Much has already been written, mostly disapprovingly, about a group calling itself “Keep America Safe,” that has demanded the identification of Department of Justice lawyers who once represented Guantanamo detainees. By calling these lawyers “the Al-Qaeda 7,” this group has not very subtly implied that they are traitors in our midst. And, by demanding that the lawyers be outed, this right-wing group would appear bent on damaging, if not destroying, the lawyers’ careers.
Almost 50 years ago, an extremist Senator from Wisconsin sought to advance his own interests by inflicting similar harm on the career of a young Boston lawyer who had traveled to Washington with the Boston legal team retained to represent the Army, headed by legendary attorney Joseph Welch. The young lawyer, Fred Fisher, whom I was privileged to know much later in his career, had been a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild while a student at Harvard Law School. Although Fisher was a good young man with a promising legal career, every bit the capitalist and a patriot, Welch understood that his brief membership in the Guild made him vulnerable to attack as a communist symphathizer, and immediately sent him back to Boston for his own sake and for the sake of the battle that lay ahead.
After some days or weeks of televised Congressional hearings, McCarthy sought to strike back at Welch, who had been scoring points against McCarthy, by accusing Welch of having a communist symphathizer on his team. Welch famously retorted: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He embarked on a sterling defense of the young Fisher, and the tide of public opinion turned against McCarthy. Ultimately, the nation saw McCarthy for what he was: a shameless and misguided ideologue who would ruin the lives of as many good people as it took to satisfy his own boundless and relentless ambition.
Now, well into a new century, McCarthy has a natural heir. Keep America Safe hopes to do to these good lawyers what McCarthy tried to do to Fisher and managed to do to countless innocent people during the heyday of the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The lawyers I know who represented Guantanamo detainees did so at great personal sacrifice. They are lawyers in large private law firms who devoted countless pro bono hours to the representation, with the support of their law firms (including the same firm Joe Welch belonged to and where I began my legal career) and with the respect and admiration of their peers in the legal community. They do not sympathize with terrorists any more than Fred Fisher sympathized with communists. To the contrary, they are patriots in the best sense, citizens who, unlike our nation's enemies, believe in the rule of law and constitutional government. They believe that no person should be incarcerated indefinitely without legal representation and an opportunity to confront the evidence against him. They have worked tirelessly to preserve the free society that radical extremists hope to destroy.
These lawyers, far from being enemies of the American people, are the guardians of our liberties. They embody the principle so aptly dramatized in Robert Bolt’s play “A Man For All Seasons," in which Sir Thomas More explains to his impetuous future son-in-law, Roper, that once a group sanctions the breaking of laws to serve what it views to be an overarching principle, there is nothing to prevent the breaking down of the entire system of laws that protect us all from rank despotism. As someone who works with many good lawyers from every segment of the legal community, I can say with confidence that these men and women represent the best among us. We should all sleep better at night knowing that they, and others like them, have been and remain vigilant in the securing of the liberty that the framers of our Constitution sought to secure as our heritage. I know I do.
Well said, counselor
ReplyDeleteThe fact that many of the Guantanamo detainees turned out to be innocent would embarrass these McCarthyists, if they had left any sense of decency.
ReplyDeleteThe NLG, by the way, was not just a left-wing organization in its early days. It was a coalition of leftists, New Deal progressives, and minority lawyers and included mainstream figures like Robert Jackson, and even anti-communists like Thurgood Marshall, who quit the Guild during the McCarthy era.