TOM C. CLARK - As the Court Remembers Him

At the time of his death, Tom Clark's colleagues on the Supreme Court each issued a statement, the excerpts from which fittingly complement the eulogies of the Chief Justice and the former Attorney General which follow on the next pages.

THE CHIEF JUSTICE: "He was unique in the annals of this Court and the judiciary, in that he took all problems of the judicial process as his personal burden His work to improve the system will be his personal monument."

MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN: "His great distinction as a judge is the reflection of his conviction that it is wrong to live life without some deep deep and abiding social commitment."

MR. JUSTICE STEWART: "The lawyers and judges of our country will long remember Tom Clark for his tireless devotion to the fair administration of federal justice."

MR. JUSTICE WHITE: "This Texan, a remarkable mixture of practicality and idealism, with a talent for getting things done but getting them done better, was unfailingly cheerful, optimistic and generous."

MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL: "Tom Clark is also to be remembered as the first Attorney General of the United States to file a brief amicus curiae in a civil rights case... This act was doubly important because it was the first brief by an Attorney General in support of civil rights, and it was ordered by a man from Texas."

MR. JUSTICE BLACKMUN: "Mr. Justice Clark was a superb ambassador, in the literal meaning of that term, from the Court to lawyers everywhere

MR. JUSTICE POWELL: "It is likely that Mr. Justice Clark was known personally and admired by more lawyers, law professors and judges than any other Justice in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States."

MR. JUSTICE REHNQUIST: "I, along with the rest of the bench and bar of this country, can attest to the fact that if ever a man's career embodied the counsel of Theodore Roosevelt's that 'every man owes some time to the improvement of his profession, it was Tom Clark's."

MR. JUSTICE STEVENS: "He earned the respect, admiration and affection of the entire federal judiciary by his evenhanded, perceptive and tireless participation in our day to day work."

MR. JUSTICE DOUGLAS (Ret.): "Mrs. Douglas and I greatly admired Tom Clark for the stand he always took on the independence of the judiciary and his willingness to face every issue in turbulent times as well as in peaceful days no matter how difficult and bothersome they were."

Tom Clark Eulogies ~

Chief Justice Warren B. Burger

Tom Clark is at once a very easy and very difficult man to talk about–difficult in the sense that the facets and ranges of his judicial activity were so broad that no brief ceremony would permit appropriate treatment. In the traditional Court announcement made from the bench on the Monday following his death, we alluded to his long career in the law beginning in Texas as a practitioner, then as a career lawyer in the Department of Justice, and the only one who had ever moved from the career service to the high post of attorney general of the United States. He served with great distinction in the office of attorney general, and after that was appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

He retired from the Court at age sixty-seven, still at the peak of his powers, in order to permit the appointment of his son Ramsey as attorney general of the United States. He took great pride in Ramsey in two respects: first, in the fact that his son succeeded to the office he had once held, and second, in Ramsey's exemplary performance in that high office.

When he retired in 1967, Tom Clark was then at a point most men or women would regard as the time for true retirement. But far from being the end of the career for him, it was the beginning of a new career–perhaps more accurately, the beginning of several new careers. He began to sit immediately on the courts of appeals all over the country and occasionally on the district courts; and in 1968, when the Federal Judicial Center began operations, having been created by Congress to act as the research and development arm for the improvement of justice, it was entirely logical that Tom Clark should be appointed as the first director of that important institution.

He brought to it a vast experience in the practice of law and in the administration of justice. But perhaps even more important than the experience was the standing and respect he had with the federal judges of this country. That enabled him to secure the acceptance of this new institution from federal judges, and he gave it standing and credibility in something less than the two years in which he served as its director and until he was required at age seventy, under the law, to retire from that position. No other person in America–lawyer, judge, or professor–could have given that center its standing and credibility as Tom Clark was able to do in two short years.

Then he returned to sitting on the courts of appeals and sometimes the district courts by assignment, and sat on the courts of all eleven circuits, something no other judge has done in the history of this country.

To all his work–as a lawyer, as attorney general, and on the bench–he brought a wonderful blend of common sense and compassion. He had a firm belief that law was not an end, but only a tool and that principles alone, however noble or great, were empty abstractions unless they were provided with the wheels for delivery of the meaning of those principles to the people.

We know–those of us who were close to him, and his family, know–that in recent years his health has not been sturdy. But as close as I was to him–going back and forth to his chambers and he coming to mine, our lunching together when I called on him for counsel and advice on the problems of the courts–I never heard a word of complaint leave his lips.

His life was unusual in many respects and in one that is especially worth noting: he did not need to wait until the end of his life for the recognition and acknowledgment of the great contributions that he made. He has received, I think, every award, every commendation that is available in this country for improving the administration of justice. He took these with great modesty and often said that he didn't deserve them, that they were not terribly important, except as it was important to the people who were giving the award and thereby elevating and calling attention to the problems.

Even while he was on the Court, up to 1967, he was a roving missionary for the improvement of the administration of justice. If he was not the founder, he was one of the prime movers in creating the National College of the State Judiciary in Reno, Nevada, which has helped more than six thousand state court judges to become better judges. He chaired the very significant Williamsburg Conference on Justice in 1971. He was one of the key figures in the monumental project on Minimum Standards of Criminal Justice sponsored by the American Bar Association. He chaired the American Bar Association Committee on Evaluation of Disciplinary Enforcement. He was constantly traveling, attending seminars and conferences, all aimed at improving justice.

On the personal side, there are some things that perhaps deserve mention. I have said that, at least in my hearing, he never uttered a word of complaint about the health problems he encountered, nor did it seem to in any way impair or interfere with the dynamic activity in programs and work he loved so much. He was a man who seemed unhurried, and yet, with the fabulous activity that we saw during his lifetime–but see in better perspective now–it is astonishing that he could be an unhurried man.

Judges from all over this country, in the state and federal courts, called on him either in Washington or when he visited their cities to discuss their problems. His callers were not limited to judges or people in high places. The clerks in the Supreme Court 'building, the elevator operators, the messengers–any person having a problem– knew that he could go to Tom Clark. And in many offices and homes in this country, of high-ranking judges and bar leaders, there are framed on their walls the small card bearing "Chambers of Mr. Justice Clark," with a longhand message signed "T.C.C." That is why he was perhaps such an effective missionary; he had not only the technical qualifications and the vast experience, but he had a great goodness and humanity. People sensed he was interested in their problems.

He lived a rich and full life that was marked by dedication to duty and love of justice, and long before his death he had won a place in the memories of thousands of judges and lawyers of this country and a respect and affection in a way that few public men have experienced during their life times.

Ramsey Clark

We come together to celebrate the life of a good man. In these troublesome times, too many find consolation in Shakespeare's observations that the death of fathers is the law of nature or that the good men do, is oft interred with their bones. I would suggest that the life of Tom Clark shows that neither need be so. He understood the wisdom of Solomon when the preacher told us "whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." He knew what Holmes meant when he said, "energy is genius" and "functioning is happiness."

He had a prodigious energy and he functioned joyously all the days of his life. He knew that the true joy of life is being exhausted in a cause you yourself deem mighty. As a child I can recall him struggling for thirty minutes to untie a knot in my shoestring. No task was too small. He labored for a decade seeking to make the difficult and cumbersome machinery of our institutions of justice work well, knowing that many doubt we can cope in our time of great numbers and incoherence.

He labored because he believed an individual can make a difference. He saw in the collective energies of all of our people the chance for freedom and equality and justice. He believed we could overcome. And he might tell us today with the poet, "Mourn not the dead, but rather mourn the apathetic throng, the frightened and the weak who see the world's great anguish and its wrong yet dare not speak."

What guided his hand through these years? He shared the view expressed by Paul in his epistle to the Romans, "Love worketh no ill to his neighbor, therefore in love is the fulfillment of the law." He saw justice as Aristotle saw it–the practice of virtue toward others. And as Disraeli saw it–truth in action. He never had so high a commitment to any ideology that he ever permitted it to detract from his love for people. He was people oriented, to use an unhappy contemporary phrase. He wanted to do things that are good for humanity. He found them to do, and he did them with his might. He never asked anything for himself. He was concerned for others. He wanted to give. It can be said of him, as Auden said of Yeats,

"In the deserts of the heart

Let the nourishing fountains start.

In the prison of our days,

Teach the free man how to praise.

A constructive human being, he was a man of giant and gentle strength. He worked from morning to night–not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. How often I've felt badly that I sat with him in the evening and read the paper while he scribbled out a dozen notes of counsel or consolation to friends.

Here was a man–we can see in his lesson how to meet the needs of our common humanity. Dostoevski recalls an incident in prison when a general visited and in the midst of all that misery he performed a simple single act of kindness. Dostoevski speculated that the handful of people among those who witnessed that act would in turn emulate it. Through them scores of others would see it and the good would radiate out for generations to come.

Tom Clark was a giver. He gave what once seemed to me too much: career, power, prestige–the work of a lifetime–cut off prematurely as he retired from the Supreme Court. He never discussed it. He never even mentioned it. Instead, he turned to things like traffic courts and for three years he labored that the good people of this land brought before municipal courts would see principle processed there, truth found and applied in their cases.

He knew that in humility, as in darkness, "were revealed the heavenly lights." And he walked humbly but firmly. As was said of another, so was it with him. "Not often in the story of mankind does a man arrive on earth who is both steel and velvet, who is as hard as rock and soft as drifting fog, who holds in his heart and mind the paradox of terrible storm and peace unspeakable and perfect."

And these are some of the reasons that I believe Tom Clark is the best man I've ever known.