Cutler, Lloyd Norton

(b. 10 November 1917 in New York City; d. 8 May 2005 in Washington, D.C.), lawyer and White House counsel under presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Cutler was the only son of two children of Aaron Smith Cutler and Dorothy (Glaser) Cutler. Both parents were New York–born children of Jewish immigrants from eastern Poland. Cutler’s paternal grandfather changed the family name from Koslow and made a fortune in New York real estate. His father was a law partner of the prominent New York Democratic politician and mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and his mother, a grammar school teacher with a Hunter College degree, became a homemaker after her first child’s birth. Cutler attended New York City public schools, including DeWitt Clinton High School, graduating in 1932 at age fourteen. After one year at New York University, he transferred to Yale University, majoring in history and economics and graduating cum laude with a BA in 1936. Three years later he earned his LLB magna cum laude from Yale Law School, where he was also editor in chief of the Yale Law Journal.

After spending one year as clerk to Second Circuit Judge Charles Edward Clark, Cutler joined the New York corporate law firm Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in the fall of 1940, working on railroad reorganizations. In 1941 Cutler married Louise Winslow Howe, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a Chicago lawyer; the couple had four children.

Although not an observant Jew, Cutler, who visited Italy, Germany, Austria, and Hungary in 1939, fiercely opposed Adolf Hitler’s Germany and strongly supported American intervention in the war. In February 1942 he moved to Washington, D.C., as assistant general counsel to the Lend-Lease Administration. Cutler spent three months in late 1942 as junior counsel on the government team prosecuting eight captured German saboteurs who landed by submarine on the Long Island coast. Six were eventually executed. After the North African landings by Allied forces, in 1943 he spent nine months representing the Lend-Lease Administration overseas on the North African Economic Board. In late 1943 Cutler enlisted in the U.S. Army, training as a combat engineer, and in spring 1944 he was transferred to the Pentagon, working as a cryptanalyst in the Special Branch preparing summaries of intercepted Japanese, German, French, and Italian signals intelligence for the president and other top officials. For the final four months of 1945, Cutler liquidated outstanding Lend-Lease stocks in Latin America.

Demobilized in 1946, Cutler remained in the capital, where he would make his mark. With three other young Lend-Lease Administration lawyers, including the agency’s counsel Oscar Cox, in 1946 he founded the Washington, D.C., law firm Cox, Langford, Stoddard, and Cutler. In 1962 the firm merged with another Washington, D.C., firm to become Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering, and in 2004 it merged with a Boston firm, metamorphosing into Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale, and Dorr, employing more than one thousand lawyers in offices on three continents. The gravelly voiced, polished, and well-connected Cutler, a lover of fine food and wine and a notable opera patron, quickly came to epitomize the consummate Washington, D.C., lawyer-politician, a judicious moderate respected by all parties for his formidable ability to devise acceptable solutions, and a skilled negotiator who could persuade opponents to compromise. His list of acquaintances was expanded from the 1970s on by his active memberships in the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission, which he helped to found in 1973.

Cutler argued nine cases before the Supreme Court, winning judgments supporting post-Watergate campaign finance reform and one in 1982 reversing an antitrust ruling against the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for organizing a boycott of white merchants. In 1985, arguing on behalf of the environmental group Greenpeace, he won $8.5 million in damages from the French government. Besides representing liberal advocacy groups and government employees facing McCarthyite attacks, Cutler advised industrialists investing abroad after World War II and represented trade associations for pharmaceuticals, cars, and chemicals, and an array of major corporations, including the Washington Post Company, Bethlehem Steel, IBM, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), American Express, and Pan American World Airways. Cutler’s legal career had a significant impact on bankruptcy law, administrative law, securities law, automobile safety, and drug safety, areas in which he sought to reach reasonable compromises.

Cutler, who viewed law and politics alike as arenas for public service, insisted that his firm, known for its egalitarian and collegial atmosphere, undertake extensive pro bono work. At the request of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in 1963 Cutler was a founder and later cochairman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a body that argued numerous civil rights cases, defended individuals arrested for protesting segregation, and represented looters arrested in the 1968 Washington, D.C., race riots. In 1979 he was also a founder of the Southern Africa Legal Services and Legal Education Project, which fought apartheid in South Africa through the courts.

Although he served on numerous government bodies, only once, as White House counsel under President Jimmy Carter (1979–1980), did Cutler desert his law practice for an official government position. A Democrat in politics, he undertook specific domestic and international assignments for both Democratic and Republican presidents; numbered among his friends the Republican secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, and James Baker; and broke with his party to support the unsuccessful 1987 Supreme Court nomination of the conservative judge Robert Bork. As a member of the Brownell Commission investigating American intelligence failures during the early Korean War, Cutler coauthored a 1952 report recommending the creation of the National Security Agency plus the position of an assistant secretary of defense for intelligence to coordinate intelligence gathering for the three armed services. In 1961–1962 Cutler helped to negotiate the return of American-trained Cuban fighters captured in the March 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

Cutler was skeptical of the possibility of American military success in Vietnam. In the spring of 1965, shortly before the escalation of American troop commitments there, Cutler, Undersecretary of State George W. Ball, and the former secretary of state Dean Acheson drafted and circulated within the government an abortive plan for a cease-fire and neutralization of South Vietnam. Besides working for civil rights, in 1967–1968 Cutler served as special counsel to the President’s Committee on Urban Housing, established to provide low-cost, good-quality private housing for low-income families. As conditions in American cities deteriorated from the mid-1960s and repeatedly flamed into race riots, in 1968–1969 he was executive director of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, which produced a multivolume report and recommendations on handgun control.

Cutler disliked President Richard M. Nixon, who included Cutler on his enemies list, and had few dealings with Nixon’s successor, President Gerald R. Ford. Cutler first encountered President Carter as a fellow Trilateral Commission member and subsequently advised him during and after the presidential campaign, later handling the problems caused by his younger brother’s erratic behavior and dealings with Libya. From 1977 to 1979 Cutler was Carter’s special representative for maritime resource and boundary negotiations with Canada, his mandate to ensure ratification of the beleaguered 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II). Crises in Iran and Afghanistan meant the U.S. Senate never endorsed the treaty, but Cutler did persuade the exiled Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi II to leave the United States for Panama, thereby facilitating the eventual return of fifty-two American embassy staff taken hostage in Tehran, Iran, in 1980. Cutler helped to formulate and implement American responses to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, including embargoing American grain sales to Russia and the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and also the imposition of economic sanctions on Iran. President Ronald W. Reagan likewise turned to Cutler, in 1983–1984 making him senior consultant to the Scowcroft Presidential Commission on Strategic Forces and appointing him member (1985) and chairman (1989) of a commission on the salaries of senior government officials. In 1989 President George H. W. Bush named Cutler to the National Commission on Federal Election Reform.

Cutler was an energetic director of several corporations and longtime trustee, director, or member of several dozen public-service organizations, prominent among them the Brookings Institution, the American Ditchley Foundation, the Washington National Opera, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Committee on the Constitutional System, the American Law Institute, and the Center for National Policy. From 1984 to 1994 he chaired the Salzburg Seminar in American studies. As a longtime member of Yale University’s council, he helped to raise $374 million for the university. A voracious reader, in his later years Cutler lectured on law and politics at Yale University, Harvard University, and Oxford University, England. From the 1970s onward he published widely in legal and foreign policy journals and wrote op-ed pieces in the Washington Post and other newspapers, dealing not just with constitutional and juridical issues, legal ethics, and international law, but also with such subjects as wealth and politics, Balkan war trials, the operation of the Federal Reserve System, handgun control, and congressional pay. Reflecting Cutler’s preference for efficiency, his Foreign Affairs article “To Form a Government” (1980), which quickly became a classic political science text, praised the British parliamentary system.

Cutler’s first wife died in 1988, and on 9 November 1989 Cutler married the artist Rhoda Winton “Polly” Kraft, widow of the columnist Joseph Kraft. Though semiretired, Cutler remained active and highly respected, his memberships on public-service ventures proliferating. In 1994 President Bill Clinton resorted to Cutler’s seasoned authority, appointing him for 130 days as unpaid presidential counsel to defuse congressional and public misgivings over White House handling of an investigation of presidential family investments. In 2001 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appointed Cutler to an advisory group developing rules for the new Military Tribunals. In 2003 Cutler served on a Pentagon advisory board on antiterrorist measures and as cochair of the Continuity of Government Commission, which planned the course of leading officials after a possible major terrorist attack, and in 2004 President George W. Bush appointed him to the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, established to assess U.S. intelligence forecasting before the 2003 decision for war against Iraq.

On these bodies and, during his final months, as cochair of a National Academy of Arts and Sciences project on “Privacy in the Information Age,” Cutler consistently upheld the rule of law.

Cutler died in 2005 of complications from a broken hip in Washington, D.C. The Republican and Democratic power brokers of Washington, D.C., who recalled Cutler’s oft-repeated motto, “Don’t just do well—do good,” attended his funeral at Christ Church, Georgetown, where the Kaddish was read for him, and his memorial service in Constitution Hall, Washington, D.C. Cutler was celebrated not just as a consummate political insider and operator but also as a man of decency and principle, as perhaps the last of an old-fashioned breed of civilized and able lawyer-statesmen whose integrity and commitment to public service transcended partisan allegiance and commanded widespread respect.

Cutler’s legal papers remain with his law firm, Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering. Official records relating to his government service are in the U.S. National Archives II, College Park, Maryland; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas; the James Earl Carter Presidential Library, Plains, Georgia; and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Arkansas. Stuart Taylor, Jr., wrote an appreciation of Cutler as power broker, “Cutler from a Different Cloth,” American Lawyer (Apr. 1994): 8. “Legends in the Law: A Conversation with Lloyd N. Cutler,” is in the DC Bar Report 26, no. 2 (Oct./Nov. 1997): 12. Cutler and his law firm feature prominently in Mark J. Green, The Other Government: The Unseen Power of Washington Lawyers, rev. ed. (1978). His service under President Carter is covered in Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (1982); Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (1982); and William Shawcross, The Shah’s Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally (1988). Cutler’s work for the Clinton administration features in James B. Stewart, Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries (1996). Cutler recorded several oral histories, including those for the Historical Society of the District of Columbia Circuit Oral History Program; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston; and the Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 9 May 2005).

Priscilla Roberts