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ELLIOT LEE
RICHARDSON: LAWYER AND PUBLIC SERVANT
1920-1999
The 25th anniversary volume of
the Harvard College Class of 1941 includes these here
abridged autobiographical reflections.
YEARS IN COLLEGE:
1937-1941. DEGREES: A.B., cum laude,
1941; LL.B., cum laude,1944(47) -
MARRIED: Anne Francis Hazard, Aug. 2, 1952.
CHILDREN: Henry Shattuck, Jan. 16, 1955;
Anne Hazard, March 28, 1957; Michael Elliot, Jan.
28, 1960.
OCCUPATION: Lieutenant governor, Commonwealth
of Massachusetts.
OFFICES HELD: Associate, Ropes, Gray, Best,
Coolidge & Rugg, Boston, 1949-53, 1954-56; partner,
Ropes & Gray, Boston, 1961-62; 1963-64 assistant
secretary, 1957-59, acting secretary, April-July,
1958, U.S. Department of Health, Education &
Welfare; U.S. Attorney for District of Massachusetts,
1959-61; special assistant to U.S. Attorney General,
April-June, 1961; lieutenant governor, Commonwealth
of Massachusetts, since 1964; secretary, 1955-56,
trustee, 1961-64 Massachusetts General Hospital;
general chairman, Greater Boston United Fund Campaign,
1963-64; vice president and director, Massachusetts
Bay United Fund (formerly United Fund of Greater
Boston), since 1963; director and past president,
World Affairs Council of Boston, since 1961; director,
Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, since 1959;
United Community Services of Metropolitan Boston,
since 1960; trustee, Radcliffe College, since 1959;
Civic Education Foundation, Tufts University, since
1964; member, Advisory Committee, Massachusetts
Council for Public Schools, since 1959; member,
Standing Committee, Trustees of Reservations, since
1960; member, executive board, Boston Council, Boy
Scouts of America, since 1964; director, Alumni
Association, 1957-60, member, Ad Hoc Committee on
Law School Faculty Appointments, Committee to Visit
the Medical School and the Dental School, Committee
to Visit the Graduate School of Public Administration,
Committee to Nominate Overseers, Committee to Visit
the Law School, Committee to Visit the Department
of Government, Harvard University.
MEMBER OF: American Academy of Arts &
Sciences, since 1958; 1941 Permanent Class Committee,
Harvard University.
PUBLICATIONS "Poisoned Politics,"
The Real Tragedy of Massachusetts, The Atlantic
Monthly, October, 1961, vol. 208; "Freedom
of Expression and the Function of Courts,"
65 Harvard Law Review, (1951).
Looking
back over twenty-five years and counting law school,
the Army, law school again, and each new return to
law practice as a different assignment, I find that
there have been sixteen of them in all since 1941.
In the five years since then I have made the transition
from lawyer-active-in-politics to politician-who-happens-to-be-a-lawyer.
Until 1962 I alternated between government, public
service jobs, and the private practice of law. Although
in the process I had worked in many political campaigns,
I was not myself a candidate.
I
found myself nominated as the Republican candidate
for lieutenant governor. Having spent several months'
hard work without being nominated two years before,
this turn of events felt somewhat peculiar. It was
a step I took, however, only after receiving the firm
assurance of the Republican gubernatorial candidate,
John Volpe, that if we were both elected he would
give me substantial responsibilities in state government,
for I saw little to look forward to in two years as
a state-level Throttlebottom.
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| Elliot
Richardson is sworn in as Secretary of Defense
in February of 1973. President Nixon looks on
as Richardson's wife, Anne, holds the Bible
and Chief Justice Warren Burger swears him in
at the White House. |
So
began four months of dawn-to-midnight handshaking,
interrupted only by four depressing days in San Francisco
as a delegate to the Republican National Convention.
At factory gates, shopping centers, clambakes and
barbecues—wherever people in any considerable
number could be found—I shook every hand within
reach. As the weeks wore on I thought more and more
often of the dedication to a book I once read which
goes something like this: "This book is dedicated
to the people sometimes referred to as 'the little
people.' Well, I want you to know they're just as
big as you are, whoever you are."
The Governor has given me more than enough to do,
and I have been extremely busy as his coordinator
of health, education and welfare programs and as chief
organizer of public support for a tax program relying
principally on a limited sales tax.
Except for the substantial certainty that I shall
be a candidate for something, next year's prospects
are also uncertain. But uncertainties are part of
the endless fascination of politics, and the satisfactions
heavily outweigh the frustrations. The chief sufferers
are family life and leisure. Happily, my wife is a
great campaigner in her own right and she is often
with me. The children come along too some- times,
especially to parades. And there are occasional—and
hugely enjoyable—interludes of skiing or fishing
and swimming and tennis.
The Massachusetts Historical Society
Annual Report for 2000 published
"Memoirs" by John Sears which are here abridged.
Elliot Lee Richardson
Yankee Doodler
1920-1999
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| Elliot
Richardson, U.S. Secretary of Defense
by Everett Raymond Kinstler, 1973 |
You
were ushered into the White House Cabinet Room—if
you were one of the fortunate folks—and shown
a red leather chair. Ordinary enough in front, but
down the back—instead of the one or occasionally
two silver plaques describing the Cabinet offices
held by the occupant—there were four.
No, said the usher, there has never been anything
quite like it.
Nor is there likely to be.
Four Cabinet appointments! And two ambassadorships,
and two constitutional offices in a major state, and
a slew of other public offices of consequence.
This tribute to Elliot Richardson is about his life
and achievement, of course, but it is also about us.
Once, in a rarely critical mood, Elliot said he considered
The Education of Henry Adams an overrated book:
"I'm inclined to suppose," he said, "the
deficiency must be in me."
For all of his awesome public success, he never reached
the peak that others predicted for him (and for which
he may have had a twinge of hope)—the presidency.
There were those of us who thought God made Elliot
to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, or at very
least a respected member of the Court; that did not
happen either. As we review his extraordinary life
and unique achievements, we might do well to ponder
whether the "deficiency might be in us."
From start to finish, there was Richardson the Lawyer.
President of the Harvard Law Review, and clerk
to Judge Learned Hand—who is seen by many American
scholars as the greatest of our jurisconsults, on
a par with Elliot's hero Justice Holmes. Later clerk
to Justice Felix Frankfurter. Associated with, and
soon a partner of, the highly respected Boston law
firm now known as Ropes and Gray, and a lecturer in
law at the Harvard Law School.
His legislative skill drew Richardson into his first
national public service, appointed by President Eisenhower
in 1957 as Assistant Secretary for Legislation in
the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.
His lawyerly skills led the same president to appoint
him U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts
in 1959, where he began a brilliant prosecutorial
career by tackling major influence peddlers in Boston
and brought down a White House intimate, Bernard Goldfine,
for tax evasion.
These lawyerlike qualities made him one of Massachusetts's
more successful attorneys general, and then—as
the world knows all too well—the United States
attorney general who refused to accommodate the corruption
of the Nixon White House and forced a vice president
out of office. Those same skills served him—and
his country—later when he patiently negotiated
a superb international treaty on the Law of the Sea,
having been appointed by President Carter, who recognized
talent across the aisle.
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| Elliot
Richardson and Archibald Cox wait for the start
of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in 1973 |
And
of course, it was to this lawyer's life that Elliot
Richardson returned when he found in 1984 that his
brand of political service had gone out of vogue.
In a sort of intellectual homecoming, he gave the
same dedication to his senior partnership at the grand
old firm of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy that
he had to all his other service.
There was also—overlooked by too many of us—Elliot
the successful politician. Starting with service as
a town meeting member and library trustee in Brookline
in 1950, followed by service on the staffs of Sen.
Leverett Saltonstall (1953-1955) and Gov. Christian
Herter (1955-1956), he showed lifelong fidelity to
a type of progressive (now called "moderate")
Republicanism: problem-solving with conscientious
attention to consequences, management with considerable
care for those whose money was being spent, public
service with complete integrity.
Richardson the politician also endured a disappointing
loss in 1962, in the Massachusetts Republican convention
and primary, to his friend Edward Brooke. Victory
followed on the heels of defeat, however, with his
1964 election as the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts,
on a ticket with the restored-to-office Gov. John
A. Volpe.
In the term that followed, Richardson did a masterful
job reorganizing the delivery of welfare services
in the Commonwealth, against heavy odds and entrenched
interests. He provided manful and meaningful aid when
the governor perceived that the time had come to support
public services and systems in Massachusetts with
a sales tax—a battle won despite heated opposition
from legislative leadership. (How different from the
attitudes of a later day!)
Much has been made—too much, Richardson believed—of
his extraordinary courage in refusing to fire special
Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox and of his resignation
in the face of presidential pressure. An episode a
decade earlier in Massachusetts, when he sublimated
his own ambition for what he perceived as a public
cause, shows that the so-called "Saturday Night
Massacre" was no fluke. In 1969, Massachusetts
Attorney General Richardson was appointed by President
Nixon as Under Secretary of State. By resigning immediately
from his Bay State position, Elliot could have accorded
the Republican governor an opportunity to appoint
one of his own as attorney general. Instead, out of
respect for the constitutional process, Richardson
remained at his post until confirmed by Congress,
throwing the choice in Massachusetts to the legislature,
which made its Democratic Speaker the new attorney
general.
The
State Department appointment initiated Richardson's
astonishing career in the upper levels of federal
service. In those years he chaired a sub-cabinet committee
that worked to reduce U.S. establishments abroad and
to modernize the diplomatic corps. In mid-1970, he
became secretary of the troubled Department of Health,
Education and Welfare, supervising 107,000 civil servants.
In the ensuing three years he restored the morale
of the agency, energized the Head Start program, decentralized
services, and helped to articulate the Nixon-Brooke
"guaranteed annual income" scheme. He worked
on some of the earliest desegregation busing proposals
and was hard at work on other reforms when the president
asked him to become Secretary of Defense in 1973.
Just as he was mastering this enormous agency and
reordering its priorities, after three months he was
moved once again, this time to become Attorney General
of the United States.
It
was in this role, from 1978 to 1975, that he made
perhaps his grandest contribution to the problem-solving
of the republic—and also experienced his most
notable hour in public service in the Watergate affair.
Later, Richardson stated that he preferred to be remembered
for his lawyerly achievements at the Justice Department.
He worked hard on an epidemic of highway deaths and
reopened the question of high rates of recidivism.
He studied, as he had in Massachusetts, the problems
of wiretapping and witness immunity. But then, rather
to his dismay, he found himself engulfed in the darker
side of the Nixon White House. In the first great
crisis, he performed the miracle of working out the
least possible disruptions involved in the removal
of Vice President Agnew from office and the succession
of Gerald Ford.
As the Watergate troubles unfolded, he kept for a
time the storm-tossed ship in navigable waters. But
when the president's men demanded that Archibald Cox,
as special prosecutor, agree not to subpoena further
data from the White House, Richardson made clear his
objections. Then, when Nixon stuck to his position
and asked Richardson to fire Cox, as the world well
knows Elliot decided he had to depart himself, telling
the president that he considered his resignation to
be "in the public interest."
Fortunately, President Ford, newly installed, stepped
in and Elliot found himself at Winfield House in London,
as a highly successful American ambassador to the
Court of St. James's. As in all his public service,
his success here owed much to his charming and accomplished
wife, Anne who had been captivated, according to family
accounts, not by his intelligence so much as by his
skill as a ballroom dancer. But the ambassadorship
also ended prematurely, when the president—setting
Elliot on a track for the highest offices—appointed
him Secretary of Commerce in 1976. There he took a
lively and effective interest in job creation and
explored the possibilities of corporate democracy
and flextime.
Some
of his inventiveness in this period was translated
into an extraordinary book, The Creative Balance.
After a lengthy unavoidable commentary on Watergate,
this work branches into an altogether remarkable
in-depth consideration of many of the unsolved problems
of American public administration. Here we find
Richardson's careful analysis of the decline of
community, and the complicated balancing act between
equality and liberty which informs modern American
politics. Here, too, we find Elliot arguing with
himself (and sometimes admitting to a change of
mind) over matters such as the "exclusionary
rule," which bars the use in courtrooms of
evidence defectively obtained (and thus indirectly
punishes the public for the malefaction of the law
enforcement official). It shows throughout the reasoned
balance and fairness of mind which hints that he
would have been one of America's great jurists.
His public service did not end at the Commerce Department.
President Carter asked him to negotiate a treaty
on the Law of the Sea, which he did with extraordinary
skill and considerable disappointment when the United
States failed to sign. Later he monitored elections
in Namibia and Nicaragua. President Clinton awarded
him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998.
What Elliot Richardson was, in the end, was a polymath,
an intellectual, a public servant par excellence,
a keen observer, and a truly great manager.
He was also—as his family and friends would
emphasize—a superb human being.
The following is a selection from the preface to
Richardson's autobiography, Reflections of a Radical
Moderate
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If knew how to make it so, this book would sound like a
radical tract. For I am a radical—a radical moderate.
I believe profoundly in the ultimate value of human dignity
and equality. I therefore believe as well in such essential
contributors to these ends as fairness, tolerance, and mutual
respect. In seeking to be fair, tolerant, and respectful
I need to call upon all the empathy, understanding, rationality,
skepticism, balance, and objectivity I can muster. These
are the attributes of moderation.
For me, moderation is not a fighting faith but a faith worth
fighting for. My commitment to it is passionate, uncompromising,
and deep-rooted—hence, radical.
Moderates have ideals, but they are not starry-eyed idealists.
Moderates perceive clearly the ugly aspects of human behavior,
but they are not hard-bitten cynics. Moderates try to see
the world clearly and see it whole. They are realists.
As everyone knows, moderation is not colorful or dramatic.
Its deliberations tend to come across as dull. Moderates
seldom get headlines, and their utterances cannot easily
be reduced to sound bites. All this is unfortunate. It would
be better for the health of the democratic process if moderate
centrism could get itself at least as much attention as
right wing conservatism (left-wing liberalism has almost
disappeared).
Being problem-solvers, moderates put a premium on solutions.
It takes much more than split-the-difference, down-the-middle
compromise to work out a sensible accommodation among valid
competing claims. To achieve and maintain a creative balance
you have to be resourceful and inventive. Take, for example,
constitutional conventions, bills of rights, and means of
curbing abuses of private power that leave adequate room
for private initiative. These are among the moderate tradition's
most durable inventions. Similar resourcefulness has more
recently found ways of advancing civil rights, protecting
the environment, and strengthening the federal-state partnership.
For a long time now it has been my good fortune to occupy
one or another well-situated perch from which to observe
the interplay of government and politics. The scenes I witnessed
provided a fascinating display of human behavior. Watching
the actors perform reinforced my awareness that our conduct
is only partially accessible to reason and never fully controlled
by it. Our most pathetic and amusing actions, as well as
the noblest and most inspiring, are driven by the need to
endow our identities with enduring significance. The former
include both the compulsive pursuit of recognition and shallow
attempts to stave off oblivion. To ask a status-seeking
young person, "Why knock yourself out for a fleeting
reward?" would be like asking a salmon why it hurls
itself upstream. But just as the salmon's spawning helps
to perpetuate its species, so society's approbation acknowledges
some benefit to itself.
The examples of noble and inspiring conduct that I've also
seen have in common the pursuit of some good end for its
own sake. Some of these examples have involved unselfish
devotion to the public interest, some unswerving adherence
to the merits, and some conspicuous courage under pressure.
Countless individuals whose performances I watched neither
sought nor expected recognition but nevertheless felt the
desire to play a meaningful part in dealing with broadly
shared concerns. What else would explain their speaking
so feelingly of the desire "to make a difference"?
It would have been impossible in the circumstances not to
accumulate a considerable store of insights and opinions,
and as time went on I began to think about putting them
on paper. What got me started was my growing concern that
burgeoning complexity, rampant distrust, and cynical appeals
to narrow interests were threatening to extinguish the spirit
of moderation. At first I assumed that all I had to do would
be to take already well-formed thoughts, put them in order,
and find the right words. I was wrong. The "well-formed
thoughts" turned out to be riddled with gaps and inconsistencies.
That was the bad news. Yet from the filling in and straightening
out that went into correcting these flaws gradually emerged
a much clearer understanding of the subjects I wanted to
discuss. Indeed, it has occurred to me that the more successful
I have been in communicating this clarity, the more likely
you will be to say, "Surely this is obvious!"
Perhaps. But it may also be profound.
Reflections of a Radical Moderate
by Elliot Richardson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996).
Elliot
Richardson was a lifelong member of the First and
Second Church in Boston. This Unitarian Universalist
congregation, the oldest church in Boston, was founded
in 1630. The covenant then signed in the course
of the two days is still the basis of membership
in the church.
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