Mr. Toastmaster, Reverend Clergy, Distinguished Guests and Fellow Alumni and Alumnae. It is an honor and a pleasure to greet you as fellow alumni. As your newest alumnus, I wish to deny emphatically that I have any presidential aspirations – with respect to the Fordham Alumni Association. Judge Leibell's sheepskin is 50 years older than mine and Ed Schulkind's 44 years. Under Senate Seniority rules, I'd settle for a vice presidency – if no one raises the religious issue.
As an embryonic alumnus interested in things Fordham, I was pleased to read last week that Fordham was establishing an exchange program with Poland's University at Lublin. Remembering the great Fordham stars of the 30s, I recognized this as a first step in the resumption of football.
It is to the eternal credit of Fordham that the teaching of law has here been accompanied by an inculcation of moral values. The graduate of this Law School has acquired something more than the tools of his profession – he has learned, both by example and precept, the high obligations of trust which are his as an attorney.
Now I did not come here to give an address on the professional responsibilities of the members of the bar. Such speeches are rarely effective, anyway, since the irresponsible are seldom present. If they are present, they seldom take the pledge as the contrite do at Billy Graham's revivals. I suppose it would be par for the course to spend 20 minutes of pious preachment on the obligations of members of the bar, and then release you mercifully to the men's bar downstairs to do an autopsy on the program committee.
But I would presume to mention briefly to you one phase of this problem that has occupied my attention in the Senate.
Twenty-five years ago, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, speaking at the dedication of the University of Michigan Quadrangle, delivered one of the finest addresses ever made in this country to a company of lawyers. His subject was that hardy perennial – the professional responsibility of the Bar. But he didn't deal merely with the evils of ambulance chasing. His thrust was far reaching and deeper – it was an indictment of two generations of corporation lawyers – that segment of the bar which had placed its technical skills and proficiencies at the disposal of the corporate and financial buccaneers of the 1920's – entrepreneurs who were at best confused and lax in the handling of other people's money. Too often, Justice Stone thought, these lawyers had surrendered the function of independent and critical judgment which has been the historic pride of the legal profession – a judgment that never spared and often guided the clients to be served. And Justice Stone convicted these lawyers, in his address, for the harmful corporate activities which ultimately brought government regulation in the early 1930's. Despite this conviction, very few of these corporation lawyers got on speaking terms with the warden of any penitentiary.
I often think of Justice Stone's appeal to the bar as I sit as a member of the McClellan Committee through grim and sometimes shocking hearings. There we frequently see the venal and irresponsible fringe of the labor movement, including attorneys who were on the scene when the deeds were done. Watching this parade, it has seemed to me to present a striking parallel to the situation denounced by Justice Stone 24 years ago.
Since 1935 organized labor has grown enormously in wealth and numbers. Its political support is solicited, it is counted on to help spread the benefits of increased production, and it helps keep the economy on an even keel by acting as a counterweight to big business. The development of such economic power was not achieved without the active assistance of skillful lawyers. In fact, the statutory regulation of labor relations made lawyers a necessary adjunct to this evolution.
The legal profession as a whole has never been as thoroughly committed to the service of labor as it is and has been to business. Certainly in the beginning there was, I think, a certain idealism and dedication in the election of many young men to "go into" the field of labor law. It meant service to many and not to a few, to the cause of economic justice and a better way of life. For the overwhelming majority, their idealism is preserved and their integrity is untarnished.
What happened to the others – the legal shepherds of the flock, who came to our hearings as defenders of the wolves who had despoiled the sheep? Their ranks – those who engage in what might well be called legal racketeering – include the following:
Lawyers who, working for a union official, arrange, conceal or worst of all share in the illicit profits of a variety of improper transactions that use union funds or power for private gain.
Lawyers paid from union funds, to which all of the union's members have contributed, who appear before our committee or a court to advise the union's suspect officers against revealing the purposes for which these members' dues have been used,, or otherwise to defend those officers against charges of stealing from or defrauding these same members that pay the lawyer's salary.
Lawyers who represent management in the morning and so-called unions or union leaders in the afternoon, who draw up the "sweetheart" contracts that keep respectable unions out, keep wages low and keep the profits to both the employers and the fake union leaders very high indeed.
Lawyers who organize "paper" locals, sham employer associations, so-called independent unions and fake health and welfare plans in order to promote the kind of collusion that costs responsible management and labor – as well as the general public – dearly.
Lawyers who use their position with the union to promote their own financial interests, using union funds or union power to accomplish transactions and investments of benefit only to themselves.
What is in these two situations – involving corporate attorneys on one hand and union attorneys on the other, which demoralized these professional men, blunted their critical judgments and put them in conflict with the true interests they were supposed to represent? Watching them before the committee, I have concluded their fall from grace was not a sudden one but the result of a gradual erosion of their guide lines. I have come, I hope, to a better understanding of the problems and the temptations and the relentless pressures which peculiarly beset your profession.
Unlike the doctor, engineer or architect, the lawyer always appears in a representative capacity. He takes on a kind of dual personality, and the undesirable characteristics of one may be merged in the other if firm resistance is not present. The lawyer is subject, moreover, to a constant and wearing pressure which does not afflict the other professions. He operates in a field of contention. In most instances, there is an adversary, striving to defeat or neutralize his every effort. Ever present is the demoralizing influence of the client, who is interested only in results, who scoffs at a first-rate professional effort unless it is completely successful, who is often more interested in who you know than what you know. Unless the lawyer is continuously mindful of the proprieties, there is always danger that the stress of the situation will blur and make indistinguishable the ground rules. There is always the inducement of the disreputable practitioner who, because of alleged connections, claims he can guarantee a favorable result. This peddling of the names of reputable judges and public officials destroys public confidence in the entire judicial and executive systems and is an especially vicious form of character assassination.
There is another form of insidious infection which is peculiar to our legal profession. The lawyer exerting his best efforts on behalf of his client finds it easy to justify conduct which he would immediately recognize as improper if he were acting merely in his own behalf. This philosophy is particularly virulent because it can be made to appear as professional service and sacrifice beyond the call of duty.
There is, too, the bond of sympathy which often comes into existence between the lawyer and his client during their relationship. I suppose this is particularly true in the field of criminal law. Bishop Sheen has said "we should hate communism but love the communist." While espousing and defending the criminal, his lawyer may unconsciously lower or lessen his abhorrence of the crime because of mitigating circumstances in the particular case.
A final pressure is the citizen's concept of the law as a sporting proposition and the sympathy which attaches to the unfortunate, the underdog and one trapped in the toils of the law. This strange but disturbing reality is manifested in a number of ways. The "Great Mouthpiece," a great book, was written about a lawyer who was a great scamp, but no book has ever been written about your great alumnus, Professor Chief Judge John T. Loughran. We see this factor again in the virtual immunity to perjury prosecution of a defendant in a criminal case, who would appear to hold a license to perjure himself in the effort to extricate himself. This is part of the "sporting chance" doctrine. So deep is this penetration that even lawyers, young and old, dream of dramatically extricating some malefactor from the death house. Few of them envision the glory of increasing the prison population.
I did not come here to suggest that you simonize your personal standards of practice or refurbish any of your professional ideals. A bad apple can't be polished and a good apple is not aided intrinsically by polishing. The law profession polices its members more and better than any other profession; and there is little or nothing Congress or a State Legislature can add.
The problem is not now, and it never has been, that all, or a majority, or even a very large minority, of labor lawyers have engaged in improper practices. But there is always room for improvement. The bad apples should not be permitted to remain, for there is little or no salvage value in them. There is no place for an attorney's anonymous. While they remain in the professional community, they are an embarrassment to the integrity of your calling and a form of unfair competition.
When they are driven out, special attention should be given to those who have grown large on the proceeds of their malpractice. Wall Street shouldn't be overlooked while the full treatment is being accorded Tremont Avenue. We should proceed courageously and dispassionately, and as the Justice Jackson said, "select those cases in which the offense is the most flagrant and public harm the greatest. …"
Perhaps none of this seems to have much immediate importance to you. I have seen no graduate of this law school appear before our committee in the capacity I have described. Its significance lies in the fact that much of the work that you have done to maintain high ethical standards, work which has been responsible for the enviable reputation this school enjoys, is besmirched by the actions and seeming immunities of these cynical practitioners of legal roguery.
The strength of our professions, and particularly the bar, has been their ability to impose high standards of conduct, not on their best elements, because that would be easy, but on their worst. And in the final analysis this is obtained not by grievance committees and disbarment proceedings, but by the standards of professional opinion, informed, organized, focused in the words of Justice Jackson "on those cases in which the offense is the most flagrant and the public harm the greatest." And that means Wall Street as well as Tremont Avenue. Such a mobilization of professional opinion cannot prevent every instance of wrong doing be they by labor lawyers, or tax lawyers or corporation lawyers, but professional opinion can prevent individual instances of impropriety from becoming an epidemic. But I know of no action by any Bar Association in the country or other appropriate authority, to institute proceedings against any of the individuals I have described or to reorient their code of ethics, to stamp out this minority except here in New York City. This is a responsibility of all who have the public interest at heart to keep burning the torch of enlightened courageous leadership on this critical issue.
Source: Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files, Box 899, "Fordham Law Alumni Association Luncheon, New York City, 15 February 1958." John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.