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PROFILE: J. Lee Rankin

J. Lee Rankin: Nation's leading lawyer played key role in school desegregation and other significant historic cases

Copyright © 2008 by E. A. Kral

In the mid-20th century, J. Lee Rankin, the Hartington, Nebraska native who grew up and resided in Lincoln, became our nation's leading lawyer.

A quiet man of wisdom, talent and integrity, he was considered a writer-attorney "who gets things done," and respected for his lack of partisanship.

He played key roles in desegregation of schools, determination of federal cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, resolution of significant historic cases, and representation of New York City as its city attorney.

During the early years of a law career that spanned nearly half a century, Rankin practiced law in Lincoln from 1930 to 1952. And he reported in a December 1, 1985 feature in the Omaha Sunday World Herald that he "had no ambition for a political job."

Yet he did serve as Nebraska primary campaign manager for New York attorney--and later governor--Thomas E. Dewey's unsuccessful effort as a 1940 presidential candidate and his successful 1948 presidential nomination. He was also Nebraska campaign manager for Dwight Eisenhower's successful 1952 presidential bid.

Rankin held views compatible with the progressive wing of the Republican Party. Moreover, his longtime friend and Nebraska native Herbert Brownell Jr., an attorney in New York and close advisor and national manager of Dewey's presidential campaigns in 1944 and 1948 and Eisenhower's in 1952, became U.S. Attorney General. In January 1953, Rankin agreed to serve under Brownell in the U.S. Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. During his three years in this position, he participated in negotiations for the St. Lawrence Seaway (constructed from 1954 to 1959), and argued in Kinsella v Krueger, a companion case to Reid v Covert in May 1956, that civilian dependents of military personnel could not be tried before court martial for crimes committed during times of peace. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that courts of law alone are given power to try civilians for their offenses against the United States.

After President Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955, Rankin also studied with Brownell a plan to adopt a constitutional amendment establishing the line of succession in the event of presidential disability. The proposal, which was initially rejected by Congress in 1956 but later formed the basis of the 25th Amendment approved in 1967, included provision for the Vice President becoming Acting President when the President himself determines his inability to discharge his duties or when a majority of the Cabinet with the Vice President determines the fact of disability. (Sometime between 1956 and 1967, a change in the latter provision allowed Congress to designate "another body" in place of the Cabinet.)

By far the most profound of Rankin's tasks as Assistant Attorney General--and which continued during his subsequent years as U.S. Solicitor General--was his major role in helping to resolve one of the most important constitutional questions in modern times--the issue of school desegregation.

In 1896, the Supreme Court had decided in Plessy v Ferguson that states could provide separate schools for white and black children as long as they are equal, that is, the same education is offered to both. Thus the "separate but equal" concept did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment adopted in 1868. However, various legal actions after the mid-1930s, for example, brought decisions that segregation in colleges was not valid and that school segregation treats black children as inferior.

Because the U.S. Supreme Court had not ruled on school desegregation arguments presented in December 1952, it asked the U.S. Attorney General in June 1953 to respond to five specific questions and participate in reargument of the case the following fall as a "friend of the court."

So Brownell designated Rankin to lead an extensive four-month study of the history of the 14th Amendment as well as the constitutional questions raised in the case. And he was placed in charge of the actual writing of the brief.

Meanwhile, when a Supreme Court vacancy occurred during the first year of the Eisenhower Administration, California governor Earl Warren was appointed as chief justice. From October 1953 to June 1969, the Warren Court was to become remembered for several significant decisions that advanced civil liberties, even though this was the era of the Cold War between Soviet Communism and American democracy when a variety of national security and domestic issues were a high priority.

On December 9, 1953, arguments were presented by the plaintiffs in the historic case known as Brown v Topeka Board of Education. At age 46, Rankin represented the U.S. Department of Justice and stated in his 184-page brief that public school segregation was unconstitutional. This position basically supported the contention of the plaintiff's chief lawyer Thurgood Marshall.

Among those in the audience to hear the presentations was Brownell, who reported in his 1993 memoirs that Rankin's "preparation and argument were first class." The Supreme Court on May 17, 1954 upheld Rankin's argument in a unanimous decision but did not rule on enforcement powers.

During the second Brown v Topeka Board of Education case decided on May 31, 1955, Rankin was a member of the Justice Department team that favored a plan to require each school district to submit a desegregation plan to the local federal court for approval and that school districts be required to submit a plan within ninety days. The Court decided to give power of enforcement to federal district courts but with no timeline for presentation or completion of plans.

Thus the executive branch of the federal government was given no direct enforcement powers, though President Eisenhower, who had authority over the District of Columbia public schools, immediately asked and obtained desegregation for them.

Rankin was appointed the 31st Solicitor General in August 1956 (confirmed by the Senate in May 1957), and remained in that capacity until January 1961. He and his assistants had the major responsibility of determining the cases and positions the federal government would take before the Supreme Court. During his tenure of more than four years, he was a party in 1,892 cases argued before the Court, which represents about two-thirds of the cases he asked it to hear.

In general, about 1,800 cases each year involving the government in some way came to him and his assistants for a decision. Many of the cases involved amounts up to one billion dollars. Rankin was credited as being a major factor in resolving conflicts among Western states to Colorado River water and in obtaining a balance of state and federal jurisdictions in offshore oil drilling.

More work on his original desegregation arguments became necessary after the governor of Arkansas in September 1957 openly resisted the Supreme Court's decisions of 1954 and 1955. President Eisenhower, at the request of local officials to end the violence in Little Rock and to uphold the Constitution, ordered the use of federal troops.

After the Little Rock school board in June 1958 suspended integration plans until January 1961, Rankin argued in Cooper v Aaron the first legal test of enforcement of Brown v Topeka on August 28, 1958. He presented the successful government case that postponing plans for desegregation in good faith would violate black students' rights and that Arkansas officials were bound by federal court orders that rested on the 1954 and 1955 decisions.

In his brief published in the August 29, 1958 New York Times, Rankin stated, in part, "There must be some kind of start...that there isn't a place in the country, if they have the will, cannot make some kind of start, even if it is the smallest kind, toward solving this problem, granting these rights and working them out." And in his conclusion, he noted "that if you teach these children in Little Rock or any other place in the country that as soon as you get some force and violence, the courts of law in this country are going to bow to it...I think that you destroy the whole educational process then and there."

While change in obtaining equal rights for blacks and others was gradual, the beginning occurred during Rankin's service from 1953 to 1961. Congress had passed Civil Rights Acts in 1957 and 1960 and Voting Rights Acts in 1957.

Moreover, Rankin filed as a friend of the court in 1960 a brief in Gomillion v Lightfoot involving Tuskegee, Alabama, which had changed city boundaries that excluded virtually all the blacks who formerly voted in city elections. In 1962, Rankin's successor argued a Tennessee legislative reapportionment case in Baker v Carr that resulted in the Supreme Court decision that federal courts could address legislative reapportionment issues.

In 1964, the Supreme Court ruled in Reynolds v Sims that a state must construct districts as nearly of equal population as practicable. Thus the "one person, one vote" concept, which Rankin initiated in 1960, eventually resulted in more equal rights for blacks and others.

There is general agreement at present that improvement in social conditions was fostered by activism in the 1950s and 1960s, but "it is doubtful that a major breakthrough in the struggle to attain equal rights for blacks could have been achieved had not the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a watershed school desegregation decision in 1954," wrote the authors of the entry on "Civil Rights Movement" in Encyclopedia Americana, Vol 6 (2003).

From 1961 to 1963, Rankin engaged in an independent law practice in New York City. He had gained admission to the New York Bar on motion, for his record was considered so outstanding that the usual requirement of a bar examination was waived. During this time, he was engaged in a variety of cases, including a lawsuit between Trans World Airlines and Hughes Aircraft.

His most notable achievement was his involvement as a friend of the court in the 1963 case Gideon v Wainwright, which became the basis for the fact-crime book Gideon's Trumpet (Random House, 1964) by journalist Anthony Lewis, who had earned Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 and 1963 for national reporting. It also inspired the April 30, 1980 CBS television movie "Gideon's Trumpet," starring Nebraska native Henry Fonda.

This landmark case involved Florida resident Clarence Gideon, who was charged with a felony for breaking and entering, but lacked the funds to hire a lawyer. After the Florida state court did not appoint an attorney for him, stating it only had to do so for indigent defendants in capital cases, he defended himself at trial, was convicted and sentenced to five years in a state prison.

While in prison, Gideon asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case. It assigned attorney Abe Fortas to plead his right to counsel. During arguments heard on January 14, 1963, Rankin, who had been invited by the American Civil Liberties Union to serve as a friend of the court, emphasized the larger issue facing the legal profession. According to Lewis' book, he stated, in part: "We know a man cannot get a fair trial when he represents himself. It is enough of a fiction to claim that an ordinary lawyer can present a case as well as the prosecutor with all his experience in Court. But when you take a layman and put him at odds, you can't have a fair trial except by accident."

Lewis wrote that Rankin's point was that the 1942 Betts v Brady decision had "the generalization backward--it assumed that only in the special case did a man need a lawyer, while the truth was that it was the rare case where one did not need counsel." The Court ruled on March 18, 1963 that the 1942 Betts v Brady must be overturned because the 6th Amendment's guarantee of counsel was essential to a fair trial in state as well as federal cases through the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

Upon retrial in Florida, Clarence Gideon was represented by an appointed attorney, and he was acquitted. According to the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court (1992), the Gideon v Wainwright decision was often interpreted as applying only to felony cases, but after the 1972 case Argersinger v Hamlin, the Court expanded on the 1963 Gideon ruling and "extended the right to appointed counsel to misdemeanors when the defendant is sentenced to imprisonment." At present, where some cities and states do not have public defender offices to provide assistance to indigents in criminal cases, trial court judges appoint private attorneys.

Rankin returned to public service from December 15, 1963 to September 24, 1964 as general counsel for a commission of seven distinguished public servants, including Nebraska native Gerald Ford, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Led by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Commission unanimously appointed him as its general counsel.

In charge of investigation as well as the writing of the final report, Rankin "assembled much of the panel's staff, examined and acted as the liaison between the Warren Commission and other government agencies and between Commission members and the staff," reported an entry in Political Profiles: The Johnson Years (Facts On File, 1976).

Among his assistants were 15 lawyers who took testimony from 552 witnesses and gathered evidence nationwide, but he was credited with redrafting and editing of the historic final report comprised of 26 volumes and an 800-page summary .

Although the conclusions that the assassin acted alone and that Kennedy and Texas governor John Connally were struck by the same bullet were well received at the time, thousands of articles and books published subsequently promoted various other theories.

Rankin rarely spoke publicly about his work for the Warren Commission, according to a June 30, 1996 New York Times obituary, but he "had no doubt that the panel had come to the proper conclusions in finding that there had been no conspiracy. "

And his deputy counsel Norman Redlich was quoted as saying, "I can tell you that he was extremely anguished at the distortions and the phony theories developed as people tried to make money out of what was essentially a national tragedy."

West's Encyclopedia of American Law, 2nd ed (Gale, 2005) reported "a 1979 special committee of the House of Representatives reexamined the evidence and concluded that Kennedy 'was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy'." Claims that federal agencies withheld evidence also caused Congress in 1992 to create the Assassination Records Review Board, an independent federal agency, to oversee the identification and release of records pertaining to the 1963 murder.

After release of the Warren Report in September 1964, Rankin resumed his private practice. But on January 1, 1966 he re-entered public service as corporation counsel for New York City after appointment by Mayor John V. Lindsey, and continued in that capacity until August 1972.

He was responsible for all litigation the city had to prosecute or defend, for giving legal opinions to city entities, and for supervising any legislation submitted to the city council and the state legislature. In an August 31, 1967 Lincoln Evening Journal article, he reported, "We have a budget of $7.5 or $8 million with a staff of 350 lawyers. Only the U.S. Justice Department is larger in the entire world. One-seventh of all court cases in the state are from New York City."

In a notable case, he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on November 19, 1969 in Walz v Tax Commission of New York that property tax exemptions for churches did not violate the Establishment Clause of the 1st Amendment. The Court decided in his favor on May 4, 1970, ruling that "benevolent neutrality" toward churches and religions is a basic value of our nation.

As an innovative city attorney, he also began a program under which graduates of law schools worked in his office for a year or two that provided them with experience before moving on to employment at law firms

Upon returning to private practice in 1972, he set up a partnership with his son James Lee Rankin Jr, which was later terminated on March l, 1979 because his son's practice in Santa Cruz, California became so large that he could not effectively participate in New York City.

Rankin lived at Weston, Connecticut after 1977, where he practiced law. In 1983, he accepted the newly created position of Solicitor General for the National Institute of Municipal Law Officers, an organization he had earlier served in several leadership capacities.

Among various forms of recognition for Rankin were at least 110 citations in the personal names index of the New York Times between 1952 and 1972. And his June 2, 1959 commencement address at Nebraska Wesleyan University titled "The Search for Truth" was published in the July 15, 1959 Vital Speeches of The Day. He received honorary doctorates from Nebraska Wesleyan in 1959 and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1961.

Rankin's papers are housed at the National Archives in Washington, DC. There are also 30 large boxes of memorabilia and papers at the Schmid Law Library at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law, where on file is an unsigned June 25, 1957 letter of tribute to the Solicitor General from a Supreme Court Law Clerk.

It states, in part, "I have gained the feeling that you and your associates are interested in a sound, fair and common-sense solution to difficult problems of law and law-enforcement as much as in any short-term victory in an individual case. This is an impressive thing, because it teaches that the Government realizes that Justice is as much its business as the courts'."

Published accounts of his career are in Current Biography (1959) and a June 30, 1996 New York Times obituary and American National Biography, Supplement 1 (2002). Some references to him are in Herbert Brownell and John P. Burke, Advising Ike: The Memoirs of Attorney General Herbert Brownell (University Press of Kansas, 1993). A relevant history of Rankin's era is David A. Nichols, A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Born in 1907 at Hartington, Cedar County, Nebraska, one of five children of Herman and Lois Gable Rankin, he moved with his family at age three to Lincoln. His father was editor, owner, or manager of various printing companies. After graduation from Lincoln High School in 1924, he earned bachelor and law degrees from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1928 and 1930. He practiced law shortly afterward, and in 1935 became a member of Beghtol and Foe at 714 Stuart Building. Eventually, it became Beghtol and Rankin.

He was married on September 4, 1931 to Gertrude Carpenter, the daughter of a prominent Lincoln family that owned a large paper company. The couple had sent 550 wedding invitations, and among the performers at the ceremony was noted Nebraska music educator Wilbur Chenoweth, who five years later composed the music for "Hail Varsity," which became the UNL fight song at sports events.

James Lee Rankin and his wife raised two sons and a daughter. He died at age 88 on June 26, 1996 at Santa Cruz, California.

For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.