The President's Lawyer: A Punishing Adversary

Not long after he finished Harvard Law School, James Draper St. Clair made his reputation as a superbly skilled trial lawyer in a 1954 dispute--over cranberries. His client, Cape Cod Food Products, Inc., sued the National Cranberry Association, now Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., charging attempted monopoly. Typically, St. Clair not only immersed himself in the legal issues but also diligently learned everything about cranberries, including how weather and flooding affect them. In court he meticulously demolished the association's case. St. Clair won treble damages of $525,000 for his client and rare praise in court from Judge Charles E. Wyzanski Jr., who described his performance as "a model not likely to be surpassed."

Over the years St. Clair, now 53, has handled hundreds of civil and criminal cases with similar success and aplomb as a partner in the prestigious Boston firm of Hale and Dorr. Thus when White House Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig began looking late last year for a trial lawyer to represent the President, he found that "Jim was high on everybody's list." On Dec. 31 St. Clair resigned the private practice that earned him about $300,000 a year in order to take the $42,500 federally paid job as Nixon's chief Watergate counsel. In action around the White House, St. Clair has struck Haig as "crisp and buttoned-down, but thoughtful and detailed." Adds Presidential Counsellor Bryce N. Harlow: "He's very lucid and clear-minded, very objective, self-assured and poised."

Known as "Jimmy" to his friends, St. Clair is sometimes also called "the Silver Fox" because of his gray hair, the sly cast to his eyes, and his cunning ways in court. Because he spends extraordinarily long hours researching his cases, he is rarely surprised by the other side. Arguing without notes, he peers over half-lens glasses and subjects witnesses to aggressive and exhaustive cross-examinations, but never raises his voice or shows anger. Says Boston Attorney Joseph S. Oteri: "He's unflappable and extremely tenacious." Lawyer-Author George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), who prosecuted two bank-fraud cases against defendants represented by St. Clair, recalls, "They were the most intense trials that I have ever experienced. He is a punishing adversary. His style is one of complete concentration and total verbal aggression."

A registered Republican, St. Clair has represented clients of widely varying political and philosophical points of view. Soon after the cranberry case, he became a primary assistant to his senior partner, Joseph N. Welch, in the famous Army-McCarthy hearings; Welch, as counsel for the Army, engaged in some historic televised clashes with Joseph R. McCarthy that helped sink the Wisconsin Senator's career. More recently, St. Clair won a pioneering case in 1967 upholding the constitutionality of a Massachusetts law that categorizes marijuana as a narcotic drug and thus outlaws its possession and sale. A year later he successfully defended Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. during his celebrated trial in Boston on charges of conspiracy to encourage draft evasion.

St. Clair represented the Boston school committee in its struggle against mandatory desegregation of the city's public schools, a case which is still on appeal. He was also chosen by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to present the case against Boston Municipal Court Judge Jerome P. Troy, who was charged, among other things, with lying under oath and unethical conduct and was subsequently removed from the bench. St. Clair argued effectively that the appearance of misconduct in a public official is as bad as actual misconduct --words that he could live to regret. At the hearing last May he declared: "It is not necessarily important that you do something wrong; it is very important that there be the appearance of nothing being done wrong."

St. Clair's willingness to take almost any case offends some people. Chaplain Coffin once said, "The trouble with St. Clair is that he is all case and no cause." Adds Author Higgins: "He is the 1970s version of the guy whom the sodbusters hired when the cattlemen tried to tear down their fences in the 1880s--a hired gun." But St. Clair believes that "every person is entitled to be represented by the lawyer of his choice."

In St. Clair's judgment, there was an overriding reason for accepting the job of attorney for Nixon: "How many times is a lawyer asked to represent the President of the U.S. in a matter of this importance? I felt that I could make a contribution, and I believed it was an appropriate matter for a lawyer to be involved in." The unique case also gives St. Clair the opportunity to set legal precedents for defending a President and is certain to put the Boston lawyer in the history books. In addition, says a longtime friend, Robert Bachman, "He believes in this country, he believes in the free-enterprise system, and he believes in the President. That's why he is there."

His job has turned St. Clair into a long-distance commuter. During the week he lives in a $600-a-month furnished apartment in Washington's Fairfax Hotel. Almost every weekend he flies home to his wife Billie and their colonial house in the well-to-do suburb of Wellesley, Mass. (They have three children: Tom, 16, Scott, 20, and Peggy, 24, who is a third-year student at Boston College Law School.) What does Billie St. Clair think of her role as a weekday widow? Says she with a laugh: "It stinks." Their 30-year marriage has been largely tranquil. She explains wryly, "He and I have never had a fight. I learned very early that he is apt to be right, and he learned to consider what I said."

The twelve-hour-a-day demands of St. Clair's job leave little time for recreation. Before taking Nixon's case, St. Clair played bridge, swam in his backyard pool or at the family summer home on Cape Cod, and rarely missed a home game of the New England Patriots or Boston Bruins. His chief complaint now is that he has no time for playing golf. He depended on the sport to help keep down his portly midriff, which is only partly camouflaged by his suits; he buys them readymade for about $200 and has them altered.

When the call came from Haig offering the job of presidential lawyer, St. Clair had just checked his family into a resort at Tarpon Springs, Fla. He had to cut the golfing vacation short, and it may be his last holiday for many months. "I have no commitment and no contract," he says, "but as a practical matter, I'm employed for the duration."

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