Wiant interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Warren: You were going to tell me something about Frances and the art.
Wiant: It's not so much the art, it's the Lewis Powell Conference Room, which is
essentially the dean's conference room. Until just a couple of years ago, this room had
chartreuse velvet chairs. Clearly someone had failed to look at the color of the fabric in
that room, let alone under the particular kind of lighting. These were like vibrant frog

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chairs, and everything else, the architects had designed custom pieces of furniture for
the library, the circulation desks, some of the stacks, the end panels, pieces of furniture,
so everywhere in the building you'd see oak, and the classrooms. The architects
worked to pick the colors of wood that would blend with bricks that were custom
baked to be the size of an antique brick. The mortar has a special formula so it would
look like old mortar instead of new. The builders had bought bricks for the building
that were unacceptable; that's why Lexington has brick sidewalks. And we had to have
the bricks all baked for the law school.

         So here this extraordinary attention to detail so that the bricks would be the color
and the size and more closely parallel the front campus, and that we have columns over
here, albeit they're giant modern square columns, to parallel again the columns and the
red brick, all this very careful attention to make this building be a twentieth century
building, but still keep some of our tradition. And we had someone on the board of
trustees who had a furniture company, and the top floor has some lovely pieces of
furniture, I do believe, but they're not quite as complementary when you put a lovely
piece of walnut in a wood in a room that's paneled with English white oak.

         How and who picked these chairs, I will not know. Frances Lewis looked at
them and said, "Perhaps they will wear out very quickly." That is the only comment she
made about anything. (laughter) And, unfortunately, they have not worn out.
Warren: Probably nobody wants to sit in them. (laughter)
Wiant: They have worn like steel. They have just within the last couple of years, when
we finally made the building a smoke-free building but for a smoking lounge, the
chartreuse chairs moved to the smoking lounge and the dean finally got new chairs for
his conference room.
Warren: Wait a minute. I don't know this brick sidewalk connection. Tell me this
story.

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Wiant: It's my understanding that the builder had purchased all these bricks to build
the law school, however many, and I know some place in Frank Parsons' files there is a
set of statistics—and I may even have it in my files—about how many bricks went into
this building. But as I understand—and you may have to confirm that—I had always
understood that those bricks were found to not be acceptable, and the builder—this was
the Bicentennial. Lexington finally had some money for a facelift. We had never had
money to tear down buildings, so we now had money for facelifts, and historic
easements were put into place. The wires were put below street, and as they were
doing that and leveling the streets, it became apparent that it was time for new
sidewalks, and they decided to use some of these bricks, maybe all of those bricks, and
the law school ordered custom-baked bricks to be the size of an antique brick. They
were custom made for us in this color.
Warren: These bricks that are now on the Lexington sidewalks, were they donated?
Wiant: No, I think the local community, the shop owners, purchased enough bricks for
in front of their place, so everybody literally came out ahead for what could have been a
disaster. I think that's true of the bricks. I do know that these were custom baked for
us, and I do know that the formula, because I have the mortar formula. When I had to
cut a hole in the wall of the courtroom to install cameras, I went through five
bricklayers before I found a cosmetic bricklayer who could actually, with the formula,
match the mortar and put those bricks back in so that there would be room enough for
this camera to pan. It's very hard to match them. It's very hard, as beautiful as this is,
when anything wears out or you need to add something, to go back to this company.
These chairs are incredible, just incredible.

         When we had an oversized class, when the reputation of the law school was just
beginning to soar, we had a very large class, and the students all received letters
offering them a spot in the next class, but, of course, then it became very prestigious to
come here, so they all came. We then had to decide that every student would have a

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desk and an office space or a carrel, but not both. So, for instance, Law Review, who
historically had a desk in the Law Review and a carrel, now only got desk in the Law
Review. We still needed carrels.

         Dean told me to find out, to get—I had to have ten more carrels. I went back to
the company who had custom-designed these carrels for us. We had had several
companies build mock-ups, and the students got to rate them, while we were in Tucker,
all these decisions about how you want to live within the building. A company,
Buckstaff, in Wisconsin, got the contract to build the carrels, and designed the final
carrels that had the best of each one of the mock-ups. So when I went back to try to get
more carrels, when I found out how much they were going to cost, which was, without
wiring and without chairs, now over nine thousand dollars a carrel, and they even
share a wall in between, I went to the dean and said, "We're only going to have these
students for three years. I have a plan. You'll buy each one of them a compact car, a
computer, and a modem, and they can just drive around for their law school." Needless
to say, we didn't buy ten more from them.

         Once again I got building and grounds to come in and build the closest replica
that they could build, and squeezed them in. Now I've dismantled some of them, that
we're now down to the size that we've been.
Warren: You've mentioned a couple of times Lewis Powell. I think we ought to spend
a little time talking about Lewis Powell.
Wiant: What an extraordinary man. When one says "southern gentleman" and one
conjures up all the good things that go with saying someone is truly a southern
gentleman, he is the personification of that. What extraordinary good fortune I have
had to know him personally, not just as an alum, but to work with him in a different
way. A fine legal mind, to be sure. But it's his sense of fairness and his sense of the
responsibility that comes with some of the rights that we have been accorded, and to
impress upon the members of his firm and all those with whom he's worked, what

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obligations come with being allowed to be a member of the legal profession. Then it's
just his exceptional good graces. He does have a sense of humor and a sense of warmth
and caring that we hold him—probably, I think without any question, he's probably our
most esteemed alum, certainly living alum.
Warren: How often does he come here?
Wiant: He has not been here since the Powell dedication. I think his health keeps him
either in Richmond or Washington, D.C. I try to visit him in his chambers at least a
couple of times a year. In recent times he has suggested that he is not traveling to see
his children; they now all travel to see him.
Warren: Tell me about the Powell dedication. How did that come to be and what was
the event?
Wiant: The event was one of those that, upon reflection, was most of what you would
like it to be and you hope you never have to do it again. When the decision was made
that the papers would come here, then we had to do what we said we would do in
providing the kind of space and servicing the collection that it would have gotten had it
gone to National Archives or to the other collection of papers. The arguments for it
being here is that for us it would be one of a kind and it would get such attention the
likes of which it would never get as being one among many collections of Supreme
Court justice papers.

         The down side is that we are remote, and that for a scholar doing research on
that period of time, a scholar would have to travel several places, that the collection
would not be together for historical purposes. That was philosophically troubling to
me, but it was a call that was not necessarily mine to make, and once it was made, it
was mine to carry out as best we could.

         We had the good fortune of being able to use the same architects, so that the
building is hardly distinguishable from the current building. The University did
decide it had to scale back its efforts and the archives were filled pretty much the day

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we moved into it, so that opportunities to expand are very limited, and that's a bit
frustrating.

         It was quite some time before, even though we had the building and we had a
few of his papers, he had made his entire collection of papers available to his
biographer and we could not take any of them until the biography was done. So it was
quite some years before we actually got the papers and were able to actually begin
serious work on them.

         The dedication itself was planned for the first part of April. We set it then
because we thought it would be beautiful and it would be warm, and Justice Powell
does not want to be cold. In fact, he dislikes cold so much that a design requirement
was that we be able to heat his office to ninety degrees, which required an additional
heating system, which meant that we had to do the worst design possible, which is put
pipes over the archives themselves. Well, once you do that, then I had to have designed
yet another system, because not only did we have the problem of fire and fire
suppression, but as bad as fire is for papers, water is equally bad, if not worse, so we
had to have a water-sensing system designed.

         The additional problem for all of this is that having done all of these things, all
under the Powell, the formal offices and the archives, not too many weeks before the
dedication, the dean came down to look, and we had Powell's office fairly completed,
and it was on that side of the building. The dean had just had a conversation with
Powell, who expressed how much he was looking forward to sitting in his office and
looking out on the football field where his son had played football. With that tidbit of
information, I was directed to have all of the furnishings taken out of one office and put
in the office on this side. This side was marginally smaller than the other office, and all
the valances and the drapes, etc., had to be recut and rehung, all of which was more or
less being done, and then ten days before the Powell dedication, the dean comes back,
and at his earlier instruction, the scholars' office had not gotten full cosmetic treatment.

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He had wanted the offices to be starkly different, and upon looking at them, he decided
they were entirely too stark and that inadequate furniture had been ordered for the
Powell Suite. I had had the plasterers come in to fill in the holes where the valances had
been removed, the office repainted, I'd had to call and say to the architects and the
interior people, "The dean wants more furniture and now wants drapes and blinds in
the other office." No lamps had been ordered. Nothing. "And I am here to tell you that
in ten days (I never looked at the bill) he told me to do it." So I did it.

         The interior person came down and said, "You have fifteen minutes to select
fabric that goes with all these fabrics in this other office and the fabrics in the front. If
you can have this selection made from these by 1:30, you will have your drapes." And
someone who has a furniture company sent a furniture saleswoman. She said, "Okay, if
you pick some chairs in these fabrics, you can have your chairs." It was extraordinary
on the part of some master craftsmen.

         At five o'clock the night before Lewis Powell was coming, buildings and grounds
was in, and some other people were in, hanging the new set of valances and drapes,
whereupon this guy said, "Lady, if you were going to do this, why did you have us
come in and fill all those holes and paint?" "I don't want to hear a single word out of
you. The story is too long to tell, but those must be up by tomorrow and we're wasting
time with you talking." And when the chairs came I had picked from a little tiny piece
of fabric, and I thought, "Well, I'm going to be on the job market if when I take this
black plastic wrapping off these chairs are not going to work." But they worked.
Warren: So does he use this office?
Wiant: He was here, he used it for dedication, and then he's simply not been well.

         With dedication we decided that no less than another grand party would be
acceptable, and this was in April, the last month of school, the week when all first-year
had a brief due, and the dean decided, and the University decided, that the dedication
dinner would be held in the main reading room. We had boarded up and moved all

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these books several times because we had no place to put them in storage and we could
not do without them during the construction, so they had been returned the last month,
the previous month, finally to the place where they would sit in the main reading room,
and the books had been, returned to the shelves, because we had to move, for insurance
purposes, all the books compacted up so they would not be directly under the
construction. We moved them back, we put them things in the main reading room, and
because it was the time of the year—every book had to be moved out of the main
reading room, but not sent to storage.

         On Friday afternoon, every stack had to be dismantled and seating for 350-plus
set up with special tables and chairs in the main reading room. Scott Beebe had to build
special lighting. I had to find a string quartet to play, and we had a nine-course dinner,
with red wine, on brand-new carpeting in the main reading room, only to have to have
all the shelves and the books back on the shelves by Monday so that the students could
continue with class. It's an event I never choose to do again. It was very—and yet it
was splendid.
Warren: I hope you were able to enjoy yourself.
Wiant: Lewis Powell had come here to play baseball and he didn't make the team, and
for favors that evening we had Lewis Powell baseball, with his signature on the ball,
and a baseball card, but with his court statistics on the back rather than baseball
statistics. And he was so touched. All of his children were here, and Chief Justice
[William] Rehnquist was here, and all the powers-that-be were here, and a lovely,
amazing dinner on the scale of toasting the building itself was recreated for an event
not to be forgotten.
Warren: That's a lovely story.
Wiant: And while he was exhausted, you could tell that he had a sense that his
university had done well.
Warren: Sounds to me like you did well.

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Wiant: I thought I was going to go crazy.
Warren: What year was that? When did that happen?
Wiant: I guess that's about six years ago. I can figure it out. They sort of run together.
Warren: I'm sure.
Wiant: I will figure that out.
Warren: Let's talk about presidents. When you arrived, Bob Huntley was president?
Wiant: Bob Huntley was president.
Warren: He certainly has a strong connection to the law school.
Wiant: Very strong connection.
Warren: Let's talk about Bob Huntley.
Wiant: To talk about Bob Huntley, I have to tell you a story about John Wilson and
how my colleagues reacted to John Wilson, who I think is just a wonderful man and an
exceptional president, a president that would equal Bob Huntley but for very different
reasons.

         Bob Huntley is a first-rate lawyer. He acts like a lawyer, he talks like a lawyer,
he plays like a lawyer, and he jokes like a lawyer. The law school knew how to relate to
Bob Huntley. He had been in the law school and had taught in the law school and, I
think, had been dean at least a little short window of time in the law school, and then
had gone to the presidency. He and Roy Steinheimer were a pair. They flew around in
Roy's plane, Roy having the name of Sky Dean. They visited law schools to see what
they wanted to do; they flew to Buckstaff to see what the furnishings were like; they
flew to places to look at the technology that should be put in here. Both of them were
just penultimate lawyers and they made decisions.

         While we had, clearly, a dean of a college who was involved, the real running, I
think, of the university —yes, there was a board of trustees, but Bob Huntley has a
personality that just could fill a room, and if there was any left, Roy had a personality
that could fill the room, and together they were just a formidable pair and were able to

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make decisions that were the right decisions, but also helped people come about to the
view that it was the right decision.

         Bob Huntley managed to keep the university going through the Vietnam years
without having the university suffer destruction, was able to bring about a capital
campaign for the university that so desperately needed money and needed to restore
its building that had not been looked after, and build the law school, and do all of that,
and he made commitments that he was going to keep, and I feel absolutely certain that
one of those commitments was that the university would not go coed while he was
president. That was an assurance in return for money to keep us going. I'm not sure
whether he personally believed—in fact, I would be quite surprised if he didn't
personally believe that the decision to go coed when we did was the right decision. He
just had a commanding personality and, as I say, with the other one.

         So when John Wilson assumed the mantel of the presidency, very literary figure,
very different background than Huntley, John wrote to the faculty this memo that went
on for probably a page and a half. Well, maybe it was a letter that he wrote to the board
and shared with the faculty, about what it was like to sit in his office and look out over
the state of the university and see the sun setting on Liberty Hall, you know, the peals
of laughter and the cheers trickling over from the lacrosse game, etc.

         Well, the law faculty just did not know what to make of this. (laughter) We
were used to memos that said what they had to say and said it in a paragraph or less;
that was it. Here comes this lengthy, very literary letter that goes on about sort of all
things that we in the law often hold in abeyance. The law school just puzzled, not
reacting very well, and thought, "How will this man ever be able to do for the law
school what Bob Huntley had done for the law school?" Although the presidencies
were very different, the law school thrived, continue to thrive and continued to become
better and better known and be a much stronger law school. It was certainly John

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Wilson's commitment to make sure that the jewel in the crown, so to speak, remains the
jewel in the crown.

         I never personally knew Bob Huntley as well as I knew John Wilson, but most of
my time I was in a junior capacity and was a law student, so I didn't go to the same
series of events where I would have had the occasion to know Bob Huntley in quite the
same way. You need to talk to Uncas [McThenia] about Bob Huntley and talk to Roy
about Bob Huntley.
Warren: I certainly intend to do that. I'd like to talk a little bit more about Steinheimer
and your appreciation of him and the role he played.
Wiant: I think that with the exception of just alum who just one did not get along with
him at all, I would venture to say that for most alums, Steinheimer was almost godlike.
This most imposing, impressive man, sort of impressive on every front, he knew what
good law schools were supposed to be and he had a faculty here, some of them an older
faculty, and then he brought in some then younger ones who had never taught
anyplace, so had no idea about how schools were supposed to run. He kept a lot of
decisions close to the chest. He made them. He might have asked for advice, but you
didn't make the decision; they were his and he made them and then you sort of carried
them out.

         He had an expression that you invariably got, which was, "My hands are tied,"
and no matter what it was you wanted, you'd walk into his office and you dare not get
on his side of the desk, you just dare not. I mean, there was always this barrier. He'd
turn around to the credenza behind him and he'd pull out this drawer. I never knew
what was in that drawer. He'd look in the drawer. I often thought it was an accounting
sheet about how much money we had left to do whatever, but he'd look in the drawer
and he'd turn around and say, "My hands are just tied on this one." It didn't matter
what—curricular kinds of things, money kinds of things, changes.

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         In many ways he was like a very firm father figure, but also very warm and
caring. The students loved him, adored him. He individually flew around and
recruited them, and he has even to this day an exceptional capability where he just
knows names, and it's almost like this giant Rolodex will be in his head. I saw, for some
alumni weekend, somebody who had not been back in fifteen years and who was
standing behind me in the line, and I turned around and it was somebody I had known
well, who had, in fact, been in recent years at that time one of the first law students who
had managed to be head of the entire campus. This was a Cornell graduate, a Jewish
kid. We didn't have very many, and they had kind of a hard time in Tucker. This was
not your Oxford cloth, khaki and blue blazer, although he clearly knew how to wear
that if he chose; he chose to wear overalls and a bandanna. Fifteen years gone, several
moves.

         Standing behind, I say hello to him. Roy's in front of me in the line. Roy turns
around, looks at him, you can see shuffling of the names, and it's like, "Well, Mr.
Schwartz, how are you? Now, are you still practicing with—" and it means he had
followed every one of those moves and knew exactly what kind of law he was
practicing and where he was. I never saw him grope for a name, unlike our last dean,
who laughs about this, too, Randy Bezanson, who just was not at all good with names.
I mean, he would forget the name of his research assistant and just not know students,
with sort of all the other deans knowing every one of them individually, by name, what
they were doing, where they had done this. When Roy would write a letter of
recommendation, that was it. He had all these contacts.
Warren: So when you say he flew around and recruited people, how did that come to
be? People would apply and then he would decide, "This is somebody I want"?
Wiant: Or he would go to law fairs and then talk to students who would show up and
be interested in. And sometimes at some places there would be lots of schools, fifty,
seventy-five schools, and students would just walk around and pick up catalogs and

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things, and he'd stop them or they'd stop to talk to him, and by the time they got
through talking, they were persuaded this is where they wanted to come, and if they
were ones that had applied and he was really going after, he would fly to wherever to
go see them.
Warren: That must have been very seductive.
Wiant: He did that with capital campaigning and calling on people and getting money
for this building. Yes, yes, and when you meet him, you will find that this man has a
magnetism that is just—
Warren: I'm looking forward to it.
Wiant: We teased a lot. He looked like a twin of Nelson Rockefeller, and especially
when he was in the dean's office, and they were about the same age. He had played
football for Michigan, I think. I mean, he had a chest like this. He selected these
amazingly—and I found out years later that he had them custom-made. I just thought
he bought these coats because he was so broad-chested that you sort of had to take what
was there. Students just cut up about his outrageous sports jackets. And the minute
summer hit, he took off the coat and tie and he wore a shirt, usually unbuttoned. We
called him Belafonte-heimer, not to his face. And he'd roll up his sleeves and he
smoked Camels. He and Mrs. Mac smoked Camels—unfiltered Camels.
Warren: So you didn't have a no-smoking policy in the building at that time.
Wiant: Oh, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We didn't have the no-smoking policy until
Dean Bezansom left the dean's office, because he smoked constantly, but not Camels.
Warren: You've mentioned Uncas McThenia. The other day you called him the
conscience of the law school. What did you mean by that?
Wiant: He is our conscience when we're really struggling with difficult social and
cultural issues or ethical issues. I don't know how many years ago, a lot of years ago, a
lot of years ago, there were some personal crises in his life and he turned to the church,
which evidently had not been a part of his life. I mean, he was always a good,

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thoughtful, caring man, but he thinks about issues in different ways and forces us to
think about some of these issues in different ways, and he has a great love of the
University , a seven-year man, and somewhere in there he went off and got a master's
of geology at Harvard, I think, but has come back and has had this long association.

         He can tell some wonderful stories about—I think it was maybe Martin Luther
King [Jr.] that he invited to the university to speak, and had to uninvite.
Warren: Ooh, now, there's a story.
Wiant: Yeah. There's some very interesting stories about our race relations on campus.
Warren: How about here in the law school? How has that evolved here?
Wiant: We have struggled. We have really struggled. There are so few minorities,
although we worked very hard on getting minorities in the law school, but it has not
been easy for them. They still are isolated. We still, after all these years, have only one
minority faculty member. We may be recruiting in the wrong spots people who are
strong enough that we would like to have here, but not people who are willing to move
to rural America. We've not been very successful in that, and that's made it harder for
students.

         A handful of years ago, we had a very, very unpleasant situation where a poster
in the carrel of a minority student was defaced with just really ugly epithets. Randy
was in the dean's office and, I think very appropriately so, wrote a letter to each one of
the law school community saying, with no uncertainty, that this type of behavior will
not be accepted. While we never really found out who did it or why, I think his very
strong immediate stance gave some assurance to minorities that we do believe they're
an important part. But it's been a very long time, just a very long time, and we still
haven't got very many, and it's still a hard row to hoe. I wish I could be prouder of us
in that regard.
Warren: Well, it's true university -wide, I think. There are very few black faces. That's
the one thing I do find odd about this place. It's out of my usual realm of experience.

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Warren: You also mentioned Hal Clark the other day.
Wiant: Ah. Hal Clark, Sr., who is a graduate of the university , has had a very fine
career in law, was on the board of trustees through several occasions in which the issue
of coeducation was debated, and he was not supportive of the proposition and was
estranged from the university for a while after the decision was made.
Warren: Undergraduate or law school?
Wiant: Undergraduate. His son, who is also a lawyer, was a classmate of mine, and his
daughter-in-law is also an alum of the school, who was absolutely outrageous in her
behavior as a student, and his son was capable of doing anything, a very bright young
man, studied all the time, never played. In fact, Hal Clark, Sr., would come and say,
"Can't you make him stop working so hard?" We tried but were not very successful,
and here was this unlikely match of this woman who would say and do anything, who
wrestled in pink Dr. Dentons, the only woman who wrestled in the law school
wrestling league, just did and said anything, two extremes attracting and making a
wonderful happy marriage, and they are coming back for their reunion this particular
year.

         So I think Hal was not as opposed to women in the law school; that really wasn't
changing—I may be putting words in his mouth—wasn't changing really the dynamics
of the university , particularly once we were over on this side of the campus, but to
change the other things about the university he found very troubling. He was a very
loyal alum and has returned to the fold and still does a great deal for us, gave us
Classroom F in the Law School, a very generous gift, and has entertained and really
made plans for all kinds of other avenues of effort on the part of the university .
Warren: I guess that was why his name stood out to me, this idea of coeducation in
general. I think that's a very interesting implication that Bob Huntley had struck a deal
about coeducation. Is that your opinion or do you really think that that's factual, that
he had struck a deal that it would not happen in his tenure?

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Wiant: It is really my opinion. It may be stronger than my opinion. You might get Roy
or Uncas, and I think if you got either one of them, it would probably be enough of a
confirmation to say that's true. Frank might be able to confirm that, too.
Warren: So what was your eye-witness account of the coming of the women of across
the way?
Wiant: We were here. There was nothing that could be done about it, and the
university was not going to do anything about it that would make it any easier for us to
be here, in a capsule.
Warren: But I'm talking about on an undergraduate level.
Wiant: Oh, on an undergraduate level. On an undergraduate level, I think the
University made a valiant effort to try to do this right. They studied things that ought
to be studied ten years earlier. They made changes in the university that ought have
been changed whether or not we added women: more lights on campus, more security,
improved health services. But they went the steps to think about how young women's
eating patterns differ from young men and why that would be an important
consideration; thinking about whether there ought to be changes in the curriculum;
going to extraordinary efforts to add, in a very fair way, women to the athletics
program. We didn't even have enough women to fund X number of teams, and if we
were going to continue to play as Division 3, we had to have X number of teams. Well,
just because you've got women here, and a hundred of them, didn't mean that they
were all going to want to do anything, let alone all at the same time.

         I think the University really tried to change those things that needed to be
changed and tried to provide a welcoming environment, even though there were a
great many faculty, and some to this day, who I think would prefer that there be no
women here, tried to create the kind of environment in which learning could take place
and would take place, and that these women would be assimilated. Yet I still hear the
young women say they won't do certain things because they're so fearful of being

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ostracized, that it's really troubling. Just as I think we have made great strides, I will
find out that we've made very little progress at all.
Warren: What kinds of things?
Wiant: Well, for instance, for the coeducation anniversary, the Women's Forum had
teeshirts prepared to sell. They were too afraid to put the sign up on the table saying
they were selling coed teeshirts, for fear that they would be ostracized by primarily the
fraternity system. And they won't speak out. I think some of their reticence to speak in
class is perhaps less than it was, that it's become commonplace for the women to do
well in class and be willing to speak, but in anything that would set them apart as doing
other than the female parallel of what the guys are doing, they don't want to become
involved or associated because of—