Above the main reception desk on the second floor of the Morgan Siler offices, there hung a large oil portrait of Archibald Morgan. Many firms had similar paintings, the stern and confident gaze of their founders assuring prospective clients that here was an assembly of lawyers like no other. Archie’s portrait was different. He wore an expression of gentle perplexity, as though the answer to a difficult question hovered just beyond his reach. The clients waiting on the leather couches could only wonder, as they returned The Wall Street Journal to the oak coffee table and glanced up once more, whether the man had ever grasped the understanding toward which he strained. The portrait would be puzzled forever.
The firm’s lawyers, some of them, could have given an answer. Archie had never lost his air of bemusement; that was how they remembered him, if they remembered him at all. But Archie had not always looked that way. There was a time, in fact, when he felt he understood the world very well.
Archibald Morgan arrived in Washington in the summer of 1937, ready to begin his clerkship with Justice McReynolds and feeling like a latecomer to the bloody fields of Gettysburg. He owed the sentiment in large part to Harvard professor Felix Frankfurter, who saw law diplomas as conscription papers and sent a yearly wave of recruits south to the Capitol to do battle. But even without Frankfurter’s influence, Archie hardly could have avoided being entranced by the struggle between the President and the Supreme Court. No law student, no American, could. The branches
of government, after a century and a half of reasonably peaceful coexistence, had finally been pushed, and pushed each other, past a succession of breaking points.
That was how Archie thought of it, watching from afar. In reaction to the sudden swoon of 1929, the unyielding grip of the Depression, the President and Congress pushed one way. The Court pushed back, striking down federal attempts to regulate the economy, always by the same 5—4 majority, sometimes through the voice of the archconservative McReynolds.
With the legislature stymied, the matter was thrown to the people. That was what it had turned on, Archie decided. They’d voted for Roosevelt, giving him that historic margin in 1936, and Roosevelt decided he’d had enough of the Supreme Court. If the Justices didn’t see things his way, he’d appoint some extra ones who would. But suddenly there was no need. In March of Archie’s third year, the battle unexpectedly ended; the Court backed down as Owen Roberts went over to the President’s side. The Court-packing plan went down to defeat in Congress—“A Switch in Time Saves Nine!” the papers announced—but it no longer mattered. Another of the conservatives, Justice Van Devanter, resigned the same term, and it was clear that a new era had arrived. The law responded to the voice of the people, and Archie had missed his chance to serve.
From Union Station, Archie walked the few blocks to the new Supreme Court building at One First Street. Only Sutherland and Roberts had moved into their chambers within; the other Justices, including McReynolds, worked as accustomed in their own apartments. Standing at the foot of the massive staircase leading up to the great bronze doors, Archie half expected to stumble over evidence of carnage, the bodies of corporation lawyers fallen where their last charge had broken and spent itself, papers charred and bloodied on the ground. Perhaps they were to be found in farther recesses; on the outside all was glistening marble. Too pristine to admit even the rays of the sun, the building shot them back at viewers. The guards on the plaza wore colored glasses; Archie squinted through a hand in front of his face and considered donning the green eyeshade popular with his classmates. Instead he took a cab to 2400 Sixteenth Street, where McReynolds awaited.
Frankfurter had done his best to shape Archie’s view of the law, but he’d done nothing to help with the clerkship. That marked Archie as a
rarity among Harvard men, to have obtained a Supreme Court clerkship without Frankfurter’s sponsorship, but Frankfurter of course held no influence with McReynolds. Archie had gotten the job through family connections, a means equally traditional and efficacious. His father, a partner at Stowe and Bingham in New York, dropped a word with a friend in the D.C. legal community who golfed with McReynolds at the Chevy Chase Club, and a month later Archie received a letter inviting him to Washington for the Justice’s personal scrutiny.
The interview was perfunctory. Archie, too smart to be complacent, had read McReynolds’s recent opinions and tried to prepare a statement about the New Deal. The latter task proved difficult. Archie had absorbed his parents’ disdainful fear of Roosevelt in college, but law school posed questions to received wisdom. Archie didn’t doubt that men, like his father, who succeeded in the marketplace deserved their wealth. But with wealth came responsibility, the need to assume the duties of one’s station. Not all of the nation’s successful men were like his father. And if they would not foster the public good of their own will, what was the alternative to compulsion of law? Sitting in McReynolds’s apartment, he was still unsure what words would come out of his mouth. But few were called for. McReynolds asked if Archie could type and take dictation in shorthand and whether he used tobacco; Archie divined that the correct answers were “yes” and “no.” Then McReynolds requested a handwriting sample, which he inspected while peering alternately at the nails of his left hand.
Archie took the opportunity to perform an inspection of his own. Even defeated, as he then must have known he was, McReynolds cut an impressive figure. Still slim and elegant at seventy-five, he possessed height evident even when seated and a bold shock of white hair over his craggy features. His shirt cuffs projected from his jacket, gleaming and immaculate. The Justice frowned at his fingernails; Archie sat attentive. “I shall expect you on July first, Mr. Morgan,” McReynolds said.
And so on that day Archie presented himself once more, eyes still smarting from the Supreme Court’s reflected glory. McReynolds greeted him as though they’d never met and set him to work on the five hundred or so petitions seeking the Court’s review that had accumulated during the spring.
Archie donned his green eyeshade and buckled down. For each cert petition he was to prepare a one-page memo describing the lower court’s
decision and making a recommendation as to whether the Court should hear the case. McReynolds, passing in the hall, peered into his room. “What is that you’re wearing?”
Archie explained that the eyeshade reduced distraction and was customary among his classmates.
“You look like a bank teller,” McReynolds said. “Take it off.”
In the weeks and months that followed, Archie learned there was a reason that he’d heard McReynolds called the rudest man in Washington. Archie worked each day in one office of the Justice’s thirteen-room apartment, with his eyeshade off and his suit jacket on. McReynolds himself was seldom around. When not at the Court, he preferred to play golf or dine with one of his female admirers.
Left most days to the company of McReynolds’s Court messenger, Harry Parker, Archie absorbed the unwritten rules of the household. As instructed, he had taken a much smaller apartment in the same building, but now he learned he was required to spend the day in McReynolds’s rooms. “If he calls and you’re not there, he’ll fire you for sure,” said Harry. Nor was Archie allowed to drink or entertain women. Lacking a kitchen, he waited until the Justice returned in the evenings and then walked to a Chinese restaurant on Eighteenth Street for dinner. And then, while the glories and mysteries of the nation’s capital swung around him like constellations, filling his vision but impossibly beyond reach, he turned back to the apartment.
In their infrequent interactions, McReynolds generally confined himself to the description of assigned tasks. When the cert petitions ran out, he used Archie to handle his personal correspondence, declining requests for autographs and acknowledging the receipt of calling cards. On occasion, almost as an afterthought, he voiced his disapproval of some practice or person. Gradually Archie concluded that these negative opinions collectively constituted the entirety of his personality: McReynolds was a bunch of prejudices held together by sheer force of ill will. He frowned on wristwatches, tobacco use, red nail polish on women, and Harvard Law School, which he deemed respectively effeminate, filthy, vulgar, and overrated. He loathed the two Jewish Justices and forbade any contact with their chambers personnel, a particular blow to Archie, whose good friend was clerking that year with Brandeis. And McReynolds railed, though now with some resignation, against the New Dealers and all their handiwork.
As the clerkship drew to a close, Archie could honestly tell himself
that he’d done well merely to survive. Many of McReynolds’s clerks did not last the year, so it was possible to do worse. But not to do better; Archie racked his brain without success in an effort to come up with any opportunity he’d had to learn something about the law. He’d had one chance to write an opinion, when McReynolds was away for the weekend. In those two days, Archie had torn through four drafts and presented the latest, along with the parties’ briefs, to McReynolds upon his return. The Justice retired to his study and an hour later called Archie in. The briefs and some case reporters lay upon his desk, as did Archie’s draft. McReynolds leaned back in his chair. “And now, Mr. Morgan,” he said, “we shall begin to write this opinion properly.” For five or ten minutes he dictated extemporaneously, eyes on the ceiling, then, examining his nails and dictating the while, he picked up Archie’s draft with his right hand and dropped it softly into the wastebasket. The assignment, Archie decided, had been given merely to keep him busy over the weekend.
Perhaps, Archie told himself, McReynolds simply had nothing to teach. In response to a direct question, the Justice had once agreed to share his accumulated thoughts on the practice of law. But wherever he thought he was reaching for the burnished wisdom of the years, his hand strayed into the kit bag of peculiar prejudices Archie had already encountered.
“A lawyer should never wear a red tie,” McReynolds observed at last. “They’re effeminate.” Archie hung his head. To be so close to the churning heart of law’s empire, and yet no part of the machinery.
From the outside, of course, things looked different. After the clerkship ended, Archie considered a return to New York. “With your Supreme Court experience,” his father said, “I expect you could demand fifty dollars a week from one of the New York firms.” But Archie wanted to make his own way, to make his own firm. And he felt he’d yet to take the measure of Washington. The city excited him, the buildings resembling the temples of Greece and Rome, the brilliant New Dealers coursing through their corridors, avid to shape the land afresh. World-building was in the air.
Archie looked up George Tutwiler, a few years ahead of him at Harvard Law School and now associated with the firm of Rose and Stone. Tutwiler took little persuading, and in the space of months the firm was launched. They hired two secretaries and took office space. Tutwiler and Morgan—the concession to George’s age seemed only fair—opened its doors at 2300 K Street on October 17, 1938.
For an alarmingly lengthy time thereafter, nothing happened. No phones rang, no hand disturbed the heavy brass knocker of the door; the virgin sanctity of the office remained unsullied by any visitor. Tutwiler had been too junior to bring with him any clients, and would in any case have considered it a breach of trust to poach from Rose and Stone. Archie hit the cocktail circuit to no effect. He listened eagerly as aged matrons lamented the obstinacy of their estate planners, and earned a reputation as a sympathetic ear. But Washington was choking on legal talent and competition was fierce. The firm teetered on the brink of insolvency. To his parents’ chagrin, Archie cut costs by marrying his secretary, Cynthia, a spirited girl two years out of Smith and destined for better things. Tutwiler’s secretary—plainer, less fortunate, or both—was given three weeks’ notice. More than once Archie considered abandoning private practice and heading for the looming shelter of the government, but the world he wanted to build was a private one. At last he called upon his father, with customary results.
The firm survived its early years on castoffs and leftovers, the unwanted work of the larger legal establishment. These were relatively plentiful; the Morgan connections put Archie first in line for such references. But he was disinclined to scavenge for hand-me-downs. His vision of himself, though unclear in his mind, was not that of a hyena in last year’s suit. This approach also meant engaging in a large amount of litigation, something the reputable firms disdained. Pride lay in giving advice that kept one’s clients out of court, not descending to the arena as a hired sword. Archie lay awake nights dreaming of the big corporation that would rely on him for counsel and offer him steady suck in return: General Electric, U.S. Steel, Standard Oil. Or better, one of the large commercial banks to which the firm might attach itself, as Milbank did to Chase Manhattan, something huge and buoyant to hold tight through the roiling years.
Then war came, and almost simultaneously Archie and Cynthia’s first child, Peter. Tutwiler was caught up in the draft, never to return from the sands of Sicily. But Archie sat this one out too. A new brass plaque, names reversed, was screwed to the wall. Archie buffed it with melancholy ardor and soldiered on. He had more to work for now. Myopia kept him safe, and history smiled on his vision. For the first time in its life, and never to be repeated, Washington was experiencing a shortage of lawyers.
Morgan and Tutwiler moved up through the vacuum, not itself unchanged by the ascent. Archie quickly hired two graduates from Georgetown—Catholic, but there was no time to be choosy—and lured more Rose and Stone associates with the promise of partnership. Morgan, Tutwiler, Stevens, Raymond, and Cox began to establish itself. One of the first things established was that Tutwiler, having left the world, was not to linger on wall or letterhead. The legal community knew firms by their first two names, and while a deceased founder might have merited pride of place to emphasize continuity, Archie’s firm was still protean and could use the second space to advertise Bert Stevens’s growing real estate practice. Demotion smacked of disrespect, and so Tutwiler was simply erased. Archie would have laid a wreath on the grave had it been nearby; instead he wrote a modest check to the American Legion and raised a quiet glass of Scotch.
Morgan Stevens prospered moderately. Archie continued to accept references from his father’s friends, but increasingly he was pleased to welcome first-time—or better still, repeat—clients who came of their own accord. And not just litigation either. Stevens was increasingly known as a wizard with a lease, a soft touch with the zoning board. A K Street cobbler joined their list of regular clients; Archie brought in the Chinese restaurant where he’d dined during his clerkship. Even a tobacconist, apparently through word of mouth. Archie celebrated the evidence of growing reputation, particularly pleased by imagining what McReynolds would have thought. The man would never know, of course; he’d died in 1946, his funeral notable for the fact that no Justice attended.
By the 1950s, Archie could look with satisfaction upon his circumstances, daring to entertain the thought that he’d succeeded in making something of himself. Peter, developed into a precociously serious young lad, attended St. Albans, where he excelled with a determination that surprised even Archie. Cynthia bore him two more children, twin girls; Archie sold his Dupont Circle apartment and bought a house in Spring Valley. He joined the Chevy Chase Club and retraced McReynolds’s steps along the links. And the firm, his first baby, continued to thrive. The fledgling businesses whose leases Stevens had negotiated turned to Raymond to deal with suppliers. Archie’s father’s friends, in a last gesture of loyalty to the old man, offered up their wills, allowing the firm finally to break into the trusts and estates practice.
Those middle decades of the century, Archie often thought later, were the golden years. Peter went to Harvard College, left it with a magna in economics, and without a pause headed north of the Yard to the Law School. The girls rode horses at Madeira and made their debuts during their first year at Vassar. Morgan Stevens grew to forty lawyers, then to fifty, taking additional floors in its K Street lodgings. It competed for new graduates with the best of the D.C. firms, interviewing at Harvard and Yale and the New York schools. Its roster of partners swelled to twenty. Some were promoted from within. One had been passed over for partner at Covington; one came from a position as general counsel to the Securities and Exchange Commission, vaulting the firm almost overnight to the front ranks of Washington’s securities regulation bar. And none of these additions required a revision of the letterhead. That, Archie realized with satisfaction, was the final indicator that he’d created something enduring. That new partners did not feel entitled to add their names, were in no position to make such demands—that was a good sign, of course. But for Archie it held a more metaphysical significance. The partners changed but the firm continued; its name referred no longer to the lawyers who’d sired it but to something else, something independent of them all. Morgan Stevens had been emancipated from mortality.
Archie presided over the firm’s growth with a father’s pride and a degree of control no parent could hope for. As it expanded, he’d divided it into departments according to practice area, each with its own head. Those heads formed the steering committee, and the steering committee reported to him. Archie’s authority was absolute, not because the partnership agreement entitled him to it—indeed, it was a point of some pride that Morgan Stevens had never had a formal partnership agreement—but because it had always been so, and every new lawyer who joined the firm understood. Archie decided who would make partner, which clients would be taken on, how many litigators would be loaned out to Legal Aid and the Public Defender’s Office. The associates did not complain; monarchy and oligarchy were indistinguishable from their perspective, and Archie treated them well. Starting salaries were pegged to the going rate set by the big New York firms and rose steadily, and Archie, unlike some of his managing partner peers, made no fetish of the billable hour.
Indeed, the associates loved Archie. He was reaching the peak of his powers as a lawyer, a respected fixture of the Washington bar with a stable roster of clients. He sat on the boards of Sibley Hospital and the National Cultural Center; he was one of the District of Columbia’s representatives in the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates. All these things were good for the firm. But they were not what caused the young associates unconsciously to mimic his slightly duck-footed amble down the corridors, his habit of doodling geometric marginalia during meetings. They were not what made the young lawyers treasure and repeat the cryptic apothegms he let fall at the meetings’ conclusions. You could tell a Morgan Stevens lawyer, Archie liked to think, by the way he carried himself, by the quality of advice he offered clients, by his wisdom and judgment and general rectitude. All the firms liked to think this about themselves, and of course all were more or less self-deluding. But for a space of five years or so there was a certain type of Morgan Stevens associate who was indeed recognizable, a young man who wore a hat and a gray flannel suit long after they were out of fashion, who walked like a middle-aged man and said things like, “The window’s faster than the door, but you only go out it once.” These were Archie’s loyal sons, and they loved him for his fatherly attention to their lives, for knowing their names and the names of their wives and children, for sending the lobby shoeshine man to their offices if he noticed a scuffed toe.
And the partners? They too respected Archie’s legal acumen; they too appreciated his solicitude. As for the question of management, well, the partners did not complain, because they agreed with his vision of what the firm should be. Archie never entertained any serious doubts on this score. The firm was what it was: his firm. Of course the partners agreed with his vision. Why otherwise would they have signed on to the venture?
Even later, reproaching himself in private conference for having missed the warning signs, Archie maintained that this assessment had been correct. He’d created a firm according to his vision, and that vision had been shared. But he’d relied also on a stable backdrop—the world in which the firm was created—not taking account of the possibility that it might look different to others if the backdrop changed. In the final analysis, Archie blamed the world. Morgan Stevens had been betrayed not by any flaws within itself but by an unexpected contextual shift, a sea change in the nature of legal practice.