Arthur Goldberg
Arthur Joseph Goldberg was an American politician and jurist who served as the 9th U.S. secretary of labor, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the 6th United States ambassador to the United Nations.
Born in Chicago, Illinois, Goldberg graduated from the Northwestern University School of Law in 1930. He became a prominent labor attorney and helped arrange the merger of the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, organizing European resistance to Nazi Germany. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Goldberg as the secretary of labor. During Vietnam, he served in the Air Force Reserve.
In 1962, Kennedy successfully nominated Goldberg to the Supreme Court to fill a vacancy created by the retirement of Felix Frankfurter. Goldberg aligned with the liberal bloc of justices and wrote the majority opinion in Escobedo v. Illinois. In 1965, Goldberg resigned from the bench to accept appointment by President Lyndon B. Johnson as the ambassador to the United Nations. In that role, he helped draft UN Resolution 242 in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. He ran for governor of New York in 1970 but was defeated by Nelson Rockefeller. After his defeat, he served as president of the American Jewish Committee and continued to practice law.
Early life and education
Goldberg was born on the West Side, Chicago, on August 8, 1908, the youngest of eight children of Rebecca Perlstein and Joseph Goldberg, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His paternal line derived from a shtetl called Zenkhov, in Ukraine, while his mother's family was from Tetiev. Goldberg's father, a produce peddler, died in 1916, forcing Goldberg's siblings to quit school and go to work to support the family. As the youngest child, Goldberg was allowed to continue school, but worked jobs on the side, including as a vendor at Wrigley Field and as a library clerk, to help support his family. He was childhood friends with future professional boxer Jackie Fields. Goldberg attended classes and lectures at the Hull House, which aimed to educate recent European immigrants. He graduated from Harrison Technical High School at the age of 16.Goldberg's interest in the law was sparked by the noted murder trial in 1924 of Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy young Chicagoans who were spared the death penalty with the help of their high-powered defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. Goldberg attended the trial while he was a high school senior. Goldberg later pointed to the case as inspiration for his opposition to the death penalty on the bench, since he had seen how inequality of social status could lead to unfair application of the death penalty. Jewish Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Benjamin Cardozo also served as inspiration to Goldberg from a young age.
Goldberg, who worked part time as a construction worker, took night courses at Crane Junior College of the City Colleges of Chicago and DePaul University. He later earned a B.S.L. and J.D. degrees from Northwestern University. Goldberg served as the Editor of the Illinois Law Review and helped Law Dean John Henry Wigmore write his third edition of the treatise on evidence. Goldberg graduated from Northwestern law school in just 2.5 years and with the highest academic record ever at Northwestern. Being just 21-years-old, he was too young to pass the Illinois Bar. However, he sued and successfully argued his own case to be admitted to the bar.
In 1931, Goldberg married Dorothy Kurgans. They had one daughter, Barbara Goldberg Cramer, and one son, Robert M. Goldberg. He was the uncle of prolific blues rock keyboardist Barry Goldberg.
Military Services
During World War II, Goldberg joined the United States Army in 1942, wherein he served as a captain and later a major, and he served until the war ended in 1945. He wanted to join the Marines, but was not physically fit enough. Goldberg served as well in an espionage group operated by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, serving as chief of the Labor Desk, an autonomous division of the American intelligence agency that was charged with the task of cultivating contacts and networks within the European underground labor movement during World War II. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency stated, "Goldberg's file notes that as both a civilian and a member of the Army, he supervised a section in the Secret Intelligence Branch of OSS to maintain contact with labor groups and organizations regarded as potential resistance elements in enemy-occupied and enemy countries. He organized anti-Nazi European transportation workers into an extensive intelligence network."During the Vietnam War, Goldberg commissioned as a colonel in the Air Force Reserve but resigned in 1964 to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest after his appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Early legal career
Goldberg was unable to work in Chicago's big law firms because they would not hire Jews. Instead, he started his legal career at Pritzger & Pritzger, a firm founded by German Jews. However, he was uncomfortable with his work at Pritzger because the work mainly dealt with representing large businesses.Goldberg's interest in labor law spiked at the start of The Great Depression and in 1933 he left Pritzger to create his own boutique law firm, which was focused on labor law. Goldberg joined the National Lawyers Guild, a group that was advocating for The New Deal, in the mid-1930s. However, Goldberg, among others, resigned a few years later due to the NLG's growing association with the American Communist Party.
Goldberg became a prominent labor lawyer and represented striking Chicago newspaper workers on behalf of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938. The strike went on for eight months and Goldberg spent almost everyday in court arguing on the worker's behalf. Eventually, the strike persuaded William Randolph Hearst to recognize the newspaper union. Appointed general counsel to the CIO in 1948 to succeed Lee Pressman, Goldberg served as a negotiator and chief legal adviser in the merger of the American Federation of Labor and CIO in 1955. AFL-CIO is one of the US major labor unions representing America's workers and labor. Goldberg also served as general counsel of the United Steelworkers of America.
Political career
Goldberg was an active participant in the National Citizens Political Action Committee and the CIO Political Action Committee. He supported the presidential campaigns of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Goldberg initially supported Senator Joseph McCarthy's efforts to investigate communism in the United States, but soon opposed those efforts after it became clear they threatened the organized labor movement.In 1960, Goldberg wanted his friend Adlai Stevenson to run for president, but Stevenson encouraged Goldberg to back Hubert Humphrey. Instead, Goldberg backed Senator John F. Kennedy. Goldberg served as a labor advisor to Kennedy's campaign and was influential in getting unions to back Kennedy.
Kennedy administration
President John F. Kennedy nominated Goldberg to be United States secretary of labor, where he served from 1961 to 1962. He was the third Jew to be named to a Cabinet position. Goldberg wanted to be named Attorney General, so he would improve his chances of getting nominated to the Supreme Court, but that spot went to Kennedy's brother Robert. As Labor Secretary, Goldberg encouraged Kennedy to increase the minimum wage, extend unemployment benefits, create job opportunities for the youth and invest in economically distressed areas. Following Goldberg's advice, Kennedy established the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, which ensured employees are treated fairly regardless of "race, creed, color, or national origin." Goldberg also championed the creation of the President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy.Supreme Court
On August 31, 1962, Kennedy nominated Goldberg as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to succeed Felix Frankfurter, who was retiring. Earlier that same year, Kennedy had considered nominating Goldberg to succeed Charles Whittaker, but chose Byron White instead. Frankfurter and Chief Justice Earl Warren were consulted by the President beforehand and both gave their full support.He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on September 25, and served on the Court from October 1, 1962, until July 25, 1965. Only one senator, Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, opposed his nomination. During his tenure, the seat Goldberg occupied on the Court came to be informally known as the "Jewish seat", as his two immediate predecessors—Frankfurter and, before him, Benjamin Cardozo—were also Jewish. In more recent times, more than one justice of Jewish descent have served on the Court simultaneously. For example, the Supreme Court careers of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan overlapped.
, Goldberg is the last Cabinet official to have also served on the Supreme Court.
Despite his short time on the bench, Goldberg played a significant role in the Court's jurisprudence. Replacing Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was a center-right Justice, Goldberg's liberal views on constitutional questions shifted the Court's balance toward a broader construction of constitutional rights. A self-described judicial activist, Goldberg voted for a liberal outcome in 89 percent of cases before the Court.
His best-known opinion is his concurrence in Griswold v. Connecticut, arguing that the Ninth Amendment supported the existence of an unenumerated right of privacy in marriage. Goldberg wrote, "The language and history of the Ninth Amendment reveal that the Framers of the Constitution believed that there are additional fundamental rights, protected from governmental infringement, which exist alongside those fundamental rights specifically mentioned in the first eight constitutional amendments.... To hold that a right so basic and fundamental and so deep-rooted in our society as the right of privacy in marriage may be infringed because that right is not guaranteed in so many words by the first eight amendments to the Constitution is to ignore the Ninth Amendment, and to give it no effect whatsoever".
Perhaps Goldberg's most influential move on the Court involved the death penalty. Goldberg argued in a 1963 internal Supreme Court memorandum that imposition of the death penalty was condemned by the international community and should be regarded as "cruel and unusual punishment" in contravention of the Eighth Amendment. Finding support in this position from two other justices, Goldberg published an opinion dissenting from the Court's denial of certiorari in a case, Rudolph v. Alabama, involving the imposition of the death penalty for rape, in which Goldberg cited the fact that only five nations responding to a UN survey indicated that they allowed imposition of the death penalty for rape, including the U.S., and that 33 states in the U.S. had outlawed the practice.
Goldberg's dissent sent a signal to lawyers across the nation to challenge the constitutionality of capital punishment in appeals. As a result of the influx of appeals, the death penalty effectively ceased to exist in the United States for the remainder of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Supreme Court considered the issue in the 1972 case of Furman v. Georgia, where the Justices, in a 5 to 4 decision, effectively suspended the death penalty laws of states across the country on the ground of the capricious imposition of the penalty. That decision would be revisited in Gregg v. Georgia, where the justices voted to allow the death penalty under some circumstances; the death penalty for rape of an adult female victim, however, would be struck down in Coker v. Georgia. In 2008, the death penalty for rape of children was ruled unconstitutional by a 5 to 4 decision. Writing for The New York Times, Adam Liptak said that Goldberg's dissent helped "create the modern movement for the abolition of the death penalty."
Goldberg also wrote the majority opinions in Escobedo v. Illinois, which provided criminal defendants the right to counsel during interrogation under the Sixth Amendment and Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, which declared unconstitutional parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that revoked citizenship for those that had fled the country in order to dodge the draft.
Despite Goldberg's short tenure on the court, a number of his law clerks have gone on to become deeply influential. Stephen Breyer later became an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and he held Goldberg's seat on the Court from 1994 until 2022. Another of Goldberg's law clerks was Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. Since other justices would be unlikely to hire a Jewish clerk, Goldberg emphasized hiring Jewish clerks. Six out of eight of his law clerks were Jewish.