Citizen Rauh: An American Liberal's Life in Law and Politics

21. Closing Argument

chapter twenty-one CLOSING ARGUMENT They [the Canadians] were made guinea pigs in hazardous experiments funded with $60,000 of CIA money. —joe rauh to william webster Elder Liberal Statesman By 1992 he could not display them all—the plaques, the parchment scrolls, the medallions—tributes to the man some called “the personal embodiment of American liberalism,” or “the liberals’ elder statesman” or “one of the last New Dealers.” To make room on the wall of his study for the new awards would have meant taking down too many other treasures, photographs of Cardozo, Frankfurter, and Dr. King, even one with Lyndon Johnson. So the awards kept arriving, but usually were left in boxes, seldom displayed, much as he had kept secret his class ranking at Harvard Law School. In retirement, Rauh had no desire to become an aging liberal icon, the passive recipient of accolades. He moved his activities from downtown Farragut Square to a small upstairs of‹ce on Appleton Street. The new venue did not signi‹cantly diminish his zeal for preaching the liberal gospel or reduce his active engagement in causes that remained close to his heart. He labored tirelessly to create and sustain a new law school in the District, af‹liated initially with Antioch College, a school he hoped would both recruit lower-income students and train lawyers with a social conscience. When Antioch abandoned the project for ‹nancial reasons, he provided the vision and energy to realize the dream of the District of Columbia School of Law as a member of its board of governors. “Heaven knows there ought to be at least one law school which trains lawyers to represent the poor,” he reasoned.1 Before he stepped down as general counsel to the Leadership Confer267 ence in the spring of 1991 and formally passed that baton on to Ralph Neas, he remained active in the con‹rmation ‹ghts against Bork, Ginsburg, Kennedy, Souter, and Thomas. His voice rang out in support of ‹nancial redress for Japanese-Americans, in support of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1989, which extended civil rights protection to 43 million Americans, and for the Civil Rights Act of 1991 that rebuked the Rehnquist-led Supreme Court.2 Historians and political scientists, most of them baby boomers with little ‹rsthand memory of events before the 1960s, arrived at his of‹ce and became the bene‹ciaries of his wit and wisdom about FDR, Frankfurter, Tommy the Cork, Reuther, Randolph, Humphrey, Kennedy, King, and LBJ. In 1988 he made a New Year’s resolution to stop sending opinion pieces to the Washington Post’s editor-in-chief, Meg Green‹eld, because “my rejection rate . . . hardly warrants the effort I have to put into writing.” Three years earlier, Green‹eld had refused to publish as too “offensive” his attack on the Senate con‹rmation of Ed Meese, Reagan’s choice to become attorney general. Washington’s major paper, he believed, had strayed far from the in›uence of Phil Graham and the robust civil liberties views of writers like Alan Barth. He blamed Green‹eld’s “ideological trip” for the newspaper’s “swing to the right” that made life increasingly dif‹cult for “the very people, organizations and issues you [the Post] once espoused.”3 At the same time, he endured the usual attacks from conservatives who called him a “knee-jerk liberal.” And he suffered the occasional barbs ‹red by journalists such as Victor Navasky at the Nation, who continued to ‹ght the ideological battles of the McCarthy era. Navasky called him “the quintessential anti-communist liberal,” a pejorative label, but one that Rauh wore proudly.4 Brainwashing, CIA Style Apart from rescuing the District of Columbia School of Law, Rauh devoted the ‹nal years of his life to a case begun in 1979–80 on behalf of nine Canadian citizens who had been subjected during the height of the Cold War to devastating CIA-initiated brainwashing experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. This epic legal battle, formally known as Orlikow v. United States,5 equaled in complexity, length, and public signi‹cance any in his long career as a civil liberties lawyer. Orlikow became his closing argument on behalf of liberalism, his ‹nal pursuit of individual justice in a life devoted to that ideal. When David Orlikow, a member of the Canadian Parliament, asked Rauh 268 citizen rauh and his...