ALAN S. ROSENTHAL, ESQUIRE Oral History Project The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit Oral History Project United States Courts The Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit District of Columbia Circuit ALAN S. ROSENTHAL, ESQUIRE Interviews conducted by: Judith S. Feigin, Esquire In 2011: March 3, March 21, April 20, May 9, May 23, June 6, June 20 July 18 and July 25 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface .. i Oral History Agreements Alan S. Rosenthal, Esquire. iii Judith S. Feigin, Esquire. v Oral History Transcript of Interviews: Interview No. 1, March 3, 2011. 1 Interview No. 2, March 21, 2011. 29 Interview No. 3, April 20, 2011.. 63 Interview No. 4, May 9, 2011. 93 Interview No. 5, May 23, 2011. 122 Interview No. 6, June 6, 2011. 151 Interview No. 7, June 20, 2011. 177 Interview No. 8, July 18, 2011.. 206 Interview No. 9, July 25, 2011.. 236 Epitaph by Mr. Rosenthal, May 2012. A-1 Index. B-1 Table of Cases. C-1 Biographical Sketches Alan S. Rosenthal, Esquire. D-1 Judith S. Feigin, Esquire. D-3 NOTE The following pages record interviews conducted on the dates indicated. The interviews were recorded digitally or on cassette tape, and the interviewee and the interviewer have been afforded an opportunity to review and edit the transcript. The contents hereof and all literary rights pertaining hereto are governed by, and are subject to, the Oral History Agreements included herewith. © 2012 Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. All rights reserved. PREFACE The goal of the Oral History Project of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit is to preserve the recollections of the judges of the Courts of the District of Columbia Circuit and lawyers, court staff, and others who played important roles in the history of the Circuit. The Project began in 1991. Oral history interviews are conducted by volunteer attorneys who are trained by the Society. Indexed transcripts of the oral histories and related documents are available in the Judges’ Library in the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse, 333 Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C., the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, and the library of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia. Both the interviewers and the interviewees have had an opportunity to review and edit the transcripts. With the permission of the person being interviewed, oral histories are also available on the Internet through the Society's Web site, www.dcchs.org. Audio recordings of most interviews, as well as electronic versions of the transcripts, are in the custody of the Society. i ORAL HISTORY OF ALAN ROSENTHAL First Interview – March 3, 2011 This interview was conducted on behalf of the Oral History Project of the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit. The interviewee is Alan Rosenthal and the interviewer is Judy Feigin. The interview took place at Alan Rosenthal’s apartment in Rockville, Maryland, on Thursday, March 3, 2011. This is the first interview. MS. FEIGIN: Good morning. MR. ROSENTHAL: Good morning. MS. FEIGIN: Let’s start at the beginning, with the beginning being as far back as you know it. How far back do you know your family history? MR. ROSENTHAL: On my father’s side, I know it back to my great-grandfather, Herman Rosenthal, who came to the United States in the early 1880s. For a while, he was working on some kind of commune in the Midwest which was rather peculiar, I think, given that he was basically a scholar. But he ended up working for the New York Public Library as the director of its division on Slavic and Baltic collections, and indeed we’ve now established a memorial fund at the library to which I contribute each year. I don’t know much else about his life. MS. FEIGIN: Where did he emigrate from? MR. ROSENTHAL: He emigrated from Russia, although his roots were in Germany. How he got to Russia, I’m not clear, but that’s where his son, my grandfather, was born, and he emigrated to this country along with his father Herman. My grandfather’s name was Max. He was a gynecologist/obstetrician and one of the founders of a hospital in New York City, the Sydenham hospital, which was up in Harlem. It’s now no longer in existence. It was taken over eventually by the city, and then Mayor Koch, I think, closed it down. I think there may be a clinic on the site, but the hospital is gone. In any event, my grandfather, as I say, was very active in the founding of that hospital. It’s where I had, at the age of three, a tonsillectomy and subsequently in 1936, when I was 10, I had my appendix removed there. All I can now recall is there was a bust of my grandfather in the hospital lobby. Max had three sons – my father, Morris, and his two brothers, Harold and Alan, after whom I was named. It’s interesting that my father had very definitely wanted to go away to college, and his father, my grandfather, saw absolutely no reason. “We have Columbia here. It’s a perfectly good university, there’s no reason at all why you should go elsewhere,” so he was required to go to Columbia and did go to Columbia. His two younger brothers, as he, did not want to go to school in New York City, and my father was able to persuade my grandfather to let them go elsewhere, so one went to Harvard and the other to Dartmouth. That’s basically what I can recall on my father’s side, given that I remember little of my paternal grandmother. On my biological mother’s side, I recall very little. My birth mother’s name was Elizabeth. She came from St. Louis. Her father, my 2 grandfather, was a lawyer in Clayton, which is a suburb of St. Louis. He was a very active Republican politician and in the state Senate for a number of years. Apparently in that era, there was a corrupt Republican machine in St. Louis and a corrupt Democratic machine, the Pendergast machine, in Kansas City, and I was told at one point that my grandfather barely escaped going to jail, which apparently did happen to one of his political mentors in the St. Louis area. In any case, I know nothing at all about any of my maternal relatives past my grandfather. My mother, who met my father in the early 1920s − I’m not clear today on the particular circumstances − took ill several years after my birth in 1926 with multiple sclerosis, and she had her ups and downs over a period of years and then died in the summer of 1935, which was just short of my 9th birthday. I don’t recall at all having any contact with my maternal grandfather or any of my other relatives on my mother’s side. I understand that my maternal grandfather, Richard Ralph, came East at one time during the 1930s to visit us, but I have zero recollection of that. As a matter of fact, the only other relatives on that side of the family that I ever met were my grandfather and my maternal grandmother who were divorced. My grandfather then remarried and had a child by his second marriage, my half uncle, who was just a year older than I am, and years later in Washington, he and I got together a couple of times. I was working at Justice. He was a lawyer and was in the Army JAG stationed 3 in Washington so we had him over to dinner once and I had lunch with him. But my contact, as I say, with my birth mother’s family was negligible. It’s a source of some regret to me that I know so little about my birth mother’s family and had so little contact with them at any point during my life. My father, less than a year after my mother’s death, remarried, and he married a woman with whom he had gone to school way back when and they were good friends. My stepmother had been married previously and had divorced her husband several years before she married my father. So in terms of my ancestors, that’s about all that I can recall. Again, it’s really a source of some regret to me that I had so little contact with my birth mother’s family. MS. FEIGIN: Tell us some more about your dad. What did he do after going to Columbia? MR. ROSENTHAL: My father was born in 1897, and as I say, he went to Columbia College. He also was, during World War I, in naval aviation, an aviation cadet, but the war ended before he got his commission, so he never was active in the war at all. Then he, as I said, went to Columbia, got his degree in the business school and shortly thereafter went to work for a company for which he worked his entire career, Stein, Hall & Company, based in New York City, though it had a factory in Chicago, I think. It was in the business of importing various products principally from what was then the 4 Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, tapioca and tea, and they also manufactured in this country various materials including apparently envelope glue. In December 1941, immediately after our entry into the war because of Pearl Harbor, he accepted a government position as an Assistant Director of the Board of Economic Warfare, Assistant Director in charge of the Office of Imports, and so he came to Washington.