1869

The Cornell University Press Podcast an interview with MartiN SiEgEl, author of Judgment and mercy hosted by Jonathan hall the transcript

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Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Martin Siegel, author of Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs. Martin Siegel practices and teaches law in Houston. After clerking for Judge Kaufman, he served as an Assistant US Attorney in Manhattan, and on the staff of the US Senate Judiciary Committee. His writing has been published in the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and legal journals. As we mark the 70th anniversary of the Rosenberg executions, we spoke to Martin about their story, as well as that of the young and ambitious judge who sentenced them to death, Judge Irving Robert Kaufman. We learn that in the decades after that fateful decision, Judge Kaufman transformed into one of the most progressive judges of his time, and Martin also shares with us his, and his fellow clerks’, experiences working for the judge. Hello, Martin, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Great to be here.

Well, I’m very excited to talk to you about your new book, Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs. This June 19 of this year marks the 70th anniversary of the Rosenberg executions by electric chair for the crime of atomic espionage. Tell us a bit about their story as well as the subject of your book, the young and ambitious judge who sentenced them to deathm, Judge Irving Robert Kaufman.

Thank you. So so the Rosenberg story came to public attention in 1951 really 1950 When they were first charged, or Julius was first charged, the trial was 1951. And they were the latest and by far the most well known figures in a sort of growing and larger espionage ring. That included a number of people in the United States and also a prominent physicist in England who was apprehended and prosecuted and jailed in England and Klaus Fuchs, who was he’s sort of not all that well known today unless you really a burrowed into this, this sort of slice of history. But he was by far the most valuable member of this espionage relating to the Soviets. He was an actual physicist and knew a great deal more about the atomic bomb than any other member and provided more valuable information to the Russians. By contrast, the Rosenbergs and Ethel Rosenberg whose brother David Greenglass, who was the main witness against them, did not know all that much about the atomic bomb. David Greenglass had been a machinist at Los Alamos, which was an entirely random sort of assignment. He had, he was not terribly well educated. He had a poor scientific background, but he was stationed there at Los Alamos and he was a committed communist, as was his brother in law, Julius and his sister, Ethel. And they had been for many years. And they decided with this sort of surprising assignment, to put their beliefs into action, so to speak. And so they persuaded David to bring back whatever information he could about what was going on there at Los Alamos to New York. And at first it was the names of scientists and things of that nature. But eventually, David Greenglass brought back and also a courier was sent out to New Mexico, who, who also brought back on a separate ship, information about the atomic bomb, primarily a sketch of the lens mold, which was a key component of the bomb, although the sketch itself as you would expect from a not terribly educated machinist was crude and hand drawn. And there’s there’s debate to this day over how valuable that information was to the Soviets. Now, unbeknownst to of course, any of those people and under the Honorable Judge Kaufman, who presided over their trial, who we’ll talk about in a minute, whom is subject of the book. The United States had broken the Soviets code during World War Two in something called Project Venona, and that’s what led them to the arrest, identify and arrest this espionage ring. That’s how Julius and Ethel came to be suspects and were arrested. Although there was precious little information about Ethel. There wasn’t more information about Julius. And again, that’s something that to this day is debated of the evidence at trial against Julius came from, as I said, David Greenglass, but some other sources as well. Another couple of couriers testified, sort of well known at the time woman who had been part of the Communist Party became almost a mini celebrity Elizabeth Bentley testified and there were a number of minor witnesses, all who reinforcing the case against Julius and his role in this this conspiracy. The only evidence against Ethel came from her brother David Greenglass, who testified that He brought those notes back from Los Alamos. She had typed them up, made them legible. Then the Julius had passed them along to his Russian contacts who, by the way, was also identified, but he’d fled or sorry, identified and dated, but he fled to the Soviet Union. And so that was the sole evidence at trial from David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth Greenglass against Ethel. And in the 1990s, David admitted that that had been perjured that he had essentially made up this story of Ethel typing in order to protect his own wife, who was also involved in this conspiracy, Ruth Greenglass, he insisted that she not be charged. But as trial approached in March of 1951, the government really leaned hard on him knowing they had very little evidence against Ethel and got him to concoct this story. So they were convicted in 1951. And then we come to the second part of your question, which is Judge Kaufman. He sent it to them to death, he presided over their trial. Let me tell you a bit about Judge Kaufman. And he’s the subject of my book. I was a law clerk for Judge Kaufman and one of his last two from 1991 1992. He died during the time we worked for him, and that’s what gave rise to this book. In 1951, he’d only been on the bench about 16 months, and he was one he was the second youngest judge in America federal judge at that time, extremely ambitious. Of course, one doesn’t get to be a federal judge, and probably it’s fair to say the most important federal trial bench in America, New York City, at that time anyway, without being both accomplished and extremely ambitious and political. He was a member of the Democratic Party, he raised money in the Democratic Party. He was sort of a protege of a number of important political and legal figures J. Edgar Hoover was prominent among them, he’d come to know J. Edgar Hoover, when he was a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office, and Tom Clark, who’s Truman’s Attorney General was a close friend, and Clark was probably more than anyone else responsible for putting him on the bench. Kaufman’s background was very much like the Rosenbergs, which I think is something that fitted into his psyche when it came time to decide what the punishment should be for their portrayal of the United States. He’d grown up quite poor. It’s sort of the classic Jewish American rags to riches in one generation story. His parents were immigrants. He was born six years after they got to America, lived on the Lower East Side eventually moved to Jewish Harlem, educated at Fordham, but but just a truly impressive sort of self made success came to public prominence as a prosecutor in the 1930s. And then in the 1940s represented prominent in private practice media figures and also Milton Berle. Nice client to have but if you’re trying to impress people like Tom Clark and J, Edgar Hoover, you can arrange private audiences after shows and benefits with Milton Berle which which Judge Kaufman did. So. So fast forward to the Rosenberg case, it was a case he wanted, he wanted to try that case. And back then today, it’s a more random assignment system back then there was more play in the joints for both the prosecutors to kind of arrange things so that they were likely to get inserted and get a certain judge, and for judges themselves, who wanted certain cases to reach out and get them down. And Judge Kaufman did that with the help of a family friend and a sort of protege of his Roy Cohn. So he gets the case and he fully appreciates. I think it’s advantageous to him as a vehicle for notoriety and for potential advancement. During the trial, he intervenes in a way that seemed to favor the government, although in his defense, that was a point on appeal, and the appellate courts denied that it was anything unusual or outside the usual discretion of a federal trial judge. He also and this wasn’t revealed until the 1970s conducted secret ex parte discussions with the prosecution, the prosecution team mostly Roy Cohn, during the trial, and although it is true that that was probably not completely uncommon in those days, I think other judges may have done the same, it was a less formal system them nonetheless, even by the rules in place, then it was a violation of legal ethics. And it’s certainly something that today looking back on it, we can see compromises neutrality, that he’s also of course well known for sentencing and Rosenberg’s to death. So what why did he do that? In the book, I argue, a couple of factors. He was extremely anti-communist as a protege of Hoover and also a disciple of Fordham. He was a product of both Fordham college and Fordham Law School. And that was a fairly conservative place in the 1930s and 40s. When Judge Kaufmann or Well, I say 20s and 30s, when he was there, but he remained sort of connected to the institution to some degree. I think that influenced his thinking. And the other factor that aside from his personal ambition that I really argued influence the result is, is just this special disdain he had for the Rosenbergs because they, as I said, started out where he did in life really almost exactly the same place, Lower East Side, Julius was raised in Jewish Harlem as Kaufman had been are a bit later. But you know, America had been so good to Irving Kaufman. He succeeded so thoroughly here he the mass prosperity, he’d achieved this sort of political and legal prominence. And I think when he came across these two people with his background he could have least arguably succeeded as he did, but who viewed the whole enterprise as corrupt, and not worthy of patriotic support. I think he saw their betrayal and special and very personal terms.

That’s interesting. Yeah, that makes total sense. In your book, you mentioned that there was a Gallup poll in February of 1953, which showed public approval of a death sentence at 76%.

That’s right.

It wasn’t an unusual sentence in that it was it was approved by the public. But then in the 60s and 70s, what happened then?

Right, right. Well, right. So to go back to your to the first part of it, in 53, you know, and certainly a 51. Even more so when they were tried. It’s the Korean War. It’s McCarthyism. Unfortunately for the Rosenbergs, they, their offense was judged, you know, assessed by a jury and then judged in terms of satisfying Josh Kaufman in probably the worst time in terms of the climate and because of his personal blind spots. I think Doug Kaufman might have been one of the worst judges they could have drawn on there. Frankly, I’m not sure he would have been terribly sympathetic, then. Right. But the Rosenberg lawyer made an interesting argument for mercy when he was arguing about the Senate. And so week after the conviction, he said, and he repeated this argument, about a year and a half later, when he was arguing for reduction in sentence, he said, who knows, but that history may turn. And what he’s referring to is that in the war, we’ve been allies with Russia. And of course, by 1951 and 53. It was a very different time, but he was making the point to the judge that, you know, I’m not sure how well this is going to look in the light of history, because who knows if we’re not allies later in time, or if this Cold War has died down somewhat, and that proved to be prophetic. He was a lawyer, who Rosen was lawyer was deficient in lots of ways. And a lot of people have said that not just me, but his his arguments for mercy, especially the second time around in 1952. Were eloquent and compelling. And he was right, that history turned off that we became allies exactly with the Soviet Union, but by the late 60s and 70s, that that sort of atomic terror. It was on the front page of newspapers during the Korean War, there was there was true and real and legitimate fear of an atomic war. And so the Rosenbergs was seen as arch arch beings for having given away our most powerful weapon that was gone, you know, it’s now the late 60s and 70s. And people are used to the Soviets having the bomb, they’re used to this concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. We’re even beginning to get into the world of detente by the 1970s. And, you know, the left had changed by Dan, it was something of a new left in the late 60s and 70s. And they weren’t they weren’t a sort of obsessed with the internees side battles of the Communist Party and Stalinism, versus, you know, other flavors of Bolshevism versus the more progressive, you know, mainstream left all of that a lot of that faded. Instead, when they charged that the Rosenbergs had been framed, a lot of people believed it. And the reason they believed it is because there was a whole new slate of government misconduct to base that argument on, for example, lies in Vietnam, you know, by the late 60s and 70s, sort of the official line of the government of Vietnam is shown to be deceptive and hollow, and then there’s Watergate. And so by the mid 70s, to say that the government might lie and frame somebody doesn’t seem as preposterous, as when the Rosenbergs defenders who were mostly communists. Well, I That’s not fair. I mean, they’re hardcore defenders in the early 50s. Were communist. But there were a lot of people who just objected to the sentences who were not communists, of course, by by the late 60s and 70s. There’s little more credence to that argument and the fact that we’ve broken the Soviets code, and we have this sort of information in that secret that we couldn’t reveal at trial. That’s not public yet, either. And the Rosenbergs offenders continue to maintain their innocence and a big catalyst was that their sons then had two small children 10 And I believe six at the time of the executions were obviously very sympathetic. But they after the executions, they sort of disappeared, they were raised by different families. Their name was not Rosenberg it was mere Paul after the family that took them in. And by the late 60s, early 70s, they make a kind of personal decision, that they are going to come forward and say who they are, and make it their cause to clear their parents names. And they were compelling, figures articulate, smart, good looking and just hard to dismiss. And they begin to hammer away at the case and say, you know, look, there was only one witness and this witness was biased. He was on trial for his own life trying to save his skin. And they poked holes and other little bits of evidence here and there. There’s a book that came out I think in 65 Icahn invitation to an inquest by to sort of left leaning science, freelance writers who did a truly deep dive into the evidence and brought out some contradictions and other things. And so this public campaign really takes hold and their rallies all over the country and their newspaper articles, their headlines like, you know, the Rosenbergs, we tried and Rosenberg’s you know, on trial again, 35 years later, and these are in major news outlets. And then something happens that really throws gas on the fire, which is revelation of Judge Kaufman’s misconduct. One of the one of the first Freedom of Information Act requests in the early 70s, after some amendments to FOIA made it easier to get information from the government was from the Rosenberg’s kids, and they began to get these snippets of information from FBI files suggesting that Judge Kaufmann had had these ex parte contacts. So now they’re not able to, they’re able to say noxious look, this case is shaky, or a lot of people may have realized they’re able to say the judge committed misconduct. And that’s that’s powerful. It really did. There were calls for Judge competence impeachment. There were calls for hearings, there was a letter by 100 plus law professors that were articles in the New York Times. And just cop was really under siege. And he had a key was, for example, he was going to give a speech at Pomona College a commencement address. He had to cancel that because it looked like there were going to be demonstrations. It’s a real foreshadowing of of some of the some of the free speech on campus arguments and controversies we see today. There were pickets he would go give a speech and a legal aid, society dinner, that sort of thing. And they were pickets there waiting for him. There it bled into his social life of the I interviewed the miracles, Michael Meeropol, one of the two sons and he told me that someone had written him a letter saying he’d seen judge Kaufman at a party and spilled wine on him and muttered to himself. That’s where Julius and Ethel. So it affected his social life, he went to a dinner party, and one of the one of the women there, accosted him and said, Why did you give him the death sentence, you know, and he sort of stammered and gave an excellent explanation. So all of this was reminiscent for him of what had happened in 5152 53. He’d experienced back then when it was alive controversy and especially in the months leading up to the executions, when there was a real move for clemency and pickets at the White House and elsewhere. experience death threats, bomb threats, he’d had to flee his apartment, on the eve of the execution because there were so many bomb threats. The FBI was constantly sweeping the apartment, it was under guard, his kids were under guard. So all that went away after 53. But it sort of came back in a fashion in the 70s. And really, it was a real tragedy in a sense for him. I don’t I’m not saying it wasn’t undeserved at some level, it wasn’t undeserved, given how he behaved in the trial. And the view of many that the sentences were excessive, but it was it was a surprise for sure.

Interesting, and what’s fascinating is, so there’s this there’s a backlash, and then there’s a as far as, you know, saving face or clearing one’s name, you have the Rosenberg children trying to clear their family name. Then you have Judge Kaufman trying to save face on his part, and how if you get accosted at party’s, and he’s an upwardly mobile gentleman, which he clearly was, how is he going to square the circle that and so what I think is fascinating is that he became something that few predicted that he became one of the most progressive judges of his time. There’s a great line in your book where you say “Grace withheld from the Rosenbergs overflowed towards others, the weak, the excluded. The unpopular.” Tell us about these pathbreaking decisions that he was responsible for.

Right. I mean, that’s one of the great ironies of this story is that it did become a leading progressive judge in his day. And he got he got very little forgiveness from the Rosenberg oriented critics, or that they viewed as a sort of Sham, you know, cheap attempted atonement, a cheap attempt to stay in the good graces of elite, liberal Jewish Upper East Side society, which he was very much a member of an attempt to remain on great terms with the New York Times he was friendly with the publisher of The Times Salzburger and and the executive editor there A.M. Rosenthal. And so that was that was kind of the theory on as the book on him is that this was this was a facade of atonement. And so I argued in the book, it’s, it’s really deeper than that. So yeah, let me describe some of those decisions. He was the first judge to desegregate a school and the North. That was in 1960-61. It was in New Rochelle, New York and fascinating case. And you know, there have been a number of those cases. And they were growing in the south, of course, but that was the first one in the north, which raised a whole different set of issues because they are that second, the segregation was less based on de jure a law and more on de facto residential patterns and things of that nature. So in some ways, it was sort of harder case to cut through that then a very crude and obvious segregation and south in prison condition cases, he became quite liberal. So there was a case arising out of the Metropolitan Corrections Center, a whole host of conditions were challenged by defendants, including body cavity searches, which had become socially routine almost, and he invalidated those and found them a violation constitutional rights Supreme Court overruled him. In First Amendment cases, he became a sort of leading proponent of freedom of the press freedom of the individual to descend. So in the Pentagon Papers case, which went through the Second Circuit on its way to the Supreme Court. He was one of the minority who argued for immediate publication, whereas the Second Circuit actually continued to pause on publication for a lot of the items and sent it back to the district judge and they were overruled by the Supreme Court a couple of days later agreeing with Judge Kaufman Kaufman innovated a couple of interesting privileges that again, don’t they’ve been cut back on by the Supreme Court. One was for reporters to be able to discuss and deliberate about their articles among editors and not have to reveal that in a libel suit that arose out of a very well publicized big case, brought against 60 minutes by former officer to Vietnam. He came up with something called the neutral reportage privilege, which has been in the news lately because it was going to be what Fox News was going to rely on. Fox News was gonna say in defense legally anyway, of its of the defamation case, arising out of the voting machines that, look, we’re allowed us reporters to report on this controversy. We’re not endorsing what President Trump might say about voting machines or his acolytes might say we’re just we’re just neutrally reporting well, that you can disagree with that. But that concept that a news outlet or reporter is not liable for the truth or falsity of the thing that reporting on that comes from the case against the New York Times brought the brought by the Audubon Society. The judge Kaufmann decided he was the judge who decided that John Lennon could stay in America John Lennon was the target of a sort of politically motivated, bogus deportation campaign by Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell aided and abetted by Strom Thurmond. They wanted to get Lenin because Lenin leading up to the 72 election was doing going around trying to organize the youth vote, it was the first election where a teen 18 year olds could vote. So they wanted to retaliate. Lenin had been here on a series of visas, and they discovered this sort of old drug conviction he pled guilty to in England. And they argued that that made him ineligible to remain in America on his visa, even though he had been here that had been automatically renewed, you know, period after period and judge Kaufman found that that was unconstitutional. The conviction in England didn’t live up to American due process standards. But government also understood what was really going on. But it was politically motivated. He had a live in the decision saying we take very seriously this idea that the deportation laws would be used as a tool of political retaliation. And then finally, one one last case I’ll mention there are lots of others, but he sort of dusted off a law from 1789, in a case brought by parent Wan family against a Paraguayan police officer who had tortured and killed the son of a leading dissident in Paraguay in the 1970s. Or that that person came to the United States, the the police colonel who did that came to the United States. And when the family of Paraguay learned that

Jonathan Martin

they came to the United States and brought a lawsuit against him under the a what’s called the Alien Tort Statute, passed as part of the very first set of laws governing the judiciary in 1789. That law makes it a tort such that you can sue in federal court for a violation of what’s called the law of nations. Well, in this case, Judge coffin became the first judge to interpret that phrase, the law of nations to embrace all of these growing human rights treaties and human rights norms that sort of grown up after World War Two. So it’s a real landmark decision allowing people who’ve been human rights victims anywhere in the world in theory to sue their oppressors as long as there was jurisdiction over them here in the United States, which in that case, there was because he was here that gave birth to really a whole area of law, like a number of wave of lawsuits in the 80s and 90s. Based on human rights violations, for example, out of the Bosnian war, a lot of the Holocaust remuneration litigation was based on that it was suits against the Marcos family, and then starting in the 90s into the 2000s, a new kind of lawsuit against American corporations and multinational corporations for misdeeds abroad. And like a lot of what Judge Kauffman did that was too liberal for the Supreme Court, the increasingly conservative Supreme Court, which is a series of decisions starting in the early 2000s. And culminating in just the last couple of years, they’ve almost eliminated that whole area of liability but it fascinatingly it, Judge confidence innovation went beyond the US it gave birth to this concept of universal jurisdiction around the world. So for example, in Spain, it was a judge for a long time who would be prosecuted Pinochet, he prosecuted other human rights abusers in places having nothing to do with Spain. And he was calling on this principle of universal jurisdiction, which took cop and and helped innovate in that decision in America in the late 70s. And 80s are such a fascinating transition.

Here he is in the 50s, as you know, the spokesperson for the government, and we’re going to really lay down the law and now he’s going against the government. It’s right. Fascinating. So now, what’s what’s also interesting is that, you know, he was very, obviously a very public figure. And these decisions are very public with long standing ramifications down the line in a very positive way. But you also go into His family life, which was very troubled, and what was the connection between his private life and then these public decisions?

Right, he did have a troubled family life like sad a lot of ways he had three kids. They suffered from substance abuse and mental illness. One of them died at 38 on a hiking trip to Peru, but there was some suggestion that drugs might have been involved. And there’s no question he had a bit of a drug problem. He had another son who had even greater substance abuse and suffered from Munchausen disease and ended up losing the limb because of that, and just being really only partially able to function. You had a third son who was institutionalized on and off and with severe mental illness, that son also predeceased him, his wife had attempted suicide, also substance abuse, alcohol problems, pain, addiction problems seem to suffer from anorexia. So these are all obviously these are these are serious, serious, no doubt deep seated ailments and and it would be facile to trace them, you know, too close- ly to any one cause. But the relatives I spoke to, did link them to some degree to a couple of things, you know, beyond simply genetics and beyond simply the environmental causes for those kinds of issues that we’re all kind of aware of, they thought the Rosenberg controversy might have had something to do with it. And that’s because the family sort of lived under siege for a long time that it was a quote from his daughter in law and said, sort of paraphrasing here, but basically, what she said was like, how do you have a normal childhood when your father is trying to Rosenberg’s you know, and what they mean is that they were under a guard, a lot, they were sort of special words, almost are projects of the FBI. One of his sons was at Syracuse in 1958 59, when Judge coffin was presiding over a kind of well known mafia case, as a he was still a trial judge at that stage. And that son received a death threat. In college that might have been no one knows what might have been a prank, no one really knows where it came from. It’s hard, it’s impossible to know if it was a serious threat. But of course, given the history was taken seriously, and the FBI immediately, you know, investigated and went and guarded him. And so there was all of that. He also had a quite difficult personality, Josh Kaufman, he was prickly. He was extremely demanding. He was a bit tyrannical go to law clerks, famously so but but also whose kids it didn’t seem very different wasn’t it was kind of father who just wasn’t satisfied and believe that the way for them for his kids to succeed was to drive them towards success. You know, he’d been extremely driven. And so by the time he has kids, the families prosperous, they’re living on Park Avenue, they’re quite well to do. And there’s a sort of sense that since, you know, general circumstances aren’t going to drive his kids the way he was driven by poverty and being second generation here in the US that he had to sort of supply the, the impetus and the incentive, and, you know, as a person who needed to be in control, who needed to be almost to dominate and when things in his life seemed out of control, like this larger controversy that besieged him, you know, he arguably sort of retaliated by tightening the screws all the harder and grandchildren of this, this middle generation who’ve done so you’d had such affliction. You know, they believe that their father’s way of being a dad, you know, couldn’t have helped those kids with their illnesses and their other issues. So, you know, it’s all it’s all sort of armchair psychology. It’s hard to know. But but they the family life was tragic in some ways.

Wow. Well, you mentioned armchair psychology, you but you also have firsthand experience. You were, as you mentioned, you were as his conference, last law clerk, and the book opens up your experience at his funeral. Tell us about some of the experiences you had and your impressions of the judge.

Yeah, so the judge, the judge can be extremely hard. And I had a fairly atypical experience actually, because when I started working for him, which was August of 1991. He wasn’t in the office. He’s coming back from vacation, and then he came back the end of August and within a couple of months, he was declining. In health, and he died in February of 1992. So I only saw sort of glimpses of what we might call the Kauffman treatment, which is like sometimes like his kids clerks couldn’t measure up for, sort of, regardless of what they did. And some of that, you know, the I interviewed about 50 former law clerks, and some of them thought it was his insecurity. He’d gone to Fordham, he hired clerks only from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford used to call them Harvard, sort of derisively, if you’ve gone to Harvard, he would call you Harvard in a sort of sarcastic way. He had this tradition, every year, when the new courts would start over the summer, he, they would write their first draft opinion for him, and he would look it over, call them back into his office an hour later and be marked up with red pen, and he’d physically throw it at them. And say, in essence, I’m gonna amend this because I assume this is a family podcast and say, this is terrible, except he didn’t use the word terrible. And you know, a lot of clerks were really discombobulated by this, many of them quit over the years, he would have cottonwood erupt, sort of irrationally, fire them, even though you were kind of supposed to know when he fired you that you didn’t really, you know, most of the time, he hadn’t really fired you. Sometimes he’d fire you, and you would not come in the next day, you would think, well, it’s terrible. I’ve been fired by my judge, how do I explain that to future employers? What do I put on my resume? You know, but at least I don’t ever have to see the guy again. And then you get a call from chambers. And he’d be where, you know, the screening and like, where are you? And he’d say, Well, Judge, you know, don’t you remember you, you fire me yesterday? And he said, No, I didn’t get in here, you know, you’re behind get it, you need to get in here. So he was just, he was just sort of impossible to predict that way. And he had he also again, grandchildren told me, he did this in his family, he would play them off against one another. So he, for many years, he had two clerks and then in the 1970s, because he was chief judge, he had three clerks. And the way the the way the office worked is you’ve sat in a kind of anti loom, and he was in a big sort of office and back and he would buzz you in with a buzzer. And the clerk who was in his best graces was cork number one, you get one buzz, and you have to run right in. And I have to tell me, like, you know, I still hear that buzzer in my nightmares, you know that just as because you had to, you had to be in there, within three seconds, whatever you were doing on the phone in the middle of a thought writing a sentence, like drop it in there. If you wanted to talk to the second clerk, there’d be two buses, you need to ask the Secretary and the third clerk was in such a deep doghouse that he didn’t even get plugged in. And in fact, and it was it was you would kind of infer some humiliating treatment if you were the third clerk, because sometimes he wouldn’t talk to you. He would just he would talk to the first clerk and say, Tell him such and such, he would just sort of kind of like freeze you out. So I mean, I just I heard all kinds of crazy stories of one one, the woman who started who was locked up right before me, you know, just couldn’t take this treatment, as long as a lot of people couldn’t. And she would go to the bathroom, and she’d cry a lot. And so eventually, the judge noticed her absence and said to the number one clerk, you know, where is she? And he’d say, well, she’s in the bathroom judge. And he would, he began to think that she must be drinking too much water. So he banned water from chambers for a while. So it’s just, it’s just one of these sort of old school tyrannical, unpredictable grenade waiting to explode sort of bosses. And these days, I don’t think I’m not sure you can get away with a

40 year run of that back then, you know, it was just like your little more unreviewable to use a legal term, right? So he did get away with it. One year, I’ll tell you one last story that one year, embarrassed him. And then in the 1980s, all three of his clerks quit it at the same time, that actually made the papers and it was kind of humiliating for him and the only time that ever happened, because clerks it however badly they’re treated, if it’s a one year job, so and you’re going on to a law firm, and you’re gonna put it on your resume, and it’s kind of feather in your cap to have as a young lawyer and you have every incentive just to stick it out. And just, you know, even if the judge is never going to talk to you again, or give you a reference, like at least you can just get out of there so so for someone to quit just shows you how bad and unendurable and really kind of was. So anyway, difficult guy, but you know, what he wanted, could also be a prince when he wanted to, which usually was dealt with awkward, but he could be funny, he could be charming. Garius and there was that side of him too, for sure. He wouldn’t have gotten where he was if he was just completely No, no, no, not at all. And as I said, he was in his earlier days when he was kind of flattering his way to the top in addition to accomplish it his way to the top, but he did both, you know, he was quite quite warm, quite sociable. And he had, you know, he had like, he had some close friends and to his friends he was he was loyal, and then even to a small number of clerks who kind of managed to graduate the Kaufman bootcamp and get into his good graces for those relatively small number he would add, you know, avidly promote their careers and stay in touch. So, you know, he could he could be that way. He just didn’t want too much of the time.

Well, we’re so glad that you were a clerk under him. You know, I don’t think this book would have existed if that didn’t happen

Absolutely not.

So we’re very grateful for that. You know, you have a personal experience when we’re grateful that you shared that with us as well as in the book but also you did a really deep in depth look at interviewing dozens of people and really getting down to the bottom of his story and and fascinating story that we encourage all of our listeners to read, it was just was given a really glowing review in the New York Review of Books. So it’s a great read - Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs. It was great talking with you, Martin.

Thanks very much, really appreciate it.

That was Martin Siegel, author of Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs.