Hardworking Bell leaves a legacy to be appreciated

Judge Griffin Bell and I were breakfasting in the White House mess in 1991 with my wife, who was then on President George H.W. Bush’s senior staff. The president heard Bell was there and sent a message to visit in the Oval Office. It was a visit among friends, and Bush and his wife, Barbara, at Bell’s invitation, were soon at Sea Island where they had not visited since their honeymoon. Rounds of golf were played, a return engagement for Bell followed at Camp David that included golf with Bush and Arnold Palmer, and Bush soon had Bell as his personal lawyer. For Griffin Bell, who died Monday at age 90, that was normal.

During his terminal illness, Bell’s doctors told him to establish a goal each day. He accomplished many during the last six months, invigorated by the outpouring of visits and calls of his lifetime of friends, and at peace after a satisfying and long life. His mind stayed clear and vigorous to the end. Former Atlanta Constitution editor Eugene Patterson was one of those who told Bell in a call a few weeks ago how “the courage” displayed by Bell and Gov. Ernest Vandiver to bring Georgia within the legal requirements of integration and save public education in Georgia “set my own bearing.”

Bell was a new 43-year-old judge for just a few months on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals when he drew the case that ended the discriminatory county unit system and changed Georgia elections. He was soon embroiled in Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett’s defiance of court orders to admit James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. The Georgia and Mississippi cases were two among about 3,000 cases in which he participated and more than 500 opinions that he wrote. These cases reflected his frequent and significant role during his nearly 15 years as a judge in which he synthesized the court’s center, advancing civil rights. President John F. Kennedy went on television in the midst of the Barnett controversy to cite Bell and other southern judges as courageous heroes.

In 1977, Bell and President Jimmy Carter had a mission to refurbish the Justice Department and FBI after the severe tarnish of Watergate. He started and ended by boosting the professionalism of the careerists in the department. When he left, the esprit of the body of the men and women at Justice was at an all-time high.

As a critical ingredient of this mission, Bell earned the respect of a cynical post-Watergate press corps. Seemingly small things were part of his plan, such as posting on the press room bulletin board his own daily logs showing his every meeting and telephone call with anyone outside the Justice Department from the day before. He enforced rules such as restricting White House contacts to only the highest levels of the department to minimize even the appearance of political pressures on lesser officials. Bell recently told NPR reporter Nina Totenberg that this transparency was the core of restoring public confidence.

While rigorous about his national security responsibilities and proud of the first modern successful prosecutions of spies, Bell also persuaded the intelligence community and the Congress to trust the judiciary to oversee domestic surveillance by authoring and passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He recruited and persuaded William Webster to resign a lifetime appellate judgeship to become head of the FBI.

Bell implemented Carter’s campaign pledge to give meaningful roles to minorities and women. African-Americans as solicitor general and the head of the civil rights division were among his first two recruits. At the beginning of the Carter presidency, there were few minorities and no women judges on the federal appeals courts, and few on the trial courts. It was one of the highest priorities of Carter and Bell, and for the first time in history, significant percentages of women and minorities became federal trial and appellate judges.

As I watched Bell operate over the years, I was amazed not only with the depth of his mind, but his laudable ability to absorb and process the energy and knowledge of the law clerks, aides, or fellow lawyers around him in order to improve his own. The daily breakfast with other Justice officials in the Martha Mitchell dining room was nothing but fodder for his intellect.

Initially labeled by some critics as a “crony” of Carter, 21 senators voted against Bell’s confirmation as attorney general. All of these opponents later publicly voiced their support for him. Bob Dole wrote in the Washington Post that his vote against Bell was one of his two worst votes in Congress. The leader of that initial opposition, Sen. Charles McMathias, a liberal Republican from Maryland, also recanted “the error of his opposition” as he hosted Bell at his Maryland farm before they together commemorated John Marshall, the first chief justice, at a nearby rural burial site.

Bell was a people’s person of the first order, who valued his own common origins. Secretaries around the Justice Department would be surprised when this attorney general would wander into their far-flung offices, alone and unannounced. It took no more than five minutes before Bell had established a common acquaintance. On the day a massive snowstorm engulfed and closed Washington, the Washington Post called the offices of the Cabinet to see who was working. He and I were the only ones there that morning, and I was off making coffee, when the phone rang. He answered in his recognizable and unassuming drawl. That was the lead of the Washington Post story about who was working in Washington.

Bell’s most mentioned trait was his rich humor and wit. Former Atlanta Constitution editor Reg Murphy wrote an engaging biography laden with samplings of this wit: “Uncommon Sense: The Achievement of Griffin Bell.” Bell introduced a widely rumored aphrodisiac, rooster pepper sausage, to Washington, headlined in a front-page story by reporter Phil Gailey, “Rooster Pepper has White House Links.”

Bell gave a still remembered acceptance speech in 1979 as “a candidate for President of the United States” at the Alfalfa Club, an annual banquet and mock political event in Washington usually attended by the current president, the Cabinet, military, judicial, political and business leaders. He began in his distinctive Georgia drawl, “I would like to advise that arrangements have been made for simultaneous translation.”

He continued (paraphrasing Churchill’s great statement), “Our motto will be to wage obfuscation. We will wage obfuscation on the beaches and on the landing fields and in the political arena of America. And when all else fails and we can no longer obfuscate, we will tell the truth to the extent we know it.”

We celebrate with deep affection the life of this rare man.

• Terry Adamson was a law clerk to Bell on the U.S. Court of Appeals, a principal assistant at the Justice Department and a friend.