It’s a long way from the Chautauqua County Village of Frewsburg to the Supreme Court of the United States, and longer still to Nuremberg, Germany, and the trial of the most vicious murderers of the 20th century. But Robert H. Jackson made those journeys successfully and masterfully. His prosecution of the Nazis on trial for their crimes against humanity was eloquent and decisive, and ensured that in the face of monstrous atrocity, justice was served.
Jackson spent one year at Albany Law School, but he passed the bar later, after serving as an apprentice in a prominent Jamestown law firm. In 1913, when Jackson was 21, the firm represented the owner of Jamestown’s electric trolley company during a contentious strike. At one point, Jackson saw angry strikers descend on the mansion of the owner, who engaged the strikers in conversation, somehow defusing the situation. Later in life, Jackson would speak of the man’s “courage” in facing the crowd.
Jackson built his reputation as a lawyer in Buffalo and Jamestown over the next 15 to 20 years, rising to national positions in various bar associations. He was also active in New York State Democratic politics, at a time when Al Smith and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were becoming national figures. When FDR was elected president, he appointed Jackson to important posts at the Treasury and Justice departments and, later, as solicitor general---the person in charge of arguing the government’s case before the Supreme Court. He was so good at it that Justice Louis Brandeis said he should hold the job “for life”. But instead, in 1940, FDR named Jackson attorney general, and the next year, to the Supreme Court, where Jackson would serve for the next 13 years.
Jackson was the first Western New Yorker ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, and today he is still only one of two on the high court (the other is the current chief justice, John Roberts, who grew up in Hamburg before moving to Indiana at age 10).
In 1945, Jackson’s fifth year as an associate justice, President Harry S. Truman gave him a special assignment: to act as United States Chief Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal, better known as the Nuremberg trials---the Allies’ prosecution of the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany. Jackson’s opening statement soon became famous for its reasoned eloquence. It began:
May it please Your Honors, the privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculation, nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 15 more, to utilize International Law to meet the greatest menace of our times-- aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors.
In the prisoners' dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now to perceive in these men as captives the power which, as Nazi leaders, they once dominated most of the world and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals, their fate is of little consequence to the world.
During the cross-examination, Jackson lost his temper with Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Goering, a clash that is the subject of the new motion picture “Nuremberg.”
(Jackson is played by Michael Shannon). But despite the temporary loss of decorum, Goering was convicted and sentenced to death. He committed suicide by swallowing cyanide the night before he was scheduled to hang.
Jackson returned to Washington in October 1946 and resumed his duties on the Supreme Court, which he continued until he died in 1954. His legacy in Western New York includes the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown and the Robert H. Jackson United States Courthouse in Buffalo.
Despite the gravity of his work with SCOTUS, Jackson always regarded his work at Nuremberg as sui generis.
“It is possible that strife and suspicion will lead to new aggressions and that the nations are not yet ready to receive and abide by the Nuremberg law,” he told the Canadian Bar Association in 1949. “But those who gave some of the best effort of their lives to this trial are sustained by a confidence that in place of what might have been mere acts of vengeance, we wrote a civilized legal precedent, and one that will lie close to the foundations of that body of international law that will prevail when the world becomes sufficiently civilized.”
Cast (in order of appearance):
Narrator: Susan Banks
Robert H. Jackson: Jesse Tiebor
Sound editing: Micheal Peters Piano theme: Excerpt from “Buffalo City Guards Parade March,” by Francis Johnson (1839)
Performed by Aaron Dai
Produced by the Niagara Frontier Heritage Project
Associate producer: Karl-Eric Reif
Webpage written by Jeff Z. Klein (Niagara Frontier Heritage Project)
Special thanks to:
Kathryn Larsen, vice president, content distribution, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
S.J. Velasquez, director of audio strategy, Buffalo Toronto Public Media
Jerry Urban, senior radio broadcast engineer