Day in Court

He served during the early '30s as a fervid assistant to Judge Samuel Seabury in the investigation of Mayor Jimmy Walker's gaily corrupt New York City administration. He spent nine years as chief justice of New York City's Court of Special Sessions, retiring in 1960 and giving as his reason ill health induced by the "constant anxiety, irritation and strain" of the job. He was a suave, London-born lawman, with plenty of influential friends--among them New York's Democratic Representative Emanuel Celler. chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It was Celler who pushed his appointment as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York; Attorney General Robert Kennedy agreed, and sent the man's name to the White House. President Kennedy, in turn, sent the nomination up to Capitol Hill--where, last week, New York's Irving Ben Cooper, 60, suddenly became the most controversial of all the 102 persons nominated so far for federal judgeships by the Kennedy Administration.

Like a Baby. As the hearings began before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, everything looked rosy. Manny Celler. appearing as a witness, was almost lyrical about Cooper: "I gained great respect for this literate, articulate and erudite man ... I am proud to say that he is a good friend of mine--not merely a sundial friend, worthless when the sun goes down." After Celler finished, a parade of witnesses followed to add their praise of Cooper. Then, on the second day of hearings, New York City's Association of the Bar, which had announced its opposition to Cooper, produced a string of witnesses who presented an astonishingly different picture of Irving Ben Cooper. "I have seen Judge Cooper screaming in a tantrum on the bench like a baby in a high chair,"testified Jean Cox, an attorney for the Legal Aid Society. On one occasion, she said, the judge had denounced her as "just a crummy little lawyer from the crummy little Legal Aid Society." Former Assistant District Attorney John Bonomi agreed that lawyers and attendants were often "Cooperized"--i.e., "excoriated and publicly humiliated"--for smiling or rustling papers. To defendants, especially juvenile delinquents, the judge was withering. "You are all punks," he told a group of young defendants on one occasion. When a grand jury committee made a recommendation that Cooper did not like, said Juryman Dashiell Madeira, a retired admiral, "he turned his back on us, turned crimson and berated the group."

Like the Devil. "He seemed to have a persecution complex," said Matthew J. Troy, a retired Special Sessions judge and longtime colleague of Cooper's. The sight of anyone whispering in the court enraged him. One whisperer, Process Server Wallace Keyser, was summoned to Judge Cooper's chambers for a dressing-down in front of nearly every employee of the court. Said Keyser: "I felt if I took the job and he is the judge, I had better be nice. So I said, 'Your Honor, you are right, you do have a big job and we all have to work together to make it easier for you.' He stared directly at me and he screamed: 'We. we. we.' about five times, meaning putting myself in his class. 'How dare you say "we"?' Then he started to rave. His eyes started popping. 'What do you mean, "we"--you a process server and me?' His face turned purple, he looked like a reincarnation, the devil or something. He looked horrible to me." Also arrayed against Judge Cooper were the American Bar Association and the New York County Lawyers Association.

Favoring his appointment were 17 present and past justices in Special Sessions Court, and a host of important friends.

But in the parade of favorable witnesses, few had ever seen Judge Cooper in action in his court. Through all the sharply clashing testimony, Judge Cooper sat quietly and tensely in the hearing room.

This week, taking the stand in his own behalf, he would have his own day in court.

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