March 8, 2000
Edward H. Levi, Attorney General Credited With Restoring Order After Watergate, Dies at 88
By NEIL A. LEWIS
dward H. Levi, who began his
association with the University of
Chicago as a 5-year-old in a special
kindergarten there and became the
university's president before going
on to be a widely admired attorney
general of the United States, died
yesterday at his home in Chicago. He
was 88.
A distinguished legal educator, he
was called upon to restore the credibility of the job of attorney general
after the turmoil of the Nixon era.
No one was more a product of the
University of Chicago than Mr. Levi.
He remained at the university's laboratory school through grade school
and high school, then attended college, graduate school and law school
at the university. He was at various
times a law professor, dean of the
law school, university provost and,
finally, the university's president.
As someone who spent most of his
life in the shadow of the University of
Chicago, Mr. Levi had enormous influence on the university, the study of
law and even the surrounding Hyde
Park neighborhood in which he grew
up and which he later helped revitalize. He thrilled at teaching Chicago's
renowned "great books" curriculum
to undergraduates, pioneered the
pairing of law with other disciplines
like economics and statistics at the
law school and fiercely recruited
leading intellectuals in order to
maintain the university as a vibrant
agora of ideas.
But he secured a wider place in
history for his role in Washington,
where he demonstrated that the
skills he had honed and deployed in
academic circles were equally successful at the highest levels of government.
As the 71st attorney general of the
United States, Mr. Levi won wide
acclaim for his stewardship of the
Justice Department in the post-Watergate era. He has been regularly
cited by political scientists and lawyers as the model of a modern attorney general.
When he was named to the post in
1975 by President Gerald R. Ford,
there was confusion about his political affiliations and philosophy. Some
news accounts questioned whether
he was best described as a conservative, liberal or libertarian. When he
left office two years later, the answer
was no clearer, but the question
seemed mostly irrelevant.
Justice Antonin Scalia of the Supreme Court, who was a senior official under Mr. Levi in the Justice
Department, said in an interview
that "there couldn't have been a
tougher job in Washington where the
whole executive branch was in disarray after Watergate."
Justice Scalia said that as attorney
general Mr. Levi "brought the department through its worst years."
He added, "It was a bad time not
only because of the disgrace of Watergate, which had affected the department most deeply, but there
were also problems at the F.B.I."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
had been conducting domestic surveillance operations, under the code
name Cointelpro, that were probably
unconstitutional. Mr. Levi forced
through regulations setting limits on
what the bureau and the Central
Intelligence Agency could undertake
in investigations.
"He brought two qualities to the
job," Justice Scalia said, "a rare
intellectuality and a level of integrity
such as there could never be any
doubt about his honesty, forthrightness or truthfulness."
Although he was appointed by a
Republican president, Mr. Levi's
performance was considered so nonpartisan that when he left the department to return to the University of
Chicago, he was warmly praised by
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
In a speech in the Senate on Jan.
25, 1977, Mr. Kennedy said, "Mr. Levi
entered office under the most difficult and trying circumstances, yet he
leaves a department once again
characterized by integrity, intellectual honesty and commitment to
equal justice."
Edward Hirsch Levi was born in
Chicago on June 26, 1911, to Gerson
B. Levi, a rabbi who came to the
United States from Scotland, and
Elsa Hirsch Levi. His maternal
grandfather, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch,
was an early member of the University of Chicago faculty and a leading
architect of the Reform branch of
Judaism in America.
After graduating from college, Mr.
Levi began studying for a doctorate
in literature at the university but
dropped out of the program. Years
later he explained that he had been
told in a friendly manner by a professor who admired his family that he
would never be given a position in the
humanities department at Chicago
or any leading institution because he
was a Jew.
He recalled that incident not ruefully but joyfully in an essay in Newsweek magazine during the nation's
bicentennial celebrations of 1976 to
demonstrate how much the country
had changed. He had, after all, become the first Jewish dean of a major law school. When he became the
president of the University of Chicago in 1968, he said he believed he
was the first Jewish president of a
major private university other than
one with a clear Jewish identity, like
Brandeis.
Gerhard Casper, the president of
Stanford University and a former
colleague of Mr. Levi's at the University of Chicago law school, said that
it was Mr. Levi who came up with the
idea of teaming with an economist to
teach his course in antitrust law. It
was from that innovation, Mr. Casper said, that the notion of tying law
to other forms of study was born.
"This was the beginning of the 'law
and economics school' of thought for
which Chicago would become famous," he said.
Mr. Casper said that he often
quotes Mr. Levi, who once told him
that "universities are the custodians
not only of the many cultures of man
but also of the rational process itself."
Richard A. Posner, another law
faculty colleague and now the chief
judge of the federal appeals court
based in Chicago, said that Mr. Levi's pairing of an economist and lawyer in teaching "was a major development, not only in the law and economics sphere but in creating interdisciplinary studies in general at law
schools."
Judge Posner said that Mr. Levi
followed the economics and law partnership by putting together a statistician and a law professor. A sociologist was added later.
In 1958, Mr. Levi founded the
school's Journal of Law and Economics, which became a vehicle that
helped the University of Chicago remain pre-eminent in the field.
Leon Botstein, the president of
Bard College and a former student of
Mr. Levi's, said that he was also a
model in furthering the notion that
intellectual arguments should be
about ideas, not personalities.
"He resented the personalizing of
arguments," Mr. Botstein said. "I
remember he was asked if he was
going to write his memoirs and he
replied, 'If I were to write a book, it
would be about ideas, not about myself.' "
Mr. Levi was also renowned
among college and university administrators for his deft handling of civil
disturbances on the Chicago campus
in 1968. Unlike administrators at
some other major universities, he
did not call in outside authorities
when more than 400 students occupied his office for more than two
weeks. He waited them out, and after
they were gone he suspended and
dismissed many of their leaders.
His slim volume, "An Introduction
to Legal Reasoning" (University of
Chicago Press, 1949) has been a perennially assigned book at many of
the nation's law schools.
Mr. Levi retired from the university in 1984; his wife, Kate Sulzberger
Hecht Levi, said he had suffered
from Alzheimer's disease for the last
six years.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by three sons, John G., a lawyer in Chicago, David F., a federal
trial judge in Sacramento, and Michael E., a particle physicist in
Berkeley, Calif.
In the bicentennial essay for Newsweek, Mr. Levi said: "The one thing
that we ought to worry about is the
propensity of this country to overreact, and to engage in cycles of
bitterness. There is a kind of theme
which runs through the modern
world that human relationships
should be looked at in terms of power
relationships, in terms of the manipulation of power. I really think
that's one of the most wicked ways of
looking at the world. It's a very incomplete way. It strips people of
their humanness.
It converts all the
other good attributes people have
into just an ability or a desire to
manipulate others."
