2. MAKING A MARK
By the time Watergate was unfolding, I had been practicing law for thirteen years, and by most standards I had achieved success. I had married my high school sweetheart, Fran, and we were raising a son. We had everything we could ask for: my highly rewarding professional life, a large comfortable home in a beautiful neighborhood, all the material things we wanted, a healthy and well-rounded eleven-year-old son, and lots of friends and close family in Houston.
It was a kind of picture-book life, while it lasted.
In the late 1960s, I was one of the leading partners in the law firm, on the Operating Committee, and among the top producers in fees and new client business. In addition to my professional life, I helped start a life insurance company with some of my old fraternity buddies. Years later the company was sold to a nationally recognized financial institution. In the meantime, a group of these same friends and I built one of the first refineries in Alaska. The project was barely completed when a publicly held company purchased it from us. We were on a real roll—it was a high stakes sort of life and financially very rewarding.
But it was practicing law and building the law firm that captured most of my attention. The entrepreneurial process was exhilarating for all of us—the more we succeeded, the harder we’d push. We committed to the best office space and began recruiting the brightest lawyers from the best law schools. For many years, I was responsible for the recruiting process, and I used to dearly love the challenge of competing against the major law firms for the best talent available. Teams of the best lawyers in the firm would fan out across the country on these recruiting trips. It was a highly gratifying experience to meet with these graduating students, tell them our “war stories,” and enroll them in our dream. It was a cause for real celebration each time we recruited a star who was highly sought after by one of the premier firms.
By this time, my relationship with the Colonel was better than it had ever been. The larger our law firm grew, and the better our reputation got, the more the Colonel seemed to like it. His pride in my accomplishments was extremely important to me, although I never would acknowledge that to him.
It was not easy growing up in the Colonel’s shadow. He was one of the most respected lawyers in the country, at the very pinnacle of the profession. Every time I made an appearance before a court, I was being compared to the lawyer who had begun the practice of law at nineteen and who had never lost a jury case. This was an impossible act to follow. Further, the Colonel was not easily impressed by anyone—you had to earn his respect “the old-fashioned way.” He was somewhat reserved, but he had his share of ego. When any of his children received his praise, we tended to remember it.
The Colonel was a member, and later the president, of the American College of Trial Lawyers, the most elite club of trial lawyers in the country. Less than 1 percent of the trial lawyers in the country are admitted to this society. The Colonel and my mother would go to the meetings of the College twice a year, and in the late 1960s, he would occasionally invite Fran and me to go along. He would introduce me to the greatest trial lawyers in the country, and I would sit around with them and listen to their stories. It was an absolutely wonderful experience for me. I learned a lot; these men were like mentors to me, and I aspired to be like them.
At one of the meetings, Robert Clare, a senior partner of Sherman and Sterling, one of Wall Street’s most prestigious firms, began telling me of a major lawsuit he had referred to one of the premier firms in Houston. They had come back to him and said there was no way the lawsuit could be won, and that he had better just pack it in and go home. He said he felt awful about this, and that there should be some way that recovery could be made. He asked my opinion about it, describing the case briefly to me. I looked him straight in the eye and said that we could get the kind of results he was looking for. So he sent the case down to us, and we were ultimately highly successful.
As a result, Bob began sending other cases to us, and we enjoyed a wonderful relationship with his firm. In 1976 I was admitted to fellowship in the College, and at one of the meetings, Bob, who was one of the Colonel’s closet friends, came up to the Colonel and said, “How’s the second-best lawyer in the world?” The Colonel looked puzzled and before he could say anything, Bob explained, “Of course, your son is the greatest.” Now we all knew that wasn’t true, but it was a great way for Bob to pay me the ultimate compliment—and the Colonel just loved it. Every time they came together from then on, Bob would greet the Colonel the same way, and the Colonel would stand there grinning. I felt “seen” by the Colonel for the very first time since he had returned from overseas after the war.
The life of a litigator was fast paced and full of excitement. Fran and I seemed to manage the hectic pace just fine, even in the face of unusual circumstances. When our son Joey was born, I was trying a lawsuit in federal court in Houston. When her labor began, Fran never questioned whether I should spend the day with her. “Go on to work,” she said, “and I’ll let the office know when the baby is ready to arrive, and then you can come to the hospital.”
I made arrangements with one of the partners at the firm to keep me advised of Fran’s progress. I planned on telling the court of my situation, assured the judge would adjourn for the day and then I could go over to the hospital. But it didn’t quite work out that way because I was in the court of a rather old-fashioned judge. When my partner came over to say that Fran was in intensive labor, I approached the bench, but the judge said, “Well, she can have the baby without you. It’s not necessary for you to go. Put on your next witness, counselor.” Luckily, I made it to the hospital just as Joey was being delivered.
In 1967, the Colonel and I started a quarter-horse breeding operation on the ranch. We originally conceived this project, “Circle J Enterprises,” as a tax shelter, but it soon became highly successful in its own right. I was the managing partner, and we had an absolutely first-rate ranch manager, Royce Baker, who ran the operation on a day-to-day basis. I devoted every available weekend to this undertaking. On Friday afternoons, Fran, Joey, and I would drive up to the ranch from Houston. I would complete my office work in the back seat while Fran drove. We would arrive at the ranch late at night, returning to Houston the following Sunday evening.
As the horse operation grew, we began showing horses around the country. We had purchased a young stud, Magnolia Pay, and successfully campaigned him to become an American Quarter Horse Association supreme champion, one of only sixteen in the world at the time. Magnolia Pay “nicked” beautifully with the brood mare band that we had assembled, and his offspring became highly marketable. Early on, one of the horses we raised was named the world champion halter mare, and the following year we bred the world reserve champion halter mare. The success of Circle J was a source of great pride for the whole Jaworski clan, who gathered at the ranch on most weekends, and managing the horse operation with Royce became another full-time job for me.
By 1970 a growing portion of the law firm’s work was taking my colleagues and me out of Houston for extended periods. We had cases that took us regularly to the east and west coasts, and abroad. In addition, the board meetings of the insurance company were regularly held in exotic, fun places—an extension of the great times we had had in the fraternity at the University of Texas.
I worked with a cadre of bright, young trial lawyers who were emerging to be some of the best around—real highfliers. We had an absolute blast trying lawsuits, working hard, and “partying” hard to celebrate our successes. In addition, many of us had girlfriends in all of the places we visited. It was all part of the lifestyle, and I gave it very little thought. In those days, it was a kind of badge of honor to be successful in this particular realm, a mark of brotherhood, and was very well accepted among most of our contemporaries.
I’ll never forget the celebration of a highly successful deposition—an episode which, although unique in one respect, was still fairly typical of the double life we were living.
At the conclusion of a deposition that successfully disposed of a major will contest in San Francisco, one of my young associates, Ken Wynne, and I stayed in town an extra night to celebrate. I invited Ken to come to Las Vegas the next day to attend one of the board meetings of our insurance company and have some fun with us.
He and I flew down to Las Vegas, and on Saturday morning we had our board meeting and worked until five o’clock. When the group gathered late that afternoon I said, “Look, why don’t we all meet at the craps table at seven o’clock tonight? Ya’ll bring your money with you because I feel it in my bones—I’m gonna really break the bank for you guys.” There were thirteen of us around the craps table that evening. Now, I was not a great craps shooter, but I did enjoy it from time to time. I liked the thrill and the risk, and I had done some reading and knew a little bit about it.
So we were gathered around the table, and when the dice were passed to me, I said, “OK, you guys, get your money out there because you’re in for a long ride.” Honestly, I don’t know why I was saying all this, but I felt it, and so I said it. After everybody got their money on the table, I threw the dice, and I crapped out. Everybody lost their money. The dice went to the next person, and everybody was hootin’ and hollerin’ at me and bitchin’ and moanin’. So when the dice came around to me the next time, I said, “Okay, ye of little faith, everybody that’s a true believer get your money back out there again because this is gonna be unbelievable. Get it out there and let’s go.”
Poor Kenny Wynne—he was a brand new lawyer with very little money, had something like twenty-five dollars with him, and had lost half of it on that first hand. So I said, “Kenny, put out the rest of your money.” I rolled the dice, and I kept that one hand for forty-eight minutes. During that time, I was hitting everything on the board. The House had to stop the game twice to bring in more black chips. Toward the end, we had emptied the entire casino, and people were standing around our table fifteen and twenty deep. By that time I had my coat off and my sleeves rolled up, making pass after pass after pass. The noise was deafening, and it was just an electric situation. I was putting three or four hundred dollars on thirty-to-one odds for the croupiers, just as a tip to them. And I would roll snake-eyes or boxcars, and the proceeds from the roll went to them. I don’t know how many times we did that.
By the time I rolled my last hand, the whole table was covered in black chips, stacked up high all over the numbers. When I made that final roll and crapped out, I don’t know how many thousands upon thousands of dollars were on that table. But there was a huge war whoop when I made that last roll, and even though, of course, it was all over with, it had been an unbelievable experience. We all retired to the cocktail lounge where I bought drinks for the whole house. Later that next day, we took off for Houston and spent the day on the airplane counting our money.
Looking back at these years, it’s difficult for me to understand how I could have maintained such a fragmented existence for so long without caving in to its incoherence and lack of central commitment. Life was an absolute blur—I was popping from one activity to another without a moment’s hesitation to reflect and consider my overall life direction.
At the time, I considered this to be a great life, but in fact, I really didn’t know life at all. Mine was a Disney World sort of life—inauthentic, narrow, utterly predictable, and largely devoid of any real meaning.
The end to this illusion would come to me, as it has for so many, by means of a personal crisis.