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4.2.12
WC: 191694

Mostly, I worked very hard, achieving an A average and Phi Beta Kappa Honors, winning debate tournaments and being elected president of the student council and captain of the debate team. Reading became my passion: literature (Dostoyevski, Shakespeare, Bellow); philosophy (Kant, Aristotle, Plato, Neitsche; history (______________) and politics (______________). I loved arguing with my professors. One of my favorites was John Hope Franklin, the first African American appointed to the chairmanship of a department (history) in a college that was not historically black. We remained friends and colleagues until his death in his mid-90s.

My presidency of the student council brought me into repeated conflict with Professor Harry Gideonese, the President of the College, a Midwestern conservative who was brought to Brooklyn to “clean out” what had become “the little red schoolhouse.” Several professors had been fired, or not hired, because of the “red” or “pink” affiliations and I fought against this post-McCarthy purge, on freedom of speech grounds. Leading the other side was a professor of romance languages named Eugene Scalia, an elegant and brilliant reactionary, whose son Antonin has followed in his ideological footsteps.

Despite my conflict with President Gideonese, the school nominated me for a Rhodes Scholarship. In my application, I wrote the following:

I believe that my college career has been a period of moral and intellectual growth throughout which time I have felt an increasing responsibility to my conscience in matters of self improvement. I felt this personal responsibility so strongly in college because I had almost completely neglected it throughout high school. A firm determination to show myself, as well as my high school contemporaries, that I could become an outstanding student in college has been a most potent motivating force.

I also listed my academic, political and athletic achievements, and promised that if admitted to Oxford:

I would read for the Oxford B.A. in the Honor School of Jurisprudence and then enter Law School in the United States.

In those days Jewish boys (only males were eligible for Rhodes) from Brooklyn were not selected by the Rhodes Committee, and despite my academic, political and athletic accomplishments, I did not even get an interview. It took several decades before Brooklyn College received its first Rhodes Scholarship.

By my senior year at Brooklyn, I had decided to go to law school. That path seemed natural in light of my success in debate and school politics. I had no idea what the practice of law was, except what I had read about the careers of such legal luminaries as Clarence Darrow, Thurgood Marshall, and Louis Brandeis. My uncle Morris was a lawyer, but he spent most of my formative years in the Army and when he returned he specialized in contract cases, which held little interest for me. I asked Grandma Ringel to introduce me to an old friend of hers, whom she always referred to as “Judge Berenkoff.” I had no idea what kind of judge he was, but he was the only judge I knew. My grandmother wondered why I wanted to meet Judge Berenkoff. I told her that since he was a judge, he might have some good career advice for an aspiring lawyer. My

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