THE RULE of LAW ORAL HISTORY PROJECT the Reminiscences Of
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THE RULE OF LAW ORAL HISTORY PROJECT The Reminiscences of Robert C. Kirsch Columbia Center for Oral History Columbia University 2013 PREFACE The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Robert C. Kirsch conducted by Ronald J. Grele on February 8 and June 28, 2012, and September 13, 2013. This interview is part of the Rule of Law Oral History Project. The reader is asked to bear in mind that s/he is reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose. VJD Session One Interviewee: Robert C. Kirsch Location: Boston, MA Interviewer: Ronald J. Grele Date: February 8, 2012 Q: This is an interview with Robert C. Kirsch, in Boston. Today's date is February 8, 2012. Where I'd like to begin is a little bit about your own biography. You were born and raised in—? Kirsch: I was born in Massachusetts in a town called Methuen, which is about thirty miles north of Boston. It's on the border with Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I was there until I went to college. Then I was in college in Vermont, at Middlebury College. Q: How would you describe your family? Kirsch: Average, middle-class family. My mom was at home with my brother and I. My father was an engineer who worked at a company at the time called Western Electric, which was part of the old Bell system. He went into one job and stayed there until he retired thirty or forty years later. A very middle-class, conservative American ethic. Both families were very working-class and I think I was the first one in either family to attend a university. It's sort of a classic American story. My father's family was German and had been in the country probably since the mid- to late-1800s. My mother's father was an Italian immigrant and her grandparents on her mother's side were Italian immigrants. It was all sort of a classic American story. They're a relatively conservative family, politically. Kirsch -- 1 -- 2 Q: Republican? Kirsch: To the core, yes. Our discussions about this case—although with my dad, before he died, I think he understood what was happening. But my mother is still uncomfortable with the representation to this day. Q: Are they religious? Kirsch: My father was Episcopalian but I think in name only. My mother's family was Italian, so they were Catholics and still are. My mother is still very regularly church-going. Q: You went to public schools in Methuen? Kirsch: Actually, no, I went to a parochial school. I attended Catholic school for my first eight grades. I went from there to Phillips Academy in Andover as a day student, which was about a fifteen-minute drive from where I grew up. From there, to college. I worked a bit in my summers and then actually took a year between law school and college and worked as a weather observer on Mount Washington in New Hampshire. It's our tallest mountain in the northeast, in a place where you get lots of extreme weather. Q: Bitter winds. Kirsch -- 1 -- 3 Kirsch: Lots of wind, lots of cold, lots of snow and ice—all the things that winter is supposed to bring. Q: Was your family at all affected by John F. Kennedy and the mythology around that? Kirsch: Certainly, I remember coming home the day he was killed. It was probably the first time I saw my mother cry, watching the funeral cortege on television when the funeral was broadcast. There was nothing beyond that. I suspect, despite everything, that while they had grief for the president—and I've never talked about it—my suspicion is that my parents had voted for Richard [M.] Nixon. I don't know that for a fact. Q: Why Middlebury? Kirsch: It was a good college. It was off in the country. A small liberal arts school is what I was looking for and something that was further north. I don’t think you can get a more attractive campus. When you're at Middlebury College, you look at the Adirondack Mountains to the west and the Green Mountains to the east and it's just a spectacular place with smart people. It was a good environment for me. Q: When you were at Middlebury, it attracted some national attention for being a leader in energy conservation. Were you at all affected by that as a student or do you remember it at all? Kirsch -- 1 -- 4 Kirsch: I guess I would have to say no because I don't remember that happening in the 1970s at all. If it was, I was unaware of what was happening. Or maybe I knew about it at the time and I've just forgotten. Q: I ask because it was one of the things I remember about Middlebury. Given your own career, I thought there might be some kind of connection between the two. Kirsch: I had an idea of what I wanted to do before I even got to Middlebury—although, at this point in life, I wonder how that could be possible. I certainly had an inclination to work as an environmental lawyer because, when I was young, I was very concerned about nuclear energy and the path that the country was on. At the time, I felt that it was an overly subsidized, dangerous, toxic-forever energy form, that there should be other places the country was investing and that it was particularly risky to invest in an industry that couldn't exist without extensive government subsidies, given our system. I had been active in some of the protests that occurred at the last nuclear plant that was built, which is in Seabrook, New Hampshire—not very far from here. Part of the motivation to go to law school was that I could see that while it was really a lot of fun to go to an event like that, you could be a lot more effective as a lawyer. Q: Where would you have picked up that interest? Kirsch: I don't know. I think just living and being aware. It's hard in our society. I guess you can be unconscious of the role of energy in our society but I think you almost have to do it willingly and with some effort. Energy is so around us and the fact that, in a place like this, if you see that Kirsch -- 1 -- 5 power plant, it is built on the edge of a salt marsh and you can see it for miles around. It's huge. Nothing seems to have gone wrong with it. Only one reactor out of two were built. In fact, the company that built it—which was a utility in New Hampshire—was put into bankruptcy because it developed that. So the concerns about the financial wherewithal of the technology I think were borne out. Whether that will change now because of what happened in Japan last year, with that industry being revisited—it's an interesting question for me as to where we're going to go with that now. Certainly, nuclear energy presents some opportunities in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, if that's the concern that we're after, but poses concerns in terms of long-term security—what you do to store and control the waste stream that comes from a plant and how you manage the risk of something going wrong at a plant, which we now know can be quite catastrophic, from what happened in Russia and what we saw happen in Japan recently. Q: How did that find a focus in Middlebury? A particular course that you took? Kirsch: No, I just knew that I wanted to go to law school and that Middlebury had a good undergraduate liberal arts program, which was what I was looking for. I didn't look at a school for a particular area of strength or expertise. I actually looked at it because of the reputation and the strength of its teaching faculty, which was very strong at the time. They were real teachers. It wasn't a university where you got teaching assistants with a lot of experts sitting in on large lectures. I remember almost no lecture courses there. Everything was really sitting in and participation, which was why I was there. Kirsch -- 1 -- 6 Q: I remember they had a reputation as a language school. People went there for foreign languages. Kirsch: It does. It has very strong programs, particularly in the summer. They have summer-long immersion programs in a variety of languages. Interestingly, I never took a day of foreign language when I was there. It didn't happen. Q: Any particular courses or professors that stand out in your mind? Kirsch: A couple. I was a political science major and knew the members of the department quite well and the people who I have still tended to stay in touch with. One was a professor named Murray Dry, who just celebrated his fortieth year at the college, so he's still there and still active. I see him when I go back. He's actually invited me up a couple of times and I've spoken to classes. I've spoken to their pre-law program about the Guantánamo case. Murray has brought me back up for that. He was somewhat of the pre-law advisor to undergraduate students and also specialized in American politics as part of the political science program and some political philosophy.