January 2002

Letters

By way of this publication that reaches every Washington lawyer (and others), I wish to take a moment and the opportunity to express my gratitude for all of the kindness shown to me over the years. I am deeply appreciative.

Leo Anderson left us several weeks ago. It has been said that at least one measure of a person's life and legacy is how they are remembered, and few scored higher than Leo. Lawyer media articles about "civility" are often seen; Leo never needed any such guidance, since at all times he was an example of professional competence, civil courtesy, sincerity and peer rapport in the highest tradition of our Bar Association. When starting out in the late 1960s, I was fortunate to have a case or two with Leo at Safeco, including some lengthy depositions in Spokane with ornery characters. Leo's quiet patience was a lesson for all parties and counsel.

Sometimes such attributes are strongly tested, but Leo always showed staying power, and the cut of the jib was consistent with the obituary notice revealing that Leo was a World War II PT-boat skipper.

The only appropriate response to president Carlisle's comment: "Although undoubtedly there will be some erosion of our freedoms, we must recognize this need for balance," (November, p. 19.) would be Benjamin Franklin's words: "Those who would give up liberty in order to gain security neither deserve, nor will they gain, either."

While it may appear that I am quibbling, I have just had the extraordinary experience of reading David McCullough's John Adams, which I recommend to my fellow members of the Bar. When one has the opportunity to examine the incredible accomplishments of one of the most illustrious of our brethren, a great deal of it recounted in his own words, under circumstances vastly more trying than ours, one realizes why Adams, Franklin, and the others gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 felt as they did.

Those giants, so many of them lawyers, understood that security can only come from a citizenry steeped in and jealous of individual liberty and willing to meet the challenges of vigilance and sacrifice that the duties of liberty impose. By sacrifice they did not mean suffering "erosion of our freedoms." They meant the type of sacrifice that they and their fellow patriots (rebels) were making every day, and which we saw so movingly reenacted by the heroic actions of the passengers who thwarted the hijacking in the skies over that very same colony which provided the locale for the birthplace of our nation.

If there is to be a purpose to the loss of life and wealth brought about on September 11, 2001 by the vile actions of the thugs who planned and carried out those despicable acts, it should be that we are awakened to and renewed in our duties as citizens. We must hone our faculties both physical and mental, our powers of observation and discrimination, and our judgment and ability to act upon and follow through with those judgments.

I raise the prominent actor who witnessed a dry run of one of the hijacked flights exactly one week before, on September 4. He was convinced of the nefarious nature of what he was seeing and brought it to the attention of both airport security and the FBI in Los Angeles. Nothing was done. I firmly believe that John Adams, once he had formed the conviction of the nature of what he was witnessing, would not have rested until affirmative action had been taken to check it out. In short, it is not enough to be right in your judgments, as Adams so often was, but you must be willing to risk the opprobrium of your peers and act upon those judgments, so that all may benefit from the soundness of those judgments.

We who fought the same kind of thugs in Vietnam learned at great cost the danger of assuming you were safe within your own perimeter. The proposals being made which would "erode some of our freedoms" are no more than nostrums tossed out to foster a greater, albeit false, sense of security. Such a sense places us at greater risk.

When pilots are armed, which affects my freedoms not one whit, and when no rational human being believes that 200 American citizens will ever again allow a handful of thugs to take their lives without a fight, then we will be secure against such atrocities. Any erosion of the freedoms we enjoyed on September 10, as a reaction to the events of the following day, would be futile, but worse, would magnify the cost of the tragedy a thousand-fold.