Ramsey Clark served as U.S. attorney general from 1967 to 1969, following service within the Department of Justice during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Clark proved to be a controversial official, criticized for being soft on crime and opposing capital punishment. After leaving public office, Clark developed an international law practice in which he represented clients who opposed U.S. government policies.
Clark was born on December 8, 1927, in Dallas, Texas. His father, Tom Clark, was a prominent Dallas attorney who later became U.S. attorney general during the Truman administration and then a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Ramsey Clark earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas in 1949 and both a master's degree and a law degree from the University of Chicago in 1950. He returned to Texas and practiced law for ten years, but in 1961, he went to Washington to serve as assistant attorney general for President John F. Kennedy. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson promoted Clark to deputy attorney general, and in 1967 Johnson made him attorney general.
Clark's service as attorney general coincided with the escalation of the Vietnam War and growing racial tensions in urban America. During this difficult period, Clark promoted policies that critics viewed as too liberal. For example, Clark refused to apply a 1966 federal law that sought to overturn the Supreme Court's decision in Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966). Clark asserted that the law, which replaced the Court's blanket prohibition against the use of illegally obtained confessions with a five-part test, was unconstitutional.
After leaving the office of attorney general in 1969, Clark moved to New York City to practice law. He soon established an international law practice that represented clients who opposed the U.S. government, especially Middle Eastern groups. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) retained Clark in 1988 to help prevent its Permanent Observer Mission from being removed from the United Nations. He successfully rebuffed this U.S.-led attempt and later represented the PLO in a civil lawsuit brought against it by the family of a terrorist victim.
Clark was unafraid to represent unpopular causes. In 1986, he filed a lawsuit against the United States and the United Kingdom on behalf of 55 Libyans who sought damages for injuries they suffered during a U.S. air strike against Libya. In 1993, Clark represented Sheik Omar Ahmad Ali Abdel Rahman, a fundamentalist Muslim cleric accused of conspiracy in the 1993 New York World Trade Center terrorist bombing and has represented and given support to such accused war criminals as Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic.
In addition to his international clients, Clark represented U.S. political dissenters in criminal actions. For example, Clark represented individuals who engaged in acts of civil disobedience to protest the production of nuclear missiles. He also supported the call for a new trial for Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement leader who was convicted of killing two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in a siege on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1975.
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