Old Bob makes the news!
Another segment to follow tomorrow.
Love, Dinky
Hillary Clinton's Radical Summer
A Season of Love and Leftists
By JOSH GERSTEIN
Staff Reporter of the Sun
November 26, 2007
OAKLAND, Calif. — In a life marked largely by political caution, one
entry on Senator Clinton's résumé stands out: her clerkship in
1971 at one of America's most radical law firms, Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein.
One partner at the firm, Doris Walker, was a Communist Party member at the time.
Another partner, Robert Treuhaft, had left the party in 1958, several years
after being called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and labeled
as one of America's most "dangerously subversive" lawyers. The Oakland-based
firm was renowned for taking clients others rejected as too controversial,
including Communists, draft resisters, and members of the African-American
militant group known as the Black Panthers.
To this day, Mrs. Clinton's decision to work at the unabashedly left-wing firm
is surprising, even shocking, to some of her former colleagues there and to
those supporting her bid for the presidency. To the former first lady's enemies
and political opponents, her summer at the Treuhaft firm is yet another
indication that radical ideology lurks beneath the patina of moderation she has
adopted in public life.
Through more than a dozen interviews, a review of law firm files and
correspondence at two university archives, and an e xamination of previously
published descriptions of Mrs. Clinton's California summer, The New York Sun has
sought to compile a comprehensive account of the 23-year-old Yale law student's
work for the Treuhaft firm, how she got there, and how acquaintances she made
that summer surfaced from time to time as her political career unfolded.
The Sun's investigation found that:
• Republican opposition researchers working for President George H.W.
Bush were aware of Mrs. Clinton's tie to the Treuhaft firm in 1992, before it
was widely known, and apparently chose not to exploit it. They reasoned that she
was the wife of the candidate rather than the candidate herself, a reasoning
that no longer applies as Mrs. Clinton seeks the Democratic presidential
nomination. Lawyers involved with the firm were surprised that Republican
operatives never moved to capitalize on Mrs. Clinton's connection.
• An oft-repeated and pub lished anecdote about Mrs. Clinton's
involvement in the firm's plea negotiations over an armed invasion of the
California Legislature by Black Panthers seems to be apocryphal, though one of
the attorneys directly involved has a "very distinct" memory of Mrs. Clinton's
attendance at a Panthers-related meeting.
• The firm was involved in another volatile Black Panthers case the
summer Mrs. Clinton worked there: the trial of Huey Newton for the 1967 killing
of an Oakland police officer. Treuhaft represented a Newton associate whose role
in the trial may have helped Newton win a series of mistrials and, eventually,
the dismissal of all charges related to the officer's death.
• Partners at the firm said it was likely Mrs. Clinton also worked on
politically sensitive cases involving a Berkeley student activist denied
admission to the California bar over incendiary rhetoric, Stanford physician
interns fighting a loy alty oath at the Veterans Administration, and men claiming
conscientious objector status to avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Mrs.
Clinton's only public recollection of her work at the Treuhaft firm is that she
handled a child custody matter.
• Mrs. Clinton's most vivid memories from that summer may be personal
ones that have nothing to do with the law firm with which she clerked. A fellow
Yale law student, President Clinton, shared the Berkeley apartment where she was
staying. The pair soon got serious and would move in together when they returned
to New Haven that fall.
Mrs. Clinton's campaign declined to make her available for an interview for this
story.
AT YALE, TURBULENT TIMES MOLD A LAWYER-IN-TRAINING
Mrs. Clinton's decision to work at the Treuhaft firm was rooted in the
turbulence, chaos and radicalism that buffeted Yale after she entered law school
there in 1969. Most campuses saw their s hare of foment, but Yale saw more than
its share in the spring of 1970 because of the impending criminal trial in New
Haven of a Black Panthers' leader, Bobby Seale, and several co-defendants, for
kidnapping and murdering another member of the Panthers. Many, including Yale's
president at the time, doubted that Seale and other black militants could get a
fair trial. As students prepared for a national student strike on May Day 1970,
a suspicious fire broke out in the basement of a Yale law library. The blaze led
to a palpable fear among professors and students that institutions like Yale
could be burned to the ground. Crazy talk abounded. One agitated Yale law
student reportedly proposed "mass suicide" to protest injustices allegedly being
perpetrated against the Panthers.
While some writers and commentators have painted Mrs. Clinton as so exercised by
the Panther trial that she formed a student committee to sit in on the
proc eedings and report on perceived abuses, a book published last year suggests
that even that modest undertaking grew out of a compromise in which law students
voted not to endorse a student strike. Mrs. Clinton and another Yale law student
were named as co-chairs of a committee "to monitor the trial, offer legal advice
to demonstrators who got arrested, and help prevent violence at the May Day
rally," according to "Murder in the Model City" by Paul Bass and Douglas Rae.
The book's authors do not disclose whether Mrs. Clinton personally supported or
opposed the strike, but they describe her as "a careful, moderate voice of
dissent." They also noted that the Clinton-led student committee voted "to
insist…that no coercion or extra-legal attempts to stop the trial should
be tolerated."
Mrs. Clinton has written about joining a "bucket brigade to put out" the library
fire and about organizing round-the-clock patrols in the wake of the blaze.
However, Mr. Bass, a longtime New Haven journalist, and Mr. Rae, a professor at
Yale's business school, noted with some puzzlement that Mrs. Clinton "never
chose to shed any light" on her actions surrounding the student strike and the
Panthers' trial. "In writing and speaking about the period, she never mentions
co-chairing the committee," the authors observed. The senator declined to be
interviewed for their book. "She wouldn't touch it," Mr. Bass said.
Ultimately, the May Day protest turned Yale into an armed camp, occupied by
thousands of soldiers, but the event yielded little of the feared violence. That
came three days later at Kent State University in Ohio when National Guard
soldiers shot and killed four students protesting the Vietnam War.
The Black Panthers' trial didn't actually begin until the fall. During the
lead-up, Seale's attorney, Charles Garry of San Francisco, became a regular
presence in the courtyards at Yale Law School.
At some point, Treuhaft and his wife, Jessica Mitford, passed through New Haven
and threw a party to raise money for the Panthers' defense. According to Gail
Sheehy's biography of Mrs. Clinton, "Hillary's Choice," the future senator
attended the Treuhaft-Mitford party. Many have surmised that this event laid the
groundwork for Mrs. Clinton's clerkship at Treuhaft's law office. A law school
classmate of Mrs. Clinton who later became a staff attorney at the Oakland firm,
Drucilla Ramey, said she saw no evidence that Mrs. Clinton was among the
groupies who surrounded the left-wing lawyers. "She was a grind," Ms. Ramey told
the Sun. "It was very fashionable not to work very hard in law school. Hillary
was in a distinct minority….Any sense that she was a wide-eyed radical
running around with Charlie [Garry] and stuff is very misplaced."
One of Treuhaft's partners, Malcolm Burnstein, said Mr s. Clinton's internship
was arranged by a national student group. "She was sent to us by the Law
Students' Civil Rights Research Council," Mr. Burnstein told the Sun. The group
also paid Mrs. Clinton during her summer at the firm, he said. It is possible
Mrs. Clinton selected the Treuhaft firm and then arranged funding through the
council. That's how she set up her first law-school summer internship working
with the future founder of the Children's Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman.
Ms. Ramey said the Treuhaft firm also drew the notice of female Yale students
for a simple reason: it hired women and took them on as interns at a time many
white-shoe firms and government offices would not. "Even in the public interest
world, it was hard to find a job," Ms. Ramey recalled. "At that time, the
Oakland public defender wouldn't hire women. The federal public defender
wouldn't hire women."
A CALIFORNIA SUMMER WITH CRUSADERS FROM THE "OLD LEFT"
Mrs. Clinton's only public recollection of her stint at the Treuhaft firm came
in her 2003 memoir, "Living History."
"I told Bill about my summer plans to clerk at Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, a
small law firm in Oakland, California and he announced that he would like to go
with me," she wrote. "I spent most of my time working for Mal Burnstein
researching, writing legal motions and briefs for a child custody case."
While Mrs. Clinton devotes considerable ink to her budding romance with her
future husband, two fleeting sentences are the only ones describing her how she
arrived at the Treuhaft firm and what she did there.
None of those interviewed for this article disputed Mrs. Clinton's claim that
she worked on a child custody case during her time at the law office. "It's
certainly plausible. We did those cases," Mr. Burnstein said.
One nationally publicized custody case that might have caught Mrs. Clinton's
attention was Treuhaft's representation in 1968 of a California artist and
photographer, Harold Painter, whose "bohemian" lifestyle led the Iowa Supreme
Court to grant custody of his son to the boy's more traditional Iowa-dwelling
grandparents.
The most eye-catching claim about Mrs. Clinton's time at the Treuhaft firm is
that she attended a plea negotiation on behalf of armed Black Panthers who
stormed into the California legislature on May 2, 1967 to protest a gun-control
measure. The band of more than two dozen men toting rifles, shotguns and pistols
caused alarm when they emerged on the floor of the legislature. They later
insisted they were trying to reach the spectators' gallery and used the wrong
door.
"I just have a very distinct memory of going to Sacramento that summer with
Hillary in my car and working with the D.A.'s office to resolve the Panther
case. I really remember that quite clearly," M r. Burnstein told the Sun.
The account is featured in both "Hillary's Choice" and a San Francisco Chronicle
article that appeared shortly after Mr. Clinton won the presidency in 1992.
However, the Associated Press reported that criminal cases stemming from the
Panthers' protest were resolved in August 1967, almost four years before Mrs.
Clinton turned up at the Treuhaft office. In addition, a former partner there,
Ms. Walker, insists that Mr. Burnstein's recollection is faulty.
"I am positive that Hillary was not involved in any Black Panther case with
Mal," Ms. Walker told the Sun. "Mal has had a thing about Hillary and the Black
Panthers for years. The rest of us know it just didn't happen."
Treuhaft, who sometimes repeated Mr. Burnstein's anecdote linking Mrs. Clinton
to the Panthers, died in 2001.
Asked about the four-year gap between the legislature incident and Mrs.
Clinton's clerkship, Mr. Burnstein said he simply could not square the dates
with his vivid memory. "I'm not mistaking her for anyone. I was more connected
with Hillary than with other clerks and I remember meeting Bill that summer,"
Mr. Burnstein said. "If the Black Panthers Sacramento incident was in fact in
'67, then Hillary did not come with me on the Black Panthers case. I may well
remember driving to Sacramento with her, but it can't be the same case and I
don't know what it was."
Regardless of whether Mrs. Clinton was on hand for the Panthers' legislature
case, there can be no dispute that she was at the Treuhaft firm as it played a
role in a highly publicized trial in which a top leader of the black militant
group, Huey Newton, was charged with killing an Oakland police officer, John
Frey.
Newton's first trial in connection with the 1967 slaying took place the
following year. He was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to between two
and 15 years in prison. However, an appeals court overturned Newton's conviction
in the case, which inspired T-shirts, buttons and posters emblazoned with the
popular 1960s slogan, "Free Huey!"
Newton's first retrial began in July 1971, soon after Mrs. Clinton arrived at
the Treuhaft firm. Newton's defense was handled by Garry, who had represented
Seale in New Haven two years earlier, earning Garry the title of "the Panthers'
honky lawyer," according to Time Magazine. Treuhaft represented a Panther
activist and longtime friend of Newton, Gene McKinney. On the witness stand,
McKinney, who was with Newton the night the policeman was killed, took the Fifth
Amendment. However, the mere suggestion that McKinney, who was uncharged, could
have been the killer may have helped Newton win a hung jury.
At a second retrial in December 1971, McKinney, again represented by Treuhaft,
also took the Fifth Amendment. Jurors deadlocked again and prosecutors dropped
the case.
Treuhaft told Ms. Sheehy in 1999 that fascination with the Panthers did not seem
to have been what drew Mrs. Clinton to his firm. "Hillary was only mildly
interested in the Panther cause," Treuhaft told the author.
The Black Panthers get a couple of brief mentions in Mrs. Clinton's memoir, but
she never offers a verdict or view on their conduct. The former first lady does
fault the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that "sometimes failed to
distinguish between constitutionally protected, legitimate opposition and
criminal behavior."
A review of some of Mr. Burnstein's legal files now at the archives of the
University of California at Berkeley shows that the Treuhaft firm also handled
two major cases in mid-1971 involving political dissent. One involved a protest
leader who was elected Berkeley student body president, Daniel Siegel.
Mr. Siegel passed his the bar exam in 1970, but his admi ssion was blocked on
grounds that he was morally unfit. He was criminally charged with inciting the
1969 "People's Park" riot, which left one man dead, others injured, and hundreds
arrested.
Mr. Siegel was acquitted of that charge, but bar officials said his statements
prior to the riot and thereafter indicated he was not suited to be an attorney.
They also asked him if he was a Communist, which he denied.
"The question is not violence versus non-violence, the question is when
violence, and how violence, and what violence," Mr. Siegel declared at a March
1970 rally at Berkeley's Provo Park, according to the archived records. "I can
see very little objection theoretically, politically or morally or anything else
with burning down the Bank of America and all its 500 branches."
At another gathering a month later, Mr. Siegel opined that nonviolence was "not
the way any more. We have to use whatever force is necessary to ma ke sure that
this war stops."
Mr. Burnstein appealed the bar committee's rejection to the California Supreme
Court, arguing that Mr. Siegel was being punished for his political beliefs. The
court eventually sided with Mr. Siegel, who joined the bar in November 1973.
Two other dissenters whose case was pending during Mrs. Clinton's summer at the
Treuhaft firm were Peter Cummings and Peter Rudd. Both were medical students
from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio who won internships at Stanford
University in Palo Alto, Calif. On arriving at Stanford, they discovered they
were required to fill out loyalty oaths to do a required rotation at the nearby
Veterans Administration hospital. "It was the typical, 'Are you now or have you
ever been a member of the Communist Party?'" Dr. Cummings recalled in a recent
interview. He said he and Dr. Rudd were not Communists, but chafed at signing
the oath. "I've always been very annoyed by and not a fan of this kind of
loyalty oath," Dr. Cummings said.
Through the American Civil Liberties Union, the pair became clients of Mr.
Burnstein. In the ensuing legal challenges, which went before riders of the 9th
Circuit Court of Appeals at least twice, the government argued that disloyal
medical students might try to kill unsuspecting veterans who sought medical
treatment. Mr. Burnstein prevailed and the loyalty oath for Veterans
Administration doctors soon wound up as a footnote of history.
Mr. Burnstein said Mrs. Clinton would have likely been assigned to some work on
the cases stemming from dissent at the Berkeley and Stanford campuses. "I don't
remember her especially working on those, but she would have if she was there,"
he said.
Ms. Walker said Mrs. Clinton probably also worked on a slew of cases involving
men seeking conscientious objector status to avoid the draft. "We were doing so
much Vietnam War stuff then," Ms. Walker recalled. "I'm sure she worked on
those."
As Mrs. Clinton left the Treuhaft firm in 1971, one of its partners was gearing
up for the defense of a Communist and black revolutionary, Angela Davis, against
murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges stemming from a 1970 shootout that
left a California judge dead. Ms. Walker became the resident Communist on Ms.
Davis's legal team. "I was asked by the Party to participate in Angela's case,"
the lawyer said. She said no one else at the law firm, including Mrs. Clinton,
worked on Ms. Davis's case.
At the trial, held in 1972 at San Jose, the Treuhaft firm's winning record held
up again. A jury acquitted the polarizing African-American activist of all
charges.
A FIRM WITH HISTORY
By the time Mrs. Clinton arrived at the Treuhaft firm in 1971, its reputation as
a defender of left-wingers and radicals was well established. Indeed, those at
th e firm assumed that reputation drew the Yale law student in.
"She did want to work for a left-wing movement law firm. Anyone who went to
college or law school would have known our law firm was a Communist law firm,"
Treuhaft told Ms. Sheehy in 1999.
"This was an old-left, radical law firm," a staff attorney there during Mrs.
Clinton's summer, David Nawi, told the Sun. "Treuhaft was suing the police and
doing wonderful work with the black community in East Oakland before anybody
else."
A Yale Law student who worked as a clerk at the firm the summer before Mrs.
Clinton arrived, Mary Nichols, said Treuhaft was open about his stint in the
Communist Party. "Treuhaft, he himself was proud of having been a Communist at
one time. This was not something that they hid in any way. They were not people
stockpiling dynamite. They were a respectable law firm, but still you knew they
had experimented in that kind of way," she said. < BR>
Another Yale Law student who ended up at the Oakland firm, Ms. Ramey, insists
she did not know of the partners' Communist ties before showing up to work
there. "It sounded like kind of a cool place to work. I had no clue. I was
pleasantly surprised," she told the Sun.
Mr. Siegel, the Berkeley protester-turned-lawyer, said committed student
leftists in 1971 would have viewed the firm's Communist connections as quaint,
perhaps even conservative. "We almost universally thought Communist Party people
were sellouts," he said. "People of my generation who were getting involved were
Marxists, Maoists, even Trotskyists. The Communist Party was pretty unpopular,
unless your parents were in it."
The details of Treuhaft's membership in the Communist Party were not formally
disclosed until 1977, when his wife, Jessica Mitford, published a humorous
memoir of their years in the Communist ranks. In "A Fine Old Conflict," she
reported that her husband signed up in 1943 and that she followed in 1944. Both
left the party in 1958, she wrote.
Ms. Walker told the Sun she is still a member of the Communist Party, which she
joined in 1942. "I'm still a Marxist, and that's why I stayed in," she said.
While many American Communists quit the party in disgust in 1956 following the
Soviet invasion of Hungary and Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Josef
Stalin's crimes, those events do not seem to have been the impetus for the
departure of Treuhaft and Mitford, who stayed on for another two years.
A journalist who edited a recently published collection of Mitford's letters,
Peter Sussman, said the couple's falling out with the American Communist Party
was driven largely by its unyielding bureaucracy.
"She was bored with it," Mr. Sussman said. "It was ineffective. She had worked
to reform it and that was unsuccessful, and to give the American party some
auto nomy from Soviet Communism."
Mr. Sussman said Mitford, who died in 1996, was also "bitterly disappointed"
about a decision the party made to cut ties with a group dedicated to resolving
racial inequities in America, the Civil Rights Congress.
Mr. Sussman said Mitford and Treuhaft probably left for the same reasons. "They
usually made decisions on such things together and they left the party together,
though they had friends who remained," the journalist added.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TAKES INTEREST BUT HOLDS BACK
The new collection of Mitford's letters indicates that Republican political
operatives knew about Mrs. Clinton's work at Treuhaft's firm months before the
1992 election, but apparently chose not to raise it despite her prominence in
her husband's presidential campaign. In a July 4, 1992 letter to a veteran civil
rights activist, Virginia Durr, Mitford wrote, "There was a v. long article in
Vanity Fair by Gail Sheehy, an interview with Hillary in which every detail of
her life from childhood on was explored — no mention of the internship in
Bob's law office. Quite right, I thought, as obviously if that came out it would
be prime meat for the Bush campaign."
In the letter, Mitford recounts that she and her husband recently had dinner
with a novelist, Diane Johnson, who raised Mrs. Clinton's clerkship out of the
blue. "I hear that Hillary Clinton once worked for you when she was a Yale law
student," Mitford remembered the novelist saying.
Mitford wrote that Ms. Johnson picked up the fact from her son-in-law who "works
in the White House dirty-tricks division…whose job is to dig up dirt on
all the Bush opposition."
"Presumably, the Bush campaign is hoarding this bit of non-news for later
springing on the public," Mitford wrote to Durr.
Ms. Johnson, best known for her book "Le Divorce," told the Sun she has on ly a
vague recollection of the discussion Mitford relayed. "I remember our
conversation about Hillary coming to work for Bob that summer," the novelist
said. "I don't remember who brought it up."
The son-in-law Mitford alluded to is David Tell, a Republican operative who was
director of opposition research for the 1992 re-election campaign of President
George H.W. Bush.
Mr. Tell, a former opinion editor of the Weekly Standard, confirmed to the Sun
that the Bush camp knew about Mrs. Clinton's connection to the Treuhaft firm,
but said last week that he couldn't recall how he learned about it. "We sucked
up everything we could possible find," he said.
Asked why the campaign never tried to make hay of Mrs. Clinton ties to a
communist and ex-communists, Mr. Tell said part of the reason was that Mrs.
Clinton was not running for office. "We were shy about going after the
candidate's wife, and it was when she was 23," he said.
So far in Mrs. Clinton's current bid for the presidency, none of her opponents
has sought to tar her over her ties to the Treuhaft firm. However, that is no
guarantee that the issue will not arise, in part because of the recent
proliferation of independent political groups known as 527s, for the section of
the tax code under which they are organized. Such groups often undertake attacks
that rival campaigns and political parties shy away from. Some 527s have had
considerable influence in the presidential race, such as when Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth attacked Senator Kerry in 2004.
Back in 1992, Mitford was not the only one who suspected Mrs. Clinton's
involvement with the Treuhaft firm would be seized on by the Republicans. Mr.
Burnstein said he, Treuhaft, and Ms. Walker agreed upon learning of Mr.
Clinton's presidential bid not to talk publicly about Mrs. Clinton's clerkship
because they anticipated it would become fod der for Mr. Clinton's opponents.
"We expected it," Mr. Burnstein said. "We were very carefully not talking to the
press back then. ... We did not want her being unfairly tarred with someone
else's politics. Hillary's politics were not Bob's politics, which were not
Doris's politics, which were not mine."
"For Hillary to pick the most left-wing firm really at that time in the Bay
Area, it's still a surprise to me that more hasn't been made of that," Ms.
Walker said. "It was such an obvious thing for them to pick up, but they didn't,
and I've never understood it."
Mr. Burnstein said he never discussed with Mrs. Clinton the decision to keep
quiet about her clerkship during the 1992 presidential race.
Aside from the two bland lines in her autobiography, Mrs. Clinton has been
tight-lipped about how she came to work at the Treuhaft firm and what she did
there. A California oral historian who interviewed Treuhaft at length, R obert
Larsen Jr., told the Sun that Mrs. Clinton seemed reluctant to discuss the
clerkship when he asked her about it at a San Francisco-area political function
in the 1990s.
"I talked to Hillary once and said, 'You know you interned at Treuhaft's firmÂ
….I've never seen anything about that anywhere,'" Mr. Larsen recalled. "'It's
not exactly secret, but it's not publicized,'" he said she replied. "I just
don't think she wanted to have the charge of being an intern at a Communist law
firm."
When the connection did emerge, halfway through a Herb Caen column in the
Chronicle on Nov. 12, 1992, eight days after the election, some conservatives
likely viewed it as confirmation of Mrs. Clinton's radical views. However, some
on the left side of the political spectrum who knew the Treuhaft firm were taken
aback.
"I was quite shocked when I found out that Hillary had been there the summer
after I was," Ms. Nichols, a Democrat who holds a top environmental post under
Governor Schwarzenegger, said. "She certainly downplayed anything that would
make you think that'd be the kind of place she'd summer….Once the
political career was actually launched, Hillary's whole life has been about
being moderate and fending off criticism from friends on the left."
"I was kind of surprised when I heard she had worked there," Mr. Siegel
recalled. "Anything I've ever heard about her or known about wouldn't have led
me to think she was interested in Marxism, for example, or any other kind of
left politics."
Mr. Burnstein said Mrs. Clinton was probably drawn to the firm by its civil
rights work and not by the left-wing politics of its partners, though she
expressed no disquiet about that. "There was nothing revolutionary about
Hillary, and I do not say that pejoratively," he said. "She was much more of a
classic liberal than the rest of us."
< BR>Mr. Burnstein said he also detected a clear change in Mrs. Clinton's political
outlook after she faced real-world campaigning with her husband. "The Hillary
that clerked for us that summer is not the Hillary that ran for the Senate and
is not the Hillary that was in the White House for eight years. The politics
were noticeably different," Mr. Burnstein said. "The Hillary of 1971 was much
more idealistic and progressive in the sense we would use the term today than
the Hillary we saw after her exposure to politics in Arkansas."
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