Bernard W. Nussbaum (born March 23, 1937) is an American attorney, best known for having served as White House Counsel under President Bill Clinton.
Contents |
Nussbaum, the first child of immigrant parents, was born in New York City and grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan. He was educated in the New York City public schools and graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1954.[1] He went to Columbia College in New York as a scholarship student where he became Editor-in-Chief of the college daily newspaper and a member of phi beta kappa. He graduated from Columbia in 1958 and enrolled at Harvard Law School. After his first year he was selected to join the Harvard Law Review and in his senior year became Note Editor of the Review. Upon completing law school in 1961, Nussbaum was awarded a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship enabling him to travel around the world for a year visiting over 30 countries. In 1962 he was sworn in as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York then led by Robert Morgenthau. He was a federal prosecutor for over 3 years and tried a number of major criminal cases. He was also a member of the United States Army Reserves.
In 1966 Nussbaum joined the New York law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one year after that firm was founded, He remains a senior partner in the Wachtell, Lipton firm and specializes in corporate and securities litigation. He has won a number of major cases, including, in 2004, a jury verdict in excess of a billion dollars on behalf of the developer of the World Trade Center against a number of insurance companies. Recently, because judicial salaries in New York had been frozen for more than a decade (the legislature refused to raise judicial salaries unless its salaries were also raised), Nussbaum represented the Chief Judge of the State of New York and the Judiciary of the State, pro bono, in successful constitutional litigation (ultimately decided by the New York Court of Appeals) which declared that holding judicial salaries hostage to legislative salaries was unconstitutional. This lawsuit resulted in the Legislature and the Governor agreeing to change the system for determining the compensation of judges. Decisions regarding judicial salaries are now made every four years by an independent commission, rather than the executive and legislative branches. In August 2011 the first commission appointed raised the salaries of New York state judges (presently $136,700 for trial judges) to the level of federal district judges ($174,000), the increase to be phased in, commencing April 2012, over the following two and a half years.
In December 1973 Nussbaum left his law firm to serve as a senior member on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate scandal. That inquiry resulted in the resignation of President Nixon in August 1974. During that year he met and worked with Hillary Rodham who was also a member of the Committee staff. After the President's resignation Nussbaum rejoined his law firm in late 1974.
In 1993, Nussbaum again left his law firm when he was appointed Counsel to the President of the United States. During his tenure he was involved in a number of major issues facing the administration, including the appointment of a new FBI director and the selection of approximately 100 federal judges. He was also involved in handling the early stages of the Whitewater matter and the investigation of the suicide of his deputy, Vincent Foster. Contrary to the advice of others on the White House staff and in the administration, Nussbaum strongly urged the President not to seek the appointment of an independent counsel with respect to these matters. He stated there was no basis for such an appointment as there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the President either before or after he entered office,. He warned the President that if he did seek such an appointment it would haunt his presidency, as the institution of the independent counsel (especially when it is investigating a President) tends to become an uncontrolled, self-perpetuating search to find at all costs some sort of wrongdoing even when none exists and would likely last as long as he was President and beyond. In a memoir published after he left office, President Clinton wrote that the single biggest error he made as President was asking for the appointment of an independent counsel.
Nussbaum resigned on March 5, 1994,[2] as a result of the Whitewater controversy and the position he took regarding the appointment of an independent counsel. He returned to his law firm and resumed the private practice of law. Following his resignation he was investigated by the Whitewater independent counsel in connection with the so-called Filegate matter (involving the erroneous sending of FBI background files to the White House),[3] but no improper conduct was found.[4] In 1993 Nussbaum was awarded an honorary LL.D from The George Washington University National Law Center. He also serves on a number of philanthropic boards of trustees, including the board of The Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York. In 2008 Nussbaum married Nancy Kuhn. His first wife, Toby, to whom he was married for 42 years, died of cancer in 2006. He has three children and four grandchildren.
| Legal offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by C. Boyden Gray |
White House Counsel 1993-1994 |
Succeeded by Lloyd Cutler |
|
|||||||