Jim Neal became a Watergate prosecutor and famed defense lawyer for such powerful clients as Ford Motor Co. and Exxon. George Barrett developed a career as a prominent labor lawyer, a renowned crusader for civil rights and an influential political player over the course of five decades. And Tom Higgins became a big-time insurance defense attorney, ascending to federal judge with an appointment by then-President Ronald Reagan.
But in 1957, when Neal, Barrett and Higgins were students in the same class at Vanderbilt University Law School, the trio were just like any other clique of shiftless twentysomethings. They lay shirtless on their dusty apartment couches, drinking cheap beer and smoking marijuana. They chased after loose women, slept through classes and exchanged flippant jokes about their law professors. And they never, ever studied.
Certainly all that would make a more interesting story. But actually, Higgins, Barrett and Neal were complete and total...ahem...nerds. They debated such heavy subjects as existentialism, politics and religion. They took part in marathon study sessions, holing up for days in Higgins’ home while his mother—yes, his mother—cooked meat and potatoes for dinner. They didn’t drink much, and it’s safe to say that that even if quarter bags of marijuana were easy to come by during the Eisenhower ’50s, they wouldn’t have touched the stuff, much less inhaled.
Long before attorneys placed photo advertisements on the tops of urinals at local nightclubs, Neal, Barrett and Higgins and many of their law school classmates viewed the law as an honorable profession—one that safeguarded an open and democratic society. To them, being a lawyer wasn’t just a job; it was both a civic obligation and an extension of one’s intellect.
“We had a highly developed sense of discipline or what one might call a work ethic,” says Judge Higgins. “I can recall late nights after studying in the library, we’d go to a local Italian restaurant for discussion and banter.” And what did the three discuss? “I suppose we talked about the very nature of man,” the judge recalls, not at all joking.
While they certainly won’t draw any comparisons to the Rat Pack, the graduates of the Vanderbilt Law School class of 1957 may well be the most impressive and influential group the university ever sent packing into the real world. They flourished in court, and in government they knew how to manipulate the system. To this day, 45 years after they got their diplomas, members of the class of ’57 continue to shape law and politics in Nashville and well beyond.
“There probably have not been too many, if any, classes where this substantial a percentage of the class has achieved such success,” says Aubrey Harwell, a prominent defense attorney, a partner of Jim Neal’s and a 1967 graduate of Vandy Law School. “Individually and as a group, they have had a huge impact on this community.”
Typical of the era, the class of ’57 was all male and, with the exception of one Asian, all white. In addition to Neal, Higgins and Barrett, the class included Thomas Shriver, the longtime Davidson County district attorney and criminal court judge who died of a heart attack in 1997, and John Hollins Sr., a former prosecutor turned Nashville defense lawyer turned divorce attorney to the stars. There was John Jay Hooker, a serial candidate for Tennessee governor and the U.S. Senate, a newspaper publisher, temporary multimillionaire, buddy to Muhammad Ali and eloquent warrior against the corruption of democracy. The elite class also included Memphians William Henry, the youngest ever chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Jim Gilliland, the general counsel for the Department of Agriculture during the Clinton administration; Al Abbey, a nationally recognized tax and real estate attorney and former general counsel to Shoney’s; Hardy Moyers, the deputy director for the Tennessee Department of Revenue over the course of four decades; and Jimmy Evans, the late commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Transportation.
And that’s to say nothing of the many lawyers who achieved stature and prominence outside of Nashville. There was Arnold Schickler who, after graduating from Vanderbilt Law School, returned to New York to start his own law firm. Today, his firm specializes in commercial litigation, listing Citibank among its clients. There was also Dan Self, who practices law in Meridian, Miss., and recently helped win an $8 million judgment for a client who had been improperly diagnosed with cancer and had to endure a chemotherapy treatment.
“It is certainly one of the most outstanding classes in the history of Vanderbilt Law School,” says Bill Willis, a graduate of the school’s 1954 class and no shabby counselor himself. “I don’t know of any explanation for why the class was the way it was. Perhaps it was just a coincidence that so many great people ended up at the same place at the same time.”
Of course, their alma mater might have played a role as well. In the 1950s, the Vanderbilt Law School was just starting to emerge as a national-caliber institution. Its facilities were unimpressive—the library was in an old chapel, and students met not in their own building but in a few makeshift classrooms at Kirkland Hall. But the school counted among its faculty a number of talented professors, including an aging but brilliant Eddie Morgan, who had been forced to retire from Harvard even though he was the nation’s premier expert on evidence. The school also had some top-shelf lawyers who lectured at the university, including Bill Harbison, who later served as the chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court and made a lasting impression on his students.
“He always made the point that a lawyer who wasn’t prepared was incapable of being a lawyer,” says Arnold Schickler. “I must say those words were very accurate. And I internalized that over the years.”
For many of the students, Vanderbilt prepared them not only to succeed in law but to treat it with an almost theistic reverence. On Saturday mornings, students took a class uncreatively titled “The Legal Profession,” which was intended to provide a real-world look at the practice of law. One of the lecturers was Cecil Sims, a founding partner of Bass Berry & Sims.
“I can recall Mr. Sims emphasizing that as Vanderbilt lawyers we should strive to practice law in a 'grand manner,’ ” Higgins recalls. Asked what that actually means, the judge pauses, arches his head and politely raises his voice, as if he were speaking to a crowd of dignitaries. “That we should be meticulously correct as the officers of the court and in our representation of law and fact to the court. And that we should conduct ourselves with our opposing counsel in an absolutely honorable and aboveboard fashion.”
The professors were demanding, fostering self-doubt among even their brighter students. Jim Gilliland studied English as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt and never scored less than an A on any paper. But he soon discovered that he would not be able to skate through law school. “I remember my first intensely researched and carefully drafted case,” he says. “The critique that came back was so devastating that I really had to learn how to write all over again.”
Clearly, it wasn’t the kind of place a carefree law student would have enjoyed. “They had you buy all these books, and you’d do well just to bring them home,” Hardy Moyers says. “You start out reading old English law, and it didn’t make any sense.”
Of course, the school’s rigorous instruction produced lawyers who had a broad, intellectual interest in their profession—an interest that helped frame their real world decisions. In a varied career, Tom Shriver served as a lawyer, district attorney and criminal court judge. As a district attorney, Shriver wasn’t afraid to prosecute cases himself—a practice that others, including his successor, Torry Johnson, don’t follow. In addition, while Shriver, like any prosecutor, was zealous in winning convictions, he wasn’t afraid to cut a guy a break if he felt that was the right thing to do.
“It was his intellectual curiosity about how the law worked and how it was interwoven with life,” Circuit Court Judge Walter Kurtz told the Nashville Banner after Shriver died. “The law is interwoven with the tragedy, sorrow and suffering you see in court. He understood how those tied together.”
George Barrett sums up his law school experience rather succinctly. “We were at Vanderbilt when it was putting together a national class law school,” Barrett says. “They were training you for a profession and teaching you that you had some sort of obligation not just to yourself but to society.”
In 1960, President Kennedy narrowly defeated then-Vice President Richard Nixon in what would be the closest election until Governor George W. Bush outmaneuvered Vice President Al Gore 40 years later. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert as U.S. attorney general, and he soon made it his priority to target organized crime and its unholy alliance with organized labor. Bobby Kennedy knew both John Jay Hooker and Tennessean newsman John Seigenthaler, and both gentlemen recommended that the new attorney general enlist the services of a young Jim Neal, the former blocking back for the University of Wyoming, who had graduated first in the law school class of ’57.
Although his experience in criminal law fell somewhat short of extensive, Neal was up to the task, successfully prosecuting a creative teamster accused of siphoning his union’s money to buy a Minneapolis department store and then draining it of all its assets. But the day before the trial, the teamster just happened to suffer a heart attack in a Miami hospital. Neal knew something was up, recalling, “I knew there was some bullshit to that.”
So the dogged attorney flew to Miami, and upon interviewing hospital staff uncovered a few nurses who would testify that the teamster had tried to bribe them to lie about his medical condition. What happened next? “We transported his ass back to Minneapolis,” Neal recalls.
Neal then led the U.S. Justice Department’s attempts to convict Jimmy Hoffa, the legendary teamster boss. Charged with relatively minor financial shenanigans involving a Nashville trucking company, Hoffa seemed to beat the rap again when a local judge declared a mistrial. But the teamster boss soon faced new and more serious accusations of jury tampering.
In March 1964, a Chattanooga jury convicted Hoffa in a legendary trial that ultimately led to the conviction and suicide of Hoffa’s lawyer and John Jay Hooker’s good friend, Tommy Osborn.
Predictably, Hoffa wasn’t an earnest participant in the judicial process. During one court appearance, the teamster boss challenged Neal to meet him at the local gym and settle things once and for all. Neal declined, although a federal marshal was assigned to watch over him. Hoffa went to prison and later characterized Neal as the “most vicious prosecutor who ever lived.”
No doubt Neal wore that as a badge of honor when, nearly 10 years later as the lead prosecutor in the Watergate scandal, he helped convict 26 of former President Richard Nixon’s aides and agents. In a Time magazine story about the conclusion of the Watergate trial, the writer described Neal as “aggressive and brilliant” and wrote that his powerful summation of the government’s complex case “may become a trial textbook classic.”
Neal and his fellow students lived in a much different era—an era that may have laid the foundation for their eventual success. While they were born into a period of American history that had its share of problems—from institutional racism to blatant sexism and misogyny—it’s safe to say that American culture during the first few decades after the depression toughened people. The shadow of economic blight at that time made it hard to take anything for granted, and instead compelled many to fight for big and small victories alike. The class of ’57 might have had more resolve than most, partly because of the very challenging time in which they came of age.
“They were in a very real sense depression babies,” says former Tennessean editor and publisher John Seigenthaler. “And I think that created within many of them a drive to achieve.”
It was a different era from today in other aspects as well. Graduations, weddings and careers fell into place neatly and quickly, oftentimes by one’s early 20s. Young people didn’t take a decade or more to find themselves, switching jobs and relationships at the slightest tinge of discomfort. (Of course, there were also mid-life crises and divorces, the latter of which was common to many graduates of the class of ’57.)
Many members of the class of 1957 had embarked on their first marriages by the time they entered law school, while others had also served in the armed forces. They were a mature, focused group. If Starbucks were around back then, members would likely have preferred to study from the wooden chairs and tables in the library rather than sprawl out with their notebooks and texts on the soft couches of the coffeehouse.
The class of 1957’s general lack of wealth fueled their drive. Modest beginnings helped them concentrate on school and discouraged the kind of youthful indiscretions common today. Later on, when many of them attained money and stature, some made up for lost time by hobnobbing with professional athletes, drinking whiskey with abandon and taking on the status symbols that come with wealth. But the ’50s were a different story.
“It wasn’t easy to be wild back then,” Neal says. “Things that are around now weren’t a factor in 1957—no pot, no sexual revolution, no money. If we could afford to drink a few beers a week we were lucky.”
Students knew they had to work hard and earn good grades to get jobs after graduation. There was no sense of entitlement. Whatever they were going to get, they would have to earn.
“My father was a small farmer,” Neal says. “I knew I had to make good grades if I was going to get a good job. I didn’t have any money, and I was somewhat in debt.”
“We all didn’t have a lot of money, and we didn’t have a lot of connections,” says John Hollins Sr., whose family had money until the depression. “We knew we had to work like hell if we were going to make it.”
Indeed, Hollins’ continued to “work like hell” long after he had created a lucrative career for himself. In 1975, Hollins defended Jeffrey Womack in what is still the most famous murder case in Nashville history. An aimless 15-year-old who later dropped out of Hillsboro High School, Womack was accused of strangling and sexually assaulting Marcia Trimble, a 9-year-old Girl Scout with blond hair, blue eyes and freckles. On a February afternoon, she disappeared from her comfortable Green Hills neighborhood and was discovered in a neighbor’s garage more than a month later. Police investigators immediately seized on Womack, who had seen Trimble the day she disappeared, as a prime suspect. The teenager did himself no favors when he told his friends that he raped and killed the girl.
In August 1979, Hollins’ law school classmate, District Attorney Tom Shriver, decided that his office had enough evidence to try the case. In the middle of the night, the police came to arrest Womack. But Hollins and his partner Ed Yarbrough doggedly defended their client. In an odd triangle involving members of the class of '57, Hollins was pitted against Shriver while fellow law school alum John Jay Hooker, then the publisher of the Banner, weighed in on the case with a castigating editorial condemning what he saw as the strong-armed tactics of the district attorney’s office.
“They went out in the middle of the night like the Gestapo,” Hooker told the Scene last year.
The district attorney, who always nurtured a deep respect for the law and due process, called Hooker after reading the editorial. “He called me up and said, 'I think you’re right,’ ” Hooker recalls. “And what could have been an unpleasant situation ended up being OK.”
Hollins also had his problems with the district attorney. “Shriver and I were pretty close, but I didn’t think his office was treating Jeffrey fairly,” Hollins says now.
And so the murder case soon became a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckled brawl. When Hollins and Yarbrough felt like the police and the district attorney’s office were manipulating the press, they fought back, leaking information to local journalists that was favorable to their client. And in a hearing for Womack to decide whether he would be tried as an adult, the defense team went so far as to imply that Trimble’s mother, Virginia, might have killed her own daughter.
But if their defense didn’t win points for grace, the attorneys certainly helped Womack. Hollins and Yarbrough managed to cast enough doubt on Womack’s involvement and enough suspicion on the role of others that Shriver dropped the charges before the case ever went to trial.
“We did hours and hours of work and put the entire neighborhood under a microscope,” Hollins says. In fact, the defense lawyers uncovered several shady characters who lived near Trimble, including a man who collected women’s lingerie. They argued in an initial court hearing for Womack that any one of those characters could have been involved in the young girl’s death.
“To be a good lawyer, you have to have a reasonable amount of intelligence, you have to have good judgment and you have to work like hell,” Hollins says.
If Hollins, Neal and most other members of the class of ’57 barely had enough money for beer, John Jay Hooker was a striking exception. The son of a famous lawyer, Hooker sprang from wealth and stature and, perhaps as a direct result, regarded law school as an annoyance. “I was not a very good student,” Hooker says, saying he graduated last in his class. “I didn’t like law school. It didn’t interest me.”
Hooker’s father, John J. Hooker Sr., was a flamboyant and highly effective attorney involved in some of the most famous cases in Nashville’s history. Accustomed to seeing his father perform on the big stage, Hooker’s initial interest in law was limited to the showmanship of it all.
“Higgins and Neal were very interested in the law in the abstract,” he says of the class’s top students. “I was more interested in watching my dad try a lawsuit.”
“We used to have study groups together, but John Jay would never come,” George Barrett recalls. “He’d finally show up at the last minute and say, 'tell me what I need to know.’ And so we all helped him.”
But if Hooker wasn’t much of a student, many of his classmates thought he’d go far. With good looks and a gift of oratory rivaled by no one in the class, Hooker set his sights on running for governor—and wasn’t shy about saying so.
“The only one who demonstrated early on his ambition for higher things was John Jay,” says William Henry, who roomed with Hooker and went on to become chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. “We knew he was going to run for governor.”
Hooker did, in fact, go on to run for governor—three times. He never did win elected office.
In between his political bids, Hooker also played entrepreneur, starting a chain of restaurants called Minnie Pearl’s Chicken. Intended as a rival to Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hooker’s franchise, named after the Grand Ole Opry Star, got off to a roaring start only to crumble under the weight of a federal investigation into accounting procedures. Hooker claims to this day the investigation was politically motivated.
At the time, though, Hooker temporarily became quite wealthy, and that led to some characteristic boasting. “When Minnie Pearl was in full swoon and, on paper, John Jay was very rich, he used to say that he graduated last in law school and was worth millions, and I graduated first and didn’t have a pot to piss in,” Neal recalls.
Hooker’s failed ambitions, outsized ego and unimpressive net worth have diminished him in the eyes of some of his classmates. But in some respects, Hooker outshone them all, socializing in glamorous circles and participating in grand legal and political struggles. A friend of the late Bobby Kennedy as well as Muhammad Ali and Warren Beatty, Hooker always preferred the big stages of life to the back-breaking drudgery that accompanies law practice.
Indeed, Hooker has a knack for being ahead of his time. Long before Arizona Sen. John McCain nearly won the 2000 Republican presidential nomination by championing the need for campaign finance reform, Hooker cited the intertwining of money and politics as an undemocratic evil. When he surprisingly won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1998, Hooker used that platform to decry dirty money in politics.
Today, he has sued nearly every significant political figure in Nashville for the way they finance their campaigns, claiming that their acceptance of campaign donations violates the state and federal constitutions. He even sued classmates George Barrett and Jim Neal for holding a fundraiser for judges of the Tennessee Supreme Court. Hooker maintains that’s in direct violation of the state constitution, which restricts most forms of gift giving to elected officials.
“If George Barrett and Jim Neal think they should not have to follow the constitution, why don’t they hold their own constitutional convention?” he asks. “I like my fellow classmates. They are all good lawyers. But I’m different. I think that if you don’t guard the constitution, the constitution will guard you.”
Hooker’s suit against his classmates, like most of his other legal efforts, went nowhere. And while Barrett remains irritated over being sued, Neal holds no hard feelings. “You’re not in a very select group if you’ve been sued by John Jay,” he says.
Hooker knows that many of his classmates think that his crusades for campaign finance reform and assorted other causes are the hallmarks of a foolish old man. But that seems to motivate him more. “It’s not pleasant to know that my peers make fun of me,” he says. “But since they can’t attack the message, they attack the messenger.”
Judge Higgins and George Barrett have about as much in common politically as Hannity and Colmes. The reserved and deliberate Higgins is an arch conservative who owes his spot on the bench to a Republican senator and president. Barrett, who has never been characterized as “reserved,” is a yellow dog Democrat who has fought aggressively on behalf of labor and civil rights causes for decades. In fact, just last year he filed a well-publicized federal lawsuit on behalf of death row inmate Philip Workman.
And yet 45 years after they studied law at Vanderbilt, the Irish Catholic pair remain good friends. There are all sorts of things that inspire and maintain friendships, but one vital element is a shared set of values. Both Higgins and Barrett have an almost divine reverence for the law and equal disdain for the way it has been corrupted by corporatization.
“When I was at Vanderbilt, law was a learned endeavor that was pursued in a professional manner,” says Barrett, whose legal triumphs include helping overturn a congressional primary in 1962. “Now it’s a business and it’s adopted the standards of the business community, which I don’t think are very high.”
Higgins, whose position as federal judge requires that he speak cautiously on most subjects, grows irritated discussing the current status of his profession. “I have been away from the practice of law for 18 years, but my impression is that the practice of law has changed dramatically,” he says sternly. “The bar was smaller and, for the most part, the lawyers all knew each other in a more intimate sense. There were personal relationships in which lawyers hunted and fished together and had a drink of whiskey at the end of the day, even after vigorous scuffles in the courtroom.”
What about the law today? “Now I have the impression that the firms are much larger, that there’s not as much of the personal relationships between lawyers in different firms and that instead of having a drink of whiskey at the end of the day, the trend is to go the gymnasium and work up a sweat,” the federal judge says.
Hollins says that today’s young lawyers don’t have the same reverence for their profession that his generation did. “We looked up to older members of the bar. Now that’s not the case. You have kids right out of law school calling Jim Neal 'Jim.’ ”
But not all members of the class of ’57 think that way. “I think half of my class couldn’t have gotten into Vanderbilt Law School today,” says Al Abbey, who graduated not far behind Jim Neal.
There is, of course, another way to interpret the nostalgia of these legal giants. Some bemoan the changes in their profession because it ended their way of doing things. Neal, Barrett and Hooker and, to a lesser extent, Higgins and Shriver, were the ultimate insiders. They mixed politics and the law with ease and skill. It started back in the ’60s when Henry, Hooker and Neal became aligned with President Kennedy and his brother Bobby—a boon to all three of their nascent careers. Around the same time, Barrett helped elect Richard Fulton to Congress, when Barrett represented the young politician in an outrageous voting scandal. Fulton later became mayor, hiring Barrett for nearly a million dollars worth of city legal work. (“By God, they got good service,” Barrett says now.)
In the ’70s, Neal, Barrett and Hooker played key roles in reshaping the Tennessee Supreme Court, helping to elect a slate of reform-minded judges. The plan was hatched on a napkin from a local catfish restaurant. And while their motives were ostensibly pure—the Tennessee Supreme Court had become a backwater institution—it probably wasn’t a coincidence that the judges they helped usher into power were all Democrats, just like them. And while no one in Nashville would say that Judge Higgins didn’t earn his spot on the bench, it certainly didn’t hurt his judicial prospects that he had supported conservative politicians long before his appointment.
“In large measure, we got involved in public life and it was the public aspect of our careers that brought attention to us,” Hooker says.
Today, if the law is more corporate, it’s also a little more autonomous from government. And if it’s bigger and more formal, it’s also not the good-ol’-boy club that it used to be.
But if members of the class of ’57 knew how to manipulate the system to their personal advantage, they also fought for worthy social causes.
“They are fallible and flawed like all of us,” says attorney Bob DeLaney, who knows many of the class of ’57. “But they’ve had a tremendous impact on our profession, on a local, state and national level.”
Not that they’ve been put out to pasture. Even now, though nearly all of them could afford to retire to Palm Beach, many continue to practice law.
In the end, there may be another factor that helps explain the enormous success of this class—good old-fashioned luck. As the old baseball truism acknowledges, it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes all the hard work, intelligence and good intentions don’t amount to much without a small dose of good fortune. “To be a good lawyer you need to work really hard and know more about the case than anyone in the courtroom. You also need luck,” Neal says. “Luck is a big part of life. But you have to be prepared to take advantage of it.”
