Judge Gerhard A. Gesell's scalding lectures to James St. Clair are typical of the outspoken jurist's conduct on the bench. A Yale Law School graduate (1935) and longtime Washington attorney in both private and Government practice, Gesell, a Democrat, was appointed to the federal judiciary by Lyndon Johnson in 1967. He generally takes a libertarian line and has been a tart critic of Government wiretapping, restrictive anti-abortion laws and the Nixon Administration's mass arrests during the 1971 May Day antiwar demonstrations. Noted for facing judicial issues headon, Gesell has been both helpful and damaging to Nixon in the President's judicial showdowns. He rejected the Administration's attempts to stop publication of the Pentagon papers in the Washington Post in 1971, but sided with Nixon in ruling that the Senate Watergate committee had not shown a sufficient need for presidential tape recordings to override Nixon's claim of Executive privilege. If he cites Nixon for contempt in the Ellsberg case, Gesell, 63, may become as well known as his father, the late child psychologist and pediatrician Arnold Gesell.

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