For Charles E. Clark: A Brief and Belated but Fond Farewell

It is hard for me to believe that it has been so long as two years now since he died. When the phone rings suddenly late in the evening—after some big Supreme Court decision, after some new or rumored appointment to the Yale law faculty, after some intriguing piece of political news from Washington or maybe from Western Europe—I still half-expect my Hello to be answered by that unmistakable blend of question and growl and chuckle that was his. I doubt that I shall ever wholly accept the fact that he is dead, since for me he never can be; let the psychiatrists make of that what they will. He was one of the few truly great human beings I have ever known. He was easily the greatest man I ever worked under—and the list includes Gifford Pinchot, Henry Luce, and gentle Wesley Sturges. Except for the uncle in whose home I grew up, he came the closest, non-biologically speaking of course, to being (ah there, Dr. Freud) my father. More than that, he was for well over thirty years a hero of mine who never once—and I mean never once—let me down. I cannot write dispassionately of Charlie Clark