A Wise Man – U.S. Attorney General Edward Levi

Feb 27

Fifty years ago, in February 1975, U.S. President Gerald Ford made a statement. He did so not primarily through words but in action, swearing in his nominee for the office of U.S. Attorney General. Thanks to Watergate and the Vietnam War, public respect for law and the federal government was battered and bruised, and Ford sought an attorney general who would restore justice. His man: Edward H. Levi. Although remembered today by a dwindling number of Americans, Levi’s life and work call to mind ideas about freedom that are at least as vital today as they were when he took office.

Levi was as thoroughly a product of a single institution as it is possible for an Ameri-can academic to be. His grandfather was one of the founding faculty members of the Uni-versity of Chicago, and Levi himself started his formal education in kindergarten at the uni-versity’s Laboratory School, earning his AB from the College and then his JD from the Law School in 1935 and securing a faculty position there the very next year. In 1945, he was named Dean of the Law School, then in 1968 became the university’s president, an office he left only to accept Ford’s nomination as attorney general.

One of the greatest challenges Levi faced as Chicago president was the 1969 takeo-ver of the university’s administration building by 400 student protestors. Unlike many peers, Levi declined to summon the police to forcibly remove the offenders, but when they left of their own accord two weeks later, he expelled many of their leaders. He wrote, “The way of citizenship is through the rights of citizens and constitutional government, not violence. Within the university, I hope the respect for personal integrity and diversity, essential to the freedom of the institution, will be strengthened by the way we meet the tests of today.”

As attorney general, Levi issued civil liberties guidelines to the FBI and CIA, requiring the agencies to show evidence of a crime before they instituted electronic surveillance. He recommended that Ford appoint his fellow Chicagoan John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court. Of Levi’s tenure, U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “He brought two qualities to the job, a rare intellectuality and a level of integrity such that there could never be any doubt about his honesty.” Senator Edward Kennedy wrote, “He left a department once again characterized by integrity, honesty, and a commitment to equal justice.”

Reflecting on Levi’s tenure in the office, Ford said, “Ed Levi was a superb attorney general. In the early 1970s, the Nixon Department of Justice was in great difficulty. The American people and Congress had lost respect because of ineffective and inappropriate leadership. When I assumed the presidency in August of 1974, it was essential that a new attorney general be appointed who would restore integrity and competence to the

Department of Justice. In cabinet meetings, he gave wise counsel to me and others on the most important issues involving the U.S. government in domestic and foreign affairs.”

Levi’s approach to law and life are revealed in a 1976 bicentennial essay he penned for Newsweek. He begins by noting that, to his knowledge, he was the first Jewish professor of law to be named dean of a major law school, and the first Jewish faculty member to as-sume the office of president of a major private university. He recalls that as a graduate stu-dent in English at Chicago, he had been advised by a professor to consider changing his field, since no leading institution would appoint a Jew to its humanities faculty. To Levi, these facts are significant because they testify to changes that have taken place in American society.

Levi recalls a reception he hosted as university president, when a Jewish student no-ticed a book by the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides on his shelf. Levi noted that it was one of the few books he had kept from the libraries of his father and grandfather. When Levi also indicated that his father had been a rabbi, the student wanted to know whether he was an Orthodox or Reform rabbi. Writes Levi, “I laughed and said, ‘Now look – is it not good enough for you that he was a rabbi? You have to worry now whether he was to your way of thinking the right kind of rabbi.’”

In his essay, Levi counsels against overreaction, what he calls the temptation to “en-gage in cycles of bitterness.” Specifically, he decries the theme running through the modern world that human relationships should be looked at in terms of power and the manipulation of power. He writes, “I really think that’s one of the most wicked ways of looking at the world. It’s a very incomplete way. It strips people of their humanness. It converts all the other good attributes people have into the ability or desire to manipulate others. We are a society which does have powerful tools for manipulation, and we’ve become very suspicious.”

Levi argues that we need to avoid enshrining a culture of resentment. He emphasizes that the modern world is full of problems, not all of which are going to be solved. “Happiness is an elusive goal,” he writes, “and no one is promised happiness. I guess what we have to do for ourselves is to give ourselves time to work things out, and not to expect miracles. We must protect ourselves against a kind of bombardment of demand for instant solutions that keeps us from working things out.” Levi has no doubt that dedication is necessary, but it needs to be tempered by patience.

Our mission, Levi argues, is not to install experts or expert technologies (such as ar-tificial intelligence) to solve all our problems now, but instead to rely on freedom and liberty. We need to be willing to look long and hard at problems, not lurch toward the first solution that comes to mind, and we need to put our faith in individuals, who know the problems firsthand in a way that institutions and expert bodies never can. Levi’s great book,

“Introduction to Legal Reasoning,” describes the law not as a system of immutable rules ap-plied by experts but ever-shifting rules grounded in reasoning about particular cases.

We should solve the soluble problems, but we should not let impatience drive us to ill-considered decisions. Likewise, we need to admit that some problems are insoluble. We should recognize them and keep talking about them, but we should not suppose that we are failing so long as we do not solve and then move on from them. The most important thing is not to arrive at a solution but to respect the true nature of the problem. As Ford knew, Levi was not only incredibly knowledgeable and experienced but also wise. Imagine that – a pres-idential cabinet appointment grounded in that most elusive of traits, wisdom.

Image courtesy of the National Archives. President Gerald R. Ford Attending the Swearing-in of Edward H. Levi as Attorney General of the United States