decided in 1972. You know, that was the
first and only time I ever ran for office. What
I have found is that I can be very effective
working public policy issues that interest
me—like congressional leadership, like
international human rights issues, like all of
the urban-growth and smart-growth issues
that I work on, both as a vocation and as
an avocation. Sometimes you can be more
effective than if you’re elected. People, sadly,
look at you differently.
Q: Meanwhile, your law career was
progressing?
A: I started in 1969 at Perkins Coie, which
was then 37 lawyers, if you can imagine.
… Took a leave of absence from there to
run Scoop’s presidential campaign in ’ 72
in Oregon and Southern California, and
also to run my own campaign after Scoop
withdrew. Funny story—When I came back,
they said: You know your desk is there, you’ve
got a bunch of files on your desk—I was a
young trial lawyer—we’ve given you a raise,
so tell us you’re not going to run again. I
said, “I can’t guarantee that,” and so I went
with a small firm, very active Democrats,
all former U.S. attorneys under Robert
Kennedy, because when I was working for
Scoop starting in 1960, I got very much into
that whole circle of the Kennedy magic and
Camelot. (Teddy made TV commercials for
me in 1972.) So I wasn’t about to say “never,
ever again,” and the long and short of it
was, it never was again. After I left Perkins, I
helped build a law firm that no longer exists,
Diamond & Sylvester. The most important
thing about that part of my life is I got to
know Joe Diamond, who most people know
as Diamond Parking. Joe Diamond was
one of the most interesting businessmen,
business lawyers I have ever known. He was
a real lion of our profession. But in that firm
there were structural issues, so in 1987 a very
good friend of mine who had been at Perkins
with me … Ray Cairncross and I founded
Cairncross & Hempelmann, and we grew
it from eight lawyers to—right now it’s 41
lawyers. It is one of the most successful, most
happy places. It’s one of the few law firms in
America where we don’t fight over money.
Q: Being part of Camelot, you must have
witnessed some amazing history.
A: I got to go to JFK’s inaugural ball; I got
to shovel snow on Pennsylvania Avenue for
his inaugural parade. I worked all that night
for 50 bucks. Can you imagine? Fifty bucks
in 1960? It was a heck of a lot of money.
And then a young woman took me to the
inaugural ball. She was the daughter of a
lobbyist for the National Forest Products
Association. I had no idea, of course, in 1961
that I’d [someday] be working for timber
companies like Plum Creek. Georgetown was
a mens school at that time. There were nine
girls schools in D.C., and Northern Virginia
and Maryland, and the senior boys would
auction the freshman boys off to these girls
as a way of raising money for the student
fund. Anne [McGrath] “bought” me as a
freshman, and one of my jobs as her serf was
to go with her to the inaugural ball.
Q: Nice job!
A: That’s how my life is. I am really, really
lucky. I ran the C&O Canal with Bobby
Kennedy when fitness started to become
something to pay attention to, and I got
to play in the famous baseball games at
Dumbarton Oaks with the Kennedy clan.
Scoop was really close to them. I was there
on November 22, 1963, and it makes my
heart … I feel it. I was there. I was there
during the Cuban missile crisis. I was
terrified. We were in range of those Soviet
midrange ballistic weapons they were
going to put in Cuba. I was there when
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and I
was there during the riots when the nation’s
capital was on fire in 1968. Then I came to
law school here, but every summer I went
back [to D.C.], and Scoop would send [his
wife and children] home to Everett in the
summers, and two summers he said to me,
“Well, I’m here by myself and you shouldn’t
be paying rent, so just come stay at the
house.” My job was to answer the phone
and cut the lawn. Scoop would drive us to
work—he never let me drive, so he drove;
we both went to the Senate office. He was
that kind of man: just a very down-to-earth
guy. I took a call one night from President
Johnson, and it wasn’t an operator; it
was: “This is LBJ. I wanna talk to Scoop.”
The Russians had just sent the tanks into
Czechoslovakia. So I was sitting there with
the senator, and he was talking to LBJ about
what to do, because Scoop was the national
defense and security expert in the Senate,
and LBJ had been majority leader in the
Senate. I remember sitting with Scoop, it
was probably 3 in the morning when we got
done. It was scary: Was this the beginning
of another world war? Scoop said, “You
know, John … look at it this way: Something
good always comes out of something bad.”
Shortly after the first of the [anti-Mubarak]
riots in Egypt, there was an article saying
[something like] I bet Obama wishes he
had someone like Scoop Jackson to call
and talk to about what’s going on in the
Middle East. What’s neat is that Scoop’s
legacy lives on. I’m now the president of
the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. I get
to do really neat things with that. Next
month I will be giving the opening speech
at a conference in Washington, D.C., at the
Brookings Institution. We have the best
and brightest talking about the need for
bipartisan leadership in the Congress, which
is extremely timely. Jackson was known as
someone who would work really well with
Republicans as well as Democrats.
Q: How did you end up in land use?
A: I started out as a litigator at Perkins
Coie. I got a lot of actual trials in those early
days, partly because I was handling all the
warranty cases for General Motors; partly
because there were no public defenders
in those days and I got appointed a whole
bunch of times to represent indigent
criminal defendants. So I had some really
big cases in the early years. I was doing
a lot of litigation for a major developer …
[and] said to the developer, “If you let me
do a little bit of your work up front, you
won’t have as many lawsuits.” So I started
doing some real estate work, and one day
he handed me a land use case. I said, “I
don’t know anything about land use.” He
said, “Aww, you can do it.” I figured out how
to do a transfer of development rights for a
