A few weeks ago, I received the expected news that Nick Littlefield, 74, a friend and mentor of mine, had passed this life after a long journey with a neurological disease similar to ALS.
His service will be held on March 3rd, and I expect it to be one of those memorial services that you remember for a long time. Undoubtedly, a who’s who of Boston will be there: politicians, lawyers, journalists, diplomats, family and friends. There will be more than a few representatives of the Kennedy Family there, and no doubt there will be stories. Nick was the kind of person who lived life so fully, so intensely, that we could take up the whole day sharing them, no doubt.
Somewhere in that mix will be a kid from Baltimore, now older, a former student of his, fifteen years his junior, with a lot on his mind. He first met Nick around 1984 at Harvard Law School, where the kid was trying to find his way in a profession that seemed dauntingly corporate, with not many good ideas to pursue if one cared about making a difference in the world. Nick’s course, The Government Lawyer, changed all that, and when the kid became a lawyer, he had better, more inspired choices because of the ideas that Nick had put in his head.
This is my attempt to say thank you, and to acknowledge the extraordinary power of mentors.
Let me rewind the clock a few decades. Bancroft “Nick” Littlefield was, in the 1980’s, a partner in a Boston law firm, with a sterling resume from Milton Academy, Harvard College, University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a stint at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan), the most prestigious federal prosecutor’s office in the country. I was a second or third year law student, interested in constitutional law and criminal law far more than corporate law or civil litigation in the big law firm scene (where all the jobs were at that time). Nick was a “lecturer” at HLS, offering a course on government lawyering, which was really a course on how to be a competent and principled prosecutor.
I took the course not expecting to ever become a prosecutor. While I had always been interested in criminal law, I had then and have now a civil libertarian’s suspicion of government power, and if ever there is power than can be abused, it is the power of a prosecutor whose ambition gets ahead of the public interest. My inclination, if I was going to go into criminal law at all, was to be a defense lawyer — defending the wrongly accused, saving souls at risk of being crushed by the machine.
Nick’s course, like so many things he led, just pulled you into his orbit of energetic intellect, enthusiasm, and positive outlook. It was almost impossible not to love that course, with all its hypotheticals about under-cover wires, plea bargaining with cooperating witnesses, and so forth. It was like cops and robbers in the Big Leagues.
What really got me, though, and has always stayed with me, was Nick’s belief that a prosecutor who is doing his/her job right has a greater capacity for doing justice than a defense attorney who is mostly reacting to the train coming at the client. What? This sounded precisely backwards. Nick explained that the decisions made in investigations of what to go after and what not to go after, the charging decisions, the deals to cut and not cut, and the day-in-day-out exercise of discretion could have life altering consequences for everyone involved. If you believed in the public interest, as he did and as I did, he made it clear that one could do a lot of good for the world by making principled decisions in the public interest. (Conversely, an unprincipled prosecutor is a disaster in more ways than can be counted.) I decided after taking that course that someday I would be an Assistant U.S. Attorney. Making money could wait.
Four years after law school, after clerking for a federal district court judge where I could learn about trials, and working at a D.C. law firm where I would latch on to the coattails of other former prosecutors and great mentors, I finally got my chance and accepted a job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Maryland. I stayed there for eight years, learned so much about law and life and the endless stories of the human experience. I saw people at their worst and at their best all day long. And I found my voice as a lawyer.
Unbeknowst to me, during these same years, Nick had left his private practice in Boston because Senator Ted Kennedy asked him to be the Chief Counsel for the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Capitol Hill. He was Kennedy’s right-hand man through the difficult challenges of getting Congress to pass the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Family Medical Leave Act, and the first increase in the minimum wage since 1981. He stayed in that job for a long time, and recently finished his chronicles of his time there in his book on Kennedy: The Lion of the Senate.
As fortune would have it, we both returned to Boston at about the same time, he to return to his law firm practice but with a new health care/biotech focus, and I to relocate to my wife’s hometown. And so it was that after more than a decade of not connecting during our D.C./Baltimore days, we re-connected here in Boston.
He didn’t remember me at first (no surprise there), but eventually I reminded him of my paper on the use of the mail fraud statute in the conviction of Maryland Governor Marvin Mandel, and how that paper had helped me get that long-coveted job at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and how so many interesting things had opened up because of that experience. We stayed in regular touch thereafter, finding that we had many other things in common, like Buck’s Harbor Maine, and tennis, and — always for both of us — politics. Until he became ill, we were occasional tennis partners. But in truth, he was such an interesting guy that I couldn’t wait to get off the court and just catch up — which is not like me at all. I normally will stay out on the courts until I drop. But for me, tennis with Nick was not so much about the game; it was this serendipitous connection with a brilliant guy with a twinkle in his eye and a lot going on in the world.
As brilliant as Nick was, he was also extraordinarily generous of spirit. Early in his life, he married the widow of a friend (former Congressman Al Lowenstein) who was murdered by a mentally ill former student. Nick adopted Jenny’s children and treated them from Day One like they were his own. Over the years, Nick would talk about what his children were up to, and it was so clear what a committed father he was. He was so upbeat, even when the political struggles of the country looked grim. And Lou Gehrig-like, he recently described himself, despite his failing body, “one of the luckiest men alive.” That’s just how he thought, no matter how big the challenge. (They say that pessimists have a more accurate view of the human condition, but that optimists get everything done. No mystery which Nick was.) He was a force of nature, and a force for good, his whole life.
Gratitude is what I’ll be feeling on March 3rd. Gratitude that I was lucky enough to have crossed paths with Nick, and caught some fire from him. The career choices I’ve made have almost all been influenced by my eight years as a federal prosecutor, and indeed some of them would hardly have been possible without that experience. I might never have gone that route but for an odd-sounding course taught by a busy but oh-so-passionate adjunct lecturer.
So here’s to mentors, and here’s to Nick. None of us gets anywhere without the help of others. And in a profession as complex and sometimes daunting as the law, I’ve been lucky to have learned from some incredible shining lights, people like Nick Littlefield. I was a tiny, tiny piece of his life. He was a much larger piece of mine. Thank you, Nick.
Boston Globe obituary: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/02/05/nick-littlefield-who-helped-kennedy-shape-and-push-through-milestone-health-care-legislation-dies/hVnO53YjQPb37XiSNBlZcM/story.html
Even We Here 