Meet the President: John C. Cruden
Interview by Kathryn Alfisi
Photographs by Patrice Gilbert

John C. Cruden will begin his term as president of the D.C. Bar on June 23. Cruden is a senior official at the Department of Justice, serving as the career deputy assistant attorney general of the Environment and Natural Resources Division. He will be the first government attorney to serve as Bar president.

Prior to joining the Department of Justice in 1991, Cruden had a distinguished career in the military, serving as a criminal prosecutor, head of civil litigation in Europe, an agency general counsel, a staff judge advocate, and ultimately chief legislative counsel of the Army.

He is a West Point graduate. He received his law degree from the University of Santa Clara School of Law and master’s degrees in government and foreign relations from the Woodrow Wilson School at the University of Virginia.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in a small town in Michigan, which was then known as Taylor Township. It was one of the suburban communities around Detroit that sprung up before World War II when the auto industry dramatically increased and workers from across the United States were attracted to the promise of a job paying five dollars a day. My father worked in the Ford Motor Company and he told me repeatedly he was the best crane operator in the entire world. It was a very nice childhood in a small town where people knew and depended upon each other.

What were your parents like?
I never knew my birth parents, as I was adopted when I was quite young. I was born in Kansas, and the family lore is that the birth mother was an unwed teenager. After my birth I apparently stayed in a Florence Crittenton home in Topeka until, as my aunt tells it, she received a call one day from a judge she knew who was aware that my parents wanted to adopt a child. After she agreed, I was immediately delivered to her by several court employees. My adopted parents then drove from Michigan to Kansas to pick me up, but it was months until they had an accurate birth certificate. My father was a Scottish immigrant and my mother’s family was from Slovenia. They were wonderfully loving and supportive parents.

Growing up, did you have ambitions to become a lawyer?
Not immediately. I had illusions of grandeur about becoming a professional basketball player, but despite endless hours of practice and playing on a few teams, I found I clearly lacked both height and talent. I didn’t really develop an interest in the law until my time at West Point. While there I had several law classes that really sparked an interest. Later on, in my first assignment after West Point, I took additional law classes in the evening and became committed to becoming an attorney.

Why did you attend West Point?
Although my family was quite supportive, because I was the first person in my family to go to college, we had very little money. I received an academic and track scholarship from the University of Michigan, but it wasn’t going to pay all of my expenses, so my track coach suggested that I consider a military academy. I then went through the process of applying to West Point, which included academic and physical requirements, but also required a congressional nomination. I was probably fortunate in that regard because I had been a speaker at an Eagle Awards banquet where I met the Michigan governor and his chief of staff and they supported me to obtain the necessary nomination.

Did you enjoy West Point?
It was an enormously challenging and exhilarating experience. Here I was, from a small town with absolutely no military experience, suddenly thrust into an intense military environment with a thousand other young people from across the United States and a number of foreign countries. It was very demanding physically and mentally, but I’m a better person for the experience.

My classmates from that time are still quite important to me. On my office wall right now is an original print by Paul R. Martin III depicting central West Point with a part of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall that includes the names of my 23 friends and classmates who died during that unfortunate war, including my roommate and debate partner, whose image is superimposed on the scene. It is entitled “Bond of Brothers.”

How did you become interested in law at West Point?
West Point had a mandatory engineering curriculum then, but you could take a small number of electives each semester. The lead instructor in national security matters at that time was a very talented major named Pete Dawkins. Pete had been a Rhodes scholar and a Heisman Trophy winner, and we all adored him. He was an absolutely excellent professor who taught us during the day and invited us into his home in the evening to talk about world events. He not only inspired me about the courses he taught, but also encouraged me in my interest in the law. I always thought he was a great example of what teachers can do to motivate and encourage young people.

What did you do after graduating from West Point?
The first, and best, thing that I did was to marry Sharon Holland Cruden at the chapel at Greenfield Village, Michigan. After that I attended a bevy of military schools, including airborne, ranger, and jumpmaster training at Fort Benning, Georgia. From there I went to my first assignment, to a unique airborne unit located at Mainz, Germany.

When did you go to Vietnam?
I went directly from Germany to Vietnam, arriving there in early 1970. My first assignment was as the senior U.S. officer in a Vietnamese ranger battalion, and then later I transferred to the Special Forces. I’m still in contact with the Vietnamese officer I worked with, as he and his wife now live in Los Angeles. For my service in Vietnam, I received a number of awards, including the Bronze Star and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star.

You took your LSAT in Saigon.
Yes. While still in Vietnam I decided I wanted to go to law school and learned, for the first time, that you had to take the LSAT in order to do that. I then learned there was going to be one offered in the spring of 1971 in Saigon.

What was it like taking the LSAT in Saigon?
The process was quite amusing. They required that everyone check their guns at the door and then passed out pencils for the test. A helicopter was waiting to transport individuals back to their unit when they finished. By the time I received the LSAT results, almost all of the law schools had stopped accepting applications. In fact, there were only two that were still accepting applications: Georgetown and Santa Clara. I applied to both and they accepted me. I went to Santa Clara because they have a wonderful clinic program, but to this day I’m enormously grateful to Georgetown and Santa Clara for accepting me, because if not for them I would have had to go to another military assignment.

How was the adjustment of going from Vietnam to law school?
As you can imagine, going from Saigon immediately to the Bay Area of California was quite a switch. There’s a certain decompression period that you go through, but I had a month or two before law school started. As I was on a leave of absence without pay from the Army, we also needed some income. So my wife, who was attending graduate school at California State University, and I found this big apartment complex that we agreed to manage in exchange for free rent. We did that for three years, during which time our first daughter was born.

Did you enjoy law school?
Yes, absolutely. It was everything I had hoped it would be. Again, it was because of excellent professors, people like Dean George Alexander, a great constitutional scholar; Professor Jerry Kasner, who recently died; and Father Paul Goda, whom I served as a teaching assistant. They gave you a sense of the higher calling of the legal profession. They instilled in us responsibility to the disadvantaged and the poor, to do more for others than our daily practice, and to make sure that the rule of law was advanced in every aspect of our professional life. Law school made me really proud of the profession and gave me a heightened sense of responsibility to public and private service.

Did you like Santa Clara Law?
It was a great school with a very diverse and talented student body united in a commitment to community improvement, equal protection, and the advancement of the rights of minorities. During that time I also worked as a public defender, supervised in a joint clinic between Stanford and Santa Clara. Interestingly enough, my supervising attorney in the program was Rose Bird, who was then head of the public defender office in Santa Clara County, but who later became chief justice of the California Supreme Court. She became a friend and mentor. I was also fortunate enough to have a managing position in our law review and made excellent friends.

Then I clerked for Justice Stanley Mosk of the California Supreme Court, a wonderful professional who befriended me, taught me, and encouraged me in my career the rest of his life. He had me write in many of the speeches I drafted for him that “the California Supreme Court is to state supreme courts as UCLA is to basketball.” Basketball aficionados will recognize this time as the John Wooden era at UCLA, so that phrase had a lot of significance. It was a truly superb state supreme court, led by legal giants.

What did you do after graduating from law school?
I knew I was going to go back in the military because my leave of absence also required more time in the military. What I didn’t know is that the military had their own graduate law program at Charlottesville, Virginia. I went there, and it was a good family experience because my wife was able to teach at UVA’s education school while she was getting her Ed.S. degree and I pursued a dual master’s at both the Army’s school and the Woodrow Wilson School of Government Affairs. After we both graduated, I went to Germany as a prosecutor, which gave me an extraordinary amount of trial practice, much of it with juries. Later I became the chief of civil litigation for Germany and moved to Heidelberg, where I also became the equivalent of a general counsel for the intelligence community, traveling frequently to Bonn, Berlin, and Munich.

You returned to the University of Virginia later in your career.
Yes. First, to obtain my master’s in government and foreign relations and later to teach civil litigation, national security law, and some environmental law. The master’s degree was important because I was pretty confident that my career would include a significant amount of international law and foreign relations.

Ultimately, I lived overseas for seven years of my life in several different places. Just last week I was in Morocco leading the Department of Justice’s delegation at an international environmental conference, and last year I was invited to attend the judicial conference of all environmental judges in Central and South America and give a series of lectures about litigating complex environmental matters. Each of these experiences, by the way, has made me even more proud of our independent judiciary that other countries are still trying to emulate.

You finished your military legal career as the chief legislative counsel of the Army. What did you do between your time in Germany as prosecutor and when you assumed that position as chief legislative counsel?
After Germany I returned to the United States and became a civil litigator in the Pentagon. I then went on a special assignment as the trial lawyer for the general counsel of the Department of Defense, and then became the general counsel of the Defense Nuclear Agency.

After my general counsel position, I taught at the Army’s graduate school in Charlottesville, leading their largest division. From Charlottesville we moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where I became the lead attorney and staff judge advocate for all national and international legal matters for a large geographic jurisdiction that extended to the Holland border and included a main office in Frankfurt and four satellite offices.

What did you do as chief legislative counsel of the Army?
My office was responsible for all interaction with Congress, particularly the Armed Services committees, including hearings, legislation, and constituent requests. I also ran all the confirmations of political appointees for the Army, which gave me some interesting insights into the political process. It was an active, time-consuming, detail-oriented position where personal reputation and integrity meant a lot.

One interesting case was an unusual representation I did of a military officer where the tribunal convened in El Salvador under very difficult circumstances. You may recall there was a horrible murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador that received quite a bit of press attention in the early 1990s. While there was great suspicion that some members of the local government or military were involved, there was no proof. We then learned that a U.S. Special Forces major had information from a very senior Salvadoran official, whom he was advising, about the identity of the ringleader. After interviewing the major, and advising senior officials in both the Congress and the Pentagon, I represented the major in a grand jury investigation in El Salvador. Because of the danger, a Special Forces team met us at the airport and accompanied us to the ambassador’s house, where the grand jury took place. It was, however, quite different from our practice, since it was really a mini-trial with attorneys representing both the Salvadoran government and identified officials. Subsequently, the commander of the military school in El Salvador was tried and jailed for the murders.

Why did you leave the military to work for the Department of Justice?
I left the Army because the DOJ gave me an offer I could not refuse. I had previously worked at the DOJ for one year as a special counsel to the assistant attorney general in the civil division, litigating drug enforcement and national security matters. The leadership of the environment division knew me and selected me to be the chief of the environmental enforcement section, a truly wonderful position. The section has 260 people including 160 lawyers, with nationwide responsibility for enforcing federal environmental laws. After four years in that position, I was chosen to be career deputy assistant attorney general for the division, and currently supervise the environmental enforcement and environmental defense sections. In that capacity I oversee all federal environmental civil litigation in federal courts that involve the United States.

When did you become involved in environmental law?
Much of environmental law as we know it today started in 1970 with the explosion of pollution abatement statutes, the original Earth Day, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. My own involvement started in the seventies as I became involved in the implementation and litigation of the National Environmental Policy Act. One of the original environmental cases I litigated involved a very important military project in then West Berlin, which received a lot of press attention because I deposed the governing mayor of West Berlin and a key senator. The case ended up in a special tribunal, located in West Berlin, which was then considering an airplane hijacking case. The government attorneys from that litigation, all admitted to the Berlin court, formed the Berlin Bar, and we still meet annually.

Later, when I was general counsel of the Defense Nuclear Agency, I had significant environmental responsibilities for the environmental cleanup of the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Unlike other such cleanups, that has been a complete success, and I participated in the negotiations that led to the return of the Enewetak natives to newly constructed housing. Later, as chief legislative counsel of the Army, I established the very first environmental counsel position in that office. Also, when I was at the University of Virginia, I wrote part of a book about environmental law. Now I’m completely involved in litigating environmental matters, and supervising environmental attorneys. I remain completely committed to advancing and improving the environment of the United States and it remains my legal passion.

What are some of the well-publicized environmental cases you have been involved with?
I was involved in the Exxon and Love Canal cases, which understandably had a great deal of publicity and attention, but some of the other cases have actually been more environmentally significant. The settlements we did with some of the auto manufacturers—General Motors, Toyota, and Honda—were quite important. In addition, I was involved in a series of cases against all of the diesel truck manufacturers in the United States, which resulted in significant environmental improvement. More recently, I have been involved in significant actions involving the Clean Air Act and have led negotiating teams on a variety of important cases. I also now believe there are over a hundred reported cases in which I either have personally litigated or was part of the litigating team.

Which cases have been the most interesting?
That’s not an easy question to answer because I have had quite a few, so I will answer with two cases that feature environmental justice issues.

Last year at the Bar’s awards dinner another man I admire, Dean Kurt Schmoke of Howard University School of Law, received an award for his law school’s groundbreaking work in Brown v. Board of Education. I talked to him afterwards because in his speech he spoke eloquently about one of the new civil rights areas of environmental justice. I asked him if he would be interested in hosting an environmental law course at Howard. He agreed and we have, over the course of last year, developed a pro bono environmental justice course taught by four members of the D.C. Bar.

When I went to the Howard Law School as a guest lecturer, I spoke about one particular case in which the department sued the city of New Orleans for violations of the Clean Water Act. In the process of negotiating a multi-million-dollar cleanup project to correct the historic sewer problems, we also agreed to a specific project to help the local citizens. As part of the judicially approved consent decree, the parties agreed to restore Lincoln Beach, a historically segregated beach that had been closed years before because of pollution resulting from the city’s sewer problems. The city has reopened the beach and it is now available to all the citizens of New Orleans.

The second case is quite recent and involves the District of Columbia. The department brought a lawsuit to correct historic sewer overflow problems. We were concerned that in heavy rainfall the existing infrastructure could not handle all of the wastewater, allowing untreated wastewater to flow into the Potomac River, Rock Creek, and Anacostia River. I led the negotiations and worked with the District’s leadership to reach an agreement that will ultimately result in cleaner water in the District and a safer environment for the residents, particularly those around the Anacostia River. I’m proud of everyone involved in these negotiations, including several local citizen groups, as the result will advance human health and the environment for everyone in the District.

Do you enjoy being a lawyer?
I love being a lawyer. It’s the fulfillment of a dream for somebody who grew up in a small town in Michigan to become a lawyer and join the profession. I always hearken back to all that we learned in law school about the responsibility of public service and of safeguarding the legal rights of disadvantaged or unrepresented people. Such activities make me proud of our profession, proud of the D.C. Bar, and cause me to promote and advance our pro bono program, following in the footsteps of past bar leaders, including heroes of mine like Rob Weiner, John Nields, John Payton, and George Jones, who worked so diligently to make our pro bono program what it is today.

How did you start to become involved in the Bar other than as a member?
My involvement started with the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Section, so I’m clearly a product of our active sections. Then Ignacia Moreno, who was the president of the Hispanic Bar Association, encouraged me to run for the Board of Governors. I did so and have served on the board for four years, serving as chair of the Screening Committee and, when I became president-elect, as chair of the Budget Committee. So my route to becoming involved in the Bar was getting caught up by the section activities, having a mentor, getting elected to a key position, and finding that I really liked the people and respected the Bar. Ultimately I was asked to run for president by two people I value a lot: former bar presidents George Jones and Shirley Higuchi. I agreed to run and was fortunate enough to be elected.

What do you think are the Bar’s strengths?
I have described why I like the Bar in terms of my wife’s hobby. She is a quilter, and what a quilter does is bring different and diverse pieces of fabric together in an intricate but cohesive patterns to make a beautiful and valuable product. Like a quilt, I believe, our strength is our diversity. We have a very strong federal presence, an active local attorney general’s office, an enormous solo and small practitioner group, a whole array of corporate and nonprofit attorneys, and our own midsize and large talented law firms. We represent all races, faiths, sizes, shapes, and sexuality. That diversity is absolutely exciting. It provides a lot of energy and it makes us rather unique.

What do you see as the immediate priorities of the Bar during your year as president?
While the Bar has many important issues, let me single out three I consider quite important and the reason every member of the Bar should pay attention to these developments.

At a recent American Bar Association meeting in Salt Lake City, bar presidents were briefed on an ABA survey of the profession. One of the findings was that over 80 percent of the ABA members surveyed thought the practice of law was more like a business than a profession. I, on the other hand, strongly believe we are a profession; that is what attracted us to the practice and what motivates us to continue and improve. Being a profession gives us both rights and responsibilities that we must constantly address and protect. In particular, we have the right of self-regulation and self-discipline—the incredibly important benefit of being a unique and stellar profession. We have the shared responsibility of making certain that our own disciplinary system is exemplary and our rules of professional conduct are clear, understood, and followed. Those professional responsibilities lead to two of the three major priorities for the Bar. First, we have a blue-ribbon committee of experts, led by former Bar president John Payton and Magistrate Joan Goldfrank, examining the disciplinary system. As a member of that committee, I can attest to their diligence and integrity, and look forward to a final recommendation that will promote both efficiency and justice in our disciplinary system.

Second, the Board of Governors is nearly finished examining and recommending changes to the Rules of Professional Conduct, based on the recommendations of an exceptional committee of experts chaired by Leah Wortham that have been examining the D.C. rules based on changes to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct in 2002 and 2003.

And third, I’m pleased that I was able to be involved in both drafting and recommending the Access to Justice Commission, which has recently been announced by the D.C. Court of Appeals. I believe that its leader, Peter Edelman, and the members chosen to serve on the commission truly represent the District’s best and brightest. This is an exciting opportunity to address in a more comprehensive and systematic way the needs of the underrepresented in the District.

What are your goals for the year?
I have chosen as the theme for my term “Lawyers Render Service.” I believe that theme flows from what I was just saying about our responsibilities as a profession.

When I say lawyers render service, I want everybody to think of a three-legged stool. One leg is our responsibility and our advocacy on behalf of numerous and diverse clients. Every time a lawyer effectively represents a client, we are giving service, and I want the Bar to enhance and facilitate that role by our robust continuing legal education program and by encouraging and educating mentors for all new attorneys.

The second leg of my program is our responsibility to the poor, disadvantaged, and unrepresented of the District of Columbia. In that regard, advancing the D.C. Bar Pro Bono Program is my highest priority, to include attracting and motivating government attorneys to volunteer their services. We will also need to provide time, talent, and financial assistance to legal service providers and vigorously support the Access to Justice Commission.

The third part is community service. Serving the community through nonprofit associations, Special Olympic programs, and other volunteer work is critical. In addition, I invite a dialogue with the Bar and the District to develop new and additional ways lawyers can be involved in supporting and enhancing schools and education in the District.

So my theme is “Lawyers Render Service” and that applies to our clients, to the disadvantaged, and to the community.

Do you see the coming term as an exciting time to be Bar president?
This is a wonderful time for the Bar. We have the best bar executive and staff in the country, the finest pro bono program, and an exemplary and supportive judiciary. We have active sections, truly dedicated and involved voluntary bars, and a superb consortium of legal service providers. We are big enough to have an impact and still continue to grow. I think this is absolutely one of the best times to be Bar president because lawyers render service, and we have an opportunity every day to make a difference in the lives of others.