Interview with Floyd Abrams
Floyd Abrams is Senior Counsel at Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, a New York-based law firm. His primary area of litigation is the First Amendment. He has argued 13 cases before the Supreme Court.
Twitter Nation
Contents
Max Raskin: For the person who represented the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case, I have to ask: What do you read in the morning?
Floyd Abrams: I still get the New York Times delivered, I read the Washington Post online, the Economist, the New York Review of Books. I’ll read articles that interest me in the New Yorker, and I watch news on television, including Morning Joe.
MR: Are there any opinion writers or reporters over the years that you miss reading?
FA: Russell Baker. And he wrote a wonderful book about journalism called The Good Times.
MR: Do you watch your son's television program?
FA: Often. Not always. But I was just on his daily radio program.
Actually today I've just begun a podcast of my own.
MR: What's it called?
FA: Floyd Abrams: Speaking Freely. I feel like I'm applying for a job with you.
MR: Oh no, it should be relaxed. What's the subject of the podcast?
FA: Different First Amendment-related issues. And another one that was released today is a very popular podcast called “Armchair Expert.” I read about it after I did my interview, but it has 20 million readers a month.
MR: Really?
FA: Can you believe that? 20 million.
MR: What do you think about this new media world?
FA: I think that there's a degree to which information is made public and discussed online that has mixed results from a societal point of view. I think that living in a Twitter nation is not a step forward, even though it has the advantage of providing more people across the board an ability to have their say and read what other people think – all genuinely great, democratic things. But I'm afraid that it's led to a coarsening of the body politic, far greater divisions in the country than was the case, and a trivialization of a lot of public issues.
MR: Do you go on Twitter?
FA: No, but if you'd asked me a year ago, would I be doing a podcast, I would've said no. So will I wind up on Twitter? I don't know. Maybe.
Clear View
MR: You’ve been remarkably productive over a very long career – how have you kept up with new technology?
FA: I haven't. It takes me a long time to learn the most menial tasks. I'm very good at getting on Zoom if someone gives me the link. But even finding a photograph – I was looking for my youngest grandchild on my iPhone – that was a major task. I was interviewed by the New York Times a year ago about Clearview, and the tech-knowledgable journalist really smartly asked me, “Do you have a smartphone?” I didn't know the word “smartphone,” and so I was put to the moral effort of “Do I lie?” So I said, “No.” She seemed delighted that I didn’t know what a smartphone was, especially since I was representing Clearview AI.
MR: Wait, so do you have an iPhone?
FA: I do – I just had never heard the word “smartphone.”
MR: So my bubbie was fantastic at email and really enjoyed using new technology, and my grandfather just didn’t – he wasn’t interested in keeping up with the latest gadget or tech. What do you think accounts for the fact that you're pretty hip, basically?
FA: I'm pretty hip. I just did a one-hour interview about Twitter, and I'm not even on Twitter.
MR: But you know about Twitter?
FA: I know about it, and I comment, I think, intelligently about it. I'm just saying I haven't leapt into using it. And I'm not alone in worrying sometimes about some of the baleful impact of it on our society.
MR: When you sit down to write a draft do you do it in longhand? Do you type?
FA: I used to do it typing, but I have no typewriter anymore. I write a lot of notes in pencil on paper, but more and more I'm writing on a screen. It's so much faster. And the idea that you can delete in a mini-second…I've spent too much of my life rewriting things I wrote in pencil.
MR: What’s the last book you read?
FA: The book I’m reading is called The Newspaper Axis. It's a fascinating book about the newspapers in England and the United States in the years leading up to World War II that were all but pro-Nazi.
MR: Have you ever read Shirer’s Berlin Diary?
FA: Sure, sure – years ago. I loved it. His name ought to be on the list of my favorite journalists you asked for earlier. He offered a lot, and he wrote really well.
Very American
MR: Do you have any recollections of World War II?
FA: Yes. I was in public school then. I remember when World War II ended, I was in camp, and we all cheered. I was nine then.
MR: What kind of camp did you go to?
FA: I went to a bunch of camps that were surprisingly left-wing given that my parents were not, but I went to camps where you play softball.
MR: Did you go to any Zionist camps like Bnei Akiva?
FA: No. My parents were not religious at all.
MR: Do you have any religious practice?
FA: Very little. I was married 58 years ago to an Israeli woman who grew up in a much more religious atmosphere. And as a result, I came to go to synagogue with her, not every week, but with some frequency. My parents had not done that. I was bar mitzvah-ed after being one of the only kids in my dominantly Jewish public school class who didn't go to Hebrew school because my parents didn’t send me.
MR: Do you speak Hebrew at all with your wife?
FA: Teasingly. I've now spent a good deal of time in Israel. We used to go there every summer to bring our children over – to see their Israeli grandparents.
MR: Did you ever think about living there?
FA: No.
MR: Why not?
FA: I'm not Israeli. I'm very American and it never occurred to me.
“Don’t worry the Yankees will win.”
MR: What was the last song you listened to?
FA: “Losing My Mind” from Follies.
FA: I like torch songs.
MR: What's torch?
FA: Torch is an old word for people badly in love. There was a wonderful woman singer – Marin Mazzie – who died young just about last year who sang that song in a particularly dramatic way.
MR: Do you like going to the theater?
FA: I haven't done anything like the rest of the world for the last two years, but yes, I liked going to the theater. I wasn't a theater buff. I probably spent more time at Yankee Stadium than in any theater.
MR: When you think about the Yankees, what team comes to mind?
FA: '49 and '56.
It's '56 because of Mantle's season and '49 because David Halberstam wrote a wonderful book about the '49 Yankees. The closest race all year with the Red Sox, and the Yankees had to win the last two games of the season to win the pennant and they did. DiMaggio was old, but still on the team then. And I was born in the Bronx.
MR: Where?
FA: A 15-minute walk from the stadium. Anderson Avenue. And my parents moved to Queens to Rego Park when I was five. I went to public school in Queens – Forest Hills High School. But the '49 Yankees were the best.
MR: What were your feelings about the Dodgers at the time?
FA: Rooting against them strongly, full time. In those days, the Giants were really out of it. They had no fans in New York. No surprise. It was all Yankees and Dodgers fans. And I was a passionate Yankee fan.
MR: Do you like listening to games on the radio or do you like watching them?
FA: Back then I had a portable radio that I put under my covers at night and would listen so my mother wouldn't know – as I'm sure she did – that I wasn't sleeping.
Now I watch the Yankees a lot. I don't have the passion anymore that than I once did. For one thing I got used to losing. The Yankees of my generation were a winning team almost every year. But even now I am still a serious Yankee fan.
In fact, there’s a story I love to tell about my mother who was born in Belarus and came here when she was five and grew up in really poor circumstances who spoke perfect English, but she didn't know anything about baseball. I was listening to the radio all the time, listening to the Yankee games and getting very nervous. And my mother, who didn't know about baseball, knew about the Yankees. And so she would say, “Don't worry, the Yankees will win.” And they did most of the time. That was very reassuring.
Judge Friendly Oakes
MR: Except for clerking, you never worked for the government, correct?
FA: Correct.
MR: Why did you never want to work for the government?
FA: It never came up. I might have had a chance to have become a judge under President Carter. That subject arose.
MR: The Southern District?
FA: The Southern District. And I spoke to the Chief Judge of the Second Circuit with whom I was very friendly.
MR: Who was that?
FA: Judge Oakes from Vermont. And I remember to this day, the words he used, he said, “Almost all my colleagues would rather do what you do than what they're doing.”
MR: I call them the marble handcuffs.
FA: I think I would've liked being a judge and I enjoy the fact that's what my daughter does. But I had a very fortunate situation in the matters of I've come to handle.
MR: You know Burt Neuborne?
FA: Mm-hmm.
MR: I've developed this theory that the people who are the most robust defenders of the First Amendment have the most benign, anodyne, conservative personal lives. Do you think there's anything to this theory?
FA: Yes. I'm a good example, but I certainly have never thought of that. But certainly, as I think of the people that come to mind and to the extent I know their personal lives, that’s really quite true.
MR: You’re known as one of the preeminent First Amendment lawyers in the country’s history – but who comes to your mind when you think of that title?
FA: Well, remember I teach it also. So, I think of judges. I think of Justices Brandeis, Black, Stewart, and Kennedy. Those are the judges that come to mind.
MR: I'm not sure how to frame this question, but the First Amendment is needed to cover unconventional things – do you have any weird music or movie tastes? Have you ever been a bohemian?
FA: I’ve never needed the First Amendment as a personal protection.
MR: It’s fascinating
FA: It's true. And I hadn't thought of that, but it's certainly true. It may well have both advantages and disadvantages. One can be more dispassionate about it, which is helpful in terms of understanding and feeling the other side, which is, in my view, extremely helpful as an advocate to really get it.
MR: There’s a whole bar of religious First Amendment lawyers. Who comes to mind in that? Who do you think is the Floyd Abrams of the religion clauses? Nat Lewin?
FA: Yes – Nat Lewin. I worked with Nat on one or two matters, and I got to know him a bit. I also think of Jack Greenberg. I don't limit thinking of him to religious cases, but as a great civil liberties lawyer, I certainly put Jack there.
I remember so clearly flying to South Africa once with Jack to help draft a possible new constitution for the country when Apartheid was ending. It happened to be we both left from London on South African Airways. I said, “Jack, what are you doing? How are you flying on South African Airways?” And he said, “I like fascist airlines. I like the idea the pilot knows that if anything happened to the plane, his family will suffer.”
MR: This is like Mussolini with the trains running on time – no one asked where they were going to.
Casablanca
MR: Do you watch TV? Do you watch movies?
FA: Old ones mostly. But, yes, I watch movies.
MR: Is there any movie that's coming to mind right now?
FA: Sigh. Of course Casablanca comes to mind and I've read two books on Casablanca I want you to know.
MR: Really?
FA: It's not just a little thing to me.
MR: What's the sway of Casablanca?
FA: Well, let me say first, I saw it for the first time when I was in law school. So I was 22 or something and by myself and Ingrid Bergman looked at me and she was in love with me. She just, she couldn't get enough of it.
The patriotism of it, the devotion at the end…
MR: Do you like [sings “As Time Goes By”]?
FA: Well, yeah. But not the way you sing it, if you'll forgive me. Yes. I do remember that song from that movie. I remember the Germans singing a song, which in English would be “The Watch on the Rhine.” That’s when Humphrey Bogart and Paul Henreid are sort of standing upstairs near the office of Bogart and at the bar the Germans start singing. And that's the one where Henreid goes down, looks at the little orchestra and says, “play La Marseillaise, play it!”
Second Lieutenant Abrams
MR: Didn’t you serve in the military?
FA: I did. I was a first lieutenant in the Army.
I took ROTC at Cornell, which was required then for two years, for all male students. Cornell was a land-grant college, and the effect of that was ROTC was compulsory for two years. And then the war in Korea was on.
MR: Did you go to Korea?
FA: No. I was in the peace-time army. I graduated from Cornell in 1956, but I graduated in uniform because I was sworn in as a second lieutenant that day. And I was in the Army for six months, in active duty – peace-time army, no military service and was promoted as a rote to being a first lieutenant.
MR: Do you still shoot a gun? What is your view about guns?
FA: No, I have a typically liberal view about guns. But I did learn how to take apart an M1 rifle and how to put it together again. And I taught it to new soldiers. It was a very good experience for me.
MR: What do you think about universal military service?
FA: I'm in favor of universal public service for people of a certain age. I think that should be required. A military service is one useful learning experience, but there are others which are more directly aimed at improving our society rather than simply protecting it.
MR: Are there any charities you like to support?
FA: This may not be responsive, but I created the Abrams Institute at Yale Law School with a substantial gift. And that charitable organization exists to protect the First Amendment.
Dangerous Ideas
MR: Do you collect any art? Are there any artists you like?
FA: My wife purchased some wonderful art for us years ago, which is on our walls. A very nice Miró and Paul Delvaux, a wonderful Belgian artist.
MR: Do you have any feinschmecker tastes? Are you a connoisseur of anything?
FA: No.
MR: What about pens? Is there a particular type of pen or pencil that you, that you're fastidious about using?
FA: No. I'm blasé about such things. They have no meaning to me. At an earlier time in my life, I would've answered about the Yankees and I've read a lot of books.
MR: Do you throw books out or do you keep them?
FA: Almost exclusively keep them or give them to people in the family.
MR: Have you ever read the Bible cover to cover?
FA: Cover-to-cover? No. But because we celebrated Jewish holidays, I went for a number of years as an adult to synagogue on Saturday morning, and lunched with friends from the synagogue thereafter, and I certainly came to read more of the Bible than I read as a child.
MR: You know they have these banned book reading lists of books that were, at one point in time, censored or prohibited. Did you ever read these? Like Lady Chatterley's Lover.
FA: Occasionally. But I’d be more likely to read the three books I bought last week – I hate to show you how narrow I am – but one is Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War, and The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler, which I mentioned earlier.
MR: Do you think in a different life you would've been a newspaper man?
FA: No, no. Or if I had been, I wouldn't have been a great one. I think I was very fortunate to find something that I did very well, and which has enormous social impact. So, I’m ready to leave it at that.