Herbert J. Miller Jr., 85, Justice Dept. Leader, Dies
Matthew Kruk
Herbert J. Miller Jr., 85, Justice Dept. Leader, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Herbert J. Miller Jr., who as a Justice Department lawyer in the 1960s
relentlessly pursued James R. Hoffa, the president of the Teamsters
Union, on jury-tampering and other charges, and later helped negotiate
the unconditional pardon of former President Richard M. Nixon for his
role in the Watergate scandal, died last Saturday in Rockville, Md. He
was 85 and lived in Boyds, Md.
The cause was renal failure, his son John said.
Mr. Miller, known as Jack, first attracted attention in government
circles for his tough-minded work on a court-appointed board supervising
the Teamsters. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, a Democrat, ignored
the fact that Mr. Miller was a Republican and hired him in 1961 to run
the Justice Department's criminal division, where he was encouraged to
take on organized crime and Hoffa.
Mr. Miller, whose favorite pastime was chopping wood, tackled his
assignment with gusto, prosecuting organized crime leaders and chasing
Hoffa through four indictments, three trials and four appeals, which
ended in 1966 with the Supreme Court upholding Hoffa's convictions on
charges of jury-tampering and fraud.
By then Mr. Miller had left the Justice Department and founded his own
law firm, Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, which quickly became one of
Washington's two leading criminal-defense firms, along with Williams &
Connolly.
In August 1974, Mr. Miller took on Nixon as a client, having
successfully represented several minor figures involved in the Watergate
scandals.
Nixon, who had just resigned as president, faced an uncertain legal
future but was in the mood to face his challengers in court and prove
that, as he once put it, "I am not a crook."
Mr. Miller told Nixon that he could not get a fair trial and that the
case would be likely to drag on for years. He eventually persuaded Nixon
to accept a pardon from President Gerald R. Ford, despite its
implication of guilt. To clear the way for his client, he said in 1999
in his first public discussion of the case, he sought assurances from
Leon Jaworski, the Watergate special prosecutor, that Jaworski would not
oppose a pardon, a potential stumbling block that Nixon feared.
Mr. Miller, who represented Nixon for more than 20 years, also asserted
Nixon's ownership rights to the White House tapes and documents, a hotly
contested issue that took years to resolve. Before the pardon was
granted, an initial compromise was reached under which the material went
to the National Archives, where neither Nixon nor archives officials
would be allowed access to it without the other's permission.
Finally, Mr. Miller persuaded Nixon to sign a statement admitting that
he had been wrong in "not acting more decisively and more forthrightly
in dealing with Watergate, particularly when it reached the state of
judicial proceedings." The pardon, granted on Sept. 8, 1974, spared
Nixon indictment and trial.
"He was the ideal attorney for Nixon," said John J. Cassidy, a founding
partner of Mr. Miller's law firm. "Nixon was so embattled, so hated,
that he needed a strong lawyer to stand beside him, and Jack never
flinched. He was fearless."
Herbert John Miller Jr. was born on Jan. 11, 1924, in Minneapolis, where
his father, a Republican, once worked for the presidential candidate
Harold Stassen. He attended the University of Minnesota but joined the
Army in his sophomore year and served in an aviation-engineering
battalion in New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan.
After World War II, he resumed his education at George Washington
University, earning a law degree in 1949; he then joined the Washington
firm now known as Kirkland & Ellis.
In 1948 he married Carey Kinsolving, who survives him. In addition to
his son John K., of Boyds, he is survived by another son, William G.,
known as Bo, of Nacogdoches, Tex.; and five grandchildren.
In 1959, a federal judge appointed Mr. Miller to a three-member board
created by the court to monitor the Teamsters and Hoffa. Hoffa's lawyer,
Edward Bennett Williams, waged an all-out legal assault on the board
that Mr. Miller doggedly resisted.
After being drafted by Robert Kennedy to lead the Justice Department's
criminal division, he became a highly visible crusader against organized
crime, whose existence was often dismissed as myth. Besides pursuing
Mafia and union bosses, he also went after Bobby Baker, a top aide to
Lyndon B. Johnson, who was indicted and eventually convicted of tax
evasion, theft and conspiracy to commit fraud against the government.
With two friends, Mr. Miller started Miller, Cassidy & Evans in 1965.
One early client was Nascar, whose drivers the Teamsters were trying to
unionize.
When Robert Kennedy mounted his presidential bid in 1968, Mr. Miller
worked for him as a campaigner and fund-raiser, and after Kennedy's
assassination, he was a pallbearer at his funeral. He went on to
represent Edward M. Kennedy immediately after the Chappaquiddick
episode, in which Mr. Kennedy, driving home from a party on
Chappaquiddick Island, off Martha's Vineyard, veered off a bridge and
Mary Jo Kopechne, a young woman in the passenger seat, drowned.
Despite the Kennedy connection, Mr. Miller did not change parties. In
his sole venture into electoral politics, he ran as a Republican for
lieutenant governor of Maryland in 1970 but was soundly defeated.
After working on the Nixon pardon, Mr. Miller continued to defend his
client's interests tenaciously. He carried on a long legal struggle to
block access to Nixon's presidential tapes and papers, arguing they were
private property. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 1982, he
successfully argued that Nixon could not be held civilly liable for acts
performed while he was president. Nixon had been sued by a Pentagon
employee who claimed he had been fired after testifying about cost
overruns.
"He's been very successful on behalf of Richard Nixon," Alan B.
Morrison, the director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, said in
1986, "and his purpose has been to keep the public from knowing what's
going on."
In 1987, Mr. Miller defended Michael K. Deaver, Ronald Reagan's former
deputy chief of staff, who had been charged by a special prosecutor with
lying under oath about using his influence with the White House as a
lobbyist. In what seemed to be a bad miscalculation, Mr. Miller rested
his case without calling a single defense witness.
Deaver, who died in 2007, was found guilty on three counts, but he
received only a probationary sentence and went on to re-establish his
lobbying career.
In 2001, Mr. Miller closed Miller, Cassidy, and most of the firm's
lawyers joined the firm of Baker, Botts, where James A. Baker, the
former secretary of state, is a senior partner.
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