Bernard Nussbaum

Bernard William Nussbaum (March 23, 1937 – March 13, 2022) was an American attorney, best known for having served as White House Counsel under President Bill Clinton.

Nussbaum, the first child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, was born in New York City on March 23, 1937.

His father and mother originally worked in garment factories.

His father was later employed by the labor union that represented garment workers, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU).

Nussbaum grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, home at the time to many immigrant families from Eastern Europe.

He attended neighborhood public schools.

In 1951, he was admitted to Stuyvesant High School, a specialized public high school in New York City which requires the passing of an entrance exam for admission.

He graduated in 1954, having been a member of the school's academic honor society, and an editor on the school's newspaper, the Stuyvesant Spectator.

Nussbaum then was accepted at Columbia College in New York.

He was awarded scholarships by New York State and by Columbia which made it possible for him to attend Columbia.

He joined the staff of the college daily newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator and, in his senior year, became its editor-in-chief.

He was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

During the summer months he worked as a waiter at hotels in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania and the Catskill Mountains in New York to help pay for his education.

In 1958, Nussbaum graduated from Columbia and was admitted to Harvard Law School.

After his first year, on the basis of his academic record, he was selected to join the Harvard Law Review and was given a full tuition scholarship by the law school.

In his senior year he became a note editor of the Law Review, succeeding future Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.

Upon completing law school in 1961, Nussbaum was awarded a Harvard University Sheldon Traveling Fellowship.

This fellowship enabled him to travel around the world for a year visiting over 30 countries.

On his return he served for six months on active duty in the United States Army and was a member of the Army Reserves for six years.

In 1962, he was sworn in as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York, in the office led by Robert Morgenthau.

He was a federal prosecutor for more than three years and tried a number of major criminal cases.

These included convicting, after a four-month trial, five officials of a federal savings and loan association of perjury.

The perjury was committed by the bank officers to cover up the diversion of over $250,000 from the savings and loan association to finance a political campaign for Congress being conducted by the president of the association.

He also won a jury verdict convicting a prominent accountant and investor of bribing and conspiring (with other major investors) to bribe an internal revenue agent.

In 1966, Nussbaum joined the New York law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one year after the firm was founded in January 1965 by Martin Lipton, Herbert Wachtell, Leonard Rosen, and George Katz, four lawyers in their early 30s who in time became preeminent in the legal profession.

In 1966, the firm had less than 10 lawyers.

As of 2022, it has over 250 lawyers and is one of the most successful corporate law firms in the United States.

In 1968, Nussbaum ran for a seat in the New York State Assembly.

In a close contest, in a Democratic primary election in Brooklyn, New York, he lost to the incumbent assemblyman.

In 1970, Nussbaum managed Robert Morgenthau's campaign for Governor of New York.

He led a group of former assistant United States attorneys in conducting a statewide petition drive to place Morgenthau's name on the Democratic Party primary ballot for the party's nomination for governor, opposing Arthur Goldberg, the former Supreme Court Justice, who was the choice of the Democratic Party leaders.

In a short period of time, well over 15,000 signatures of registered Democrats were collected in over 50 New York counties, with the requirement that there be at least 100 such valid signatures in each county.

Many of the upstate counties in New York had few residents and even fewer registered Democrats.

This made the petition drive difficult.

However, it succeeded and Morgenthau began his primary race against Goldberg.

A third political party, the Liberal Party, then decided to give its nomination to Goldberg.

This decision, which would have had the effect of splitting the vote against the incumbent governor, Nelson Rockefeller, if Morgenthau won the Democratic primary, made it virtually impossible for Morgenthau to defeat Rockefeller in the general election.

Morgenthau therefore withdrew from the primary race.

Goldberg ran as the Democratic/Liberal candidate against Rockefeller in the general election and was defeated.

In 1972, Nussbaum represented Elizabeth Holtzman who, in a surprise victory, had defeated senior U.S. Representative Emanuel Celler, who at the time was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, by a little over 600 votes in the Democratic primary election.