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Revision as of 19:53, 18 August 2004
William Ramsey Clark (born December 18, 1927) served as the 66th United States Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson. He is the son of Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark. He is a recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award.
Born in Dallas, Texas, Clark served in the United States Marine Corps in 1945 and 1946, then earned a B.A. degree from the University of Texas in 1949, an M.A. and a J.D. from the University of Chicago in 1950. He was admitted to the Texas bar in 1951, and to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States in 1956. From 1951 to 1961 Clark was an associate and partner in the law firm of Clark, Reed and Clark. He served in the United States Department of Justice as Assistant Attorney General of the Lands Division from 1961 to 1965, and as Deputy Attorney General from 1965 to 1967. Clark was director of the American Judicature Society in 1963. From 1964 to 1965 he was national president of the Federal Bar Association. On March 2, 1967, President Johnson appointed him Attorney General of the United States. He served in that capacity until January 20, 1969.
Clark played an important role in the history of the American Civil Rights movement: during his years at the Justice Department, he supervised the federal presence at Ole Miss during the week following the admission of James Meredith; surveyed all school districts in the South desegregating under court order (1963); supervised federal enforcement of the court order protecting the march from Selma to Montgomery; and headed the Presidential task force to Watts following the riots. He went on to supervise the drafting and executive role in passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1968. As Attorney-General, Clark also opposed the government's use of wiretaps.
Following his term he worked as a law professor and was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement. He visited North Vietnam in 1972. In 1974 he was the Democratic Party's candidate for the United States Senate from New York but lost to Jacob Javits.
More recently, Clark is well-known for having unconventional political views and for providing support and legal advice to numerous controversial figures in conflict with the US or western governments, including:
- alleged former Nazis Karl Linnas and Jack Riemer
- antiwar activist Father Philip Berrigan
- Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier
- Liberian political figure Charles Taylor during his 1985 fight against extradition from the United States to Liberia
- Lyndon LaRouche, who faced charges of conspiracy and mail fraud
- Slobodan Milosevic in the International Criminal Court.
- Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a leader of the Rwandan genocide
- PLO leaders in a lawsuit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the wheelchair bound elderly tourist who was shot and tossed overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship by Palestinian terrorists in 1986
- The state of Iraq, serving as legal counsel for the Hussein regime.
Clark is affiliated with VoteToImpeach, an organization advocating the impeachment of President George W. Bush. He has been an opponent of both Gulf Wars. It is also widely claimed that his association with Lyndon LaRouche in the early 1990s went beyond legal counsel to advocacy. He is the founder of the International Action Center, which has much overlapping membership with the Workers' World Party. Clark and the IAC helped found the anti-war group ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).
External links
| Preceded by: Nicholas Katzenbach |
Attorney General of the United States | Succeeded by: John N. Mitchell |