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<TITLE>Conversation with Ira Michael Heyman, p. 2 of 6</TITLE>

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<p class=SMALL><A HREF="./heyman-con0.html">Ira Michael Heyman Interview</A>: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley</p>

<p>
<center>
<img src="./images/HeymanConHead.jpg" width=475 height=200 alt="Values, Persuasion, and Leadership in the Public Sector: Conversation with Ira Michael Heyman, former Chancellor of UC Berkeley and former Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; 8/1/00 by Harry Kreisler."><br> 

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<tr valign=top><td align=right><font size="-2">Photo by Jane Scherr</font></td></tr></table></center>
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<P class=SMALL>Page 2 of 6</P>

<h1>The Law and Public Service</h1>
<P>
<TT>Let's talk a little about law school. You were at Yale. You were on the Law Review there, right?</TT></P>
<P>
Yes.</P>
<P>
<TT>So what skills did you get in your training as a lawyer that were useful and helpful as you entered into all the management roles you later had, at Berkeley and then at the Smithsonian?</TT></P>
<P>
Well, it's where I learned to read.</P>
<P>
<TT>That's good.</TT></P>
<P>
I must say that being at Yale is a special treat because the student body is so good. It was small enough so that you could have intimate discussion groups and so I learned a lot from that kind of experience. But you learn an awful lot about governments. You do, because in so many ways law is really the authoritative, or seemingly authoritative statement that comes out that's crucial to governance.</P>
<P>
<TT>You learned to think about issues from different perspectives?</TT></P>
<P>
Oh, clearly. You know, every time there's an appellate decision, for instance, you're reading about the resolution of conflicting arguments. And so many of the cases that you read in law school are very important ones, and you usually had two quite skilled counselors, and quite ethical counselors. Not in the sense that they told the other fellow's story, but they didn't tell a false story themselves. So working on a single record that had been established in the lower courts, you got two different takes on those facts, well argued, and then you got a resolution of that set of conflicting arguments by the court. A way of dealing with life, especially in institutions, that is very appealing to me.</P>
<P>
<TT>And also, touching base with reality and applying ideals to the real world?</TT></P>
<P>
Well, that does certainly occur in that method of teaching which has been, at least during my lifetime, the principal way of teaching in law school, which is a very Socratic method, in which you're getting your students to participate deeply in that conversation, so that those who do their work and all the rest get deeper and deeper into the subject matter. But you're right: on the one hand, you're talking about ideals, especially in subjects like constitutional law. And on the other hand, you're talking about reality. Maybe you develop the sense that I've had, which is that perhaps the real genius of the American system is not that we behave so well, but that we have a set of written ideals that keep pulling us in the right direction and really do operate in that way. I think, for instance, the reparations to Japanese-Americans after the Second World War, which could never be significant in terms of what we did with those people's lives, but was such a symbolic gesture on the part of the United States, recognizing that it had done wrong -- and largely in terms of Constitutional principles, as far as I'm concerned.</P>
<P>
<TT>When you were leaving the Smithsonian, you said in a speech, "At the heart I believe all of our work in the law is a belief in process. The way things are done matter to us. Time after time in my life at the Smithsonian, I find myself asking how a decision was made. What expectations were built into a particular strategy? Who was present at the table? How clearly were purposes articulated?" And then you go on to say that your studies in the law got you to thinking about the bigger picture.</TT></P>
<P>
Well, you know, lawyers really are 90% process and 10% substance. But the process is substance, if you will, because what that means to me, and meant to me at the time that I wrote it, is that if you're very thorough in terms of process and if you're very thorough in terms of an organized and sensible way to make sure that it's been an inclusionary decision, so that a lot of people have participated in it, the soundness of the decision is enhanced. I think that especially occurs to lawyers, and while others have other things that they stress, I think it's very sound in the management of a place where you really want it to be decentralized and not have all the decisions come to the center. And the way that you try to assure a good practice is to assure that the folks out there really are following sound processes. Then the number of times you have to make a decision are much, much lessened.</P>
<P>
<TT>When you finished law school, you had the extraordinary opportunity for a year to be the chief clerk to the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Earl Warren. Tell us about that experience and how you think it impacted you as a young lawyer, as somebody who obviously was concerned about values, and who was about to go out in the world and run some of our major institutions.</TT></P>
<P>
I'll tell you that in a moment, but what you said reminded me of something else. My career has been very serendipitous. I've really not thought about what's going to happen at any stage of my life. When I applied to Yale, which is a very hard law school to get into, I was then called up to active duty in the Marine Corps, which meant I couldn't attend, but I went through all the process in any event. And my grades were okay. They were really pretty good. And my LSAT score was very good. But the competition is enormous. That year, Yale took in twice as many as it normally does because it thought it would lose a lot of those whom they admitted to service. Well, it turned out they didn't. It was a huge class. Only a few of us went. But it certainly enhanced my opportunity to be admitted that it was such a huge class.</P>
<P>
So I came back from service two years later, and what was Yale going to do? Not honor [their promise to an applicant] who had fought for his country or at least had served during the war? So, of course, they let me in. And then I went through law school, and I did okay. I went and practiced law for a year because I wanted to test how it was to practice law. My wife and I were living in New Haven. She was getting her graduate degree in History of Art from Yale. I was commuting to New York to practice law. It was arduous. And then the Chief Judge of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals -- which is the Intermediate Federal Court of Appeals, but the Second Circuit has got a lot of very juicy cases because it's New York, Connecticut, and Vermont -- he lost his law clerk to the air force at the last moment, so he asked me will I do it. And he asked me largely because his clerk up until then was a classmate of mine from Yale. So I went to the firm. I asked them, they said, "Fine. Take a leave of absence." And thus I went to work for him.</P>
<P>
That Christmas I was in Florida seeing my grandparents. My wife and I had gone down. I came back, went into the office, there's a phone call that I'm meant to return to the Chief Justice of the United States. I find out at that point that Yale had put me in for that clerkship because Warren liked to have at least one clerk with Court of Appeals experience. So I went to him. I saw him. He said, "We'll do fine." I go back to the law firm and I say, "How about another year?" They say, "Fine." So that's another piece of serendipity that occurs. There are more later in life. But I guess the point I'm trying to make is that being open to opportunity and not being absolutely determinative with regard to goal can be very nice and can be very productive.</P>
<P>
<A name="hero"></A>
Now, you asked me about Warren and what my views of him were and how did that affect me. Well, there were two things about Warren that affected me deeply. One is that he's a genuine American hero. And what I mean by that is that certainly at the time that he was Chief Justice of the United States, he was an exceedingly principled man. He was an enormously human man. He could bring that to bear on the conflicts that came before the Court. He was obdurate and stubborn about those values. I suspect most of us have forgotten, but he was under tremendous pressure in the United States. The John Birch Society was after him. There were huge billboards in many places in the United States about lynching Warren or at least impeaching him. The pressure was immense, and he didn't waver at all. In fact, practically every day he walked to the Court with Tom Clark, who was then an Associate Justice. And they walked together from out about two miles away to work, no secret servicemen, no nothing. And that was the kind of a person that he was. So he really was a hero. And he certainly was to me, given his values.</P>
<P>
The second point was, while I had concluded that I really did want to try teaching, he was the one who steered me to Berkeley. I had never seen Berkeley. I was interviewed by some members of the faculty. They accepted me without being interviewed here, and I accepted coming here without ever seeing it. It's worked out well, but really it was Warren who steered me.</P>

<P class=SMALL>Next page: <A HREF="./heyman-con3.html">Leadership and the Management of Public Institutions</A></TT></P>

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