John Shattuck Interview (1997): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

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Background

Mr. Shattuck, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you.

Tell us a little about your background. What led you into the field of civil liberties and then humanitarian law?

It's a long story but to make it short, I was an early '60s person. That is to say, I went to college in the early '60s and I was very much a part of two major movements that developed in our country. I think the fact that I went to college in the early '60s meant that I avoided all of the turmoil of the late '60s. But I certainly was influenced by the antiwar movement, which developed into full force, and then also the civil rights movement, which was a long, developing process. Why was I so influenced by those? My own curiosity in this area was piqued, I think, by my father, who was a Republican lawyer in a small town outside of New York City. When I was about eight or nine, in the middle of the McCarthy period, he defended a woman who was being pilloried for her allegedly communist views and communist background. He made it very clear to me that he defended her not because he supported her -- he didn't support her (she was a candidate for the School Board) -- but because he thought that she was being very unfairly pilloried and not given an opportunity to defend herself in public. That made a deep impression on me at the time. I remember it suddenly dawned on me that you didn't actually have to support what someone was saying or who they were to support that fact that they had rights and that if society was going to deny those rights then somebody ought to come their defense.

That was just one of a number of incidents in my childhood that got me really interested in the basic fairness that, I think, our civil liberty system represents. By the time I got to college I was very actively engaged in civil rights work. I traveled to places that were the early sites of civil rights activity. In the later part of the '60s I was involved in organizing major demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. And I was interested, obviously, in the content of that, in the sense that I was deeply opposed to the war in Vietnam. But again, reflecting on my father, who had a big influence on me -- my father was a heavily decorated World War II hero, Marine, twice wounded, two Purple Hearts, fought in Saipan on the beaches -- I always knew that while we may have differed about some of the basic questions around the Vietnam War, we had a lot in common when it came to the right to engage in protest or, in the case of this earlier example I cited, the right of a woman to be defended even if you disagreed with her position. So I got very interested in the First Amendment rights: the rights of protest, the rights of people to take positions against their government, even when others disagreed with that. Out of that came my experience in law school. I was fortunate right after law school to be able to land a job at the American Civil Liberties Union just as the Watergate period was beginning to break. And I landed right in the middle of some very interesting cases, including cases where I defended people who had been wire-tapped by the government.

This would be Morton Halperin.

Mort Halperin, yes. I went on to interview under oath, take the deposition of Richard Nixon, H.R. Haldeman, John Mitchell, Alexander Haig, all of the cast of characters who were active in the Nixon administration and who became central figures in one of the great civil liberties crises in our country.

And you were a young attorney at that time. Tell us a little about that experience.

Well, it was pretty heady. It was also a little scary. I remember one time when I was taking Nixon's deposition in San Clemente. I think I'm the only lawyer, incidentally, ever to put him officially under oath.

And he was president then?

No this is after he was president. He had left the presidency. This was in 1975 or '76, I believe. It just is kind of an amusing anecdote of how it was slightly scary as well as heady. As we got off the plane from Washington, a lot of reporters met us at the airport because obviously this was a heavily publicized event. We got into our car -- we were in a rented car, a bunch of us packed in there. I was the lawyer who was actually going to take the deposition, so I was sitting in the front seat writing notes and getting ready for this nerve-racking event, putting a former president under oath in a wire-tap case. We were speeding down the freeway toward San Clemente when a big black limousine pulled up beside us. The other lawyers in the car looked out. I was still buried in my notes and I could hear this gasp in the car, because the limousine had a turret. It opened up and there was this thing that began to point out at us. I just looked up from my notes and here was this turret kind of staring right at me. Well, of course it was a TV camera. We thought maybe this was going to be our last gasp.

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