandating that children with physical, emotional and learning disabilities be educated in the public school system.

Despite the satisfaction of my work, I was lonely and missed Bill more than I could stand. I had taken both the Arkansas and Washington, D.C., bar exams during the summer, but my heart was pulling me toward Arkansas. When I learned that I had passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought that maybe my test scores were telling me something.

I spent a lot of my salary on my telephone bills and was so happy when Bill came to see me over Thanksgiving. We spent our time exploring Boston and talking about our future.

Bill told me he enjoyed teaching and loved living in a rented house on the outskirts of Fayetteville, a friendly, slow-paced college town. But the political world called, and he was trying to recruit a candidate to run against Arkansas’s only Republican Congressman, John Paul Hammerschmidt. He hadn’t found another Democrat in northwest Arkansas willing to run against the popular four-term incumbent, and I could tell that he had begun to consider entering the race himself. If he decided to do it, I wasn’t sure what it would mean for us. We agreed that I would come down to Arkansas after Christmas 1973

so we could try to figure out where we were heading. By the time I arrived for New Year’s, Bill had decided to run for Congress. He believed that the Republican Party would be hurt by the Watergate scandal and that even well-entrenched incumbents could be vulnerable. He was excited by the challenge and had started to put together his campaign.

I was aware of the announcement from Washington that John Doar had been selected by the House Judiciary Committee to head up the impeachment inquiry to investigate President Nixon. We had met Doar at Yale, when he served as a “judge” during a mock trial, in the spring of 1973. As Directors of the Barristers Union, Bill and I were responsible for supervising a simulated case for course credit. Doar, recruited as the trial judge, was a Gary Cooper type: a quiet, lanky lawyer from Wisconsin who had worked in the Kennedy Justice Department to help end segregation in the South. He had argued some of the government’s most important voting rights cases in federal court, and he had worked on the ground in Mississippi and Alabama during the most violent episodes of the sixties. In Jackson, Mississippi, he had stepped between angry protesters and armed police to prevent a potential massacre. I admired his courage and his relentless, organized application of the law.

One day early in January, while I was having coffee with Bill in his kitchen, the phone rang. It was Doar asking him to join the impeachment staff he was organizing. He told Bill that he had asked Burke Marshall, his old friend and colleague from the Kennedy Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to recommend a few young lawyers to work on the inquiry. Bill’s name was at the top of the list, along with three other Yale classmates: Michael Conway, Rufus Cormier and Hillary Rodham. Bill told Doar he had decided to run for Congress, but he thought the others on the list might be available. Doar said he would call me next. He offered me a staff position, explaining that the job would pay very little, the hours would be long and most of the work would be painstaking and monotonous. It was, as they say, an offer I couldn’t refuse. I couldn’t imagine a more important mission at this juncture in American history. Bill was excited for me, and we were both relieved to put our personal discussion on hold for a while longer. With Marian’s blessing, I packed my bags and moved from Cambridge into a spare room in Sara Ehrman’s Washington apartment. I was on my way to one of the most intense and significant experiences of my life.

The forty-four attorneys involved in the impeachment inquiry worked seven days a week, barricaded in the old Congressional Hotel on Capitol Hill across from the House office buildings in southeast Washington. I was twenty-six years old, awed by the company I was keeping and the historic responsibility we had assumed.

Although Doar headed the staff, there were two teams of lawyers: one selected by Doar and appointed by the Democratic Chairman of the committee, Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey; the other, appointed by the Republican ranking member, Congressman Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, and selected by Albert Jenner, the legendary litigator from the Chicago-based firm of Jenner & Block. Seasoned lawyers under Doar directed each area of the investigation. One of them was Bernard Nussbaum, an experienced and pugnacious Assistant U.S. Attorney from New York. Another was Joe Woods, a corporate lawyer from California with a