{"id":182766,"date":"2021-04-12T12:01:15","date_gmt":"2021-04-12T11:01:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=182766"},"modified":"2021-04-12T05:51:08","modified_gmt":"2021-04-12T04:51:08","slug":"ramsey-clark-attorney-general-who-became-a-critic-of-u-s-policies-dies-at-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/04\/ramsey-clark-attorney-general-who-became-a-critic-of-u-s-policies-dies-at-93\/","title":{"rendered":"Ramsey Clark, Attorney General Who Became a Critic of U.S. Policies, Dies at 93"},"content":{"rendered":"

10 Apr 2021 – <\/em>Ramsey Clark, who was U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson and then, after leaving government service, redefined himself as a relentless critic of American foreign policy and as a courtroom defender of widely reviled figures such as former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, died April\u00a09 at his home in New York City. He was 93.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

\u00a9 Helayne Seidman\/for The Washington Post Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark in 2002.<\/p><\/div>\n

The death was confirmed by a great-niece, Sharon Welch. The precise cause was not immediately known.<\/p>\n

The son of conservative Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark, Mr. Clark grew up in the lap of the political establishment and was the last surviving member of Johnson\u2019s Cabinet. As a young man, he showed few signs of his firebrand future, but in the half-century that followed his 22-month term as the nation\u2019s top prosecutor, he underwent a remarkable political transformation and became a persistent voice of dissent against the government.<\/p>\n

As attorney general, Mr. Clark had prosecuted pediatrician and best-selling author Benjamin Spock for conspiracy to aid draft resisters during the Vietnam War. Within three years of leaving office, Mr. Clark had flown to Hanoi to denounce U.S. aggression and went to court to defend Philip Berrigan and other leading antiwar activists.<\/p>\n

For a time, Mr. Clark was a darling of the left \u2014 a blunt and outspoken former Cabinet member who publicly raised questions about the morality of American interventions abroad. He attacked what he called the United States\u2019 \u201csham\u201d democracy, ruled not by the people but by the wealthy few, and he decried the nation\u2019s \u201cgenocidal\u201d foreign policy and \u201ccertifiably insane\u201d military spending.<\/p>\n

Still, Mr. Clark continued to serve occasionally in official capacities for the government. In 1979, at the request of President Jimmy Carter, he tried to negotiate the release of 53 Americans taken hostage in Tehran after the fall of the U.S.-backed shah in Iran. When he was denied entry into Iran, Mr. Clark flew home.<\/p>\n

Then he returned to Tehran months later to take part in a \u201cCrimes in America\u201d conference that adopted a resolution condemning U.S. actions in Iran. Mr. Clark called the seizure of hostages \u2014 who were, at the time, more than 200 days into their incarceration \u2014 \u201cunderstandable\u201d but wrong. He urged the United States to apologize for its wrongdoings in Iran. Carter threatened to prosecute the former attorney general for violating the U.S. ban on travel to Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you really love your country, you work very hard to make it right,\u201d Mr. Clark later told the Los Angeles Times. \u201cAnything else is an extreme act of disloyalty and an extreme failure of courage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Ramsey <\/span> \u00a9 AP\/Associated Press<\/span> Attorney General Ramsey Clark testifying before a Senate subcommittee in 1967. <\/span> <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Mr. Clark later sued the U.S. government for bombing Libya in 1986 in response to a terrorist attack on a Berlin disco. He traveled to Panama after the 1989 American invasion to document what he said was the U.S. military\u2019s coverup of a \u201cphysical assault of stunning violence,\u201d and he voiced opposition to U.S. war efforts against Iraq in 1990 and 2003.<\/p>\n

‘Guaranteed fairness’<\/h3>\n

Conservatives came to loathe Mr. Clark, but support for him also began to erode among left-leaning activists as he made a habit of defending a rogues\u2019 gallery of accused terrorists and war criminals.<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish he didn\u2019t do some of these things,\u201d Leslie Cagan, a peace activist, said of Mr. Clark in a 2005 interview with the New York Observer. \u201cHe is one of the few public well-known leftists in this country, and it does make our work harder sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

His client list included political extremist Lyndon LaRouche<\/a>; several followers of the Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh; former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was on death row for killing a Philadelphia police officer; and Lori Berenson, an American who was imprisoned in Peru for aiding a Marxist revolutionary group.<\/p>\n

Mr. Clark also defended Slobodan Milosevic<\/a>, the former president of former Serbia and Yugoslavia, who died while being tried for genocide by a United Nations tribunal at The Hague; Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Rwandan pastor who was found guilty of engineering a massacre of ethnic Tutsis inside his church; and Karl Linnas, an elderly former commander of a Nazi concentration camp.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t go after septuagenarians 40 years after some god-awful crime they\u2019re alleged to have committed,\u201d Mr. Clark once said, speaking of Linnas. \u201cIf you do, then what it really means is, if we find you, we\u2019ll kill you, so act accordingly. It means that we\u2019re going to be condemned to eternal conflict, which is my great concern. We\u2019ve got to find a way to end wars.\u201d<\/p>\n

His most notorious client was Hussein, who was accused not only of orchestrating the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds, but also of ordering the murder of 148 boys and men after his motorcade was fired on in 1982 near the Shiite town of Dujail.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had this huge war going on,\u201d Mr. Clark told the BBC in Hussein\u2019s defense, \u201cand you have to act firmly when you have an assassination attempt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Clark called his legal work an extension of his 1960s Justice Department efforts to defend civil rights. \u201cPeople are guaranteed fairness under the constitution,\u201d he told the Dallas Morning News in 1996. \u201cAnd the constitution doesn\u2019t say you only get fair treatment under certain conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those who knew Mr. Clark regarded him with a mix of bafflement, admiration and frustration. He raised serious questions about ensuring fair trials for society\u2019s most untouchable criminals. But he also displayed inconsistencies that troubled his fellow pacifists and onetime allies \u2014 denouncing genocide, for example, while at the same time excusing Hussein.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe lost the opportunity to be a really effective, influential voice on the American left, such as it is, and that was a great loss,\u201d Mr. Clark\u2019s onetime law partner, Melvin L. Wulf, told the New York Times in 1991. \u201cHe was and is a total enigma to me, and I don\u2019t think anyone worked with him as closely as I.\u201d<\/p>\n

‘The sense of a need to help’<\/h3>\n

William Ramsey Clark was born Dec. 18, 1927, in Dallas. He spent his early years in Dallas and Los Angeles before attending Washington\u2019s Woodrow Wilson High School. He then joined the Marine Corps and served as a courier in Europe.<\/p>\n

He graduated from the University of Texas in 1949. That same year, he married a fellow student, Georgia Welch.<\/p>\n

They had a daughter born with multiple disabilities, Ronda, whom Mr. Clark credited with giving him \u201cenormous empathy for the poor, the deprived and the handicapped, the sense of a need to help.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s taught us how ignorant we all are really,\u201d he said in a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times. \u201cWe think we know a lot in comparison to her, and then we look around at Beirut, at nuclearism, and 8\u00a0million infants who starved last year. Eight million.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Clark\u2019s wife died in 2010. Their son, Thomas C. Clark II, died in 2013. Survivors include their daughter Ronda Clark, of New York; a sister, Mimi Gronlund of McLean, Va.; and three granddaughters.<\/p>\n

Mr. Clark received a combined law degree and master\u2019s degree in history from the University of Chicago in December 1950 and spent the subsequent decade working for his family\u2019s Dallas law firm. He joined Robert F. Kennedy\u2019s Justice Department in 1961, following his father \u2014 who had served as attorney general, under Truman \u2014 into public service.<\/p>\n

As an assistant attorney general in the Public Lands Division (now the Environment and Natural Resources Division), Mr. Clark built a reputation as an efficient administrator. He also had important roles in the Justice Department\u2019s civil rights battles, including in the aftermath of riots that broke out when James Meredith, a Black student, enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1962. He helped draft major civil rights legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.<\/p>\n

Mr. Clark was appointed to the top Justice Department position in 1967 by Johnson, a fellow Texan and old family friend. Mr. Clark\u2019s father resigned from the Supreme Court to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest \u2014 a move that allowed Johnson to burnish his civil rights credentials by filling the vacancy with the high court\u2019s first African American justice, Thurgood Marshall.<\/p>\n

Departing from his father\u2019s politics, Mr. Clark carved an identity as one of the Cabinet\u2019s most left-leaning members. Known in the Justice Department as \u201cthe preacher\u201d for his stubborn adherence to principle, he was perceived by critics as soft on crime.<\/p>\n

He implemented an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment and asked Congress to outlaw it for good. He also aggressively restricted federal wiretapping operations and repeatedly refused to authorize FBI wiretaps on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n

After leaving the presidency in 1969, Johnson derided his attorney general\u2019s tendency to \u201cgo around preachin\u2019 bleeding-heart stuff\u201d and called the appointment of Mr. Clark his \u201cbiggest mistake.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought I had appointed Tom Clark\u2019s son,\u201d Johnson once said. \u201cI was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

After leaving government service in 1969, Mr. Clark joined a prestigious Wall Street law firm. He departed soon afterward, saying he was frustrated by his inability to revolutionize the policies of American corporations from within.<\/p>\n

He wrote the best-selling 1970 book \u201cCrime in America\u201d about the root causes of crime and the failures of the correctional system, and later that decade mounted two unsuccessful campaigns for the U.S. Senate from New York. In the 1974 race against Republican incumbent Jacob Javits, Mr. Clark limited his campaign contributions to $100 each and proposed cutting the defense budget by half.<\/p>\n

\u201cI went upstate and told hunters I thought we should abolish handguns and license long guns,\u201d he said. He told Long Island voters that he wanted to close one of the area\u2019s biggest employers, a manufacturer of military planes.<\/p>\n

Surprising observers, he mounted a respectable challenge, losing to Javits by only six percentage points.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank God, I didn\u2019t win,\u201d Mr. Clark later said. \u201cFrankly, I would have been bored.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Tom <\/span> \u00a9 Wally McNamee\/The Washington Post<\/span> Ramsey Clark, right, taking the oath of office as U.S. attorney general in 1967 from his father, Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, as President Lyndon B. Johnson looks on. <\/span> <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – washingtonpost.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ramsey Clark, the U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson who redefined himself as a relentless critic of American foreign policy and as a courtroom defender of figures such as former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, died April 9 at his home in New York City. He was 93.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":182768,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[229,867,1142,2468,70],"class_list":["post-182766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-obituaries","tag-activism","tag-anglo-america","tag-obituary","tag-ramsey-clark","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}