By Milt Silverman
Bill Enright prepared for everything, including his own funeral. Several years ago he called and said he wanted three people to speak at his funeral – his son, his best friend, and me. I told him I was honored and promised to do so. Recent events made that impossible. They do not prevent me from putting in writing what I would have said.
The most important thing I can say about Bill Enright, and the reason that he will be remembered, is how he lived.
Before Bill Enright did anything, he thought about whether it was legal, ethical and moral. I had known him several decades when I asked if he would give me a signed photo so that I could put it up on a wall in my office. Over the years I had put up photos of people I admired. They were on a wall, off the beaten path, near a side door to my office. I looked at them now and then for inspiration. At the time I asked Bill, I had three photos, one lawyer, and two judges.
After I asked Bill he called up, said he had the photo, but would like to come by and deliver it to me personally. I said that was not necessary, but he insisted. After he arrived we sat down in a war room in the back. He pulled out the photo and placed it on the table. “I did not sign this,” he said. He explained that he had researched the issue of whether he could sign it and concluded that he could not because it might be considered an “endorsement.”
“I did not sign this photo,” he said, “but I wanted to tell you what I would have said if I could.” He spoke. I listened. After he left, I put the photo on the wall. It meant much more to me unsigned.
Bill Enright was welcoming and gracious. In the legal business we all know that there is a hierarchy. Some lawyers are considered “bigger” than others. Some judges are considered “more important” than others. Bill Enright was “big” as a lawyer and “important” as a judge, but he never let it show. He did not look down at, or pull rank on, anyone.
Here is a story that proves my point:
In the sixties and early seventies, Bill Enright was one of the top criminal defense lawyers in San Diego. I knew this because in ‘66 and ‘67 I was in my first year at Cal Western. Because I had decided to be a criminal defense lawyer, I went to the courthouse as often as I could to watch big time trial lawyers in action.
While I never saw Bill Enright try a case, I did see the next best thing. Some outfit –perhaps the local bar – did a complete, gavel-to-gavel mock trial in a criminal case and videotaped everything. Bill Kennedy was the prosecutor, Bill Enright was the defense counsel. I got a copy and watched it several times, then, and in later years.
In 1971 I was a poverty lawyer at Pueblo County Legal Services in Colorado. I was visiting and my family had a small house on the eastern slope of Mount Helix. As it turned out, Bill Enright’s house was about 150 yards west, across a ravine, from my family’s house.
I was walking up a road to my house while a man I recognized as Bill Enright was walking down, away from his house. I was walking with a young man, while Bill was also walking with a young man. For some reason, the two young men knew each other, and stopped to talk.
Bill was casually, but elegantly, dressed. I must have looked like a bum. I had long hair, a beard, boots, jeans, a cowboy hat, and was probably wearing the same clothes I arrived in. Bill smiled, extended his hand, and said, “I’m Bill Enright.” I introduced myself. “Aren’t you a lawyer?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Yes I am,” he said. “So am I,” I said.
His response surprised me. It was if he had found a long-lost member of his family.
“Well,” he replied, grabbing my hand and shaking it with exuberance, “welcome to the Bar.” He asked many questions – where I went to law school, what I had done since graduating, my plans for the future. His words were warm and encouraging. The whole conversation was about me, not him. He made me feel welcome.
I never forgot. Years – decades – later, I was attending a big function with probably at least a hundred or even more people. Bill was getting some big award. He was at the front, saw me, got up, walked to the table where I was sitting, and gave me a warm greeting.
I wrote to him after that and told him about the first time we met. “You were a big shot and I was a nobody” I wrote, or words to that effect, “and you treated me like an equal.” I told him about the lasting effect that had on me, and I wanted him to know how it had influenced my life. I think we all should take time to tell people things like this before they are no longer with us.
While in Colorado I was a Reggie Fellow (Nap Jones was also a Reggie) and the assignment only lasted a year. I came to San Diego, hung out a shingle, and starved. Over the years small criminal cases turned to bigger ones. During that time I talked to Bill on the phone and went to his office once. There, I met his partner, Jack Levitt. When Bill and I talked, it was about being a trial lawyer and legal ethics.
Once in a while, over the years, Bill called and asked for help. The first big one was when he called and said there was something called the American Inn of Court which was started by Warren Burger and the idea was to promote trial tactics, strategy, and ethics by putting experienced trial lawyers and up-and-coming trial lawyers together.
The American Inns of Court was one of Bill’s signature projects. Local Inns of Court started appearing throughout the country. The American Inn of Court is in San Diego because of Bill Enright. He started the first, which was called the Lou Welsh Inn of Court. At least two others followed, one named after civil trial lawyer, and later, Judge, and later, Justice William L.(“Ted”) Todd Jr. (of Carstens & Todd, later Carstens, Todd, Wright and Toothacre) whom I clerked for in my first and second years of law school. (Charlie Grebing – who became a great civil defense trial lawyer – was the other clerk).
Another local Inn of Court followed. The lawyers who created it named it after William B. Enright. Bill deserved this honor. He boosted the Inns of Court nationally, as well as the local Inn of Court, when opportunity presented itself.
The second, annual nationwide meeting of all the Inns of Court was held in San Diego at the Hotel del Coronado in the mid-eighties. Bill called me and said that the agenda called for the local San Diego Inn to show what a monthly-meeting presentation looked and sounded like. Bill said he assigned himself to oversee the presentation and tasked me with coming up with ideas, suggesting participants, and providing them to him.
Bill and I had many conversations about topics and participants but I did not think I was coming up with something which really “popped.” Then, as time was closing, I saw an article in Parade in the Sunday newspaper about Lt. Col. Thomas Trammel Hart. I excitedly called Bill and told him about it.
During the Vietnam War, Lt. Col. Hart was flying an AC130 Spectre gunship over Laos when he and his sixteen-member crew were hit by anti-aircraft fire. Hart managed to fly ten minutes of level flight before the gunship exploded. Evidence at the crash site showed that Hart had bought time to enable some crew-members to survive. Two crew members bailed out and were soon rescued. Bloody bandages and five deployed parachutes were photographed near the crash sites. The fact that some of the parachutes were buried showed that more than two crew-members survived, because airmen were trained to bury parachutes to evade capture. However, other than the two who were rescued, there were no other known survivors.
On March 29, 1973, pursuant to the Paris Peace Talks, the United States announced that Vietnam had returned all American prisoners of war to the United States. National television showed joyous reunions as returning captives reunited with families.
In July of 1973, twenty months after Hart’s AC130 Spectre gunship was shot down, and four months after what the United States claimed was the return of all captured prisoners of war, a U.S. reconnaissance plane taking photos 100 miles from the crash site photographed a message stamped down in elephant grass. It read “1973 TH.” Intelligence analysts concluded the message had been written by Lt. Col. Thomas Hart.
The government, eager to prove no one had been left behind, tapped the Army’s Central Identification Lab in Hawaii to provide the proof. This happened before the advent of DNA. Dr. Furue positively identified seven bones as those of Col. Hart. The Army announced it was going to bury Col. Hart. Mrs. Hart objected, claiming those were not the bones of her husband.
Bill and I talked about it and we decided to use the “Bones of Col. Hart” for the Lou Welsh Inn’s presentation at the annual meeting. Judge Enright would preside. Bonnie Reading of Seltzer Caplan would do the direct. Dan Broderick (a famous trial lawyer who also happened to be a medical doctor) would play Dr. Furue. Jerry McMahon would do a traditional, by-the-book cross. Mine would be less conventional. The purpose was to illustrate two different styles of cross-examination.
Instead of a hand-out on paper with a “Statement of Facts” we opened with a video, with voice over, of the flight, shoot down, open chutes, the government’s attempt to bury Col. Hart after declaring him dead on flimsy grounds, and Mrs. Hart’s effort to stop them.
Bill said we should not only video the introduction, but the whole program, edit it, and call it “The Bones of Col. Hart.” He also authorized me to hire a forensic anthropologist to come up with seven very similar looking bones and mount them as an exhibit for cross-examination.
Bill’s leadership resulted in “The Bones of Col. Hart,” which I understand was shown across the United States in local Inns of Court for well over a decade. This production was only one of many which Bill conceived of, oversaw, and presented over the years. I saw one of the first – the trial where Bill Kennedy was the prosecutor and Bill Enright was the defense counsel.
Bill devoted a great deal of his time educating young trial lawyers and emphasized the moral and ethical responsibilities that trial lawyers have. Bill liked to tell stories which had a moral. One story he told was about person responsibility, and it featured a famous trial lawyer named Joe Ball.
Ball tried cases all over the country but his firm was located in the Los Angeles area. He was senior counsel for the Warren Commission. He represented Watergate figure John Ehrlichman, auto maker John DeLorean and Saudi Arabian financier Adnan Khashoggi. But the story Bill Enright liked to tell about Joe Ball was Ball’s defense in the Friars Club case.
The Beverly Hills Friars Club was founded in 1947 by Milton Berle and actors and singers like Bing Crosby, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, George Jessel, and Robert Taylor. Other members included Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. The Friars Club started a tradition called “Roasts.”
Cards were also played there. In 1967 famed Johnny Roselli (found nine years later stuffed in a 55 gallon fuel drum floating on a bay near Miami) and Maurice “Fat Maury” Friedman (front man for the mob in Las Vegas in the fifties before Howard Hughes bought the mob out) were arrested for rigging gin rummy games at the Beverly Hills Friars club and stealing millions. Others were involved in the conspiracy.
Joe Ball and his firm represented one of the defendants. As the case moved to trial a young lawyer in his firm made a mistake that had the
judge threatening contempt and the DA threatening prosecution of the young lawyer.
When Bill told me the story it was like he was acting out a scene in a movie. Describing Ball’s reaction to the threat, Bill pointed at me, and in a firm voice said: “If you want to come after someone, come after me. I was his boss. Everything he did was at my direction. If you want to blame someone, blame me.”
The moral was, whenever you can, do not try to push blame off onto someone else. Whenever you can, take the hit yourself.
A related story with a similar moral was told to me by Bill while we were talking about another of his favorite topics– books. Bill was inquisitive and always trying to learn new things. One way he did this was by reading. He read all kinds of books, completely unrelated to law. After he “went senior” (took on “senior status” which allowed him to semi-retire by taking on a reduced caseload) one of the things he did was attend classes at UCSD – not for credit – for the joy of learning.
One of the stories he told was about Joe Welch (of the Boston firm of Hale & Dorr), who represented the Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings, starring the infamous senator Joe McCarthy and his sleazy side kick, attorney Roy Cohn, possibly the most disreputable lawyer of all time. After elected to the United States Senate by the state of Wisconsin in 1953, McCarthy earned a reputation for mediocrity, dishonesty, drinking and a quick temper. Within a few years a poll of the Senate press corps voted him the worst U.S. Senator.
Sensing he needed to find an issue which would thrust him into the spotlight as an American hero, McCarthy settled on claiming that the United States government had been infiltrated by Communists. He gave a speech to a Republican women’s club in West Virginia in 1950, where he held up papers, waved them, and said words to the effect: I have here in my hand a
list of 205 names – made known to the Secretary of State – as being members of the Communist Party, who are still working and shaping policy at the State Department. Over time, his target widened. The movement he spawned came to be called the “Red Scare.”
By 1954, McCarthy was at the height of his powers. Everyone was afraid of him. If you stood up to him, he called you a Communist. He destroyed many lives in the film industry by claiming that certain screen-writers were Communists. The movie industry hewed McCarthy’s line. Many screen writers were blacklisted.
McCarthy and his sidekick Cohn set their sights on the United States Army. In the spring of ‘54 they lodged charges and televised proceedings against the Army claiming that it had been taken over by Communists. When Welch, representing the Army, started landing hard counterpunches, exposing a blackmail plot orchestrated by McCarthy and Cohn, the two showed how low they were willing to go.
Welch had a young lawyer working at Hale & Dorr named Fred Fisher. Before joining the firm, Fisher disclosed that he had once been a member of the National Lawyers Guild. The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1936 as an alternative to the policies of the American Bar Association and its practice of excluding minorities from membership. The Guild was opposed to fascism and supported labor unions and progressive policies. During McCarthy’s Red Scare era, the National Lawyers Guild was among the organizations which had been labeled “Communists” or “Fellow Travelers.”
Because of this, Welch decided not to put Fisher on the team defending the Army. The Welch side and the McCarthy side talked about this before the case started, and McCarthy’s side agreed not to bring it up during the hearings. (This was a tradeoff because Cohn had tried to pressure the Army to give favorable treatment to his friend, Army Private G. David Schine).
Of course, when Welch had McCarthy on the ropes, McCarthy broke his promise and went after Fisher by name. Using his patented “I have just learned…” “Did you know…” “Isn’t it true that [put in name] who works for you is a member of [put in organization] which is a well-known Communist front organization.
Welch interrupted: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
Then Welch stood up and walked out.
And that was the beginning of the end for Joe McCarthy.
The moral of the story was, there may come a time when, when your gut tells you to speak up and do something drastic, do not hesitate, stand up, or speak up, and hit back.
Another story Bill and I discussed centered around his deep antipathy toward innocent people being railroaded. One book he suggested I read, which we later discussed, was In Harm’s Way, about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II.
In July of 1945 the Captain received orders on a Top Secret mission to deliver cargo at Tinian island in the Western Pacific Ocean. Its secret cargo were the components of a bomb called “Little Boy,” including half the world’s supply of uranium-235, enriched to fuel an atomic bomb, which, on August 6, 1945, would be loaded on to a B-29 Superfortress bomber called the Enola Gay and dropped six hours later on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
As it headed for Guam and from there to the Philippines, the Indianapolis was sunk by two torpedoes from a Japanese submarine. Three hundred of almost two thousand crewmen went down with the ship. The others, with few lifeboats and many without life jackets, floated in the water for three days. Many were eaten alive by sharks. It took three days before Navy command even realized that the ship had been lost when a routine patrol flight spotted men in the water.
The Navy blamed the Captain. The truth was, it was the Navy’s fault. It had failed to notify the Captain that a Japanese submarine was operating in the vicinity of the ships’ return route to Guam.
The moral of the story was that anyone – even an innocent person who did nothing wrong – could be railroaded when the government set its mind to it. People accused, prosecuted and convicted for something they did not do was something that Bill got very angry about. This came out when Bill and I discussed In Harm’s Way.
Bill really had a deep-seated enmity toward injustice. He wanted everyone to be treated fairly. Once he became a judge, he talked to me about never putting his thumb on the scale. He also believed in redemption. Soon after he had become a District Court Judge, he told me that sometimes, when he gave someone he believed deserved a lenient sentence, he would pull out a key, hold it up, and tell the defendant, words to the effect: “This is the key to freedom. You hold it in your hands” when giving a partial, or complete, non-custodial sentence.
Bill passed on knowledge, experience, and understanding, but he did so by gaining it every day. In the morning, when he got up, and put on his shirt, he took a single piece of paper, folded it twice, and put it in his front pocket. During the day, when he had a good idea, heard a memorable phrase, or learned something new, he would jot it down on the paper. At the end of the day, when he returned home, he would put it on a stack. He did this for decades.
I once told him that he should have the notes typed up and put into a book. He told me no, those notes were for someone special, his son. I nodded. I understood.
Bill Enright was one about whom King David spoke in the Psalms. He trod the road of truth. He is gone, but his footsteps linger, beckoning others to follow.
This piece was originally published by the Association of Business Trial Lawyers San Diego.