Ramsey Clark

Ramsey Clark (born December 18, 1927, Dallas, Texas—died April 9, 2021, New York, New York) human rights lawyer and former U.S. attorney general under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Clark—the son of Tom C. Clark, who served as attorney general under President Harry Truman and later as an associate Supreme Court Justice—followed his father into law and graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1950. He worked briefly in a private practice and then made his way in 1961 to the U.S. Department of Justice during the early days of the Kennedy administration. He soon emerged as one of the Justice Department’s more radical lawyers, often at odds with prevailing opinions on civil rights law enforcement. Employed as assistant attorney general in the lands division from 1961 to 1965, he was one of the few senior department figures to advocate a more active role for the Justice Department in protecting civil rights activists.

With the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the Justice Department under President Lyndon Johnson became much more active in the field of civil rights. Yet, the Justice Department found itself struggling to understand and deal with the civil unrest triggered by the Vietnam War and the perceived slow pace and limited scope of social change. Clark was thrust further into that environment as he became deputy attorney general in 1965, acting attorney general in October 1966, and finally attorney general in March 1967.

Clark won both acclaim and condemnation for his work as attorney general. His delicate balancing act in weighing the interests of the state against individual rights to privacy and protest was not always well received. Indeed, Richard Nixon made him a central issue during the 1968 presidential campaign and promised a new attorney general if he were elected. To address civil unrest, Clark implemented the Community Relations Service and the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance (later replaced by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration) programs, which emphasized riot prevention and effective police-community relations. He also defended the right to privacy by denying wiretaps requested under a dubious catchall provision of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. At the same time, he prosecuted a huge number of draft-evasion cases—more than 1,500 in 1968 alone, the most notable of which was the prosecution of Benjamin Spock for conspiracy to encourage draft evasion.

Unfortunately for Clark, his balancing act came crashing down when he created the Interdivisional Information Unit in 1968 to collate, store, and disseminate data on the composition and motivations of “dissident groups.” Those data were provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to prevent civil unrest, but he failed to provide the FBI a framework within which it should operate. That allowed the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to target groups like the Black Panthers and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and led to gross violations of civil liberties.

Upon leaving office as Nixon became president, Clark embraced his activist tendencies with a passion. In his legal work, he took on clients like Vietnam War protester Father Daniel Berrigan, and he proceeded to lay out his views on criminal justice in his first book, Crime in America: Observations on Its Nature, Causes, Prevention and Control (1970). For Clark, crime emerged from the dehumanizing effects of poverty, racism, ignorance, and violence. He argued that America needed to address those problems through education and rehabilitation rather than resorting to prisons, which he saw as criminal hothouses that only exacerbated the problem.

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In addition to championing a more holistic approach to criminal justice, Clark sought to address specific issues. In 1973 he and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Roy Wilkins launched an excoriating attack on the Chicago Police Department and the state’s attorney for their roles in the 1969 shooting deaths of Black Panthers Mark Clark and Fred Hampton. Clark claimed that that kind of violence occurs when such little value is placed on others that perpetrators see no wrong in seeking to control or destroy them. That charge would be the leitmotif of his subsequent political activism as his emphasis shifted from U.S. government actions at home to actions abroad.

Since the 1970s Clark opposed U.S. military interventions wherever they occurred—Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, Libya, Somalia, Iraq, the Balkans, and Iraq again—largely through his International Action Center. In 1992 he wrote The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, in which he accused the United States of war crimes, condemned the United Nations for its sanctions against Iraq, and criticized the American media for failing to inform the public. He was also a leading figure in the campaign to impeach President George W. Bush over the Iraq War. In 2013 he led an American antiwar delegation to Syria to protest potential U.S. military action against the Syrian government’s alleged use of chemical weapons.

While such activities have been seen as anti-American, it was his choice of legal clients that made Clark controversial. He represented Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana—accused of leading Hutu killing squads against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Clark contended that his clients could not receive justice at the hands of their accusers, though he was widely accused of employing some dubious moral and legal logic in making those claims—such as in his condemnation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for dispensing “colonial” justice.