Well, this goes back a long way into the seventies. I worked with Frank
Thompson who was the Congressman from New Jersey and the head of the
Labor Management Relations and a very popular Congressman and a good
friend of Kennedy's. He'd been the co-chair with
Whizzer White on Voter Registration and McGovern asked him to be the
same thing in his campaign. Gene McCarthy was his old-time buddy. They
all were in the House together when Jack Kennedy first came. So it was
sort of an Irish mafia crowd. They all liked to laugh and live it up. In
any event, he was on the Woodrow Wilson Foundation at Princeton
University and Nick Katzenback who was later the Attorney General and
the Secretary of State was also on the Woodrow Wilson. And President
Kohene, I think his name was, at Princeton found out that the Woodrow
Wilson School is for public administration. And public administration
was sort of losing some of its attractiveness to law schools. So
President Kohene asked Katzenback and Frank Thompson to see if they
could not work some sort of a program in the Woodrow Wilson School to
bring in law. So Frank Thompson asked me to make some notes and I did.
The Woodrow Wilson was a two year program and they spent time in
Washington interning in the Congressional offices and working for the
agencies. We thought we would expand and have a two year and
Page 29 a three year program; one for public management
and the other for law. But each would include a year in Washington and
the law thing would be public law oriented with just enough of the other
to pass the Bar. So that was a proposal that went to President Kohene
and he favored it, but then he resigned. His successor came in and was
not interested. He said, "I cannot start a law school at this
point." And he talked about having the Woodrow Wilson School at
Princeton work something out with the University of Pennsylvania Law
School where Woodrow Wilson's people could go to Penn Law
School and take Constitutional Law or whatever, you know. So that ended
that idea, but Frank Thompson thought it was a great idea to have such a
law school. So Barnaby Keeny was a good friend of Frank Thompson and he
was the head of the government funded arts program. He was also the
President of Brown University, so Frank Thompson asked Barnaby Keeny,
"How about setting up a law school at Brown?" They
don't have a law school in Rhode Island. Barnaby Keeny liked
Frank Thompson. They went fishing together all the time. He thought it
would be nice to have Frank Thompson there, so he put it before his
Trustees and they said, "Well, we tried that once and it
didn't work." That was in 1836 or something. So that
was out. But then Barnaby Keeny stopped being the President of Brown.
He'd reached retirement age. He went to Claremont right
outside of Los Angeles which has four or five colleges all under the
same common supervision. He went out to head the graduate school and
they had Scripps and Pomona and Harvey Mudd is their engineering school.
So he suggested to the President there that they might
Page 30 want to start a law school. So Frank Thompson and I were
invited to Pomona to go see the President and meet with the heads of
each of the institutions and make a tour and talk to the political
science departments and so on, and we did and it was very, very nice. We
had dinner with the Trustees and I sat next to the guy who is the
president at a major oil company that does business with Russia. He was
just back from Russia. In any event, everything was fine and the
President liked the idea. We had a breakfast with he and his wife at his
house. Frank Thompson, Barnaby Keeny and I. "When could I be
available?" and all that sort of thing. But each of the
institutions had veto power. Pitzer was the newest of them and that was
sort of an experimental, undergraduate college and they vetoed us. They
thought we would interfere with their fund raising drives. But all the
others wanted us, so that was a disappointment. And then the New College
which was started in Florida where the Barnum and Bailey Circus is, was
interested. The President of that had interned for Frank Thompson at one
time or had done something. So he invited us down. But then they went
bankrupt and that ended that. So we put it on ice for awhile. Then Frank
Thompson got caught in ABSCAM and what to do? So, we thought,
"Let's see if we can't float our college
again; the law school." And the essence of the law
school…. All the law schools are alike now. They are pretty
much peas in a pod. Wherever you go they teach the same subjects in the
same way and the students are all super-acheivers from the beginning and
the professors are all people who were number one, two or three in their
class and
Page 31 edited the Law Review and had three
years at a prestigious job in Appellate Court or a firm or something,
and then go into teaching. Just like in English, you get your Ph.D. and
go into teaching. So, I thought there ought to be a different kind of a
law school; one where people are kind to one another and that the
professors have all achieved. They should be achievers, not
academically, but in the public arena.