In Court: Wright for the President

The man who will represent Richard Nixon in Judge John J. Sirica's second-floor Washington courtroom next week is one of the nation's foremost constitutional authorities, University of Texas Law Professor Charles Alan Wright. A prolific scholar and ambitious lawyer, Wright, despite his relatively youthful age of 45, is by no means overmatched against his twin adversaries Archibald Cox, Harvard law professor and special Watergate prosecutor, and Senator Sam Ervin, the constitutional doyen of the Congress.

Wright's credentials include the authorship of the definitive handbook on the federal court system. He was brought into the White House last year, before Watergate erupted, to craft constitutionally sound legislation that would reverse the wave of court decisions ordering busing to achieve racial balance in public schools. The antibusing bill Wright designed was stymied by the U.S. Senate, but Nixon was so impressed by his legal skills that Wright has become the constitutional specialist on the new White House team of lawyers parrying the legal thrusts of Watergate. It was Wright who wrote the White House refusal to Cox's request for the presidential tape recordings, and he is briefing the press on the President's evolving defense.

The son of a Philadelphia journalism professor, Wright was a whiz kid who finished college at 19 and graduated third in his class from Yale Law School at 21. He then taught at Yale and the University of Minnesota before moving to Texas in 1955. A busy traveler who prefers trains to airplanes, Wright augments his $30,000 salary from the University of Texas with approximately $35,000 more from royalties on his bestselling handbook on the federal courts, a casebook on federal jurisdiction and procedure, and 13 volumes of a continuing series he has co-authored on federal practice. "Nobody in the country has done as much writing at his age as he has," says University of Texas Law School Dean W. Page Keeton. Wright clerked for one year under U.S. Circuit Judge Charles Clark and credits him with turning his interest away from corporate and tax law. Says Wright: "Judge Clark interested me in a subject most people find uninteresting--federal procedure."

Wright is considered a brilliant teacher who lectures without notes and cites cases from his own books by page and paragraph number from memory. But students complain that he is aloof and suffers from an irresistible urge to drop the grand legal names of the age. When a student once expressed some confusion about a principle of Federalism, Wright replied: "I had some question about that too until I asked Justice Frankfurter about it."

Wright will not discuss course work with students in his office after class because "if a question is important enough to ask, it is important enough to ask in class." For years he refused to call on women students for classroom recitation; when they complained, he simply ceased calling on anyone at all. "I never ask a lady to do anything against her will," was his explanation. In a skit called "Charlie Wright, Superstar," law students last year parodied him as a man just nominated to the Supreme Court. In the "confirmation hearing," the character of Wright pointed a menacing finger at a hostile Senator and zapped him into oblivion with a lightning bolt. The real Wright's reaction: "I didn't attend. I don't care much for humor."

Teaching law has not kept Wright from practicing it, nor is Richard Nixon his first glamorous client. Last year Reclusive Billionaire Howard Hughes wisely engaged Wright to appeal to the Supreme Court Trans World Airlines' $180 million default judgment against him; Wright won a reversal. Once considered such a bothersome liberal in Texas that the university president tried unsuccessfully to have him fired, Wright has in recent years represented more conservative causes. Wright pleaded the case of the Texas highway department when it attempted to build a freeway straight through an idyllic San Antonio park. "I'm a longtime Sierra Club member," says Wright, "but I don't believe the federal courts should tell a state where it can or cannot build a highway." Similarly, he argued in the Supreme Court for the constitutionality of the death penalty, but for strict legal reasons: "I'm opposed to the death penalty personally, but I don't see how you can read its prohibition into the Constitution."

Wright argued before the Supreme Court against lowering the voting age in federal elections to 18, not because he personally opposed the idea but because he felt a constitutional amendment was required to achieve it. But Wright takes on the cases of the indigent as well; he once argued without fee the appeal of four California blacks convicted of marijuana possession in Dallas. They were subsequently freed.

Though he fervidly denies it, Wright's colleagues feel that he deeply yearns for a U.S. Supreme Court seat. He maintains longtime friendships with Chief Justice Warren Burger and Associate Justice Harry Blackmun, and was indeed mentioned for a seat on the high court before he came to Nixon's White House. He openly supported the President's ill-fated nominations of Clement Haynsworth ("He is one of my judicial heroes") and G. Harrold Carswell ("He is a friend").

Wright's primary nonlegal passion coincides with that of his No. 1 client, Richard Nixon: he is a football fanatic. Like Nixon, Wright was a sometime college player (right end at Wesleyan in Connecticut). He says, "I'm prouder of having played than anything I've ever done in my life." At the University of Texas, Wright coaches a law school football team (the Legal Eagles) with the same intensity that he studies the law, personally buying matching dark blue jerseys for his players, treating the team to $40 worth of postgame beer--if they win--and sometimes harassing Texas Longhorn coaches for scouting reports on law school-bound football players from around the Southwest Conference. One opposition player recalled Wright's seriousness: "We were losing to the Eagles 42-0, really getting routed. I looked over on the sidelines and there was Wright, chain-smoking and pacing the sidelines, shouting and planning strategy furiously with his quarterback."

Divorced from his first wife, Wright is remarried and has five children. He works long hours but always retires early to get a solid nine hours of sleep. That regimen may be sorely tested before his tangles with Cox, Ervin & Co. on behalf of Richard Nixon are concluded.

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