A.C.L.U.--Let There be Law

You know the traditional picture of the defender of the American way of life--he's a tall, whip-thin, taciturn type in buckskin who looks a little like the young Jimmy Stewart, with a Bible in his breast pocket and a fowling piece cradled in his arm. Not a bad image in its day, and we all loved him. But if the American way of life still means personal liberty and freedom for the individual regardless of color, creed or national origin, our first line of defense is now manned by a curious amalgam of Jewish lawyers, Quakers, pacifists, a clutch of what Spiro Agnew calls "radiclibs," some angry black men and an occasional romantic conservative. This is almost certainly an unfair description of the membership of the American Civil Liberties Union--no group this side of Santa's little helpers can be capsuled into so few categories--but it touches most of the bases. And the A.C.L.U. certainly does qualify for the role of the nation's chief (continued on page 122)A.C.L.U. (continued from page 119) defender of personal liberty.

Author and columnist Max Lerner has said that civil liberties comprise "a seamless web" that has to be tended everywhere, lest the entire fabric be rent. In 48 affiliate organizations in 44 states, the Union is constantly checking the national fabric for danger and damage. At any given time it will be handling more than 1000 civil-liberty cases around the country, from challenging Judge Julius Hoffman's antic rulings in Chicago to doing the day-to-day grunt work of integrating juries and voter-registration rolls in the South. Within hours after the shots rang out at Kent State, the A. C. L. U. offered free legal representation to the families of the slain students and an attorney was on his way to the campus to establish a field office for any student needing legal help. In its 51-year history, the Union has established the most sensitive and immediately responsive early-warning system against threats to civil and personal liberty that this country possesses.

By the nature of its work, the Union is constantly in the headlines, defending the constitutional rights of such disparate public figures as Julian Bond, H. Rap Brown, Captain Howard Levy and Lieutenant William Calley. Even more important, however, are the hundreds of relatively unpublicized cases the Union takes on every day. In most of these, anonymous citizens are simply getting screwed. In Upstate New York, an A. C. L. U. attorney gets a hurry-up appeal to go to the aid of welfare recipients who have been clapped into jail. Ordered to work on county road gangs at no pay to get their welfare checks, the men were arrested on a charge of "interfering with the proper administration of public assistance" when they failed to show up for their indentured servitude. In Chicago, an A. C. L. U. attorney forces the city to extend press credentials and privileges to Muhammad Speaks, the official organ of the Black Muslims. In New York City, the Department of Corrections eases its rules about press access to prisons and prisoners shortly after the A. C. L. U. announces that it plans to file suit in the case. In Los Angeles, the Union brings a class action against police abuse on behalf of black citizens. In Sacramento, A. C. L. U. attorneys hustle over to the court to force the state to allow militant black leaders to speak at an open rally. At the same time, another team of A. C. L. U. lawyers is successfully defending the right of members of the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross on their own property.

The last two cases illustrate the sort of seeming anomaly that delights the A. C. L. U., while it often puzzles its critics. To Union attorneys, however, the cases are virtually identical--denial of freedom of expression. The Union also defended the Ford Motor Company's right to distribute anti-union propaganda and supported Mississippi governor Ross Barnett's right to a jury trial when he was charged with contempt of court as an aftermath of the James Meredith case. "We don't really defend people," says Eason Monroe, director of the Southern California affiliate, "we defend principles. We have only one client--the Bill of Rights."

Their client needs all the help it can get. This most precious national document has traditionally been our most beleaguered. In the Thirties, there was a movement in the leftist community to suspend the protection against self-incrimination provided by the Fifth Amendment when the nabobs of Wall Street hid behind it to protect themselves from prosecution following the 1929 stock-market crash. During the Fifties, every right-winger worth his copy of Red Channels wanted to suspend the Fifth to get at the Commies who were paraded before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. More recently, several proposals have been offered to take Fifth Amendment protection away from members of the Mafia. And Agnew is hardly the first Federal officeholder to want to muzzle the media in violation of the First Amendment: Thomas Jefferson once threw up his hands in despair over Federalist newspapers, suggesting that "A few prosecutions of the most prominent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution, but a selected one."

In an A. C. L. U. spot poll in St. Louis, 90 percent of the people questioned didn't recognize the Bill of Rights when it was read to them. When they found out what it was, 60 percent didn't like it. A national study undertaken by CBS Television showed that the majority of Americans are against at least five of the ten basic tenets of the Bill of Rights. They said they were against "extreme" groups' being allowed to demonstrate even if there were no clear danger of violence and against the right of individuals or the press to criticize the Government when such criticism might be contrary to the national interest. They were also in favor of the state's being able to hold a suspect in jail without evidence until the police could dig some up and of the state's being able to prosecute a man more than once for the same crime.

"If the Bill of Rights were put to a national referendum today," says A. C. L. U. national legal director Mel Wulf, "it might go down to a crushing defeat."

The A. C. L. U.'s battle to preserve the Bill of Rights and the constitutional protections it prescribes was first joined in 1920. Roger Baldwin, an irreconcilable pacifist--he had served a year in prison as a conscientious objector during World War One--brought together a varied group, including Norman Thomas, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow and Felix Frankfurter, to form the Union. They established "a permanent, national nonpartisan organization with the single purpose of defending the whole Bill of Rights for everybody."

The guiding principle of the A. C. L. U., most simply put, is that where individual freedoms are concerned, the government--any government--is probably up to no good.

The A. C. L. U. first came into national prominence in 1925 during the "monkey trial" in which Darrow battled with William Jennings Bryan over the right of biology teacher John Scopes to teach Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools. The verdict went against Darrow, but, as Baldwin pointed out, the A. C. L. U. "may not always win, but we never lose." The drive by the state of Tennessee to write the book of Genesis into law was stopped and the issue of academic freedom was first effectively raised. Since then, the Union has played at least some part in almost all the hallmark cases involving civil liberties that have branded their names into the American conscience--Sacco and Vanzetti, Scottsboro, Gideon, Miranda, Spock-Coffin, the Chicago Seven.

The work load of the Union today covers a broad spectrum of civil-liberty issues. In recent months, the cases handled by the Washington, D. C., affiliate have included:

• A suit to force D. C. General Hospital to give an abortion to an indigent woman.

• A challenge to the Navy for moving the Naval Munitions Department without assuring reasonable travel arrangements and desegregated housing for almost 2000 low-level employees.

• A suit contesting the firing of a Federal employee because he is a homosexual.

• A brief arguing that a woman cannot be convicted of soliciting for immoral purposes solely on the basis of a plainclothesman's testimony.

• A challenge to the Federal Bar Association ruling that applicants must sign a non-Communist oath.

• Representation of an Army enlisted man who has become a conscientious objector while in the Service and wants a discharge.

• A suit to enjoin stop-and-frisk practices by police.

• An appeal calling for the reinstatement of A. Ernest Fitzgerald, the Pentagon cost analyst who was fired because (continued on page 222) A.C.L.U. (continued from page 122) he testified before a Congressional committee about cost overruns in the development of new aircraft.

• An appeal against the conviction of Abbie Hoffman on the charge of desecration of the flag for wearing a flag shirt.

"More than any other organization in the United States," former U. S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has stated, "the American Civil Liberties Union has realized that the rights of the meanest, the lowest, the poorest and the most despised among us must be protected as stringently as any."

Clark said he had found the Union a significant help in fulfilling his duties as the nation's chief legal officer. "Justice is not a contest, it's a quest. The Union has consistently brought high professional standards, judgment and insights to that quest. The most valuable role of law is moral leadership. Without that, you don't have equal justice for all, you have a game and a power contest between people who can manipulate the law. Here the Union has been vital. It has helped to impose high moral standards on the law and the rule of law."

The A. C. L. U. is a loose, patchwork operation whose seeming--and sometimes real--disarray belies the number of Harvard Law School degrees involved. The small permanent staff of the national A. C. L. U. is housed in a shabby suite of offices in Downtown Manhattan, with branches in Washington, D. C., and Atlanta. The national staff and a 78-man board of directors, who give huge amounts of their time to the Union, attempt to direct and coordinate the work of the fiercely independent local affiliate organizations.

"You can't imagine what it's like to administer a national organization of vocal, highly opinionated civil libertarians," said one of the Southern members. "It's like trying to run a lion act in the middle of a three-ring circus with no tamer--and all the lions are lawyers who want to be ringmaster."

While the national board sets basic policy, the local chapters are given, and take, the broadest leeway in fighting their own civil-liberty battles wherever they find them. The affiliates are often far ahead of the national A. C. L. U. The Southern California affiliate began to attack the death penalty seven years before the national organization took a position on the issue. And they sometimes find themselves cast in the role of legal laboratories exploring unfamiliar territory. In 1969, the Southern California affiliate formulated as its own policy the concept that one of the most essential civil liberties is simply the right to live in a clean environment and launched a series of ecology suits to stop commercial and state organizations from befouling the air and water. From these suits, the national office will formulate an over-all policy to guide similar suits elsewhere. In Chicago, the affiliate stopped the city housing authority from continuing to build low-cost public housing entirely in black-ghetto areas, a practice that had the effect of creating Federally financed segregated housing. A court desegregation order now requires that 75 percent of such housing must be erected in previously all-white neighborhoods. This case may well change the face of Chicago and restructure the pattern of public housing throughout the nation.

The national office and its affiliates are frequently at odds with one another. The affiliates pushed a not entirely willing national organization into the middle of the Spock-Coffin case in 1968 and the Maryland affiliate once took such a divergent view of a case that when it was finally heard by the Supreme Court, the state affiliate argued on one side and the national office on the other. The Northern California affiliate operates almost entirely autonomously. "The fighting keeps us in shape," explains Chuck Morgan of the Southern regional office in Atlanta.

One thing they all can agree on is that they are broke. The A. C. L. U. nationally has to raise more than $3,000,000 a year to keep going. The entire annual budget for operations in Mississippi is a scant $1500. There is so little money in the bank and the cash flow of the national headquarters in New York is so delicate that they literally open the mail, cash the checks for dues and donations and pay the bills. Throughout the country, the A. C. L. U. has fewer than 200 full-time paid employees, about equal to a moderate-sized Wall Street legal firm. What makes the Union as effective as it has been are largely its unpaid workers. More than 1000 attorneys around the country have signed up to work on A. C. L. U. cases for no pay, giving away an estimated $5,000,000 a year in legal fees.

Whatever the budget, each affiliate tries to maintain a basic "fireman" capability to handle cases as they come through the door. The Southern California affiliate, for example, processes over 40 phone calls and letters a day. Of these, sometimes as many as 20 cases a month are taken to court. The trouble with being a fireman, of course, is that you have no control over how many fires there are going to be and the work load sometimes soars out of control. After a mass arrest at a San Fernando Valley State College demonstration, the affiliate called in more than 60 volunteer lawyers to handle the cases of nearly 300 defendants.

Additionally, each office develops its own civil-liberties program, which is as elaborate and far-reaching as its budget and staff allow. As director of the New York affiliate, Aryeh Neier, who is now executive director of the national A.C. L. U., concentrated on four of the basic compulsory organizations in society: the military, the prisons, the educational system and the mental institutions. "To get the broadest possible effect out of our work. we want to go into areas that have major social impact," he explains. "For example, not only are we challenging inequities within the application of the draft law, we are challenging the very existence of the peacetime draft. We are fighting not only the monstrous wrongs done to the mentally ill but the whole concept of involuntary commitment."

Four years ago, a former math teacher named Ira Glasser began specializing in civil-liberty cases in the New York City public school system. What started out as a series of fairly lightweight cases involving students who were suspended for violating unenforceable dress and grooming standards has since mushroomed into yet another large-scale disclosure of the dolorous conditions in public education in the city.

"The so-called dropout problem is a myth," says Glasser. "There's a push-out problem. The school system doesn't know how to handle anyone but nice, bright middle-class kids who couldn't possibly fail. For the rest, each school district wants to get rid of them as quickly as possible, with as little regard for the kids' right to a public education as it can get away with."

Frequently, the students are not officially dismissed but are simply told to go home until they hear from the school. They never do. Glasser found that the system has been able to adjust the books to cover much of this kind of activity in a way that would warm the heart of a Seventh Avenue cloak-and-suiter getting ready for tomorrow night's fire. But by matching actual attendance records with official class rolls, Glasser showed that on any given day in New York City, there are anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000 kids the system can't account for.

Civil liberties, when they exist for students, are often at the whim of local principals. One dismissed a student for distributing "seditious literature." Glasser investigated and found that the boy had been handing out mimeographed copies of the school board's own ruling on dress codes. Long hair on boys seems to make principals especially irrational. Even though the New York State commissioner of education consistently held that a school cannot prescribe the length of a student's hair, Glasser finds that principals continue to harass their students by suspending so-called offenders anyway.

"The real scandal is that we are in a free society and school is supposed to be the socializing influence that prepares kids to take their place in that society," Glasser says. "They are taught about freedom but don't have any. The best kids, maybe five percent, see the hypocrisy. All they really learn in school is that adults are full of shit. But what's worse, the rest of the kids never realize what's wrong. They never learn how to be free men."

The New York affiliate is used to prying open the state's legal garbage can to find out what's hidden under the lid, but rarely has it found conditions to match what it uncovered when it began its investigation into New York's mental-health facilities. A sampling from a world where you sign over your rights along with your belt and shoelaces when they put you away:

• A man was held in the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane for more than 20 years as the result of a murder charge. Ninety-five percent of the case against him came from his codefendant, who was actually convicted of the crime. By the time the convicted murderer finally went to the electric chair, he had told eight separate and contradictory stories. The judge who finally released the inmate called the case "gruesome" and said that there was "no speck of evidence" against him.

• Another man was sent to Matteawan solely because the police thought the story he had told them in an assault case was insane. Four years later, when his story was finally checked out, it was found to be true and he was released.

• A woman was taken into a state hospital as an alcoholic. Authorities found that when sober, she was a good worker, so they put her to work six days a week as a scrubwoman, kitchen helper and bedpan cleaner at no pay for 16 years. The hospital said it was therapy.

• Until the Union put a stop to it, you could be involuntarily committed for a minimum of 30 days on nothing more than a complaint from your wife, girlfriend, neighbor--or just somebody you met at a bar who said he saw you "acting crazy."

The A.C.L.U. attorney in this harrowing work is Bruce J. Ennis, who left a large Wall Street firm three years ago, when he "got tired of saving millions of dollars for people I'd never met." He found that while the popular idea of a shyster defense lawyer copping an insanity plea holds true, it can also be used as a device by the prosecution to deny a defendant his constitutional right to a speedy trial. "Increasingly, when the prosecution doesn't have a good case, or the energy to build one," says Ennis, "they resort to involuntary commitment."

Several years ago, a man was shot in a subway. The police made a roundup of all mental cases on home leave. When they found one who answered the general description, they recommitted him and wrote off the case. The man who had been shot sued the state for negligently releasing a dangerous mental patient. But when the court investigated, it found that the inmate could not have done the shooting. Even so, Ennis could not get the man released without the approval of the district attorney who had put him there in the first place. The D.A. refused. As a result of this case, power over incompetent persons was taken from the D.A.'s office and given to the patient-defendant's own lawyers, but it didn't do much good for the man in question: He died 14 months after his recommitment, the day before he was to be released.

"What is most appalling," says Ennis, "is that the majority of the inmates are not really mentally ill at all. They're just old. More than half of the mental-institution population are 60 or older. They are not getting any psychiatric treatment. It's custodial care that should be part of the welfare program."

Throughout its history, the traditional weapon of the A.C.L.U. in the civil rights battle has been the amicus curiae brief--in which the Union acts as a friend of the court, addressing itself specifically to a constitutional point within a case. In the landmark Miranda case, the A.C.L.U. brief was instrumental in the final Supreme Court decision, which affirmed that anyone in police custody cannot be held and interrogated without being informed of his right against selfincrimination. The Court also held that a suspect has the right to consult an attorney. Most importantly, if the suspect cannot afford an attorney, the state has to provide one. The Court used whole sections of the A.C.L.U. brief in the wording of its decision.

In the past few years, however, the Union has gone increasingly into direct representation of clients whose cases involve constitutional issues. Close to 80 percent of its cases now involve it as an adversary before the court. An essential part of the Union's operation involves fishing in the muddied waters of the law for clear-cut constitutional violations that will hold up during the long legal haul to the Supreme Court. It's a waiting game--waiting for the Government to make such an egregious intrusion on personal liberty that the Union has a nice tight case to present to the High Court.

Four years ago, in Arizona, a 15-year-old boy named Gerald Gault was charged with making obscene telephone calls. Since the case involved a minor, the usual rules of law did not apply. Neither he nor his family was ever given a written or oral statement of the specific charges, thereby preventing the preparation of a defense. The boy was denied his right against self-incrimination. He was not allowed to have a lawyer, nor was he or his family allowed to cross-examine the complaining witness. In fact, the woman never appeared in court. The judge handled the case entirely on the basis of a police report. There was no transcript of the proceedings. If an adult had been taken in on the same charge with all the normal legal protections, the maximum sentence he could have received was two months. The boy had a sentence of six years hanging over him until the A.C.L.U. caused the case to be overturned.

Test cases often go far beyond the confines of the original decisions. In 1966, as a friend of the court, the A.C.L.U. supported the winning side in a Connecticut case that held that married couples could practice birth control without interference from the state. The ruling has since become the basis for a burgeoning legal doctrine that personal sexual practices are protected from government intrusion.

Along with its legal program, the A.C.L.U. mounts an active lobbying operation in Washington and the largest states. As spokesman for an organization that has no bloc of votes to deliver and no financial contributions to offer, Larry Speiser, who was until recently the national A.C.L.U.'s director in the capital, ran a low-key operation. "It was--and still is--all lobbying by persuasion," he explains. "We can't scare anybody, so there's no arm twisting." Over the years, Speiser created an effective technique by developing research facilities for friendly Congressmen. Speiser also spent a great deal of his time testifying before Congressional committees on the constitutionality of laws pending in the Congress. It seemed a singularly lonely job.

Mindful of Justice Learned Hand's dictum that when liberty dies in the hearts of men, no constitutions and no laws can save it, the A.C.L.U. also has embarked on a nationwide propaganda campaign. Pounds of press releases pour out of the national and affiliate offices daily. Sponsoring seminars and press conferences and providing public speakers are part of the program. "A most important objective of the Union," says David Isbell, a director of the Union in Washington, D.C., "is to create better public understanding and sympathy for civil liberties."

Isbell became a chief voice for the Union in its drive against the Administration's Federal preventive-detention bill, which allows a Federal or a Washington, D.C., court to hold a man without bail for 60 days if it feels he might commit another crime while out on bail. Speaking before Congressional committees against the bill before its passage, Isbell used the measured tones of a man from an establishment firm. Informally, he conveyed a barely controlled sense of moral outrage that is common to A.C.L.U. attorneys when they talk about their work: "It's a goddamn fraud. There are a lot of statistics to show the percentage of people on bail who commit crimes, but very few on the over-all percentage of crime that is committed by people on bail. In Washington, it is six percent. And only half of that is committed during those first 60 days, so you're down to three percent. Under this bill, the judge has to be able to predict which offenders will actually commit another crime within the 60 days they're held. No one feels he can do that better than half the time, so you wind up with a one-and-a-half-percent reduction in the District crime rate. You could accomplish that with better street lighting."

The concept of civil liberties is much broader than the specific wording of the Constitution. (The right of privacy, which Justice Brandeis called the most prized right of all, is not even mentioned.) Prodded by aggressive new members and under pressure from the large state affiliates feeling the heat from the problems of the ghettos, the Union has become a much more activist organization, determined to broaden its operations beyond its traditional concern with the gut civil-libertarian issues of freedom of speech and expression, due process of law and discrimination. In recent years, it has begun to campaign for broad-based political and social reforms, such as the right of 18-year-olds to vote (now the law of the land), the abolition of the present peacetime draft system and abortion reform. Last year the Union adopted a resolution identifying the war in Vietnam as a major cause of deprivation of civil liberties by drafting men to serve in an undeclared war and demanded an immediate termination of the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.

The A.C.L.U. has jumped into the forefront of the women's liberation movement with a brief before the Supreme Court attempting to declare sexual discrimination unconstitutional. It is also constantly involved in the battle against censorship. Most recently, it entered The New York Times's Pentagon-papers case on behalf of the readers of the Times, arguing that their right to know the facts of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was even more important than the Times's right to publish them.

Clearly, the Union is heading toward even more politically troubled waters than it has sailed before, but, as Mel Wulf says, "If the A.C.L.U. isn't under attack by somebody every day, it isn't doing its job." By that criterion, it's doing its job very well. Occasionally scorned by the New Left as part of an establishment hustle for trying to make the American system work, the A.C.L.U. has been accused by the radical right of being responsible for everything from godless communism to air pollution. The Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith got angry over the Union's defense of the right of policemen to belong to the John Birch Society, while an official of the Illinois Police Benevolent and Protective Association charged that "among the Communist fronts that honeycomb the United States today, the American Civil Liberties Union is the most active in plaguing the nation with oblique attacks on American institutions and constitutional safeguards."

The most serious charge that can be leveled at the Union is a historic one. At two critical junctures in American history, when it was needed most, the A.C.L.U. lost its nerve. During the shameful forced evacuation of Japanese Americans on the West Coast to detention camps during World War Two and when Senator Joseph McCarthy was stalking the country in the Fifties, the Union sat on its hands and failed to come forward with any meaningful representation. Over its otherwise illustrious 51-year history, that isn't a bad record, especially when you remember what the rest of the civil libertarians were doing--Earl Warren helped organize the nisei evacuation and then--Senator John F. Kennedy ducked out of town to avoid being counted in the final Senate showdown over McCarthy. Yet the specter has been raised that the Union tends to lose its effectiveness when the going gets really rough. Wulf admits the Union "ran chicken" during the McCarthy era. "We were so busy worrying about our respectability we didn't do anything and missed our chance to be in the forefront of the fight against McCarthy."

Most Union officials feel, however, that today it is far stronger than it was in the Fifties. Membership has tripled. The range of legal services available and the will to utilize them has grown correspondingly. "The Union will make mistakes in the future," says Wulf, "but they won't be the mistakes of omission we made before."

They'd better not be, because the next decade may be more perilous for the survival of personal liberty in America than any in history. The Burger Court has already turned its back on many of the advances of the Warren Court. In 80 percent of the cases before the Warren Court in which the Union was involved, it was on the winning side. That batting average has already slipped to below 50 percent with the present Court.

"Fear and anxiety have become our greatest dangers," says John de J. Pemberton, former executive director of the national A.C.L.U. "There are increasing numbers of things to be fearful about: the possibility of living in an inhospitable environment, street crime, revolution, organized crime and nuclear war. People in their fear are sometimes willing to give up the rights of others for a sense of immediate safety. Later, when the danger is past, they find out too late that they've sold off their own rights as well."

The Union's greatest fear for the future of civil liberties in the United States is in the possibility of a massive and violent collision between left and right. "The radicals of the left," Justice William O. Douglas has said, "historically have used ... tactics to incite the extreme right with the calculated design of fostering a regime of repression from which the radicals of the left hope to emerge as the ultimate victor."

Federal and state agencies are asking for or are already using an arsenal of repressive instrumentalities: preventive detention, military-intelligence surveillance of domestic politics, systematic harassment of militant black organizations, Governmental-agency black-listing, increased wire tapping and subpoenaing of confidential files, among others. It's not that it becomes no longer possible to distinguish the political dissenter from the political lunatic, it's that the public gets tired of making the effort. It's so much easier and safer to lock them all up. Don't think it can't happen. Listen to Assistant Attorney General Will Wilson's sure cure for student unrest: "I think if you could get all of them in a penitentiary, you'd stop it." Washington, D.C., made a good start on just such a course last May Day, when police slapped some 13,000 peace demonstrators into municipal compounds. The A.C.L.U. entered the situation quickly, with a series of moves that led to the dropping of charges against most of those detained and included a class-action injunction that may prevent similar suspensions of normal procedures in the future.

"The struggle for civil liberties is entering a war phase," says Southern California's Eason Monroe, "and we're going to have to fight like hell." Who wins the battle will depend largely on the men who fight it.

Fortunately, in spite of penurious pay scales for its executives--in some cases, $4000 a year to start--the A.C.L.U. attracts some of the finest talent in the country. Because of lack of funds, the New York affiliate alone has to turn down four or five applications a day from promising young attorneys who want to join the Union's permanent staff.

For lawyers with a political sense that the law should be a social instrument rather than an economic tool, the A.C.L.U. is practically the promised land. Norm Siegel, a hot-shot New York University Law School graduate now working for the A.C.L.U. in Atlanta, puts it this way: "My God, it's exciting work. At law school, you hear about the great men in our profession, and then you come to the Union and here they are. I can't imagine doing anything else." Wulf, who has had his name on more briefs before the Supreme Court than any man in the history of the American bar, agrees: "It's a rare privilege not to have to practice commercial law."

Some lawyers, such as Chuck Morgan, join the A.C.L.U. because they like the excitement of tough trialwork. Morgan became a national figure defending Captain Howard Levy and is now one of the most feared criminal lawyers in the country. When he appeared at Fort Jackson to defend a case, he found a handwritten note scrawled on the bulletin board of the Judge Advocate General's office. The note read simply, "Morgan's back!" "That," he says happily, "I want on my tombstone."

Every A.C.L.U. official, permanent or volunteer, takes some sort of financial beating by being associated with the Union. Allen Brown, an A.C.L.U. attorney in Cincinnati, handles so many free Union cases that his private practice has gone to pot and the Union literally has to pass the hat to keep him going. Beverly Jackson, part-time executive director for the Union in Louisiana, doesn't earn enough to pay he baby sitter.

They all seem driven: Mel Wulf takes off an hour or so from a 60-hour week to play tennis on a municipal court and thinks of the lost time as an indulgence. A few years ago, he took a six-month sabbatical to take his family to London for a rest and vacation; within two weeks, he was back in his New York office writing briefs. Marvin Karpatkin, who spends almost a third of his time away from a lucrative Manhattan practice to take on free draft cases, is constantly hounded by his own devils. "I'm obsessed by the thought that every time I successfully handle a draft case, some black ghetto kid who may have even sounder justification is gobbled up to take his place." And then he adds, in words that could be the Union's motto: "It's not enough. It's never enough."