What a marvelous thing it is, both for the country and me that I, the son of an illiterate merchant, am now going to see the president of the United States.
Morris Abram was sixteen years old when he entered the University of Georgia in 1934. At five feet, six inches tall, he had delivered his high school valedictory address at Fitzgerald High School standing on a stool to enable him to see over the podium. It did not take long, however, to reach his adult height, just short of six feet.
The state of Georgia was the first to charter a state-sponsored university. The university’s first building, opened in 1801, was called Franklin College of Arts and Sciences in honor of Benjamin Franklin.1 Abram had to travel two hundred miles from Fitzgerald to reach the university’s main campus in Athens, located in the northeastern part of the state.
Coming from a rural town well outside Georgia’s political and cultural center, Abram was at first overwhelmed by his new surroundings. Still, he found exhilarating the opportunities they afforded him to pursue the intellectual interests he had begun to cultivate as a teenager in Fitzgerald. Abram decided early in his freshman year that he had little interest in joining a Jewish fraternity. He was, he later wrote, far too proud to assimilate with Gentiles, far too “antisemitic” to associate with exclusionary Jews, and far too socially inept to fit in with assimilated German Jews. When invited to join, he responded that he was personally opposed to groups that were segregated by race or religion.2
Still, the interest in Judaism he had cultivated largely on his own growing up in Fitzgerald led him to flirt early on with the idea of becoming, like his great-grandfather, a Reform rabbi. Attending Friday night services on campus, he befriended the local rabbi, who agreed to meet with him twice a week. But there were two problems. The first was his difficulty with the Hebrew language, whose alphabet he had not learned during his childhood. The second was his discovery through his exposure to the rabbi in Athens that his role was to be “the ass kisser to the rich in the congregation and to visit them on all occasions.”3
One of the ways the university opened a new world for Abram was by exposing him to students from the larger cities of Georgia and from outside the state. Some were Jews from New York to whom Abram took an immediate dislike. Loud and “ostentatiously Jewish,” he nevertheless found himself drawn to them with their ability to comprehend and talk freely about politics and high culture. Their world, he wrote, “was big, foreign, and full of new ideas.”4
One who had a large impact on Abram’s thinking was a graduate student named Joe Gitter, who had come to Athens on a teaching fellowship while pursuing a master’s degree. A mathematician, philosopher, and “a first-class mind,” Gitter had attended New York’s City College, a haven for smart New Yorkers who could not afford its private universities. His wife Naomi was the sister of Mannheim Shapiro, head of the Community Services Division of the American Jewish Committee. The Gitters lacked the arrogance of others on campus from a similar background, and Abram found that their discussions of fundamental questions helped bring about a maturation in his political outlook.5
Abram’s most lasting friendships at the university grew out of an introduction that was made by a university administrator who also headed the campus YMCA. Bobby Troutman, a devout Catholic, whose father was the general counsel of Coca-Cola, came from an old-line, wealthy Atlanta family. Gus Cleveland, a future head of the Georgia State Bar, was a Baptist from South Georgia. Troutman, Cleveland, and Abram soon began traveling the state under the auspices of the Religious Voluntary Association, a program of the YMCA, preaching the virtues of interreligious tolerance.
One of the trio’s themes was the similarity of the three religions’ traditions. Reflecting on the experience in later years, Abram noted that their discourse was made possible by papering over the enormous gulfs between their religious beliefs. The appreciative crowds reflected the fact that “we were telling people what they wanted to hear.”6
Abram came to realize that he was speaking in those days the Judaism of his mother. “The idea of the identity and peculiarity and singularity of the Jewish tradition,” he told Eli Evans, “just didn’t occur to me. I was very anti-Zionist, those nuts who were going to interfere with this sweet and easy flow of amity between Jewish Americans and other Americans by creating a state which was bound to create dual loyalties, and which was bound to create all kinds of questions in the minds of people who otherwise were very sensible and had agreed to a peaceful coexistence with Jews in this country.”7
Abram’s family background—his grandfather, great aunt, uncle, and brother were all physicians—drew him early on to the study of medicine, which he pursued during his freshman year. But an inability to excel at drawing what he saw under a microscope, particularly in comparison with the other pre-med students, combined with a fear that a career in medicine would be insufficiently stimulating, led him to abandon the idea of becoming a doctor.8 What had fascinated Abram from his childhood was the drama of the local courthouse. Now he was attracted even more to the law’s more intellectual underpinnings. At the university he began his lifelong appreciation of the “majestic prose” of the U.S. Constitution, especially the words of the Fourteenth Amendment that guaranteed “equal protection of the law.”9
Abram’s teenage success as a public speaker in his hometown led him shortly after his arrival at the university to seek out the two literary societies—in reality, debating associations—on campus. His first choice, Demosthenon, named for the Greek orator Demosthenes, was one of the first literary societies in the United States, founded in 1804, the same year the university graduated its first class. A leading member was Abram’s classmate Herman Talmadge.
Talmadge’s father Eugene, who had succeeded Richard Russell as the state’s governor two years earlier, was on the verge of establishing the machine that enabled him to dominate Georgia’s politics for the next two decades. Abram was already familiar enough with his rants against FDR and organized labor to steer clear of any group with which his son was closely associated. Instead, he joined a rival organization known as Phi Kappa, founded in 1831, that carried on a friendly rivalry with Demosthenon.
The debating coach in the university’s English Department got wind of Abram’s walkout at the older institution because of the younger Talmadge’s involvement in it and arranged a debate between the principals of a burgeoning political rivalry. Georgia governors then served two-year terms and Herman Talmadge’s father was up for reelection that fall. The topic was whether Eugene Talmadge should be reelected governor.
Talmadge whipped up the working men with whom he had packed the large audience in the campus chapel in the same way his father did with his supporters on the campaign trail. Abram countered by accusing his opponent of a lack of originality. “I don’t believe he would be very proud of his son tonight,” Abram asserted. The tactic worked with the judges, who ruled that Abram won the debate over Talmadge.10 The two would remain bitter political enemies throughout Abram’s battles against the county unit system while Talmadge was fighting to preserve it after succeeding his father as governor in 1948. (Years later they would become friends and even business partners after working together on a fundraising project for the university.)
It was during Abram’s junior year that he became president of Phi Kappa. Shortly thereafter, he came up with the idea of inviting President Roosevelt to become a member in order “to put one over on the Demosthenon.” FDR had established his “Little White House” in the state’s Warm Springs, which he frequented to receive treatment for polio.
Abram was astonished and delighted when the president accepted his offer to become an honorary member of Phi Kappa. Because his disability created logistical obstacles to receiving his membership in Athens, Roosevelt invited Abram and his fellow members to join him in Warm Springs for the induction. “I thought,” said Abram, “what a marvelous thing it is, both for the country and me that I, the son of an illiterate merchant, am now going to see the President of the United States. It just filled me with pride.”11
Abram invited his father to travel from Fitzgerald for the induction. Although he agreed to make the trip, Sam Abram chose to wait outside the gates of the Little White House during the ceremony. Following Abram’s presentation and the president’s acceptance, father and son left “with a great feeling of elation and accomplishment.”12
But in the glare of what he called “celebrity and the high places,” situations in which he frequently found himself later in his life, Abram often identified with his father, standing awkwardly outside the gates of the Little White House. Many years after the ceremony, when Abram drove his wife and youngest son to the site where he had personally inducted President Roosevelt into his college literary society, he stopped before the entrance where they all got out of the car in tribute to Sam Abram.13
During Abram’s junior year at the university, the year he began his formal legal education, he competed for a Rhodes Scholarship, a goal he had set for himself as far back as his high school days. Although he advanced beyond the state competition, he fell short in the regionals. With assistance from his roommate Bobby Troutman, who told Abram he needed to stop speaking “like a hick,” he succeeded in his senior year. Graduating summa cum laude in 1938, having achieved no grade during his four years below 90, he was accepted into Oxford’s Pembroke College for the following fall.14
But Abram never set sail for Great Britain, as planned, during the fall of 1939. When Hitler’s troops invaded Poland on September 1, the trust that operates the Rhodes Scholarship moved quickly to suspend the program. As Abram’s hopes of studying at Oxford faded, the University of Chicago’s law school announced an offer of tuition scholarships for all would-be Rhodes Scholars similarly affected by the breakout of World War II. But even with free tuition, Abram lacked the resources to cover his living expenses. Robert Troutman Sr. stepped forward to make it possible for his son’s friend to complete his legal education at the highly regarded law school.
Abram found his year of study there particularly challenging, entering as a transfer student “with poor preparation” to a university whose law school had earned a reputation for academic rigor. For better or worse, he wrote to his friend Bobby Troutman, the school emphasized the philosophical underpinnings of the law, leaving the more technical aspects to be learned on one’s own.15
Although Abram had been accepted at Harvard with a scholarship, the university offered only one year of credit for the two years he spent at the University of Georgia Law School. Chicago offered credit for both years, enabling him to enter as a third-year student. Despite his status as a Rhodes Scholar, he was frightened “not of failure but that I would not excel here.”16 Still, as he wrote to Troutman, a student at Harvard Law School and the roommate of Joseph Kennedy Jr., the older brother of JFK, he was enjoying the work more than he did at Georgia. And while he found the students not as friendly as those he had met in Athens, he developed relationships with many. They breathe the air of intellectuality, he noted, and while that could grow stale, “that is a dislike all Southerners must not carry too far.”17
Abram quickly befriended several members of the faculty, including Fritz Kessler, a leading authority in Europe on Anglo-Saxon law who had fled Nazi Germany in 1934 with his Jewish wife. Kessler, an adherent of the school of legal realism, became best known for his work on contract law. Abram described him to Troutman as his ablest professor, with a magnetic personality and “the most delightful man I have ever known.”18
By November he was telling his friend that he no longer needed financial support, having taken a position that paid forty dollars a month. “I can never thank you and your father enough for your help,” he wrote. “Always I shall try to be the sort of person that your father would want to see whom he had helped become.”19 The job was assistant director of the Hillel Foundation, which serviced the Jewish students on campus and gave Abram the opportunity to put into practice ideas and principles he had begun developing as an undergraduate. In this role his mentor was Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky, who headed the Hillel Foundation program at Northwestern and who had taken on the task of setting up a chapter at Chicago.
Abram had met Pekarsky shortly after his arrival at the university, and the rabbi asked him shortly thereafter to lead one of the graduate seminars the foundation was sponsoring. As the relationship grew, Pekarsky became a Jewish role model, and for the first time Abram was made to feel “that Jewishness could be quite different from Protestant practice without being incomprehensible to me personally and out of phase with the American social setting.” A disciple of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Judaism’s Reconstructionist Movement, Rabbi Pekarsky helped Abram restore his Jewish identity, which had been diminished during his ecumenical travels for the YMCA with his Christian friends at the University of Georgia.20
Abram’s correspondence with his friend Bobby Troutman records a deep concern about his future as well as an uncertainty about the direction he should take in starting out his legal career. One possibility was to seek a position in Washington, but he was discouraged from doing so by the senior Troutman, who believed it would burden him with a specialization that would close off future possibilities.21
Abram began exploring his options in Atlanta. Janice Rothschild Blumberg remembers meeting him at the home of Leonard Haas, a prominent Atlanta attorney who was the ACLU’s first lawyer in Georgia. Abram’s accomplishments as an undergraduate, she said, “made him well-known particularly to interested Jewish attorneys in Atlanta. I knew a couple of them who were close to my parents who frequently invited him to their homes. Their wives had intentions of getting to know him because they would have a brunch party on Sunday and would invite all the single girls in Atlanta, I mean we were all single, the girls in our crowd who they thought were reasonably intelligent, to meet him.”22
But Abram was already attached. During his junior year in Athens he began a romance with a young woman named Virginia Somerville from the small town of Rockmart in the northwestern part of the state. Abram described her as “tall and willowy, attractive, very sweet, reasonably intelligent and quite believing in Jesus, though thoroughly accepting of me.” Although he dated other women during his year in Chicago, he told Bobby Troutman that “every other girl is dim beside her.”23
Abram told Eli Evans that he and Virginia didn’t have sex because this was not done “unless you intended to marry the person.” And marriage was never really in the cards for them. For one thing, Abram said, “her horizons were limited,” and “I knew very well that I had more potential in me than she had in her.” And he did not think he could spend his life with someone “who genuinely believed in Jesus.” But she was loving and “I had many a pleasant day with her.” Although they ceased to go out with one another in 1943, they stayed in touch for many years afterward.24
In view of Abram’s degree from a prestigious law school, his legal career got off to a surprisingly rocky start. During his undergraduate days at the University of Georgia, Abram had spent many weekends at the Troutman home at 132 Peachtree Circle in the affluent Ansley Park section of Atlanta, where the family had a live-in butler and maid. Abram was grateful to his friend, who “opened up Atlanta” for him.
But if he expected to receive an offer from the firm of Spaulding, Troutman and Meadows upon his return to Atlanta following graduation, he was soon to be disappointed. “Here was a man,” he said, referring to his best friend’s father, “who thought I was very bright, invested money in me, would never let me repay him, and never thought of inviting me into his law firm, where his son was then practicing, nor did the son think of it.”25
Miles Alexander, who became a senior partner in the Atlanta law firm Kilpatrick, Townsend and Stockton, knew Abram early in his career by reputation and later through his involvement in the local chapter of the American Jewish Committee. Alexander said that in those days, “Atlanta firms did not take women, did not take blacks, and many did not take Jews. I know that early in Morris’s career that left a real mark on him because his closest friends in college were Bobby Troutman, Gus Cleveland, and Harry Baxter, and they went with the prestigious firms.”26
Many years after Abram’s failure to find a place in the Spaulding Troutman law firm, the younger Troutman’s sister told Abram that he was acceptable “until I got mixed up with the colored question or the county unit, and then, brother, she said, they were steering clear of me but really because they didn’t want to be tarred.”27
Although he had friendly conversations with the principals of seven law firms, including Haas, he received only one offer.28 Allen Post, who had served on the committee that had selected Abram for the Rhodes Scholarship, took him into his practice after he received his JD from the University of Chicago in the summer of 1940. Allowing himself only ten days to prepare for the Georgia Bar exam, Abram was stunned to learn that he had failed it and would need to retake it later that year. He later claimed the reason he didn’t pass the exam was because he had atrocious handwriting, and the panel of examiners was old and didn’t want to bother reading his responses. The evidence he offered was that the only difference between his first and second attempt was that in the latter successful effort he took more care with his handwriting.29
Nonetheless, while waiting for the results of the retake of the exam, Abram was offered a position in the firm Howell and Post at the standard wage of seventy dollars per month. The senior partner in the firm, Hugh Howell, a former chairman of the state Democratic Party’s Executive Committee, had been a close adviser of Eugene Talmadge early in his career. When Talmadge ran for governor two years earlier, Abram had campaigned against him.30 By the time Abram joined the firm, Howell and the senior Talmadge had become enemies.31 To make matters even more complicated, a senior associate at the firm of Howell and Post, himself a Klansman, was the son of the Grand Dragon of the Knights of the KKK.32
Abram did have one more opportunity when the head of the Fulton National Bank offered him a position there. But a career with the bank, he believed, would restrict his political views and the work would be “damn dull.” But there was another reason. Abram saw no Jews in high places in any of Atlanta’s banks, and he wasn’t about to enter an institution in which there would be some lid on where I could go.”33 Many years later, recalling the experience during his presidency of the American Jewish Committee, he took the opportunity at a gathering of one thousand and five hundred of the country’s top bankers to chide their industry for not advancing Jews to management positions.34
At first Abram was encouraged by the opportunity to practice law in Atlanta. Allen Post, he informed Bobby Troutman, “I find to be a brilliant man, but even more than that. He is fair and friendly as well. Mr. Howell has his limitations, but there is no man I have known who is more genuinely kind or willing to help whenever he can.”35
But for the most part, he found the work disappointing. Post, who had gained a first in law from Oxford’s Bailliol College, had little time for mentoring and Howell lacked the ability to do so.36 What was most significant about this interlude between the completion of his law degree and Abram’s decision to join the U.S. military was his introduction to Carlyn Feldman, the daughter of a prominent member of the Atlanta Jewish community who had founded the Puritan Chemical Company. Abram was drawn to her extraordinary beauty. Although the two began seeing one another, marriage was out of the question, since she was still in her late teens. As he wrote to Bobby Troutman, “she is still so young there is no need for much pressure.”37
But with war approaching, Abram was beginning to feel financial pressure. He was determined to follow the example set by his older brother in enabling him to afford college by doing the same for his younger sister Jeanette. He was already a second lieutenant in the Air Force reserves from his ROTC days, and by enlisting he could choose his desired location: Fort McPherson, a base near Atlanta.
Abram spent the war years entirely in the United States. During the early months after his enlistment, he was telling Troutman that he had intentions of marrying Virginia Somerville.38 But two years later his life took an entirely different turn. A friend of his at the University of Chicago had told him during his year there about his girlfriend, a woman from a prominent Florida family. Abram was more than intrigued by her photo and the letters she sent to his friend.39
Toward the end of 1943, Abram’s friend from his days in Chicago gave him an introduction to his now former girlfriend Jane Maguire in Orlando as she prepared to participate as a sponsor for the Orange Bowl in Miami on New Year’s Day. A twenty-three-year-old graduate of the Florida State College for Women, Jane Maguire was a reporter and feature writer for the Orlando Morning Sentinel. To Abram, she represented the perfect mate for someone seeking to move from the world of his childhood to one to which he aspired. Jane’s father, Raymer Maguire, was a past president of the Florida Bar Association, a leading candidate for national ABA president, and chairman of the state board of regents. Jane’s mother, Ruth McCulloch Maguire, was a cousin of the founder of the McCrory chain of five and dime stores. In addition to her role as a journalist, Jane was a member of the Orlando Welfare Association and the Spinsters Cotillion.40
To Abram, “this was all I was looking for in terms of family,” a gate opener who satisfied all his ambitions. Coming from a well-connected family, Jane Maguire was beautiful, elegant, and well-dressed. In short, she had “all the graces to open all the doors and to make me feel more comfortable socially with all the gaucheries” that came from growing up in Fitzgerald.41 They were married in a formal ceremony by the pastor of Orlando’s First Methodist Church at the home of a friend of Jane’s parents, who were separated. Neither Raymer Maguire, who gave his daughter in marriage, nor his wife was told that Morris and Jane had been married first by the Reform rabbi in Albany, Georgia, two weeks before.42
The year 1944 marked brief stints for the newlyweds as part of Abram’s military service in Illinois, Alabama, Washington DC, and Texas. The following year, as the war was winding down and his wife was pregnant with their first child, they moved to Santa Ana, California, where Abram, now a major, was sent to direct the public relations effort at the country’s largest Air Force base. There he met Gus Tyler, who as a young socialist had argued passionately against rearmament in the 1930s to prepare for a Second World War. With Tyler as his tutor, he gained an understanding of the bewildering factional distinctions that characterized the American political left. As the war was winding down, Abram and Tyler organized a conference to address the needs of returning soldiers, and its success helped garner for Major Abram the Legion of Merit.43
Abram had not abandoned his dream of studying at Oxford. Shortly after the war he began making inquiries about how to enroll for the term beginning in January 1946. By then the trust that runs the program had relaxed the rule about the scholars bringing their wives, but children were not allowed to accompany them. On the advice of the trust’s American secretary, Swarthmore president Frank Aydelotte, Abram traveled to England with both Jane and their young daughter Ruth and managed to enroll without incident.44
The two years spent in England were for Morris Abram an idyllic time. The sweeping beauty of his surroundings, the university’s rich cultural traditions, and the intellectual stimulation he received from some of the world’s most brilliant minds were more than he could have hoped for. But the living conditions they faced were less than ideal. Morris, Jane, and Ruth lived in a mews flat infested with mice. It had a potbelly stove and an insufficient amount of coal to deal with what Abram described as the coldest place he had ever experienced. Jane would ride her bicycle to the coke ovens and as soon as the coke came out would bring twenty-five cents worth home to keep the baby warm.45
Jane, though not able to advance her own career, was more than up to the domestic challenges they faced. “We lived in a tiny attic apartment that could only be reached through a trapped door,” said Ruth, “but that didn’t stop my mother from entertaining university dons who had to enter through that trapped door to reach the modest flat. It never embarrassed her; she was a princess and he was a king.”46
At Oxford, Abram pursued a BA in politics, philosophy, and economics on the advice of his tutor after abandoning his original plan to study for a PhD.47 It was the relationship Abram developed with Arthur Lehman Goodhardt, the Regius Professor of Jurisprudence, that opened the door to a life-changing experience. Born into an American Jewish family, Goodhardt was the grandson of one of the founders of the Lehman Brothers investment banking house. During Abram’s first year at Oxford, the professor visited U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in Nuremburg, Germany, where he was serving as the Chief Prosecutor of Nazi war criminals and returned with an enthusiastic evaluation of the conduct of the trials.
Jackson agreed to Goodhart’s request to take Abram on during his summer recess at Oxford as a member of the chief prosecutor’s staff. In Nuremburg the Abrams lived in luxury at the Grand Hotel where the staff was housed, a welcome contrast to their meager accommodations in Oxford. In the Grand Hotel, he recalled, “we were the rulers.”48
Abram’s assigned task was to comb the trial record of the top Nazi leaders to come up with evidence that could be used against those German industrialists who had fueled the Nazi war machine. He was convinced that all those in this defendant category were guilty, and that the ultimate tragedy was that “the sons of bitches never got their just desserts.” Most guilty, he had no doubt, were Hjalmer Schact, the banker, well known and respected in the West, and Franz Von Pappen, a friend of the pope. Abram believed their source of protection was the fact that both had powerful friends in the United States, including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and such high U.S. officials as Lucius Clay and John J. McCloy.49
Abram learned much about trial techniques during his summer in Nuremburg. He was highly impressed with the British prosecutor who questioned Julius Streicher, the publisher of the notorious Nazi publication Der Stermer. Rather than dwelling on Streicher’s Jew-baiting, the counsel concentrated on his incitement that led directly to the destruction of Nuremberg’s great synagogue in a speech that had lasted nearly two hours. By contrast, Abram was disappointed with the performance of Justice Jackson, whose early cross-examination of Hermann Goering dealt with Nazi philosophy, enabling the war criminal to run circles around his inquisitor.50
Abram’s experience at the Nuremburg trials included, in addition to hearing oral testimony, seeing graphic photographs, films, and written documentation of the slaughter of the millions of Jews and others designed and carried out by the Nazis. It taught him unforgettable lessons that shaped many of his future views about international law, strengthened his belief in a homeland for the Jews, and brought him closer to the Jewish people. The Nuremberg experience, he said, did as much as anything to establish his identity.
During the trials, Abram wrote, he “began to ponder the links that bind all Jews to some common fate.” No longer was that bond strictly religious, as defined by their enemies. The anti-Semite had now broadened the definition of Jews to include the genes of a single grandparent.51
Abram strongly defended the legality of the Nuremberg trials, which he believed were conducted with scrupulous adherence to due process. Far from a kangaroo court, many of those on trial he believed to be guilty were declared innocent. Regarding the charge that the trials were ex-post facto, he argued that the Hitler regime had clearly violated international treaties that Germany had signed. And perhaps most significant, it was important for the sake of history to know what the defendants did and why they were being punished. Guilt was established by written documents that provided indisputable proof.52
When Abram was a student at the University of Chicago, despite his interest in the subject of legal philosophy taught by future Attorney General Edward Levi, he could never quite grasp the idea of natural law. The concept, going back to the ancient Israelites, Christians, Greeks, and Romans, posits that there are laws that transcend the rules adopted by a particular society or state. It was not until that summer of 1946, while working on Justice Jackson’s staff in Nuremberg, that Abram began to realize what the Nazis had violated was “a system of right and justice binding on all humanity.”53
For Abram, the experience provided a powerful intellectual and emotional awakening. During the year Canadian corporate lawyer Eric Block worked at UN Watch, Abram spoke with him about working for Justice Jackson at Nuremberg and being moved by the experience, and by the evidence that was supplied. As Block recalled, “I think Morris knew about the Holocaust, but at Nuremberg he came face-to-face with the evidentiary record which just astonished him. Not just evidence about the slaughter of Jews but how the people on trial at Nuremberg were more than willing participants.”54
During his years as an undergraduate, Abram had considered himself an anti-Zionist. The first time his position on that issue changed was the summer he was forced to confront firsthand what had befallen the Jewish people. As Jane Abram expressed it, “either you’re a Jew with no heart or a Zionist.” Abram said, “It flummoxed me, that she, a non-Jew, should see things so clearly.”55
But beyond that insight, Nuremberg exposed Morris Abram to complicated legal questions and courtroom practices that would occupy his mind and influence his outlook on fundamental questions for the rest of his life. Upon the completion of his Oxford education, Abram began to incorporate many of those lessons when he returned to Atlanta to practice law.