I was a young guy just getting started, and I was watching him not only from the perspective of what an expert does, but here’s how he operates.
Jacob Cohen attended the February 1970 press conference in Manhattan where Morris Abram announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination to oppose New York senator Charles Goodell that fall. As Cohen recalled, “To me, the central line of that speech and the one which brought the audience to its feet—although they may have been cued to do this, including many black leaders in New York City—was that he did not agree to premature death notices of the civil rights movement. As far as he was concerned, there was still much to do, and he was not going to join that chorus of people who say it’s all over.”1
But to Cohen, who had worked on the speech, Abram’s candidacy was little more than a pipe dream. Others, including his friend Vernon Jordan, who tried to talk him out of running, were also skeptical. When Arthur Goldberg announced his candidacy to oppose Nelson Rockefeller for governor, an action he had personally assured Abram his status as a former Supreme Court Justice precluded, it was clear to Abram that they would be competing for the same donors. The problem was compounded by questions that had been raised about Abram’s ability to meet the residency requirement for the New York Democratic primary. Although the requirement was ultimately waived, by that time Abram had little choice but to drop out of the race, which he did only two months after the February announcement.2 Despite working on the Goldberg campaign that fall, he later told Eli Evans that his law partner “never apologized to anybody for entering the race because he thought he was God’s gift to the state of New York. Naturally, he turned out to be the world’s worst candidate who ever lived.”3
Shortly after his return to New York from the Boston area, Abram sought and gained reelection to the firm he had left to pursue the presidency of Brandeis. After all, he had a large family to support. The law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, stocked with political celebrities past and present, among them Adlai Stevenson, Arthur Goldberg, Willard Wirtz, Theodore Sorenson, and Ramsay Clark, was at the time among the largest two dozen law firms in the United States. But it was not so much its partners who accounted for its fame but rather the importance of its clients, which included government agencies and high-level government officials. Although it had departments specializing in bread-and-butter legal matters including trusts, corporate law, and taxation, its specialty was in the more volatile litigation area.4
The firm’s leading partner was a short, mustachioed man named Simon Rifkind, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants who had been a classmate of William Douglas at Columbia Law School. Appointed to a federal judgeship by President Franklin Roosevelt, Rifkind left the bench in 1950 to join what was then a fledgling law firm. Considered by many to be the best trial lawyer in the country, Rifkind provided Paul, Weiss the leadership it needed to prosper.5
Judge Rifkind (as he would always be known), who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Truman for his work with uprooted Holocaust survivors after World War II, had brought into the client base of the firm a substantial number of wealthy entrepreneurs, including many in the Jewish community.6 When Rifkind sustained a heart attack in the late 1950s, there was a great deal of concern about the prospect of losing many of its connections to the Jewish community earlier than expected. Abram’s presidency of the American Jewish Committee beginning in the early 1960s made him an attractive candidate to fill that expected void.7
Abram told Eli Evans in the mid-1970s that his move to New York had been prompted by his curiosity to see if he could “swat in the big leagues.” But reflecting on his New York practice, he was less than enthusiastic: “If the truth be known, I’d rather practice law in Atlanta or even Fitzgerald than practice in New York. I’ve had all the legal experiences and all the courts I want.”8 Several years earlier, he had turned down a federal judgeship in New York that Senator Kennedy had offered him. “I didn’t want to sit in court on my fanny and listen to lawyers argue and try to pass out sentences on narcotics cases,” he said. “That just wasn’t my idea of life.”9
During his early days in the firm, Abram had his work at the American Jewish Committee and the United Nations to stimulate his intellectual and political interests. When Abram’s autobiography was published in 1982, some of his partners were irritated by the fact that he had given unusually scant recognition to the firm, choosing to highlight the other aspects of his career. This complaint was echoed in a review of the book by legal journalist Lyle Denniston. Describing Abram as “one of the heroes of American law” and “a leader in the cause of human dignity,” he concluded that Abram must believe that the powerhouse firm where he spent the previous twenty years was simply “a way station” on a path to “livelier or more important missions elsewhere.”10
According to Jeh Johnson, who entered the firm as an associate in the mid-1980s and became its first African American partner, “Morris was kind of aloof. He was sort of an independent actor. Since he did a lot of his own stuff, he wasn’t a part of the central fabric of the firm. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I don’t mean to say he was an outcast; he was kind of like me in a way, he had a lot of things going on in addition to his practice.”11
Although Abram’s work at Paul, Weiss was as challenging as anything else he faced during his career, it could not match the satisfaction he derived from his mission-driven activity outside the firm. Nor could it match the sheer joy and educational value he had derived from his early years practicing law. Many of the cases he argued in Atlanta went before juries where Abram relied on his charm and rhetorical skills to succeed. In fact, it was during his early career in Georgia that he gained an abiding respect for the men and women of the jury. Even in the one case in which he lost what he believed was an open-and-shut case due to the local prejudice in an Appalachian town in the northern part of the state, “I cherished the very opportunity to experience such a case. I would never have been content in a large firm whose principal clients were banks or insurance companies.”12
Max Gitter, a longtime partner at Paul, Weiss, recalled the time as an associate in the firm when he went with Abram to argue a case before the Georgia Court of Appeals:
In southern courtrooms there was a wonderful custom where the justices came down to shake hands with the lawyers. Twice I experienced this in the 4th Circuit in Virginia. And it was really gracious and nice. Morris would tell the story of when he argued some important case early in his career. In the course of the argument, he used “dayenu,” Hebrew for “it would have been enough,” to say, a fortiori, my client is innocent. He kept repeating “dayenu” [i.e., even this would have been enough to acquit]. He ran into the chief judge at some function after the argument and the judge said to him in a very deep southern accent, “DA-EINU!” So, he obviously made an impression on that judge.13
Abram handled a wide range of corporate litigation for the firm, including cases dealing with antitrust, taxes, securities, and real estate. His reputation in the New York legal community was, according to Gitter, “very high. He was a very devoted lawyer to his clients, and very protective of them.” In 1977 Abram was described in New York magazine as “one of New York’s most respected lawyers.”14
Sidney Rosdeitcher, who had accompanied Abram to Americus, Georgia in 1963 as an associate at Paul, Weiss, recalled Abram’s courtroom style: “He was a very persistent cross-examiner. And he had an enormous presence in court. It was very difficult to resist his cross-examination. I’ll never forget Morris’s cross-examination of the plaintiff who had sued an insurance company he was defending. It was terrifying; I can’t tell you exactly what made it so terrifying, but it was so relentless, and he was so forceful and yet smooth. You know, he had this Southern accent which sugarcoated some of the things he was saying. But it was terribly intimidating to a witness.”15
Abram reflected on his courtroom style in his conversations with Eli Evans: “A mild man,” he said, referring to himself, “in the courtroom my adversaries think I’m a terror. There it’s a different situation. Aggression, which is the hallmark of a trial lawyer, every one of them who’s successful is a very aggressive person, but aggression in a controlled environment. Nobody’s going to hit you for what you say in a courtroom.”16
Success in the courtroom, Abram believed, required not only an instinct for the jugular but also enormous powers of concentration with respect to both the laws and the evidence. It also required an ability to improvise in situations in which a witness hesitates or offers a surprising answer. Abram told young lawyers in his firm not to follow a script or read to a witness during cross examination. Instead, he suggested, “Talk to him, watch him, see what’s making him nervous.”17 When Abram knew a witness was lying, he would pull out some papers and review them slowly to make that person think he was reading something incriminating. This technique, he said, “will turn liars into truth tellers.”18
In the fall of 1963, Abram was invited back to the University of Chicago where he had received his law degree nearly a quarter of a century earlier to deliver a lecture on the first day of class to its first year law students and the board of its alumni association. The lecture was entitled, “The Challenge of the Courtroom: Reflections on the Adversary System,” and was reproduced in the school’s publication. Abrams told the students, “The reason I choose that of the advocate in the adversarial system is the plain truth that I would find any other practice a bore.” He did not, he said, want to advise clients in the intricacies of corporate law but rather enjoyed studying legal issues at the point of controversy. “I am a generalist in the law,” he declared, “and a specialist only in procedure and drama. The principles of my branch of the profession are drawn not only from the cases but from Machiavelli and Clausewitz.”19
Robert Destro, who later served on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights with Abram, first encountered him as an adversary in a 1977 civil rights case. This time Abram was on the side of a law firm charged with discriminating against an Italian Catholic graduate of Notre Dame law school by turning him down for a partnership. According to plaintiff John Lucido’s complaint, the firm Cravath, Swain and Moore, described by the New York Times as “the Rolls Royce of Law Firms,” had a history of favoring white Protestant males in its promotions.20
Fresh out of law school, Destro was the general counsel of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which weighed in on behalf of Lucido. Cravath hired Paul, Weiss, with Abram as the lead counsel, to defend it in the first big lawsuit brought against a prestigious New York law firm under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Cravath and Paul, Weiss position was that Title VII did not apply to legal partnerships.
Destro believed Lucido’s case was a solid one: “There was a certain disdain for the idea that an associate, even a senior one with a stellar record like John’s, would have the temerity to challenge a big white stocking firm like that.” Abram, Destro pointed out, was defending a group of people who stood at the apex of the legal profession and who regard law firms as private clubs.21
The Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz was outraged that a “Jewish firm” such as Paul, Weiss would be taking the position that anti-discrimination laws did not apply to the same law firms that once kept Jews out of their boardrooms. “I thought it was extremely cynical. My view is that discrimination against anyone is discrimination against everyone. I thought I was on the right side and Morris was on the wrong side. I mean, this was not a criminal case. He did not have to defend Cravath.”22
Not surprisingly, Robert Rifkind, a partner at Cravath and the son of Paul, Weiss’s leading partner, saw things differently: “We weighed the issues of what defense we should rely on,” said Rifkind. “We desperately wanted to bring the case to an early halt. There was a view that as a technical matter, the statute didn’t apply. That is to say, that a partnership is not a position of employment. It’s a position of ownership, and that therefore, the statute didn’t apply.”23
Dershowitz took on the first part of the Lucido case, winning the argument that his client had the right to take legal action against the law firm. The next phase of the case involved the question of whether the firm actually discriminated against John Lucido by denying him a partnership.24 Rifkind, who started as an associate at Cravath the year before Lucido and knew him well, pleaded with him to drop the suit and get on with his life. “It had never occurred to me that the firm had discriminated against him on the grounds that his family had been Italian. ‘Oh yes, he said, that’s what they were doing.’ And of course, the charge that we were discriminating against Catholics was nonsense, because we had many Catholic partners at the time.”25
When Destro joined the plaintiff’s team, it was very much up in arms about the tactics Abram and his team were using, insisting that depositions be taken for thirty consecutive days:
Now I can tell you everything from the day I was born in less than half that time, maybe if you said eight hours a day for ten days that would be just about it. But they wanted thirty. And I have to tell you, Morris could be pretty theatrical. I was a young guy just getting started, and I was watching him not only from the perspective of what an expert does, but here’s how he operates. Of course, Morris was doing his client thing. That’s what he was supposed to do. There did come a time when we said, look, this is over. If you want, we will go down and see the judge. Some of that is lost in the fog of antiquity, but Morris did a very good job. He was very detail oriented; he didn’t let one jot or tittle escape.26
In the summer of 1973, feeling some dizziness when standing up from the rocking chair he occupied while working in his office, Abram arranged to have a complete physical. He set the appointment with his longtime physician for June 19, the date of his fifty-fifth birthday. Within days he was diagnosed with acute myelocytic leukemia (AML), a type of cancer that starts in the blood-forming cells of the bone marrow.27
Abram met the news with a mixture of “terror and disbelief.” Recently separated from his wife Jane, he was aware that just a year earlier, the wife of his Atlanta law partner Robert Hicks had died of the disease a mere five months after receiving the diagnosis. “When I heard that Morris had that horrible disease,” Hicks recalled, “I really wrote him off. I thought I might see him only one more time when I went to New York.”28 But Abram’s determination to face his disease was steadfast. Hicks wrote to Abram telling him how upset he was, saying how he wished there was something he could do. Abram later recalled that he had received a letter from a friend assuming he was going to die “that made him so mad,” Hicks said, “he said he would not die to spite me.”29
But in fact, the odds were significantly stacked against him. As of 1973, survival rates for patients with AML were fifteen percent for five years, lower for someone Abram’s age. Abram’s treatment at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City began that September under a new protocol that doubled these odds, according to early statistics. The regimen included a particularly aggressive treatment of chemotherapy involving two agents, one administered for seven days and the other for three.30 Abram’s progress was checked with highly painful bone marrow extractions. Despite weakening with constant fever, by the end of the month, three weeks after his treatment began, he was being kept alive by the infusion of red cells, platelets, antibiotics, “and the blind luck that no infection had appeared.”31 Despite his weakness from both the illness and its treatment, Abram, a dedicated tennis player and swimmer, was determined to maintain as much physical activity as possible. Doctors, nurses, and patients could see him sprinting through the corridors of Mount Sinai holding on to one or even two tables containing his bottles and tubes attached to his forearm.32
Two months after being released from the hospital and placed on maintenance therapy, Abram contracted hepatitis, which put continued treatment for his AML on hold while he dealt with another debilitating disease. He faced the additional challenge of being scheduled to try a complicated tax case for Textron, the Providence, Rhode Island–based defense contractor, for which he had spent two years in preparation. At first, his doctors were adamant that he not attempt to brave the winter elements in Rhode Island while battling both his ailments and the pressures of high-stakes litigation. But when they saw the anxiety caused by the prospect of dropping out of the case, they relented. After a four-day trial, in which he won the case for his client, he returned to New York in a severely weakened state.33
By the spring of 1974 Abram was able to return to chemotherapy, this time leaving him with bouts of nausea and chills. Abram’s determination to beat the disease was reinforced by his deep involvement in every detail of his therapy. As an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, he had seriously considered a career in medicine before turning to law. His renewed interest in the subject served him well during his consultations with his medical team about proposed treatments. On at least one occasion, he believed his spotting of a deviation from his prescribed treatment may have saved his life.34
While Abram considered himself fortunate to be at a hospital he described as “a wonder of modern science,” he was less impressed with its day-to-day operations. He was outraged, he later wrote, to see “elementary principles of hygiene and nursing care violated.” He registered constant complaints and “never surrendered to the system.”35
During his early days at Mount Sinai, Abram became aware of new and promising treatments for leukemia, one in Israel involving an immunological agent with the acronym MER, the other in England involving the injection of radiation treated leukemic cells. Since the former had not received FDA approval, Abram was prepared to fly to Israel to receive the treatment. Such a radical step was avoided when he received the necessary permission to use it with the intervention of Senators Henry Jackson and Hubert Humphrey.36
Abram’s hematologist, Dr. James Holland, an internationally renowned cancer researcher, initially was not sanguine about Abram’s chances for survival. For an adult, he told the New York Times, AML was the most malignant of tumors.37 Holland was just beginning an experimental treatment using leukemia cells treated with an enzyme much like the radiation treated cells being used in England. The treatment required an elaborate effort to set up a team of physicians, nurses, and technicians to put together the program and equipment necessary to separate leukemia cells from diseased patients, treat them, and inject them back into patients. Holland decided to combine this treatment with the immunotherapy developed in Israel. Abram wrote, “During this period I never doubted that I had Dr. Holland’s goodwill and sympathy. In fact, I had the sneaking suspicion that he wanted me as a patient as much as I wanted his novel therapy. I sensed that he saw in me a will to fight, a basically healthy constitution, and a willingness to take risks.”38
A bone marrow test in June 1974 showed that Abram was still in remission when the administration of the combined injections commenced. Two years later he was taken off MER, with which he had become saturated, but the injections of leukemia cells continued monthly along with bimonthly chemotherapy that left Abram with chills, nausea, and fatigue.39
As he approached his fourth year in remission while continuing to receive aggressive monthly treatments to maintain it, Abram decided to go public with his story, giving a series of interviews over several weeks at his home and office to Pranay Gupte of the New York Times. Abram had met Gupte, a graduate of Brandeis, during his presidency. The result was a front-page article in which Abram attributed his survival, against very high odds, to the team of expert physicians who treated him, combined with his determination to defeat the disease. Up to that point, his illness was known only to family and close associates and friends. He hoped his story would give strength to others with the disease. “My devotion to the people I love and to my work is magnified,” he told Gupte. “I am relishing every minute of this new lease on life.”40
Shortly after the article appeared, and after Abram contracted hepatitis for the third time from blood contaminated products, the doctors discontinued his chemotherapy. The cell injections ended in January 1979 when they declared him cured. Abram’s assertion that willpower can play a key role in curing an acute form of cancer was challenged years later by Barron Lerner, a professor of Medicine and Public Health at Columbia University. Still, Lerner concluded, “The idea that concrete steps can be taken in the face of a dreaded illness may serve as inspiration for those who become ill with cancer.”41
In January 1975, during a particularly difficult period in Abram’s battle with leukemia, he was called upon by New York Governor Hugh Carey to chair a Moreland Commission investigation of the state’s nursing homes. The governor was acting in the aftermath of evidence uncovered by the Temporary State Commission on Living Costs, headed by Assemblyman Andrew Stein, looking into the mistreatment of elderly patients. The patients were residents of nursing homes owned by a large-scale operator in New York and New Jersey named Bernard Bergman, an Orthodox rabbi. Since leaving Brandeis five years earlier, Abram had felt deprived of the chance to “do the moral deed.” And in addition to looking for an effective investigator, Carey had quite deliberately sought out a prominent member of the Jewish community to chair the commission.42
In New York, Jews were heavily involved in the nursing home industry. Abram knew that Jews tended to enter the untested businesses and from 1966 on the nursing home business was, in his words, “an untested field with a gush of federal money.” Conditions in many of the state-subsidized homes were appallingly decrepit, and many New York politicians were implicated in the system either by reaping its benefits or simply looking the other way. By appointing someone with Abram’s background, the governor believed he could limit his political risk that might accompany the implication of Jews, including religious leaders, in wrongdoing. Although Abram anticipated criticism, there was no backlash from the community, with every major Jewish leader saying to him to go after them, since “they are a disgrace.”43
Abram also knew that the investigation was guaranteed to be rife with political implications involving the ways in which government favors had been doled out during Nelson Rockefeller’s nearly fifteen year tenure as governor. Again, the issue involved members of the Jewish community, since the governor’s closest link to the Jewish community, Samuel Hausman, had ties to Rabbi Bergman.
The hearings, held at the New York County Lawyers Association Building at 13 Vesey Street in Lower Manhattan, were televised on New York’s Channel 13, the local public television station. They reached a dramatic pitch with the testimony of Nelson Rockefeller. By the time Abram had the opportunity to question him, Rockefeller had left the governor’s chair to become the vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford.
Rockefeller requested to have his testimony taken in private, but Abram insisted otherwise. He and the commission staff prepared extensively over a period of several days for the questioning of the former governor. Having studied Rockefeller’s performance before the U.S. Senate during his vice presidential confirmation hearings, where he was able to outmatch the committee’s undisciplined questioning, Abram and his staff concluded that he alone should conduct the interrogation.44
Abram spent the day before his encounter with the vice president scrawling pages of questions on a legal pad. On the day Rockefeller appeared, the commission’s staffers handed out to the press and to the witness incriminating documents. By comparison, Rockefeller was not prepared, having spent the previous two days on a campaign swing through the South.
For the next five hours, Abram, with his family looking on, pursued the ex-governor relentlessly. He established that Rockefeller could have saved the state millions of dollars by hiring auditors his health department had requested. He demonstrated that the state’s nonprofit nursing homes had a vastly higher cost per bed than privately built ones. He showed that the state lacked a plan to deal with patients released from state mental hospitals, a charge Rockefeller himself had leveled against New York Mayor Lindsay while accusing him of mismanagement. And above all, Abram was able to remove any doubt that the vice president had been made aware of the conditions in his state’s nursing homes while doing little, if anything, to address them.45
Ken Auletta, covering the hearing for the Village Voice, was mesmerized by the former governor’s “dazzling” performance: “He was alternately: Funny. Bored. Impatient. Angry. Sincere. Incredulous. Hostile. Charming.” He even managed to play the role of host, “acting as if he had invited them to the hearing and rewarding his guests with ‘I think that your commission is offering tremendous service.’” Rockefeller’s position was that he had left his appointees to take care of operational matters while he concentrated on the bigger picture.46
The commission had deliberately waited months before calling Rockefeller to testify to build a case against him. His testimony had followed hearings on a Bergman-owned nursing home in the Concord section of Staten Island built several years earlier without the prior approval of the State Department of Health and that had subsequently failed to receive an operating license. Bergman built the home with the confidence his political connections would get him the required approval. Those connections included Rockefeller’s key link to the Jewish community, Samuel Hausman.
As Abram pursued this line of inquiry, which included the revelation that Hausman had a relative with an interest in the nursing home, Rockefeller, abandoning for the moment his earnestness and charm, tried to turn the tables on his inquisitor by asking Abram if he had never himself tried to intervene on behalf of a family member with a public official. It was not an empty gesture. He was on the verge of revealing that Abram had tried to do that very thing with respect to relatives bidding on a Port Authority concession. But as Abram later pointed out, even though there was no conflict of interest involved, he had withdrawn the request after accepting the Moreland Commission position. In the end Rockefeller decided not to pursue the gambit.47
The vice president claimed that the interest of his staff in the Bergman matter, which included no fewer than eight meetings his chief of staff had held with either Bergman or Hausman on his behalf, had arisen from the rabbi’s charge that he was being discriminated against. But as Abram pointed out, the governor’s chief of staff had spent two and a half years on the Bergman matter after finding out that the charge of discrimination was bogus.48
His testimony concluded, it was time for the vice president to depart, but not before demonstrating his legendary political agility. He shook hands with each commissioner, including Chairman Abram, to whom he brought up his upcoming speech before a dinner of the United Negro College Fund that Abram chaired. He answered questions from the press, thanked the reporters present for their patience, and, when asked if the hearing would affect his campaign to stay on President Ford’s reelection ticket, insisted that there was no such campaign. After being congratulated by the commission’s public relations counsel and shaking the hands of several policemen and others on the street, he departed. Abram wrote, “though I had a duty to discharge in exposing his responsibility in a great human tragedy, even I admired what he himself would have called his ‘chutzpah.’”49
Following the report of the commission, Rabbi Bergman was convicted of Medicaid fraud and bribery and sentenced to four months in federal prison and eight months in state prison. He was also ordered to repay $2.5 million that New York State auditors said he had stolen from the Medicaid program.
In its 218-page report, issued on February 25, 1976, the commission pulled no punches, implicating over a dozen major public figures—including Vice President Rockefeller, his successor as governor, Malcolm Wilson, New York Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz, Assembly Speaker Stanley Steingut, Assembly Majority Leader Albert Blumenthal, Mayor Abraham Beame, and former mayor John Lindsay—in negligence, interference, and/or impropriety.
Abram told a press conference that the commission had turned over thousands of instances of larceny “or worse” to a special prosecutor. The report quoted Lindsay saying that he had no knowledge of the poor conditions in the nursing homes. Regarding that comment, Abram remarked, “That’s what happens when you govern a city of eight million people by the six o’clock news.” Sixty-eight nursing homes were closed in the aftermath of the commission’s report. Ten of eleven bills recommended by the commission to strengthen regulation of the nursing home industry were soon passed into law in Albany.50
In a speech before the National Retired Teachers Association the following month, Abram commented on what he had learned from the experience. As long as care is paid by third parties, especially the government, he told the group, “an increasing number of hands will be available to receive the handout.” The only possible control over the accelerating costs of service to the elderly is a requirement that in every possible case, some portion of the cost be privately born.51
In November 1978 Congress created a Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research (PL 95–622). The commission’s mandate was to study issues such as the definition of death, genetic testing and counseling, and the differences in the availability of health services depending on income or residence.52 When White House staff proposed that Abram be selected to serve as chairman of the Commission, Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) Secretary Joseph Califano sent a memo to President Carter making the case for another choice. Although he agreed that Abram, whom he knew well, was “an excellent and dedicated lawyer,” he preferred Dr. Maurice Lazarus, who was already serving on HEW’s ethics advisory board and would be much better received in the community that is most interested in the work of the commission. Lazarus, he added, “supported you early on and continues to be a strong supporter.”53
But the White House staff held firm to its first choice. In their memorandum to Carter, senior presidential aides Tim Kraft and Arnie Miller cited Abram’s national reputation, his early support for the president, his interest in working with the administration, and the credibility he would bring to the commission’s recommendations. In addition to his partnership in a prestigious law firm, his UN credentials, and his presidency of Brandeis, they also cited his service since the previous year as a lay member of the Human Subjects Review Panel at Mt. Sinai Hospital and his authorship of “Living with Leukemia,” the lead article in the 1979 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica Health Annual.
When he received the call from the White House, Abram was hesitant. He had, after all, given up the idea of pursuing a medical career over forty years earlier. On the other hand, he did have firsthand experience as a leukemia patient who had personal experience with issues the commission was authorized to pursue, among them informed consent, protection for human research subjects, and doctor-patient relations.54
Abram also had to overcome his concern that a government commission would naturally be drawn to recommending a host of new laws and regulations to deal with matters that he believed, in this case, called more for ethical guidelines than legal prescriptions. After he agreed to serve, the president announced the membership of the panel on July 18, 1979. In addition to the chairman, it included a high-level group of experts on the medical aspects of research, law, ethics, economics, and genetics.55
Abram’s nomination was confirmed by the Senate at the end of September. For four years beginning in January 1980, the commission met nearly thirty times and issued reports dealing with subjects as varied as genetic engineering, defining death, protecting human subjects, securing access to health care, and deciding to forego life-sustaining treatment.56 The commission’s recommendations included guidance to relevant federal agencies, government support to ongoing initiatives, and a few targeted legal and statutory reforms.57
Abram realized early on the importance of achieving consensus among the commission’s members, given the heavy emphasis it would be placing on ethical guidelines. With such consensus, he believed, the commission “could lay the cornerstone of a national moral structure for handling biomedical issues.” As it turned out, even with a turnover of the Carter-appointed members after their term expired and their replacement with Reagan appointees, there was only a single dissent on a single report of the eleven the commission issued. And Abram was particularly proud that the panel’s work was completed over 80 percent below its authorized budget of $20 million.58