21st Annual Goldmark Award Luncheon

2007 Charles A. Goldmark Distinguished Service Award recipient Pat McIntyre was honored during the Goldmark Luncheon February 16, 2007 at the Red Lion Hotel on 5th Avenue.  Superior Court Judge Michael J. Fox introduced ABA President-elect William H. Neukom to give the featured speech, "Mainstreaming the Rule of Law."   Northwest Justice Project Executive Director, César Torres followed to introduce Mac.

Judge Michael J. Fox introduced speaker William H. Neukom

I'm sure that for many of you here today, your first glimpse of our keynote speaker was on the evening network news. During the seemingly interminable Microsoft Antitrust trial, Bill Neukom seemed to live in an overcoat with ten microphones thrust toward one of his ubiquitous bowties.  On TV,  Bill, like others involved in the trial, seemed more like what we know call "spinners" than lawyers, trying to cast the day's developments and testimony in the light most glowing for their clients.

Microsoft survived that ordeal, not because of Bill'' TV commentary, but because of his leadership of a legal team that kept the focus on what was important for his client. I want to let you know, however, that Bill had a life before Microsoft, and that is the life that has propelled him to become the President-Elect of the American Bar Association.

If you'd like to learn more about Bill's career at Microsoft, I commend to you the profile of him in the January issue of the King County Bar News.

The President of the ABA will have a leader in Bill who will speak out on difficult issues, including those involving securing equal access by the poor among us to our courts and legal system. Since beginning his career in Seattle forty years ago at MacDonald Hoague and Bayless, Bill has been a leader of the organized bar on problems of legal access for everyone. Among the many examples of his leadership is what he did for me personally, and, more importantly, for my migrant farm worker clients.

In 1971, Lupe Gamboa, a former Goldmark award recipient, and I were arrested at the Rogers Walla Walla Labor Camp, where Lupe had brought me to talk with a group of workers about their potential wage claim case. We were met by an armed guard and told to leave; having driven six hours to see these clients, we refused. Shortly thereafter, we were in the back of a police cruiser, headed for the County lock up. Shortly after that enjoyable experience, we were convicted of Criminal Trespass in Walla Walla District Court, and then again in a de novo trial in Walla Walla County Superior Court.

This is where Bill Neukom and Llew Pritchard and the ABA came to our rescue. We had been arguing unsuccessfully that the workers had a constitutional right to receive legal information and counsel in their homes, and that the private property owners of the camp could not prevent labor organizers and lawyers from going into labor camps for such purposes. Bill and Llew went to work, and after a long struggle, convinced the American Bar Association to file an amicus curiae brief in the Washington State Supreme Court. When the ABA filed their brief, it stated that lawyers not only had a right, but a professional obligation, to go into labor camps and other areas where poor people lived to give them access to their legal rights and remedies.

The Supreme Court unanimously reversed our convictions in 1973, with an opinion firmly establishing the principle that farm workers could not be held like prisoners, isolated from the services and people who could help them.

Bill will speak today about his own views on what "The Rule of Law" means today for our society. He has lived his own career as one who represents his own clients vigorously, and has advanced to his present position by hard and unstinting committee and section work within the ABA.  But, he has not forgotten that the primary duty of a lawyer called to lead other lawyers is to conduct oneself in a manner that insures that the legal system serves all who come before it in a fair and equal manner. As ABA President, Bill will be a forceful advocate for the "Rule of Law" serving the poor, and the concept that lawyers serving the poor must act vigorously and independently on behalf of their clients, no matter where their paycheck comes from.

Patrick "Mac" McIntyre's acceptance remarks

Thank you, César, for your very warm and complimentary remarks.  And thanks to all of you for being here to join with me in what this tremendous occasion is really all about: re-committing ourselves to the work of achieving true equal justice for all.  Like all of you, I always look forward with particular anticipation to this annual event - a special time of reconnection and renewal that honors the memory and accomplishments of Charles Goldmark and the Goldmark family, and affords all of us the opportunity to take some time to enjoy the many wonderful personal and professional relationships that we have developed in the course of our pursuit of a common and vitally important cause.  I'm deeply pleased and extraordinarily honored to be here and - on behalf of our entire Alliance for Equal Justice - to receive such recognition.

You know, a couple of weeks back I was somewhat taken aback to come across a fairly obscure quote that is credited to Woodrow Wilson.  "If you want to make enemies," he's reported to have said, "try to change something."  I recognize, of course, that he was speaking from a deep sense of disappointment and frustration.  But still...when I get an introduction like the one César has given, and when I see the smiles and feel the support in this room, not to mention all the nice congratulatory notes, cards, calls and emails I've received, I have to think that, either President Wilson was trying to change the wrong things, or he simply had a hopelessly cynical and completely misanthropic perspective.  You have been, and you continue to be, the best family, friends, colleagues, critics and mentors that anyone could ever have hoped for, and I want you to know, above all else, how totally fortunate and blessed I already consider myself to be without receiving any additional awards or recognition at all.

As I indicated earlier, and I hope you understand how sincerely I mean it, I am acutely aware that the efforts and achievements celebrated by this recognition represent collective and not individual accomplishments.  While I don't for a minute mean to suggest that I view any of our accomplishments as being directly comparable in their scope and importance, I would very much like to follow the lead of someone like Albert Schweitzer.  As I expect most of you will recall, after he won the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for working with the poor in central Africa, Schweitzer used the money to build a facility for treating leprosy.  He changed many lives and inspired countless others.  Yet he was keenly aware of the mischief that can come from the cult of personality, and he actively eschewed the mantle of the hero.  "Of all the will toward the ideal in mankind," he wrote, "only a small part can manifest itself in public action. All the rest of this force must be content with small and obscure deeds.  The sum of these, however, is a thousand times stronger than the acts of those who receive wide public recognition.  The latter compared to the former are like the foam on the waves of a deep ocean."  So, it is in that spirit that I want to thank you for and proudly accept the Goldmark Award.  Thanks to all of you for all that you do and have done - for being the real force that propels the waves of change.  I am honored beyond words today, and more grateful than I know how to say, for the friendships and associations that I have enjoyed and benefited from over the past 30-plus years.  

I know I should just stop right here, but I can't resist taking advantage of this opportunity to share a few more thoughts.  I do appreciate that it's perfectly okay for us to acknowledge and take pride in our efforts, or even to just pause now and then for a little bit of fun and celebration.  But I also think it appropriate to remind ourselves that the state of our physical environment is not the only matter in regard to which we are confronted by some inconvenient truths.  The reality is that the Alliance for Equal Justice faces many extremely difficult challenges and has a great deal of unfinished business.  Just over the past few weeks, as I have thought about what I might say to all of you, I couldn't help but to note a variety of troubling developments or events. 

On the front page of the newspaper, for example, I was moved to see the photo of an otherwise strong grown man broken down, in tears, because he cannot afford, and because our system will not provide the medical and dental assistance necessary to remove his four infected wisdom teeth. 

A King County Bar Bulletin advises us, in the middle of a period of record rainfall and many nights that chilled me to the bone, that, "[o]n any given night, more than 8,500 people in King County are without permanent shelter, either on the streets or in emergency or transitional shelters.... [and] some 27 percent of those in shelters are children under the age of 17."

Yet another news article reports that there has been a recent and significant resurgence of activity and membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

I suspect that a lot of you have also been distressed as I have at what certainly seems to be the undue politicization of judicial election contests and perhaps in some cases even the appointment and evaluation process for our highest level public attorneys.

And, of course, as we learned from the Civil Legal Needs Study, and as all of us know only to well, the great majority of the poorest and most vulnerable residents of our state are still not receiving an adequate level of legal aid despite commendable new funding commitments and our best continuing efforts.

I don't recite these unfortunate realities to provoke controversy or counsel despair. I've always been optimistic, and I remain so, about the inevitability of our achieving - eventually - the full realization of equal justice for all and the restoration of a widespread respect for and understanding of the rule of law.  I agree with the activist-historian Howard Zinn, who encourages us to realize that "...to be hopeful in bad times is not...romantic.  It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness... If we remember...where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction."

I don't have any doubt whatever but that we can pull it off.  Today - just as was the case in 1995 when the initial State Plan and the Northwest Justice Project came into being - the only things that can stop us are Turf, Territory and Ego ... or forgetting that true leadership is foremost and always about our supporting one another in pursuit of clear and deeply shared values...about constancy and conviction - and never, ever about manipulation or control.

And, happily, there are a few positive and relatively simple steps, which I've been asked and am glad to mention, that every one of us can take immediately.  On each table you will find an "I Believe" statement together with a petition that the Equal Justice Coalition will be submitting to the Legislature. I am certain there is no one here who would not agree with the statement, and you can demonstrate your support for the Alliance for Equal Justice and for all the Justice in Jeopardy initiatives by reading it and adding your voice to the call - and I hope you will do just that.  I also hope, if you have not already done so, that you will make a personal contribution at whatever level you can to LAW Fund, that is, the Legal Aid for Washington Fund.  We need to walk our talk about equal justice under law being everybody's business, and we all need to be real role models for the private-public partnership that we tout and that we know to be essential to achieving adequate levels of support for legal aid. 

And lastly, with regard to continuing and future leadership, as many of you know, the recently revised State Plan for Civil Legal Assistance  concluded that it is well past time for us to act on the recognition that leadership occurs and is necessary at all levels, and that the development of such leaders merits intentional investment and support.  And so, accordingly, each of you was given a flyer about a new leadership development initiative with an invitation to assist the members of the ATJ Board's Nominating & Leadership Committee as they move forward with that important challenge.  I urge of you to read it and I hope that you'll give serious consideration to participating directly.

In closing, I'd like to leave you with one final quotation, a rhetorical question really.  It comes from Marian Wright Edelman and provides a great example of how a call to action may be powerfully, directly, and yet at the same time quite bluntly and succinctly stated.  Her question to me... to all of us... is simply this:  "Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?"

And that's why I'm so optimistic.  Because I know that everybody in this room is leaving here today with exactly the same right answer to her question. 

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

Not you.

Not me.

Not us...Thank you all very, very much.