Attorney General Robert H. Jackson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt JOHN Q. BARRETT I had the privilege to meet Leon Silverman, in whose memory this lecture series is named, through his longtime close colleague and friend Judge Lawrence E. Walsh,1 who was my employer, mentor, and friend. Mr. Silverman was a dedicated leader of the Supreme Court Historical Society and a giant of the private bar. In 1949, he joined the law firm that in time became Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, LLP, and ultimately he became its chairman. In addition to Judge Walsh, another connection from Leon Silverman to this lecture is the fact that one of his senior colleagues and friends in his law firm was Samuel Harris.2 In 1945-1946, four years before Silverman joined him in law practice, then-Captain Sam Harris, of the Office of the Judge Advocate General, United States Army, was a junior but quite important member of the U.S. team prosecuting Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg.3 His boss heading that team was Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was away from his job as an Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Jackson is, of course, part of my focus in this lecture. There are additional connections be tween past giants and this lecture. Another luminary who became, in due course, a name partner in Mr. Harris’s and Mr. Silverman’s law firm was Sargent Shriver. He was a brother-in-law of Robert F. Kennedy, who in the late 1950s, after Justice Jackson’s life time, moved with Mrs. Kennedy and their growing family into what had been Jackson’s home in McLean, Virginia: Hickory Hill. Indeed, a few years after that, Bob Kennedy also moved into one of Bob Jackson’s former government offices, the Office of the Attorney General of the United States. But I am getting ahead of myself. My real starting point in this lecture is this majestic Supreme Court building on two specific dates in the life of Robert Jackson. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt, the second person who is a subject of this lecture, was not present at the Court on either of the two dates that I am about to describe, his presence was felt on each. A.G. JACKSON AND PRESIDENT FDR 91 The first date was Thursday, October 13, 1932. Robert H. Jackson, then a lawyer living in Jamestown in western New York State, was in Washington, D.C., for the Conference of Bar Association Delegates and then the American Bar Association’s annual meetings, held one after the other at the Mayflower Hotel. Although Jackson was only forty years old, he had been active and risen high in local, state, regional, and national bar association activities. At the 1932 meeting, he was an officer and a program speaker at sessions of the Con ference of Bar Association Delegates (a predecessor to today’s ABA House of Delegates).4 On October 13, 1932, Jackson was, I assume, one of the many lawyers in Washington for the Bar meetings who was present outside this building, then under construction. Chief Justice Hughes and most of the Associate Justices were present. The Chief Justice and Bar leader John W. Davis each spoke. President Herbert Hoover wielded the trowel as the cornerstone was laid into place and secured with mortar.5 Given Jackson’s relative obscurity, I suspect that he watched from a position quite deep in the crowd. On this evening, as Game Seven of the World Series is about to be played, it seems appropriate to guess that Jackson had what we would call a “Bob Uecker seat” at the big event.6 On that date in October 1932, the idea that Jackson, a young lawyer from western New York State, would someday occupy a judicial seat in this building would have been far fetched. I doubt that that daydream occurred even in Jackson’s own mind, even though he had great self-confidence and ambition. And yet that came to pass, and in less than nine years’ time. Among myriad reasons for that, a key one, the necessary one constitutionally, was the person who that day was in...
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Jul 1, 2023
Frank G Bosman 
