Transcript

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Mr. Justice, what did you think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt?

He was coming along during this period.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, he certainly was.

I first stood in his presence because he was the commencement speaker at my Harvard College graduation in 1929.

Commencement in those days was in the Sever Quadrangle, in Harvard Yard.

I well remember his standing up, because he had been crippled by polio and was leaning on the arm of Jimmy, his son, at the time.

He was governor of New York and obviously gearing up to run for the presidency and get the Democratic nomination.

He was very impressive, he was a great speaker and, of course, he won in '32, '36, '40, '44.

So he was a dominant figure in American politics over a long period.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you ever vote for him?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, yes, not always.

The Roosevelt days, of course, he had a tremendous following and a tremendous number a detractors.

You were either strongly for F.D.R. or strongly against him, one way or the other.

Eleanor, Mrs. Roosevelt, I think was a great plus for him because she filled in in so many ways where he was perhaps a little deficient.

A great public speaker, almost a show of arrogance as you watched him, with that long cigarette holder sticking up here, but certainly was popular.

I suppose he's a great president despite the fact there's no real memorial for him yet here in Washington.

There's just that one stone in the grounds of the National Archives Building on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It's the only thing I know of.

Of course, we went through those campaigns.

In those days, one didn't run for a third term, but he did and was elected and overcame that opposition that some people have that eight years for one person in the White House was enough.

He had a lot of ideas, certainly the New Deal legislation was full of ideas, not all spawned by him but by his advisors.

He went through the Court-Packing plan which, only he could propose and get away with it I suppose and not be perpetually defeated after that as a consequence of it.

I think probably the most interesting campaign he had was against Wendell Wilkie in '40.

I've often wondered what the country would have been like had Wilkie been elected instead of F.D.R.--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: You were friendly with William O. Douglas, who was a close friend of F.D.R. Did William O. Douglas ever talk about F.D.R.?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --A little bit, sometimes as we drove into court together.

He admired him tremendously, of course.

I can understand why the two would respect each other.

Of course, I've always felt that William O. Douglas came within a hair's breadth of being president of the United States.

The choice of the vice-presidency there in 1944 got down between Harry Truman and William O. Douglas, they were the two finalists.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did Justice Douglas ever talk about this?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, I can't say he did.

I don't think that it's anything that hung heavy in his conscience at all.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What kind of president do you think William O. Douglas would have been?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I think we had a much better presidency with Harry Truman, really.

Douglas was extraordinarily able but whether he would have been a good president is a different question.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: You are often likened to President Truman, I guess because you're both named Harry and partly because you're both modest men.

Did you have any feelings about Harry Truman either when he was vice president or president, or any contact with him?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I thought he was a person greatly to be admired, certainly, and what a task to inherit there when F.D.R. died.

Living in the shadow of Roosevelt.

People knew eventually there would be somebody not named F.D.R. who was president but, you see, by 1944 there was a whole generation of young people, little kids who grew up, the president of the United States was F.D.R., never thought of anybody else: When Truman came in, of course, he was from the Midwest, out of Independence, Missouri, he was, people tried to stain him with the fact, he was a member of the Pendergast Gang there which was not a very savory relationship to have.

He merged into, I think, colored his place in politics because of that connection but outgrew it and shed any adverse implications that it might have had.

I think probably he will go down as one of the great presidents.

There are those who differ.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you ever meet him?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

That's all though.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: On what occasion?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I think probably some gathering the 8th Circuit had in Kansas City and he came around.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: You mentioned that Judge Gibson was a close friend of his at one point.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I did.

He was, but I think a closer friend was Judge Albert Ridge, a federal district judge first, then on the court of appeals, from Kansas City.

He and Truman were in Battery "D" together and went through the war together in that capacity.

Ridge thought the world of him.

It seems to me that Truman had a commission, maybe a second lieutenant or something at the time but, he thought the world of him.

And so did Floyd Gibson who came along later and was also out of Independence.

You never could say anything adverse about President Truman.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: During this period, living in the Midwest, did you ever feel that it was threatening, the degree of power concentrating in Washington?

This was now, in history, if you remember a period of great growth for the federal government and the federalization of law.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: That issue was always brought up every election that came along.

There were those who were afraid of it, there were those who accepted the benefits of it and weren't afraid of it.

I wasn't particularly, even though I saw the change in the power of the federal courts as illustrated with what you asked me a while ago about a federal court's interfering with conditions in a state prison.

I think generally it worked out for the good although there are those who say there's much too much power on the federal side.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember how you felt when the Supreme Court decided Schechter Poultry and other cases in which they were striking down New Deal statutes?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: From the legal point of view, it was an exciting time because F.D.R.'s reputation for getting things done was on the line.

Of course, he made the most of it as a political issue and Chief Justice Hughes stepped into that situation and one could say he turned the Court around, maybe.

It was exciting in many respects.

The four older justices, Van Devanter, Sutherland, Butler, and McReynolds... the court packing plan went down and was defeated, it should have because there were other ways to solve that problem apparently.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Pierce Butler was the first justice from Minnesota.

Did you ever meet him during your clerkship days?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I met him once.

I knew his brother Francis better because he was practicing in the old firm in St. Paul.

I'd encounter him once in a while in legal matters that we had, usually in opposition to each other.

I knew the Pierce Butler homestead on Summit Avenue in St. Paul.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was Pierce Butler like?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Most people thought he was an old curmudgeon and hard to meet and kind of tough and rough and gruff and all those things, and I suspect he was.

Francis was a little bit that way.

You didn't get by with anything with Francis in trying to be nice to him, you had to be hard-boiled and take a positive position, but that's the way they practice law.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: In later years you came to play, as circuit justice for the 8th Circuit, kind of, a father figure for the 8th Circuit judges.

Do you think Pierce Butler had any kind of reputation among the 8th Circuit judges?

What kind of vibes did they get from him?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, I don't think they got any vibes at all.

He was only on the Supreme Court and that was it.

No I don't think... at least I didn't sense any.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Another feature of your chambers, once you came to the Court, was the relationship that you had with your clerks and also with the family of clerks.

Was that something that was engendered in Judge Sanborn's chambers or among Judge Sanborn and his clerks?

You were the first, but there were many who followed, I guess.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: There was never very much in a social way with Judge Sanborn.

The Sanborns had their own friends and being a law clerk you were kind of a citizen sitting in the back row, of course.

I think that was true for my successors as law clerks, I can remember some of them.

When I moved to Minneapolis to practice law there and the judge stayed on in St. Paul, and then I went to Rochester, I kind of got out of touch with his clerks generally.

One of them, not the one who succeeded me but the one who came third, Walter Trenerry, wrote a book, which was a pretty good one, called Murder in Minnesota, and he covered about 8 or 10 rather famous, in history at least, murders that had taken place in the state of Minnesota.

The book was fairly popular for a while.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: In the time that you were clerking, were there many dissents?

Did they go err bane very often?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, they went en banc very rarely, maybe once or twice when I was there In the seventeen months.

No, there weren't many dissents.

The judges would get into colloquy before they wrote a dissent.

A.K. Gardner, who was chief judge for a long time, was very much against dissents.

He thought it showed a weakness on the part of the court somewhere and wanted to get everybody together, mainly his way, most of the time.

Now, of course, dissents are very common.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When the judges conferred after oral argument, did you get full reports about what went on at the conference?

Were the conferences long, or were they quite quick?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: They were usually... this is when I was a clerk... they were usually short and the judge came in and told me what the answer was.

Ninety-five percent of the cases it was the way his vote was, initially, so it didn't surprise me.

In my day, when I was on the Court of Appeals, we always conferred every day after argument.

We didn't put it off until the end of the week.

Some of those conferences lasted fairly long.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --Two cases that have been mentioned by former Harvard Law dean, Erwin Griswold, in his memoirs, are two tax cases that were argued during the term you were clerking, Burnet v. Burns and Allison v. Commissioner.

In his memoir he says,

"I lost the first case... Burnet... and won the second... Allison. "

"At that time, Harry Blackmun... whom I did not then know... was law clerk to Judge John B. Sanborn, who sat on both cases. "

"It may be that Blackmun, future Justice of the Supreme Court, made drafts of opinions in one or both cases but I never asked him. "

Can you settle that question?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, he never asked me.

These are two cases in 63 Fed 2nd, and Judge Sanborn wrote the opinion in one of them.

He did not write the opinion in the other one.

He was the junior judge of the three who sat on the case.

I have a vague recollection of the one that he wrote and I'm sure I wrote a bench memo for him.

Reading some of the language struck me as being a little bit familiar anyway.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you know Erwin Griswold or know of him?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No, I did not.

And I don't recall the argument.

It probably took place down in St. Louis, and I was sitting up in St. Paul and didn't go down for the argument.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Could you have stayed on as Judge Sanborn's clerk longer than you did?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I think so.

He certainly didn't press me to leave at all.

We talked about it a little bit.

I was there seventeen months.

Had I gone on to finish two years I'm sure I would have felt that was enough.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: So how did you then make your transition from the clerkship into private practice?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Of course, I was out interviewing with both Minneapolis and St. Paul firms.

But at that time, when I was a clerk, the Foshay Enterprises, who was a, developer and operator in the Minneapolis area, the Depression caught up with his enterprises and a lot of them went into receivership.

In Minneapolis to this day, there is a building called the Foshay Tower, and had the Depression not come along I think that Wilbur B. Foshay would have been a famous man in Minneapolis economic history.

But the Dorsey office was counsel for most of the receiverships in the collapse of the Foshay empire.

Judge Sanborn as a district judge had been in charge of some of those receiverships.

When he was elevated to the Court of Appeals the chief judge of the Court of Appeals designated him to continue as district judge in those receiverships.

The result was that regularly people from the Dorsey office would come over to St. Paul and his chambers to get orders signed, or to have short hearings.

They would come in and instead of waiting in the outer ante room they were ushered in to where I worked, it was a large room, larger than this one, and I got to know them fairly well, rather welcomed them, and they knew I was working there and had to get out sometime and, it just happened that in due course they asked if I'd be interested in corning over into the Dorsey office in Minneapolis.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How big was the firm at the time?

It was called the Junell office at that time, and I'm guessing now, probably fifteen to twenty.

Is that a big office?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: That was a big office for those days.

It was the largest in Minneapolis.

I've always thought it was one of the best.

I remember going over there.

I had, of course, to go in and see Mr. Junell, who was the head guy.

He was a hard-boiled fellow.

He was Finnish and had come from the upper peninsula of Michigan and was a graduate of Michigan Law School.

And someone had tipped me off never to say anything adverse about the University of Michigan Law School when you are talking to John Junell.

So I took that up and went in there and praised the University of Michigan Law School and the upper peninsula as against the lower peninsula, and we got along very well.

He turned me over to a couple of his partners at that time, and they were nice enough to ask me to come.

Mr. Junell had had a serious automobile accident shortly before and it affected his practice days and he gave up before very long.

Then it became the Dorsey office.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Who was Dorsey?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I shouldn't say it became the Dorsey office, it really didn't.

The old firm at one time, as I remember was Junell, Driscoll, Dorsey, Barker and Fletcher.

Robert Driscoll was a St. Paulite over there in Minneapolis who, shortly after I began as an associate, left the firm to go to Chicago and become general counsel for Greyhound Lines.

Greyhound was one of our prim clients.

So his name came out and it was Fletcher and so forth for a while.

Clark R. Fletcher was a litigator who graduated the University of Wisconsin Law School, a very able lawyer.

Dorsey in the meantime, however, just before the Depression, had gone to San Francisco, left the firm, gone out to go in some brokerage office to make a million-a-year and the Depression came, and he came back to Minneapolis and the firm took him in but they demoted him from number two in the firm name to number five or something like this.

He was always a dominant figure in the firm.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was his area of specialty?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: He was.

an old litigator, a business-getter and wore the map of Ireland on his face and had a tender concern for the young lawyers.

One wouldn't expect it but he was always concerned about them and getting them along.

If he ever had to let one of them go because he wasn't cutting the mustard it nearly broke his heart.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did that happen a lot?

Was it competitive?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, yes it did.

In those days, as I suppose is still true, you either went up or you went out, you didn't stay on as an associate forever.

There have been a few exceptions maybe.

But Fletcher and Dorsey ran the office for a long time, and it was a good one.

Their primary client was the First National Bank of Minneapolis.

I think the firm, which is comparatively young, it was really very young when I was there, it was formed in 1921 or '22, by Judge Lancaster and Judge Simpson, who had been Hennepin County District Judges, and I think gave up the bench on the promise from First National Bank of Minneapolis they would have that business.

That's the way the firm started and you know, you get a good big bank, it leads to a lot of things and that's the way the practice was built.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you feel that in choosing between a Minneapolis practice and a St. Paul practice you were making a choice between a higher-class and a lower-class kind of lifestyle?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, I was glad to get to Minneapolis, I was glad to have any job at all.

Practice in those two cities, I think, is contrasting.

St. Paul is the older city, the wealth over there is vested wealth, families that have had it for two or three, four generations.

Minneapolis is much the younger of the twins and full of bustle and boom and new industry and the like.

I think, although probably Chief Justice Burger would disagree with me on this, that practice in Minneapolis was much more lively, more exciting than practice in St. Paul.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now he was there, Chief Justice Burger, when you returned?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes he was indeed.

He had been admitted to the bar one year before I had.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you see him very much when you were a cub?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: We always kept in touch with each other.

Socially, with two others, or eight of us, we would get together once a month anyway, sure.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Are these your old friends from the original neighborhood?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, yes, indeed.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When you first got to the Dorsey firm, how did you get your first assignments?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: As usual, the cubs there, and there were two or three of us, were thrown into general stuff.

Any partner would call on any new associate and haul him in.

I remember I sat at a double desk with one of my cub associates on the other side and I on this side and whenever we had a client come in, why the other one had to get out of the room.

We graduated to a room with a window, which was a big promotion.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Where was the office located?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: We were on the 13th floor of what was called the First National Soo Line Building.

The Sao Line is a railroad, Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Sainte Marie.

We were there for a long time and finally the firm grew and took over two or three floors.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did you come to do the tax practice?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: That was a matter of great concern for the cubs.

Leland W. Scott was the tax partner.

He had been here in Washington working for the Internal Revenue Service when the Dorsey office plucked him out of that and brought him back to the Midwest: He was a very knowledgeable, able person who knew tax law.

But his health was not good, and he was out of the office as much as he was in.

But tax practice was beginning to blossom and I think the office generally felt, and I couldn't agree with it more, that we never let a case go out without some consideration of the tax consequences.

With Leland Scott being indisposed, we were told, I suppose, by Dorsey, that one of us would be assigned to a tax partner.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: One of the cubs.

Yes, there were about four of us.

We all groaned, none of us wanted to get into that.

That would be a real condemnation.

The chip landed on me and all the others thought it was great.

And here I was going into the tax department and never studied taxation.

Did you volunteer in any way?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No.

None of us did.

We waited for the ax to fall.

But it was the best thing that ever happened to me, actually.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: It has sometimes been said that because of your math background you had an affinity for tax.

Did you feel that way when you started doing it?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: It might have.

I have a feeling that that fact was a factor in my being chosen, but nobody ever said that.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: The other cubs at the time, did they stay with the firm and become partners?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Who were they?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: There was Don Nelson, who held on for a while and eventually left to become general counsel of Minneapolis Honeywell for a while.

W. F. Marquart who stayed on with the firm and retired a while back, multi-millionaire, I suppose.

Malcolm McDonald who was a year or two older than I was and eventually was picked from the firm by the First National Bank of Minneapolis to become its vice president and General Counsel in-house.

They all did very well.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now you came to do quite a bit of litigation in the tax department.

Did you have a preference between litigation and counseling or you thought it was all part of one--

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I thought it was all part of a job and actually I thought that tax litigation was rather pleasant.

You're up against government lawyers for the most part; they were nice people.

Or you're up against somebody in the U.S. Attorney's office, and usually one felt he knew as much as that poor guy who had been selected just as I was to do the tax work.

If a case was important enough, always there was somebody from Washington that came out.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --How did you come to feel about the I.R.S.?

You later went on to write many opinions about tax at the court.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I think it's a responsible agency and much depended on the individual who was representing them.

I have no reason to be critical of the I.R.S. We thought they were wrong in a lot of cases, and we proved that if the results meant anything, but they also proved themselves right many times.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When we were filming in the courtroom in our first session, you recalled that you had worked on a case that was one of the very first cases announced in that courtroom.

Can.

you tell us more about that?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I think that is Douglas against Willcuts in, I'm guessing, 286 U.S., somewhere in there.

The Supreme Court building was opened in 1935, and this is the first case reported in the U.S. Reports, beginning with the 1935 term.

It may not have been the first one announced because, as you know, we announce cases by juniority.

But it's the first reported because they are reported by seniority.

There it is, with Leland Scott having come down to argue it and Clark R. Fletcher on the brief.

Well, Mr. Fletcher hadn't anything to do with the case but they had to put somebody on the brief.

I'd written the brief but I wasn't admitted to the Supreme Court Bar so they couldn't put my name in it.

I well remember it.

We lost the case, and properly so in those days.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What do you remember about the argument in the case?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, it was pretty good.

I thought Scotty did a very presentable job.

Forgotten who was on the other side, it might have been Sewell Key or someone active at that time.

But tax law was changing, and the government was scraping the bottom of the barrel of things, and I think situations, particularly in the trust field, that were long felt immune from the tax hand of the government were being exposed and defeated.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember much about the Supreme Court bench and the Justices and how they were behaving?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No.

I don't, particularly.

I was glad to be there.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How many Supreme Court cases did you work on at the firm?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, I'm guessing, as long as I was in the tax department, everyone that went up I was in, I think, in on the briefs, generally.

Certainly, we must have had a dozen where cert was filed, of course, fewer than that where cert was granted.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Erwin Griswold has made reference to one case you worked on in 1943, Dobson v. Commissioner.

Do you recall anything about this case?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: The Dobson case was another one of the same ilk.

We had won it in the Tax Court and the I.R.S. took an appeal to the 8th Circuit and won a reversal of the Tax Court's decision.

We filed a petition for cert being fully convinced, all of us in the office, that the case was a loser, just a flat loser.

I thought for a while that maybe they'd send me down to argue it because they had nothing to lose if it was a loser.

In the office at that time was William L. Prosser, Prosser was teaching at the University of Minnesota, and had come over at times when, particularly later in the war years, but he was there and he didn't have much to do and the decision was made, let's send Bill Prosser down on this case.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Was he a tax expert?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No.

Didn't know anything about taxes.

He knew just about as much as I did when I went into the tax department.

And so, Leland Scott and I worked on Bill Prosser, tried to tell him what this case was all about.

The office generally said, you go down and argue it and don't be concerned if you lose it because it's a loser.

Well, it turned out that he won it, nine-zip, to his utter amazement.

He came back after the argument and was thoroughly discouraged that the argument had gone very badly.

But what happened was, not only did they reverse the 8th Circuit on the merits, but they also pronounced a lot of basic law having to do with procedure in appeals from the United States Tax Court, for the first time.

To what extent were findings of fact made by the Tax Court to be given deference by the Courts of Appeals and that sort of thing.

So the Dobson case became very important from a procedural point of view and not so much from the inherent income tax point of view.

Of course, Bill Prosser, being Bill, would never let the rest of us forget about it, you see,

"you had a loser up here and sent me down over there. "

"Just easy to overcome. "

"Good lawyer and knows how to do it. "

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was he like?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Well, Bill was fascinating.

We all liked him for the stories and... an amazing kind of a creature.

He was not very good with clients, I suppose, because he was so full of theory, and I can still see Bill in his office in there, typing away, always did his own typing, with a cigarette in his mouth and his front covered with cigarette ashes.

Stimulating.

We brought him in on a lot of stuff.

He always had ideas and must have had a great influence in his classes.

He was a practical joker.

One time when I was teaching as an adjunct at the University of Minnesota Law School, after the war, he had a class on the other side of the hall from my class.

At the end of the hour our classes would switch, they'd go over to him and his would come over to me.

And pretty soon I discovered that Bill was insulting me from the beginning of the hour until the end of the hour, as to my character generally, as to my inability to teach classes and the like.

So I returned the favor.

We had a lot of fun.

We almost got him into trouble with one of his practical jokes one time, but he was a stimulating presence to have.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did you start teaching?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I started teaching night school at the St. Paul College of Law, which is now William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, the school from which Chief Justice Burger graduated.

It's a fine night law school.

Judge Sanborn was a trustee and allowed as how I ought to go up and do a little teaching.

So I did.

It seems to me that I taught there for about six or seven years, beginning, I think, about 1935.

Started off teaching Real Estate and Future Interests and all I did was use Bart Leach's terminology from Harvard.

And then I was squawking so much that they didn't have a course in taxation, so, of course, I got what was coming to me,

"Good, we'll put it in and you teach it. "

You see.

So I had to teach Tax Law for a while.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: So that was quite a time commitment given your workload at the firm.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, it was too much, really.

And I paid for it a little bit.

A couple of times going down with pneumonia and not enough sleep.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you enjoy the teaching?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, sure.

Well, you would know far better than I do.

I think teaching is a great sport and is hard work, particularly the first two years until you get your course organized as to what you want to cover, what cases you want to cover.

After that, I think it's much more enjoyable, and you fill in with developments in the law.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you ever consider going into teaching full-time?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, I considered it.

The Dean of Minnesota, as I indicated, I had taught at the University of Minnesota as a adjunct for two years, and at the end of that time, Dean Everett Fraser, who was the father of Congressman Fraser, later--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now and then Mayor Donald Fraser.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Yes.

--called me into his office one day and suggested that I come over and join the faculty.

I thought about it a little bit and gave him a negative answer, whereupon I received one of the most severe chewings-out I've ever had in my life.

The gist of which was,

"Look, you're just starting your career, what really do you want to make out of your life? "

I quote,

"Do you want to be another James Dorsey? "

He wasn't insulting Jim Dorsey, what he meant was,

"Do you want to, eventually, if you're lucky, become head of a law office and be satisfied with that? "

"If you go into teaching think of the influence that you can have on young, eager minds, and that's where you should be. "

"I'm disappointed that you're turning me down. "

We were always friends after that, but, as I look back on it, that interview was one that distinctly influenced my life, no question about it.

Because every time I thought of leaving practice, I thought of Everett Fraser.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And that encouraged you to consider other options.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

What did I want to make out of my life?

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you do pro-bono activities, bar activities?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, to a degree, although not as much as one of the other, older associates was doing.

He was doing so much, particularly in connection with bar work and its pro-bono activities that the primary partners called him and said,

"Look, we're still in a depression time, we need your time. "

"Billable hours, are more than we do pro-bono hours. "

So they weren't very eager, although the need was even greater then.

Times were tough,--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you know of any minority law firms?

Or were there any law firms that had sort of a more of a public interest or legal services representation in town?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --No, but I can remember when the Dorsey office took the first woman in.

That was a major event.

But we were all nice to her, I think she was happy.

But some of the old-timers, it was a hard thing for them to swallow, at the start.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did she stay with the firm?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: She stayed with the firm.

Her name was Betty Washburn and eventually she married a vice president of the University of Minnesota and moved out into other things and then died.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Now, it's around this period that you met Dorothy Clark.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: When was that?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: You're getting kind of intimate now, Professor Koh.

That was August one, nineteen hundred and forty-seven and it was a blistering hot, Sunday morning.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: How did you meet her?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I had a regular Sunday morning tennis date with a friend of mine whose tennis was about the same as mine, and we always played on Sunday morning, always had a good workout.

As I said, it was blistering hot, we got three sets under our belt and down the court, there were four or five courts in a row, in the far end there were two young women playing tennis and I suggested let's go down and see if they'll play a set of doubles, we can ease off that way.

So we went down and they said sure.

And Dottie was one of them.

She walked to the other side of the net and I just followed her.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What was she doing at the time?

Was she a student?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: She was a secretary for a businessman in St. Paul, who was very civic-minded.

She was, through him, engaged in a lot of civic activities.

I followed her over there because I thought her legs were rather pretty and after we had that set, why, we went and took a swim.

Both of us were pretty hot and very offensive, I suppose, at that point.

Yes, we had a few dates along the way from then on.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Was Dottie a life-long native of Minnesota?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: She was born in Cloquet, which is up, near Duluth, so was a Minnesotan to that degree.

She went to high school at a little town called Barnum, which is on the main highway between the Twin Cities and Duluth.

Then eventually, because her family didn't have any money, she did some secretarial studies and became a secretary and came down to the Twin Cities, got a job.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And you, at that point, were you a partner yet at the law firm?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Not at that point.

This would be forty-seven--

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Thirty-seven--

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: --Thirty-seven.

I think my partnership came along a little later.

I knew her for four years before we were married.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: --When did you propose?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: If Dottie were here, she would make a joke and say that I proposed to her in bed.

Translated, what that means is that she was ill at the time and I went over to see her and thought she was in a helpless condition and so I, while she was stretched out in bed I asked the fatal question.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And then when did you get married?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: We were married on the 21st day of June, 1941.

And this brings lames E. Dorsey back into the picture.

Before that, oh, it must have been, shortly, not too long after we had met, I, with a gulp, took her to a firm party.

The party was out at Lake Minnetonka where one of the partners had a summer home.

When we arrived, whoever was receiving us said,

"everybody's down on the dock in the lake. "

So I went down and Dorsey was out there "holding court", so to speak.

So I took Dottie's hand, took her up and introduced her to James E. Dorsey.

He didn't say anything for a moment, he just looked her over from top to toe and his greeting was,

"How do you do Miss Clark? "

"When are you and Harry going to get married? "

Which, of course, translated means that he approved.

So it was.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Where did you first live as a married couple?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: We had an apartment on 3rd Avenue South, in Minneapolis, right near the Minneapolis Art Institute.

It was a brand new apartment complex and we were the first occupants of the little apartment we had.

It was close enough to downtown, it was 22nd, 23rd, 24th Street, along there, so that I could walk back and forth, and did during those early years.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: It's well known that you were the best man at Warren Burger's wedding.

When was that?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: The chief justice and Mrs. Burger, Elvira Stromberg, were married on the 8th day of November, 1933, if my recollection is correct.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: So while you were still a law clerk.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, yes.

I well remember when they drove off in a little, he had, I think it was a Ford, the old Model-T, they drove off for Washington.

I thought,

"My friend's gone down with a strange woman, and I'm left alone. "

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did they attend your wedding?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes.

They did indeed.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Was it a big wedding?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: No.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: And where did you go for your honeymoon?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Where did Dottie and I go?

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Yes.

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I had a fairly new car, and we packed it up and neither one of us had been South before and I thought it was high time we got down into the South, see what it was like.

So we drove South and went straight down to Louisiana, New Orleans, and then over into Florida and ended up at Miami Beach, at a hotel way out in the hinterland at that time; of course, it's all been built up now, but, we rather liked it because it was so far out and quiet, and we enjoyed the ocean.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: It was shortly after that that Pearl Harbor was bombed, shortly after your honeymoon.

Can you remember where you were that day?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Yes, it was a Sunday morning and we were in our apartment in Minneapolis and the radio was on and the news came over it.

Of course, everyone was in a state of shock that this would happen.

Despite the fact that there had been kind of a tension building up in the preceding year actually.

I remember the next morning going in to see Mr. Dorsey on some matter.

I just remarked, I said,

"Things are changed, aren't they? "

And he said,

"Yes, we're in a full-fledged war, and how it's going to affect the office, we do not know. "

Those were tough times and some of my young friends, young lawyers, were lost in the war.

No one in our office was lost, but others in other offices were.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Did you consider joining up?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: Oh, sure, and we all in effect were drafted, of course.

I remember going out to Ft.

Snelling for a physical and the like.

That summer of '42, Dottie and I decided we had a little time coming and let's go back to Miami Beach and we did.

We had to be careful because gas rationing was then starting to be in effect.

So we saved up our coupons and decided not to use them and went down by train.

I can remember staying there at the same hotel with, at night, with soldiers, during the day also, but at night particularly with soldiers patrolling the, beaches, because there were rumors of German submarines off the coast, and the threat had been made that they'd come in on Florida somewhere.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: Do you remember where you were when you heard about the Atomic Bomb and Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

JUSTICE BLACKMUN: I don't remember that exactly.

I should, but I don't, where we were.

HAROLD HONGJU KOH: What we'll do Mr. Justice is we'll begin again next session talking a little bit more about the children and how they came.

Then we'll talk about the Mayo years and your move from the Dorsey firm and onto the Mayo Clinic.

But I think we'll end this session here.

End of interview