My Postdated Obituary For Ramsey Clark: RIP
Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark passed away at 93 years old this week. I had the opportunity to meet him once at a human rights event, and was tangentially involved in one of his several high profile cases, the details of which I will keep private. It was one of the cases that he drew huge criticism for taking, and I was one of the people who was part of a fundraising team which raised the money for his retainer, as it was an appeal of a Federal conviction which went eventually to the Supreme Court. (they wouldn't hear it)
People that I worked with knew him personally, and I heard a number of stories about him which displayed his real depth of character. Ironically, he was someone whose politics at times I deeply opposed, but I had nothing but respect for him. He went head to head with the racist tyrant FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on matters of justice, law and principle. Ramsey had no skeletons in his closet and was beyond Hoover's type of blackmail.
He often said that every case he took, whether criminal, civil, or international law cases, he would take because the principle of justice and rule of law was threatened by an unjust prosecution. He followed in the tradition of Clarence Darrow, and his father, Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark in that regard, in that he would defend "the Devil himself" in order to defend those universal principles. And that he did, associating himself with a wide variety of defendants, personalities, political figures and others, from Sadaam Hussein, to Jane Fonda, Slobodan Milosevic, anti-war activists, and others.
He believed the right to a fair trial under the law was inviolable. He took cases in which the defendants were in some cases objectionable human beings, or not, because he knew that if a "kangaroo court" trial became acceptable because the defendant was justifiably hated, that the innocent could be similarly railroaded.
Many people still hate his memory for marching in Iran during the Islamic Revolution under a banner reading "Death to America". That was not what he stood for. He did not support Khomeini at all. As he told someone that I worked with, he hated the policies of Henry Kissinger which backed the criminal regime of Iran's Shah, which violated human rights by conducting mass murder and torture under the SAVAK, Iran's secret police. In this I agreed with him 100%.
Ramsey was an easy target for political pundits on the Left and the Right. But he never deviated from his core belief in defending the Freedoms guaranteed by the US Constitution. His work in the Johnson Administration for Civil and Voting Rights was critical to making sure Federal laws passed by Congress were enforced. His fight with Hoover was about that. He was a warrior in the battle for what was, in effect, America's second attempt at Reconstruction of the South, to end the Jim Crow Era. And he never stopped fighting for Civil and Human Rights until Friday of this week. Would that we had more people like him today. I am proud to say that Martha and I were a part of his world, though a small one. RIP Ramsey Clark.
