Word: claire
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cooperated completely with the grand jury" in its Watergate investigations, he knew-but did not mention-that Jaworski had been denied many tapes and documents and had therefore issued a subpoena to get them. Its existence was not revealed by Jaworski, but by Nixon's counsel, James St. Clair, in a television interview. Jaworski had been willing to keep the matter secret so that the White House could save face by delivering the evidence and later claiming that it had done so "voluntarily...
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...
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...
...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...
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...