Notice Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.. RESTRICTIONS Opened July 14, 1969 [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
July 14, 1969 by Jerry N. Hess HESS: Judge, could you give me a little of your personal background: where were you born, where were you educated, and what positions have you held? TANNENWALD: Well, I was born in a little town in upstate NewYork called Valatie, which is about halfway between Hudson and Albany, and it is best known because it is the next town to Kinderhook, which is where Martin Van Buren was born. I went to grammar school in Valatie and in those days there were no psychological problems in skipping children, or at least people weren't aware of them, so that I completed the eight grammar grades in five years, and graduated from the Valatie grammar school at the age of ten. I was eleven the month after I graduated. At that point my mother and father moved to Albany and I entered the William S. Hackett Junior High School, which was the first class of the junior high school in Albany. I spent a year there, and then went on to the Albany High School and graduated from there in 1931. I was fifteen the month after I graduated from high school, and the combination of the fact that my age, being so young, and the fact that I didn't have any money, caused me to wait a year before I went to college. I spent that year taking a couple of courses in the high school. I think I took a chemistry course and worked for the legislative correspondent of the New York Times every afternoon. In those days the New York Times used to publish the list of new corporations formed every day, and it was from the office of the secretary of state in Albany and type it up and send it in to New York. I had the job of typing. I was not a typist. I did it by the old-fashioned hunt and peck system, which I still use. In September of 1932 I entered Brown University in Providence on a scholarship and graduated there fours years later summa cum laude and then went to the Harvard Law School. I put myself through Brown, principally by borrowing enough money to see me through my first year, and I did the same thing at law school. Other periods I worked. It may be an interesting commentary to note that the aggregate of my gross expenses before scholarships and so on for my four years at Brown was approximately the same as the cost of one year of my younger son's education at Dartmouth some thirty odd years later. I entered Harvard Law School and kept my nose to the grindstone the first year and ended up first in my class, made the Harvard Law Review. I was also the first in my second year and for the three years' average. I was note editor of the Harvard Law Review. While I was in law school I did some outside tutoring to make some money, and also in my last year in law school, I helped the then professor of taxation, Erwin Griswold, later dean and now Solicitor General of the United States, write a couple of briefs. His wife had been stricken with polio the latter part of my second year in law school, perhaps the summer of 1938. In any event, my last year which was '38-'39, academic year, his wife was flat on her back in the hospital in Cleveland, and the financial drain on him was enormous, so he did a considerable amount of outside practice. He had two or three of his students helping him write briefs, and so on. I was one of the few members of my class who decided I wanted to go into private practice instead of going into Government service, and I made arrangements to join the firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges when I finished law school. In the spring of 1939 when Professor Magruder was appointed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, he asked me to come with him as his law clerk for a year, but I had made up my mind I wanted private practice, and I had a job so I didn't need the clerkship for a job, and I guess I was ambitious to make money in those days and so I turned him down. It's one of the few regrets I have in my life, not that it would have helped me pragmatically. I don't think it would have had any direct bearing on my future career, but I always have felt that I missed a year that would have been a very pleasant memory and a very wonderful experience, because Magruder was quite a man. I entered the firm and did general practice until shortly after Pearl Harbor, when I became very restless. I tried to get a commission but couldn't on account of my eyes, and I had lots of friends who had been classmates of mine in law school who were working in Washington. The bulk of the members of the Law Review, as a matter of fact, came to Washington to work, and I started looking for something that would give me an outlet for my emotional problems of not being willing to stay in private practice while the war was going on. One of my good friends, who unfortunately is now deceased, was Philip L. Graham, who later became publisher of the Washington Post. Phil was then assistant general counsel of the Lend-Lease Administration. I talked to Phil and he found out that Dean Acheson, who was the Assistant Secretary of State, was trying to augment his staff but had budgetary difficulties and so temporarily it was worked out that Lend-Lease hired me, and I went to work for Acheson in the State Department. This is why I am listed as a principal legal consultant to the Lend-Lease Administration. I never really worked for Lend-Lease. I started from the very first day I went to work, which was I think in May of 1942, over in the State Department working for Acheson in the economic warfare area. I think after a month or so I was assigned to the Foreign Funds Control Division, which involved the diplomatic and political side of the Treasury Department's exchange control regulations during the war. HESS: What were some of your duties while you were there? TANNENWALD: The duties of that division were--it was a very small one--were to maintain liaison and coordination with the Treasury Department, in order to make sure that the diplomatic and international political considerations on controls over transactions and dollars were taken into account for freezing foreign-owned assets. For example, one of the provisions that came in, that came under consideration, was the question of freezing or getting the Latin American countries, in addition to ourselves, to stop the importation of U.S. currency, green stuff, and this involved negotiations with Brazilians, for example, and I was involved in that. We also were involved with the Alien Property Custodian, and some of the political implications of the seizure of enemy-owned assets which were held--purportedly held by the enemy via a neutral country. For example, I was involved in the seizure of American Bosch and what to do about it. The Swedes claimed that it was a Swedish corporation. These were the kinds of problems that we got into. I stayed there only for a year, because it became apparent to me that I was going to be drafted, and while I had no basic objections to serving in the army as a buck private it seemed to me that if I could find an assignment that would make better use of my talents, I would be well advised to do it. In 1942 the United States Air Forces, the Army Air Forces, under General [Henry H.] Arnold, had decided to copy a system that the British had created at the time of the Battle of Britain, which was to opt the services of the Air Force and to make scientific analyses at the operational level and put their conclusions, if they could, into practice, without having the information come back to the laboratories in the United States, which meant it would be six months or a year before the answers came back and by that time it might be too late. The chief of that setup in the Army Air Force was a professor in my law school, W. Barton Leach, and Leach felt very strongly that there was a role for the lawyers to play, particularly if they were possessed of technical background. And I had had the equivalent of a mathematics major in college, and so I was offered the chance to become the deputy chief of the Operations Analysis Section of the Eighth Fighter Command in England, and I took it in the spring of 1943. Leach's theory, which was quite valid and proved out in my case and a few other cases, was that a lawyer could perform two functions in that kind of a setup. Let me just say a word about what the setup was. Most of the sections were on the bomber side, and they would do analyses of the strike photographs to determine such questions as the proper pattern for bombing, whether you bombed individually or whether you bombed on the leader of a squadron or a wing; or the various kinds of fuses and size of bombs for particular types of targets. On the fighter side, we got involved in problems such as the proper belting of ammunition, the study of combat film. Every fighter plane automatically took a film of his combat to determine ways in which fighter pilots might be trained for better accuracy, because this was before the automatic sighting mechanisms, and the pilots were notoriously poor in their shooting capabilities. Gasoline consumption studies, which became very important as they tried to push the outer range of the fighter planes, to Berlin for example, and then later in the Pacific, when the planes based on the Philippines and Okinawa were flying over water into Japan. But the point that Leach had and he was quite right, was that a lawyer could serve a very useful purpose in that area. Two ways: First of all, he was the administrative officer of the section, he was the one who had to take care of all the nonsense of getting the supplies and getting the travel orders and the day-to-day housekeeping problems that most of the long-haired scientists didn't want any part of, and even if they would have had to do it, they wouldn't have known how to do it. Secondly, the key to the success of these sections lay in the ability of the scientific personnel who were members of the section to communicate their conclusions from their studies to the commanding general of the unit. This meant that you had to put it in language that the average military officer would understand, and here again, Leach felt, and quite correctly, that a lawyer, particularly a lawyer with a scientific background, could perform a useful function. I found tha |
